Coming Apart

“I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.”

--David Brooks, New York Times

“Coming Apart is a must-read for [mainly] its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism.”

--Heather Wilhelm, “RealClearBooks”

We have already discussed Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (here and here). Now raves are beginning to pour in. To David Brooks, Murray has shown that America’s “real social gap” is between “the top 20% and the lower 30%.” Brooks chides liberals for “latch[ing] onto [the] top 1% narrative” that the financial elite is our biggest problem. Liberals do so because it “excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.” Excellent point.

Yet Brooks himself says,

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

Good old Brooks, again quick to defend his elite.

Brooks’ solution for Murray’s sharp division is oh so 1970s: a National Service Program that would “force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together.” Right. How exactly does that bring people together once national service is over? How did that work out for the last draft (or national service) generation, once Vietnam was over?

Heather Wilhelm, as her above quote states, is struck by how committed Murray is to moving life beyond materialism:

"If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life -- achieve happiness," Murray writes, "the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith." The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are "the institutions through which people live satisfying lives." This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class.

Wilhelm seems to agree with Murray’s jaundiced take on the upper class. She quotes him writing,

the new upper class . . . don't mind the drift toward the European model, because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience -- much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.

Charles Murray himself, in a recent TIME essay, concentrates on the “new upper class,” which he defines as well under 100,000 nationally, as well as a “broader set, numbering a few million people, who hold comparable positions of influence in the nation’s major cities.” This “upper class” is the “Gated Country” we earlier wrote about, and much smaller than the upper-middle class 20% (over 60 million) college graduates who make up Murray’s fictional “Belmont” (though the “Belmont” folks are culturally similar to the upper class, echo their politics, and aspire to join them).

The “Gated Country”-“Belmont” distinction is one both Brooks and Wilhelm seem to miss. Murray’s especially unhappy with those at the top,

so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. [They can] completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.

The “New Elite” Defined

Charles Murray is a controversial libertarian at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Murray believes IQ has divided America in a potentially dangerous way. Murray has been in hot water since publication of his Bell Curve in 1994, because two data-laden chapters in the book suggest, with appropriate qualifiers, that African-Americans may have lower IQs. (As Jimmie Walker would say, “Dyn-O-Mite!”)

Here’s what Murray currently says about what he calls “the New Elite”:

➢ That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial.

➢ the New Elite [accepted acknowledgement of their high status] back in 1991, when Robert Reich said we had a new class of symbolic analysts in his book The Work of Nations. . . in 2000 when David Brooks took an anthropologist's eye to their exotic tribe and labeled them bourgeois bohemians in Bobos in Paradise [a]nd . . . when Richard Florida celebrated their wonderfulness in his 2002 work, The Rise of the Creative Class.

But Murray does take issue with some characterizations commonly attributed to the “New Elite”:

➢ start with the principal gateway to membership in the New Elite, the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities. In the idealized view of the meritocrats, those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment, favoring bluebloods and the wealthy, but now they are peopled by youth from all backgrounds who have gained admittance through talent, pluck and hard work.

➢ [While o]ver the past several decades, elite schools have indeed sought out academically talented students from all backgrounds [and c]ompared with 50 years ago, the proportion of students coming from old-money families and exclusive prep schools has dropped [as] the representation of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans has increased[,] about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families (see Joseph Soares, The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges). Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families. [emphasis added]

➢ Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55% of SAT-takers this year but got 87% of all the verbal and math scores above 700. . . a function of [their] ability . . .to do well in a challenging academic setting.

Murray says these upper middle class “brainiacs”

➢ spend school with people who are mostly just like them -- . . . ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth . . . never . . . outside the bubble of privilege. . . When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble. Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice).

➢ [Later, their marriage announcements in the New York Times look like] the mergers of fabulous résumés. . .[C]ombining their large incomes and genius genes, [they] then produce offspring who get the benefit of both.

The deepening stratification between the New Elite and the rest of us has concerned Murray since he wrote The Bell Curve:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite . . . becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation [can go] “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” . . . [but a]n elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

Murray points out the “New Elite” clusters in a small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities--Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, as well as university cities with ancillary high-tech jobs, such as Austin and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. And with geographical clustering goes cultural clustering.-- "Mad Men", yoga, pilates, skiing, mountain biking, backpacking in the Sierra Nevadas, an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, a small ship going to the Galapagos.

Murray’s “New Elite” live in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attract, for example, just 1.7% of the Harvard students who go to work after graduation.

In his conclusion, Murray sends a neat right hook to the jaws of folks like me—and Murray himself—who think we are exempt from “New Elite” designation:

I doubt if there is much to differentiate the staff of the conservative Weekly Standard from that of the liberal New Republic, or the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute from those of the Brookings Institution, or Republican senators from Democratic ones. The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They . . . may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

Twilight of the Meritocracy (I)

In his important book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, conservative Charles Murray does two things liberals detest. First, he documents how the great middle of America, those who haven’t graduated from college, are falling behind in spite of government programs. And second, Murray ties the growing upper-lower gap not to big government’s failure to engineer equality, but rather to our national elite’s failure to provide moral leadership.

Liberals don’t want to hear that meritocracy is creating a semi-permanent underclass. Even more, they reject attempts to connect moral decline to their leadership. (We’ve covered Murray’s book here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere.)

That’s why last Sunday’s front page New York Times story is so important. In a long article, reporter Jason Deparle confronted the very issues Murray raised in his book. Deparle wrote:

41% of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17% three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides. . . Less than 10% of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60%. Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” said [Sarah McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist]. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.” . . marriage also shapes the story in complex ways.

These are Murray’s findings exactly. Deperle connected economic problems and marital decline because poorer women see fewer “marriageable men,” so end up struggling alone. He quotes Harvard sociologist Christopher Janks: “The people who need to stick together for economic reasons don’t, and the [wealthy] people who least need to stick together do.” In fact Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute ties 40% of inequality’s growing gap between lower-middle- and upper-middle-income to single parenthood.

