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A Response to Charles Murray —Majestyk
I want to start this post out by trying to establish my bona fides regarding the subject that I am about to talk about. I have seen a reasonably broad swath of socioeconomic status in my life. My parents started out as fairly typical, middle-class people. My mother’s family (from rural Green Bay, Wisconsin) were almost uniformly blue-collar (my grandfather failed to finish high school) while my father’s family (mostly college-educated) were landowners and timber barons in Idaho … but they ultimately lost it all.
Thus I certainly didn’t come from money, despite the fact that improvements in my father’s employment allowed him to purchase many nicer things for my younger sister than I had when I was her age. This is the nature of things. There was a little bit of Fishtown and a little bit of Belmont in my upbringing. But there was never a hint of the negative stereotypes of Fishtown.
I married a girl who was most certainly from Fishtown, despite my increasingly Belmont-ish young life. This was an unmitigated disaster. Ultimately, our values were simply incongruous on any of the major fronts of marriage (Emotional, Sexual and Financial) – and it caused me to have an unintentional tour of some of the more Fishtown-ish aspects of life.
In the depths of despair, financial ruin, and cuckoldry, I sued for divorce. After finally untying myself (and my children) from the millstone of Fishtown, I feel like my life has shot up from the muck of the slough of despond like a bubble released from a hot bottle of soda.
I’m certainly not rich now, but I’m much better off than I was previously and I’m on a trajectory that I couldn’t have anticipated. I feel fortunate; despite my own foolishness, my life is now on firmly on the road to Belmont.
Great, you say, but what does this all have to do with Dr. Murray?
Something that Dr. Murray said during the most recent Ricochet Podcast stuck out at me like a sore thumb: “The fact of being American [used to transcend] class.”
Did it really? When was that true? What has changed? Dr. Murray speaks of it as if at some point that fact stopped being real. But was it ever real in the first place?
My awful marriage to the Millstone of Fishtown drove home to me just how different of a world we live in from one class to another. The simple fact is: Being American no longer has the same meaning to people who live in different classes, if it ever did. One class views being American as an opportunity, and the other seems to view it as an opportunity to prey upon their fellow Americans.
I don’t share the values of those people in Fishtown – and I don’t want to have anything to do with them either. Their influence is toxic. Their values are foreign, alien, and repugnant to me.
This quotation by Dr. Murray from de Tocqueville struck me as well: “The more opulent members of America take great care not to separate themselves from the lower classes – they talk to them every day.” I find this to be highly suspect.
Did James Pierpont Morgan talk to dirt poor people on a daily basis? Did John D. Rockefeller? How about Andrew Carnegie? I doubt it. If you’re familiar with a place called “the Breakers,” you’ll realize that highly successful, even hyper-rich people like Cornelius Vanderbilt were not interested in mucking about with people from the lower classes. They wanted to get as far away from them as possible — and they built walls and barriers to keep the Fishtownians out of Belmont.
In a time more contemporary with de Tocqueville, you might argue that Thomas Jefferson spoke on a daily basis to dirt poor people, but I’m not sure that talking to people you owned really counts.
To be fair, most of the 19th century industrialists certainly did have the experience of coming from grinding poverty, but they didn’t live their lives as though they still did. Those guys demonstrate to me that Fishtown, poverty, and malaise are not merely places and class distinctions. They are attitudes, lifestyles, and outlooks.
In a country such as ours, a person has to be actively trying to sabotage themselves to end up in a position where they’re broke, helpless, unemployed and starving. Is that the fault and the moral responsibility of the people who sometimes fall into the trap of poverty? Perhaps it is. The other part of that is: Fishtown isn’t forever, except for a select few who are extraordinarily resistant to the incentives and signals that the economy is trying to transmit to them. Failure is actually a more clear economic signal than success is, and a far less pleasant one at that.
The simplest rules for having a successful life in America are the same as they ever have been: Finish school, don’t get pregnant as a teenager, work hard, save, and take care of your family.
