When I see somebody talking about the "liberal elite", I think of koan.
Yesterday in my Internet travels I stumbled upon this take in an old article.
nytimes.com
Charles Murray Examines the White Working Class in ‘Coming Apart’
Nicholas Confessore
For some decades now, a popular conservative narrative of modern America has gone something like this: Our center-right nation, devout and industrious, is ruled by a politically liberal elite that disdains family, despises religion and celebrates indolence with government handouts. Many people find this story convincing. It helped fracture the postwar Democratic Party and midwifed the culture wars. Today it feeds the political frustrations of the Tea Party movement.
Charles Murray, the influential conservative scholar and provocateur, believes this story is wrong. In his new book, “Coming Apart,” Murray flips the script that has energized Republican politics and campaigns since Richard Nixon: the white working class, he argues, is no longer part of a virtuous silent majority. Instead, beginning in the early 1960s, it has become increasingly alienated from what Murray calls “the founding virtues” of civic life. “Our nation is coming apart at the seams,” Murray warns — “not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.”
Using a statistical construct he calls Fishtown — inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighborhood of the same name in Philadelphia — Murray sorts through demographic data to present a startling picture. Women in Fishtown now routinely have children outside of marriage. Less than a third of its children grow up in households that include both biological parents. The men claim physical disability at astounding rates and are less likely to hold down jobs than in the past. Churchgoing among the white working class has declined, eroding the social capital that organized religion once provided.
Illegitimacy, crime, joblessness — these are not merely the much debated pathologies of a black underclass, Murray finds. They are white people problems too.
And what of the white upper class? In place of an aristocracy of inherited wealth, Murray suggests, we now have an aristocracy of inherited intelligence. Drawing liberally on his own past work, most notably “The Bell Curve,” a controversial 1994 study of intelligence, Murray says those with high I.Q.’s have replaced the old WASP elite in a modern economy that rewards brains over bloodlines.
High-I.Q. Americans have come to dominate elite colleges. They tend to marry one another — “cognitive homogamy” — and produce children statistically more likely to be smart themselves.
Cocooned in the same neighborhoods, this new upper class has its own culture. Its members don’t watch game shows or go to bars with pool tables in them. They are skinnier. They don’t smoke. They are, Murray insists, predominantly liberal. Yet this overclass, Murray finds, is also truer to the founding American virtues than is the white working class.
Murray constructs a fictional town for this new upper class as well, which he calls Belmont. While marriage did indeed decline among Belmont whites, the drop stabilized in the mid-1980s. In Belmont, births outside of marriage rose, but far more gradually than in Fishtown. The men — and many of the women — hold down jobs and work hard. Couples may have babies later in life, but they are meticulous about rearing them and obsessive about getting them into college.
The problem, Murray argues, is not that members of the new upper class eat French cheese or vote for Barack Obama. It is that they have lost the confidence to preach what they practice, adopting instead a creed of “ecumenical niceness.” They work, marry and raise children, but they refuse to insist that the rest of the country do so, too. “The belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade and has not revived,” Murray writes.
<snip> |
