Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

Perhaps the essential difference between the conservativism of the eighties and the conservativism of the nineties is that the former was mainly economic and upbeat and the latter seems to be mainly cultural and gloomy. The books that best convey the mood of Reagan conservativism are exuberant briefs for tax-cutting, like The Way the World Works and Wealth and Poverty. Now we're getting a spate of neo-Hobbesian works that see the country socially disintegrating and wish for a stabler social order - it's evening in America. Fatherless America, which gazes out across the land and sees "a society that is spinning out of control," is a good example, and also the best one of these books that I've read so far.

The current conservative mood has a delayed-reaction quality. Most of the social indicators now causing alarm - crime rates, black out-of-wedlock birth rates, the slow down in median family income, the size of welfare rolls, drug use, the frequency of premarital sex and abortion - rose most steeply during the sixties and seventies, and now show signs of becoming, if not less alarming, at least not increasingly alarming. Newt Gingrich's almost daily railings against the sixties are evidence of the retrospective quality of conservative politics today. Imagine politicians and intellectuals of the 1860s spending most of their time debating the pros and cons of the Andrew Jackson era. They couldn't, because they were too busy fighting a war; our ability to contemplate the long-term corrosion of the social fabric is a luxury arising out of the relative peace and prosperity of our own historical moment. We're in a crisis enabled by a lack of crisis.

The specific ill that concerns David Blankenhorn is what he call-9 fatherlessness - that is, the increase (from about one-sixth in 1960 to about one-third today) in the portion of American children who don't live with their natural father. It's an original rubric, under which he places a wide range of familiar social problems, from divorce to violent crime, to out-of-wedlock childbirth. All these, he says, are best understood as consequences of the erosion of the ethos of traditional fatherhood. It's interesting, and a good illustration of the current conservative mood, that Blankenhorn barely mentions government and politics as contributors to the problem that so concerns him. The "cultural elite" (which can't be overthrown by elections) is the villain.

Fatherless America begins with an enormous...