That these simple values aren’t being successfully transmitted outside of the confines of Belmont seems not only unlikely, but impossible to me. Something else is at work here. I think it’s demonstrable that wrongheaded economic incentives delivered via government welfare programs led to entrenching a class of people who self-selected for dependency.
We’ll never be rid of Fishtown. Conservatives realize this because of our differing outlook on life, the universe, and human nature. Liberals and their policies guarantee not only that will we never be rid of Fishtown, but that it will perpetually grow on the outskirts of Belmont, feeding on the scraps and demanding an ever-growing portion of the pie.
Intermarriage and cultural exchange between Belmont and Fishtown can’t fix this problem; the cultural DNA of one is inherently rejected by the other. So why doesn’t one subsume the other? The DNA of one side of the equation is reinforced by the financial might of the other. The signaling is broken.
I don’t want to echo John Derbyshire and claim that we’re doomed, but we are certainly going to continue to do the same thing over and over again until we fix the problem of rewarding behavior that guarantees your perpetual economic ruin.
Published in General
Majestyk, I have visited the homes like The Breakers and heard the stories. The thing is, they did interact with poorer people all the time because they all had many servants. In those days, everyone had to work because the welfare state was nonexistent. Pull back on welfare and people will work. They have to.
I interact with some Fishtown people through my church. There are some chronic cases, that’s for sure, but we try to teach them well and I think there is a lot of hope for those kids.
I appreciate your story, though, because it sounds like you saw the seamier side of Fishtown in a very personal way.
We ran similar races and came out ahead. Good for you!
As far as the very rich, no one could really stereotype them effectively I think. I’ve seen billionaires act like everyone else and people worth just a few million crap on everyone they hired for work.
I have noticed an interesting new breed of wealthy in the last 5 or 6 years and they are very intertwined with the government or the finance industry, but I repeat myself.
There’s a distinction that I used to hear all the time between “decent” folk and “common” folk. Lower-income people have different names for them, but the decline and fall of these decent folk is what Murray documents. A remnant hangs on…barely.
BTW, nice article.
It’s called regulatory capture. Timothy Geithner, Steven Rattner et al, are the poster-children.
These are the undeserving rich – people who got that way more for who they knew than what they knew.
Yes, good article and some good insights. I’ve been working on an apartment building for the past five weeks that has a lot of Section 8 tenants. I’ve never really been around people like that – tattoos, smoking (cigarettes & pot) and Mountain Dew! There are signs of decency and aspiration, well cared for children – I hope they’ll end up OK, but the carpet guys had six buckets of glue stolen ($35/ea) while at lunch. Where do you go sell carpet adhesive? Look, there’s a reason people with the means move to the suburbs/away from the Fish Town types. In Murray’s defense, I think his theory had to do more with the distance between the professional class and the working class. Glad things are looking up for you. Don’t feel guilty or simply ‘lucky’ for where you are.
One of my grandmothers, raised in the lap of luxury, in the antebellum South, she categorized people as trash, rif-raff, and decent folks. She read to me out of Emily Post every night after dinner, I needed it having been in orphanages and foster homes. By the time I was 12, could set a perfect table and knew what fork to use first.
The other grandmother was dirt poor, also raised in the South, her parents survivors of Sherman’s march through Georgia. She was born in a wagon train on the way to AR, where land had become available. Her grandfather was from “landed gentry” in England, and neither she, her siblings, nor her children ever needed to read from Emily Post, they had perfect manners, I didn’t realize that until I was grown. My mother in her Alzheimer’s demented state would use her proper manners at the table when I told her we had “company.” Actually what I am getting to is, being poor doesn’t make you fishtownish.
I don’t want to lend that impression either – but the problem is that while one doesn’t lead to the other, they tend to hang out on the same darkened street corners.
Good post.
I think the issue is one of degrees, and it is never easy to characterize differences in degree using broad, sweeping language.
To wit: of course there have always been major class differences in America. They are an inevitable part of any prosperous society (even those which try to use the rule of law as an equalizer). But there American classes lay along a continuous spectrum, not separated by an opaque wall: people mingle with, and take pride in associating with, those of other classes – to an extent not imaginable in most other countries.
