Charles Murray is a libertarian political scientist, opinion columnist, and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. He is the author of the controversial 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and most recently of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.
The Politic: Is America the united, classless society we’ve always held ourselves to be, or is it really the case that there are two separate, deeply divided Americas?
It used to be that there was a core of truth to the idea of a single America that is actually what made America unique. The civic culture that still existed when I started the book Coming Apart in 1960 was extremely broadly shared. Now, there would have to be exceptions for blacks, who in 1960 still were excluded from a lot of participation in that civic culture, but if you look at the population of whites, which was about 88% of the population then, poor people got married at about the same rate as affluent people did, they went to church at not very different rates, engaged in civic activities and community activities at very similar rates.
In all of these very basic ways of being an American and running local communities and the rest of that, there was a common civic culture. A phrase that was in common use in 1960 was “the American way of life.” And that was what people had in mind when they talked about the American way of life: a very distinctive, locally centered, community-centered civic culture, and that has pretty much disappeared. Now if you’re talking about America, I’d say that we have definitely diverged with a new lower class that no longer participates in that civic culture and a new upper class that is increasingly segregated from it.
The Politic: You touched briefly on the idea of marriage rates and religious participation rates. Could you expand on exactly in what areas we can see the differences between these two classes developing?
In the book I choose what I call the founding virtues, and the reason I call them the founding virtues is that all of the founders very explicitly stated that this constitution would not work unless there were certain qualities in the American people, that getting the laws right wasn’t good enough.
The four founding virtues that all of them mentioned as absolutely essential in one way or another was first what they used to call “marital morality,” which was really refer ring to the institution of marriage and the integrity of the institution of marriage, and then industriousness, which was the classic American signature trait—we work our asses off, and it’s historically what Americans did and what distinguishes them—and religiosity—the founders were not particularly devout in the traditional sense themselves, but they all thought that religion was absolutely essential to sustain the moral system—and the final one was honesty. I took those four and I tracked using quantitative indicators what’s happened to them over the last fifty years, and in all four of those cases there has been a major divergence between the behavior of the upper-middle class, meaning college-educated professionals and managerial types, and the white working class, meaning high school-educated and blue-collar or service workers.
The Politic: What brought this divergence about? Was it state action or cultural change?
There was some of both. I’m on record in Losing Ground with my indictment of the effects of government social policy, but you also have to think of things that were going on independently of government policy, such as the feminist movement. If you had the kind of increase in economic independence that came with more and more women in the labor force, you’re going to get a major change in the role of men and marriage that was unavoidable. It’s one of the many instances in which things that were good in their basic sense had side effects that weren’t so good. That was one example: increased labor force participation by women. That’s great. More economic independence, that’s great. But men who end up being a whole lot less interested in and committed to marriage was a result. A similar example of that is a good thing that happened around the time: places like Yale shifted from being schools with a lot of rich kids and a few smart ones to schools with a lot of smart kids and a few rich ones. Yale got much, much better, along with Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and the rest, at going out and identifying the talent wherever it was and scooping it up. Where are you from?
The Politic: Atlanta, Georgia.
Fifty years ago, you probably wouldn’t have ended up at Yale unless you were from one of Atlanta’s leading families, [and] you probably would have ended up marrying the girl next door. But as it is, you are probably going to be on a corporate career trajectory where you won’t get married until your late 20s, or maybe later, and the girl you marry will probably be an MBA from Harvard or some similarly selective institution as well. That’s great in one sense: it’s good for people to marry others who get their jokes and understands what they’re talking about, but it also tends to create a separate culture, an elite culture, which is increasingly contemptuous or ignorant of mainstream American culture. That’s bad.
The Politic: What can Yalies do to burst this elite bubble while in college and afterwards?
Summer jobs are a good way. Don’t go take an internship at the American Enterprise Institute or with your congressman for your summer job. Forget about getting ahead with your career. For example, go out and work as a busboy in one of the hotels in the national parks. They do a lot of hiring in the summer; you ought to be able to get a job there. I guarantee you’ll run into a whole lot of people that aren’t at Yale.
There are a lot of other kinds of jobs you can take which will at least avoid what too many people in elite colleges do now, which is that they use their summers to further embed themselves in this glossy little elite world that they want to enter. You’re [also] going to have after you get out.
A lot of the jobs that Yalies are going to get are in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and those areas have very, very large enclaves of super ZIPs, of these elite bubbles where you’ll probably end up. If your career gives you the option of not going to places like that, you might consider not going to places like that.
The Politic: So are there any potential solutions? And if so, do they have to come from individuals, or is there any role the state can play in this?
There’s no role for the state that I can see. It has to be individual, and it actually has to come from people like you, people who are at elite colleges, who are starting off in their lives and often times have grown up in an upper-middle class environment and have the option of pretty much removing themselves from contact with ordinary Americans. You have the option of going into a career and living in places and in ways that keep you completely ignorant of them. I hope that this book is an idea whose time has come, because among older members of audiences that I speak to, I get lots and lots of parents who are part of the new upper class, who are really worried about their kids, because they grew up in the working class or middle class. They still remember what that was like. But they see their kids, perhaps people like you who have not had nearly the range of experience they’ve had, and they’re worried about you being hothouse flowers.
This is something for Yalies to worry about in more concrete terms. I talked to the CEO of a very large corporation, who said to me, “We don’t even interview at Harvard and Yale and Princeton anymore. We don’t want them. We’re sick of their sense of entitlement. We’re sick of their unwillingness to start at the bottom and learn their business from the ground up. We want to hire kids from Southeastern Oklahoma State who share our values and will come in and work hard and be part of our organization.”
That still leaves you with lots of job opportunities in law firms and investment firms, but beware, because there are a lot of smart, powerful Americans out there who think that you’re hothouse flowers and are losing interest in you. So these are also things you want to think about when you’re going about your summer jobs and you’re going about planning your life. Don’t think of breaking out of the bubble as something you do for the public good. Think of it as something you really need to do to grow as a person.
Ryan Proctor is a freshman in Saybrook College.