A Better Proletariat (and More Brandy Please**) for Charles Murray

 

"A Good Year for the Roses" - George Jones

One of the more maddening things about so-called thinkers of the right is the degree to which their purported concerns about certain issues never actually lead to them advocating public policies that might  alleviate the problem in question.  Thus, for instance, despite their long time obsession with births out of wedlock, right wing intellectuals virtually never voice support for policies that would make contraception cheaper and more readily available or practical sexual education for young people that would enhance its use.  And God forbid that abortion be seen as something that should be accessible, covered by insurance, and not stigmatized.  But then again, right wing intellectuals aren't really interested in solving problems, they are interested in being able to fulminate against people's failings and to make sure that there are votes enough to perpetuate the interest of the wealthy in the halls of power.

The area where one sees this disingenuousness in perpetually full flower is the treatment of the white working class by the intellectual right.  Time and again, one reads about the identification of the Republican Party with working class whites -- a vital element of the base after all -- and yet one struggles in vain to think of a single policy advocated by the right which would have the practical effect of improving working class life.  I seriously could not sit here at the moment and come up with one thing on the conservative agenda that would help working people.  Instead, the loyalty of white working class voters is sought through appeals to tribalism, ressentiment, bigotry, and attempts to make the white working class feel victimized by so-called liberal elites. 

One gets the sense as well that certain elements within the right wing intelligentsia find the white working class to be something of an embarrassment, a disappointing people who are failing to uphold their rightful position as exemplars of American values, the good patriotic, God-fearing, hard-working yemonanry that campaign commercials love.  It has dawned on at least a few of these thinkers that the working class of Red State America is a place where divorce and unwed births are far more common than in the decadent liberal enclaves of the coasts, a fact that causes them no small amount of discomfort.

Charles Murray of Bell Curve infamy is one such thinker and he has recently published an article in the Wall Street Journal (and a book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010) devoted to this subject, in which he blames the break down of working class family life on liberals.  It is a classic of the genre, one which Roy (twice), TBogg, and Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice have already taken a crack at, leaving pretty much nothing but a dead body for me to kick around -- but I can't pass up even that chance.

Murray looks at the differences in marriage and divorce rates, out of wedlock births, participation in the labor force, and crime rates in 1960 compared to those of the recent past and pronounces white working class communities to be in trouble, especially when compared to how these numbers look in communities in which white professional congregate.  (Murray omits brown people from his book -- they are hopeless after all.)  Murray uses two communities to illustrate his claims -- Belmont Massachusetts, an affluent bedroom community of Boston, and Fishtown, a working class section of Philadelphia -- and finds that the people in Fishtown are crime-prone shirkers who don't go to church, fornicate promiscuously and either don't get married when having children or marry but divorce.  This, of course, is the fault of people in Belmont who between striving all day at their high paying jobs and drinking imported beer in the evening, have no time to lecture the people of Fishtown on their moral failings.  (Read the article and tell me that this is not an accurate summary.)

So deindustrialization is not the problem, nor is the decline of unions*, the degree to which the tax code has become skewed in favor of the very wealthy (the non-working wealthy, by the way, like Mitt), and a rapacious capitalism that treats working class people like expendable cogs in a machine.  (Incidentally, in 1960, 28.6% of the American work force belonged to a union.  This was before the rise of big public employee and service unions and when women constituted a far smaller percentage of the work force.  I think it is fair to say that probably half of American working class white men in 1960 belonged to a union.)  No, the problem is the morality of the 1960s, coupled with the degree to which snooty liberal professionals have isolated themselves from these real Americans, depriving them in the process of their superior moral example.  No government programs are necessary to arrest the state of moral decay in working class America -- instead, we who live in the "super zip codes" need to leave them and our Belgian ales and endive salads behind, move into neighborhoods where we would find our blue collar brethren -- perhaps we could be bused in -- and lecture them about their moral deficiencies.  How could such a plan not succeed?

