Four conservatives to watch

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe identifies four young conservative thinkers who might just revamp the moribund movement: Reihan Salam, W. Bradford Wilcox, Megan McArdle and Luigi Zingales. I'm tickled to know Reihan, and to link to his stuff. I don't know Megan, but I link to her material too. I sort of know Brad Wilcox, from ages ago, when I lived in Washington. Here's what Bennett writes about Brad:

For social conservatives, it is the family, not the individual, that is society's building block. When the family breaks down, they argue, so does the nation. Today, however, the term "family values" has taken on the whiff of Bible-Belt moralizing - a relic of the 1990s culture wars that's certainly conservative, but hardly intellectual. But there may be an strong empirical basis for conservative family values, some sociologists are arguing. The field of sociology hasn't traditionally been friendly to conservatives, but when it looks at the impact of fractured families on children and neighborhoods, the results are striking: Children not raised by their married mother and father are more likely to drop out of high school, be depressed, and even commit suicide. Boys from broken homes are more likely to end up in jail; and girls more likely to be teen mothers. Some researchers, not all of them conservative, blame the decline of the two-parent family for much of the increase in economic inequality and child poverty in recent decades.

An emerging major voice in this field is W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who studies religion, marriage, and the nuclear family. In both his scholarly work and in popular conservative venues like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review, he has pressed the case that Americans should be working harder to preserve traditional family structures.

The threat for Wilcox is not gay marriage, but two old taboos that have lost much of their force in modern America: divorce and single parenthood. He suggests creating tax and welfare incentives to make marriage more financially attractive than mere cohabitation. He is also a believer in "social marketing" - billboards encouraging parents to make sure the family eats dinner together, or prime-time TV commercials about how divorce affects kids.

The issue, as he sees it, is not a matter of preserving traditional moral values, but of insuring equality of opportunity. He argues that it is counterproductive to insist, as many liberals have, that all types of families are equally good for kids. Overwhelmingly, he points out, it is poor and working-class families who are grappling with the effects of divorce and single parenthood.

"The retreat from marriage in the United States over the last four decades has been important in fueling increases in inequality as well as child poverty," he says. Marriage needs defending, in other words - not because of what it represents, but because of who it protects.

Luigi Zingales I'd not heard of, but he sounds really interesting. Here's a bit from Bennett's piece:

Luigi Zingales says it's time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that's begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it's often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

"I'm very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business," says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Separating the support of free markets from the long Republican alliance with business isn't easy, says Zingales, but it's important. As he and colleague Raghuram Rajan laid out in their 2003 book, "Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists," powerful companies, given the chance, work hand-in-glove with government officials to craft laws and regulations that protect them while limiting competition and transparency.