In her recent book The Two-Parent Privilege, the economist Melissa Kearney assembles a mass of data supporting a proposition that has long been argued for by right-leaning scholars, and seems self-evident to countless people: that marriage is beneficial to society, and children are better off when raised by a mother and father. Kay Hymowitz observes:

What makes The Two-Parent Privilege an event is not [its conclusions], but the author herself. Ever since the brouhaha following the 1965 Moynihan Report’s warnings about the rise in single motherhood among low-income blacks, the policy and social-science establishment has been loath to engage the issue. This has remained true even as the same family troubles spread to the white and Hispanic working class, and even as evidence mounted that the breakdown in marriage was not only bad for children but also worsened inequality. When a prominent scholar with impeccable center-left credentials like Kearney forthrightly makes that case, she is veering into policy quicksand.

This is a danger of which she is well aware. At professional conferences, her colleagues have reacted to her research with comments on the order of: “I tend to agree with you about all this but are you sure you want to be out there saying this publicly?” Others have told her that she sounded “socially conservative,” implying that she was “not academically serious.”

[Indeed], the research enumerated in The Two-Parent Privilege enriches our understanding of working-class decline and, more broadly, the nation’s political and cultural polarization. . . . Kearney only touches on another uncomfortable truth emerging from The Two-Parent Privilege. The subject of the choice of whether or not to marry—something most Americans, liberal and conservative, revere as a personal decision—remains largely off limits despite its profound social and economic impact.

“We should be clear-eyed about the reality,” Kearney writes. “Parents affect their children’s lives and shape their outcomes in ways that government cannot fully make up for.”

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.