As traditional marriage and monogamy come under attack, we must ask a serious question: Can our democratic republic survive the erosion of these foundations?
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On a recent episode of Dangerous Laughter, I explored this question with a man who loves monogamy in part because he only has time to wait for one woman to stare at a menu for 20 minutes: former communications director for U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, lawyer, and commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll.
Carroll’s riveting book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, is essential reading for everyone who cares about the survival of our culture and human flourishing. Regardless of modern progressive hookup culture having a love child with the old polygamist impulse, marriage and monogamy are major components of what makes Western culture successful — and worth defending against a return to the thousands of years of polygamy we clawed our way out of. (RELATED: Marriage: The Inequality Gap We Should Be Talking About)
All you have to do is read the sordid telenovela stories in the Old Testament to realize that trying to maintain a household with multiple wives invites chaos and drama that cause misery and dysfunction, to say the least. Read about Rachel and Leah’s bitter contest to produce children, and you’ll see what I mean. David and Solomon’s families were nightmare fuel too, with rivalries, violence, and sons plotting against their own fathers. Apparently, the ancient world had reality television before somebody even invented the television.
In the wake of monogamy came the growth of civil society and the other institutions that allow democracy and capitalism to flourish.
When Jesus came, He told folks that God intended, from the beginning, that one man with one woman in holy commitment was the ideal for humanity; you know, like with those crazy kids, Adam and Eve. That instruction put into practice changed everything, as Carroll argues. In the wake of monogamy came the growth of civil society and the other institutions that allow democracy and capitalism to flourish. As those norms spread, human flourishing took a big step up into the light of civilization as God intended. (RELATED: America’s Cultural Chasm: Family v. Individualism)
This didn’t happen overnight. Jesus didn’t rise from the dead and hand everybody a wedding registry on Amazon. Carroll describes a process that unfolded over centuries, as the Church challenged polygamy, arranged marriages, and cousin marriage. In his account, those changes weakened powerful family clans and helped make room for voluntary associations — guilds, universities, and charter cities. People could build relationships and institutions beyond the commands of the patriarch who happened to own the most land and collect the most wives.
One of the major problems inherent to polygamy is that it leaves large numbers of men with no wife and a whole lot of pent-up frustration. Northern Virginia, nicknamed the “Wahhabi Corridor,” is a case study. Go to Tysons Corner Mall, for instance, and you’ll see a lot of idle men from Muslim Countries where polygamy is still practiced sitting around building resentment. That same dearth of available women led young Viking men to get onto long boats and sail to Ireland, where they slaughtered husbands and brothers and stole their women to Iceland or Norway. (RELATED: ‘Woke’ Polygamy is Coming Soon)
Carroll illustrates the problem with a hypothetical society in which men at the top have several wives, leaving roughly 40 percent of men without one. These single, idle men can become troublemakers for society, taking risks a family man wouldn’t and creating disorder. His argument is that concentrating wives among powerful men makes a society more violent and turbulent, while monogamy gives more people a stake in a stable future. (RELATED: Feminism, the Nose-Ring Theory, and Our Potential Extinction)
Carroll also argues that fertility is higher in monogamous societies than in polygamous societies or those where marriage has largely broken down. Social mobility and opportunity are higher, and the sexes are less polarized. Monogamy is much healthier and more beneficial than polygamy — not just for the people exchanging rings, but for the neighbors who have to live with the consequences of everybody else’s choices. (RELATED: Marriage Is the Antidote to Societal Decay)
Even leftist professors, when they’ve been honest in their studies, have acknowledged that marriage is beneficial — not just to children, not just to husbands and wives, but to entire communities. Carroll wrote Sex and the Citizen to drive that point home to a culture increasingly adrift from its moral moorings.
The research that set him on this path came through Senator Lee’s Social Capital Project at the Joint Economic Committee. Instead of just staring at GDP figures and tax tables until everybody lost consciousness, the project examined the institutions and relationships that hold communities together. Carroll expected to find evidence that marriage helped families. What surprised him was how much evidence there was that the benefits extended beyond the front door.
He then went looking for a history of marriage and found a peculiar gap: books treating the institution as an oppressive relic, and books focused on the modern same-sex marriage debate. He wanted to explore the much longer history of marriage and explain why it mattered. Apparently, asking what keeps a civilization functioning is less fashionable than explaining why everything your grandparents did was terrible.
But, alas, influential strands of feminism have spent decades tearing down the nuclear family. As Hanna Rosin put it in the passage discussed during our interview, “Feminist progress right now depends on the existence of hook-up culture, and to a surprising degree, it is women, not men, who are perpetuating the culture.” (RELATED: Why are Liberal Women so Unhappy?)
