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.

“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.”

Establishment = Obama

"the grandees of the universities, the foundations, the arts, the unions, and the government employees are all heavily invested in Obama — the class warrior who assures those of the upper classes that class and racial resentment will be turned against others."

--Victor Davis Hanson, “PJ Media”

“Republicans often say 'Obama and Biden want to raise taxes by a trillion dollars.' Guess what? Yes, we do.”

--Joe Biden

“the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside.”

--Barack Obama

We are blessed with the way Obama and Biden unintentionally speak the truth. Obama is Washington, is the Establishment, is big government, and this picture isn’t going to change from inside big government Washington with Obama at the helm. And as Biden honestly says, our big government needs more, ever more in taxes to keep going.

Here is the Merriam-Webster definition of:

es·tab·lish·ment   noun

an established order of society: as a group of social, economic, and political leaders who form a ruling class (as of a nation)

It’s a fact. We have an establishment, and it’s represented at the top by Obama. The establishment is our most important club. Our leading universities initiate pledges into the club, which has its founding chapter in New York City, and its largest, most active chapter in Washington.

Once in the establishment, it matters not what path members followed to arrive, their most important job becomes to retain membership status and to pass it on to their children. In pursuit of that objective, all is fair; the end justifies the means.

Let me be clear. The establishment not only professes in our democracy to rule on behalf of the people, members truly, deeply believe the people’s best interests are served by their continuous rule. Do not underestimate the ruling class's sincerity.

The establishment see themselves differently than outsiders see them. They lie with the greatest of fluency because they view themselves as acting on behalf of the oppressed. Or as Leon Trotsky wrote, "The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it to considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality."

Life works like this. Your perspective changes when you are welcomed inside the establishment. Your number one goal, however, remains constant: preservation.

Our current establishment is centered on government. Hence Washington’s dominant role; hence the president’s leadership. As Karl Marx was at his most effective as an outsider analyzing capitalism, so too do free market conservatives do best today at analyzing big government’s failings.

Listen to conservative Michael Barone, writing in "RealClearPolitics", “Overall, Obama stands for maintaining and expanding the welfare state that operated tolerably well in the big [blue] America of half a century ago but is coming apart in our early-stage information society today.”

Barone tells us how the establishment protects its own at the expense of the masses:

just as housing policies created a housing bubble, college loan policies have created a higher education bubble. The flood of money has been captured by colleges and universities through above-inflation tuition increases and administrative bloat. The Obama administration does not crack down on them, however, but on graduates or dropouts with thousands in college loan debt that they can't escape through bankruptcy.

Obama's policies, from Obamacare to high-speed rail, treat people as identical cogs in a very large machine, part of a mindless mass that would not be able to get along without government guidance. In the information age, these industrial age policies have prevented the vibrant economic growth which gives young people the opportunity to find work and community service that maximizes their own special talents and interests -- to shape their own world and choose their own future.

We have talked at length about the amazing phenomenon of national wealth collecting in the Washington metro area. The phenomenon underlines the fact that big government increasingly dominates our lives, and to our national detriment.

Or so says conservative Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times:

Household incomes rose in most counties around Washington last year, even as they continued to sink around the country . . .Yes, the system is rigged under Obama, rigged to favor the growth of the federal government — its bureaucrats and the lobbyists, lawyers and special-interest groups that feed off taxpayers — at the expense of reviving the private economy where taxpayers live. Perhaps nothing summarizes Obama’s failures better than this picture of government affluence funded on the backs of the middle class.

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.

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.

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.

No Dad, Big Problem (II)

Walter E. Williams is a black, conservative economist at George Mason University. He also is appalled at America’s working-class family breakdown.

In Investors Business Daily, Williams makes these points:

• 29% of white children, 53% of Hispanics and 73% of black children are born to unmarried women. The absence of a husband and father from the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems. [emphasis added] 

• the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data show that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. 

