Pro-family policies have been well within the mainstream of conservatism for a long time.
The New York Times recently ran a feature on conservatives who advocate pro-family economic policies, including tax credits for children and measures to facilitate paid leave for parents of newborns. Dana Goldstein’s story strikes me as fair both to those conservatives and to conservative critics of those ideas, although the latter group, inevitably, gets briefer treatment.
But I think she overplays how new this strand of conservative thought really is. The truth is that pro-family policies have been well within the mainstream of conservatism for a long time and were often considered complementary to other conservative economic policies. Every supply-side tax policy that has been enacted from Reagan onward came accompanied with some expansion of benefits for children and parents — usually a large one. That was the case in 1981, 1986, 1997, 2001, 2003, and 2017. The tax credit for children was championed by, among other prominent conservative figures of the post-Reagan era, Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, and George W. Bush.
It’s understandable that Goldstein would frame her story the way she did, because conservatives on both sides of the argument are apt to make the same mistake. That mistake allows conservatives who favor these ideas to enjoy the marketing advantages of casting aside stale dogmas and hands other conservatives the ability to say their own opposition is simply a matter of sticking with longstanding principles that everyone on the right used to hold in common.
Short memories and the drama of the Trump years have also led to a tendency to identify the Republican Party at one unusually libertarian moment in time, around 2012, with the longer story of American conservatism. But I think it’s more accurate to view conservatives attempting to devise a pro-family platform as building on their predecessors rather than breaking with them.