America as a cultural Third World
Charles Murray is troubled by the increasing class divide in the US. Excerpt:
People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.
When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.
This is a long post, so I’m putting most of it below the jump. Read on.
Murray then takes a tour through the various ways that elite white American culture has diverged from working-class white American culture. He does this by comparing the white elite Boston suburb of Belmont with the white working-class Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown. Here is an especially notable point of comparison:
Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.
For example, suppose we define “de facto secular” as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29% of Belmont and 38% of Fishtown fell into that category. Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont, from 29% in the 1970s to 40% in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010. But it grew even more in Fishtown, from 38% to 59%.
Murray says that the cultural difference between the uppers and the rest of America was not nearly as marked as recently as 1960. There were differences, obviously, but there was still recognizably a common culture. Now, the elites have clustered around what he calls “SuperZIPs” — towns and areas where the elites live in isolation:
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 does in fact live in a world that is far more culturally rarefied and isolated than the world of the power elite in 1960.
And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they 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.
Murray says that purely economic explanations for this state of affairs are insufficient. The breakdown of social norms is a more plausible explanation. Plus, economically successful people will always marry within their own class, he says. Yet he clearly sees that there’s something troubling about a broadly democratic America turning into a Third World model, where a superrich cultural elite rules the teeming masses from behind gated communities.
So, what’s his solution? For elites to start moving to Fishtown, pretty much. That’s it. Seriously:
Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you’re not part of that America, you’ve stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.
Such priorities can be expressed in any number of familiar decisions: the neighborhood where you buy your next home, the next school that you choose for your children, what you tell them about the value and virtues of physical labor and military service, whether you become an active member of a religious congregation (and what kind you choose) and whether you become involved in the life of your community at a more meaningful level than charity events.
I get what he’s saying here, but Daniel Larison has put his finger on what is so naive about this:
So Murray’s solution appears to be telling members of the “new upper class” to change quite a few of the cultural habits that he has just described as part of what distinguishes them from everyone else. If he explained why they should or would do this, I must have missed it. … Murray clearly believes that the “new upper class” ought to engage “in the rest of America” to reduce cultural inequality, and he wants it to be strictly voluntary, but he gives no clear reason why anyone should volunteer.
Exactly right. Why should Mr. and Mrs. Belmont send their kids to school at Fishtown High, which is likely to be a place where the education won’t be nearly as good as what’s on offer at Belmont Prep, and — more crucially to Murray’s main point — the mainstream culture is likely to be inimical to the values that they prize. There may be a moral case for doing this, but Murray doesn’t make it. Moreover, he doesn’t stop to think that the working-class people of Fishtown may not particularly want to adopt the moral and cultural values of the Belmontese. There is a certain sense of noblesse oblige informing Murray’s prescription. What if the people of Fishtown don’t give a rat’s ass about the cultural preferences and values of the elites who deign to live among them? Where is the guarantee that the Fishtownians will be improved by the presence of the Belmontese? The assumption is that if people have a better example set for them, particularly an example of people who prosper by living according to a certain set of bourgeois norms, then they will all want to be like the bourgeois. How do we know that’s true, especially in a popular culture that constantly and powerfully agitates against bourgeois values of self-discipline and stability? If you’re a Belmontese, you’re being asked to risk your kids losing the values that are likely to advance their economic condition, and maintain their social stability, for the sake of … what, exactly?
Understand, I’m not saying that Murray is wrong to diagnose a problem for our country in this cultural divergence. I’m simply agreeing with Larison that his solution is no solution at all. If you’re going to ask people of means to take that kind of risk, you’re going to have to appeal to something a lot more potent than telling them that life in the upper-class suburbs is sterile, and that they’re vaguely missing out if they only stay around their own kind.
This state of affairs is a lot more complicated than most people prefer to think. For one thing, it’s normal for people to want to live around those who share their values. The kind of people who bang on about the value of “diversity” are usually left-wing cultural egalitarians who also — Sailerbait! — extol the “vibrancy” of “diverse” neighborhoods. As the liberal political scientist Bob Putnam found, neighborhood diversity actually diminishes social capital. Why? Look:
But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”
“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.
In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the “contact” theory and the “conflict” theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.
Putnam’s findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.
“Diversity, at least in the short run,” he writes, “seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.”
My guess is that this has as much to do with different cultural values, which include moral values, as it does with ethnic and racial differences. As Murray points out in his essay, cultural differences among whites — that is, people who share the same race — have become far more distinct and divergent in the past 50 years, as we have become a society in which consumer and lifestyle choices have become not only more available, but more prized. Indeed, it is the libertarian instinct, in both its left-wing and right-wing versions, that has brought about the state of affairs that the libertarian Charles Murray finds so problematic. If maximizing and exercising freedom of choice is the telos of American life, as libertarianism in both its forms holds, then why should any American choose to live among people who don’t share the moral beliefs and practices he valorizes? And if an upper-middle class family did decide to leave Belmont for Fishtown, why should the blue-collar people of Fishtown choose to risk the scorn and rejection of their tribe by choosing to live by the values of the outsiders? The cultural pressure brought to bear upon black students who study hard and make good grades — Stuart Buck’s great book “Acting White” is the thing to read on this topic — as well as the persistence of poverty and dysfunction among black folks who reject bourgeois values, undermines the idea that all we need to change the behavior of increasingly dysfunctional working-class whites is for well-off white people to live among them and teach them a thing or two about how to live.
To refresh: the problem Charles Murray diagnoses is real. He offers no real solution. I can’t see that its possible within libertarian philosophy to come up with an effective solution. Murray needs to read Alasdair MacIntyre, who doesn’t have much of a solution either, but who at least understands the profundity of our cultural brokenness. This cultural Third World to which America is descending — by which I mean a society in which the ultrarich live radically segregated from the masses — seems to me to be an outworking of ideas and trends that have been at work for a very long time.
50 years ago, the top tax rate was 91%. That additional tax revenue both (1) created a lot of infrastructure jobs so that more people could be at or near a middle class level; and (2) took away the ability of the upper class to wall themselves away (often, literally) from everyone else. Perhaps for very high tax rates (2) is a feature and not a bug. 91% tax rates aren’t coming back any time soon, but perhaps it’s time to consider a large increase in the higher tax rates as a win-win, rather than a win-lose.
Larison says Murray offers no reason anyone would volunteer. You seem to agree. But Murray does:
“Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile.”
It might not be a convincing reason. But it’s a reason.
To me… it’s actually convincing. In a few years, I will have an opportunity to send my kids to the very nice Catholic high school that’s a few miles down the road. I plan to send them to the public high school here in town.
