Charles Murray, the most brilliant sociologist at work in the United States today, has written a fascinating essay in New Criterion about the class polarization taking root in the United States. Once upon a time, he argues, Americans of different social and economic classes mixed easily with one another. Today, they no longer do. Increasingly, the lower class and upper class live in increasing isolation from middle-class society, a phenomenon that will harden class divisions over time.
In “Belmont and Fishtown,” Murray quotes that preeminent observer of early 19th-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville: “In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.” No longer, says Murray.
Focusing on white Americans to sidestep the muddying issue of race, Murray says that upper and lower class Americans are experiencing a divergence in fundamental cultural values. Most upper class white Americans are married; a minority of lower-class white Americans are. Upper class whites are far more likely to work for a living; lower-class whites are more likely to drop out of the labor force. Only an infinitesimal percentage of upper-class whites engage in crime; the crime rate among lower-class whites has sextupled since 1960. And despite the stereotype of working-class whites “clinging to their guns and religion,” upper-class whites are far more likely to actively practice religion and engage in community-building activities than lower-class whites.
For all their education and cosmopolitan ideals, however, upper-class whites are isolated from mainstream society. Writes Murray: “a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. ”
Is this, perhaps, the sociological root of ideological polarization in the United States today? Murray does not explicitly state so in this essay. But he leaves the reader with that very distinct impression. The new upper class, he says, shows no inclination to reach out across the widening divide.
“And so the unraveling of the civic culture in [lower-class] Fishtown occurs without the knowledge or the concern of [upper-class] Belmont, let alone with any attempt by Belmont to assist the people of Fishtown who are still trying to do the right thing. Fishtown is flyover country, or those ugly suburbs that the people of the new upper class view from afar as they drive from their enclave in Greenwich to their office in midtown Manhattan.
— JAB