Coming Apart: Why It Matters

After establishing in Parts I and II of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 that a new upper class -- a "cognitive elite" -- was coming to dominate the culture, politics, and the economy, and a new lower class that didn't work much and didn't marry much was causing a cratering of lower-income America, Charles Murray now turns to the question: What do we do about it?

As he says: 

The trends of the last half century... signify damage to the heart of American community and the ways in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.

So, something has to change. Social democrats may call for a "distribution of wealth." Social conservatives "may see a compelling case for government policies that support marriage, religion, and traditional values." Murray, a libertarian, sees "a compelling case for returning to the founders' conception of limited government."

Central to his argument is the difference between the Italian town of Montegrano in the 1950s, where nobody did anything for anyone that wasn't family. Compare this to St. George, Utah, where, on one day in the 1950s, the town newspaper reported a blizzard of volunteer organization meetings and accomplishments -- in a town of 4,462 people.

Or take the 112 Protestant churches in Manhattan and the Bronx at the turn of the 20th century and their 38 industrial schools, 45 libraries, 44 sewing schools, 40 kindergartens, and so on. Then there were the secular fraternal organizations: Elks, Moose, Odd Fellows.

They drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes.

To get these organizations to work, their leaders had to "mobilize and interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds or they were not successful."

Whatabout today? Well the data seems to indicate that the new upper class is doing fine, with attendance at city council meetings and parent associations in the schools. It is pretty clear that social and civic interaction has declined drastically in the new lower class.

This is reflected in estimations of other peoples' trustworthiness: high in Belmont and declining in Fishtown. Ethnic diversity erodes social trust, even within an ethnic community.

All of which leads to deep unhappiness. Wanna be happy, in the Aristotelian sense of "lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole?" Then you need to practice the four virtues, because

Happiness = Baseline happiness + satisfying work + happy marriage + high social trust + strong religion

In other words, happiness is a combination, of success in the four "sources of deep satisfactions: family, vocation, community, and faith." They are entwined and go together. In the welfare state all these activities are separated and enfeebled and run or supervised by government.

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life... If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then the status goes away... Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say "I made a difference."

Report of people being "very happy" has gone down a bit in Belmont, from 50 percent to 40 percent. But in Fishtown from 35 percent to 15 percent.

 The new upper class practices the four virtues, but issues a "set of mushy injunctions to be nice" to the rest of society. The upper class practices the old virtues, with hard work, stable families, civic work and higher religious membership, but "we have to respect everyone else's way of doing things, regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, cultural practices, or national origin". "No derogatory labels for anyone" except for "people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." The new upper class practices the old virtues, "but it no longer preaches them."

What of the future? Murray has "four predictions" that are really prophecies.

First, what happens in Europe will not be pretty as their welfare state implodes.

Second, science will undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state, because human nature cannot be changed.

Third, there will be an increasing understanding that there is a fairly simple alternative to the entire apparatus of the welfare state, a basic income proposed by Murray in his In Our Hands.

Fourth, Americans will prove their allegiance to the American project, in some kind of Great Awakening.

America's new upper class must "once again fall in love with what makes American different." It needs something more than piecemeal legislation or Supreme Court decisions. We need to talk about how America is exceptional and why it should stay exceptional.

Coming Apart: The New Lower Class

Just as America now has a new upper class "who are more and more removed from the lives of everybody else" we now have a new lower class.

In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level white collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms... [By] 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs... In the years after 1960 America developed something new: a white lower class that did not consist of a fringe, but of a substantial part of what was formerly the working-class population.

Murray asserts that the pre-1960 America was notable for the practice of four "Founding Virtues." Industriousness: even "the penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was consumed by it." Honesty: "the extraordinary respect which people pay to the law." Marriage: Feminist Harriet Martineau thought that "marriage is in America more nearly universal, more safe, more tranquil, more fortunate than in England." Religiosity: Although many Founders were Deists, they all agreed that "Religion was essential to the health of the new nation."

Murray proposes to track what happened to the founding virtues between 1960 and 2010 in two representative neighborhoods: Boston's upscale Belmont and Philadelphia's downscale Fishtown. In real life the two places are not purely upper class or lower class, but Murray will assume they are.

In 1960 64 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Fishtown and only 6 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Belmont. By 2010, only 30 percent qualified for Fishtown and 21 percent qualified for Belmont.

Marriage: In Belmont in 1960 95 percent of white people were married; in 2010 83 percent were married. In Fishtown in 1960 84 percent of whites were married; in 2010 only 48 percent were married. In Belmont in 1960 about 75 percent of white reported "very happy" marriage. In went down in the 1980s but in 2010 was back up to 73 percent. In Fishtown, 67 percent of marriages were "very happy" in 1960. In 2010 only 52 percent. OK, how about this. In Belmont, the percent of children living with both biological parents dipped from 97 percent in 1960 to 87 percent in 2010. In Fishtown this percentage dipped from 94 percent in 1960 to 35 percent in 2010.

