I could continue to pile on the accolades, as many scholarly and popular commentators have done, but given that this is a book seminar that aims to stimulate debate, I will move on to a few critical observations. Perhaps unfortunately, these observations come from someone who knows little about the law and so I will have to approach the book from the standpoint of a political scientist attuned to the structure of theoretical and empirical argumentation. From this perspective, the book offered a good many insights but also left me with some questions.

One of the things that intrigued me about this book was the Gramscian edge to Teles’s analysis, by which I mean the way he conceptualized the problem facing conservatives as a subset of a more general challenge for social movements that seek to combat hegemony. Powerful groups entrench themselves not only through electoral power, but through domination of the major institutions of a society – educational, financial, professional, media, cultural, and so on. Their ideas and way of life thus come to seem normal, natural, inevitable. For insurgents, be they Islamic militants in Pakistan today, communists in early 20th century Italy, or conservatives in the 1960s United States, they must not only battle political domination head on but construct a parallel universe of institutions that steadily erodes the power of dominant groups throughout the society, economy, and polity. In many ways, this framework fits the case of the conservative legal movement, and conservative movement more generally, as activists have challenged liberalism not only through electoral mobilization, but through the construction of an alternative civil society: private schools or, barring that, home schooling; universities and law schools; foundations, a number of which are discussed in this book; and media programs and outlets, to name some examples.

The basic question this raises is how these kinds of anti-hegemonic movements emerge and why they sometimes succeed. There are plenty of movements that pop up around discrete causes, but fewer successful movements that take on some of the basic premises on which a society operates. Such movements should be especially rare given that they must develop a long-term strategy and have only weak prospects for success, as Teles describes early in the book. Activists wander in the wilderness with vague glimmers of hope for any real impact on the world they live in. So what gives rise to these movements and why do they sometimes succeed?

Teles’s answer often hinges on fairly idiosyncratic factors: key individuals who found themselves at the right place at the right time; smart decisions or the ability to learn from past mistakes; funders willing to support the movement at important junctures. There’s no grand strategy, at least in the beginning; instead, individuals construct networks and institutions that beget resources for the creation of yet more networks and institutions. Teles thus focuses a good deal on agency, but as a result gives less attention to the structural side of the structure-agency divide. Where he pays most attention to political opportunity structures is in examining the Liberal Legal Network as the structure against which conservatives react, and he also notes some important shifts in American politics that increase the importance of elite political competition. Beyond that, Teles does not spend much time examining other political opportunity structures that might make the conservative legal movement more or less likely to emerge and succeed.

Given the seeming success of the larger conservative movement – if not always in concrete policy terms, then in blocking further change along liberal lines and in constructing alternative political and social institutions – I wondered whether there are greater forces at work here beyond these individual agents. One could cynically argue that money is behind it all: conservatives often represent a point of view that business and people with means like; thus, the mobilization he describes could be analyzed, as David Vogel has done, through the lens of the business reaction against the regulatory state since the 1970s. Teles intriguingly argues that legal conservatives often achieved more when they got away from seeming to be in the pocket of business. Still, the basic fact remains that there are conservative foundations with enormous amount of money that they are pouring into conservative causes and institutions.

I also am less willing than Teles is to jettison electoral factors in explaining the rise of the conservative legal movement. I wholeheartedly buy his argument that there is no direct linkage between electoral success and legal change: the lag time for legal movements to bear fruit shows there is no easy connection between the two. I would posit a more indirect connection however, as electoral victories such as that of Reagan in 1980 galvanized the movement and made credible conservative ideas that had been largely rejected in 1964 when espoused by Goldwater. Moreover, had liberal Democrats not only taken over the party by the 1970s but also continued to win elections, they would have continued to shape the judiciary along liberal lines and taken other hegemony-building measures that would have made it that much harder for conservative challengers to gain a foothold.

More generally, the right-ward shift of the Republican party since the 1970s and its electoral successes since then show that there is a deep well of conservatism in American society that is there to be tapped. Whether that well is fed by cultural beliefs about free markets and individual rights, economic power relations that favor business over labor, defenders of local political authority in a federal system, or some other source, the fact remains that conservatism has long been a powerful force in American politics and has had renewed influence since the 1980s. The conservative legal movement is one arm of that larger force that has been particularly successful because of the way the law offers an access point for social change in the US. The question I would thus pose to Teles and the readers of this symposium is how we can understand the relationship between the larger structural or contextual forces at work here with the individual actors who worked on the ground to effect change.

A final question I would pose concerns how best we can think about anti-hegemonic movements and their leadership. Gramsci wrote at a time when centralized, hierarchically-organized communist parties fought against bourgeois domination. They had leaders, they had foot soldiers, they had a vision of how economic and political change would occur. By contrast, the creature Teles describes is a headless one with a large number of appendages, sometimes waving in unison, sometimes moving in uncoordinated ways. There was no vast, right-wing conspiracy, but a confluence of events and people that moved the society and the law down a particular pathway. This may be a more realistic account of how movements work in practice, but I wanted to know how we should think more generally about why some movements succeed where others do not. How can a movement achieve its goals when it has no center, no unified leadership, and often no coherent and agreed-upon strategy? Perhaps this is where the conservative example can make liberals optimistic about their own prospects for achieving social and political change.