And similarly with mobility: most people won’t move significantly far from their childhood class during life. But significantly more Americans will move out of their childhood class than in any other country on the planet.
We’re the most stratified country in the world, except for all the other countries out there.
Quoting myself is rude, but I’ll do it here this once. ;)
“What changed”, you ask? Easy: leaders, or those who proclaimed themselves to be such, in the past would at least insinuate if not promote the idea that being part of the better-to-do is something attainable and worth striving for. As a result, Americans were set apart from the rest of the world in that no matter your original station, you were able to improve your lot by CHOICE and ACTION. We weren’t prescribed a predefined status. Now politicians and politicos obtain countless media hours preaching (as is their religion) that it’s not your choices and actions that resulted in your situation, but “the rich.” An amorphous foe defined by those who hear what they wish. Until a counterargument is articulated on a grand scale, we’ll not see Americans grabbing their bootstraps in the numbers of our past.
It all went downhill once we stopped wearing hats.
The average person, OK. But not everyone is average – some people really do have unearned bad luck. The likelihood of such unearned bad luck in a country as fortunate and prosperous as ours is quite small, but it’s still nonzero.
Sometimes, terrible things do happen to decent people. It can’t be helped. Nobody can prevent every terrible thing from happening, and nobody should try.
I’ll also note that it’s always easier to label behavior self-sabotaging in retrospect.
For example, a lot of conservatives consider it noble to power through pain. If it hurts, just bear it. Don’t be a pansy. Don’t whine. Don’t let yourself get lazy. Just grit your teeth and keep going. And you know, for most of the people, most of the time, this might be good advice. But this stoic approach comes with a risk. Every once in a while, powering through the pain will turn out to be the wrong thing to do – you may end up permanently crippling yourself.
Is it therefore reasonable to call a stoic attitude self-sabotaging? Probably not, most of the time. Even when it sometimes cripples you.
I’ve seen “rich” people who make between 100-200 thousand a year crap on everyone they hire for work… I love Murray, and working with the poor has been an insight into class differences on a personal level, but I’m not sure that it really can break down by income quite as easily as we’d think. Of course, I’m of two minds on this – talk to me on Monday and I’ll contradict everything I said on Sunday.
I concur: great article, Majestyk.
I have to disagree with this to a certain extent. Take my current town, for instance. We’ve got “homeless” folks who stand on street corners holding signs – they’re almost comical. “Hungry,” “need work,” etc… but those guys stand on those same corners for years. Years. They don’t get money and get out of their situations. They get money and continue to linger. Yes, bad things (unearned bad luck, for instance) happen to ordinary people, and it temporarily disadvantages them. But as Majestyk said, if you stay there, it’s because you want to.
cont from #16: along those lines, when my wife and I drive around town and see those “homeless” people, I can virtually always identify them by name and most recent criminal offense. They almost always carry backpacks, and if you happened to look inside those backpacks, you’d find needles, heroin, sometimes large wads of cash, a stack of stolen credit cards, and so forth… Interestingly, I’ve sat down with many of them and listened to their sob stories. The fact is, everyone has bad things happen, everyone has rotten luck. Some people let it dictate their lives. Others don’t. I think that is what distinguishes class more often than not.
The thing is, we’re talking about choices here, and the sad fact is that it’s OK to choose to live in Fishtown – whatever that might look like. Don’t want to work? Welfare, Section 8, assistance of a zillion kinds, and you can live, eat, and have a roof. For some people, if given too much of that, that will be all they ever want. They’ll want more of the same – more help, more assistance. The longer this goes on, the more permanent this “I need help” idea becomes, which disastrously turns into “I deserve help”.
I’ve seen this happen to family members, a sister, an RN, who eventually devolved into such a low state with substance abuse that she was homeless, living in a shelter, her daughter (thankfully) taken away by DCF, and her choices wound up killing her. Talking to her about how to change was impossible; all she wanted was the next “thing” that was going to provide her something for free.
If those dependency choices become limited, will people still choose them? Meaning if the net is removed, will people still hit the ground?
