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.

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.