No, instead I suggest we might learn from the way some European countries go about dealing with what is often a controversial issue – whether or not mothers should work when their children are young, and what the role of the state should be in subsidizing these decisions—and then figure out our own homegrown solutions. While conservative observers hold that official European policy increasingly favors the imposition of “radical feminism” – meaning the elimination of the full-time homemaker – the reality is considerably more complex. In countries such as Germany or Austria, the attachment to parental care is so strong that state policy has long sought to subsidize mothers (or the very few fathers) who stay home with young children. In France, because people have different views on this question – much as in the United States – government policy subsidizes both child care and parents at home, rather than impose one model on everyone. France’s free, universal preschool system appeals as much to stay-at-home-moms as it does to working mothers. Even in Sweden, one conservative commentator has to admit, the very long parental leave time is indicative of a strong commitment to parental care. As a result, many more babies are breast-fed for six months in Sweden than in the United States.

In addition, publicly-subsidized child care is not the Leviathan envisioned by many conservatives, by which the state uses its power to manipulate the hearts and minds of young children. In Germany and the Netherlands, the state subsidizes voluntary organizations – many of which are religiously-based – who then provide kindergartens, day care, and other family-related services. While services for families are subsidized, parental choice is maintained. This is very much in line with the church-run day care favored by social conservatives as a last resort.

In short, a commitment to the material well-being of families does not imply a one-size-fits-all solution, whereby one set of values gets imposed on everyone else. What is needed is first some agreement that subsidizing families with children is a worthy goal – something we have long done through both the tax code and publicly-supported education. Then, a pluralistic vision of family needs could bring together liberals and social conservatives, if the latter are willing to shed their alliance with economic libertarians, and the former relent in their focus on abortion and the strict separation of church and state (which complicates state subsidies to church-run day care). But first, we need to start having that sensible national conversation about work and family.

Adios.

Increasing men’s parenting time also has informed Dutch policies that give all workers the right to request part-time hours from their employers. One goal of the policy is to encourage both parents to work part-time and split caregiving duties at home. So far, few parents are actually living this model; in 2003, only six percent of couples with young children had both parents working part-time. Nearly 75 percent of employed Dutch women work part-time—the highest rate of part-time work in the western world. Still, the ideal is out there.

Ultimately, the focus on men is an attempt to maintain the lengthy leaves and flexible work-time that parents cherish while mitigating the disproportionate effects of these policies on women. These efforts are not only revealing of the gender egalitarian discourse around parenting in many European countries, but also of the importance parents place on having time to care for their own children. Few policy-makers advocate cutting parental leave or the availability of part time work. Instead, they have adopted the goal—rhetorically if not substantively—of making men into fathers.

“[Children] grow up to be taxpayers, workers, and citizens. The claims we collectively enforce on their income will help finance our national debt and fund Social Security and Medicare. Even if all the intergenerational transfers in our tax system were eliminated, leaving all us baby boomers to rely on our own bank accounts in old age, we would need to hire the younger generation to debug our computers and help us into our wheelchairs.”

To those who say having children is a private choice, much like deciding to get a pet, I’ve heard Folbre trenchantly respond, “Yes, but will your golden retriever pay for your Social Security?”

The experience of parental leave in other countries offers some lessons about its possible effects on the economy, employers, and women’s employment. Parental leave programs generally are not very expensive, amounting to at most one or two percent of GDP. Firms in Western Europe report that they face no major disruptions from parental leave, as long as the leave is not too long (more below). There also is a wide consensus that parental leave increases, rather than decreases, women’s employment (a lengthy OECD report offers details).

One potential downside is that, even though most countries make parental leave open to both men and women, women take the vast majority of leave days. When leave is long, this can have some consequences for women’s place in the labor market. In Sweden, for example, parents have the right to a parental leave of up to 18 months, but women take nearly 85 percent of parental leave days. Women also predominate among the ranks of part-time employees. As a result, the Swedish labor market is one of the most sex-segregated in the world, as women cluster in public sector jobs that are structured around the assumption of interrupted work schedules and part-time employment. Thus, one major goal of Swedish policy these days is to encourage men to take more parental leave; already there are two months of “daddy only” leave (in addition to paternity leave), that are lost to the couple if the father doesn’t take them. Yet, men working in private sector jobs report feeling pressured by their employers not to take a lengthy leave.

More generally, whether or not parental leave is costly, difficult for employers, and harmful to women’s employment hinges on the length of the leave. The current menu of family leave proposals in the US is unlikely to have these negative consequences. The California leave offers only six weeks of leave paid at 55% of wages – up to a maximum of $728/week—and is paid for by employees. This is unlikely to break the bank, sink the economy, or undermine the place of women in paid work.

One reason is the weakening of labor unions in the United States. While unions have not always been strong advocates for women’s rights, the feminization of the labor force and union membership in many European countries had injected concerns about working time, parental leave, and child care into union and left party politics. Without a similar collective actor in the US, American parents lack an organized proxy that can champion their interests in the political sphere. Moreover, the issues of child care and parental leave are most pressing for parents at a time when they are too busy to become politically active. Politicians simply do not hear that they need to expend political capital to address the needs of working parents. What they do hear, however, are the voices of the highly organized movement of social conservatives that will strongly oppose public child care subsidies and paid leave as favoring working mothers over stay-at-home moms. This asymmetry of political activism – frazzled and unorganized parents versus a politically mobilized minority – creates substantial obstacles to a sensible conversation about work and family.