Granted, it’s not a terrible high school. There are not bullets flying around. But it’s less of a prep school. There are more working class kids there. It’s our own little version of Belmont. I am choosing not to participate.
I don’t feel like I am nuts.
Mr. Dreher writes: “If maximizing and exercising freedom of choice is the telos of American life, as libertarianism in both its forms holds, then why should any American choose to live among people who don’t share the moral beliefs and practices he valorizes?”
Check that statement, Mr. Dreher; you’re operating from a false assumption. The telos you’re talking about is not the maximization of freedom of choice, it is the maximization of freedom from consequences. Consider the abortion “debate”, for example; its fundamental center is whether or not a woman should be able to escape the consequences of her own sexual behavior, which is, for the most part, a voluntary activity.
There have always been wastrels, slackers and layabouts among us, but what that segment of the population has today that has been absent in earlier times is: a) sufficient economic activity to produce wealth for redistribution; b) a political/economic class that can profitably advocate for said redistribution, and c) a social medium of communication that is very useful for emotion-based appeals for/approval of redistributive activity.
Mr. Dreher, you describe the arrival of a “cultural Third World”, which is descriptive and somewhat accurate. I think that the endgame you describe, where “the ultrarich live radically segregated from the masses”, is a bit off. It is the productive classes that will wind up living segregated from the welfarist/redistributive masses. We see this already; the process having begun with both white and black middle-class flight from the inner cities in the 1950s. I say the 1950s is the pivotal period, since that was when mass automobilization and suburbanization came to this country, along with the foundations of large portions of the Provider State.
We see this at a variety of levels in our society; the urban poor in their city enclaves, the rich in their gated communities, the (fortunate) elderly in their senior-citizen Sun Cities and “retirement communities”. The rent-seeking elderly, through entitlements, are able to segment themselves off from their families and the larger culture; segments of the rich, through lobbying/State contracts do the same thing. The poor urban classes are kept in their enclaves through the actions of the State bureaucracies that nominally “provide” for them, as well as by the difference in income-earning requirements between State dependency (which costs them little or nothing, in monetary terms) and in earning a living for themselves, which costs much in terms of time, effort and personal time-preference. In each case, the productive classes have taken steps to remove themselves from the presence of the idle/parasitic classes, or, in the case of the parasitic elderly, to remove them from the producers’ presence.
The real endgame will come, I think, when the burden on the producer classes grows to the point that they are unable to pay for the programs that the State apparatus has set up to support and provides for the beneficiary classes (including themselves). Europe is seeing the beginnings of this process, and the USA is not far behind.
When that happens, I predict that quite a few of those Taker-class sorts will find themselves either on the end of a rope, starving to death, or (in a few cases) in some desperate underclasser’s stewpot.
Either way, the situation is going to correct itself. We just get to choose how. But our time for choosing is running out. 9-12 years, I estimate. And the clock is ticking.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
I’m not sure if it’s so much the ultra-rich, expensive as it is to live in certain places, that Murray describes as a certain combination of education, professional accomplishment, and culture. My observation confirms the cultural gap, reinforced by earnings or wealth that allow families to escape the dreck. As you say, who wants to live or educate their children amidst dysfunction. That’s nothing new. What’s different is that the sorting involves the respectable working class and the middle classes. Murray’s remarks about higher education resonate here. There’s a massive gap between effectively non-selective institutions (Ole State U) and selective institutions that have a critical mass of capabale and engage students with the preparation to thirve rather than muddle through. Here’s where culture gets reinforced, even if income/wealth or race are the same.
Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you’re not part of that America, you’ve stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special. (emphasis added)
I can’t tell you how much of a kick I get out of someone on the Right arguing for more diversity!
Putnam as quoted, emphasis added:
Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us
Rod, emphasis added: My guess is that this has as much to do with different cultural values, which include moral values, as it does with ethnic and racial differences.
I agree with Rod and with Larison that there doesn’t seem to be any obvious solution, but I think this is a fascinating piece. Many of Murray’s fans eagerly sign on to the idea, as Rod phrased it that ” it’s normal for people to want to live around those who share their values.” Many of them go beyond it and emphasize “ethnic and national differences”. In this context, it’s interesting that Murray compared white communities at different income levels.
In any case, Murray is saying something diametrically opposed to what much of his audience–the VDARE/Sailer crowd, for example–tend to like to hear, even though he restricts it to white enclave. I do notice that the VDARE types on the Internet, anyway, seem very well-educated and don’t, by and large, strike me as being very much interested in the needs of lower-class whites, either, except inasmuch as such interests are perceived to conflict with those of other ethnic gropus–certainly not to the point of moving in next to them. It’s always phrased oppositionally in terms of different ethinc groups, never social class. Unlike their formulation, I agree with Rod that it’s more about class and values than ethnicity.
Consider, though–if sequestering yourself from other classes is self-limiting, why not so also for doing so from other ethnic groups, races, etc.? Why did that not occur to Murray?
Also, the thing that’s never answered in these discussions, and in regard to which I’ve highlighted the phrase in Putnam’s quote. Sure, humans are tribal–they’re also violent, selfish, venal, and anything else nasty we care to mention. But we don’t say, “Well, gee, we’re violent by nature, selfish by nature, etc.–guess that’s just how it is.” We try to overcome those negative traits. As Captain Kirk would say, “Yes, I’m a killer–but I won’t kill today.”
So do we throw up our hands and say, “Well, we’re tribal, so things’ll just get progressively Balkanized and Third World-like. Too bad, them’s the breaks,” or do we try to figure out a way to increase trust in the long run in diverse areas?
In short, it seems to me that to say people are tribal is a cop-out.
For those of us who are Christians, it seems a fortiori the case that we need to strive to rise above tribalism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus acknowledges human nature when he says, “Even the pagans do as much as this.” But then he goes on to say that if his followers can’t do better than that–rise above eye-for-an-eye, hate your enemy, etc. then what have you done so special? Sure, diversity isn’t an easy thing; but what worthwhile is?
As a conservative-leaning libertarian, I agree with Murray’s diagnosis, but I too wonder what – if anything – can be done about it. In fact, reflecting on my own childhood, I’m not sure I’d want anything to be done about it.
I grew up in a military family; my dad was an NCO, so we would probably qualify for the lower-middle class. My home life was stable and loving, but my education was a disaster: We were fundamentalist Baptists, and though we avoided many of the social pathologies Murray describes, neither our church nor our church-related school had any patience for intellectual curiosity. The public schools would likely have been worse.