Another study of 2,000 mothers in their mid- to late 20s found that a third with high school degrees or less already had children with multiple men, along with 12% of mothers with post-high-school training. But none of the women who finished college before giving birth had had children with more than one man.

Brookings Institution’s Scott Winship looked at class movement by 2,400 Americans now in their mid-20s. Of those in the poorest third as teenagers, 58% with two parents moved to a higher level as adults, while only 44% of those with an absent parent did. At the top, just 15% of teenagers living with two parents fell to the bottom third, but 27% of teenagers with one parent dropped to the bottom.

Deparle’s findings about the sharply rising and negative consequences of single motherhood are so similar to Murray’s that the liberal New York Timesman was forced to acknowledge the existence of Murray’s book. But Deparle did so only in a sentence bordered by parentheses, in which he said that Murray “attributed the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of economic opportunity.”

That drew a sharp rebuke from Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution:

[Deparle’s] outcome differences are called "class" differences. . . when two white women, who came from families in very similar social and economic circumstances, made different decisions and got different results . . . Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality.  [emphasis added]

The meritocracy may read Murray, but seemingly still cannot grasp how government programs eat away at personal responsibility rather than nurture it.  It's a fact that the 48 years since liberals launched the war on poverty are the very 48 years single motherhood has exploded. It’s time for the meritocracy, hardworking and to be found nurturing children in two-parent families, to advocate on behalf of personal responsibility at all economic levels.  As Murray says, it's time for the upper class to preach “what it practices.”

If not, then the current elite should allow power to pass from their hands.  They should allow others to try personal responsibility based on competition and freedom of choice.

Culture and Conservatives

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Here is America’s “core culture,” as defined in 1993 by Samuel P. Huntington, who was born the same year as Moynihan (1927), and was a political science colleague of Moynihan’s at Harvard:

the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music; the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.

One can certainly say that Huntington’s “core culture” definition is dated by current standards, but is one with which conservatives could readily identify. It also seems likely liberals would happily use politics to, in Moynihan’s words, “save” parts of Huntington’s culture “from itself.”

Now here’s a more 21st Century definition of American culture from physicist Mark Mills and engineer Julio Ottino. They describe our culture as “high inertia,” distinguished by “open-mindedness, risk-taking, hard work, playfulness, and, critical for nascent new ideas, a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking.” Mills and Ottino have fixed on what works in the U.S. economy.

And what about American mass culture, a force that often seems distant from “hard work” and “nascent new ideas,” but indeed shows elements of “risk-taking,” “playfulness,” and “a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking”? Peggy Noonan was thinking about culture high and low when she wrote that American culture:

is governed and run by the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry is, and has been since the New Deal, firmly rooted in the Democratic Party. It was invented by the ethnics of the East. . . who joined the Democratic Party as soon as they got here. And they let everyone in America know, and they do it to this day, that the Democratic Party is the cool party, and the Republican Party is the one [not cool], the one that seems like a character flaw to belong to. . . Democrats were, through most of the 20th century, better at propaganda. [emphasis added]

Earlier this year, we relayed Charles Murray’s concern about many left out of the American success story: working-age lower class whites with no education beyond high school—30% of the white population aged 20 to 49. They would seem especially susceptible to the influence of American mass culture.

Murray is disturbed that 52% of the lower class population he studied are unmarried, 44% are single parents, 32% of the males are unemployed or in part-time work, 59% of the men and women are non-religious, and they collectively live in communities with a crime rate nearly five times above that in 1960. Murray calls the lower class problems cultural. He blames them on 1960s-era liberals who made it economically more feasible for women to have a child without a husband, for men to get along without a job, and safer for people to commit crimes without suffering.

Murray’s remedy would be to reverse the 1960s-onward cultural deterioration by restoring the religious values and morality, the emphasis on hard work, that supported marriage, two-parent families, and men who provide for their families and stay away from crime. Murray strongly rejects the “nonjudgmentalism” of our current upper class toward lower class (mis)behavior. In short, Murray seems to advocate a lower class return to Huntington’s “core culture” values (he believes the upper class is already there).

Robert Samuelson, in the Washington Post, took direct exception to Murray’s pessimistic view of where American culture currently stands with our masses. To Samuelson

There is such a thing as the American character and. . . it is durable. In 2011, only 36% of Americans believed that "success in life is determined by outside forces" [Pew Global Attitudes survey]. In France and Germany, the responses were 57% and 72%, respectively. America is different, even exceptional.

While Samuelson rejects Murray’s pessimism, his “American character”--taking responsibility for one's own actions--is in line with both Huntington’s “core culture” and the values Murray supports.

John Podhoretz, writing in Commentary following the death of James Q. Wilson (the criminologist who developed the famous “broken window” theory), chose to highlight Wilson’s following endorsement of morality:

I wish to argue for an older view of human nature, one that assumes that people are naturally endowed with certain moral sentiments. We have a peculiar, fragile, but persistent disposition to make moral judgments, and we generally regard people who lack this disposition to be less than human. Despite our wars, crimes, envies, snobberies, fanaticisms, and persecutions, there is to be found a desire not only for praise but for praiseworthiness, for fair dealings as well as for good deals, for honor as well as for advantage.

Wilson held values that, again, are close to those of Huntington’s “core culture.”

And the same can be said for Victor Davis Hanson, the Stanford Hoover Institution conservative who, in reaction the “politics of blame” in Obama’s state of the union speech, emphasized virtue over tribal loyalty when he wrote:

The content of our character alone matters; those who are not so confident in their own, usually demand that their tribal affiliations be essential and not incidental to their personas. Most accept that culture, not race matters, but it matters still more not to say that.

