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.

In Humiliation, Rage. Solving America's Race Problem

I just solved America's Race Problem. It's simple really.

Just ask yourself: why are blacks so angry?

The answer is obvious. Because blacks never had to fight for their freedom. All along, from Wilberforce to Waters, they have been mascots, political toys with which whites play their virtue-signaling games.

Anti-slavery campaign? It was started by William Wilberforce, rich-kid son of a merchant from Hull, England, in the Baltic trade. One thing about rich kids, from Wilberforce to Marx and Engels to Horkheimer and Adorno to Marcuse: They desperately need to do something to make their meaningless lives meaningful.

Civil War? It was a war between virtue-signaling whites in the North and Southern whites who vowed that the prissy Northerners could take their slaves out of their cold dead hands.

Civil Rights era? It was mostly a whites affair. Smart Jewish kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Cherished mascot of white liberals. And King used the non-violent protest concept that Gandhi developed. And how did Gandhi develop it? Because the Brits allowed this high-caste Indian to go to Britland to study to become a barrister and get inside the whole culture of British law and figure out how to beat it.

But whatabout slave rebellions? Here are PBS's five favorite slave rebellions:

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. "About 20 slaves."
2. New York Conspiracy of 1741. Never got to a rebellion, but about 130 blacks and others were hanged, exiled, or "sent to the stake."
3. Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800. Bit of a cock-up on the rebellion front. Gabriel planned to rally more than 1,000 to his revolt, but bad weather made his supporters lose heart.
4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. Charles Delondes and "about 25 slaves" rose up and attacked their plantation's owner.
5. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831. Nat Turner and "about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them."

Notice that two of the five rebellions are termed "conspiracies;" they never made it to full-blown rebellions. Not exactly Kirk Douglas and Spartacus, when about 70 slave-gladiators were eventually "joined by 120,000 men, women, and children" forming "a surprisingly effective armed force" in the Third Servile War.

So, basically the whole slave and civil-rights and critical race theory thing was all about whites virtue-signalling each other. With blacks as the mascots, the sacred objects to be sacrificed to the gods on liberal feast days.

If I were a black I would be humiliated by all this. No wonder that black males have such a super-macho culture. It is a compensation for their actual humiliation at the hands of rich-kid white liberals.

Now let's get all Churchillian about this. Remember his immortal lines:

In War: Resolution,
In Defeat: Defiance,
In Victory: Magnanimity,
In Peace: Good Will.

Yes, but whatabout the humiliation of blacks in being the 200-year special mascots of whites from Hull to Our Nance's San Francisco? Exactly,

In Humiliation: Rage.

Now you know why blacks are so angry.

OK. I've identified the problem. Now, how about a solution? 

Thank you, Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

The solution is simple, and comes right out of the current mass frenzy about police killings of blacks.

I agree with blacks. It is intolerable to have white police officers offing their best and brightest, when they are only mildly resisting arrest.

So I propose that no white policeman be allowed to arrest or use lethal force against any black suspect. Period. Because justice. 

But wait, you say! That means that our Democratic cities will all go up in smoke and violence, and the murder rate will double and triple.

Exactly. And then, maybe, blacks will form an organic movement -- trained Marxists need not apply -- and demand that their municipal leaders fund the police, crack the heads of the gang-bangers and homeboys, and restore peace to "our communities."

Then the rest of the Churchillian homilies will apply.

In War: Resolution,
In Victory: Magnanimity,
In Peace: Good Will.

For blacks will finally, organically, in the teeth of opposition from all the white liberal virtue-signalers, achieve what they have always lacked. Self-respect.

Ain't I a stinker? As Bugs Bunny put it so many moons ago.

My New Reality on Race and Economics

One of the central beliefs of conservatives for the last half-century is that the "broken-windows" policing using the CompStat data-driven approach, associated with Bill Braxton and Rudy Giulani, is a Good Thing. Police need to concentrate on the areas with the most criminality, and they need to get after the routine criminal acts of the criminal class.

The value of this was confirmed in nice liberal journalist Jill Leovy's Ghettoside when she wrote that the problem of policing in big cities is that people daren't testify in court about gang killings, because intimidation, but that people in big cities blame the cops for harassing the gang-bangers for minor infractions.

