The One Percent

In an important new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Charles Murray observes that America has become increasingly divided. Once largely united by a common middle-class culture, we’re now trending in different directions, one up and toward a new elite class, the other down toward a more and more dysfunctional working class. “The divergence into these separate classes, if it continues,” Murray argues, “will end what has made America America.”

The economic divergence is old news. Over the past fifty years, household income for the top 1 percent has grown from $200,000 (in today’s dollars) to $400,000. Meanwhile, household income for the bottom half of Americans has stayed flat, and would have fallen for many were it not for increased spending on government programs and the earned income tax credit.

Liberals presume that the income gap is the problem. We need to combat income inequality, we are told, which means raising taxes on the winners in the global economy, so that the government can transfer even more wealth to the poor. Murray’s analysis is important because it indicates that this alone won’t reduce the growing and troubling divide between Americans, because the difference is more a function of moral capital than income and assets. It’s the culture, stupid.

The new elites live in places like Belmont, the toney Boston suburb and the name Murray uses as shorthand for wealthy and influential Americans. When he speaks of “Belmont,” he is referring to a statistical cohort created by aggregating the affluent, well-educated, and professionally successful people throughout America. All told, about 20 percent of white Americans live in statistical Belmont. They are the new upper class.

Folks in the bottom third live in Fishtown. The real Fishtown is a white working-class neighborhood in northeastern Philadelphia that has been the subject of a number of sociological studies over the past fifty years. Murray draws on those studies, but in Coming Apart, Fishtown, like Belmont, is shorthand for a statistical cohort: people with blue-collar or low-level office jobs and no academic degree more advanced than a high-school diploma. These people make up the working class that is becoming America’s new lower class.

The 1960s ushered in many changes, one of which was the end of the broad social consensus, call it bourgeois morality, that held sway among white Americans of all classes, upper, lower, and middle. What is striking, however, is that no thick, overarching social consensus has emerged after all the turmoil. Instead, as Murray charts in compelling detail, when it comes to behavior, affluent white America and poor white America have gone in two very different directions.

Take marriage. In 1960, the overwhelming majority of prime-age white adults (the cohort of 30 to 49-year-olds that Murray focuses on) in Belmont and Fishtown were married, bore very few children out of wedlock, and rarely divorced. Over time the sexual revolution and women’s movement changed attitudes dramatically. But Murray’s analysis shows that Belmont residents have readjusted in ways that largely preserve marriage as the norm. Today 85 percent of Belmont is married.

Although private schools in the real Belmont and other neighborhoods populated by the affluent teach well-to-do teenagers to be nonjudgmental, tolerant, and inclusive, the social environment is still safely bourgeois. Not only does marriage remain the norm, but hardly anybody in statistical Belmont is getting divorced (only slightly more than 5 percent), fewer than 5 percent of children are living with a single parent, and next to none of their classmates were born to unmarried mothers. In other words, today Belmont talks the talk of the sixties, but walks the walk of the fifties.

Meanwhile, sadly, statistical Fishtown is living the sixties. Less than 50 percent of prime-age adults are married. Their divorce rate is around 35 percent. Nearly 25 percent of children are being raised by single mothers. Only 30 percent of children are living with both biological parents when their mothers turn forty. Among mothers who drop out of high school, 60 percent of their children are illegitimate. This collapse of marriage, Murray warns, “calls into question the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.”

There are other signs of crisis. Prime-age white working-class males have increasingly dropped out of the full-time work force, and the same males are dramatically more likely to be in prison now than in 1960. Far fewer are likely to go to church or be involved in any civic or community organizations.

Murray comes up with a very useful measure of community dysfunction: the percentage of “problematic people,” which he arrives at by combining prime-age males not making a living, single mothers raising children, a guesstimate of prime-age adults who are living alone, and those uninvolved in any community activity. In 1960, only about 10 percent of people in his fictional Fishtown were problematic. Today more than a third. Belmont? From 1960 to present the number of problematic people has been negligible.

These statistical trends are among the reason why white working-class communities in America, whether in rural Iowa or ethnic Philadelphia, are more violent, less cohesive, and less pleasant places to live. Because we’re fallen creatures who tend toward lust, sloth, and greed, our communities require constant reinforcement and renewal. If the fundamental social mechanisms for renewal are diminished—marriage, parenting, productive work, interpersonal trust, and religious or communal involvement—then the social law of entropy takes over, which is what is happening today in poor American communities

How did this happen? We can’t identify a single cause. But reading Coming Apart I found myself entertaining a hypothesis about Belmont’s contribution to Fishtown’s dysfunction. “Within just a few years,” Murray observes, “white college-educated men and women became enthusiastic recruits for the sexual revolution.” By 1970, only around 50 percent of the cohort that makes up Murray’s statistical Belmont in the General Social Survey believed that “extramarital sex is always wrong.” Yet by the 2000s, 70 percent affirmed that extramarital sex is always wrong.

