Liberal Families Are Looking Pretty Traditional

Picture an old-fashioned, idealized American scene.

Young kids walk to and from a redbrick public schoolhouse; almost every kid’s commute is less than 10 minutes.

On warm weekend days, the children run lemonade stands, doing brisk business.

Their parents host a Christmas-tree-and-baked-goods sale on the school field every December, which draws a boisterous crowd.

And about those parents: They’re almost all married.

Divorce and single parenthood are rare.

The whole tableau is, at first glance, a social conservative’s dream come true.

This scene exists in the real world.

The neighborhood is my own; the elementary school is my kids’ school.

But this is no conservative small town.

It’s an urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a city where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90 percent to 6 percent in the most recent election.

Virtually all of the parents in this neighborhood are highly educated Democrats.

Judging from what I see in my community here, these deep-blue Washington families are the kinds of families that so many conservatives value.

The strong marriages of elite blue America—families whose lives are, in a way, pretty darn conservative—offer a useful counterpoint to the simplistic culture-war narrative.