Or killing, or failing to resuscitate said gang-bangers when they are shot or restrained when resisting arrest.

I now realize that this policy was wrong. We should let the folks in the inner city kill each other to their hearts' content until they organize politically and demand that the majority whites are complete racists until they stop the killing.

Back in the day, in "Mau-mauing the Flack Catchers," Tom Wolfe captured the problem with policing the ghetto, reported recently by Steve Sailer. Back then the political types thought that the way to deal with riots at Hunters Point in San Francisco was to talk to the gang leaders, or anyone in control.

What they didn’t know was that Hunters Point and a lot of ghettos were so disorganized, there weren’t even any “key gangs,” much less “key gang leaders,” in there. That riot finally just burnt itself out after five days, that was all.

And now we are seeing, in the Ma'Khia Bryant killing where allegedly a cop shot Bryant because she was allegedly attacking another young black girl with a knife, is that it's none of his business. He killed a black girl, a child. That is all.

OK. I get it. White policemen have no business enforcing in the law on blacks. Period.

And actually that follows the logic of my reductive Three Peoples theory. People only accept law enforcement by their tribal leaders. For middle-class Responsibles, the tribe is the nation, so the national -- or municipal -- police force is the right organization to enforce the peace. But Subordinates identify with their race or their ethnicity or their country-of-origin. They need to be policed by the leaders of their tribe or race. Although, of course, we all know that race is a social construction.

Exactly. People identify with their socially constructed race as they have been socialized to do by their socially constructed leaders. 

Therefore, while Blacks identify as Blacks, white police officers should not enforce American law in Black ghettos. However, when a Black ventures out of the ghetto into America...

When Blacks start to identify as Americans, citizens of the nation called the United States of America -- as some already do -- then it is OK for white police officers to enforce national law.

I have had a similar realization with respect to economics. Back in the day, I thought that Reaganomics had conclusively demonstrated for all time that Big Government and Keynesian economics were sick and wrong. That is what the recovery from the Carter years of "stagflation" conclusively demonstrated, when the Reagan administration instructed the Federal Reserve Board to kill inflation, and it did. And the Reagan administration forged an agreement with the Democrats in Congress, Tip O'Neill presiding, about cutting taxes and spending. The result was Morning in America, even though the Democrats decided not to honor their commitment to cut spending. The Dirty Dogs.

But now the Biden administration has been told by the best economists not to worry about the debt, not to worry about inflation, and that its trillions of dollars in "infrastructure" will boost the economy.

It's as though the Reagan years never happened.

In other words, the Reagan years saved the bacon of the Democrats, and allowed them to continue to believe in their fantasies that license them to continue with their program of spend-and-elect.

Or, to make the problem bigger, per Ike, if you believe in power, as everyone in politics does, you necessarily glomm onto ideas that propose a national mobilization to fight a war against an existential peril. Thus, today's headline that "Biden pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030." Because if we don't mobilize as one and buy Teslas the planet is going to burn.

So, the Black problem is that, until Blacks are crying out in sheer terror to insist that the white man comes into their neighborhoods and stop the killing, nice sensible ideas like CompStat and "broken windows" ain't gonna fly. 

Likewise, until our Democratic friends are utterly demolished by their big government spend-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes political philosophy and are deposed by a successor regime, successive Reagan revivals ain't gonna help.

And all of that, I believe, is a shame.

The Question of Men, Women, Stress, Hierarchy, Complaint and Conformity

Responding to my piece on "Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues, But..." regular reader Sara reminds my that my notion of the women's Culture of Complaint was corrected a while back by a woman red.hibiscus who wrote:

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience... The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

Perfectly correct. Actually I would say that, in a perfect world, men have a Culture of Courage. After a couple of drinks it descends into a Culture of Insult. In a perfect world, women have a Culture of Conformity. After a couple of disagreements, it descends into a Culture of Complaint. Ying and Yang, and all that.

The piece on Liberal Women got into the question of "stress" which I think is a Girl Thing. I also think that "mental health issues" has a lot to do with women experiencing conflict in the man-designed public square. Conflict is part of the game for men, but intolerable for women.