• In 2009, the poverty rate among married whites was 3.2%; for blacks, it was 7%, and for Hispanics, it was 13.2%. The higher poverty rates — 22% for whites, 35.6% for blacks and 37.9% for Hispanics — are among unmarried families. 

• Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the kind of music accepted today that advocates killing and rape and other vile acts. Punishment for criminal behavior is lax. 

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is similarly alarmed. In USA Today, Reynolds writes:

why don't people get married. . .? [B]ecause they don't have to. Single motherhood (or fatherhood) is no longer looked down upon . . . Shotgun weddings are largely a thing of the past. Welfare payments and other social assistance can (partially) replace a father in the house. (When you subsidize something, you get more of it -- and we're subsidizing unmarried mothers). And. . . marriage [is] much less attractive . . . than it once was. [emphasis added]

marriage and kids [are] now seen as something closer to exile from adult life -- imprisonment in the land of Chuck E. Cheese and My Little Pony. Suburban parents often drive SUVs instead of minivans because minivans, though more practical, are associated with low-prestige activities like parenting, while SUVs are associated with higher-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. . .masculinity in today's society [is] not a dad -- just look at the bumbling doofuses who portray dads on pretty much every TV commercial and sitcom.

The problem [is] the kids do worse. A government check isn't a substitute for a father, and. . . single-mom kids . . . tend to do worse on measures ranging from educational attainment and future income to criminality. And the process feeds on itself: Women want "marriageable" men -- those with good incomes and stable lifestyles -- but the more single-parent households there are, the fewer men are likely to be "marriageable" in the next generation.

Neither Williams nor Reynolds mention Charles Murray’s research on families Coming Apart, but both seem in tune with Murray’s concern that a government-encouraged moral breakdown contributes to the problem.

Faith and Work

Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) and author-husband Jed Rubenfeld in their book The Triple Package wrote this, to me, significant passage:

Nietzsche--a man with a superiority complex if ever there was one--believed that all of Christianity was founded on a reverse superiority claim . . . exalting the poor and pitiable in order to destroy aristocratic civilization, ultimately replacing it with modern democracy and the equality of all mankind. (p. 182)

If Nietzsche was right, Christianity--especially Protestantism in the 16th through 19th centuries--helped separate the aristocracy from their subjects, aiding the bourgeoise and launching democratic revolutions. Faith in various forms underpins a value system of hard work, discipline, and postponement of gratification that any healthy democracy would seem to want.

In life, New York Timesman David Brooks writes, we experience “out of body” moments of such sheer beauty they help us realize we are but one small piece of something far grander; moments that draw us toward faith, love, a positive natural order. These moments are extremely important.

Yet Brooks emphasizes that

the main business of faith [is] living attentively every day. The faithful are trying to live in ways their creator loves. They are trying to turn moments of spontaneous consciousness into an ethos of strict conscience. They are using effervescent sensations of holiness to inspire concrete habits, moral practices and practical ways of living well.

Brooks quotes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik to argue that living faith is an arduous task:

The pangs of searching and groping, the tortures of spiritual crises and exhausting treks of the soul purify and sanctify man, cleanse his thoughts, and purge them of the husks of superficiality and the dross of vulgarity. Out of these torments there emerges a new understanding of the world, a powerful spiritual enthusiasm that shakes the very foundations of man’s existence.

The discipline associated with faith is certainly a part of life for many who successfully reach the top, whether they believe in some god or an environmental consciousness that demands lifestyle rigor.

And faith or lack of it, as conservatives such as Charles Murray argue, helps explain the current gap between professional and lower class households. Another conservative, New York Timesman Ross Douthat, in fact tells us that

We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster.

The split between the values our national elite seems to advocate--a permissive “do what feels good”--and the hard work elite parents ask of their children is mirrored in the contrasting sell-buy perspectives that underpin free enterprise. Entrepreneurs rely on the most base forms of marketing to meet popular desires for instant gratification, but the “sell” side of those transactions calls for planning and hard work.

The same goes for the dichotomy between serious politicians on one hand, and the crude messaging to which they expect voters will respond on the other.  It's as if the elite truly believe “A sucker is born every minute.”