[*One would think that unions would be an institution that "small c" conservatives (who actually don't exist) would enthusiastically support.  They are decentralized, democratic organizations that help give people a sense of identity and belonging in their communities, they promote economic stability, and they undertake the kind of private charitable efforts -- passing the hat for members in distress is a common occurrence at meetings -- that conservatives claim to value.]

**"More Brandy Please" is the intellectual property of Charles Pierce. but I am sure he wouldn't mind me borrowing it, even if it is not being used to describe David Brooks. 

Comments

[oddjob]

?

Why didn't he at least use one of the tony Philadelphia suburbs (Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, one of the suburbs on the Main Line, etc.) as his comparison? It's not like by comparing one neighborhood in Philadelphia to one other neighborhood in Boston he's done anything statistically useful. At least if he's going to traffic in isolated anecdotes he ought to show at least a little bit of consistency.

But then again, this is Charles Murray.....

[Sir Charles]

oddjob,

Methodological rigor and Charles Murray don't really go hand in hand.

Besides, I enjoy we decadent liberal effete Massachusetts types as the moral exemplars for a nation.

Maybe Murray read my posts on Red Families v. Blue Families.

One gets the sense that he would like to dissolve the working class and elect another.

[oddjob]

One gets the sense that he would like to dissolve the working class and elect another.

Wasn't that pretty much the reason (back in the day) that George H. W. Bush's father was a big promoter of Planned Parenthood?

[big bad wolf]

murray is 98% absurd. there is a bit of something to the idea that a more shared culture existed across class lines in 1960. i, being a product of that culture, notice how it separates me from the younger members of the group i now reside in. younger means about 40 and down in this context. they are, in fact, amazingly scornful of the things they consider unsophisticated or uncool in others. me, i look at some of the things they scorn and say, not my thing or not so healthy, but i get how someone might want to do that or eat that, or why they might (gasp) even enjoy it such doing or eating (but then we still vacation, unironically at the jersey shore). i'm pretty damn snooty when it comes to books and movies (and don't even get me started on t.v, minnow was grossly optimistic), but i am put off by the fussy, self-satisfied white educated who do, i think, think they are better. they might even be better, but their self-satisfication, which is evident to me, who lives among them, must be all the more galling to those who live below them.

that siad, murray's ability to ignore the economic circumstances of the last 50 years is remarkable. notice how he says that white working class men can still make the same amount that they did in 1960. luckily we've had no inflation and no change in things like housing costs or educations for the last 50 years.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

I think there probably is more of a cultural divide today than in 1960 and I am definitely familiar with the annoying tendencies of the professional class strivers of the "super zip codes" -- I am really in the belly of the beast with respect to the latter.

But what I love about Murray is that he is not really encouraging people to get to know their fellow citizens better -- he is encouraging the economically successful to go out amongst the great unwashed and tell them how to live. It's really quite audacious and suggests to me -- surprise, surprise -- that Murray has absolutely no feel for working class sensibilities, despite his pretend homage to NASCAR, Branson, and Budweiser.

The notion that working class people have the same relative earning power that they had in 1960 is preposterous. That was the era in which a single working class bread winner was able to purchase a home and other necessities for a family with multiple children. to say that this has become a challenge today would be a gross understatement.

[oddjob]

but then we still vacation, unironically at the jersey shore

Ah! But where on the Jersey Shore do you vacation? ;)

[oddjob]

In recent years, the rich have seen their wealth grow dramatically while the poor and middle class have basically flatlined. ... The infographic below, which draws from Hacker and Pierson’s book, explains how our politicians — on both sides of the isle — fell under the spell of corporate dollars and re-engineered our economic system to favor the wealthy....

(From a previous episode of Moyers & Company.)

[Paula B]

>>Thus, for instance, despite their long time obsession with births out of wedlock, right wing intellectuals virtually never voice support for policies that would make contraception cheaper and more readily available or practical sexual education for young people that would enhance its use... But then again, right wing intellectuals aren't really interested in solving problems...

There is no logic here, as you say, SC. I suspect the right-wing adopted its stance against birth control and abortion exactly five minutes after someone realized how much time and money they would save by letting the church spreading its message for them. By church, I mean any organized religion. As you imply, you could build a good argument for various forms of contraception within the religious framework of some churches, yet the right wing tends to lump it with abortion, tainting contraception with the suggestion of murder.