I suppose in an earlier America, somebody like me would have stuck around. The prospects of gaining entry into upper middle class society in a major coastal city as a member of the professional class would have been next to nil. At best, I would be a professional in the town or region in which I was raised, and – if I were following Murray’s advice – my kids would be exposed to the same disincentives to excel academically and grow intellectually to which I was. The fear of having my children drop out of the middle class would be far greater than it is now, and I’d still have to interact with the buffoons and bullies (both adults and then-classmates) who made my life miserable in junior high.
There are times when I read Wendell Berry, or this blog, or Front Porch Republic and feel the impulse to pick up and move – well, I don’t know quite where, as our transient childhood means I have no place to which I can return – but then when I think about the mockery of intellectual achievement and the other dysfunctions that now plague small-town America, I thank God for allowing me to live in an era in which escaping all that was possible. (This sounds more cynical and condescending about small-town America than I actually am. There is much to love – particularly the community – and I envy Rod’s ability to move back to a place he’s previously known as home.)
This is not to say that we as a society are better off. Berry has convinced me that much was lost when the best and brightest were drawn inevitably to national centers of power rather than staying home. But in many parts of the country, we’ve long since lost the critical mass of such people, and my moving back (wherever “back” would be) wouldn’t make a lick of difference, would almost certainly restrict my horizons for professional and intellectual growth, and would, as Rod says, expose my kids to values inconsistent with my own (or bullying if they insisted on pursuing academic excellence). That price is too high.
Sounds like “Busing Redux”. That worked pretty well in the Boston area in the 70′s, right?
One more thing: Rod notes, correctly, that libertarianism doesn’t have the answer, but I’d like to see evidence that any ideology does. Liberalism certainly doesn’t. Nor does Gingrich/Palin/Romney conservatism. Front Porch Republic has a great deal of attraction to me – on an emotional and aesthetic level – but what does it have to say to folks like me – probably a majority of the Belmont crowd, at this point – who have no place to go home to and/or whose memories of what it was like to be an overachieving kid in the communities FRP extols are still fresh and raw?
I liked this part from the piece and I would have expected Rod to point it out:
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.
It may be that given the time every society will develop an hereditary caste system and wealth is not the only deterninant of who is in which caste. And it is nothing new.
And the interesting thing is that we come by who we are in it naturally, by birth and surrounding. I was not from a wealthy family but we were extremely “middle class” and there were just certain assumptions about life and how you lived it. For example, my father could not have cared less that I was not athletic and could not catch a baseball for bleep. But I was taught to play golf because in those days business deals were made on the golf course. One of the funniest moments of my time in college was teaching my friends how to drink without getting drunk because it was important to be able drink liquor, good liquor, and still be functional.
And then, many years ago, I was going out with a young woman from a well, prole family. But she so wanted to be middle class. And she worried terribly about such things as to which fork to use. And one night I said to her, out of frustration, that there was a time when I worried about such things, but that was when I was thirteen. She was trying to be what I had been born to.
Or, as we said when I was young, “A rich truck driver is still a truck driver.” It is not money. It is something far less tangible that makes for social class.
Excellent post Rod. I read Murray’s piece in the WSJ this weekend and all I could ask was “So what’s his solution?”
I think there are particular benefits to living in communities much poorer than your own socio-economic status-in those communities, there is much more of a potential to make a difference through activism, volunteering, etc. because the margin for improvement is so much greater. Of course, this depends upon your taking wise actions, and not just telling the current residents to “live like me.”
I’m not even persuaded that it’s possible within non-libertarian philosophy to come up with an effective solution. I’d say Rod’s crunchy localism is about as far removed from libertarianism as I can imagine, and yet it still seems more likely to me that it’s going to produce the same homogenization, since the level of commitment you’d need to willingly migrate into a neo-Benedictine community of “traditionalists” would be pretty high. Too many conflicts arising from ideological diversity would lead to the same loss of trust, and it would be even more fatal to a community where trust between neighbors was the basic glue of society.
Sorting together only the people with this level of commitment doesn’t sound like a recipe for integrating Belmont and Fishtown. It’s just calling out one small portion of the Belmont demographic and asking them to separate out further. I’m not 100% what Rod means by the phrase “community” at times, but I’m going to guess that the number of books he’s selling to members of the ethnic underclass, for example, is pretty small.
None of that is to say that I don’t think that there are problems with libertarianism, just that I don’t think this *particular* problem is *uniquely* a problem of libertarianism.
The trouble is that Murray’s limp, absurd prescription is all that’s left for him once he takes any government intervention off the table and doesn’t begin to acknowledge the complete breakdown of the social contract caused by unbridled, triumphant capitalism. The deeply-reported NY Times piece the other day about why Apple moved its assembly operations to China is as good a starting point as any for a more serious discussion of solutions to the very real dilemma Murray identifies. What might Steve Jobs have done differently if he had a commitment not only to his shareholders but to his fellow citizens? (I do not minimize the difficulty of that question and, up to a point, the validity of standard conservative responses to it.) What tax policies encourage – or at least do not discourage – the transfer of job abroad? What government policies would encourage the development of the kind of educated population and infrastructure Apple required? More generally, what additional tax revenue is required to supplement the sparse educational, social and cultural resources available in Fishtown? Add your own questions – the point is Murray accepts the situation pretty much as given, and ignores the factors and influences, some obvious and some not so obvious, that led us to this pass. One thing I do know: Electing a conservative Republican as President will almost certainly accelerate rather than mitigate the trends Murray identifies. And in that case one can’t be in any way sanguine about the long-term consequences for America’s social stability.
Re: “He offers no real solution. I can’t see that its possible within libertarian philosophy to come up with an effective solution.”
The one thing that libertarian Elites can do is help emplace as many transition pathways as possible in the Fishtown communities. And the first is decoupling education from the government. I would love to see every Fishtown have access to its own high school modeled after Saint Anthony’s in Jersey City:
http://www.stanthonyhighschool.org/
Unfortunately, these excellent alternatives to the sclerotic public education system are rapidly disappearing because of the economic stranglehold that is enforced by the Public Education Leviathan.
This issue has become clearer to me in recent years given my own relationship with a woman from a rural background and — being blunt but accurate, as she would say herself — a different, lower socioeconomic level from mine. Even anonymously I have no wish to go into full details about how the differences underscore many of our varying outlooks, hopes, expectations and plans, but they are there, and while my sunniness can sometimes obscure me to them, I am not blind. Indeed, she moved to be with me and has had struggled economically since then, and her question about what if I had moved to be with her instead is often not rhetorical.