American democracy would be better off if we instead shared the upper class’s actual high valuation of work, discipline, and postponement of gratification--characteristics faith once underpinned.

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.

The Religious Wars

"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."

--Linus, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)

We live. We die. We cope with death, each in our own way. I am not a serene person, so I like serenity. I like Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe, and his definition of serenity:

Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate.

Religion helps us cope with death, and celebrate life. We aren’t alone. We are part of something bigger; something is there to support us.

Because humans need religion, it’s been present from the beginning, helping, celebrating, providing a path to a meaningful life.  It’s there today, in science-believing secularists’ worship of the environment.

And from the dawn of civilization, the power structure, politics, has exploited religion for its own purposes. The priesthood above. The masses below.

It’s important to me that Jared Diamond, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel-searing insight into politics as kleptocracy, considered one of the four key tools leaders use to retain power to be creating a religion that justifies kleptocracy.

A force as important as religion inevitably generates its own counterforce, in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. New religions tend to arise from among the people in reaction to the perverted, top-down religion imposed by kleptocratic leaders.

So we’ve had Roman emperor-gods to Christianity to imperial Christianity and the 1000-year “Age of Faith” in Europe countered by Islam elsewhere then by the Protestant Reformation’s 1517-1688 two centuries of warfare to the rise of science to the status of a religion to the un- or anti-science 19th and 20th century religious awakenings to U.S. urban secularism’s response to Protestant/Republican era Babbittry to the 1960s final overthrow of organized religion—TIME’s “Is God Dead?” (1966).

James Taranto, in the conservative Wall Street Journal, writes about “a fascinating essay” by Jeffrey Lord for the American Spectator's website. Lord attributes Democrats' problems with the white masses to a cultural shift that took place after JFK's assassination. Lord quotes Robert Caro, the biographer of Kennedy’s successor:

The New Frontiersmen--casual, elegant, understated, in love with their own sophistication . . .--were a witty bunch, and wit does better when it has a target to aim at, and the huge, lumbering figure of Lyndon Johnson, with his carefully buttoned-up suits and slicked-down hair, his bellowing speeches and extravagant, awkward gestures, made an inevitable target. . . . When he mispronounced 'hors d'oeuvres' as 'whore doves,' the mistake was all over Georgetown in what seemed an instant.

Lord said Kennedy himself had a healthy respect for the American people and for Johnson. But after his assassination, "the attitude toward Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson that was evidenced by Kennedy's liberal leaning staff, by the Washington Georgetown set, by Washington journalists-- seeped into the sinews of liberalism itself":

Slowly this contempt for the American people spread to institutions that were not government, manifesting itself in a thousand different ways. It infected the media, academe and Hollywood, where stars identified with middle-America like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball were eclipsed in the spotlight by leftists like Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda.

In our new, hip culture, it became respectable to diss the white American majority, or more precisely, its white males along with their spouses, who in American small towns, as President Obama said, bitterly “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them.”

So here we are in 2012, where as conservative columnist Mona Charen writes,

we reached a grim milestone: The majority of births to women under the age of 30 are now outside of marriage. Among blacks, 72% of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it's rare in the African-American community, where only 31% of couples are married (In 1960, it was 61%). . . A full 85% of youths in prison come from fatherless homes, as do 80% of rapists, 71% of high school dropouts. . .90% of the change in the violent crime rate between 1973 and 1995 was traceable to the rise of illegitimate births. A large sample looking at students in 315 classrooms in 11 cities concluded that "The single most important variable (in 'gang centrality') is the family's structure ...: the greater the number of parents in the household, the lower the reported gang centrality."

In the Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that the "relationship (between single-parent families and crime) is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature."

We need religion. We need the structured, two-adult families that religion supports. So says Charles Murray, in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Many others endorse the need for values that come from within—discipline, hard work, postponement of gratification, optimism, belief in self—values supported by religion.