[oddjob]

a good argument for various forms of contraception within the religious framework of some churches

I am aware that at least one Unitarian church in the Boston area does so.

[Sir Charles]

Paula,

I believe that the argument against contraception goes back to the idea that someone somewhere might be having a good time of which they do not approve. Most likely a woman.

[Paula B]

SC--I just a saw headline about a man killing his wife for giving birth to a baby girl. Have you ever heard of a wife killing her husband for impregnating her with a baby boy? Maybe someday. We can only hope.

[oddjob]

Sickening. Since his sperm determines the sex he should have killed himself if he was going to kill anyone.

[Sir Charles]

Ugh.

[nancy]

oddjob -- That graph.

I can hardly believe my eyes.

Do you suppose the spelling of aisle as 'isle' was deliberate? Sort of like Driftglass' reminder about the club you're not in, or in this case there's an isle you're not on nor will you ever cross the moat to visit it.

[paula b]

Wait, doesn't Romney live in Belmont? Oddjob?

[big bad wolf]

oddjob, of late, we've gone to wildwood, one of the places my mom used to go in the 50s when she was single, but over the years we've been there, atlantic city, ocean city, and long beach island, near beach haven. we body surf, putt-putt, eat slices on the boardwalk and fried seafood in little restaurants. we could be in europe, and most of us have, but at heart we're 60s kids of depression parents and the shore feels more like what we are.

i'm pretty sure that the stuff about the sperm determining the sex of the child is a story put out by witches to undermine god's rightful patriarchal order.

[Davis X. Machina]

Come on now, people, have a heart. Those sluts don't shame themselves, you know.

It's a big job, but many hands make light work -- church or think-tank, doesn't matter....so long as we're all pulling together.

[Sir Charles]

DXM,

I thought many hands made an orgy.

bbw,

Wildwood -- now that's real America. (You just keep hoping Springsteen will be one hole ahead of you at the putt-putt.)

[Sir Charles]

Paula,

Ironically, Belmont is the birth place of the John Birch Society.

[Linkmeister]

I propose that any mention of Charles Murray should immediately be followed by a parenthetical phrase. To wit:

", author of the highly-controversial and refuted-with-extreme-prejudice book The Bell Curve,"

Any macro authors in the crowd?

[Sir Charles]

Linkmeister,

Ha! Sadly, I have no skills.

I also like the shockingly blunt title that Roy gave Murray's piece of racist crap.

[beckya57]

I don't think the people pulling the strings, i.e. the corporate elite and the GOP leadership, believe any of the red meat they serve the masses; I think they're all laughing at the rubes who vote for them behind their backs. Someone like Murray, on the other hand, probably does believe what he says; after all, he's built his career on it. Paul Campos at LGM had a really interesting post today on how people convince themselves of self-serving falsehoods that protect their paychecks and identity. He was talking about law school faculty, but I think it's equally applicable to the right-wing "intellectuals" who make a nice living at the think tanks peddling nonsense that serves the 0.1%'s interests.

[MR Bill]

Not going to link, but David Brooks is requesting gallons of brandy while he praises the Murray book in today's NYT.
In his usual confused way, he give a glancing blow to the concept of National Service. But the rest of it is pretty much a defense of plutocracy, and a swipe at the less successful:
we aren't productive or moral enough to succeed it seems.
a quote:
'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. '
No mention of tax policy that favors the rich: of fortunes that act like black holes in space, sucking up and destroying everything around them as they accrete more wealth, and Mr. More Brandy would like you not to notice, more power, to warp the system to into a death spiral.
We have been in a loop where the self reinforcing feedback for the wealthy (and their parasites and enablers like Brooks and Murray)that will allow them to overwhelm the common good if we don't return to taxing huge fortunes and curbing the power of the entrenched, all the while pretending that there is no other course but class stratification as the natural order of things...
One thing about feedback loops is that they accelerate. I hate to think it, but we don't have too many more elections before these trends reach some truly dreadful place, like a Romney presidency with a Republican congress. Kiss democracy goodby.
Lots of bad news on the home front(Like Tim's dear mom, a Fox news junkie, has figured out how to screw him out of his inheritance (the property and small house he made out of a barn) as she's sure 'it's not prudent financially, and I might need it to go into the nursing home')
while giving his two favored siblings their property...a gesture of rejection that has sent him into an emotional tailspin: and of course,in the trivial, the rehearsal is reaching the point were this thing seem impossible.