Except that culture does matter, and it does matter that we speak of it. Culture can lay the foundation for productive work, for economic progress. Or it can undermine both.

Yearend Reading: Women on Top

In an article titled, “Women on Top, Men at the Bottom,” Philip Brand, a New Hampshire writer, has reviewed Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women is Turning Men into Boys. Hymowitz believes that when male students graduate -- if they do -- they tenaciously hold to uncertainty, glancing off jobs and relationships, undecided about what to do and whom to love for a decade or so as "preadults," Hymowitz’s term for an unflattering metamorphosis.

Preadulthood is a consequence of two related economic trends that are reshaping both men and women. The first is the extended period of training -- college and beyond -- deemed necessary to the modern economy. The second is women's flourishing in the new economy, two developments that make Hymowitz's book so timely.

Hymowitz says economic changes drive cultural ones. She puts economic conditions first -- along with the increasing professional accomplishments of women. “Preadulthood” is "an adjustment to huge shifts in the economy, one that makes a college education essential to achieving or maintaining a middle-class life."

Hymowitz points to the lifetime earnings gap separating college graduates from those who have only a high school diploma. But a changing economy more friendly to the educated is also "very, very female friendly," offering women more career choices. Last year, women became a majority of the workforce: "At the heart of preadulthood is women's determination to achieve financial independence before marriage."

Right now, the "second sex" dominates higher education from attendance data to graduation statistics. After graduation, young single women out-earn men in nearly every U.S. city, and they are more than twice as likely to own real estate. More education typically means delaying marriage. The average college-educated woman now waits until 28 to wed. And what goes for the goose has to go for the gander. Forty years ago, 80% of men aged 25-29 were married. Today it's 40%.

Why do men suffer in “preadulthood”? Libertarian scholar Charles Murray blames government social programs that slam non-college males. Welfare state programs have had a devastating effect in many inner-city communities. Murray says that when “the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that [man’s] status goes away.”

Journalist Hanna Rosin, writing in the same vein, describes a group of men in Kansas City she calls "casualties of the end of the manufacturing era."

The 30 men sitting in the classroom aren't there by choice: Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. Like them, [the social worker running the class] explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical "white picket fence" -- one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. "Well, that check bounced a long time ago," he says..."All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain't even that...What is our role? Everyone's telling us we're supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It's toxic, and poisonous, and it's setting us up for failure." He writes on the board: $85,000. "This is her salary." Then: $12,000. "This is your salary. Who's the damn man? Who's the man now?" A murmur rises. "That's right. She's the man."

In his book Manliness, Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield wrote to become a man is to develop a sense of duty, which means responding productively to life's challenges. Mansfield points to a U.S. Navy ad that shows men jumping from helicopters into the ocean on a rescue mission to "answer the call."

Today, however, men are unemployed, and the cause, Mansfield believes, is modernity, which relies on technology more than duty to satisfy our needs and protect us. The economy's productivity and the government's programs provide a baseline level of security that is the "very antithesis of manliness... The entire enterprise of modernity could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed."

Jonathan Rauch is another writer who like Hymowitz believes shifting economics is reshaping the American family. Rauch says the new model is delayed marriage and delayed family formation, as men and women pursue their education. This leads to new gender roles, with fatherhood redefined to include children's emotional well-being, and motherhood including bringing home a paycheck.

But Rauch is speaking to college graduates. Next year Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart will argue that American behavior in the core areas of marriage and family is dividing along class lines to an unprecedented extent. For the educated upper middle class, Rauch’s new model may work fine. But in the working class, intact families are an endangered species.

Murray compares the extent of marriage in the upper-middle class relative to the working class for those in the prime of life (ages 30-49). In the 1960s, 88% of those considered upper-middle class and 83% of those considered working class were married. In 2010, the figures were 83% and 48%. That 35 percent gap "amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes in this country...Marriage has collapsed in the working class." And the rate of out-of-wedlock births has skyrocketed. In 1960 only 6% of children of working class parents were born out-of-wedlock. Today the number is nearly 50%. (Note: Murray looks only at data for white Americans to underscore his argument that class, not race, is what divides us.)

A new Pew study has figures similar to Murray’s. In 1960, nearly three-fourths of those 18 and older were married. By 2010, that number had plummeted to 51%. Four in 10 births were to unmarried women. In 1960, the most- and least-educated adults were equally likely to be married. Now, nearly two-thirds of college graduates are married, compared with less than half of those with a high school diploma or less. And those with less education are less likely to ever marry and more likely to divorce if they do. Looking at the figures, Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution concluded that “family structure is a new dividing line in American society.”

Comment: On top, married, educated women. On the bottom, unmarried, uneducated men.

Trump: Conservative Agonistes

Trump won the Republican nomination. He won in large part because his behavior separates him from polite society. Those in the Republican primary who gave Trump their votes dislike the establishment. They want to send the establishment a message. The more Trump is a bad boy, the more Trump’s army embraces him.

Not surprisingly, the establishment's Republican wing struggles with Trump’s win.  Even Walter Russell Mead has a tough time accepting Trump.  Mead, in my opinion, is one of conservative America’s most astute analysts. Mead several years ago realized the progressive elite has failed our nation. So he has a soft spot for Trump voters and in the end, Mead has sided with the Trump army, if not Trump himself:

Clinton[‘s] praetorian guard—Wall Street, the upper middle class feminists, the African American establishment, the Davoisie, the institutional power of the great foundations and educational bureaucracies, Silicon Valley, Hollywood—have defeated their intellectual and political rivals in their spheres of interest and influence. Supporting her is a massive agglomeration of power, intellect, wealth and talent. Her candidacy is the logical climax of the Baby Boom’s march through the institutions of American life. . . The American Right for all its earnest efforts has been unable to construct a counter establishment that can compete with the contemporary liberal behemoth.