These values aren’t conservative alone, but while liberals tend to practice them for themselves, they encourage dependency rather than self-reliance among those they privately believe to be unfortunate inferiors—Democrats’ entitlement constituents of minorities, unmarried women, dependent youth, and the elderly.

Isn’t that the point to where our religious wars have evolved in 2012—self-reliance supported by religion or dependency on big government?

“Creative Destruction,” the Bloody Sox, and 0.5% Growth

Boston Red Sox Curt Schilling's Bloody Sock (2004)

The 1981 Warren Beatty film “Reds” was a triumph. Beatty won his “Best Director” Oscar, and “Reds” scored nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Beatty), and Best Actress -- the Big Four. Based on John Reed’s book Ten Days that Shook the World, the movie successfully captured the exhilaration of “Reds” (Communists) winning the 1917 Russian revolution.

In 1991, ten years after “Reds” appeared, the Russian revolution was over. Communists were out of power after only three generations. Revolution had turned into just hanging onto power, to corruption, decay, and finally defeat.

It was ever thus. Idealism carries new leaders to the top. The next generation begins caring more about hanging on while securing a better life for self and family. Growth slows, the people become restless, the elite counters with bread, circuses, and suppression. Decline and fall.

So it is with America’s meritocratic elite. Rising to power in the name of ending the Vietnam War and equality for blacks and women, promising that America’s best would deliver prosperity for all, our establishment now exists to enrich themselves and their families, preserve the status quo and divert the people from their current economic plight with bread, circuses, and fixation on identity politics.

It also increasingly practices coercion toward its enemies.

The TV sports empire ESPN, owned by the Disney Corporation, is an integral piece (circuses) of our meritocratic elite. ESPN first suspended, then fired, baseball hero Curt Schilling for inappropriate comments on his personal Twitter account, not for anything said on air. So much for “freedom of speech.”

Here’s the Schilling Tweet that got him suspended last year:

Yes, it’s both inaccurate and offensive to compare the Muslim ummah to the 1940 German population. Schilling apologized and pulled down his Tweet, but ESPN nevertheless punished Schilling by suspending him for the rest of 2015.

A few weeks ago, Schilling offended ESPN again. This time, the sports network fired him for Tweeting:

A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.

Fired for saying that on his private account? The guy’s a conservative!

But ESPN hasn’t stopped there. Now, in a gesture the conservative New York Post accurately called “Stalinist,” ESPN completely edited Schilling out of its 2010 film on the epic 2004 American League Championship Series between Schilling’s Boston Red Sox and the rival New York Yankees, who had won six of the previous eight such championships. The Sox came back from being down 3 games to 0 in the 2004 series, and down 4-3 in the 9th inning of the 4th game facing ace closer Mariano Rivera, who was set to wrap up yet another Yankees series win.

The Yankees, Rivera pitching, managed to give up a 9th inning run, lose the game, lose the next 3 as well, and become the first baseball team ever to blow a 3-0 advantage in a 7-game series. The Yankees have won only one league championship series since that crushing defeat, while Boston has gone on to win three World Championships.

In the epic 2004 series, Schilling won the 6th game, heroically pitching with a torn tendon sheath in his right ankle, sutured in place in an unprecedented procedure by Red Sox team doctors so that he could play (see bloody sock above). Schilling’s heroics covered 17 minutes of ESPN's original film. ESPN removed all 17 minutes. That makes ESPN like Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin; each time Stalin purged one of his colleagues, he removed all traces of the victim from the state’s photographic record.

Such tactics -- in the end -- didn’t save Communism. They won’t save today’s “politically correct” elite either, no matter how hard the establishment seeks to turn popular attention toward perceived injustices visited on transvestites and other identity groups, and more importantly, away from America’s unsolved economic problems.

In this year’s first quarter, the U.S. GDP grew by only 0.5%. John H. Cochrane, writing in the conservative Wall Street Journal (subscription), documents the pain caused by growth slowing from 3.5% between 1950 to 2000 to only 1.7% since:

By 2008, the average American was more than three times better off than in 1952. Real GDP per person rose from $16,000 to $49,000. And those numbers understate the advances in the quality of goods, health and environment that came with growth. But if U.S. growth between 1950 and 2000 had been the 2% of recent years, instead of 3.5%, income per person in 2000 would have risen to just $23,000, not $50,000. That’s a huge difference.

