Somewhere on the road from "Ozzie and Harriet" to "Murphy Brown" and Newt's new "Boy's Town," America lost something. David Blankenhorn thinks he knows what it is.
Fatherhood.That's fatherhood: "a social role that obligates men to their biological offspring." Fatherhood: "the key to the emergence of the human family and, ultimately, of human civilization."
Beneath the academic blandness of these phrases lies the rather sharp point of Blankenhorn's new book, "Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem."
In it, the founder of the Institute for American Values, a New York-based think tank, argues that much that is wrong with America can be traced to the separation of children from their biological fathers.
"Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation," he writes. "It is the leading cause of the decline in the well-being of children. It is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse to domestic violence against women."
Much has been written and said in recent years about the rise of the single-parent family, the head of which is almost always a woman. What Blankenhorn has done is turn the discussion on its head. Rather than talk about mother-headed households, he talks about households lacking dads.
When he looks at late 20th century America, he sees many of the same problems as other social critics. But where others see a complex web of interrelated social failings, he sees only one primary problem - and only one solution, summed up in five words: "A father for every child."
It is an argument that is both timely, given the new emphasis on family values in Washington, and instantly controversial, given the rising number of nontraditional families headed by single mothers, stepparents and homosexuals.
"I think this book is going to be very controversial," said James Levine, director of The Fatherhood Project, a New York-based advocacy group that seeks supportive programs and policies for families of all stripes, traditional or not.
Levine is critical of "Fatherless America," which he finds simplistic and unrealistic. "It's a great book title," he said, "but it's a sloppy analysis of what's really going on in America."
Blankenhorn, in an interview at his office near Lincoln Center, argued that his thesis is simple, but not simplistic.
"Really it just comes down to this: I believe that every child deserves a father . . . and a good society seeks to maximize the likelihood that every child will grow up with two loving parents. And if you don't want to hold that up as an ideal, which we increasingly don't seem to want to, then you had better prepare to live with the consequences."
Blankenhorn's book is especially interesting on two levels.
One is political. While the book makes an argument primarily associated with conservatives, Blank-en-horn says he is a Democrat who has never considered himself to the right politically. He likes to point out that Vice President Al Gore was the keynote speaker last year at a conference of the National Fatherhood Initiative that Blankenhorn helped organize.
Still, he acknowledges siding with conservatives on some aspects of family policy.
"My theory is that now, there is very little difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to describing the problem. There's differences when it comes to what we're going to do about it. . . . It's the difference between the people who want to deal with the consequences of the trend, versus people who want to deal with the trend."
The other unusual aspect of Blankenhorn's argument is the emphasis he puts on the role of fatherhood in "socializing" - or civilizing - men.
Fatherhood, he argues, is a role that is imposed on men by society, while motherhood is an essentially biological role. So while the mother-child bond is nearly unbreakable, the father-child bond needs society's support. Right now, he says, society is doing little to support either parent - but the consequences of unsupported fatherhood are far more devastating.
Mothers, he argues, will continue to be mothers without societal support, but fathers will leave the fold. Without a role of responsibility in the family, their stake in society will diminish, as will their incentive to be good, law-abiding citizens.
"The withdrawal of cultural supports for motherhood is sad and harmful," he writes, "but the withdrawal of cultural supports for fatherhood is tragic and calamitous."
What caused these cracks in society's superstructure? Blankenhorn argues that American society is a victim of its own belief in individual freedom, which, taken to its logical extension, relieves individuals of all group responsibility.