In Time — which is careful to remind its delicate readers that “the views expressed are solely his own” — Charles Murray outlines some of the material in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:
What makes the new upper class new is that its members not only have power and influence but also increasingly share a common culture that separates them from the rest of the country. Fifty years ago, the people who rose to the most influential positions overwhelmingly had Hank’s kind of background, thoroughly grounded in the American mainstream. Today, people of influence are characterized by college education, often from elite colleges. The men are married not to the girl next door but to highly educated women socialized at the same elite schools who are often as professionally successful as their husbands. They were admitted to this path by a combination of high IQ and personality strengths. They are often the children — and, increasingly, grandchildren — of the upper-middle class and have never known any other kind of life.
As adults, they have distinctive tastes and preferences and seek out enclaves of others who share them. Their culture incorporates little of the lifestyle or the popular culture of the rest of the nation; in fact, members of the new upper class increasingly look down on that mainstream lifestyle and culture. Meanwhile, their children are so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. If this divide continues to widen, it will completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.
Advertisement
Much truth in Murray’s diagnosis, but I can’t say much for his prescription for a cure though, as Kathy Shaidle writes, paraphrasing Murray’s solution. “Competent, responsible rich people should move next door to incompetent, irresponsible poor people, who will then supposedly be inspired by the former’s example to pull themselves up by their own Air Jordan laces:”
Murray’s startling reverse-Beverly Hillbillies “solution” to the great divide’s “problem” is his new book’s biggest “takeaway,” and not always in a good way.
Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher remarked dryly:
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….
Yes, no doubt life was terribly “interesting” for Helen Hill, Susan Poff, and Robert Kamin—right up to the second they were killed by the “underprivileged” ingrates they’d stooped to embrace.
(Naturally, The New York Times’ David Brooks thinks Murray’s idea is just dandy and would be even better if it was turned into a federal government program.)
Charles Murray has forgotten more about race, class, education, and intelligence than I could ever learn, so I feel deeply sheepish issuing the same challenge to him (and to David Brooks) that I would to any semi-anonymous, upper-class, bumper-stickered do-gooder preaching “zero population growth,” state-sponsored solar-powered homes, and a ban on the internal-combustion engine:
After you, sir.
Immediately after the 2004 election, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, then the president of ABC News (the initial reporting on 9/11 certainly proved a challenge to Westin, you may recall), and Tina Brown, now the editor of the Daily Beastweek, then the host of a long-since-canceled CNBC show.
RUSH: So, anyway, she’s got David Westin on the program, and she says, “David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?” She’s talking about the red states of America here, folks. “Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?”
WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.
RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.
Instead of dispatching foreign correspondents to red state Alabama, what Murray is calling for is wealthy coastal elites to “Occupy” less fortunate neighborhoods mostly in their own blue states. Living in Silicon Valley, adjacent to Palo Alto, Marin, and the aforementioned Atherton, I can’t see that happening, well, ever. Can you?
Update: “Mitt did it all wrong” Don Surber writes, in a very much related post:
No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.
Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?
The press loves the kids of privilege — Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and the rest of the trust fund babies — but only if they support huge government programs that transfer wealth from workers to non-workers. Remember, the press says liberals win despite their wealth while the press says conservatives win because of their wealth. The press never inquires into the manipulation of the tax code that allows wealth to transfer on to the fifth generation of a 19th century robber baron or 20th century bootlegger.
As the Professor writes, read the whole thing.™
Actually, the mirror-image of that federal program already exist:
Section 8 housing, which supports exporting the ghetto/barrio into the middle class suburbs, by new apartment complexes sucking on the government tit (built just for that purpose), or money to the landlord of the house a few lots down.
Funny how the high $$ zip codes never get affected. But we are the presumed racists.
The correlation between increased crime and pockets of Section 8 housing has been proven more than once.
I know ABC News PrimeTime (John Stossel maybe?) did a story on it a few years ago.
