The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.
America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”
Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.
People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.
When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity. Read more of this post
Like this:
Like Loading...
Filed under Aerospace, Automotive, Banking, Business, Children, China, Construction, COOL Country of origin labeling, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Farming, Food, Funding, Global Warming Climate Change, Government, Green, Healthcare, Housing, Industry, Insourcing, Internet, Jobs, Labor, Made in USA, Manufacturing, Media, Mexico, NAFTA/CAFTA, News Release, OIL and GAS, Other, Outsourcing, Pet, Political, Power of Consumers, Press Release, Product, Product of USA, Retail, Science, Small Business, Supply Chain, Tainted Products, Tariff, Tariff, Tax, Tax, Technology, Toys, Union, USA-C, USDA, WTO
Tagged with 1960-2010, Alexis de Tocqueville, American Enterprise Institute, American workers, Belmont, Boeing, Boston Consulting Group, Buy American, Charles Murray, Charles Schumer, China, Chrysler, Coming Apart: The State of White America, Crown Forum, cultural inequality, Currency manipulation, de facto secular, economic elite, economic inequality, Economy, elite schools, exports, Fishtown, ford, Free Trade, General Social Survey, Google, Green, hyper-elite zip codes, hyper-wealthy, Industriousness, Industry, insourcing, Japan, Jobs, jobs summit, Made in America, Made in USA, Made in USA Certified, mainstream america, Manufacturing, manufacturing jobs, non-latino white, Outsourcing, Philadelphia, political elite, President Barack Obama, private jets, recession, recovery, reshoring, revolutionized, secularization, South Carolina, Stimulus, SuperZips, tax, The American Way of Life, The Occupy Movement, Trade Deficit, U.S. Jobs, U.S. Manufacturing, unemployment, W.H. Brady Scholar, white house, WTO
