Is the collapse of blue-collar marriage a foregone conclusion?

It’s been just over 40 years since Springsteen’s bestselling Born in the USA came out in 1984 — an album with “a rowdy indomitable spirit,” as Debby Miller wrote in Rolling Stone at the time.

The melodies suggested a deep optimism but the lyrics were primarily concerned with “people … getting left behind” full of foreboding of the fate of small-town America and the working class in the face of deindustrialization. Springsteen could see what was coming. In the four decades since, we have seen a collapse of blue-collar work with more than 6 million manufacturing jobs being lost.