For my parents’ generation, divorce was a stigma and vanishingly rare, at that. But recently I stood outside a Middlesbrough job center interviewing one hundred or so people who were seeking work. Every single one of that hundred came from a broken family. Every one. And of those who now had children themselves, every one was no longer with the partner with whom she’d had the child. And this state of affairs had not made them happy; it had wrecked them. They were all J. D.’s mum now.
Liddle goes on to say that liberalism has a lot to do with this — not just the left-wing liberalism of social permissiveness, but also the right-wing liberalism of market über alles:
Both of these doctrines, left and right, in the end amounted to the same thing: You are your own God now. The old God will not stand in your way, nor, frankly, will the state. You have total freedom to do as you please.