For that reason Larison’s (and your) take on the lack of desire to move to a different place and context sums up my own problems with his piece, but what I find especially wearying about Murray is his insistence about how ‘like will marry like’ when it comes such backgrounds. We met years ago, fell in love as we did and I frankly am already planning the day for my proposal to her later this year. I’m sure he would say he only meant in the general sense of things and I would agree with that. But if he is going to deal with broad assumptions about what drives one’s soul — and the matters of the heart — then I reserve the right to treat them like the annoying simplicities they are. Our situation is not perfect, and has been fragile at points. But I’m damned if I’m not going to do my best for her and for us to see it through, and I know she is too. If Murray wants to ignore that kind of pugnacity and dedication in setting a course despite what society tells us we ‘should’ be doing then the fault is his.
“Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.”
Has this guy ever watched The Little Rascals? It was all about the rich and poor and the staggering chasm between their worlds.
When someone talks about a ruling elite I wish they would define their terms. Murray’s Belmont is a nice fictional town, but it’s residents are described as in the top 20%, which is not ultra rich. For example Belmont parents on average can’t afford private schools as that is reserved for executive communities such as Weston and Lincoln (which are Super Zips). For example my real town has similar demographics to Belmont, but I’m not part of an ultra rich ruling elite. Basically it bugs me that partway through his article he jumps from the top 20% to the top 0.5% and they are not the same thing.
Really there’s nothing mysterious going on with this clustering and Belmont residents will not move to Fishtown. People who are educated want their kids to be educated and most people can’t afford private schools. So they move to towns where the schools have good outcome statistics and hope for the best. The funny thing is that the outcome statistics are often a result of people who care about their kids educations moving to town, but cause and effect sometimes get entangled like that. At some point this increased demand for homes drives prices up and the flow of new residents shuts off.
So do Mr. and Mrs. Belmont have a responsibility towards the residents of Fishburn? One key to a happy life is realizing what you can and can’t control. Mr. and Mrs. Belmont know that they control the behavior of their children to a limited degree, but definitely not other people or their children. Mr. and Mrs. Belmont are also aware that people learn from their peers as much as their parents, so controlling your children’s peer group is a way to indirectly control who they learn from.
Also his term “de facto secular” is a bit sketchy. A lack of money could be a cause for a person not joining a religious congregation, not the other way around.
The Murray piece begins to get us beyond the useless name-calling and blame-exchange that passes for culturally attentive politics in our national conversation (shouting match?). But you and Larison are sadly,exactly right about his lifeless solution.
Maybe someone could write about MacIntrye’s “Benedict Option” in terms of a particular time and place that could point in the direction of existing solutions and alternatives to individual life-style experiments.
As a Philadelphia resident nearly all of my adult life (1976 to present, minus two years hiatus), and with strong personal ties to Fishtown, the comparison and analysis is fascinating and one I will examine in detail before offering further detailed commentary. For now, I would just point out that Fishtown has been going through a revitalization process for about 10 years, and Murray would find some significant changes from his data.
One change I will mention: I strong and very deliberate effort to support and enhance the local public schools, notably with pro bono instruction time provided by local professionals, especially in the arts.
The best way to make the working class into virtuous citizens is to give them work to do.
Is it possible that an increasing class divide in American just means that American society is returning to what seems to be a fairly common state of affairs around the world? Are people like Murray nostalgic for a post-WWII America that was at least in part the temporary result of the devastation suffered by much of the rest of the developed world in the war? Or, even worse to consider, did the much higher tax rates of those days actually do our country some good?
Excellent posting!! I can definitely relate living in Flatbush, which was overwhelmingly West Indian when I moved here six years ago and is now decidedly more mixed. And the place I grew up – Bethesda, Maryland – is now a more isolated ghetto of the super-rich than any part of New York save the Upper East Side.
A large part of the reason I seriously consider eventually settling down in Vermont – as the great Steve Sailer pointed out, the one state that voted for Kerry and has an above-replacement level white birthrate.
Thank you for posting this, Rod. These issues are huge concerns of mine, and I have no idea how one addresses them. It makes me very sad that there is no common interaction between the rich, middle class, and working class as there was in my Mississippi hometown when I grew up: It seems now that there are only very well-off absentee landlords of plantations (now run by international conglomerates) and the remainder of folks facing the standard hardships of jobs and insurance and child support. The middle class appears to be all gone–or at least moved to Memphis or Dallas or Nashville.
I do live in a community outside DC that is exceptionally civic-minded, and that is not especially stratified. At the same time, almost everyone we know sends their children to private schools because of anxiety about the very same cultural factors that are probably the very reason Murray wants us to send our children to them…
One thing is for sure, speaking of those second-generation children raised in the affluent suburbs: I knew kids like that when I went to boarding school up East in high school, and their experiences were as narrow and provincial as any inner city kid’s might be.
The whole thing just makes me so,so sad. And as a Christian, I’m especially saddened by the blindness of people from different classes who can so easily know so little–and be OK with that–about each other.
As others have noted, the US seems to be transitioning from a race-based society to more of a class-based one. Not that race and racism still aren’t issues–they are–but for a long time, the bonds of racial identity, and the official treatment of nonwhites as second-class citizens, was a major defining feature of American culture and law. Much praise for American equality during our first two centuries glosses over this fact–that a substantial proportion of the population was kept in bondage, terrorized by lynch mobs, and otherwise kept away from a seat at the table.
Nowadays, economic class seems to be a bigger driving factor. Gated communities housing the wealthy are home to many Indians, African-Americans, and Chinese who have become financially successful, many of which adapt similar bourgeoius values as do wealthy whites. And a big source of political unrest–primarily the Tea Party, but also quite a few in the OWS movement–is that poor whites who used to find themselves sorted as “white” now are more and more finding themselves sorted as “poor”. It’s as if they woke up one morning to find the town’s railroad tracks had been moved in the night, and they were now on the wrong side.
If history is any indication, those on the “good” side of the tracks, tend to resist any attempt at integration with those on the bad side. Jim Crow was testimony to this. One of the most extensive social/legal experiments in the US–busing to integrate segregated school districts–failed, as many white parents simply enrolled in private school or moved to the suburbs rather than permit their kids to be bussed to inner-city schools they perceived as inferior.
One other point though: While Murray refers to this as a cultural “third world”, it’s also long been the state of affairs in much of Europe for many years. Europeans countries have long been more class-conscious than the US (treating economic classes as fixed strata, and having less confidence in the possibility of upward mobility for the industrious)–a likely explanation for the continent’s generally more leftist politics.
