Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.
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Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
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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.
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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.
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As much as I hate to say it, this guy (Murray) is not wrong. And I really don’t think the solution is what the editorial’s author is advocating - forceful intermingling of the two classes through some kind of “National Service Program”. I, for example, being a member of the “upper” half now, have lived for a long time among, and am pretty familiar with the “lower” half. I don’t see how that helps lessen the divide.
I agree with you that the top 20% is where the income and cultural wedge is forming, however that does not mean that all of the members are to blame for it. The 1% is a slogan pointing toward the architects of unfair inequality, who are not all of the 1%, but are hardly any of the 20%.
Educated, liberal Red Staters tend to assume, as Barack Obama famously did, that the Blue States are filled with impoverished white trash who “cling to God and guns.” They figure, the stupider and less educated you are, the more devoutly Christian you must be.
What Murray is showing is that, even in Red States, it’s just the opposite. A big Baptist Megachurch in Texas ISN’T filled with illiterate, obese Wal-Mart shoppers in stretch pants. THOSE people tend not to go to church at all. The white Southerners most likely to go to church are, in fact, middle and upper-middle class people with college educations.
I know- it’s completely counterintuitive, to both liberals AND many conservatives. But it’s true. The white people who actually ATTEND a Southern Baptist church every week tend to be richer and BETTER educated than the white Southerners who don’t belong to a church. The white Southerners who attend that Megachurch tend to be married and to hold white-collar jobs. The unchurched white underclass tends to shack up without getting married, and to work menial, dead-end jobs.
That’s one reason Red and Blue Staters have such different opinions and different diagnoses for fixing America’s problems. An awful lot of Northern leftists imagine that the white Southern underclass is filled with Bible thumpers who blindly parrot whatever Reverend Billy Bob tells them. In reality, the white Southern underclass is pretty well divorced from church and from traditional notions of Christian morality.
An educated, liberal SDMB regular may imagine that religion is somehow holding the rednecks down, and may genuinely think the rednecks will be happier and more prosperous if they abandon their faith. But an educated, conservative Red Stater is troubled by the degree to which the white Southern underclass has ALREADY abandoned Christianity… because the results often aren’t pretty.
I agree with Asotrian’s interpretation, which is not exactly confined to just Mr. Murray and this article. A recent article in The Atlantic titled Can the Middle Class Be Saved made the same point. Middle class success in terms of jobs, education, savings, and home-ownership tend to be positively associated with being married and faithful, being religious, and cleaving towards traditional values (not necessarily associated with any political party). Regarding religion and education, I’ve posted plentiful evidence of the same in prevoius threads. Some people very badly don’t want to believe it, though.
I read it, but I don’t get it.
I do get that the largest difference is between the upper 20 and the lower 30 percent. I suppose Murray has compelling data for that. But then, in the last ten lines of the article, he proposes:
So, where did *that *come from?
Even more so, it has been tried out in the Netherlands, with limited success. Neighborhoods were designed so that old and young, poor and rich live within walking distance from each other, go to the same school, etc. The results are not spectacular, and it is hard to tell if the whole thing is a cause, a symptom, or merely a result of our egalitarian income distribution system.
When you have (some) religions that argue that you get what you deserve, it kind of makes sense that those who have think the religion is right and those who have not don’t necessarily buy into it.
And if you have (some) religions that argue that the poor are always with you and that they’ll get rewarded in heaven, it makes sense that some who have think that absolves them of having to do anything for those poor.
In other words, I think some of their correlations have the causation backwards.
The social benefits of religious membership have to do with the creation of reserves of social capital in what gets called the “third place” (i.e., a locus of community involvement beyond the home/family and the workplace). As the point was made in Bowling Alone, Americans are less frequently joining these sorts of associations and, as a result, community bonds begin to fray. Murray, in his original WSJ article, made the same point.
As regards the salutary effect of marriage (which I do not controvert), it is indeed curious that the most salient stance taken by conservatives on the issue is how to prevent its expansion.
I watched Undercover Boss the other night. The CEO was unimpressed with one truck driver who felt a disconnect with the company. The CEO had him work in the home office for a few weeks. Wow, what a great opportunity. But no, this guy was pissed off: “You can’t take someone who has driven a truck and keep him cooped up in a office. Once you have tasted freedom you can’t go back”. Slightly paraphrased, but if anything it was even stronger. There is a guy who will never make it out of the bottom. He has contempt for white collar workers, those who have gone to college, etc.
I disagree that it is Democrats who have contempt for the poor, white southerners. The Republicans play up their folksiness and talk about those Ivy Leaguers in the Northeast who don’t have real American values. This despite the fact that many of them were Ivy Leaguers themselves. The Republicans are treating people as fools and saying complete nonsense that they think they can get away with if people are idiots.
But it’s not just conservatives that bear responsibility. I’d love to see unions push for a “promote from within” policy so that blue collar workers can make it into management and other salaried positions in the company (other than just foremen). There is no reason a smart line worker couldn’t learn to do CAD/CAM or other skilled work.
I suspect that the correlation between church attendance and social success (assuming it exists) has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the religion’s doctrine. More like the availability of a social support network.
The national service angle seems shoehorned in. Unless we are talking about a totally randomized, no exceptions system, the elite will use their money and social connections to get more out of the system for their kids, resulting in the workforces on the most desirable projects being just as homogeneous as the schools the kids came from.
Aside from that, interesting article. How much of this divide is due to the way school districting distorts the housing market? There seems to be a link between higher-performing public schools, higher housing prices, and higher-earning parents. The richer enclaves have better schools because there are fewer poor kids, because it costs too much to live there, or in the case of suburbs there is no good public transit for those who can’t afford a car. Of course, the really elite, and those who aspire to be, bypass the system entirely and send the kids to private schools.
Unwittingly, you perfectly illustrate Murray’s point, which was not, as you seem to think, “remember when we all used to go to Princeton,” but rather, until very recently in America, those line workers were your neighbors, your fellow congregants, and, imagine!, your parents.
Notice that the Belmont executive does not wonder “Why don’t these people want to be more like me and go to college and work in an office instead of driving a truck (because I suppose we don’t actually need people to drive trucks?!?)” or having an appropriate respect for fancy credentials as your post seems to do.
Alas, yes. He’s not wrong about the diagnoses: in the WSJ article, the separation he documents and the other statistic he cites are real. Just as in The Bell Curve, the achievement gap is a real thing.
Where we part company is on the etiology of this and proposed remedies.
You know; it seems to me the argument the writer is making has a strong (and likely unconscious) undercurrent of “the good old days, when only white Christian men counted”. Because otherwise it doesn’t make sense; most people weren’t just like that executive but with less money. Women weren’t, blacks weren’t, Jews weren’t, Hispanics weren’t; the only ones who were, were a minority that had all the power, controlled the official public culture of the US and liked to pretend no one but it mattered. That’s one of the things that has changed in the intervening years; there’s a whole lot more intermixing of subcultures and awareness of them. And in some ways less of a division; women these days tend to live a lot more like men do than they did back then.
