The decline of marriage in white America over the past 50 years is having dire consequences for lower- middle-class and working-class whites, Dr. Charles Murray, author of “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010”, said Tuesday during an appearance at The Heritage Foundation.
Discussions about out of wedlock births and poverty have previously largely been tied to discussions of race and minority ethnicities. They have also stirred the pot of penned up emotions about racism, but Murray has news for whites – these same maladies have been making themselves known in white America and threaten to create a new underclass.
“There has been a striking difference in trajectory between the upper and lower classes,” Murray said. “But the spirit of non-judgmentalism has stricken their living of our founding virtues as moot.
“Marriage is alive and well in the upper middle class, and divorce has even gone down.”
In 1960, 94 percent of upper class whites were married compared with 84 percent for lower middle and working class whites, but that number had declined to 84 percent for upper class whites and 48 percent for lower middle and working class whites by 2010.
“What is happening in the United States has nothing to do with race or ethnicity,” Murray said.
Murray argues that the nation’s Founders unanimously believed that Americans needed to be honest, religious and industrious for the Constitution to work, but those virtues have increasingly been eroded among those he calls the “New Lower Class”.
“Increasing out-of-wedlock births are at the center of our problems,” Murray said. “Kids born to unmarried women do worse in all of the important outcomes.
“The stigma of out-of-wedlock births is gone, and a great number of out-of-wedlock births are to those women who are not on welfare,” Murray continued. “A lot of them say, ‘Why should I marry that loser?” It’s like bringing another child into the family.”
Nineteenth century French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the American sense of religiosity, morality, industriousness and the importance of marriage set them apart from Europeans.
Marriage’s decline has had a strong impact on American industriousness.
“We used to have a civic culture that was shared between the lower class and the upper middle class,” Murray said. “Being an American was part of being in a civic culture that made you aware that you were part of something else.”
Americans prided themselves in a sense of egalitarianism that deterred them from wanting to look better than their neighbors. Consequently, many CEOs and other upper-income earners shied away from outwardly ostentatious living around 1960.
“People would buy a Buick instead of a Cadillac because having a Cadillac was getting too big for your britches,” Murray said. “It was considered un-American to consider yourself better than someone else.”
But one of Murray’s biggest discoveries is a growing segregation between the classes in America.
“We have developed an upper class that is ignorant of mainstream America,” Murray said. “Increasingly people live in enclaves where they don’t have to deal with other people [who aren’t like them].”
This isolation has been particularly acute particularly in the areas of the country surrounding Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area where a large portion of wealth and power is concentrated.
Politically and socially, these areas have gravitated more toward the far-left of the political spectrum isolated from the plight of the New Lower Class and from the proper solutions to their issues.
Murray argues that the problem among New Lower Class white men isn’t the inability to find a job unlike 50 years, but rather the unwillingness to find jobs because of a decline in a belief in the virtue of industriousness.
“No set of policy solutions that would have the effect of putting the toothpaste back into the tubes,” Murray said. “To father a child and not to be a father to that child makes you a bum in some deep sense. You are not a man. Being a man requires taking responsibility for your kids.”
Cultural changes have to precede policy changes, and tactics to bring about those cultural changes need to change because appeals to religious morality no longer have the same impact they would have had in 1960, according to Murray.
Murray argues that the welfare state destroys the things in life that provide the sources of satisfaction in life such as family, community, vocation and faith.
“The welfare state tends to leech out the consequences for responsibility. Raise kids not because it is easy. It is because they are hard,” Murray said. “Each of the four domains says, ‘We’ll take responsibility and the welfare state is incompatible with them.
“It drains human life of a lot of its meaning and satisfaction.”
