As the Freedom Conservatism project enters its third year, we are launching several new initiatives to broaden our ranks, reach new audiences, and help build an American Right capable of leading our country to a brighter future.
One of these initiatives is a series of original essays to be published here at FreeCon Central. Our 330+ signatories represent a broad swath of American conservatism, including academic scholars, policy practitioners, and former public officials with significant expertise. We’ve asked some of these FreeCons to offer their perspectives on how best to apply the principles of Freedom Conservatism to America’s toughest challenges.
Today, we begin with a piece by John Shelton, policy director at Advancing American Freedom and a former policy staffer on Capitol Hill. (Have an idea for a future essay? Email John.Hood@jwpf.org.)
Marrying Up
A Freedom Conservative Strategy on Family and Fertility
By JOHN SHELTON
“Most individuals are happiest in loving families, and within stable and prosperous communities in which parents are free to engage in meaningful work, and to raise and educate their children according to their values.”
— Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles
National Conservatives and other voices on the nationalist-populist Right have an unfortunate fascination with shiny objects over substance. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in current debates over family policy. Notwithstanding the occasional exception (e.g., J.D. Vance’s careful criticism of efforts to nationalize childcare benefits), the broader conversation has drifted away from core principle and practical policy.
Take, for example, the 2024 campaign debate over the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Then-Senator Vance proposed a dramatic expansion, raising the credit from $2,000 to $5,000 per child. The sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, promptly outbid him at $6,000, tripling the existing credit. Unlike the earlier childcare debate, here Vance succumbed to a classic temptation: trying to outspend Democrats. It’s a contest that Republicans will never win, nor should they try.
This misguided instinct in the CTC debate illustrates a growing problem I call “cherry-on-top” family policy. Everyone knows that the cherry is the finishing touch on the perfect ice cream sundae. But no one confuses it for the sundae itself. What makes the sundae worthwhile — the ice cream, the hot fudge, the whipped cream, even the sprinkles — is far more important than the final garnish. Yet all too often, family policy on the Right is reduced to the cherry: how big the CTC should be.
Such a singular fixation leads to policy myopia. Rather than address the underlying conditions that make family formation so difficult, too many conservatives act like a larger CTC is a silver bullet. For all the spurious claims that Freedom Conservatives only care about GDP, National Conservatives seem to have their own three-letter obsession, the CTC — in this case, the Child Tax Crutch.
Family policy ought not to become so narrowly focused. This is especially true for the CTC. Due to a convoluted history of refundability changes, the credit increasingly resembles yet another government check rather than tax relief. The real crises that family policy must contend with — declines in marriage and lack of affordability — are too profound to be solved by writing ever-larger federal checks.
The Collapse of Marriage
“Marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children,” according to the research of Melissa Kearney. Children raised in married-parent households consistently enjoy higher levels of emotional, educational, financial, and professional success. It should come as no surprise, then, that the marriage crisis is the principal driver for the majority of the problems that family policy seeks to address. Consider, for example, that the much-discussed fertility crisis is essentially a symptom of the marriage crisis. Solve the latter and the former largely resolves itself.
While some imagine the problem could be addressed with a simple sin tax on divorce, Freedom Conservatives understand that not every problem can be solved with blunt federal force. Yes, the states’ adoption of no-fault divorce laws certainly played a part (led by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, much to his later regret). Still, the marriage crisis is not merely a problem of broken vows. It is of vows never taken. Over the last four decades, the number of never-married 40-year-olds more than quadrupled. In 1984, an even smaller U.S. population produced 20 percent more weddings than occur today.
And yet, without usurping the constitutional prerogative of the states, there are some basic steps Congress can take to begin to address this crisis. There is a straightforward fiscal piece as well as a thornier cultural component.
Let’s start with the fiscal one. Federal policy has often directly discouraged marriage. Consider the Head of Household tax filing status, created to be more generous to single mothers than families with “two-parent privilege.” The problem with these well-intentioned provisions is that they penalize marriage by offering greater financial benefits to unmarried women in otherwise identical circumstances.
Even more consequential are the marriage penalties embedded in more than 40 means-tested welfare programs, including SNAP, WIC, the EITC, SSI, and Section 8 housing. As Robert Rector has documented, these penalties can amount to a staggering 12 percent of a family’s income, creating a powerful disincentive for lower-income Americans to marry. Without violating federalism, Congress can and should put an end to all of the marriage penalties it has created itself.
Second, on the cultural component, we know that the fates of fertility and faith are connected at the hip. As recent books from Philip Jenkins, Catherine Pakaluk, and Tim Carney have demonstrated, religious people are more likely to get married and have large families than secular folks are. But before the Catholic integralists and their Protestant sympathizers take this as license to defenestrate the First Amendment, it’s important to note that disestablishment has strengthened religion by forcing it to contend for itself through persuasion rather than coercive power.
