Friday Interview: Murray Documents How America is 'Coming Apart' | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is the CJ Staff, who is a contributor to the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Book contrasts key features of upper-class, working-class communities

    RALEIGH     America always has had richer and poorer people. In the past, they were different primarily in the amount of money they had. Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says over the past 50 years the wealthy and not-so-wealthy have become very different in ways that extend beyond income levels. Murray documents the changes in the book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray discussed key themes from the book during an interview with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: First of all, why did you decide that this was something that you wanted to dedicate years of research and writing to, this changing of the classes, the rich and the poor in America?

    Murray: Well, a couple of things. First, if you go all the way back to The Bell Curve, which was in 1994, the first few chapters in that are talking about the development of a cognitive elite that was distinct from the rest of society and increasingly running the country. And those themes reemerge in Coming Apart. So it's been a long-time intellectual preoccupation of mine.

    But at the same time, I have also lived in a small town in rural Maryland, which is mostly working-class and middle-class people, with a few oddballs like me and my wife. And so we have watched the civic culture in our town change over the years. We still love the place, and there are still lots of people doing everything right, but there's also the kind of deterioration in the civic culture that I have seen elsewhere in working-class America. So it was also personal experiences that motivated me.

    Kokai: There are lots of facts and figures in this book, but the main story line follows two different neighborhoods that you set up: Belmont and Fishtown. How did you come up with that device?

    Murray: It was a way of making a statistical analysis more accessible. Instead of saying over and over that I'm referring to "white working class," I can use Fishtown, which is the name of a white working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, as sort of the label for that. And with Belmont, well, my co-author on The Bell Curve was Richard J. Herrnstein, and he lived in Belmont. And so that's a classic upper middle-class suburb, and it was a tribute to him. I didn't realize at the time that Mitt Romney actually lives in Belmont, too. That was an accident. But I think it has kind of personalized the discussion of the upper middle class versus the working class, and it also corresponds, really, to the way those kinds of communities operate. And people know analogs to Belmont and Fishtown in their own lives.

    Kokai: Belmont and Fishtown, you argue, in 1960, if you look beyond just the amount of money people had to spend, were not as different as they are today.

    Murray: Right.

    Kokai: How have they changed?

    Murray: Well, marriage is the classic example. I use lots of other evidence, too, but marriage all by itself. Eighty-four percent of white working-class Americans ages 30 to 49 were married as of 1960 - 84 percent of Fishtown, and 94 percent of Belmont were married. It was the overwhelming norm for organizing the community in all classes of America.

    As of 2010 you still had 84 percent of the people in Belmont who were married. So in the upper middle class, marriage is alive and well. It's still the basis for organizing communities and all the rest. In Fishtown you're down to 48 percent married. I mean, that's a stunningly large divergence between classes in just 50 years, because we're talking about the central cultural institution.

    When marriage changes, everything changes. And in Fishtown that has meant, among other things, social capital collapses because a great deal of social capital is generated by parents trying to create an environment for their children. The behavior of men changes because we also know - social scientists have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt - that marriage civilizes men in terms of their attachment to the labor market, their productivity in the labor market. Marriage goes down; you get a lot more feckless males than you've had before. So it's that kind of thing, which explains why I say that the classes are qualitatively different now than they were before, way beyond anything explained by income.

    Kokai: You have documented a number of changes in Belmont and Fishtown, or the communities that they represent. Having this information in hand, what should we do?

    Murray: Well, you don't pass a government program. I'll start out with what you don't do. Because we're talking about cultural shifts. The government does not know how to stage-manage cultural reformation. It happens because there is a change in the minds and hearts of the people who are engaged in these issues.

    Why did I write the book? My audience was not policymaker. My audience were people in Belmont. I talked to them in a variety of ways in the book about the degree to which they are now disconnected from mainstream America, the degree to which this disconnect is endangering the American experiment, and also ... to think of their own self-interest, rightly understood, as to what kind of life they want for themselves and their children. And so I am preaching. I am preaching to one family at a time, and what I hope the book will help foster - it certainly won't do it by itself - is a national conversation about these issues.

    Kokai: You mention that you're talking to the people of Belmont, and the reason is because more and more these are the people who make the major decisions about where our country is going, aren't they?

    Murray: Right. I actually talk about the new upper class, which is a subset of Belmont, the most successful, the most influential. They are the ones who are increasingly isolated in these enclaves, which is as true in North Carolina, around Raleigh and Durham, as it is anywhere else. You have extremely affluent, well-educated suburbs, which are very homogenous and which have developed a culture which is quite distinct from mainstream America. And among those who've always grown up in those kinds of towns, they haven't a clue what life in mainstream America is like, and that is not healthy given the way America is supposed to function.

    Kokai: The book has been out for a while now. As you've talked to people who are of the Belmont variety, what's been their response? Have they said, "I didn't know this," or "Surely you're exaggerating"? What's been the response?

    Murray: No, they don't say, "Surely you're exaggerating." Instead I get the reaction from a lot of people that they've been worrying about these same things. And it's especially true of very successful people who themselves grew up in middle-class or working-class families. And they look at the life their children have had, and they're saying to themselves, "A lot of the things that made me what I am my kids aren't getting. I've put them into an environment where they are sheltered and buffered from all of that." And they don't like that. So the good news is that the book has hit a responsive chord. I think I'm talking about problems whose time may have come.

    Kokai: If that's true, is there a sign that perhaps we can reverse course, make some changes that will help not only the people in Fishtown who are facing these problems but the people in Belmont who will face problems down the line?

    Murray: America has done it before. We've had at least three Great Awakenings, in religious terms, maybe four, depending on which historian you read, which have had huge effects on the culture of the American people in relative short periods of time. You had the Civil Rights Movement, which went from a standing start in the mid-1950s to landmark legislation in 1964. So when America moves culturally, it can do it very quickly. Whether it will happen - if I were a betting person, I'd say the odds are against it, but people have gone broke betting against America, lots of times.