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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The two white tribes

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Charles Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.”  The conservative sociologist of family Brad Wilcox — what a fantastic choice of reviewers! — gives the book a positive notice in the Wall Street Journal today: So much for the idea that […]

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Charles Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.”  The conservative sociologist of family Brad Wilcox — what a fantastic choice of reviewers! — gives the book a positive notice in the Wall Street Journal today:

So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.

More:

Mr. Murray’s sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness. And his book shows that many of these findings are also applicable to poor and working-class African Americans and Latinos. Mr. Murray notes that “family, vocation, faith, and community” have a “direct and strong relationship to self-reported happiness.” Not surprisingly, he shows that since the 1970s happiness has plummeted in working-class and poor communities—but not in affluent communities.

The economic and political success of the American experiment has depended in large part on the health of these founding virtues. Businesses cannot flourish if ordinary workers are not industrious. The scope and cost of government grows, and liberty withers, when the family breaks down. As James Madison wrote: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

David Brooks writes about the Murray book today, saying that he’ll “be shocked if there’s another book this year as important” as this one. He points out that Murray is writing only about white people, so racial differences don’t skew these results. More:

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

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.

Nobody votes for a politician who blames them for problems — their own, or the country’s. Maybe they’ll vote for a politician who gives it to them straight, but convinces them that they, that we, can and must do better. Who is that politician? Anyway, it’s a mistake to think that the culture can be changed by politicians. The culture can be changed by culture-makers. Do you expect that Hollywood (“Hollywood” = the American entertainment industry) can be expected to change its messaging? Of course not. To do so would not only violate some of the sacred moral codes of these people — in particular, the idea that gaining and exercising maximum sexual autonomy is the pinnacle of modern democratic life — it would also not make much practical sense to them, given that they live far from the social chaos that results from poor and working-class people choosing to live by the same values they see valorized in popular culture.

Culture could be changed by religion — but as Murray shows, the lower classes have abandoned churchgoing. Besides, what does American religion increasingly characterized by the tenets of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and its core teaching that what really matters is relating to a deity that wants you above everything to feel good about yourself, have to say to people who need a radical change of life? MTD is a religious strategy for managing their decline.

A big problem here is that nobody knows what to do about this. Writing in the Journal the other day, Murray weakly offered a prescription that said the well-off (that is, the morally and culturally stable) ought to move next door to members of the other tribe. Well, maybe. But why, concretely, should a particular family choose to do that? Murray, a libertarian, suggests that it would make life more interesting for them. I bet it would, but people who have found a stable mode of life for their families don’t necessarily want interesting. If members of the first tribe are going to be convinced to make that move, it will have to come from strong moral conviction, informed either by religious commitment or a civic republicanism. (Here is a story about a Dallas man who made this kind of decision for his family, out of religious commitment). And even if they do make that move, why should members of the second tribe accept the lifestyle modeled by the new people on the block? Isn’t it possible, perhaps even likely, that they will reject bourgeois norms as elitism, as snobbery? If “respectability,” as modeled by these middle class people, is seen to be achieved only at the expense of group and class solidarity, there will be a powerful disincentive to adapt them (think of how difficult it is, culturally, for poor and working class black students to develop good academic habits, because they stand accused of “acting white.”).

Brad Wilcox suggests that Hollywood could and should change its messaging — agreed, but this is unlikely to happen — and that politicians could do more to stabilize the economic situation for the working class:

First, policy makers and business leaders need to shore up the economic foundations of working- and middle-class life. Globalization has paid huge dividends for the upper class, but it has undercut the earnings and job security of men (and their families) lower down the social ladder. Public policies designed to strengthen the educational opportunities (e.g., better vocational programs) and economic security (portable health-care plans) of ordinary Americans could help in renewing the economic foundations of the nation’s virtues.

Agreed, but from a politician’s point of view, where is the incentive to stand up against the globalism dogma preached by the GOP and the New Democrats? Besides which, as Brooks observes, it appears that neither party is focused on what really is undermining America’s foundations, but rather are all in for competing narratives that satisfy emotional needs, and have the dubious virtues of making all their problems Somebody Else’s Fault.
UPDATE: Daniel Larison is unimpressed by Brooks’s national service proposal. Excerpt:

All of this seems like a deliberate effort to avoid addressing problems of wage stagnation, rising cost of living, and other factors that prevent stable family formation.

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