Marriage, which was the default way to form a family in the West regardless of income or education, has become another part of US life reserved for the privileged. One of greatest Western institutions is now increasingly reserved for middle and upper classes.
The British weekly magazine The Economist now explains that marriage is no longer considered essential for raising children. A once universal institution has become the brand of those "who made it". 48 per cent of children in the UK today are born out of wedlock, compared to 8 per cent in 1970. One third of new borns in Italy come from de facto unmarried couples. In 1960, three quarters of American adults were married. Half of them are today.
Marriage once was "a rite of passage" to adult life, while today it is a method of transmitting the cultural, social and economic advantages of the medium-high classes to their children. That is also because today, statistically, people marry more and more within the same class (graduates among graduates, etc ...). Meritocracy is now becoming hereditary. Marriage in the West today is favored by wealthy people and by minorities who have strong marital cultures. Namely, Muslim minorities.
From being universal and fertile, marriage in the West has become elitist and sterile.
There is, however, a cost for this type of marriage. If you insist on accumulating wealth before starting a family, your chances of having children will become thinner. In most rich countries, the more highly qualified women are, the more likely they are to remain childless.
In Italy we lost 100.000 births in just ten years (one fifth of the total). It is the "childless" ideology, the dominant one in the West according to which reproduction is a pure option, not a destiny. It is the advent of the "childfree life", as a cover of the weekly Time magazine proclaimed. It shows a young couple on the beach, without children, intent on enjoying life. From being universal and fertile, marriage in the West has become elitist and sterile.
The West today is deeply affected by three ideological plagues: post-national, with the erosion of the identity of Western countries; post-God, with the radical secularization of Western societies; and post-family, with the rising of the childfree and gender ideologies, the construction of a Western society of gender neutral human beings.
And probabily this is why the West hates Israel, the opposite of the decadent West, a God, national and family oriented society.