Commentary: For Democrats, our kids are dough to be kneaded

Voting is 10%.

The cultural crisis in America has deep roots, and we won’t just vote our way out of it. To see the crisis clearly, watch a single minute of a California state legislator arguing in favor of a bill — signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 7 — that will “allow youth 12 years of age or older to consent to mental health care services,” meaning children can leave home and enter residential treatment facilities without parental consent:

Blanca Rubio Explains Parenting to the California Assemblywww.youtube.com

Of course parents cannot raise mentally healthy children, she says, because they’re not even licensed by the state as mental health professionals. How can you possibly talk to your children without credentials? It isn’t even proper to have that kind of unlicensed personal interaction, right? My favorite part of this discussion was when she assured us she definitely doesn’t talk to her own children, because she doesn’t have the right kind of professional license.

The road to that sick argument is very long.

Start in the first decades of the 19th century, with the transportation revolution that began to connect the country with interstate roads, canals, and the first railroads. Then the Civil War, as a homogenizing project that turned two economic systems into one, set the country on a path of aggressive connection. The wartime Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, preparing the way for the final linking of the whole nation by a network of rail systems.

Joined together by transportation, America began to standardize and began to grow giant organizations that advanced the project. The historian Alan Trachtenberg describes the Gilded Age as an "age of incorporation," a term with the double meaning of national, societal incorporation and the growth of a hierarchical, organizational, and distinctly corporate capitalism.

Until 1883, communities set their clocks to the sun: It was noon, locally, when the sun was directly overhead. Then the railroad companies established four standard national time zones, and it was suddenly the same time in cities that were hundreds of miles apart. Another historian, Robert Wiebe, describes the last decades of the 19th century as the moment when “island communities” lost their isolation and became pieces of a firmly connected country.

You still buy products from corporations that were born in that moment, as in the case of the 1898 merger that created the National Biscuit Company, now better known as Nabisco. People used to make their own soap from cooking fat and ash, or buy it from the neighborhood peddler who collected grease from housewives at the beginning of the week and came around at the end of the week to sell the cleaning products he made from their kitchen waste. Then railroads delivered livestock to Chicago, slaughterhouses generated giant piles of animal fat, and soap became a corporate product made in factories.

The birth of giant corporations that sold products nationwide meant the birth of a managerial class, technocratic elites whose specialized economic roles were to manage people who managed people who managed people who managed people who managed functions. With the arrival of the technocratic managerial elite, we’re almost at our destination.

So let’s get to the story of the bread. The Progressive Era feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described the dangers of bread made in homes: wheat ground to different consistencies, different families’ recipes that called for varying amounts of yeast, sloppy activation of yeast with a variety of water temperatures, wood- and coal-burning ovens that delivered inconsistent heat for an inconsistent baking time. A hundred household loaves had a hundred textures and flavors.

But the Second Industrial Revolution and the emergence of large corporations fixed the problem: Every loaf of bread was baked by a trained professional, to a standardized recipe, with standardized ingredients, in industrial ovens kept to a consistent temperature. Every loaf of professionally baked bread was good, and every loaf was reliably the same. Standardization and professionalization fixed the quality problem inherent in a piece of household behavior, Gilman wrote. So why not do the same thing with every household function?

If professional bakers could make a consistent loaf of bread, trained teachers and social workers would make a consistent cultural product: human beings trained to the same professionalized standard. This was the logic of the moment, born in the Gilded Age and matured in the Progressive Era. Technocratic managerial specialization spread to government and charitable organizations, in the creation of what the historian Christopher Lasch called “the helping professions.”

Another century of that logic, of the helping professions on the march, brings us to the moment when the California legislature knows your children should be removed from your home so they can be rendered mentally healthy by licensed professionals. The same logic undergirds the argument over “trans kids” and parental notification policies in schools: Children should be their authentic selves only with trained and credentialed professionals, not with dangerous and ignorant parents.

Republican state legislators are fighting back, but a cultural project with extraordinarily deep roots and a wide range of extremely well-entrenched professional interests won’t be defeated at the ballot box or in the legislatures. It’s defeated in homes, families, and communities, one child at a time and one family at a time. It’s fenced in through politics, but it’s defeated, slowly, day by day, through culture. We have no choice but to win that very long fight.