Political Scientist Warns That White America Is Destroying Itself
We can’t get all of our political ideas by listening to news commentators briefly sparring with each other. Sometimes we have to turn to deeply grounded authorities who have spent a lifetime studying a subject.
It’s well-known that the social sciences account for the most liberal professors in universities, the result of purges over the past few decades. Only a handful of super strong conservatives remained in those ranks.
Charles Murray stood almost alone in the decades after the 1960s with penetrating studies like Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, which was nothing short of courageous when it came out in 1984. Still on my home bookshelf, the book challenged the prevailing liberal orthodoxy issuing from the Great Society’s infatuation with the welfare state.
Now Murray has applied his statistical and historical skills to the other group of disenfranchised Americans, the white middle class, using two representative neighborhoods to anchor his discussion of this tragic story, being played out as we read. Graham H. Seibert’s Amazon review of Murray’s recent book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 reads well:
[I]n 1960 Fishtown was a very Catholic neighborhood in which the men worked, the women stayed home, and the kids went to Catholic school. My ex-wife was one of them. What they considered to be social problems were excess drinking, quite a bit of it, fistfights and a bit of philandering. Young people, however, knew what was expected of them. They got married, before or after becoming pregnant, and provided families for kids. It was a moral expectation that was generally observed. People had responsibilities and took them seriously. They did not accept welfare, they answered the call when they were drafted, and they participated in church and civic organizations.
Fishtown in 2010 is a very different place. People simply don’t feel an obligation to either work or get married. There are many never married people, and many out of wedlock children. A lot of the guys are just bums – don’t work, don’t want to work, don’t want to get married, and waste their time watching television. An inordinately large number have figured how to game the system by qualifying for Social Security disability. Their attitude is that work is for chumps. Quite a few of them have drinking and drug problems, but Murray does not consider these disabilities to be nearly as important as the lack of any of the four foundations in their lives. No more religion, no social connections with the community, either no marriage or an unsatisfactory marriage, and no vocation.
Murray, a longtime libertarian, claims that intrusive, European-style government has taken away the need for these four virtues and undermined the people who attempt to practice them. Kids don’t need a father if the government provides money and social workers. Men don’t need work if the government gives them handouts. Social connections aren’t important if there’s nothing really to be done improving the place.
Murray claims that the state of affairs in Belmont is much better. People work hard, get married, stay married, are resolutely and obsessively concerned with their children, and are involved in community. More than that, counterintuitively, they are more involved in church than are the people remaining in Fishtown. They may not believe the dogmas, but they understand the social value of belonging.
What has changed in Belmont is the conviction that the set of virtues they practice really ought to be preached. Belmont now believes totally in moral relativism. If somebody else doesn’t want to remain married to his kids’ mother, doesn’t want to work, or spends all of his money on drink and drugs and all of his time watching TV, they’re not going to be judgmental. That’s somebody else’s life.
Another thing that has changed in Belmont is their acceptance of lower-class culture. A Belmont mother will not prevent her daughter from dressing like a hooker, using gutter language picked up from rap music, or swearing like a sailor. There is not a sense that “Belmont girls don’t do that.” Also out the door are old-fashioned morality, the idea that you shouldn’t seduce girls when they’re drunk, cheat on tests, or tell the clerk at McDonald’s if he gives you too much change. People just don’t have a sense of seemliness anymore. Kids can wear the most outrageous clothes, and their parents can take the most outrageous bonuses from their companies, and rich people can take inappropriate and undeserved handouts from the government without blushing in the slightest.
Murray makes a few huge oversights. Race is one. White people are everybody’s least favorite ethnicity. We get called anti-Semites and racists, and are constantly backpedaling in the face of accusations from Hispanics and overwhelmed by the sheer intellect and industry of the Asians. Even in the unlikely event we were to resist in the ways he advocates, society would still sweep us along its unfortunate path. Another oversight is education. All sectors of society are being worse educated year-by-year, Belmont, Fishtown, and most especially the black and Hispanic groups he doesn’t mention. The educational system seems dedicated, whether by design or sheer ineptitude, to destroying religion, fostering dependence on government, and stultifying personal industry and ambition. Oh, and it goes out of its way to denigrate anything in American history of which white people might be proud.
My Puritan forefathers hoped to establish a country in which the four founding virtues – industry, honesty, religion and marriage – might flourish. It worked for a few centuries, but now appears to be hopelessly broken. I do not think it is possible within any country. Murray himself relates Toynbee’s description of the way in which every great empire contains the seeds of its own destruction. I would advocate that each individual leave countries out of the equation as they seek the best future their family. Find a community – Mormons would be a good place to look – where civic virtues are still in evidence. Find a way to educate your family – homeschooling looks good – to shield them from the propaganda and the mediocrity of the public system. Find a religious community of like-minded people. And do not be afraid to look the world over to find these things – America may no longer be the place.
