Americano: is fatherlessness tearing America apart?

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🗓️ 20 November 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

With essayist Mary Eberstadt, whose recent article for First Things argued that the riots in the wake of George Floyd's killing come down to the sexual revolution and fatherlessness.

Americano is a series of in-depth discussions on American politics with the best pundits and experts stateside. Presented by Freddy Gray, editor of Spectator USA. Click here to listen to previous episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:25.9	Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray and I'm the Spectators
0:32.7	US editor. And I'm here to tell you as if you didn't already know that the 2020 presidential
0:38.6	election is now over and Donald Trump appears to have lost. He isn't going away, however,
0:45.8	not any time soon. And it looks as though the last few weeks of a Trump presidency promised to be
0:50.8	even more crazy if that were possible than the previous four or so years.
0:56.3	We'll be discussing all that and more in the coming weeks.
1:00.3	I'm joined today by Mary Eberstadt, who is a senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute
1:06.3	and the author of Primal Screams, how the sexual revolution created identity politics.
1:13.1	And we're going to be asking if fatherlessness is tearing America apart.
1:19.6	Mary, you recently wrote an essay for first things,
1:23.1	the excellent Christian publication,
1:25.7	in which you discussed this idea that the riots that we saw
1:29.7	over the summer that I think disturbed a lot of people all over the world and confused a lot of
1:34.1	people all over the world were to do with fatherlessness. Can you explain a little bit your thesis
1:40.0	in that essay? Yes, thank you, Freddie. So first, let's give it a little bit of context. The riots that
1:46.9	took place in the United States and the protests were unprecedented in American history. From late
1:53.7	May into September, there were some 10,000 incidents of what's called unrest. And of those, some 500 turned violent. The violence was not
2:04.4	limited to a couple of cities. This happened across the nation. So again, thinking about how
2:11.3	unprecedented this is, I thought it was important to try and get at root causes. Now, we all know that the explanation
2:19.0	given typically is this was all because of racism. And in the article of Fury of the Fatherless,
2:26.8	I dispose of that explanation because I don't think it holds up on inspection for several reasons.
	...

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