Industriousness: Prime-age males not in the workforce went from 5 percent to 15 percent for men with "high school diploma or less." That went from 1.5 percent to 3 percent for males with "BA or higher." Whatabout women? In 1960 40 percent of Belmont women were in the labor force and 33 percent of Fishtown women. By 2010 nearly 80 percent of Belmont women were in the labor force and 72 percent of Fishtown women. Heads of household? In Belmont in 1960 about 90 percent worked 40 or more hours per week and in Fishtown 81 percent worked 40 hours or more. In 2010, Belmont about 88 percent of heads of household worked 40 or more hours a week but in Fishtown a little over 60 percent worked 40 or more hours a week.

Honesty: Using violent crime arrests as an index, In Fishtown it went from about 120 arrests per 100,000 population in 1960 to about 750 per 100,000 in 1995 and descended to about 600 per 100,000 in 2010. In Belmont violent crime arrests are almost non-existent, less than 20 per 100,000 in 1960 and lower still in 2010.

Religiosity: In Fishtown "de-facto seculars" went from about 40 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2010. In Belmont it went from about 30 percent in 1960 to about 40 percent in 2010.

In the real Fishtown, these days, they talk about "family people" and "lower class." The family people are slowly moving out. Still, Fishtown appears to be gentrifying, with factories "turned into chic loft apartments." And so houses "that were worth $30,000 in the 1990s are selling for $200,000 and up." So pretty soon the family people will cash in on their houses and move to the suburbs, and the lower class will be unable to afford the rent.

Murray ends up with "three problematic categories" in the new lower class: 

1. Men who aren't making a living -- from 13 percent to 30 percent in Fishtown
2. Single women with children -- up from 5 percent to 18 percent in Fishtown
3. Isolates -- people with no involvement in community organizations

Or, as I like to say: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Up next: What to do now.

Coming Apart: the New Upper Class

In Coming Apart Charles Murray proposes that today's America has a three class system, with a new upper class that features a "cognitive elite," along with a new lower class, and "everybody else." His first job is to describe the new elite that is different from the old elite.

Back in the day, "upper class" meant the "old-money rich of the Northeast United States" and the closest equivalent of today's new upper class was called "The Establishment," and the thing about them was that they weren't that different from ordinary Americans. They just "had more money." Even in Cambridge, Mass., the world of Harvard and MIT was not that different from the rest of America. In those days, "the intellectuals of Harvard Square didn't have the critical mass to reshape the community." 

But now? David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise describes Wayne, PA, once a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia.

The town... has six gourmet coffeehouses... [a] fabulous independent bookstore... [There is] Studio B, a gift emporium that hosts creative birthday parties... Sweet Daddy's sells gourmet jelly beans... The Great Harvest Bread Company... where they sell apricot almond or spinach feta loaf for $4.75 a pop.

Mainstream America does not read newspapers, but new upper-class America reads The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, and they read the New Yorker and the Economist. The upper class doesn't listen to talk radio, but they do listen to NPR. They don't watch much TV, and certainly not "game shows, soap operas, music videos" etc. Foreign travel is a big deal to mainstream America, but routine for the new upper class, which has "coworkers and colleagues from around the world." Then they put an enormous investment into their children as "helicopter parents."

In the working world, the new upper class has a flexible, creative environment. For "everybody else" things are still pretty regimented.

And, of course, the new upper class tends to be liberal. And high IQ. As Murray writes,

the higher-tech the economy, the more it relies on people who can improve and exploit the technology, which creates many openings for people whose main asset is their exceptional cognitive ability.

This is where Murray got into trouble with The Bell Curve when he observed that blacks to not score high on cognitive ability. The new upper class did not want to here that in the mid 1990s.

But if cognitive ability is really important and affects the bottom line big time then it make sense that such people will be making a lot more in 2010, relative to others, than in 1960. Median family income for the top one percent shot into the stratosphere starting in the mid 1990s.

If you have exceptional cognitive ability you will be bullied by the kids at an average school. No problem, elite colleges have been selecting out the exceptional students since at least 1960. The exceptional students do well at selective colleges and marry exceptional students and have exceptional children that get into selective colleges. As Murray says:

Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper-middle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite.

Guess what. Racial residential segregation has been decreasing, but socioeconomic segregation has been increasing, and "the affluent increasingly segregate themselves off from the rest of American society." They live, increasingly, in SuperZips (in the 95th to 99th percentile of income). For instance, if you take graduates of Harvard Business School class of 1979, 61 percent lived in SuperZips in 2004. It's no wonder that the new upper class has a "whiff of 'we're better than the rabble' mentality." Call them Overeducated Elitist Snobs (OES). Oh and SuperZips vote Democrat, big time. And they are typically represented by doctrinaire liberals in Congress.

And they live in a liberal bubble. Murray provides a questionnaire for his urban educated readers to determine how bubbly they are. For instance: "Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?"

But there is a bright side to the new upper class. "As individuals, the members of the new upper class are just fine -- engaging, well mannered, good parents and good neighbors." And they are good performers. When the NYPD hired 300 policemen in 1940 on the basis on test scores the results were spectacular, for the 300 "achieved far higher rank and suffered far fewer disciplinary penalties than the typical class of recruits."

And the new upper class has made spectacular improvements to the economy, from the information economy to the design and durability of most consumer products. And the medications!

But could we roll back the inequality? Hardly, for the talented would head for the hills. 

The new-upper-class culture is not a product of great wealth... It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities.

Places like Marin County are not about wealth so much as about culture.

But the new upper class is "ignorant abut what much of the rest of the population lives." The question is how to change that, assuming that force majeure will not work. 

Up next: The new lower class.

Coming Apart: The Setup

Why is Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 just about white people? Is Murray a racist?

Well, there's a history on that. In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It argued the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future, which Murray and Herrnstein said would be an economy in which you needed to be a member of the cognitive elite to thrive. But what about the low IQ people, especially blacks, that test lower on IQ that whites? How dare you, said liberals, you racist.

So, in 2012 Charles Murray said, OK, let's see what has happened over the last 50 years in white America, and see how things worked out on the intelligence front. So that's what Coming Apart is all about the new cognitive elite Upper Class, the kind of people that live in Belmont, a fancy suburb of Boston. And it's about the new Lower Class, the kind of people that live in Fishtown, a down-at-heels neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Murray starts the book by painting a picture of American life the day before the Kennedy assassination. It was remarkably homogeneous, with a third of households watching The Beverly Hillbillies every week. There were only three TV networks, and limited restaurant choices. Almost everyone was married and only 3 percent of children were "illegitimate." At the movies the Production Code limited nudity and sexual situations and cursing. But Jim Crow still reigned in the South and 20 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.

But still the times they were a-changing, with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nader would soon publish Unsafe at Any Speed. Bob Dylan was in the air and the Beatles were changing popular music.

And then President Kennedy got assassinated and legislative genius Lyndon Johnson became president and legislated civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and increased welfare. The rest is history. And the subject of Coming Apart. But only white people, because it would be racist for Murray to write about the rest of America.

Next: The New Upper Class.

A Letter to Charles Murray

Dear Mr. Murray:

It's 20 years since the frenzy over your Bell Curve and so I decided to write you a letter, to express my thanks to you for your life's work. You stopped a number of rhetorical bullets over The Bell Curve, and people like me need to tell you that we appreciate and honor your sacrifice.

Who can forget your Losing Ground, the 1984 book that led to welfare reform in 1996? It is something to have been the intellectual spotlight that forced President Bill Clinton to sorta, kinda, maybe "end welfare as we know it" in the runup to the presidential election in 1996.

My takeaway on Losing Ground is to say that the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.  So liberalism, ever since, has simply been a power game, with the ruling class paying the rank and file in the Benefits Brigade for their support, and riling them up crude appeals to race, class, and gender.

I read The Bell Curve and thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read your warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then.

I liked your Human Accomplishment and its disquieting reminder that in creative endeavors all the rewards go to the winners. It tells me that much of the angst and distemper in our liberal friends can be attributed to the fact their culture of creative individualism is bound to disappoint most of its believers. How much better is the conservative/libertarian culture of what I call "responsible individualism" in which almost everyone can participate and be a modest winner.

I think that your Coming Apart is the finest of your books and the best revenge on your critics. Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that you say that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.

After reading Natalie Scholl's Bell Curve 20-year interview on the AEI-ideas site I am inspired to look more closely into your "valued places" idea and I will get a copy of your In Our Hands. But I must say that I flinch from the idea of a guaranteed income. In my view this confirms the current system whereby the ruling class gets to use the entire government fisc to buy the votes of the voters.

I like to divide the American people in three.  There are the People of the Creative Self who believe in illuminating society with their creative and expressionistic individualism. There are the People of the Responsible Self, who believe in serving society through individual responsibility and service. Finally there is the residue of the peasantry, the People of the Under Self, who used to live by attaching themselves to a landed squire and now attach to a political boss,  a union boss, a cacique, a community organizer. The point of your "valued places" I reckon, is that the women that don't marry and the men that don't work get resocialized into useful "valued places" as the followers of some powerful patron. My faith is that we can, we must, do that without the powerful patron being the government. Alternatively, of course, we can return to the 19th century and socialize the People of the Under Self into the middle class with enthusiastic churches and fraternal associations.

Thank you, Charles Murray, for your honest and intelligent witness in a life of worthy human accomplishment. There are many, like me, that honor you and your work.

Sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

Poor Having Fewer Babies

Few things have worried the bourgeoisie more than the excess birthrate among the poor.  It probably started with worry about all those starving children, but by the turn of the 20th century and Margaret Sanger and all it reduced down to the problem of the unfit.  That's what Planned Parenthood was all about, remember.  And it worked.  To this day Planned Parenthood maintains a heavy presence in lower-income neighborhoods.

The interesting backstory to this is told by Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms.  It turns out that before 1800 in England the poor had less surviving children than the rich, for obvious reasons.  Since the Gerald O'Hara rule then applied, that "land is the only thing that lasts," primogeniture dictated that the younger children of the rich, the landed warrior class, were kicked downwards into the professions.  And the younger children of the professions were downwardly mobile too.  And so on until we get to the landless laborer.

But that all changed with the industrial revolution.  The poor started having more children than the rich and the children of the poor moved up in the social scale: an upwardly mobile society.  Hence the Sangerite panic a century later.

But now, according to Ross Douthat in The New York Times, the poor and the immigrants are having less children:

American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered...

This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust.

But here's the clincher:

Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at all.

 So all the worriers about the survival of the unfit can go home.  The unfit are having less unfit babies.  Back to the good old days of the pre-1800 downwardly mobile society.  But I don't think this will end well.

You only have to read Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, to see why.  Life is peachy-keen among the educated class: that's you and me.  We get married, we have children, we get divorced less than average.  But in the lower orders, things are not good.  Fifty percent of children are living with one parent, and working-class men are leaving the workforce.  All the statistics show that children of single parents present more pathologies than children of two-parent families.  My favorite is that children of single parents suffer six to 30 times more from physical abuse than the children living with their married biological parents.  And then there are the men.  Single men do worse than married man, much worse.

Says Instapundit: "Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be."

But that misses the main point.  If the lower orders are doing worse then that amounts to the failure of the welfare state.  The whole point of the welfare state was to tax the rich in order to help the poor.

It goes deeper than that.  It means that the welfare state has turned out to be profoundly unjust.  Sooner or later the lower orders will bust out of their welfare-state ghetto with rage.  You'd like to think that they would focus their rage on the people that tempted them with welfare state goodies and in the process wrecked their families, their work ethic, and their prosperity.  But they probably won't.  They will probably go after the Mitt Romneys of the world, the uncaring capitalists that create the jobs in this world, on the prompting of some latter-day community organizer.

That would be a shame.  For all of us.

Obama's Great White Whale

You expect politicians to have hackneyed political ideas, and President Obama doesn't disappoint.

It's been obvious all along that his central concern is "inequality" and a post-election piece by Zachary Goldfarb points that up.

As Obama did in legislative fights during his first term, he also will be striving to reduce a three-decades-long wave of rising income inequality that has meant that fewer Americans have prospered while more struggle to get by.

Three decades, you'll note, takes us back to the beginning of the Reagan administration.  It means that the astonishing economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s was a mirage.  It's the basis of  "you didn't build that," of Joe the Plumber and "spread the wealth" and just about everything the president has done.

And the rest of the liberal political culture is not far behind.  That's what all the nostalgia talk about "good jobs at good wages" in the 1950s is all about.  Back then we had big corporations and strong unions and the working stiff made out well.  Today with outsourcing and greedy bankers and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney the little guy is getting screwed.

That's the liberal line.

The conservative line comes out of people like Charles Murray and his Coming Apart.  The conservative line is that the mechanical liberal administrative welfare state hurts the very people it is supposed to help.  It encourages people in dependency, breaks up families, gives the children of the poor a lousy education, puts government under the thumb of government employee unions and business into the corruption of go-along-to-get-along crony capitalism.  Oh, things are going swimmingly for the cognitive elite, the people that are good at going to school and getting credentials and navigating bureaucratic hierarchies.  But if you are a meat-and-potatoes kind of person, one that learns by doing, and that lives in a face-to-face rather than a memo-to-memo culture--well tough luck for you.

But there's another troubling aspect to this, and it is coming out int he fiscal cliff crisis.  We learn from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the basic fiscal-cliff proposal from the Obama administration is basically $1.6 trillion in tax increases.  If this is true, it means that the Obamis are not advancing a serious proposal for entitlement reform.  It means that, if there is any entitlement reform, it will be just a bargaining chip in the power struggle between the two factions of our ruling class.

This tells us a lot more than you might think.  Republicans and conservatives would like to reform the government entitlements so that they are self-financing, so that the federal government finances can get onto a long-term balance.  They want to get the government out of the middle of all this.  The Democrats don't.

When the Democrats stopped observing the Budget Control Acts after 2009 they opted for the annual cliff-hanger like the 2011 debt-default crisis, and now the fiscal-cliff crisis.  They are reducing policy to an annual national cage fight.

In my judgment this is a serious betrayal of the "little people," the welfare-state dependents that rely on those government programs.  It shows that the Democrats don't really care about them except for their votes.

Because when the crash comes, Arnold Kling's "sudden stop" when the government has to balance spending and revenue because it can't borrow any more, then the welfare-state dependents are going to be hurt the most: "women and minorities hardest hit" as the headline goes.  Eating the paint off the walls, as the Russians say.

But really, anyone that relies on a government to keep themselves in groceries deserves what they get.  Government is force, politics is for bullies.  If you cast your vote with the bullies, you get what you pay for.

I don't think that President Obama is really interested in the long-term fate of the dependent classes.  He has a facile answer for all that: "inequality."  Just lower the level of struggle for the struggling classes by making the rich pay a little more, and you can make America a better country.

There's another way of putting this.  Just let politicians do what comes naturally, dividing people by income and class and looting the producers to pay off their supporters, says President Obama, and all will be well.

Well.  The whole thrust of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke has been that you surrender society to "sophisters, economists, and calculators" at your peril.  He means, in our modern argot, that society cannot be reduced to system and administrative routine.  We humans are social animals, not mechanical animals.

The Next Great Moral Movement

Everyone keeps telling Republicans to lose the social issues.  Which is great advice, until the next great moral movement arrives.  Then you'd better get with the movement or disappear from the public square.

What do I mean?  I mean that human society runs partly on self-interest and partly on morality.  You may think that everyone operates purely on self-interest, but they don't.  People want to believe that they are on the side of the angels, and they spend a lot of energy persuading themselves that their nasty little hypocrisies are just minor and temporary diversions from the straight and true.  That is why they say that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

If we look back at the modern age, we have seen two great moral movements.

The first was the anti-slavery movement.  The argument was simple.  Here we western chappies were drinking our tea and coffee with sugar from slave plantations, and making a nice little packet of money out of it too.  We were treating the slaves that put the sugar on our tables as mere human resources, human machines that we could exploit and use up without regard to their humanity.  The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it this way.  We should treat people as "ends" not as "means."  The plantation slave is the ultimate in treating a human as a means, a mere resource to be used and burned up like coal or oil.

The second great moral movement was similar to the first.  It was the socialist movement.  The argument was almost exactly the same.  We were treating the people that worked in factories, in mines, and mills, as if they were machines, to be worked hard until they were used up.  Again, like the plantation slave system, the factory system treated the worker as purely a means, a mere resource, rather than a brother or sister human.  It was inhuman.

It is easy to describe and to oppose such crimes against humanity, but much harder to really do something about them.  The battle against slavery ended in a century of Jim Crow for the liberated slaves, and the liberation of the worker spawned the most cruel and oppressive political regimes imaginable.

There is a reason why these noble movements went so far astray.  They put their faith in government and government is always and everywhere a system of force.  So, the activists decided that the solution to a system of exploitation and force was to substitute another system of force.  Tell me another one.

The upshot is that we have our modern gigantic governments careening out of control and enslaving their peoples in the name of liberation.

Obviously this will not go on forever.  A moral movement will arise to fight the injustice and the hypocrisy of a system that professes sweetness and light and practices the arts of oppression and exploitation.

Reenter the social issues.  The modern conservative critique of the liberal culture is that it is a culture of pure selfishness and encourages its votaries to treat all other humans as a means to an end.

Sex?  You can couple and uncouple as the mood takes you, but No means No except when it doesn't.  Marriage?  Critical for gays but optional for everyone else.  And babies.

Yeah.  A woman has the right to control her body.  And that means she can terminate the life of her "fetus" or "unborn baby" as she chooses, treating the life within her purely as a means rather than a end.

My guess is that, sooner or later, we will see a great moral movement arise about the whole question of sex, marriage, and abortion.  Whatever liberals say, the sexual revolution has been a mixed blessing to women and children--and men too.  You can see the results in Charles Murray's Coming Apart.  Marriage and family is doing fine in the upper-income educated class.  It is collapsing in the underclass and seriously damaged in the middle class.  Social collapse is really hard on the kiddies.

Nobody can predict the timeline on the next great moral movement, any more than people can predict the stock market.  My guess is that it will really get going in the debris of government debt and default that is coming in the next few years.  Probably it has already started, but we boobs can't see it because we are looking in the wrong places.

But when it comes it will change everything.

America's Moral Challenge

Throughout its history, writes Michael Barone, the Republican Party has attracted "voters who are generally seen by themselves and by others as typical Americans."  For many years that also meant northern and Protestant.  And the Democratic Party base was Southern and also Northern Catholic.

But now everything has changed, and the Republican Party's base is typical Americans that are "white married Christians."  A consequence of this is that over the last two decades the Republican Party has lost the votes of educated suburbanites, as Democrats have attacked the social conservatism of non-college whites as "extremism" while still insisting that the GOP is the party of northeastern big-business WASPs.

You could say that the 2008 election was a perfect storm for Republicans as affluent suburbanites recoiled from the Texas taint of the George W. Bush years and happily voted for America's first black president.

Today, of course, the affluent suburbanites aren't quite as affluent, and they feel that they didn't quite get what they bargained for in America's first post-partisan president.

But I think there is a real moral problem with the educated suburbanites that advertise themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal."  Because I think that the socially liberal world-view is responsible for America's biggest problem.

The problem is exposed in Charles Murray's Coming Apart about white America.  Briefly, the top 20 percent, the educated elite, is doing fine.  But the bottom 30 percent is not doing fine.  And the main problem with the bottom 30 percent is that about half the children don't have married parents.  Lower-income women often don't get married to the fathers of their children, and lower-income men often don't work.

There is no particular mystery about this.  America is organized for the benefit of the upper 20 percent and the kind of life they want to lead.  The top 20 percent sends their kids to college-prep high schools and on to college and graduate school.  When they are established in a career at about 30 then it is time for marriage and children.  And 80 percent of 30-49-year-olds in the top 20 percent are married.

For people like this the "socially liberal" world view makes sense.  You are relaxed (but careful) about your sexual life, and take care not to get a kid started before you are ready for marriage.

But suppose you are not college material.  Suppose you don't get on in school.  Then you are living across the grain that the top 20 percent has designed and built for America, and things aren't going to be so easy for you.  There are credential problems associated with the good jobs; there is the minimum wage, which makes it difficult to get started and work your way up by acquiring skills as you go.  There are the swingeing taxes on employment, especially outdoor work like construction, that make labor expensive but sequesters a lot of labor income in government trust funds for Social Security, unemployment, and workers comp instead of giving it straight to the worker.

But heck, if you are a young man you still want to get laid, and if you are a young woman you still want to have a baby.  Social liberalism means that it's OK to get laid and it's OK to get an abortion or raise a kid as a single parent.

Only, of course, kids of single parents have much worse prospects that the kids of married parents, including the problem of abuse from the sexual partners of single parents.

Now I have a word for the situation in which the bottom 30 percent is placed by decades of government and social policy dictated by the top 20 percent.  I call it "injustice."  I think that the educated top 20 percent has ripped apart the culture and the well-being of the bottom 30 percent like a tornado.  They confiscated the right for the bottom 30 percent to solve their own problems and live life on their own terms.  The top 20 percent built the society they wanted for themselves and they threw money at the people that didn't want, or couldn't compete, in their Brave New World.

Nobody has asked "non-college whites" what they want.  And the college whites, the people that live in affluent suburbia and work in office parks with good salaries and benefits, have been led by liberal Democrats to sneer at the opinions of the non-college whites: "bitter clingers" as Candidate Obama explained to his rich-bitch contributors in 2008.

There is hypocrisy here.  The top 20 percent do not actually live the "socially liberal" lifestyle they affect to support.  They are pretty family oriented and pretty careful about their sexual behavior.  After all, the upper-20-percent life trajectory requires a careful husbanding of human and economic capital.   You need to study hard in school and then work hard in your profession.  You need to select a mate carefully, to make sure that your investments in your career aren't compromised.  Fortunately, if you make a mistake--an unwanted baby or an arrest from an excess of high spirits--then Mom will clean up your mess for you.

In my view the great challenge for America in the years ahead is to thrash out a new moral culture.

No, wait.  In my view the great challenge for the upper 20 percent in the years ahead is to give the "typical American" non-college whites the cultural space to build out their own authentic culture without marginalizing it as "extremism" or "bigotry."

This will not be easy for the top 20 percent.  It will take an effort in "consciousness raising" similar to the effort that pushed the civil rights revolution through in the 1950s and 1960s.

The problem is that just as there were powerful Southerners standing in the schoolhouse door pushing back against civil rights there are powerful liberals today in education, politics and culture pushing back against any move to mainstream marriage and reform education and the workplace to make it more non-college friendly.

So things are going to get worse before they get better.  And many people in the bottom 30 percent will suffer grievously.

Liberals Out of Touch

In the New York Times review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart, Nicholas Confessore tells us a little more than he intends about liberal denial.  Writes he:

You will learn about working-class laziness, but you will find little discussion of the decline of trade unions or the rise of a service economy built on part-time work without benefits.

Murray's thesis is that the welfare state has led to a breakdown in white working class culture, the bottom 30 percent of white America: a decline in marriage, a decline of civic culture, and a decline in men working. Meanwhile things are peachy keen up in the top 20 percent.  Marriage is doing fine, and divorce is even declining.  People work like mad.

Murray argues that the welfare state has hollowed out the bottom 30 percent.  But Confessore grumbles that things would be fine if only unions were still strong and benefits were still robust.

So let us give Michael Barone a word.  He was raised in Detroit, and there is something he wants you to know about those good union jobs for good wages and benefits.

I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.

That's one of the reasons why the unions ended up killing the automakers.  They insisted on "30 years and out" for the workers that hated their jobs, and then they insisted on health benefits for their retirees.  It was a bridge too far for the automakers.

One of the things that advanced lefty thinkers have been pondering for the last half century is that big, rationally-designed bureaucratic organizations are inherently oppressive and exploitive.  They necessarily treat humans as merely a means to an end, a labor resource, whether the big organizations are corporate or governmental.  Of course they have ended by tying themselves in knots over this because they can't let go of the idea politics is everything and that that enlightened thinkers ought to be organizing the lives of the workers.  They can't let go and let the workers organize their lives like any social animal.  They have to butt in and save the workers from themselves.

So we have the rank-and-file New York Times reader in denial about the 1950s and the philsophers in denial about the limits of politics.

I just took a quick look at Wikipedia's stages-of-grief article.  Did you know that there are critics that say the Kübler-Ross model is rubbish?  It is perhaps more accurate to term the denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance progression is not a healthy, but a victim response to life challenges.  Since our liberal friends don't believe in adaption in a societal context (because it is social Darwinism, darling) they regard unfavorable trends as an insult to their self-esteem.  Thus they respond to change with disfunctional denial and rage.

We are called all our lives to adapt to changing circumstances.  The liberal model of the bureaucratic welfare state just doesn't work.  We are never going to have an economy again with "good union jobs at good wages" where we can sit back like bumps on a log and extract monopoly wages from our fellow citizens.  It was a fantasy back in the 1950s and it owed everything then and now to liberal political power.  Do liberals want to lead their followers out of a dead end, and encourage them to compete in the new world economy, or do they want to exploit their victim-denial response until the whole system collapses as in Greece?

The Democrats' Educated Voter Problem

Everyone likes to pose our great political divides as Republican problems, as in the "gender gap" and in "moderate voters hate Republican social conservatives."

No doubt, and that matters in swing states like Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina where the pundits say the November election will be decided.  Why?  Let William Tucker tell you.

Now, what do these three states have in common? Very simply, they are the nation's new "suburbs," the emerging middle ground between urban centers of the East and West Coasts and Upper Midwest... These are Joel Garreau's "Edge Cities" or David Brooks' "Latte Towns" -- take your pick -- inhabited by Richard Florida's "Creative Class." Their voters are college-educated, employed well-paying, high-status jobs, but far enough away from the media centers so that they haven't yet bought into the liberal dogma that the only way for things to be "fair" in America is to vote for Democrats.

These folks are the paradigmatic voters that say they are "economically conservative and socially liberal."  Actually, according to my interpretation of Charles Murray in Coming Apart, they are reverse hypocrites.  They act socially conservative but talk socially liberal.  Go figure.

Let's stipulate that those college-educated folks with their high-paying jobs hate the bitter clingers and their God and their guns.

But what about the other side of the equation?  Remember how Candidate Obama was going to heal the wounds of the Red-Blue divide?  Remember how he only got out a teeny squeak of his "share-the-wealth" agenda to Joe the Plumber back in 2008?

Not any more.  These days President Obama is class-warrior-in-chief.

How about this reckless statement.  Suppose those college-educated folks in Colorado and Virginia and North Carolina just hate the class-warfare rubbish coming out of Democrats' mouths--from the president to the superb Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and on down the Democratic food chain to the execrable Occupy crowd--suggesting that rich folks, the one percent, "pay a little more."

Class warfare may play well in the inner city or with the government union employee that gets two to three emails a day from the union boss telling her how she is being screwed by the Republican governor.  But the college-educated employee working for a young technology company is an achiever.  He or she has made a big investment in education and a career.   Share-the-wealth means that he or she will have to pay more taxes out to slackers.  It means that the return on all that investment and achievement is going to be reduced.

Yet here we have President Obama doing the Democratic equivalent of Rick Santorum.  The "socially liberal" educated voter hates Rick Santorum and his social conservatism.  Why wouldn't the "economically conservative"educated voter hate President Obama and his economic class warfare?

Just asking.

Misunderstanding Charles Murray

What is it about liberals, anyway?  Why did they gang-tackle Charles Murray on The Bell Curve? And why does liberal Joan Walsh of Salon miss the point of Murray's latest book, Coming Apart? 

I suppose it's because she sees everything through a lens of social justice, in that everyone's position in society is a consequence of white racism, or a consequence of how much support they get from government.

The point of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 is that the white working class are suffering many of the same pathologies as the minority underclass: a decline in marriage, an increase in single parenthood, a detachment from community organizations, and a retreat among single men from work.

The reason Murray made his book exclusively about whites was that he wanted to detach from his argument any question of racism.  Folks like Joan Walsh live by the accusation of racism.  If brown people are doing badly, it must be due to racism. The argument that Charles Murray wants to make is that if the white working class is experiencing increases in social pathology then something other than racism must be at work.  Maybe it is government programs!

Joan Walsh lives by the notion that a Democratic majority of "the young, women, lower-income blacks, Latinos and Asians" is waiting to take over--if not this year then next.  The suffering white working class could throw a wrench in the works if it votes Republican in 2012, and that would be a pity.  And in due course, social justice activists will have to pay attention to their grievances.

The forces of social justice have always looked out for the rights and singular insights of minority populations. We’re about to have a new one to think about.

And that's even though "low income white people have benefited from the long legal and extralegal history of racial subjugation and white supremacy".

Actually Walsh is wrong about that Democratic majority.  If it forms, it would be the young, single women, all blacks, lower-income Latinos and lower-income Asians.  And I'm not so sure about the young, since they have been disproportionately affected by Obamanomics and might be having second thoughts about hope and change.

But Walsh does make a telling point about white seniors.  The most Republican counties are the ones that get most federal payments, "crop subsidies, housing assistance, and Medicaid payments".  In other words, Republicans are all on welfare.   Tea Party supporters, for instance, have no intention of giving up their Medicare, yet that is just what Paul Ryan and the Republican Party want to do; they want to end Medicare as we know it.

Will white seniors continue to support the Republican Party if it takes away their Medicare and replaces it with a fixed subsidy?  Maybe that would be the issue that creates a Democratic majority.

But that would turn Joan Walsh's social justice notions on their head, because a Republican reform of Medicare would make wealthy seniors--like me--pay more.  So she is hoping for a realignment based upon Republicans making Medicare more progressive?

No wonder she doesn't get the point of Coming Apart.

Duck and Cover, Mr. President

I suppose that President Obama knows what he is doing with his class warfare strategy for reelection.  His State of the Union speech was complete with Warren Buffett's secretary, the one that pays more, percentage-wise, in tax that her boss.

But I'd like to warn you, Mr. President, that there is a ballistic missile en route that may well change the terms of trade in the current political argument.  The missile is Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010.  It shows that it's not a question of the One Percent versus the 99 Percent, as our Occupy friends suggest.  It is not a question of millionaires and billionaires not paying enough in taxes. It is more a question of the top 20 percent of the upper-middle class doing fine in America while the bottom 30 percent does not.

Last time Charles Murray had a blockbuster it was Losing Ground in the 1980s. That book was an analysis of the effect of the welfare state and its welfare programs.  It led to the reform of welfare in the 1990s.

The point that Charles Murray tries to make, over and over again, is that "inequality" is not a problem of millionaires and billionaires making too much money.  It is a problem of the government spending too much money on the welfare state.

It sounds very caring and compassionate for the government to spend money on the poor.  If only it were true.  Instead government spending leads to the breakup of families and the idleness of men.

Government spending doesn't lead to idleness in the upper-middle class because, oddly enough, the government designed by the upper-middle class helps the upper-middle class do what it wants to do anyway: go to school, get a degree, get a job, start a family.  But the welfare state has the opposite effect on anyone below the upper-middle class.  It encourages women to choose the government over marriage, and it encourages men to abandon the mothers of their children.  Unmarried men tend to work less than married men--a lot less.  Also, of course, a bums-on-seats education system may work very well for the sons and daughters of the middle class, but not so well for the sons and daughters of the working class, where people learn more by doing that by listening to teachers.

I just have this feeling, Mr. President, that when we look back on 2012, we will remember not your 2012 State of the Union Speech, but the publication day of Coming Apart: January 31, 2012.

America's Class Divide

Conservative policy supremo Charles Murray has a new book coming out about the class divide in America, between the upper-middle class, the 20 percent at the top that is doing fine, and the 30 percent at the bottom that isn't. Reportedly titled "Coming Apart," you could say the book is a sequel to Murray's book about social programs, Losing Ground. There's a great video of Charles Murray delivering the numbers here. Murray has limited his story to white America. Because the story he has to tell is not about race.

Here's the basic message. Back in 1960 about 88 percent of the top 20 percent of 30-49 year-olds was married and about 83 percent of the bottom 30 percent was married. Now it is 83 percent and 48 percent. That's right. Less than half of the working class is now married, but there's hardly been a change in the top 20 percent.

Rick Lowry of National Review extracts the rest of the details from Murray's talk.

• "In 1960, births to single mothers in the working class were just 6 percent; now they are close to 50 percent."
• "In 1960, 1.5 percent of men in the upper middle class were out of the workforce; it's 2 percent now. In 1968, the number for working-class men hit a low of 5 percent; even before the spike in unemployment after the financial crisis, it was 12 percent in 2008."
• Today, "Among the upper middle class, 42 percent say they either don't believe in God or don’t go to church. In the working class, it's 61 percent."

The next thing to do is to decide who's to blame. Well, we conservatives know what to do about that.

But the bigger question is: how do we change the culture so that all Americans can participate as full social members in American society? When you have a big chunk of the bottom 30 percent not married, not working, not contributing to society, you have a society that is not very social.

But then, we conservatives would say, what do you expect? Administration and bureaucracy, the basic logic of the welfare state, are not the characteristics of society, they are the characteristics of an army.