In view of all this, Sara writes, we need to remember

1) The idea that open confrontation (instead of gossip) is anti-female culture 

2) The idea that stress AKA conflict is intolerable to women and they won't stand for it. 

Men live in a dominance hierarchy, Sara writes, and "see their survival in the world around them as a fight to be on top of the pyramid." But

Women however, because of the nature of their female bodies, necessarily see their own survival in the world around them as a fight to be left alone and survive in an EXISTING CONTEXT set by men.

Actually, I would refine this to say that most men most of the time know their place in the dominance hierarchy, and only occasionally attempt to change it in a fight, a point made by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster hierarchy argument.

I suppose the same applies to women, wanting to be left alone to run their households and raise children in the context created by marriage, and only occasionally being challenged by the gossip of the women's Culture of Complaint -- which is, no doubt, concerned about the woman in question appearing to violate the Culture of Conformity.

To get all Hegelian we would say that the male Culture of Courage has its negation in the Culture of Insult, while the female Culture of Conformity has its negation in the Culture of Complaint.

I would say that, despite the male hierarchy, there is among men a curious counter-current of equality. When men greet each other with an insult they are expressing that notion: "hey, pal, you are no better than I am." And, for instance, when I had my interview with billionaire Steve Ballmer I was careful to treat him as an equal, and behave as though I expected to be treated as an equal.

And I think that in the women's Culture of Conformity that asserts an equality among women there is a hidden hierarchy that every woman knows but nobody talks about. The Culture of Complaint is all about adjusting that hidden hierarchy.

Also, another woman corrected me on the Culture of Complaint saying that the ideal among women is Kindness. (This explains the last line on the virtue-signaling #WeBelieve yard sign that insists "Kindness is Everything").

I suspect that the Culture of Conformity and the Culture of Kindness are different aspects of the same thing.

Don't ask me how all this aligns with the left's insistence that everything is a social construction, except when it isn't.

"I Will Make You Safe"

Here's how to get elected president in 2024. Tell the women of America: "I will make you safe."

Because by 2024, what with the gathering chaos of Biden-world, women won't be so worried about Trump's rudeness. No indeedy. They will be wanting a Strong Man that will stop the madness and Make Them Safe.

Normally, as I say, Women Expect to be Protected. In normal times, when it really seems that they are being protected, it is natural for women to look askance upon aggressive men that like to duke it out in the public square. It seems like the rude men are making them unsafe.

I disagree with that, but I get it. What Women Want is to get on with their womanly tasks of keeping the kids alive and protecting their reputation as chaste women in the community of women. Aggressive men don't fit into that world.

They are wrong of course. What they should be doing, in normal times, is encouraging men in their manly sports, to keep them up to the mark. Most manly pursuits, from hunting to sports to politics, are relatively harmless. Indeed, they are genius, by deflecting men's natural propensity to quarrel into safe channels.

But when chaos looms, then women stop expecting men to cool their jets; then they start expecting men to sacrifice themselves and protect them, the women.

Now, my guess is that the current Democrat policy circus, from chaos at the border to chaos in the cities, to loot and plunder for the educated Snobs and the helpless victim Scum, is going to make women really afraid, perhaps even including the virtue-signalling women of the #WeBelieve brigade and the "Hate Has No Home Hare" huffers. 

Because what our Democratic friends are forgetting, as they go pedal-to-the-metal on every lefty activist notion imaginable, is that all their activism makes ordinary middle-class Schmucks less safe and less secure and less prosperous.

As I read the Strauss and Howe Fourth Turning I realize that the Big Thing that sparks their "Crisis" is the accumulated injustice of the current ruling-class regime. This is not to damn our liberal ruling-class friends in particular. It is just in the nature of the beast that every ruling class favors and feeds its own supporters and neglects the rest of the community.

Let me just boil it down to one chart from usgovernmentspending.com:

Do you see how, over the last century, government spending steadily increased as a percent of GDP up until about 1980. When, shall we say, it had gone about as far as it could go? And by the way, when ordinary American workers stopped participating in the increase in wealth and income?

Think of all that government spending as loot and plunder that the ruling class takes out of the hide of ordinary people and puts in the hands of its supporters. And I mean everyone from Social Security recipients like me to unionized teachers in the public schools to college professors to grant-wielding scientists to all kinds of people getting government contracts and subsidies, etc.