Even when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, the class structure and privilege structure of our society was fully operative, though I was completely naive about this at the time, just thinking of our family as “middle class”. Much later I realized how much my socioeconomic status, the typical American indifference to education and my high school’s miserable reputation had limited my college choices, and how much my uninformed college choice had limited my grad school choices, and how that led to failure in my chosen academic career (in spite of much ‘bourgeois’ hard work and dedication along the way). (Not a bid for sympathy; an observation.)
There’s a lot of conflation of the terms cultural/societal/moral etc. going on here. I think it would be helpful to distinguish between mores, ethics, societal values, pop culture and high culture in these discussions. What are usually called the Culture Wars are really Mores Wars (no repetition in sound there). (I am NOT an ethical or epistemic relativist, by the way.)
The conservative movement is generally, publicly, indifferent to high culture. The conservative movement hates loose mores, not loose morals. The conservative movement venerates the profit motive above all else. One of the conservative movement’s heroines famously opined that there was no such thing as society. Americans in general don’t give a damn about education, scholarship, Wissenschaft, Geist or high-cultural activity — they don’t have a ‘personal relationship’ with those things, as they allegedly do with Jesus and certainly do with money and status and guns, and they don’t think they are worth remunerating someone for. You can’t change these things.
Years and years of unrestrained veneration of Capital have led to the current situation, where the REAL elite (not the latte-drinkers that Sarah hates) are more alienated from ordinary people than Marie Antoinette ever was.
Conservatives have it precisely bass-ackwards: it’s not ‘big government’ on the American model that in general stifles people’s freedoms; it’s much more the effects of settled, entrenched societal values (like: education ain’t really important) and the ‘free market’ (as when your profession becomes obsolete or cheaper in Asia when you’re middle aged, or the rental market exceeds your salary’s capability) that do so.
Sorry, this was a bit of ramble. Maybe something more to the point later.
I think the uncomfortable reality is that the fault isn’t really on the elite side. The Amerian middle class used to be extremely broad an aout-maechanic and a doctor could both honestly claim to be middle class. What changed was the wholesale abandonment of middle class values as the baby boomers came of age. It didn’t really affect them negatively, because they were lving off the social capital created by the preceding generations.
However, fast forward 20 year when that rejection was entrenched in the education establishment, and entertainment industry, and big business and you get a generation that makes choces that prevent them from participating in the American middle class. Single parenthood, victim mentality and gloablaization are powerful barriers to entry to the middle class life.
The politicans response of giving everyone the accroutements of a middle class lifestyle, a college degree and a house hasn’t improved their ability to function without the values to match.
A couple of thoughts:
The problem of diversity causing “turtling” is a short term one—if people remain in the same neighborhood more or less permanently. It takes longer to come out of your shell and meet and accept your neighbors, but it does happen. Likewise, people will slowly adapt their moral and cultural preferences to resemble those of the people around them.
However, this requires making a long-term, even lifetime commitment to a particular place to help create that “sense of place”.
And this leads to the second point: the real culprit here is mobility. The more mobile we are, the more we can segregate ourselves. If we live in a city where the dominant forms of transportation are walking and the horse and buggy, then we’ve all got to live in the same neighborhoods. If we live in a city where the car is the dominant form of transportation, then we’ve can spread out over a much, much larger area (remember, as the radius of distance we can commute increases, the available area we can live in increases by the square of that amount). And that means the opportunities for segregation become vastly increased.
Likewise, long-range communications and transportation (airplanes, yes, but also long haul trucking, container ships, etc.) have the tendency of breaking down some cultural barriers in the form of wide distribution of movies, books and music, standardized consumer products and so on, but it’s also produced an elite global class of people that will have more in common with members in other countries than with lower class people in their native country. Cultural barriers that were once set at borders are erased, but those at the borders of socioeconomic class are heightened.
The result is that I don’t really see how you fix this without pretty much wiping out the technological advances that have so enriched us. You can’t have a high tech society without high tech communication and transportation, and once those are in place, the process more-or-less naturally unfolds.
I suspect the “problem” becomes pronounced with age; that Murray’s description might be apt for boomers, less so for gen-xers (such as myself) and less still for Millennials. Why? Because the breakdown of one kind of unified culture is being replaced by another – the internet/always-connected/social media lifestyle – and boomers are caught in the gap.
” I do notice that the VDARE types on the Internet, anyway, seem very well-educated and don’t, by and large, strike me as being very much interested in the needs of lower-class whites, either, except inasmuch as such interests are perceived to conflict with those of other ethnic gropus–certainly not to the point of moving in next to them.”
Actually we do care about the needs of ‘lower-class’ (I would say working class) whites, and Americans more generally. I would say more so than the open borders/diversity crowd who couldn’t really care less about working class whites.
Murray elsewhere has described growing up in Iowa at a time when things were a lot like Lake Woebegone wher all children above aveage. I suppose that would give a different perspective from someone raised in Fishtown or Belmont, not least by making differences of class and culture a surprise when faced by them in their starkest form.
People naturally congregate among people who share their educational level, income, interests, occupation and often race or ethnicity. You aren’t going to change that without a powerful incentive and, if you do, you’re probably going to end up with people who don’t necessarily fit in easily in a community.
The place where I live has good public schools where doctor’s children and the children of millionaires go to school with the children of single mothers who work at the local gas station. Sometimes they become friends but not always and there’s still some class tension. The shared schooling as well as the likelihood that they both have German or Scandinavian immigrant ancestors a few generations back can make for things in common. Children of doctors from somewhere in Africa or India are here as well and have to fit in because there are fewer kids like them that they can form a social group with.
Communities that don’t have that one public school or that one library or grocery store or mall where everyone congregates are probably not going to have as much luck blending social classes. There are no gated communities here, thank God.
Actually even ‘care about the needs’ is inaccurate, we want a country where working-class whites don’t have the game continually stacked against them, where the overall environment is conducive to them fulfilling their own needs.
I think Murray shorts the economic side of this. Yes, it’s vicious cicrle, with cause and effect running in both directions: financial stress and uncertainty wreck long term planning for a stable family life (and at low income levels prevent it altogether). And family instability prevents people from getting ahead.
But the vicious circle is more easily broken on the economic side than the cultural. However the Right’s culture warriors, even when they are sincerely concerned (and I believe Murray is), would never dare back the measures needed to break the cycle economically (e.g., jobs for all, at whatever cost to the oligarchy) so they confine themselves to fretting about marriage rates and the like.
By the way, we’ve been down this road before (very broadly speaking). Why (I’m asking everyone) aren’t we seeing religion step up to the challenge, the way the Methodists and others did in the 18th century when the British working class was drowning itself in Gin Lane? Churches today seem like hermetically sealed enclaves, and the few that address the larger culture are either lobbying the politicians or ranting and raving hellfire and brimstone quite unhelpfully.
