“When Liberals Blew It.” That was the title of a Nicholas Kristof column in The New York Times last week. The column commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the breakdown in African-American family structure. Subsequently, Moynihan wrote:

“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families ... never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Since the time of that prophetic pronouncement, things have only gotten worse – and not just in the black community. Kristof reports the latest numbers: