Writers bloc

Times of uncertainty always spawn a genre of books postulating that America is in a state of internal rot caused by an unraveling of the economy, the “social fabric,” or both. The first such book I ever read was written by a disgruntled Federalist in 1801 who feared that “Mad Tom” Jefferson would turn the United States into a slaughterhouse and a bordello by importing the French Revolution’s guillotine and libertine moral values. Since then we have done a lot more “coming apart” during times of hyper political partisanship, civil war, controversial foreign wars, economic depressions, Populist uprisings, and changing moral values. For all that “coming apart” during the past 235 years, we Americans are still remarkably together.

The current economic gloom has spawned the latest of the “coming apart” progeny. I’ve reviewed Mark Steyn’s AFTER AMERICA and Pat Buchanan’s SUICIDE OF A SUPERPOWER, which are oriented around the same theories of social and economic decline. There is also a small library of books based on the theme that America must end because it has become ungovernable on a polarized Red State / Blue State basis.

This book, like the rest of the current “coming apart” genre has been written hundreds of times before — in the 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s. It fits the theme of “Decline and Fall” of society in way that the eminent 19th Century historian Brooks Adams wrote of such books in the late 1800s: “Everyone has a new prescription for humanity and a new diagnosis. They all begin with the Roman Empire and point out resemblances.”

The common fault of books of this genre is that they overstate the supposed virtues of previous generations and then make unfavorable comparisons with the present. They want us to believe that America has degenerated from its past as an idealized “Currier and Ives” portrait of virtue and family values. Sorry, but America has ALWAYS been a nation composed of rambunctious human beings, not saints. On the other hand, these books do contain elements of truth, because they are written during times of economic distress when the country IS backsliding economically and socially.

Charles Murray’s book, like others in the genre, does overstate its premise. It has the common fallacies of selective recall of the past, glib generalizations, and illogical comparisons between the quality of life and human nature now vs. generations ago. These false comparisons will be seriously misleading to younger people who didn’t grow up in the 1960s. Nor is Murray well educated on earlier American history. He has studied platitudes, not the people. And he has the academic’s bias of stating opinions as if they were facts. Nevertheless the book does contain a core of truth about the middle class in our time. I would therefore like to review it from the perspective of what it might mean for the 2012 election.

I think that white Americans do sense that they are dividing along class lines, as Murray theorizes, and many are reacting by espousing the conservative politics of the “Tea Party.” I haven’t heard any political pundits explain the Tea Party well. Even its members can’t seem to agree on its agenda. Perhaps they see themselves as a protest movement against the runaway spending in Washington and in the state governments. But I believe that it goes deeper than that — right to the heart of what Murray is talking about.

Murray believes that Whites are “coming apart” because many are being sucked down into the lower class behaviors of illegitimacy, indolence, and crime. Other upwardly mobile Whites have excelled in high-paying technology, finance, education, and media jobs. Murray says that the traditional white middle class — those who used to do well with hands-on jobs in offices and factories — are vanishing between these extremes.

Murray has narrowed his focus to Whites in order to avoid any hint of racism. Unlike some other recent “coming apart” books, he doesn’t try to blame white people’s problems on other races. I would therefore like to pose these questions about his premise: Are White people REALLY reaching a great social divide, with many sinking to the bottom, some rising to the top, and few remaining in the middle? If the premise is true, is anybody taking deliberate actions to counter it?

Based on personal experience I do believe that increasing numbers of Whites ARE drifting into the lower-class lifestyle of indolence, welfare, ignorance, drugs, and crime. My family recently moved out of an area that had acquired a preponderance of lower class Whites. Many white kids in this rural/suburban area had taken on the behaviors associated with inner city gangs. Their dads had run off, leaving Mom to support the family with Welfare, Section 8 housing vouchers, food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security. The boys had organized themselves into a junior league drug Mafioso. The girls wanted to get pregnant and go on welfare. We decided our children’s future required us to move, so we left as had many before us. This is a perfect example of what Murray is talking about. Upwardly mobile Whites segregate themselves by choice, leaving lower-class Whites to segregate themselves by default.

Why are so many white families being pulled down into the lower classes? I agree with Murray that it’s due to:

1. The creation of the Welfare State that began with LBJ’s Great Society in the mid 1960s. Of course the Welfare State is going to dull people’s work ethic. Why WOULD people choose to work when they can live from the government? The Welfare State has helped in some ways and hurt in others. Instead of suffering from extreme poverty today’s lower-class kids suffer from a drug culture sustained by welfare money.

2. The devaluation of work. For decades the corporate pirates who pull the politicians’ strings have been telling us not to worry about the removal of America’s industrial economy overseas. Maybe they’ve been wrong. Maybe the primary result of free trade has been to move so many production, engineering, and management jobs overseas that too many of our workers can’t find employment at anything other than minimum wage service jobs, and not even enough of those. Maybe we have been waging economic genocide against our middle class by replacing their jobs with overseas peon labor.

So now we are living in an economy that over-values welfare and under-values work. Why are we surprised that people make the economically rational decision that welfare pays better than work? If people think it’s in their best interests to embrace the lower class welfare culture of drugs and thugs then that’s what they’re going to do.

The good news is that many are resisting the trend. I have seen that even the most difficult public schools have teachers dedicated to instilling ethics of education and work in at-risk kids. I have seen many parents who not only raise their own kids with good values but also volunteer to help influence other people’s kids as coaches and mentors. Many kids resist the negative influences of a substandard environment and grow up to excel. We need to reinforce the efforts of these good people who refuse to be dragged down by the low-class undertow.

The distressed white middle class is also banding together politically. IMO the Tea Party is all about telling BOTH political parties: “You don’t understand what we are going through to prevent our families from being sucked into the underclass.” The Tea Party is made up of Whites who fear that their middle class lives are endangered. They are small business owners having to get by with 1/3rd of their pre-2008 income, retirees trying to live off of pensions obliterated by stock market crashes, and laid off office and factory workers.

The distressed white middle class rejects “establishment” candidates who seem to be loyal to big-government and big-business interests. They prefer “rogue” candidates who are NOT welfare state bureaucrats, big-business moguls, or media and academic intellectuals. This has nothing to do with race. They view Barack Obama as a glorified community activist. But they see Herman Cain as a self-made man, like themselves, who made good in the REAL business world. They identify more with hands-on businesspersons like Cain, Bachman, Palin, etc. than Mitt Romney, whose experience is in the rarified air of big company finance.

So what are the specific grievances that the white middle class would like their favored candidates to change?

I think they’re first of all looking for someone who will limit the Welfare State. They understand that we’ve got to have a social safety net, but that it can’t be so over-generous that it corrupts the work ethic and bankrupts the country. Thus far their ire has been directed against government, which they believe is living beyond its means and beyond what is fair to ask the distressed White middle class to pay in taxes. This was the motivation that swept Tea Party candidates into Congress, state legislatures, and governorships in 2010.

The distressed white middle class is also venting its wrath against Big Business abuses. They are strong believers in free enterprise. Many are small business owners. But they resent the big corporations who send their workers’ jobs overseas or degrade their employment status to contractors lacking healthcare and pensions. They are angry at Big Business hustlers who put them out of work, devalue their pensions, and foreclose their homes then run to the government for bailout money paid for by the taxes of the middle class whose lives they are trying to destroy.

The distressed white middle class would love to see a candidate who tells the government: “You have to live within your means” then tells the corporations: “No more profiteering by putting the middle class out of…

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