Yet . . . in the eyes of many Americans [the Boomer elite has] not done all that well in the real world. Foreign policy, financial policy, health policy, support of the middle class, race relations, family life, public education, trade policy, city and state government management, wages: what exactly has the Boomer Consensus accomplished in these fields? Many Americans think that the Consensus is a scam and a flop when it comes to actually, well, making things better for the average person. . . This is where Trump comes in. His supporters . . . are united in opposition to the status quo. They believe that the emperor has no clothes . . .

To Mead, Clinton stands for competent management of “an unsustainable status quo,” and “a pair of safe and steady hands on the wheel” of a ship slowly gliding “toward the reefs.” By contrast, the Trump movement has “the social instinct of revolt and rejection” that is “a sign of social health.”

The single most thoughtful conservative voice is probably that of Charles Murray. Murray has documented how America’s cultural wars -- the loss of post-war unity, the decline of religion, and consequent rise of secular progressiveism -- has damaged working and lower classes. You might therefore expect Murray, like Mead, to identify with Trump's working class-based movement.

Yet as a true credentialed elitist, Murray can’t stomach Trump:

Trump makes strategic decisions about what useful untruths he will tell on any given day — it looks as if he just makes up stuff as he goes along. . . That he deals so heedlessly in those misrepresentations makes it impossible for an opponent to conduct an authentic policy debate with him.

It’s one thing when a candidate knowingly deceives the public on a few specific topics. Hillary Clinton has knowingly tried to deceive the public about her flip-flop on gay marriage and her misuse of her e-mail server. That’s bad. It should be condemned. This aspect of her character should affect one’s deliberations about whether to vote for her. It’s another thing entirely when a candidate blithely rejects Pat Moynihan’s (attributed) dictum, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”

To bury Trump, Murray quotes fellow elitist and New York Times anti-Trump commentator David Brooks, who wrote:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

Murray advises fellow establishment conservatives:

I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man.

Comment: We wrote earlier about the liberal elite’s “smug style,” a “knowing” meritocracy happily superior to “stupid hicks.” Murray, a Harvard grad and author of books that separate people into classes -- even races -- by IQ, seems to be rejecting Trump because he isn’t smart enough to base policy on facts. Apparently use of facts, book knowledge, is the decisive measure of the man.  Murray's elite snobbery shows in his asking “people with high IQs” not to betray their “intellectual powers” by endorsing Trump.

Here’s what smug liberals and conservative Murray miss: the unwashed masses are unimpressed with “the best and the brightest” running the country, and are perfectly happy to make a mess (Trump), if it will produce real change. “You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

We don’t yet know whether the Trump movement is strong enough to overpower the status quo liberal elite and their “identity politics” allies in the classes below. We do know the fight is underway.

America’s Damaged Working Class

In “The Gated Country,” we repeated Charles Murray’s description of how the upper class lives so differently from the rest of us. Murray, however, has documented another profound division below the top: that between upper middle class college graduates and a lower class whose education stopped with high school.

Murray examined only non-Latino whites in order to clarify how broad and deep U.S. cultural divisions have become. And he looked only at those between the ages 30 to 49 to show the trends aren’t explained by ages of marriage or retirement.

To represent the 20% of whites between 30-49 who are college graduates working as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media, Murray has created the fictional community of Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston).

And to represent the 30% of whites between 30-49 with no degree beyond high school, who if they work, are in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist, he invents Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution—see picture).

In his examination of differences, Murray emphasizes single parenthood because he believes children born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than those raised in intact families, an unwelcome reality even after controlling for parents’ income and education. And he justifies his look at religiosity by noting that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors.

Below, a chart that lays out the differences between Belmont and Fishtown:

________________
* = “de facto secular” is someone who professes no religion or attends a worship service no more than once a year.

Murray’s statistics portray two starkly different worlds within the U.S. below the upper class “gated country” at the top. “Belmont” is aspirational, upper middle class, and part of an America that works. “Fishtown” presents a problem Murray sees as cultural, a lower class caught in a downward spiral of deterioration because 1960s social policy made it economically more feasible to have a child without a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let government handle community problems you and your neighbors formerly took care of.

Murray doesn’t see any easy solution to closing a gap that was smaller in 1960, and is gigantic today. But, he says:

There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.[emphasis added]

Family Breakdown and Working Class Depression

"Father Knows Best" (1954-60)

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will recently noted that when House GOP budget chair Paul Ryan spoke of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” and added “there’s a real culture problem here,” he was accused of “racism, blaming the victims.”

Will wrote that Ryan

had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe — had tiptoed into [i]n March 1965, [saying] that “the center of the tangle of pathology” in inner cities — this was five months before the Watts riots — was the fact that 23.6% of black children were born to single women, compared with just 3.07% of white children.

Forty-nine years later, 41% of all American children are born out of wedlock; almost half of all first births are to unmarried women, as are 54% and 72% of all Hispanic and black births, respectively.

These oft-repeated figures remain shocking, staggering.

Will believes that

The family is the primary transmitter of social capital — the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individual’s life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty. [emphasis added]

The 1960s brought us a civil rights movement that “dismantled barriers to opportunity,” and a simultaneous “social regression driven by the explosive growth of the number of children in single-parent families,” resulting in a “continually renewed cohort of adolescent males from homes without fathers” producing “turbulent neighborhoods and schools where the task of maintaining discipline eclipsed that of instruction.”

Will added that Moynihan observed “something ominous . . . the decline in the minority—then overwhelmingly black—male unemployment rate [accompanied a] simultaneous rise of new welfare cases.”

Will explains:

Policymakers had long [believed] in social salvation through better economic incentives [rather than consider] the decisive factors are not economic but cultural — habits, mores, customs[. I]t is easier for government to alter incentives and remove barriers than to alter culture.