That doesn’t mean we should be satisfied with a status quo that actively treats religious institutions worse than their secular counterparts. As I have argued elsewhere, “the government should bend over backward” to avoid squashing religion underfoot. Such an approach would focus on expanding parental choice in education — most private schools are religious — as well as protecting the right of faith-based institutions to receive the same benefits and deliver services as non-religious institutions and upholding the conscience rights of Americans.
The Crisis of Affordability
The immediate crisis of marriage is not the only matter of concern for family policy. The NatCons are correct that there’s a profound economic dimension to the crisis, though they’re far from the first to articulate it. Back in 1987, Reagan tasked his administration with identifying federal policies that lessened household income, and justifying any that did.
The good news is that, unlike the marriage crisis, the affordability crisis lends itself to dozens of solutions that conservatives have long championed: tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, and so on. The Cato Institute’s Vanessa Brown Calder and Chelsea Follett provided a helpful roundup of them in a 2023 study (although as a pro-lifer and social conservative, I stridently disagree with their proposal to further loosen restrictions on IVF).
The bad news is that the nationalist-populist Right dismisses many of these policy reforms out of hand as “Zombie Reaganism.” Instead, they embrace policies that are destined to make life more difficult. Tariffing lumber, steel, clothing, and food makes basic living more expensive. Raising the minimum wage destroys jobs while keeping those with less education or experience from reaching the first rungs of the economic ladder. Blocking the sale of public lands exacerbates housing shortages in some regions while subsidizing mortgages inflates the price of homes nationwide. All of these supposedly benevolent government actions drive up the cost of living for young families.
Worse still, their preferred solutions, like supercharging the CTC or creating a new Parent Tax Credit, fail to address a crucial truth: affordability isn’t just something that affects current families with children. It also affects young people who are deciding whether to form families in the first place. If a man cannot afford a home or a decent standard of living, he is far less likely to become a husband and a father. In other words, the affordability crisis creates its own marriageability crisis, fueling a vicious cycle of loneliness, economic stagnation, social instability and cultural decay.
Neither cash transfers nor industrial policy (that is, DEI for a small and shrinking fraction of union employees) can stop the downward spiral. However, as the first Trump administration demonstrated, conservative economic policies — tax cuts, deregulation, and free-trade agreements — can unleash broad-based prosperity. At the height of the Trump-Pence administration, millions of new jobs were created, inflation was tamed, and real median household incomes hit an all-time high that hasn’t been matched since.
It’s time to make family policy great again. Despite the National Conservatives’ mockery, it’s the Freedom Conservative agenda that has delivered the most tangible gains for the American family.
Government checks may ease symptoms, but they cannot cure the disease. We should pursue bold reforms to eliminate marriage penalties, welcome religious institutions back into the delivery of education and other services, lower the cost of living for current and prospective parents, and promote economic conditions to enable young Americans to marry, raise children, and flourish.
These are not merely economic or political concerns. They are moral imperatives, and the requisite building blocks of any truly great nation.
In the mix
• At RealClearPolitics, Freedom Conservatism co-founder John Hood described the committee process that resulted in last week’s revision of the FreeCon statement to highlight property rights and the indispensable role played by families, congregations, and other institutions of civil society in inculcating virtue and fostering community.
FreeCons are “rebuilding an American right firmly committed to free enterprise, free trade, free speech, balanced budgets, decentralization, equal opportunity, and the rule of law,” wrote Hood, president of the Pope Foundation.
“Our rivals on the right, calling themselves National Conservatives and other labels, see things quite differently. They reject our fiscal and regulatory agenda as ‘zombie Reaganism’ and our commitment to localism and pluralism as evidence we ‘don’t know what time it is.’”
• At National Review Online, Jack Butler praised the addition to the FreeCon statement of “the laws of nature and nature’s God” as the foundation of individual liberty.
Butler, a FreeCon signatory and NRO submissions editor, wrote that quoting the Declaration of Independence serves to underline an important distinction between Freedom Conservatism and National Conservatism, the latter of which exhibits little connection to the American Revolution’s mission statement.
“This is a welcome sign for a movement that is both new and old,” he argued. “Freedom Conservatism is a political tendency rooted in the American Founding. It has found expression repeatedly in our nation’s history: in this magazine, in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and elsewhere.”
• In USA Today, FreeCon signatory John Tillman wrote that conservatives can learn a lot from the political ascendancy of Zohran Mamdani — despite his wrongheaded ideology.
Mamdani’s socialist ideas would “further impoverish the people they purport to help,” wrote Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project. “But he’s still talking the language people want to hear — the language of affordability.”
Moreover, the Right has invested far too little time and resources building relationships and institutions in urban areas.
“Conservative ideas are now almost nowhere to be found in the biggest cities, not even in the buildup to major elections. But if Republicans don’t compete year-round on the cultural battlefield, they have little chance of winning electoral fights.”