ABSTRACT
Now the great corporations diminish the moral and economic importance of the family. To love family life, to see in family life the most potent moral, intellectual, and political cell in the body politic is to be marked today as a heretic. Virtually all Americans, outside our professional classes, are family people. There are many different traditions, styles, patterns, and emotional laws in the different ethnic and regional cultures in America. In democratic and pragmatic societies, the dream of the solitary spirit often transfers itself into a moral assault upon institutions, traditions, loyalties, conventions. A politics based on the social unit of the family would have a revolutionary impact on the sterile debate between Democrats and Republicans, and between libertarians and socialists. Survival has depended on family discipline. Blacks as well as whites survive by such rules, as long as authority in the home is strong.