To Will, any government belief in money-based solutions “is refuted by the importance of family structure,” with “the challenge” facing broken families “to acculturate those unacquainted with the culture of work to the disciplines and satisfactions of this culture.”

Will quotes Nicholas Eberstadt’s findings that “labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are demonstrably lower in America than in Europe” and “a large part of the jobs problem for American men today is that of not wanting one[,” leading to an] “unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men.”

Will asks “why the problem Moynihan articulated half a century earlier has become so much worse while . . . the astonishingly rapid receding of racism and discrimination — has become so much better,” and blames “what Moynihan called ‘the leakage of reality from American life.’”

Will and Ryan fault government policy for turning newly-free minorities into government dependents. Transfixed by the juxtaposition of Moynihan’s 1965 focus on single-parent families with the simultaneous liberal triumph of civil rights, the “War on Poverty,” and the “Great Society,” they treat activist government as the cause of family breakdown.

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart--a work we have covered in detail here--also blames government policy for family breakdown, which Murray, Will, and Ryan all place at the center of working class difficulties. Murray, by writing about whites only, frees his analysis from accusations of racism, a ready charge when both Will and Ryan talk about “inner cities.”

Family breakdown is worse among blacks, but affects all races.  Murray specifically blames 1960s social policy that

made it economically more feasible to have a child without a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let government handle community problems you and your neighbors formerly took care of.

Modern America began in the 1960s. There were three revolutions--sexual, civil rights, and equal rights for women--all made more emphatic by the government’s Vietnam disaster that deprived our then-WASP male national elite of its moral authority. Vietnam paved the way for revolution in America just as World War I triggered the Russian Revolution and World War II led to the triumph of Chinese Communism.

The old culture that idealized the American “Father Knows Best” family with the father providing, the mother nurturing, and the children protected, turns out to have been the 1960s most consequential casualty.

Inner Cities: Personal Responsibility and Single Parents

Baltimore, April 2015

Catholic Ross Douthat, the New York Times house conservative, must walk a fine line between pushing his personal views and alienating his liberal audience. In the following statement, he is quietly defending traditional marriage. . . very quietly:

What a society believes and teaches about the link between sex, marriage and procreation has major implications for how, when and whether people couple, marry and raise children, which in turn has implications for every other societal arrangement.

Douthat means we’re better off with one father and one mother, bonded by marriage vows, raising their own children. That’s it. He’s not condemning anything.

In the same article, Douthat names abortion and hints at a problem:

In the . . .early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit.

Douthat is making a very important point. The birth choice upper class parents believe is best for everyone isn’t working at the class level where choice means government subsidies and freedom from “marriage-first” morality.

African-American Columbia University professor John McWhorter, writing in the liberal “Daily Beast,” is much clearer than Douthat about how liberal good intentions have damaged urban America. McWhorter asserts that three key dynamics since the Civil Rights era began 50 years ago have generated the “inner-city misery” we see today:

First, the Black Power ideology that proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s discouraged black communities from maintaining the old-time mantra that adversity meant that blacks have to try twice as hard. The wise insight was that after centuries in the United States, the persistent double standard was demeaning, and while that made basic sense, it changed black America’s orientation towards individual initiative. That helps explain, for example, why only in the ’60s did it become common for poor blacks to burn their own neighborhoods in protest. Even amidst Jim Crow, black people did not do this.

Second, in the late ’60s, partly in response to the riots of the Long Hot Summers, welfare was transformed from a time-limited program intended for widows to an open-ended program that didn’t care whether recipients ever got jobs. This had the unintended consequence of discouraging marriage, and made it easier for women to raise kids without the father around. This, a story too little told, decisively impacted the black experience nationwide.

Finally, the War on Drugs created a black market alternative to legal work for poor black men underserved by bad schools. Frankly, “The Wire” explained this dynamic better than any academic analysis.

That’s 1) victimization replacing individual initiative, 2) family collapse, and 3) drugs. 1-2-3.

Michael Barone, in the conservative Washington Examiner, notes that liberals and conservatives now share a similar concern, even if their solutions differ:

Our kids, at least many of them, are not doing very well. The reason, writes [liberal] Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his just-published Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, is the "two-tier pattern of family structure" that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. . . Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated.

Among the bottom third of Americans in education and income, however, the negative trend accelerated. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was alarmed that 26% of black births were to unmarried children. The rate is about twice that for the least educated third of Americans of all races today. [emphasis added]

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart describes the same phenomenon among white Americans. Curiously, Putnam [ignores] Murray's work. But Putnam agrees with Murray (perhaps grudgingly) that this is bad for the kids involved.

Like most high-education Americans, [Putnam] doesn't want to denounce people for breaking old moral rules even when that hurts their kids. The libertarian Murray doubts that government can do much. But he thinks that high-education elites, with their strong family structures, can. They need to "preach what they practice." Bloomberg's Megan McArdle, agreeing, nominates Hollywood for a lead role. Midcentury America's universal media -- radio, movies, television -- celebrated the old rules.

Hollywood preaching sound morality? So last century; so gone by the ‘60s.

Trump, Sanders and the new Civil War

"the 1960s are best understood not an an aberration, but as an integral part of American history. It was a time of intense conflict and millennial expectations, similar in many respects to the one Americans endured a century earlier--with results as mixed, ambiguous, and frustrating as those produced by the Civil War."

--Maurice Isserman and William R. Kenan, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, p. 4

The 1960s, 50 years ago, represented a major turning point in U.S. history. Is the nation about to turn again?

We have written about how the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913 brought a symbolic end to American politics’ post-Civil War era. President Woodrow Wilson, who visited the battlefield and spoke about healing the war’s wounds, was himself the first elected Southerner since the Civil War.

