While politicians and preachers have been trumpeting the importance
of families for generations, the phrase “family values” is relatively
new. William Safire traces the origin of the term to 1966, but it was
a young White House speechwriter named Pat Buchanan who deserves much
of the credit (or, depending on one’s perspective, blame) for importing
it into the political realm. In 1971, the 33-year-old Buchanan urged
President Nixon to adopt “family values” as a theme for his reelection
campaign. While Nixon did not use the phrase during the 1972 campaign,
Republicans since then have heeded Buchanan’s advice: the phrase “family
values” has appeared in every Republican Party Platform since 1976.
In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle gave his now (in)famous Murphy Brown
speech at the Commonwealth Club of California, in which he argued that
the Los Angeles riots of that year were “directly related to the breakdown
of family structure.” While the speech represented a conscious effort
by Republicans to make the 1992 presidential campaign about “values,”
Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” slogan ultimately proved
to capture more accurately the anxieties of American voters.
Whether it was Clinton’s electoral success or some other factor (such
as the ironic co-opting of the phrase by the entertainment industry—the
1993 movie Addams Family Values and the band Korn’s “Family Values”
tours immediately come to mind) that reduced the popularity of the
phrase among conservatives, the use of the phrase “family values” in
political campaigns has declined dramatically since 1992. The phrase
appeared in 323 and 130 campaign-related stories that appeared in The
New York Times in the years leading up to the 1992 and 1996 presidential
elections respectively. But by 2004, the total number of campaign-related
stories in the Times that mentioned the phrase had dropped to just
31, about the same number as appeared in 1984 and 1988.
Whatever the reason for the decline in the use of this particular phrase,
one need look no further than the language of the 2004 party platforms—in
which Democrats outline their plans to “strengthen” families and Republicans
outline their plans for “protecting” them—to understand that talk of
families, if not “family values,” will be a mainstay of American political
discourse for the foreseeable future.
Vincent G. Moscardelli is an assistant professor of Political Science at UMass Amherst
