Coming Apart

Newsletter: Coming Apart

David Brooks of the NYT is constantly on a chase for explanations of our social structure that won’t make the upper crust look bad. His latest find to do that is Charles Murray’s new study called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a book that at bottom wants to blame the “welfare state” for beginning the process of “coming apart.” Since Murray makes no bones about being a conservative sociologist I have to take his thinking with a grain of salt, especially his contention that the cultural divide between the two white communities--what Brooks calls the upper-tribe, which represents 20% of the white population, and the lower-tribe, which represents 30% of the same population--that the divide between them is cultural more than economic, and stagnant wages, a decline in manufacturing, rampant joblessness, and divisive inequality have little to do with the separation of tribes or classes. Brooks doesn’t want to use the word “class, “ but I don’t see “tribe” as a great improvement or more descriptive somehow. No matter how you cut the pie, it’s still round.

Murray attempts to turn the accepted idea of class differences upside down. For example: the notion that working class people, those that Sarah Palin likes to call “ordinary Americans,” are the backbone of our core American values, like faith, hard work, honesty, and marriage. Murray calls these our “founding virtues.” In contrast the upper crust was viewed as secular, skeptical, irreligious, often divorced, dishonest and a bit decadent. In the early sixties the two groups lived cheek by jowl, not so far apart as they are today. The old interaction is totally absent. So how are those “founding virtues” doing today? Lets look at what Murray discovered. Having a child out of wedlock is now a rare occurrence in the upper-tribe, whereas in the lower-tribe 45% have kids outside of marriage, and, not too surprising, marriage is less frequent or tends to be unstable. And remember we are talking about only the white population. It appears lower-tribe probity and core strength isn’t what it used to be. In the upper-tribe, after a flirtation with countercultural values in the sixties and seventies, has righted the ship and the folks in the 20% group are now going to church, divorcing less and maintaining the centrality of marriage and smart child-rearing, display civic concern, believe in the value of education, working hard, and live in enclaves of considerable stability. Their communities are no longer contiguous with the 30%. They live in gated communities or in suburbs filled with the like-minded.. The homes of the well off cost ten times what they had cost in the sixties. They live in isolation from the poor and middle class. And the separation is quite deliberate. One critic called it “self-segregation.” Birds of a feather flock together. It’s a cliché but its still true. The cultural habits of the elite class would be unrecognizable to the lower tribe—to mainstream America. They eat differently, they play with more expensive toys, have more expensive cars, like a different brand of entertainment, and live in clusters in what Murray calls “super Zip Codes, surrounded by huge lawns and neighbored by other rich. They are separated not only by culture but by geography.”

What is really coming apart is the lower tribe. Murray thinks the bonds of community, and the founding virtues that support the bonds, are frayed and in decline. Many men are working just part time and those once called “bums” are no longer scorned like in the past. It appears that he is suggesting that there is a degrading process going on among the 30%, as they seem to be falling into the same “sociological underclass” that we usually associate with African-Americans and other ethnic subsets. While the poor in the rest of the world are emerging from living on a dollar a day, the 30% are going backwards, experiencing the early stages of Ghettoization. Murray’s conservatism is revealed when he blames the “welfare state” and government bureaucracy’s habit of allocating funds inefficiently. (What about Medicare, sir!) There are few people being coddled by a welfare system these days, unless you consider food stamps a luxury and unemployment insurance a waste of money during hard times. Murray pays little attention to the inequality gap between the tribes, keeping to his premise of cultural differences, paying little heed to the economic factors which are obviously huge and causative.

Brooks comments about the lower tribe: “ Members work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.” He softballs an answer to the great divide: persons from the upper tribe should interact with their brethren on the lower level, something along the lines of the old Vista program. National Service is easy to suggest, but hard to bring off, especially with the current Congress.

Bradford Wilcox of the Wall Street Journal reviewed Coming Apart and concluded “policy makers and business leaders need to shore up the economic foundation of working and middle class life.” That’s a good place to start.