Over the next 50 years, if income could be doubled relative to 2% growth, the U.S. would be able to pay for Social Security, Medicare, defense, environmental concerns and the debt. Halve that income gain, and none of those spending challenges can be addressed. Doubling income per capita would help the less well off far more than any imaginable transfer scheme.

Given the importance of income growth, Cochrane asks: “Why are growth-oriented policies resisted?” His answer:

Growth comes from productivity, which comes from new technologies and new companies. These displace the profits of old companies, and the healthy pay and settled lives of their managers and workers. Economic regulation is largely designed to protect profits, jobs and wages tied to old ways of doing things. Everyone likes growth, but only in someone else’s backyard.

After all, capitalism IS “creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter, from Karl Marx).

So what do we do? People want security and are threatened by change. Tyler Cowen, an economist writing in the liberal New York Times, surprisingly advanced religion as one way out of our current difficulties:

Mormons have done relatively well in economic terms, perhaps. . . because their religious culture encourages behavior consistent with prosperity, such as savings, mutual assistance, family values and no drug and alcohol abuse. . . it seems reasonable to observe that changing social norms, sometimes associated with religion, can help improve living standards. . . Technology, trade and even religion may help restore prosperity to the middle class.

Such emphasis on sound values is consistent with the recommendations of Charles Murray (Coming Apart), whose response to the gap he documents between the meritocracy and America’s lower class includes a working class return to religious values.

Passing of the Elite (III)

"War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means."

-- Carl von Clausewitz

Simplify von Clausewitz to these words:

"War is . . . a continuation of [politics] by other means."

And update von Clausewitz for 21st century democracies:

"[Politics] is . . . a continuation of [war] by other means."

War. Our ruling class is underperforming, and putting great energy into hanging on. If Democrats have their way, the coming election will turn on how people feel about Republicans crippling government’s most popular programs. It won’t be about the cost and inadequacies of Obamacare, won’t be about unbalanced budgets and astronomical debt, and it won’t be about an administration failure to create jobs. No, it will be about mean Republicans.

Here’s the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza:

The 2010 election was devastating for Democrats across the country, but the South was at the epicenter of the destruction. . . John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster based in Alabama, [argues] a Republican Party willing to cut Social Security and Medicare [is] at the root of a return to Democratic competitiveness in the South.

And Donna E. Shalala, Clinton’s health and human services secretary, tells us:

As [the new health care law] move[s] forward, it is important to remember how profoundly Medicare and Social Security altered the lives of . . . middle-class families. [emphasis added]

We earlier wrote about how Democrats now talk “middle class”—not “working class”—because their base has moved upscale; it’s now comfortable, secure government workers.

Democrats plan to win in 2012 using the "Colorado Strategy," derived from Colorado senator Michael Bennet's surprising win in his 2010 race. As Sean Trende of “RealClearPolitics” says of the "Colorado Strategy":

Obama's strategists have signaled that this could be the strategy [for] the 2012 Presidential race. . . Sen. Bennet won his election in a swing state in a tough year for Democratic incumbents by doing extremely well among minorities, college educated liberals, independent women, social moderates, and environmentalists.

In other words, “doing extremely well” among a Democratic base we earlier identified as 64% of the potential electorate.

And because that 64% potential Democratic base includes many worried about debt, jobs, and Obamacare, the Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost warns:

we should expect a highly negative reelection campaign from the president. . . Republican efforts to rein in the budget deficit will be cast again and again as the party's perfidious attempt to realize its 80-year dream of destroying the social safety net. What else can the president and his team do[?]

