Charles Murray has written this book to describe the formation of American classes that represent a remarkable societal change during the last fifty years. I found the book to be difficult to read despite the fact that I was interested in the overall subject. I sometimes wished for more analysis and less raw data.
The author writes that November 22, 1963 “…became the symbolic first day of what would be known as the Sixties and the cultural transformation…” That was the day after the ashen-faced Walter Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
The discussion of the early sixties is very interesting. There were limited choices in television stations, and you either saw a movie in the theatre or never saw it (absent DVDs and TiVo). People drove cars made in America, and there were few places where you could go out to a meal with ethnic food. Movies and television were carefully watched to eliminate any hints of racy themes or profanity. Marriage was nearly universal, and divorces were rare. A federal court had declared that the book Fanny Hill couldn’t be sent through the mail despite the fact it was well-written. The court wrote that “…filth, even if wrapped in the finest packaging, is still filth.” The North and South were both segregated, although laws allowing segregation in the North were gone. Most women were expected to stay in the home, and those who wanted to work did so as secretaries or teachers. There were few illegal drugs. Twenty percent of the country fell below the poverty line, but, the statistic I found most startling, was that 95 percent of Americans called themselves working or middle class. That means that most poor people did not believe they were “lower class.”
The author writes “This book is about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever know. I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America.” He often refers to the “American Project” in which he describes that people left free to live their lives as they see fit was the basis for what made the nation such a powerful force in the world. He fears that “…America is coming apart at the seams—not seams of race and ethnicity, but of class”
Part 1 is titled “The Formation of a New Upper Class.” He defines the “Narrow Elite” as those who wield political and economic power. They are the owners and top executives of companies, news media, lawyers and physicians, college executives, and city officials. The children in the families of the new upper class have so many activities outside of school that they don’t have time to be children. The new upper class has become separated from the rest of society, and has become dominantly liberal. The people from the upper class neighborhoods of the four largest cities voted 64% strict liberal and 3% leaning liberal 2002 to 2008.
The new upper class is almost exclusively college educated. The lower end of wages for the top percent of taxpayers was in the $200,000 into the early 1990s, but that number had escalated to $441,000 by 2010. The people of this class are effectively segregated from the rest of the country. They tend to be isolated into what the author describes as “Super Zips,” or zip codes where the very wealthy are congregated. Some of these people have been called overeducated elitist snobs, or OES. They make decisions affecting the lives of everyone else, but increasingly don’t know much about how everybody else lives.
Blacks and Latinos constitute only 3 percent of the Super Zip population, but there is a higher percentage of Asians than what would be expected for their share of the population. On the issue of race, the author predicts that whites will be the minority by midcentury or sooner.
The book analyzes neighborhoods called Belmont (upper class) and Fishtown (working class) to discuss what has happened to marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Most people of Belmont (just about 90%) are married, the family is intact, the unemployment rate is low, and few have become criminals. In Fishtown the marriage rate has dropped to below 60%, over 20% of the children live in a single parent home, unemployment is more than the national average, and criminal convictions have increased markedly. The only graph that looks similar for the two towns is the one that shows how many “nonbelievers” there are (about 20% in both towns). Self-reported happiness has declined to about 40% in Belmont and a disturbing 20% in Fishtown.
Despite the fact that the subtitle of the book is “The State of White America 1960-2010,” the author reveals that “Expanding the data to all Americans makes hardly any difference at all.” “Coming Apart” may have told the story of white America, but its message is about all of America. It is predicted that we are on the path to no longer being a “super power,”, and unless things change everything that has made the country exceptional will disappear. This is happening because we are handing over the meeting of human needs “…to bureaucracies—the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for giving people the kind of help they need.” We seem to want to mimic Europe where “The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible.” He observes that the more we pass laws and regulations, the closer we move to the European welfare state, and the American Project will be dead.
One of the harshest statements the author makes is how the members of the new upper class won’t use derogatory labels for anyone, including criminals. “When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.”
The book does leave hope that a new awakening will overtake the country. This could be based on the “…most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.” That will require that the American new upper class “…must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”