Someone earlier on the thread remarked on the rejection of middle class values by the educational and entertainment establishments. I think that’s an important point. Egalitarianism and the assault on value has had a serious impact. There used to be an “aspirational” culture along with “middlebrow” entertainment. Not any more. Note all the efforts to shock bourgeoise sensibilities, often by some pretty bourgeoise folks. There’s also been a decades long trend “romancing the proles” by elevating the authenticity of boorish and uncultured behavior. Instead of taking cues from the educated–see Steve Allen’s television programs from decades ago–it’s act like Snooki and company. What parents wanted their children to avoid has become the default positon, unless you consciously avoid it.
Steve M – I am floored – as I was reading this I was also thinking of St. Anthony’s!
A few years ago I attended a basketball game at St. A’s. Evening – in a really bad neighborhood. On our way to St. A’s we passed the public HS – Ferris. Barbed wire surrounding the school, plastic wondows because glass windows promote break ins. Grafitti everywhere, litter and dead trees. We were getting pretty nervous. Arrive at St. A’s – trees healthy, little grassy area well tended, no grafitti no litter no barbed wire. Polite young men directing people to the parking spaces. Typical 40′s style Catholic high school architecture but spotlessly clean and well cared for. During the half time we were in the hallway – a white adult dropped a gum wrapper and the african american cheerleader from the school zoomed up – picked that wrapper off the floor – and then politely asked the group of men if they would please not drop garbage on the floor as this was their school and they liked to keep it clean.
I often wonder why it is that St. Anthony’s or other schools like this in Newark can be successful. It does seem to me that this sense of taking pride in your school and yourself because you are part of that school is an important ingredient.
And I wonder why – since we have all these examples of small schools doing such a great job whilst their big public school neighbors fail miserably – why do we not learn from these schools? And why can’t we extend these lessons into the community?
Obviously – there is an issue here about values but – is it really true that cultural values of hard work, achievement, and temperate living are restricted to elites? Maybe those cultural values are lying right beneath the surface in the Fishtowns of the US but people need some support to live them out. I am reminded of Pres. Bill Clinton arriving in Newark at a dinner and announcing a ton of money to build housing which would attract middle class people into Newark. This was of course based on the premise that such middle class people would improve the city. The Archbishop of Newark created quite a stir when he got up to speak and told the president that Newark didn’t need imported white middle class people – that the people who lived in Newark now given decent jobs and opportunity would become that middle class.
So the answer to this dilemna in my mind is – a tax structure which returns decent paying jobs to US cities. This includes addressing the problem of high urban property taxes with lower suburban property taxes.
Lots of good comments here. I keep going back to Alan Ehrenhalt’s point in “The Lost City”: that the close-knit communities we all love, at least in our dreams, were achievable only in an era of significant conformity and lack of consumer or professional choice. You cannot have maximal freedom (of consumer/lifestyle/career) choice and also have the kind of strong and binding culture that Murray esteems. I realized in the midpoint of my life that the good things I had back in my hometown were worth giving up other good things I had living in the big city. But this choice was only possible because I was fortunate enough to have a job I could do via wifi, and a broad-minded employer. If not for that, it would have been all but impossible for me to move back to this town, because there aren’t jobs here in my field.
Richao also adds some much-needed realism to this discussion. It’s not always the case that the upper middle children are missing out on wonderful diversity by living in an economically and culturally segregated enclave. Their parents may well be the kind of people who did grow up in a small town, but who were intellectual types who were made miserable by bullies who pushed them around because they were bookish nerds. These people may have gone off to college and entered an economy that rewarded them handsomely for the same skills and interests that got them picked on back home. It’s not hard for me to see why they would be reticent to go back to a community where their kids might be bullied.
MH – On the other hand, there’s a (diminishing but still existent) possibility that the next President of the U.S. will be from Belmont! (And he makes $21 million a year.) I think any wealthy-ish town will have super-wealthy sprinkled in.
Mitchell,
I don’t know if you are speaking for yourself, or speaking for what you perceive to be the center of society–but I want a country where working class PEOPLE don’t have the game stacked against them.
Continuing my prior post on the race-vs-class thing. Obama’s approval ratings among whites are presently lower than they were in 2008. White liberals still generally like him (other than a few who object to his policies from the left); rich white conservatives have never been too fond of him (and some loathe him outright). Where he has lost support among white voters is in the middle–particularly among the middle class and below. This demographic is suffering, is not used to suffering, and is ready to lash out at the Obama Administration, just as surely as they lashed out at the GOP in ’08.
His approval rating among minorities, though, remains quite high. Part of this may may racial solidarity among African-Americans, and part of this may be the xenophobic bent of the Tea Party, but a big difference between lower-class whites and lower-class minorities is the latter are used to being in the bottom social strata, whereas the former are not. To them, Obama is–at worst–more of the same (assuming that the President gets the blame or credit for economic conditions, deserved or otherwise), and when the alternative is a party that openly embraces bigotry, sticking with him is really a no-brainer.
You cannot have maximal freedom (of consumer/lifestyle/career) choice and also have the kind of strong and binding culture that Murray esteems.
Did we have this? I cannot imagine that a logger in the Pacific Northwest would have had any knowledge of African American blues 70 years ago.
Murray might be referring to a brief moment when “mass media” was very limited: when there were only 3 TV channels and when radio was so strictly regulated there was little local flavor beyond the local weather report.
Scotty,
I was speaking for immigration restrictionists of the Vdare type, for want of a better label. Of course that’s arrogant of me. And I just don’t believe in ‘people’. It’s clear here in California that despite the obvious economic harm done by mass immigration (legal and illegal) , harm that is borne more by ‘Latinos’ than by whites, the Latino block wants high immigration at all cost. Blood is thicker than water, and of course numbers means political power.
If not for that, it would have been all but impossible for me to move back to this town, because there aren’t jobs here in my field.
You could take a job outside your field.
James Kabala, that’s true. I’ve walked around Romney’s former neighborhood and the houses are quite nice. The same is true for Winchester near Mystic lake.
“Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms…”
Yes, except if they tried to do that, they’d get either ignored, yelled at, punched out, or worse. Norm-defying people usually have a problem with teachability.
Newark used to be a great working-class city. I have relatives who still live in the area. The city, like many others, was ruined by the race riots and the ascendency of corrupt black political machine politics. Nothing really much else to say.