Wilson was a Democrat and a segregationist. Until Wilson and except for Democrat draft dodger Grover Cleveland of New York, every elected president from 1868 through 1900--nine elections--was a Republican and an officer, usually a general, from the victorious Union side. The 1913 Gettysburg encampment for over 53,000 Civil War veterans--Yankee, Confederate, all lily white--helped knit up the nation’s bitter North-South division.

Yet it took another 50 years or until the 1960s for blacks to secure the freedoms the Civil War had promised a century earlier.

The Civil Rights movement ended one era but opened another--the anti-Vietnam “civil war of the 1960s.” Today’s politics with its sharp division between elite and masses, between educated and less-educated, between professional and working/lower class, all bear the scars of Vietnam, all tracing back to the draft.  

Brief history of the draft

The North instituted the first federal draft in 1863. That draft allowed $300 buyouts by those who could afford it, which led to massive New York City riots and the death of over 1,000. Because of the riots, buyouts ended a year later, and a more equitable draft enjoyed popular support through both world wars and Korea.

Then came Vietnam, which in 1965 produced the first draft riots since the Civil War. Though the more privileged in the draft-eligible pool successfully used student and medical deferments or enlistment in the reserves to escape Vietnam, dodging the draft generated guilt that fueled a massive anti-war/anti-draft movement.

In 1967, Selective Service terminated the controversial student deferments at age 24, while extending the draft-eligible age range from 26 to 35, threatening the privileged even more. Then in 1969, a lottery affecting all regardless of student status--an even more equitable system--went into effect, in its first year hitting the pool aged 20 to 26, and after that, each cohort becoming 19. The lottery survived only because draft numbers fell fast until the draft's 1973 end (see chart).

During Vietnam, from a pool of approximately 27 million, Selective Service inducted 2.2 million men. It also “encouraged" another 8.7 million to pick their branch rather than risk the draft, and in fact, the majority serving in Vietnam were volunteers.

Almost 16 million men, including me (serving as a diplomat), avoided active military service. Of those, 57% were exempted because of jobs including other military service, deferred usually for student status, or disqualified for various physical and mental deficiencies, often helped by sympathetic physicians opposed to the war. Perhaps 100,000 draft eligible men fled the country.

________
*= A total of 1.5 million men were drafted during the Korean war (1950-53), with annual totals much higher than for Vietnam, but covering just three years. At peak strength, U.S. ground forces in Korea totaled 302,483. To avoid the infantry, many joined the Navy, Air Force or National Guard. Others gained deferments by scoring at least 70 on an intelligence test, but when 65% were deferred in the test’s first year, many suspected bias. In December 1950, 82% of the Army in Korea were regulars; two years later, the ratio had flipped to 63% draftee, 37% regular. The bulk of ground combat forces were working class, though more select because the Army rejected 50% of potential draftees. In Korea rear-echelon forces (67% of Army personnel) served 18 months, while combat troops (33% of the Army) fought for 9-12 months.  

Brains win out  

"For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace."

--Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal

Murray’s “half-century” is the 50 years since the draft helped separate those able to escape Vietnam from those who served. A guilt-ridden, anti-war elite nurtured in the crucible of academia and fighting at home in the name of equality and justice, went on to gain control of most leading institutions. The meritocratic values that spared a generation from combat in Vietnam won the “civil war of the 1960s.”

America’s less-educated losers fell further and further behind. As Murray writes:

For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015 (see chart below). Over that same period, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. . . In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income. . . about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs also have become a major problem.

These people are responding today to the anti-establishment appeal of Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Bernie Sanders.

Women win out  

"Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment. And I've got to tell you that it is ... (APPLAUSE) It is really quite amusing to me."

--Hillary Clinton

The anti-war, anti-draft movement that powered the 1960s civil war included millions of women. They hated war and racial discrimination, were sympathetic to their draft-threatened brothers, but women also fought for freedom from constraints that blocked their true equality with men.

As Murray reminds us:

the civil rights and feminist movements. . . began as classic invocations of the [self-reliance] creed, rightly demanding that America make good on its ideals for blacks and women. But the success of both movements soon produced policies that directly contradicted the creed. Affirmative action demanded that people be treated as groups. Equality of outcome trumped equality before the law. Group-based policies continued to multiply, with ever more policies embracing ever more groups.

Democratic politics wins, the working class turns

The 1960s civil war meant that by the 1980s, the Democrats’ longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income women, had alienated the white working class. Murray points out that a half-century of economic growth passed virtually nothing to the lower classes; real family income hasn’t increased since the late 1960s. For 50 years, American corporations have sent overseas millions of manufacturing jobs, the best-paying working-class jobs--70% held by males.

Murray adds that

[d]uring the same half-century, the federal government allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors for the remaining working-class jobs[, many in] the construction trades or crafts. They too were and are predominantly men’s jobs: 77% in 1968 and 84% in 2015.

By today, as Joel Kotkin has found:

only 51% of Americans call themselves middle class while the percentage identifying with the lower classes rose to 48%. The bulk of this population belongs to what some social scientists call the “precariat,” people who face diminished prospects of achieving middle class status—a good job, homeownership, some decent retirement. The precariat is made up of a broad variety of jobs that include adjunct professors, freelancers, substitute teachers—essentially any worker without long-term job stability. According to one estimate, at least one-third of the U.S. workforce falls into this category. By 2020, a separate study estimates, more than 40% of the Americans, or 60 million people, will be independent workers—freelancers, contractors, and temporary employees.

Democracy--one person, one vote--means we will hear from this angry, downscale mass, whether or not a new civil war is already upon us.

G-20: Rejecting “the Pond”

“The Pond” is an expression suggesting “no distance between the U.S. and Europe.” I wish it would go away. Perhaps, it was an innocent-enough exaggeration when the two continents were coming together in the 1970s, with the introduction of Concorde New York-London flights of 3-1/2 hours. But after 27 years of never really catching on, the Concorde ceased service in 2003. The distance then grew greater, not ever shorter as we once had expected. But “the Pond” phrase lives on.

