Some years back during a conversation with Charles Murray about his justly praised book Coming Apart, Bill Kristol made perhaps the single most outrageous statement he has ever uttered in public. Murray’s book chronicled the decline in the traditional work ethic and other foundational values in the American lower classes, and Kristol suggested a solution. If the indigenous American lower classes are increasingly “decadent, lazy [and] spoiled,” Kristol said, “don’t you want to get new Americans in?”
The idea of replacing legacy Americans with immigrants is as distant from conservatism as one can get. The Americans described in Murray’s book are far more connected to American culture than any “new Americans” Kristol would like to see take their places. Given that, however, it is undeniable that there are significant problems with the white lower classes that need to be resolved.
Murray noted some of the relevant trends 15 years ago, and many of those have continued to get worse. The imprisonment rate for lower-class white Americans, for example, has skyrocketed in recent years, more than doubling since the mid-1980s. Though white poverty rates have remained mostly stable for decades, white Americans make up 43%—more than 40 million people—of those on Medicaid/CHIP. Though they are 60% of the overall population, and therefore underrepresented statistically in those ranks, this is still an unacceptably high number.
Murray shows clearly in Coming Apart that a fair amount of the problems affecting white America did not involve unexpected and insuperable life disasters for those who were otherwise self-sufficient and productive. Rather, there has been a sustained retreat from the ethic of work and honorable self-reliance that were once much stronger. There is much reason to believe this trend is ongoing and indeed getting even worse.
The American white working class and underclass are similar in many ways, most notably in terms of their general location in the bottom half of the socioeconomic hierarchy, though some skilled members of the working class make salaries that are indistinguishable from many in the middle class. But they also differ in ways that are of tremendous importance.
By classic social scientific terminological consensus, the working class is that segment of a society employed in blue-collar trades and industrial fields. The underclass comprises both the straightforward unemployed and those who work in poorly paid segments of the service economy and other occupational fields in which pay, benefits, and job security are considerably worse than in working-class jobs. The two groups can also generally be visually distinguished, and they can easily be told apart behaviorally.
I have some informal ethnographic data to share on this point. I spent a pleasant day a few weeks ago at Knoebel’s Amusement Park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, with my family. The park draws people from all over the area. There is no entry fee, and rides are paid for with tickets you purchase inside the park, so there is no economic barrier to entering.
The white American working class and underclass make up the majority of the people there on any given day, just by visual evidence. As an inveterate social scientist, even as I was enjoying the rides and food with my family, I was informally taking mental notes on the human population around me.
One woman I observed was perhaps in her 60s or 70s, almost certainly a grandmother, to judge by the ages of the girls and women surrounding her. She had on an Aerosmith shirt and was missing a front canine and smoking. I could not help but overhear a large part of their conversation, as all of them talked at essentially a shouting register. This elderly woman spoke in a vocabulary that would have made a truck driver or a drill sergeant proud, nearly every sentence sporting one or two profane terms.
I frequently saw messages emblazoned on t-shirts that made addiction and criminal behavior into objects of humor. I saw several “Floating down the river while killing my liver” shirts. A woman walking with small children was wearing a shirt bearing the message “It was a rough week, but I didn’t need bail money so there’s that.” The demeanor of many of the people wearing these shirts told me with a fair degree of certainty that alcohol abuse and jail time were probably not mere abstractions for them.
There was a girl, 11 or 12 at most, who was so morbidly obese she could walk only with waddling difficulty, and her mother and father, perhaps in their forties, were both so overweight that they were in mobility scooters. All three were eating huge ice cream cones and holding massive soda cups as they passed.
There was a woman, perhaps 20, with at least six or seven different facial piercings and both arms full of tattoos. Some of the tattoos consisted of inexplicable long numbers and reminded me of the marks borne by concentration camp survivors. She had chosen to have herself marked in the way that Nazis imposed on populations of people they saw as inhuman.
Again, all of these descriptions were social types. I saw many individuals who were similar in appearance and behavior to these individuals. Some were far more exaggerated than these.
Fishtowns Galore
When I was growing up during the 1970s, you could clearly see the distinction between the two populations. I lived in a border area between a working-class white neighborhood and another dominated by the white underclass. Nobody in the working-class neighborhood ever sat out on their front porch, drunk at midday, beer cans scattered all around. Working-class front yards never had broken-down cars parked there. Working-class homes were humble and showed their age, but they were not falling apart with no effort at maintenance, with gutters hanging unattached, paint peeling, and roofing tiles missing and lying in the yard.
Working-class men and women dressed like members of their class, in t-shirts and jeans, and it was easy to tell they had limited means. But their shirts did not boast of their drunkenness or criminal records. The men did not go about scraggly, unshaven, and unbathed day after day. The women did not dye their hair green and purple, and they did not decorate their arms and legs with tattoos that they constantly showed off with sleeveless shirts and skimpy shorts.
The white underclass, by contrast, was already beginning to show these external signs of distinctiveness that I saw at Knoebels. And now you rarely see an underclass white person who is not tatted, facially pierced, unbathed, unshaved, uncombed, and wearing pajamas in public.
In Murray’s insightful book Coming Apart, one of the most telling facts was the significant decrease in rates of religious adherence and behavior in the white lower classes in recent decades. It turns out that overall rates of irreligion, as defined with multiple variables, do not vary hugely by social class according to survey data. The overall trend is an increase in those who have no religious beliefs, in all social classes, which is itself a troubling phenomenon.
When you get into the most meaningful specifics of irreligiosity, however, the class difference Murray discusses becomes apparent. When you explore, for example, the frequency of religious attendance (one of the religious variables most clearly connected to the ability of religion to pass along moral values and behaviors), you find that Americans at the bottom of the hierarchy have rates that are substantially lower than those of other classes.
The point is certainly not to replace the lower classes—it is to endeavor to fix our culture such that they might be brought out of the mire in which they currently live. We should help their children escape the trajectories that led their parents to the dismal position they now occupy.
Securing our border and removing those who are here illegally is an important part of resuscitating America. But if we cannot also reduce the now alarmingly growing numbers in the white underclass, that work will be for naught.