The reason places like St. Anthony’s are successful is because they aren’t funded by people in the city. Most inner-city Catholic schools are funded by the diocese using money from elsewhere. St. Anthony’s will no doubt eventually suffer the same fate as countless others in the region. The days of schools being supported by strong local tithes are long gone.
Its amazing that this post does not reference television as having an effect on making people turtles in their communities. I grew up in an underclass diverse community, but thankfully I’m from Canada so it had no affect on my ability to move to the upper middle class. I love living in a diverse racial environment but I do not like living where foreign cultures predominate in Canada. It frustrates me. I remember my mother warning me about “strangers” and it never fully got out of my head. People all need to attend the churches in their neighborhood, church is a great place for rich and poor to come together and maybe if we stopped watching so much TV , and there was actually someone at home during the day we could have neighborhoods again.
“If you’re a Belmontese, you’re being asked to risk your kids losing the values that are likely to advance their economic condition, and maintain their social stability, for the sake of … what, exactly?”
For the sake of us all, maybe? Not sure it would work, but if it did work, I think it would be worth the slight risk. And I say slight because if you have a household and extended family which highly values and encourages reading, education, morality, and stability (financial and emotional), your offspring are likely to choose the same path. Highly educated and well off parents tend to produce more of the same. But that’s just my take on it and it’s why politically I’m more communitarian than anything.
Although why other people should sign up for it, I don’t know. Maybe if someone did some research to find out whether well off people who raised and educated their kids in an economic/social bubble had any worse a long term outcome than those who sent them to public schools. Then the incentive might become financial. Sure, I could send John Jr and Jane to that $40,000 a year private school. But I could also invest that and get an actual return on my money.
Heard a similar theory on the migration of affluent Blacks out of ghettos (Harlem) once segregation laws and eased. Something to consider.
Cecelia said: “The Archbishop of Newark created quite a stir when he got up to speak and told the president that Newark didn’t need imported white middle class people – that the people who lived in Newark now given decent jobs and opportunity would become that middle class.”
Are you saying that all it would take to instill middle-class values in the neighborhood would be jobs and money?
Or is it possible that lower-class types of behavior contribute to the lack of money and jobs, thus follows the need to live in poor, run-down areas.
Alcogito, lower class types of behavior are indeed self destructive. But one big issue is mobility. Your typical single parent living in the projects has no car, and public transit is often slow and the coverage spotty – the buses often don’t run to the suburban office parks where one might attain a good job. She or he also cannot afford to relocate, and put down a security deposit and first month’s rent for an apartment near a good school where the kids might be exposed to other types of lifestyles and break out of the cycle. It’s not all one or the other – access to good jobs and good schools might not be a cure, but it would help and it would offer a more viable pathway out of dysfunction for the motivated youngster.
alcogito – I think that there are many decent families living in poor run down areas who truly want a better life and who try very hard to instill values like a strong work ethic in their kids.
Those kids who go to St A;’s and other schools like it are an example of poor kids from poor families who still value education and a work ethic and who – when given the chance at a good education – take advantage of that opportunity. But when the decent middle class jobs leave and you lack the ability to follow them – since they are going to India etc. and the school system collapses then you end up in low wage jobs with all the attendant social problems. So if jobs are available – some people will still be on welfare etc but there are still a lot of families who would seize that opportunity.
I think the problem of a decline in American religiosity has been addressed in terms of a consequential decline in the ethical and social mores of American society – particularly in the working class, where Sundays which used to spent in church are now spent with friends at a NASCAR race or an NFL football game. As was noted in one of Rod’s earlier articles, loosened sexual morals may have been a phenomenon discovered in England to coincide with the 18th Century flow of people into large cities. In America that same trend occurred for the backbone middle class in the late 20th Century.
But something even more significant than loosened morals concerning sexual and other indulgences has occurred. The increasing secularity of America, in both the owner and worker classes, means fewer of these men and women are filing their lives with the activities of the church – a life in which people of great diversity have a history of interacting as equals, and more than, that interacting as joint participants in common ventures, from filling plates in soup kitchens to washing the cups for communion to preparing for a horde of kids coming to Vacation Bible School. Church life in America was the place where, if black and white didn’t often come together, yet the business owners, the corporate managers, the lawyers and doctors, served side by side with clerks, plumbers, factory hands, maids and school teachers. They’re diverse experiences and varied gifts informed one another in the deliberations of church sessions and diaconates. Their children studied their bible lessons together, took their retreats together, built their scout huts and carried packages to the poor together, serenaded shut-ins together, put on plays together, as equals. They did this because each Sunday they heard sermons that affirmed their common humanity, their common sinfulness, and their common need for the grace of God in Jesus Christ. When that message was exiled from public schools it only took a generation for the balkanization of American culture to set in and for public schools to be abandoned. But worse than that, those who left the public schools (as well as those left behind) also left going to church. The result is that there are far fewer occasions in which Americans from diverse walks of life have to reflect together, rejoice and mourn together, work and pray together, and discover why what they hold in common is far more significant than what sets them apart.
If you want the answer to Charles Murray’s dilemma, I don’t think you will find a path that will take America where he wants us to go, unless that path leads us, together, back to church.
Who says that raising kids in Belmont immunizes them against bad behavior? Some years back in Michigan there was a notoroious case where the “best” senior boys in Grosse Pointe (exclusive old money suburb) were hauled off to jail for having wild pot parties in one boy’s parent’s mansion– he had a whole wing to himself- where they were getting underage girls wasted and having forcible sex with them. Of course the parents were crying the usual malarky– “He’s such a good boy– he doesn’t derserve to be in jail!”
“I cannot imagine that a logger in the Pacific Northwest would have had any knowledge of African American blues 70 years ago. ”
You need to read up on the thriving African American music scene in Seattle at that time
Murray clearly believes that the “new upper class” ought to engage “in the rest of America” to reduce cultural inequality, and he wants it to be strictly voluntary, but he gives no clear reason why anyone should volunteer.
Well, to start at the most morbid… the more these two societies separate, the more likelier it is that eventually the inhabitants of all the Fishtowns will surround the gated Belmonts with pitchforks and torches and AR-15s and wipe them out. Phil Ochs wrote a song about that — The Ringing of Revolution. He introduced it “everyone on the inside, spiritually resembles Charles Lawton, and everyone on the outside physically resembles Lee Marvin.” So, before we get to the Eloi and the Morlocks (a somewhat different cinematic paradigm), anyone in Belmont who sees a real future for their grandchildren ought to get out.