Obama has jumped “the Pond” to London for the latest G-20 meeting. The G-20, as its own website says,

brings together important industrial and emerging-market countries from all regions of the world. Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world's population. The G-20's economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.

The G-20’s impressive statistics combine numbers from all of Europe, something the G-20 gets away with because one of the G-20 members represents the entire “European Union,” even though EU members Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy are also G-20 members. Add the U.S. and Canada, and 7 of the G-20’s members are of “the Pond.”

The term “the Pond” especially bothers me because it re-enforces the East Coast-based American elite’s obvious admiration for Europe at a time when, under Obama, we are drawing closer to European-style democratic socialism—government control of industry, high taxes, powerful unions, government-financed underclass, nanny-state regulations, national health insurance. Our elite loves Europe.

Conservative scholar Charles Murray recently laid out his case against Europe and for continued American exceptionalism. Murray said in Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Paris, “the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There’s a lot to like—a lot to love—about day-to-day life in Europe.” But he also suggested, “the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.”

Here’s the heart of Murray’s case against Europe (my summary):

“A life well-lived” has meaning. It brings “deep satisfactions”— what we look back upon when we reach old age. Such a human activity has to have been important; to have required a lot of effort (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”), and; you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

Few activities can satisfy those requirements. If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Nobody has to make use of all four institutions, but the stuff of life—the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships—coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness—occurs within those four institutions.

The goal of social policy should be to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things.
The problem is that every time the government takes trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it strips those institutions of their vitality.

Families are not vital because raising children and being a good spouse are fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community does important things that won’t get done otherwise. When the government says it will take the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it takes action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He can take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised for doing so. If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.

“The Europe syndrome” goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible. Work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with leisure. Why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really? Why spend time worrying about neighbors? What could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

Murray hopes America will have “a Great Awakening” that will take our elite away from modern day Europe and back to our roots in family, community, vocation, and faith.

Brexit tells us. . .

the people are sovereign,

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”

--John Milton, Aeropagitica (1644)

We don’t, we must not, settle for the status quo.

“Society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”

--Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic

The status quo in 2016 are big state -- or the Brussels (EU) superstate -- bureaucracies believing their knowledge entitles them to rule.

“The environment, women’s rights, children’s rights, equality, all of this,”

--Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

So San Francisco's Boxer says, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

And not, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“As the Democrats have locked up most of the software, design, entertainment, media and financial oligarchy, they have [lost] virtually all of Appalachia, and could also [have begun] to weaken . . . even among union members. [There’s] a growing rift between greens, and their oligarchic and public sector allies and traditional construction and industrial unions. . .green San Francisco elites and Hollywood stars enjoy lives of almost absurdly conspicuous consumption, while urging everyone else to cut back their carbon. . .” [emphasis added]

--Joel Kotkin, Orange County Register

It’s still before the fall. Maybe the people are not yet sovereign, but it’s coming.  

those on top don’t get it,

“simplistic idiocies win elections”

--Charles Murray, National Review

“This election. . . has boiled down to a coin toss between a consistent, calculating liar and an inconsistent, compulsive liar.”

--Heather Wilhelm, “RealClearPolitics”

Conservatives Murray and Wilhelm are like Trump. They see this election personalized in an individual, overlooking the angry, Brexit-type seismic wave Trump is riding.

Listen to John Allen Gay, writing in the National Interest:

“conservatism . . . is skeptical that the intellectual’s tool—individual reason—is best suited for answering complex political questions. . . individuals, short of information, limited in experience, prone to prejudice, often err; wisdom manifests in society, which on net has more information and more experience.”

Conservatives trust cultural norms, distrust the intellectual leader.

it’s time to “be humble”.

A message for all commentators, including me.

“Today, our politics reside in an intellectual cul-de-sac. People only want to hear themselves pontificate, or listen to those who confirm, affirm, and validate. Proof? How many Democrats regularly listen to Fox News? How many Republicans frequently tune into MSNBC?”

--Frank Luntz, TIME

“Opinion columnists who spend any time at all interacting with their readers are well aware of how pitifully rarely we manage to change anyone’s mind about anything. I’m not saying that it never happens, because it does. But mostly, folks read us because they agree with us, and they enjoy having us agree with them.”

--Megan McArdle, “Bloomberg”

Didn't Shakespeare teach “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

No Dad, Big Problem (I)

Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic, is appalled by what’s happening to American families. He’s stung that “58% of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women,” while “two in five of all births are to unwed mothers, an all-time high.” To Thompson, the big question is, “Why so few marriages?"

His answer:

• marriage like any other contract [is] most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them. 

• Low-skill men have had a rough two generations. The evaporation of manufacturing work has gutted their main source of employment, while globalization has held down their wages. Marriage has declined the most among men whose wages have declined the most (see graph below--hit to enlarge). 

 

• Thompson quotes from The Truly Disadvantaged author William Julius Wilson, who argues that "high rates of unemployment and incarceration mean. . .the local dating pool [is] populated by unmarriageable men--[so] women chose to live independently." 

• Thomson also believes it’s much easier to raise a child and keep a home given modern household innovations, including cheap prepared foods, cheap clothes, machines to wash and dry, and to vacuum. Machines not only encourage women to seek work, but also make it easier for them to raise a child alone. 

In the end, this is bad news, suggests Thompson, meaning “women find themselves drifting ‘unintentionally’ into parenthood with men they have no intent of marrying,” thereby creating “another generation of problems.”

To Thompson, it’s pretty much economic determinism, a concept associated with Marxism. At least Thompson, however, sees family breakdown as a problem.

This blog, in contrast to Thompson, has repeatedly followed the lead of Charles Murray, whose book Coming Apart first and best documents family breakdown in the white working class since the 1960s.   Murray pins the breakdown on “Hollywood” values combined with government policies that encourage single (female) parent families, while lowering the importance of (male) employment.

