The British author Louise Perry’s critique of the sexual revolution has just been published in Danish. The thesis is that the sexual revolution of 1968, which progressive culture has celebrated as a liberation, has not benefited very many people. It has benefited a small segment of men and an even smaller segment of women – the highly educated and resourceful, with networks and choices.
For most other women, liberation has meant unstable relationships, single parenthood and economic vulnerability. The revolution devours its own children, just not the few well-off ones.
Perry’s point points to something larger that the progressive elite consistently turns its gaze away from: the ideas one promotes have consequences, and the consequences fall unevenly.
A life in contradiction
The progressive elite is not difficult to spot. It lives in Østerbro and Frederiksberg and other expensive addresses, works at universities, in the media and in the cultural sector, and has strong opinions about how society ought to be organised.
It praises diversity, rejects the nuclear family as a norm, regards religion as something enlightened people have outgrown, and sees cosmopolitanism as the only intellectually honourable position.
And then it lives in a completely different way from how it speaks.
It lives in homogeneous, white neighbourhoods and moves away from them if they become too diverse, that is to say if too many immigrants arrive (the phenomenon is called white flight).
Members of the elite are often married, almost always between man and woman. The divorce rate in this group is markedly lower than in the rest of the population.
They send their children to private schools (again: if the public school has too many immigrants, too much diversity).
They raise their children with boundaries, demands and expectations of achievement. They inherit and save and pass wealth on to the next generation. They engage in voluntary work in the local community. And they go to church, perhaps not every Sunday, but for baptisms, confirmations and funerals.
In other words, they live a conservative life behind a progressive façade.
Those who listened
The mechanism is clearest in the United States. Timothy Carney describes and documents it in his analysis of divided America in the book “Alienated America”. The progressive elite preaches and promotes a way of life that proves disastrous for the middle and working classes, who actually adopt it.
Those who voted for Trump and considered the American dream dead probably said that they were conservative – but in reality lived a life in the liberation that the elite praises verbally, or they lived in areas marked by progressive “liberation”:
Absent fathers, broken-down local communities, no church attendance, no associations, no civil society. The elite itself managed perfectly well behind the walls of its prosperity ghettos.
The pattern is the same here at home. The progressive commentator who publicly problematises the nuclear family himself lives in a long-term monogamous relationship with shared children and a shared mortgage. The politician who speaks warmly about diverse family forms will celebrate a silver wedding anniversary this summer.
The author Carsten Jensen – the arch-progressive moralist – lives in a fashionable flat in Østerbro between his stays on Ærø, which is perhaps Denmark’s most homogeneous local community.
The American economist Thomas Sowell – who himself is black and grew up in poverty in the Southern states – has pointed out what the cultural project of the 1968 revolt did particularly to the black population in the United States.
Before the victories of the cultural revolution and the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s, the proportion of black children growing up without a father in the home was a clear minority. Today it is a majority. In the mid-1960s, around a quarter of all black children were born outside marriage; today it is around seven out of ten.
The cultural dissolution of norms that the progressive elite preached became, in particular, a reality for those who did not have the resources to bear the consequences. The liberation – the dismantling of the ideal of the nuclear family, the church and other traditional institutions – was a political and moral catastrophe. Especially for the working and lower classes.
Ideas have victims
One may object that there is nothing wrong in living differently from how one speaks. That the private and the political are two different things. But that escape route is too simple. The problem is also larger than mere hypocrisy.
The progressive elite speaks with cultural authority. It sets the agenda in the media, at universities and in cultural life. When it again and again signals that the nuclear family is an outdated construction, that religion is a crutch for weak souls, and that the liberated life is the authentic life, then these are normative messages that move downwards through society and shape other people’s choices and self-understanding.
The problem is precisely not that the elite lives conservatively, but that it does not say so. That it remains silent about what actually works, because that would collide with its worldview and its identity as the vanguard of progress. It is trapped in its own narrative.
Sowell and other wise thinkers have formulated it very clearly:
The behavioural norms of the middle class – stable marriage, investment in children, rootedness in the local community, discipline and the postponement of immediate gratification – are the most reliable paths to a good life.
But progressive culture has made it socially impossible for many to say this aloud, because it sounds like a condemnation of those who do not live that way. In the same way, it has promoted an entire cultural industry that lives off selling the destructive message of liberation.
The result is that those who most need the joyful and edifying message never receive it.
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The life of the progressive elite is not without charm. There is something sympathetic about people who engage locally, keep their marriages alive, invest in their children’s future and maintain a faith that gives life direction. It is a good life. It simply ought not to be a secret.
The real solidarity would be to say it aloud. To have the courage to recommend to others what one practises oneself.
To tell young women without educational capital what Louise Perry has already told them: that the promises of sexual liberation are not free of charge, and that the price for them has historically been highest for those who had the least.
To tell fatherless boys in Guldborgsund, Morsø, Ishøj and Albertslund the same thing that Sowell has told American ghettos for decades: that a father in the home is not a patriarchal construction, but one of the most well-documented factors behind a child’s chances in life.
We often hear hypocrisy criticised with the words: Practice what you preach. But here the opposite applies: Preach what you practice.
The progressive elite preaches liberation and lives conservatively. The edification contained in the discreet life it actually leads is something it ought to have the courage to share with everyone else.