We keep breathing, and stay alive for Better Days.

[MR Bill]

ah, you beat me to it...

[oddjob]

Wait, doesn't Romney live in Belmont? Oddjob?

I can't remember whether Romney lived in Belmont or Brookline. Regardless of which it was he's since moved out of Massachusetts.

[oddjob]

i'm pretty sure that the stuff about the sperm determining the sex of the child is a story put out by witches to undermine god's rightful patriarchal order.

As Colbert has observed, reality has a known liberal bias.

[Sir Charles]

MR Bill,

I am going to move the Brooks update to being a post of its own so it is not so easy to miss. This post is already plenty long I think.

[MR Bill]

ok reposting my comment: I'm pretty proud of the black hole metaphor.

[Sir Charles]

MR Bill,

Please do -- I have to say I find courtiers like Brooks and Murray far more annoying than the run of the mill, hate-filled right wingers. There is something more insidious about the way they operate.

[Beckya57a]

I'm looking forward to Moral Hazard's commentary.

[Sir Charles]

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

[wrote this after MRBill at 9:04, and before I saw the Brooks update as a new post.]
I'm trying something here, so forgive me if I make comments that are repeated above me. I hadn't had a chance to get to this thread until now, beyween trying to mend fences and trying to roll out my other two campaigns -- and a *special* bonus campaign that you all can do, no money required, just writing to -- and reading -- a few local papers. But that's for the other thread, and if my name pops up on the 'recent' file for those posts, I hope the people who were reading these ideas are still interested.

But I decided, once I stated reading Sir Charles' opening, that I already had a lot to say, so I'll open it in another window and scatter comments as I read, almost like 'live blogging.' It;ll mean my name will seem to be popping up too much, but let's try it.

Okay, I have complained repeatedly about us treating 'the blimp' as important, but I still do enjoy and welcome these take-downs, that Sir Charles does so well, and when it leads to a positive discussion, more the better. I'd hate to lose them, but maybe we could give one or two "Idjit of the Week' Awards -- spelling deliberate (for SUPERNATURAL fans) -- and concentrate our scorn on the pompous presenters of pregnant platitudes there. (In this case, 'pompous presenters of platitudes about pregnancy' would also apply.)

But let me start with a generalized comment, and I realize that here -- as in many places -- I've 'talked round' the topic without ever zeroing in on it. So here goes Prup's Paradox #1:

The reason the Democratic Party has lost much of its appeal for the Working Class is largely because it continues to try to appeal to the Working Class.

Think about it, and I'm using Sir Charles' case because it is both on point and because he is so eloquent and expressive in his position. He is great at explaining why the Democrats are so obviously much better for the Ralph and Alice Kramdens of the world -- and they are -- but the Kramdens, 'working class and proud of it,' maybe scheming for some 'side money' but still knowing they will gladly remain a bus driver, who live in the type place they do -- those people don't exist much any more, and those who keep the 'working class attitude' are much more likely not to be 'white.' White working class people usually already are, or see themselves as, or expect 'sometime soon' to be living the life of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, not the Kramdens. (At worst, they expect their children to.)

These people are no lomger living in the Thirties, where 'class lines' were drawn, where unions were still fighting even to be considered legal entities instead of unlawful conspiracies, where mobility -- at least on the lower levels -- was much less. and where the attitudes towards changing 'class' was much difference. (How many times have I, in novels, memoirs, movies, and biographies from the 30s seen the theme "The son wants to go to college, but he has to fight the father, who insists he 'follow the family tradition' and 'join the union and get a job'"? -- And you see the same theme used for middle and lower-middle class families and 'the family business.' Those stories don't get written today, and wouldn't connect very well if they were. Today's 'theme' is more likely the son (or daughter) who opposes the father's insistence on going to college and 'advancing himself' because the offspring wants to be a musician, an actor, or, not infrequently, a 'workingman.')