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The six-season HBO series Sex and the City portrayed the false promise of promiscuity to the nation and the world. The four women leading the ensemble depicted sexual freedom through short-term relationships that wouldn’t derail education and careers. The pill and legalized abortion made the whole lifestyle much more convenient. Commitment became the thing you postponed while shopping for the next man and the next pair of shoes.
The Gen X characters helped sell Millennials and Gen Z a false freedom that frankly leads to a lot of trickle-down misery: the lonely, unfulfilled life caricatured in JD Vance’s “cat lady” remarks. In our conversation, I raised the tendency to replace the caretaking of a family, a home, or a husband with the caretaking of whatever happens to be the social justice warrior menu item of the day. They nurture the cause, feed off it, and let activism become the thing that drives them. Who needs a husband when you’ve got wokeism and a protest calendar?
Carroll sees an identity problem at work. If your political worldview teaches you to divide everybody into oppressors and victims, ordinary relationships can start looking like ideological contamination. The cause changes, but the need to belong remains. A person can wind up investing all that care and energy in the latest outrage while the relationships closest to home go unattended.
And before the men start congratulating themselves, we discussed Andrew Tate and how the supposedly macho rejection of marriage can arrive at the same destination. Feminists claim marriage oppresses women; the Tate brothers say it oppresses men. Carroll’s criticism of Tate is that a worldview treating women as commodities undermines the same institution that radical feminists dismiss as oppressive. Both sell the idea that commitment is a trap. Apparently, the feminist seminar and the internet alpha-male academy can agree on something after all. The lonely guy sitting at home with pornography, video games, and a credit card doesn’t look particularly liberated to me; he looks like somebody’s recurring revenue stream. (RELATED: The Cult of Andrew Tate: Modernity’s ‘Men Without Chests’)
Dating apps can make the situation worse. Carroll argues that attention becomes concentrated among a small group of men, while many others get left on the sidelines. Meanwhile, the men getting all the attention can keep moving through temporary partners without settling down. It’s the old impulse to collect women, now with a touchscreen and push notifications. Some people find a spouse online, certainly, but an endless menu is a lousy substitute for learning how to build a life with one person.
Then there’s Taylor Swift and the celebrity culture surrounding her. I’m a Philadelphia guy, so I have a soft spot for our hometown talent. Taylor built an empire with songs about relationships and breakups; now, with Travis Kelce, I hope she builds a marriage that lasts. Carroll wished them a long marriage and plenty of children. You can enjoy the music and still want the love story to end somewhere other than the next breakup album. (RELATED: Will Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Single-Handedly Save Marriage?)
Our criticism was aimed at the obsession surrounding celebrity life. Carroll and I discussed the hours people spend creating and curating content about stars they will never meet. Every hour spent obsessing over a celebrity is an hour these people can’t spend with a friend, a date, or their family.
Dolly Parton offered a different kind of example we hope Swift can emulate. Her marriage to Carl Dean lasted nearly six decades, through a career that could have supplied a thousand excuses to trade commitment for quick success. She managed to be a superstar without turning her husband into a disposable supporting character. She and Carl didn’t have children, but her work helping children learn to read showed how care can reach far beyond one’s own household.
Dolly had country fans, rock fans, straight fans, gay fans — people who disagreed about practically everything else. She gave them music, humor, and something useful. As Carroll put it in our conversation, Dolly epitomized family values. That’s a better model of success than convincing lonely people to spend their lives tending somebody else’s fame.
Even Hollywood used to understand the appeal of building a family. We talked about Father of the Bride, with Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, and Martin Short stealing scenes as the wedding planner. We talked about Jim and Pam on The Office, whose romance gave audiences something to root for beyond another disposable hookup. Apparently, people still enjoy watching two people fall in love and stay together. What a shocking development. Somebody alert the sociology department.
Carroll’s argument deserves attention because the stakes go well beyond a culture-war shouting match. Marriage shapes the habits of responsibility, cooperation, and care that a free society needs. You can’t keep weakening the institutions that teach those habits and then act surprised when loneliness, resentment, and distrust fill the space.
We spent decades liberating ourselves from every social obligation, and now we’re shocked that people are lonely. Carroll’s book asks us to reconsider what we threw away — and whether we can afford to keep throwing it away.
One wife is plenty. A healthy, functioning free civilization would be nice too.
READ MORE from A.J. Rice:
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A.J. Rice is host of the Dangerous Laughter podcast, and author of the new #1 political satire bestseller, The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity. He serves as President & CEO of Publius PR, Editor-in-Chief of The Publius National Post.
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