Here is another one http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/84533907.html
True enough in my experience.
A widow a few doors down decided when she moved to let her place as a Section 8 rental.
Suddenly, our neighborhood in a solid middle class part of Silicon Valley, three bedroom, two bath tract houses in the former orchards of San Jose, had a crime problem.
The worst was when a young man appeared at my front door, asking for a “loan” of $10 to buy “Pampers.” Sure dude!
Pressure from her former neighbors and old friends had her withdraw from the program. The crime problem went away immediately with the change of tenants.
A mandate forcing David Brooks to move into a double-wide somewhere in the “middle places” actually sounds like a good idea.
After all, when Thurston and Lovey moved in next door to the Skipper and Gilligan the entire island’s culture was strengthened in the first few episodes alone. Bonds were forged, pants were crisply creased, and talent shows ensued. Why spend all day on your coconut i-phone checking the Dow when the joys of diversity and community await just one hut over?
“I say, drinks all around, little buddy. Drinks with paper umbrellas. I’m from the New York Times and I’m here to help.”
That’s all well and good, until the ghastly day that David Brooks moves into YOUR neighborhood. If this plan gets tried out, I predict a massive “Red Flight” to the cities and coasts. Followed by court-mandated busing of their children to Bobo schools in flyover country.
What? Stop looking at me like that.
Brooks is slightly too young to remember the Bellevue South kerfuffle, but since I’m a few years older and grew up a few blocks from him on Manhattan’s east side, suffice to say the city’s idea to put in low-income apartments back in the 1960s between First and Second Avenues north of 23rd Street — with the idea that mixing the lower income folks with those middle and upper-income types from the neighboring area — was not greeted with much enthusiasm by the (generally liberal) local residents, and was scaled back massively. Only one building ended up being fully low-income, and the Daily News did a story in the 1970s on what a hell-hole it had become in only a few short years.
The Bellevue South protest was more low-key than a similar protest in the even-more-liberal Forest Hills-Rego Park area of Queens in 1971, over a huge Section 8 apartment complex there that ended up never being built (and also ended up making a name for Mario Cuomo on brokering the deal). That carried the same mindset as those in Boston (including a lot more liberals) who were dead-set against mandating school busing plans in the 1970s.
The Boston and Manhattan liberals were all for social engineering out there, where it was obviously those knuckle-dragging troglodytes needed some re-edukatin’. But it wasn’t going to happen in their neighborhood where it would affect their quality of life. My guess is if New York opted to try a similar experiment today in David Brooks’ neighborhood, he and the other residents would react no differently, while explaining why while it’s good for other areas, the blocks around their residences are uniquely unsuited for such experimentation.
I would like to note something which is rarely mentioned or analyzed, but I think is very likely the root of all our troubles.
Prof. Murray is a true genius. His coldly analytical research is so good becasuse he truly lets the data lead him to the proper conclusions, instead of the other way ’round, which is what most lefty profs do. He is a thorn in the side of the well intentioned dolts because his research is absolutely bulletproof, his conclusions spot-on. I have said this for years: he is truly a valuable man.
It is when we come to his solutions to the problems he so elegantly frames that he turns into another Ivy League “expert”. They tend to the downright goofy. This case is no different. They are simplistic solutions, employing wishful thinking and generally relying on the assumption that if the unwashed dopes would just do this one, simple thing, all would be well. That this flys in the face of the entire history of human existance never fazes these guys.
I am sure that this is because to be an expert with such a degree of understanding of a particular subject requires a very focused mind, not overly concerned with surrounding trivia. Unfortunately, the greater their specific knowledge, the less they see the big picture. Our world is now run by such people, and it shows. If Murray would stick to identifying the problems, at which he excels, and leave the remedies to others, perhaps his work wouldn’t catch so much flack.
Alas, it’s the dread “know-it-all” disease, and our leaders are well and truly stricken with it. It’s also called “hubris”. It goeth before something…I can’t remember what, exactly…