Marriage Bootcamps Won’t Save America
When confronted with modern America as it exists—rent like ransom, atomized, anxious, digitally warped—the conservative instinct is no longer persuasion or reform. Rather, it’s reenactment. Cue the marriage bootcamp. Cue the compulsory day of rest. Cue the hope that if we all stand still long enough, 1983 might quietly return, holding a casserole.
The latest proposals from The Heritage Foundation read less like policy and more like historical cosplay. America, we’re told, is suffering from a family crisis, a masculinity crisis, a meaning crisis. All true. The response, however, is to treat adults like malfunctioning recruits who simply missed induction. A few seminars. Some worksheets. A stern man with a clipboard explaining matrimony.
It’s a strangely bureaucratic vision of romance. Love, but make it mandatory. Commitment, but with a curriculum. Desire, but only after orientation. Conservatives once warned that the state should stay out of private lives. Now they want it hovering in the bedroom, tapping a watch, asking whether cohabitation has been adequately processed. This isn’t small government by any serious definition. It’s closer to moral micromanagement dressed up as tradition.
Modern America looks less like a Rockwell painting and more like a pressure cooker. Grocery bills devour paychecks. Health insurance reads like a threat. Dating’s been outsourced to apps that reduce human beings to headshots and height filters. Work is unstable, portable, and exhausting. Wages crawl. Prices sprint.
Into this landscape strolls the bootcamp brigade, convinced the problem is insufficient discipline. Men, apparently, are failing because no one made them sit through enough lectures on commitment. Women are delaying marriage because they haven’t been encouraged. Families are fracturing because the calendar lacks a federally approved day of rest.
Intimacy can’t be scheduled when millions of people are running on caffeine and resentment. You can’t ritualize commitment when the future feels unaffordable. You can’t shame men into responsibility while denying them the basic conditions required to exercise it.
The conservative answer keeps missing this because it’s aimed backwards. It assumes a social order that no longer exists and pretends the only task is to reinstall it, like an old operating system. The trouble is that the hardware has changed. Mass immigration has altered labor markets. Housing scarcity has rewired life trajectories. Technology has rewritten romance and reproduction. Communities have dissolved into delivery addresses.
Against all this, conservatives offer workshops. There’s something faintly authoritarian about the tone. Not in its stated intentions, but in its governing logic. It mirrors the rationale behind China’s dating boot camps, where declining family formation is addressed not by economic reform but by organized correction. It also echoes the Soviet habit of treating private life as a site for state optimization. Different language. Same assumption: that society can be fixed by managing people more closely. The conservative movement once understood something crucial: culture can’t be commanded. It must be cultivated.
The focus on “saving men” illustrates the failure perfectly. Men are told to marry earlier, work harder, commit faster, lead more confidently. But men are also navigating an economy that punishes risk, delays stability, and treats them as disposable until proven profitable. We demand providers, then build a society that makes provision impossible.
The same blindness runs through conservative family policy. Children are spoken of with reverence, while the cost of raising them is conveniently ignored. It now costs more than $20,000 a year to raise a child in America, before college, healthcare shocks, before housing inflation finishes the job. Many “children” now rely on parental support well into their 30s, not from immaturity but from arithmetic. This is a structural reality, yet conservatives persist in treating it as a cultural lapse.
They praise fertility while maintaining systems that make parenthood a luxury good. They extol marriage while tolerating housing markets that require two high incomes just to secure a modest lease. What’s framed as moral failure is more often economic exclusion. The problem isn’t that Americans forgot how to form families. It’s that family formation has been priced beyond reach.
In this context, bootcamps are inadequate and insulting. They imply that failure is personal rather than structural. That young adults are adrift because they lack guidance, not because the ground beneath them has given way. Conservatives ridicule the left for believing social problems can be solved with DEI seminars and racial-bias workshops. Now they’re offering their own version, just with different pamphlets. The faith is identical. Process over reality. Instruction over conditions. Behavior corrected in theory, untouched in practice.
What’s missing is humility and honesty.
If conservatives want stronger families, they must first accept that nostalgia isn’t a plan. You can’t restore a social order without recreating the conditions that sustained it. That means confronting housing policy, labor precarity, regional decline, and economic concentration. It means less instruction and more construction. Until then, the movement will keep prescribing yesterday’s remedies to treat today’s injuries.