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I'm sure that plays well to traditionalist boomers. I really don't know what load-bearing social scaffolding in modern times you expect to bolster this sense of responsibility.
Well, responsibility isn't needed in a world where you can be made to be financially responsibly by the state.
First of all, the social sanction that outside of small communities like this, men who try to find ways to not pay their child support are largely seen as terrible human beings among all ideologies, races, and income levels. About probably the only thing a non-college educated Trump-voting guy making $40k and a PMC woman whose still sad Hillary lost that is making $250k can agree on is guys who don't pay reasonable child support and try to avoid it are a-holes.
Plus, the collapse of cash-only jobs means it's impossible to have any income that make senses that avoids wage garnishment.
Yes, most people have been socially conditioned to still expect men to carry the weight of themselves and others. Even those who have gotten completely tanked on "Women don't need men" narratives for the better part of a decade or more clearly believe this. This doesn't make it right, fair, or justified. Nor is there any assurance that this state of affairs is permanent.
I'm not sure how much weight being a self-interested asshole will carry in the future when we have turned into a nation of self-interested assholes. Or when the thing you're banking on to carry forth this duty (masculinity) has been discarded as either a historical myth or a vacant shape not exclusive to one gender ("girls can be just as strong/powerful/responsible/horny/aggressive as men"). I need to pay child support because I'm a man, but 'man' doesn't have a definition any more, traditionalism is dead, and I'm supposed to keep this going because Outlaw83 prefers it this way?
Good luck with that. No way this will ever collapse, I'm sure.
You vaguely gesture towards some "responsibility" that you can't even coherently define. And when pressed, you collapse into threats from the state and just-so social sanctioning. You can't offer anything else, just sticks. Said threats are certainly salient to this dynamic, but if that's all that's on offer, then I wouldn't be be so assured of this being an enduring constant.
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Guys are assholes until you find out most child support is owed by blacks. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CSRA-22-24-T7-01042024.pdf
Then the issue is suddenly genericized and pivoted. Child support should be enforced, but if it is specifically black men that do not pay child support then it is all men who are evil. This pivoting is glaringly obvious to any in the system, and the disingenuity suggests that society is not even with its castigation, even if one population still 'suffers' more by population proportion, because their criminal proportion is still not accurately captured.
One compelling reason for the stateification of social more enforcement is because community social sanctions do not work evenly, and if some communities display greater failure rates in internal prosocial behavior enforcement then it becomes appealing to use the state as the mediating entity. Reworking extant incentive structures is difficult in the best of times, and we plainly are not living in such an era of boundless abundance and social trust.
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