The Gated Country

“liberals often argue that the real enemies of average Americans aren’t bureaucrats and Harvard-trained technocrats; they are the financial wizards, evil corporations and plutocratic tycoons. Maybe so, but at this point the argument doesn’t convince many people. Besides, why can’t both be enemies? After all, many elite liberal Democrats, in office and out, have been exceedingly Wall Street-friendly.”

--Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

We have a sharply divided nation. Because conservatives are represented at the top of our liberal-dominated power and wealth social structure where most national dialog takes place, we mistakenly believe conservative/business v. liberal/knowledge represents the true national division.

In fact, the American upper class not only has its schools, its residences, even its entire lifestyle in common, but also shares its separation from, and its fear of, America’s less-favored super-majority. Credit for this understanding Charles Murray, whose Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 documents our profound class divisions.

Our upper class is nationwide gated America physically separated from the rest of us. Murray, in his own words:

the top of American society. . . run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation's corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, [highly] detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans . . .—not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes. . . SuperZIPs.

If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington's power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile. Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation's other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation's power elite [lives in a] culturally rarefied and isolated [world].

Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into [this] world. [T]hey have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

Insulated. Isolated. And afraid.

“It takes a marriage to raise a child.”

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of the conservative City Journal and author of Marriage and Caste in America. Her latest article contains a wealth of valuable information:

When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago. . . Critics objected that the real source of misery in the [white working class] wasn’t a lack of marriages; it was the extinction of manufacturing jobs. The disagreement was familiar to culture-war veterans: conservatives versus liberals, family breakdown versus dearth of good jobs, culture versus economics.

[Yes,] globalization, technology, and the knowledge economy have wrenchingly changed the working-class world. Still, Coming Apart is correct: you can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. . . the single-mother revolution.

[It] started in the 1960s, when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons [included] the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.

The embrace of “lone motherhood”—women bringing up kids with no dad around—has been an American specialty. “By age thirty, one-third of American women had spent time as lone mothers,” observed family scholar Andrew Cherlin in his 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round. “In European countries such as France, Sweden, and the western part of Germany, the comparable percentages were half as large or even less.” . . cohabiting relationships here, unlike those in Europe, have short shelf lives. According to [a study that] examined couples in large American cities in the 1990s, about half of cohabiting couples split before their child was five—compared with just 18% of married couples.

the single-mother revolution . . . has been an economic catastrophe. [A]mong married couples with children[,] only 8.8% [are poor], up from 6.7% since the start of the Great Recession. But over 40% of single-mother families are poor, up from 37% before the downturn . . . of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institute’s [sic] Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.

Hymowitz takes on the liberal argument that unskilled, low-earning women are hard up not because they lack husbands, but because the unskilled are more likely to become single mothers:

The Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman tried to address that objection by studying low-income women who had entered “shotgun” unions—that is, getting married after getting pregnant—on the theory that they represented a population roughly similar to those who got pregnant but didn’t marry. The married women, he found, had a significantly higher standard of living than the unmarried ones. “Even among the mothers with the least qualifications and highest risks of poverty,” Lerman concluded, “marriage effects are consistently large and statistically significant.”

How did we so fail to understand the simple truth that two incomes are better than one? And two adults at the dinner table?! “It takes two committed adults—a marriage—to raise a child.” Hymowitz continues:

many single mothers are barely getting by. . . A father’s contribution to the family income, even if it was just $15,000, would dramatically improve the mother’s lot, not to mention that of [the] children. [And if you are married], it’s still possible to move up to the middle class, despite the factory closings . . . Ron Haskins of the Economic Mobility Project [found that] “If young people do three things—graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they’re 21 before having a baby—they have an almost 75% chance of making it into the middle class.”

the single-mother revolution encouraged lower-income men and women to think that mothers could manage on their own—at the very historical moment that their children needed more education, more training, and more planning. The rise in single motherhood was ill adapted for the economic shifts of the late twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Hymowitz, like Murray, has found how profoundly different it is at upper economic levels, where parents have accommodated both their child-rearing and marital habits to the new economic reality. College-educated mothers see children and marriage as a package deal; they marry before having children, with divorce rates falling since the 1980s. Partners practice “assortative mating,” marrying those of similar educational status, in contrast to past “marrying up” of, say, nurses to doctors and secretaries to bosses.

The household income implications are obvious. Hymowitz notes “a lawyer was always likely to earn more than a plumber—but today, plenty of upper-income households are headed by two lawyers.” One study found that assortative mating brought about a 25% to 30% increase in inequality among married-couple families between 1967 and 200, with far wider gap between power couples and single-mother families.

Additionally, assortative mating pays for music and art classes, books, sports, and tutoring. Two parents actively invested in children’s well-being, living in the house, means spending more time with their kids even though mothers are more likely to be at the office during the day, with the increases especially high among college-educated parents. High-income parents of children up to six years old spent an average of 1,300 more hours than lower-income parents taking their children beyond home, day-care, or school.

Hymowitz writes that college-educated parents, unsurprisingly, are responding to college admissions competition by “building their kids’ cognitive, social, and emotional skills even in the earliest years.” This approach turns children into competitive workers in a knowledge-based economy, while below, not only do poorer children have fewer “enrichment expenditures,” they also get less mother time and involvement, reflected in educational outcomes and so future earnings.

To me, it’s so overwhelmingly cultural. Our upper class—Asian, Hebrew, Protestant ethic—“tiger parents” raising self-reliant children. Our lower class—dependent, “entitled” (it begins with welfare)—products of the gigantic and failed “Great Society” anti-poverty social experiment, a welfare state keeping them in dependency.

Hymowitz concludes, “At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes. . . the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat.”