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.