Primal Screams ― How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics

A bitter divisiveness afflicts America. To act “with malice toward none, with charity toward all” has become a faded ideal as citizens silo themselves into hyper-partisan tribes defined by politics, race, gender, and sexuality. The rancor of news pundits, the incivility of social media, and the storm of opposition to free speech on college campuses are symptoms of a fraying social fabric familiar to anyone with even a casual eye on current affairs. 

Explanations of this discord have been offered from many quarters but have failed to get at its roots. To the dispassionate observer, the hostility between “tribes” seems simply irrational. But Mary Eberstadt, accomplished essayist and cultural critic, may have gotten to the bottom of it. Applying her peerless lens of analysis, she argues that the rise of identity politics is a direct result of the collapse of the family.

Her logic—backed by startling new data—runs as follows: humans for centuries have forged their identities within the structure of the traditional family. The family, in a real sense, is the first tribe. But with the decline of the family, generations of people have been set adrift and lack a firm sense of who they are. To fill the void, they shape their identity according to their membership in a politicized group, and their seemingly constant fury is in fact a primal scream for the familial root system of which they have been deprived.

Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. She has been a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. She has written widely for magazines and newspapers, among them First Things, Policy Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, and Commentary. Her previous book with Templeton Press was 2013’s How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization.
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