Sir CH: you make a good example here because of the amount you've said about your growing up and the influence your father had on you -- and you 'hit it big' in the parents' sweepstakes. He passed on ideas to you about the value of work, unions, and the workingman that I can hardly agree with, and not all that many people have ever taken the ideas and done so much good with them as you have.

The irony is that, from what you have said, when he was teaching you these ideals, he'd already left both the working class and the union side of the table, and had become firmly (economically, at least) middle class and 'management' -- at least in relation to the Police Union, even if he joined a 'chief's union.'

He was and is a rarity in retaining respect for and the ideas of a class he'd left. Most people are much more likely to take on -- and frequently exaggerate with a 'convert's enthusiasm' -- the values of the class they have just entered, or dream of entering. And that's true up and down the ladder. Frequently no one is harder on 'ghetto values and ghetto culture' than the newly successful black who knows how hard he had to fight to escape them. And few people are as ridiculous (classic comedic characters) as the 'nouveau riche' desperately aping the 'aristocracy of inherited wealth' they wish to be accepted by and allowed to join. (At least there aren't as many European Princesses around for them to woo as in the classic stories.)

Dmocrats are absolutely right on their claim that their policies are best for the working class (and the middle class, and, in fact for much of the upper class as well), but the workingclass doesn't want to hear that appeal, because accepting it, to a certain extent, means they accept they are -- and will remain -- in that class. Either they want to be appealed to as 'middle class members who happen to be workers' or as different identities entirely, racial, ethnic, members of a community that shares its traditions, most of all today, religious.

Let me wrap this part of my response up with a simple analogy. For many working class people the working class (and their jobs in many cases) feel like prisons they will eventually be released from.

Imagine prisoners could elect their wardens and there were two candidates. One promises to improve the conditions in the prison, answer all the justified complaints the prisoners have, and make their stay more humane. The other guy says he's not doing a damn thing to fix things, the conditions are just what you guys deserve, and don't come running to me if a guard gets too nasty to you, or the guys running the gangs can't keep their guys under control and they have a grudge against you, but 'What I can promise you guys is that I cut a deal for you. Elect me, and I've got it arranged that everybody gets a 10% cut in the sentence he's got left, and y'know the money we'd been spending on you. Well, what we would have spent keeping you here, we got arranged you get half of it in your own pocket.'

Which one gets the votes? And if the things he promised don't come true, it's because of those dumb liberals on the prison administration who think its better throwing money at the guys who are gonna be stuck here for years than using it to make your life better on the outside.

Maybe that's got something to do with why we're losing the 'white working class'?

[some 'brief preliminary remarks' whew. But I'm gonna keep trying what I was doing.]

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Two quick -- really this time -- follow-ups. To extend the tv analogy even farther, we forget that a Ralph Kramden who wants to try to be an Ozzie Nelson can turn out becoming an Archie Bunker -- another reason why our appeals sometimes don't work.

But I'm not arguing the DLC position that 'we have to become more conservative and business oriented, and abandon our obnoxious liberalism to keep the middle class workingman.' They've got it 180 degrees wrong. What we need to do is to keep our same liberal, Keynesian, equalitarian, pro-regulatory positions, but begin to frame them (perfectly honestly and accurately) as being better for all parts of the middle class than are the conservative ones.

Back later to the main thread, but cats and wife calling.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Another point I missed is that we forget that while there still may be a 'working class' today's 'Kramdens' are named Rafael, Rahim, Raven, or Rachel, not Ralph; that the working class is no longer mostly white (or male.) But we still use language honed in the Thirties that is aimed for a 'class' that still is.

[MR Bill]

'With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.'
-Auden, Elegy on William Butler Yeats