War. Conservative Michael Medved, writing in USA Today, says both sides in this war

believe that our country [is] set apart from the rest of the world. The right views America as exceptionally blessed and righteous — chosen by God to inspire humanity with distinctive ideals of liberty, self rule and free markets. The left [sees] the U.S. as exceptionally guilty [(slavery, genocide against natives, imperialism)] and exceptionally backward when it comes to social justice, [lacking] the welfare state guarantees that characterize other wealthy nations.

War. Writes Matthew Continetti in the Weekly Standard, “liberals think conservatives are evil while conservatives think liberals are stupid.” Liberals do think conservatives evil. But conservatives know liberals are smart, not stupid. It’s just that liberals are too smug, too self-assured, too close-minded about evidence challenging liberal orthodoxy.

So the war builds between the two sides. Fred Barnes, also in the Weekly Standard, after reviewing the book Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics by Morris P. Fiorina with Samuel J. Abrams, writes:

The book’s theory is simple: “In America today there is a disconnect between an unrepresentative political class and the citizenry it purports to represent”. . . While the political class tends to divide sharply between liberals and conservatives, the public is far more centrist . . . The moderate majority [is] often forced to choose “between relatively extreme candidates” put forth by the political class.

Unfortunately in war, most are forced to choose one side over the other.

Priestly Rule (II)

Intellectual rule via elite control began with Mesopotamian priests 6000 years ago.

For the U.S., Kennedy’s “Camelot” was a high point of intellectual rule. David Halberstam brilliantly defined this rule in The Best and the Brightest, which documented the origins of the Vietnam disaster. The intellectuals made a Faustian bargain for the keys to the Pentagon, agreeing in exchange to wage an aggressive popular defense of freedom in the face of international Communism.

Kennedy’s “best and brightest” won the Cold War’s most important victory in 1962 by adeptly handling the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy followed that up with the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and turned that year to completing our civil rights revolution at home, which the Kennedy team under Texan Lyndon Johnson carried to victory in 1964-65.

Of course, the commanding intellectual control over America all came apart over the next four years, as brains separated themselves from the Democrats responsible for Vietnam.

Intellectuals drove the U.S. from Vietnam. Intellectuals used Watergate to drive Nixon from the White House. Since that double triumph, the Democratic Party home of the intellectuals has held power in Washington (White House + Congress) for just 6 years out of 40—15% of the time. From the coming of the New Deal until 1968, Democrats controlled Washington for 26 of 36 years—72% of the time. Used to power as an entitlement, intellectuals have been frustrated by the Republican Party’s return to power since Vietnam, largely through use of the national security issue.

But while denied full political power, the modern-day priest class has come to dominate our national elite made up of bureaucrats plus institutions that need government’s help to further their agenda—entertainment and the arts, academe, the Third Sector, and the media. The only elite groups outside this Democratic core are the military, small business, the clergy (but only social conservatives), and big business (but only those who oppose high taxes). Entitlement, the belief that it is right for intellectuals to rule America, is alive and well in 2007.

Clinton as Secretary of State: Second Thoughts?

Obama’s picking Clinton as Secretary of State seemed an astute move, bringing her inside the tent. But the Washington commentariat, the media’s elite, seems to think otherwise. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius says, “the idea of subcontracting foreign policy to Clinton -- a big, hungry, needy ego surrounded by a team that’s hungrier and needier still -- strikes me as a mistake of potentially enormous proportions.” His Washington Post colleague, guru-in-chief David Broder, believes Clinton is wrong for the job because Obama

does not need someone who will tell him how to approach the world or be his mentor in international relations. One of the principal reasons he was elected was that, relying on his instincts, he came to the correct conclusion that war with Iraq was not in America's interest. He was more right about that than most of us in Washington, including Hillary Clinton.

And the most influential Washington commentator on foreign policy, the New York Times’ Tom Friedman, doubts Obama will have Clinton’s back (he really means Clinton will have Obama’s back), “given all that has gone down between them and their staffs. . . particularly with Mrs. Clinton always thinking four to eight years ahead” to a “run again for the presidency.”