All of this, in some way, goes back to the stratification of society, abetted in some real way by the tax code. Half the country pays no net income taxes. Of the half that do, the top 50% of that group pays 97% or so of the total income taxes collected. Using Ricochet-ese, the bulk of the country does not have “skin in the game” – all they are doing is using the proceeds of other peoples’ labor to avoid having to be responsible for themselves and their families, by having a job and living a good and productive life.
I like the sentiment, but do explain.
This article is helpful, it touches on some good points. Its the atlantic so its riff with pearl clutching, but useful none the less.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/308343/
Personally I blame a breakdown in fraternal organizations, and criminally low interest rates.
This post offers some worthy insights, and I feel compelled to write at length. Alas, I’m off to Fishtown this morning for what I know will be another futile assault against ignorance. I have much to offer the children of Fishtown, but despite my best efforts I simply can’t undo the value system taught them by their parents. It’s a matter of habits, you see. More this afternoon when I return . . .
Quoting oneself might be rude, but Charles Murray could respond to this “response” by quoting himself.
“This again was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?”
From Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
Not entirely sure how, or from what direction, or whether, this obtains. But it seemed to fit.
Ideas have consequences and values will out. If you believe as the Fishtown folks do, and have the values of Fishtown, your life and prospects will reflect that just as surely as the sun comes up in the east.
Great article.
I’ve seen a heck of a lot of this too. Fishtown really is an attitude.
Take a buddy of mine. Parents were the working poor. His father worked, but his mother always sought the easy road of dependency and blame. My buddy and his brother clawed their way out through college, but one married well and the other married a Fishtown wife with a ream of problems. The one who married well continued to prosper and grow, while my buddy’s wife was a constant millstone of addictions until she looked hard in the mirror. The moment she truly walked away from her past was when their fortunes turned. But in doing so she made enemies in her own family for “selling out”.
There is a 3rd sibling in that family – a sister who takes after the mother. This sister is a conniving dependency case for life. She’s as smart as her brothers, but has taken the other road.
And a very few bad things cause permanent injury – a permanent disadvantage. And when one of those things happens, all the wanting in the world cannot undo what has been done. You can (and should) adapt, of course, and make the best of your now-limited life. But it quite likely means spending the rest of your life in a place you never wanted to be.
I mean, until you can come to terms with your limitations and learn to want the life you have when you can no longer have the life you want.
Sure, everyone has bad luck, but people also have varying amounts and kinds of bad luck. And when you say “more often than not” the difference is in whether you let your bad luck dictate your life, you’re tacitly admitting that in the minority of cases, the difference is something else – perhaps something less directly under the individual’s control.
Great post, Majestyk! Very real and engaging.
Your general point reinforces my own resistance to Murray. I mean, it’s impossible to gainsay any particular thing he says. But he seems to me to miss the heart of things.
Toqueville knew what our founders also knew. The economic and governmental system they instituted relies on a “religious and moral people.”
By systematically dismantling the institutions in our society that inculcate religious and moral values, while at the same time flooding the cultural zone with trash and instituting dependency, the left is destroying the people it claims to help.
Yes, I’ve always felt that Murray just discovered that there were ignorant, poorer people in American and the Right jumped on board the class wars. It has never been any different and some leave it. There are more of them because there are more ways to destroy your life (and your kids’) with drugs and more welfare. What he doesn’t know, I feel, are that some of these people are truly free. They don’t mind dumpy, trailers and they live on the little income they have by choice, do not owe money, etc. Just because you have upholstered furniture on your porch doesn’t mean you’re unhappy. Many retirees do this.
My amazement is more at the rich/middleclass people who are actually poor- and I know many of all ages. They, themselves, have no savings and intermittent income. They are ‘too smart and talented’ to work for only $10/hour but still they manage to live the good life. They would fit in any book club, wine tasting or restaurant BUT HAVE NO MONEY themselves. They do have friends, family, and Pell Grants and are basically terminal free loaders- but for some reason socially acceptable.
Majestyk, I think the behaviors you describe are more prevalent in fishtown, but can still be found in the uppercrust. I’ve dated girls that have come from better means than I and have had pathologies that would be more associative with fishtown.