BENNETT, LIMBAUGH AND AMERICAN VALUES

The press release from what used to be the book publishing firm, Simon & Schuster, and is now apparently something called Paramount Publishing Consumer Group, is stamped in bright red capital letters: SHOCKING.

The inevitable blurb is furnished by Rush Limbaugh and contains the trigger words, "chilling ... raw ... like a kick to the solar plexus."

But this time Simon & Schuster is not publishing a dubious expose' on Ted Kennedy, as it did last year, or some sex-studded detective thriller.

The paperback is "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," a volume of tables, charts and graphs assembled by William J. Bennett, former secretary of education and drug "czar," now toiling at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. The full quote from Limbaugh refers to "some of the most chilling statistics I have ever read ... the raw data on what has happened to American society in the last 30 years."

This is the second consecutive year that Bennett has gathered the figures on crime, illegitimacy, divorce, abortion and other troubling social phenomena. The numbers in this volume are not much different from the 1993 edition. But obviously the marketeers have decided there's a mass audience for this bad news, especially when Bennett's collection of inspirational tales, "The Book of Virtues," is riding high on the bestseller list.

Bennett is a great polemicist, but in the index he is wearing his Joe Friday disguise - "Just the facts, ma'am." Many of the numbers need no sermonizing; they are appalling enough in themselves: The average teenager spends 1.8 hours per week reading; 5.6 hours on homework and 21 hours watching television. The number of unmarried pregnant teens has doubled in the past 30 years; the number of teenage suicides, tripled.

A more policy-oriented treatment of these social trends has been published more quietly (no Limbaugh blurb) by another Washington think tank, the Brookings Institution. In almost every way, "Values and Public Policy," a collection of essays edited by Henry J. Aaron, Thomas E. Mann and Timothy Taylor, is a more significant development. It shows how concern about social trends and the values they represent has moved from the conservative precincts where Bennett works into liberal academia - and, through that route, into the thinking of the Clinton administration on such issues as welfare reform and family policy.

Because the facts of social disintegration are - even without the red-ink hype - so staggering, this is no longer a matter of ideological argument. Time was, the Brookings editors say in the introduction to their volume, when social scientists like themselves dismissed values arguments as "facile, simplistic, judgmental and ill-considered," because they implied that "all society can do is condemn the sinners and pray for them to come to their senses."

But it is no longer possible to pretend that the values by which people live their lives don't matter. The public no longer buys that, if it ever did, so "experts" who cling to that belief are increasingly marginalized in the policy debates.

When the experts shake off their fright about values, however, they really can help inform the political dialogue. For example, we really need to understand why crime and illegitimacy rates have soared. David Popenoe of Rutgers cites social scientists from Margaret Mead to James Q. Wilson as demonstrating that folk wisdom is right in believing that "as families go, so goes the nation."

"Every society must be wary of the unattached male," he writes, "for he is universally the cause of numerous social ills. The good society is heavily dependent on men being attached to a strong moral order centered on families, both to discipline their sexual behavior and to reduce their competitive aggression."

Today, he points out, almost a quarter of all men between 25 and 34 live in non-family households, either as singles or with formally unattached others. The proportion of the average American's adult life spent with spouse and children has declined from 62 percent in 1960 to 43 percent, the lowest in our recorded history, today. "This trend alone probably helps to account for the high and rising crime rates over the past 30 years," Popenoe writes.

Such knowledge is only the beginning of the search for remedial policies. But it certainly directs attention away from such popular gimmicks as "three-times-and-you're-out" mandatory lifetime sentences and toward policies that require males to take responsibility for children they have sired and measures that make it sharply preferable, in both financial and social terms, to be part of an intact family, not flying solo.

In retrospect, it's amazing that American politics was hung up for so long in partisan debate about "family values." Now that it's largely over, perhaps we can work at reversing some of those trend lines Bennett charts.