Friedman specifically rejects the “team of rivals” argument for appointing Clinton, a rejection given fuller treatment by historian Matthew Pinsker, who writes that while Obama loves Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals book on the Lincoln presidency, in fact bringing all his rivals into his cabinet gave Lincoln serious problems.

Having Ignatius, Broder, and Friedman all diss the Clinton appointment is a sign that strong opposition is coming from the Obama camp, which is sharing its concerns with the commentariat. Clinton herself is getting ready for rejection by putting out the word she may not be interested in the post after all, though that “might simply reflect her need to create an alternative storyline if the deal falls apart.”

Anyway, the commentariat loves all this. With Democrats back in power after eight years in the wilderness, the media are once again players.

Stop the Destruction: School Choice NOW!

Michael Strong, CEO of FLOW, has spent 15 years running innovative schools. He has a powerful message about “School Choice and Adolescence in America” (go here to read in full):

William Damon, Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, [has found] that many children thrive in the face of adversity, [displaying] "persistence, hardiness, achievement motivation, hopefulness, a sense of purpose, and more." Damon goes on to say that

"Research in the [positive youth] developmental tradition has taken seriously the role of moral and religious beliefs in shaping children's identities and perspectives on the future, and research has demonstrated a strong relationship between religious faith and at-risk children staying out of trouble." . .

[T]hat "moral and religious beliefs" are relevant to adolescent well-being, most parents knew . . .fifty years ago. . .

By the 1980s Brookings Institution researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe were coming to the conclusion that the decline in test scores despite doubling our expenditures in education was not an accident. . . the private sector was more efficient and innovative than the bureaucratic government-managed sector. Despite their liberal Brookings base, they broke ranks with the Democrats and advocated school vouchers in their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. . .

Adolescence in America is largely a disaster. Bill McKibben, the environmentalist writer and advocate of natural living, is as vocal in his critique as any fundamentalist Christian: "If one had set out to create a culture purposefully damaging to children, you couldn't do much better than America at the end of the 20th century." Patricia Hersch, in a book titled A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, states: "All parents feel an ominous sense - like distant rumbles of thunder moving closer and closer - that even their child could be caught in the deluge of adolescent dysfunction sweeping the nation." . .

Does anyone doubt that if parents had been given school vouchers in 1960 they would have gravitated towards schools that encouraged virtues and a sense of purpose? Both common sense and Damon's research suggest that generations of students educated in such schools would have been and can be far less likely to suffer the "health effects stemming from social causes" that have harmed adolescents over the last four decades.

Consider Latter Day Saints (Mormon) public health: Utah, where 70% of the population are Mormon, has the lowest, or near the lowest, rates of smoking, lung cancer, heart disease, alcohol consumption, abortions, out-of-wedlock births, work-days missed due to illness, and the lowest child poverty rate in the country. Utah ranks highest in the nation in number of AP tests taken, number of AP tests passed, scientists produced per capita, percentage of households with personal computers, and proportion of income given to charity. . . No public health initiative is remotely as effective as Mormon culture.

. . . if an education market were allowed to function freely, parental interest in their children's well-being would drive an ever-more sophisticated market in happiness and well-being. . . Adolescent well-being cannot be developed using a character education curriculum taught by faculty who are cultural relativists. The faculty must believe in something, they must themselves be united by a common moral vision, and the school's leader must be free to organize the school around the core moral purposes of that community.

It is possible to create safer, better, happier, healthier, schools, and many parents would send their children to such schools if they had the option. . . Parents, choosing among educational entrepreneurs, could solve the problem of adolescent health far more quickly and more effectively than can academics trying to guide public policy.

After the fall of communism, many people acknowledged . . . that governments cannot meet people's needs as effectively as markets can. . . Government cannot provide lives with purpose; only individual human beings, organized in communities with a common purpose, can provide young people what they need.

School choice is, of course, politically incorrect. [Still, it’s wrong to wait for academics] to acknowledge that government can't solve these problems, but that free people can. Competition is a discovery procedure, and we can discover right now how to solve the problem of adolescent health. Let us do it.