Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
If this piece by Charles Murray isn't a natural Ricochet conversation-starter, nothing is.
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).
If you're in America, do you live in Belmont or Fishtown?
What's odd to me is realizing that I grew up in neither and have never lived in either. And some of his observations make a kind of dismaying sense of the feeling I have, when I go back to the US, that there's no place I'd fit in. When I ask myself, "Where would I live if I moved back to America?" I always have this uneasy thought--thus far unarticulated--that I couldn't bear the complete unreality of Belmost, but what on earth would I do in Fishtown?
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
We have divergent views on what we consider interesting.
I'd rather watch a reality show than to read Charles Murray.
Apr '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Well, I really enjoy reading Murray. That probably means my head is in Belmont while the rest of me is Fishtown.
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Tell Charles I grew up in a black neighborhood. What's he gonna name that?
May '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I too, apparently live on both sides of the tracks.
I think there is quite a high number of us out here.
I have lots of friends, for instance, who are highly educated and fairly sophisticated in their tastes, but whose moral and religious convictions have little in common with the liberal elite. Most of them, but not all, are pretty strapped financially.
And, come to think it of it, it seems to me that those elite themselves, in their own way, have "withdrawn from America's core cultural institutions." They may be getting married, but they get divorced easily too. They favor SSM; they don't go to church...
Edited on Jan 21 at 7:22amJun '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Bad welfare policy > broken families > crime and illiteracy > cultural isolation.
May '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
We should not be surprised that none of us come from either of these Potemkin straw towns invented solely to help ease an author's strained point. Yes, I get the contrast. I think it's reaching too far.
Nov '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I grew in the suburbs of a southwestern SunBelt state, populated and defined by people fleeing both the Belmonts, Fishtowns and my own native Detroit. Not sure I relate.
May '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
You would do just what the rest of us do. You would find some middle ground. Live somewhere not too far from a university and a big city. Join a church or synagogue, and maybe a reading circle. Start a dinner club. Train it to the occasional symphony. Live among normal people. Find like-minded friends.
It's not perfect, but it's not bad either.
What would be really great is to find work at some serious endeavor with wonderful people committed to a great cause.
Dec '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Define from:
I was born into a black neighborhood, moved to a rural neighborhood (fishtowny), and now I am by description a belmontian, but live in the place oddly of both.
I am a fishtown new money person with a fishtown temperment, but belmotian tastes.
Feb '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Hey now, I actually live in Fishtown (literally).
Jun '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
It's very real, wherever there's a critical mass of the very wealthy--West Coast, East Coast--but less true in the Midwest.
In smaller cities it's just harder to live separate lives, and for that reason, more time and effort goes into providing quality education for the poor. If you could transplant an ordinary public school, and staff, from rural North Dakota to New York City, they could probably charge tuition and soon have a waiting list.
May '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Is America moving towards a society where light-skinned people with money and education live in gated communities surrounded by somewhat unhappy dark-skinned people?
Dec '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Let's not insult Mr. Murray's intelligence. Fishtown and Belmont are models. Cultural trends. The whole of America fits into neither. But while there are a lot of lost souls choosing materialism and therefore striving for Belmont, and a whole other lot of lost souls feeling hopeless among the materialism and falling into Fishtown, there's a vast in-between of people leading purposeful lives. I'm one of those and you would be too, Claire, if you chose to live here.
I feel I've neglected my Ricochet community for not having put this up in a post, but better late than never:
Niall Ferguson comments on Charles Murray's Coming Apart in his essay, Rich America, Poor America.
I'm off to the punishment room now.
Sep '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I like Murray, too. And I don't think it's a trivial point, though trying to create geographic subsets is problematic. Take me and my twin sister. Her mindset is totally in Belmont. (E.g., she watches nothing but MSNBC and old BBC series and embraces the president's pseudo-intellectual notion that the country can go green in like, twenty minutes.) I, meanwhile, am much more comfortable with the get-your-hands-dirty-when-you-work viewpoint of Fishtown, though demographically I'm not such a great fit (I didn't grow up working-class, I'm not religious, and I'm boringly WASPy through and through). Adding to the oddity is that she makes lots more money (good for her!) and lives in the more mainstream city of Raleigh while I live right down the road in the Eastern bloc nation of Durham. In other words, a physical distinction is too ephemeral to be pinned down. ... Claire, what about New York?
Jun '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I'm familiar with San Francisco. If you want real examples, take St. Francis Wood vs. Hunters Point.
Feb '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
"If you could transplant an ordinary public school, and staff, from rural North Dakota to New York City, they could probably charge tuition and soon have a waiting list"
As long as they could remain independent of the NYC education bureaucracy. If they were placed under the control of this bureaucracy, then within 3 years their culture and performance would be that of other NYC schools.
Jul '10
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Hey, Antiphon, as someone born in Philly, and whose mother was once a public health nurse in Fishtown, I want to know: is Fishtown still Fishtown? I know and appreciate the image that Murray is using for his thought experiment, because that's a memory of Old Philadelphia. But hasn't Fishtown, like everything else, changed?
As for the point that Murray is making, it's hard to disagree. Yes, there is an increasingly disconnected new upper and new lower class, perhaps because both of them (not just the elites) are disconnected from common cultural preferences and institutions. When (for example) baseball is really by far the most popular sport, boxing and racing the closest competitors, it's a lot easier to have a common cultural language.
Apr '11
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Frankly, I'm disappointed in the thoughtfulness of the responses. His point is meaningful and should be of great interest to all. Belmont and Fishtown are not "Potemkin straw towns". To think this grossly misses the point.
He reports on whites and the 30 - 49 age group not because that's all he cares about, but because they show the least changes among demographic groups and yet they still have significantly diverged. He is clearly NOT saying America is simply Belmont and Fishtown.
He is lamenting the breakdown of family and previously widely shared American values and the dysfunctional impact of that breakdown. And there are sniggers at his attempt to communicate this?
Murray is doing an invaluable service by framing these arguments based on and backed with solid data. Why does that matter?
Large swaths of our country - particularly in upper income/ability/intellectual circles - have lost all notion of cultural confidence and can't rally to common sense. However, they are uniquely susceptible and vulnerable to data based argument.
Murray just did all the spade work for you. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
Charles Starnes:
Murray just did all the spade work for you. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. · 1 minute ago
Completely agree. And he put his finger on something I really feel when I go back.
Re: Are You From Belmont or Fishtown?
I do think of Ricochet that way ...