In fact, it is only when we deal in groupthink that mixing is so difficult. Inhabitants of Belmont will look down their noses at “those people” in Fishtown, and Fishtown will return the favor. But when individuals live next door to each other, it is an entirely different story. My father taught chemistry all his life. I can’t recall another university professor who lived within two miles of us. The kids I played with, and went to school with, had fathers who worked in paper mills and the wire works, owned home heating businesses, drove delivery trucks… Of course in the days before Sputnik, the working stiffs made more money than professors did, and flaunted it.
Hey, that’s it! We need powerful unions winning substantial wage concessions so the people in Fishtown can afford to move to Belmont! And then the inhabitants of Belmont will rehab old Victorians in Fishtown!
This is more than a cultural brokenness. It is also an ideological one. The ideas of progressives and conservatives no longer create cultures that sustain the common good. They are antithetical to them because they are ultimately about the “me” at the center of all these cultures.
Just consider, not the poltiics, but the “cultural revival” that would come from either Newt, Romney, Santorum or Paul. Is there any? There is no cultural ethos upon which to build a society with any of them. I attribute that to the exhaustion of modern conservative ideology.
And I believe the same can be said for Obama and progressive ideology. It too is backrupt and exhausted, and like conservatism is essentially destructive, rather than constructive.
And then the inhabitants of Belmont will rehab old Victorians in Fishtown!
Except for the specific labels, Siarlys, that is precisely what has happened and is happening in Fishtown, Northern Liberties, the various neighboring sections of University City (Penn and Drexel) in west Philly, and many sections in the northwest quadrant such as Germantown and Mt. Airy. I have long lusted after some Victorian twins in west Philly, having had a teasing taste when renting an apartment in one for a couple of years in the late 70s. I’d be living in one right now if my wife hadn’t vetoed anything west of the Schuylkill.
As a former tax lawyer and tax policy analyst, I am making an effort to correct the near complete lack of broad understanding of our tax system wherever I can find it (this lack of understanding itself is a huge problem because it encourages class envy and demagoguery). One of the most fundamental errors is confusing tax rates with taxes actually paid. No one ever paid 91% in income taxes, however much liberals may wistfully, and mistakenly, recall such times. The tax code then contained far more opportunities to avoid taxes than it does now (yes, even now).
In fact, the portion of the total federal income taxes paid by the top 1% and 5% have increased steadily for decades. The tax cuts for the rich that liberals so deplore did not shift the actual tax burden down to the middle or lower classes. Our system has become increasingly more progressive, more so than France and Sweden, for example.
In my home state of California, the state income tax is now so heavily dependent on top earners that it is dangerously vulnerable to economic downturns, which, like our current recession, tend to reduce the income of the top 1% far more on average than lower income groups. And so income tax receipts fall much more quickly, and are much harder to predict than they were when the tax burden was shared more broadly.
I end with my usual plea for a much simpler, nearly flat tax with next to no deductions, preferably based on consumption rather than income (that is another debate), but above all one that can be understood by the average taxpayer and that is perceived as fair. Might as well believe in the tooth fairy however.
The tax increases on the rich that seem to be the primary desire of liberal Democrats, if enacted, would increase the tax burden by upper income earners to the highest in US history, would move the total tax take to well over the long-term average of 19-20% of GDP, would never take in as much revenue as predicted (tax increases ALWAY result in lower revenue than predicted) and would in any event not come close to closing the exploding deficit.
There never was some golden age when the rich paid their “fair share.” The rich pay more now than ever, and increasing those taxes further is not going to fix the deficit, much less improve the economy.
The tax increases on the rich that seem to be the primary desire of liberal Democrats, if enacted, would increase the tax burden by upper income earners to the highest in US history,
The equivocation in “highest” (percentage in one place, total dollars in another, perhaps constant dollars in others) is a problem.
would move the total tax take to well over the long-term average of 19-20% of GDP,
And the non-imaginary problem with this is what, precisely?
would never take in as much revenue as predicted (tax increases ALWAY result in lower revenue than predicted) and would in any event not come close to closing the exploding deficit.
If we choose to identify and punish offshoring aggressively, perhaps not so much.
There never was some golden age when the rich paid their “fair share.” The rich pay more now than ever, and increasing those taxes further is not going to fix the deficit, much less improve the economy.
The people we’re talking about captured practically every penny of the doubling of per capita productivity in the USA of the past 30 years. As a cohort they’ve delivered little or nothing of compensatory social value in return. If anything they’ve mostly stuck the money into socially nonproductive sectors, creating an economy of a rapid succession of bubbles in e.g. luxury goods, low quality goods, and engineered shortages of necessities.
The historical social justification of the continued existence of the super-rich was their service as sources/concentrators of capital and economic organization after calamities (wars, natural disasters, depressions/recessions). In the West they lost this role to Central Banks and economic experts in the 1980s or so. As you point out, they’re not going to recover this role nor do they desire to, nor are they as a cohort in any hurry to take any other socially responsible role.
Arguably, as a cohort the American super-rich currently serve largely as a variety of economic scavenger, clearing away the pre-Modern low productivity forms of industry. This task nearing completion, the question arises as to what we as a society really need them for as a class if they refuse to render any more relevant service to society. That is the issue at the bottom of the Gingrich-Romney dispute. Personally, I think a Romney nomination and perhaps Presidency is desirable precisely because it makes the issue unavoidable and undeniable and in-your-face. It will force all sides to come to serious conclusions.
Murray should have also mentioned the lack of social mobility through marriage. Back in 1960, the nice young Fishtown secretary could get on the streetcar and go to work in the office of the upcoming young Belmont executive – and very likely “hook” him. Instant ramp-up in social status, for her at least. IF she was socially skilled and pretty, that is.
Now, like marries like to a degree not seen since the days of the old pre-World War I aristocracies. Doctors don’t marry their nurses; they marry other doctors. (And you did not become a nurse by going to college then; nursing was learned hands-on through hospital / clinical programs.) Secretaries married executives. Teachers married principals. Legal assistants married lawyers.
This made it way easier for at least some lower-class people to move into situations of more wealth (as well as more “culture,” if you want to get parochial about it.)
Greg Richey, How dare you inject actual expertise into this rarefied space. Out with you!
Um, Stef, you make a good point but your timeline is a bit off. Back in the 60s Fishtown’s name was as precise to its residents and businesses therein as the nearby Brewerytown. Young women found jobs gutting and cleaning fish (if their fathers and brothers left any for the taking), and some might have dreamed about riding a bus or trolley downtown to watch the high-society types strut their stuff on Broad Street.
[...] – Rod Dreher on Charles Murray [...]
If it’s as bad as all that, then here’s a possible solution: elites who own and run businesses must go to church. And then start hiring employees with a demonstrated concern for their church or synagogue, and a record of attendance. Seriously.