Matthew Yglesias makes a great point that is often overlooked in the “family values” debate: protecting the institution of the family is a valuable and legitimate goal of government. He writes:

It’s genuinely the case that we have a lot of social problems that are complicated by family instability — children are expensive and time-consuming and tend to be much better off if both parents are involved in bringing them up. So the idea that marriage and family life could, in some sense, use some shoring-up isn’t a crazy one. But conservatives don’t seem to have many actual ideas about doing this apart from blaming the gays. But I think serious social conservative ideas on this front would be welcome.

This observation is an example of the Third Way approach to politics because Matthew is saying that sound policy should affirm values that other political thinkers see as antithetical: not allowing anti-gay discriminationi and not allowing cultural decline to unravel the institutions of marriage and family.

What’s missing to make this a Fourth Way approach is to identify that the seemingly conflicting values arise from concerns at at least three distinct levels of social evolution. Protecting existing social institutions is a top priority of tradition-minded thinkers (amber altitude), defending the individual liberty of gays is a top priority of liberals (orange), and affirming a more inclusive understanding of the family is a top priority of multicultural-minded thinkers (green altitude). Matthew’s analysis would be strengthened by acknowledging that the goal of politics is to balance these values and not allowing any one set of values to establish a “dominator hierarchy” over other legitimate values.

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