“White Trash”: A Mortal Threat to America

A conservative researcher contradicts U.S. Republicans: The problem isn’t liberal elites, but the lower class. Their poverty is the result of moral decay.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum know who should be blamed for what ails America under Barack Obama’s leadership: Corrupt and decadent elites on the nation’s coasts who deny God and American exceptionalism, and who want to oppress pious working families in America’s Midwestern heartland with higher taxes, gay marriage and socialism.

What at first glance might be seen as a joke is being proven reality by much of what both Republican candidates are saying out loud. Mormon Mitt Romney is being outdone by Catholics Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich when it comes to reigniting the cultural war.

Both swear that it’s the corruption of top Wall Street earners in New York and liberal cliques in Washington that are causing the willful ruin of America.

The problem with this global picture is the fact that the reality in the United States is out of sync. The fact is that the elites are really the last stronghold of conservative American values. The blame lies mainly with lower-class whites living without God, family values and a proper work ethic. That’s the conclusion reached by libertarian political scientist Charles Murray, a researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and thus a natural ally of Gingrich and Santorum.

His book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” gives a clue as to what the problem is right on the dust jacket: A brimming champagne glass floats in the heavens, and below it on the ground, there’s a crushed beer can.

Murray depicts the chasm between the upper 20 percent of the population who reside in the real town of Belmont, Massachusetts and the precariousness of the bottom 30 percent of those who live in the equally real Fishtown, Pennsylvania.

Murray writes that no connection exists between the two communities, where earlier military service may have been a common experience. People no longer know one another.

America’s elites have more in common with their counterparts in London, Delhi, Berlin or Hong Kong than they do with the uneducated and angry have-nots in their own cities.

As late as the 1960s, the most expensive upscale house for the wealthy cost (only) twice as much as the average house, and you only had to pay (in today’s dollars) $47,000 for a Cadillac Eldorado.

Owning those things, while still out of the reach of the average American, was nevertheless still in the realm of possibility. A worker at head of a family with two or three children was paid enough to lead a comfortable life, and his boss earned 20 times what he did, not 400.

Those days are gone. As Murray points out, they had disappeared regardless of the economy; the level of morality had declined before the economy did.

Poverty Resulted From Moral Decline and Not From Economic Conditions

Murray’s thesis is that a creeping decline in moral values gripped the people. The values of the founding fathers — hard work, honesty, faith and a sense of family — went on the defensive, were discredited and ended up forgotten. Where 84 percent of the people of Fishtown had been married in 1960, that number had fallen to 48 percent between 2000 and 2010.

The number of children living in two-parent households fell from 96 percent to 37 percent. The arrest rate for violent crimes quadrupled in Fishtown; the unemployment rate quintupled to 10 percent.

By 2008, 12 percent of males between the ages of 30 and 49 were out of work, four times as many as in 1968. During the four decades included in Murray’s analysis, legal as well as illegal aliens had poured into the country, proving to the author that “America had jobs for everyone who wanted to work.”

What kind of jobs these were — no labor union wage protection or regulated working conditions, no pension or health insurance — is apparently of no importance to Murray. He still sees Fishtown’s miseries as a consequence of moral decline, not economic conditions such as the disappearance of entire industries lost to the export of jobs to low-wage foreign lands and Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the union movement.

Cause and Effect Reversed

Here’s where liberal economists have a bone to pick with Murray. Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and columnist for the New York Times, doesn’t dispute the figures cited by Murray, but he brings up what Murray ignores. Krugman believes Murray confuses cause and effect: A lack of money and a lack of food on the table caused an eventual loss of morals.

Since 1973, entry-level wages for high school graduates, adjusted for inflation, have fallen 23 percent. At the same time, jobs offering good social benefits have disappeared. In 1980, nearly two-thirds of American workers were protected by company health insurance plans; by 2009, that had declined to 29 percent.

Krugman notes, “So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals.”

The Wealthy and Successful Should “Preach What They Practice”

How the well-educated, highly paid winners of economic globalization in Belmont could possibly vote for Barack Obama is a mystery to Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and, apparently, also to Charles Murray. The candidates have to be deeply disappointed that among the upper classes — of all places, right where they claim secular decadence thrives — conservative values also thrive.

In Belmont, 83 percent of residents are married and 84 percent of children live with two biological parents. Nearly every family head has a job and works diligently, proudly, reliably and often long hours; they just don’t go to church very often.

Nonetheless, Murray demands that the Belmont upper classes should shed their reservations and finally make it clear to Fishtown’s residents in no uncertain terms that the right path is marriage, family and self-determination (rather than welfare). In other words, the wealthy should preach what it practices.

But as members of the very elite class they both scorn, Gingrich and Santorum don’t make very good role models. To that extent, Murray is correct when he defends his book with the caveat that the data it contains should disturb both liberals and conservatives alike.

Murray disputes the allegations of Krugman and other critics by saying his book was written more to stimulate debate about the future of Fishtown’s residents than it was intended to be an analysis of the causes of their problems. In subsequent interviews, however, Murray makes it clear he considers the 1960s to have been a sociopolitical disaster for America.

The beginning of the end came about when the elites were able to enact reforms that were a signal to low earners to a change in what mattered. Krugman says Murray ignores opposing trends: the huge retreat in the rate of teen pregnancies and violent crime since the 1990s.

Others complain the whole debate over a divided America is anachronistic because the elites in the United States don’t adhere to American values but belong to a class that has profited from globalization.

Libertarian Murray rejects government as a solution to problems. He has no advice, he notes, on how to help the citizens of Fishtown. The only thing he knows for sure is that handouts are certainly not the answer. He is unwilling to debate globalization, saying that his book deals with America and that a major portion of it describes America’s exceptionalism and the fact that it can’t be compared to any other nation. The rest of the world, he says, is of no interest to him.

Murray claims understanding and sympathy for the Occupy Movement followers, who see American society in terms of 99 percent losers and 1 percent super wealthy. The anger isn’t directed at the 1 percent because they’re wealthy but because the game is being played with a stacked deck.

18 years ago, Charles Murray published the book “The Bell Curve,” co-authored by Richard Herrnstein. The book purported to show an inherent intelligence gap between the white and black races; because of the controversy, he was alienated as somewhat of an untouchable by his colleagues.

“Coming Apart” may be controversial, but it is unlikely to make him a pariah again. In any case, it will be the last book he writes on this particular subject. Murray promises, “If I can’t persuade people at this point, I’m not going to persuade them with another book.”