Why isn’t this completely good news? The neo-traditionalism that now exists in Belmont lacks moral energy. As Murray points out, and with some exasperation, our elite culture insists on a nonjudgmental public ethic. Children out of wedlock? That’s not wrong, it’s just a life style choice. Divorce? Unfortunate, perhaps, but often necessary, and in any event it only makes things worse to condemn it.

Given the neo-bourgeois uniformity of Belmont—marriage as the norm, infrequent divorce, very few illegitimate births—Murray finds this nonjudgmentalism “one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture.” I’m not baffled at all. Precisely because it has largely isolated itself from the rest of America, Belmont can get on quite well without the strict judgments of the old moral codes. Exclusive neighborhoods, private schools, and elite universities preserve an environment of sensible but restrained hedonism. A fierce focus on academic success among the young and career success for adults builds habits of discipline that can function reasonably well without old-fashioned moral rigorism. And when things go wrong, therapists and counselors and other professionals are ready at hand.

So why moralize? After all, strict moral standards might rebound and strike elites in their moments of weakness. People in Belmont are human like the rest of us. Some do in fact get divorced. Their sons are sometimes gay, their daughters sometimes promiscuous, and so forth. The new elites are not about to sacrifice the happiness of their own for the common good!

Meanwhile, Fishtown disintegrates, and not because it’s poor. Abject poverty consistently produces a great deal of unhappiness, but that’s not the situation for Fishtown. Working-class people in the 1960s, an era of less material comfort than today, when surveyed largely expressed satisfaction with their lives and their communities. That’s no longer true. Although in surveys 40 percent of the new upper class today describe themselves as “very happy,” only 15 percent of statistical Fishtown do so.

Murray shows that if people at the bottom of the economic ladder have high work satisfaction, are married, experience levels of social trust, and engage in weekly worship, they have exactly the same self-reported happiness as Belmont types who have the same qualities. This suggests that “there is no inherent barrier to happiness for a person with a low level of education holding a low-skill job.” The problem is that Fishtown, unlike Belmont, does not have enough social capital to encourage the sorts of attitudes and behaviors necessary for happiness. Far fewer in the working class than in the upper class are married and go to church. Meanwhile, crime and a lack of communal engagement reduces social trust.

One reason for this social disarray is a lack of a strong moral consensus. Our crass and often crude popular culture deforms many lives, unchecked by the nonjudgmental ethic endorsed by the upper class, an ethic in many cases imposed in schools and reinforced at many levels by the official voices of elite society. Belmont refuses to make the sorts of moral investments necessary to rebuild the social capital of Fishtown.

One would think that bad times in Fishtown would make Belmont anxious. But for the most part they don’t. The collapse of functional working-class communities does not threaten the new elites. Not only have they segregated themselves, but they benefit from the social changes that make so many lower-class communities dysfunctional. As community activists know, “problematic people” can’t be organized. They have very little political potential, which is one reason why elite money rather than political machines and ward bosses matter in politics today.

Moreover, the social dysfunction increases the need for expert intervention, supervision, and remediation. And who oversees all this? Elites with degrees from the Kennedy School of Government or Yale Law School and other institutions that produce the people who design and run government programs, nonprofits, and labor unions as well as corporations. Today the staffs of ACORN and the AFL-CIO increasingly come from the same Belmont world as do the investment bankers at Goldman Sachs.

The super-elite neighborhoods—the most thoroughly isolated and really rich communities in America—vote for the most doctrinaire liberal candidates. This liberal commitment doesn’t reflect a bad conscience. It’s self-interest. As the majority of the population is demoralized by political correctness and infantilized by the nanny state, the democratic resistance to governance by experts diminishes dramatically.

Coming Apart suggests that the Occupy Wall Street slogan points us in the right direction, though the 1 is really 20 percent, and their offense is not economic. One of the most fundamental forms of greed that has emerged in the last fifty years is cultural and moral. Since the 1960s, elite culture in America has crafted a nonjudgmental ethic suited entirely for itself.

Murray hopes for “a civic Great Awakening among the new upper class.” It’s not impossible. In 1960 few imagined that the old, strict bourgeois morality would crumble so quickly in the next decade (though in retrospect the changes were already underway). Today a nonjudgmental ethic and its close relative, political correctness, have become the default positions of the establishment. Young elites mouth these anti-pieties, but without conviction. Perhaps they tire of elite self-regard. Perhaps they desire to be arrested by moral conviction.

For the sake of Fishtown—for the sake of a renewed common moral culture in America—I hope so.