The more money that government takes out of the hide of ordinary people making their ordinary living, the more that it creates victims of injustice, people who cannot make a decent life for themselves because of the rip tides in the economy created by the government playing favorites.

Now Strauss and Howe gin up a cutesy Jungian theory of the circulation of archetypes, Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists to explain the political cycle. I think it is a cutesy way of covering the nakedness of the truth with a decent drapery, to drag in Edmund Burke. Because, after all, Strauss and Howe are educated class Snobs, and they know that the educated class can only take a little twinch of truth at a time. We get to their "Crisis" when the current ruling class is running out of ways to hide the naked injustice of their rule -- and pretty well all ruling classes are unjust, because "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Hey, we are all human, and we all like a bit of free stuff. But it leads in the end to a situation where a ruling class is trying to cut corners -- like ours right now -- because the sums don't add up. So the ruling class launches its BLMs and Antifas into the streets, and demonizes the opposition as an "armed insurrection" and pretty soon women start looking for a Savior to Make Them Safe.

To Be Continued. As they say.

A New Three Layer Theory: Snobs, Schmucks, and Scum

I was reading The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, after my daughter recommended it five years ago.

I agree with its notion of historical cycles, and that they tend to be about the length of one full human life, eighty to one hundred years. And that it is convenient to break up the cycles into 20-year generations.

But I'm not sure I agree with grafting Jungian archetypes onto the generations: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist.

And I don't agree with the idea of distilling hundreds of topical best-sellers as a real view of social and cultural reality. The picture that Strauss and Howe paint is really the ebb and flow of educated-class fashions. It does not really deal with politics as the ebb and flow of who-whom, to coin a phrase.

I'd say that a better way to understand history is to think about how the ruling class, living in its bubble, is often clueless about the miseries it is committing on the rest of the society. Let us rather say that a cycle begins with a new elite dishing out loot and plunder to its supporters, and then dealing with the unanticipated consequences of its actions. For instance, it might have seemed like a good idea to offer loot to senior citizens with Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, but what happens when these programs end up eating the budget? And the well-to-do seniors make sure the politicians know that they'd better not mess with their entitlements.

The basic fact is that the ruling class, any ruling class, is nothing but a bunch of Snobs. The ruling class thinks it is the fount of all wisdom, and no wonder when nobody dares to challenge it, because consequences. In our case we have a ruling class that is endlessly coming up with cool ways to buy votes and launch impressive projects of self-admiration. But what happens to the ordinary middle-class Schmucks on the receiving end of the ruling-class brilliance?

For instance, take California, please. In the 1970s, my first decade in the US, California was already in the lead in controlling suburban development and saving the coastline from development. But the result was to make housing brutally expensive for the young'uns just starting out. It was clear to me that I could never afford to live and work in California. But the existing residents of California that I met seemed to be copacetic with the new order: they accepted the importance of saving the environment for future generations.

No wonder. Because the new California worked well for the establishment Snobs, and for minor Snobs, people already enjoying modest positions of honor from the ruling class. Ordinary middle-class Schmucks, not so much.

And then there are the lower orders, people just trying to get by, somehow. The Snobs have spent the last century telling the helpless victims how much they care for them and how much welfare and housing and benefits they are going to get. But in truth the Snobs do not care about the Scum; they only care about their votes.

I wrote 20 years ago that a truly enlightened elite would set up the culture and the economy -- a Road to the Middle Class -- to encourage the lower orders to acquire the skills and the culture of the middle class and rise up from indigence and the lower-class culture of subordinate serfdom or rebellious gang-dom into the responsible culture of middle-class work, home, family, and order. That is not the policy of our ruling-class Snobs.

The result, as Charles Murray described in his Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, is an America where the Snob class of educated professionals has great careers and merger marriages, a Schmuck middle class is doing so-so, and a Scum at the bottom where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The beauty of the current system is that the ruling class Snobs get to tell the Scum how much they care, and then blame the Schmuck cops and other notorious white supremacists for the travails of the Scum.

No doubt at some point this false ruling-class narrative will fall apart. And then the only question will be the size of the butcher's bill.