Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I came across this harrowing account by Professor Allison Stanger of Middlebury College, who was injured in the tumult following Murray’s attempt to speak at the famous college in Vermont, where Bill McKibben is one of the writers in residence:
www.nytimes.com/… The title says a lot: “Understanding the Angry Mob at Middlebury that gave me a Concussion.”
It stirred up a lot of memories for me, of being very unhappy when William F. Buckley Jr. was the commencement speaker at my graduation in May of 1972 at Lafayette College, the seeming very antithesis of the feelings of the students during those years, 1968-1972. He spoke, and I wore my McGovern button up to the podium to collect after four years of hard work. And I listened: the core of what Buckley said was that there are many forms of idealism, not all on the left side of the political spectrum, and that “entrepreneurship” was one of them. I think that the conclusion that the pursuit of profits, even under today’s “smiley” umbrella term — pursuing “shareholder value,” is a form of idealism is stretching the concept, and given how it has turned out after “financialization” under Neoliberalism, I’m even more skeptical — but I still remember what he said.
And the riot at Middlebury brought me back to my own confrontation with the book that Murray was going to be speaking about, “Coming Apart,” a comparison of the success of America’s upper middle class meritocracy, who have all the right stuff, and also the “Founder’s values,” and the sinking, sorry state which Murray thinks has been
the self-inflicted fate of America’s working class. Some of it has been self-inflicted, but my focus is on all that Murray has left out, some remarkable events that were happening even before the “Stayin’ Alive” decade that Jefferson Cowie describes in his history of the working class in the 1970’s. This is still a very timely discussion, needless to say, and if you want another fine article about the topic, George Packer’s late October, 2016 interview with Hillary Clinton, and many others,
including Charles Murray, please visit this most comprehensive and insightful piece at the
New Yorker — you can sense Trump being elected when you add up all the observations and laments from the many commentators:
www.newyorker.com/...Larry Summers’ admitting that the Democratic Party elites paid very little attention to this group of citizens is a classic of sheepish, belated admission of “Major Miscalculations” — which happens to be the title of a new essay I’ve written, forthcoming.
And now for my review at Amazon. From 2012.
This review is from: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Hardcover)
June 2, 2012
Who "Done" It? Who Did in the "White Working Class?" They Did It to Themselves, according to Charles Murray.
Charles Murray's new book is actually a book about change, how some parts of American society, like the upper middle class residents of Belmont, Massachusetts, have done very well, and others, the working class residents of Fishtown, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, have not. But it's also, implicitly at least, about causality: a book about "winners and losers" between the years 1960-2010, and he is covering a span of American cultural and economic life which saw enormous changes in both. But which sphere of human activity drove the changes? Murray says it was character changes in the working poor that did them in, while the Belmontians thrived by their retention of the right values. If only, if only, the poorer Philadelphians could have kept the virtues of our "Founding Fathers," they would have done much better than portrayed here. This, readers, is one gigantic fairy tale, and if the book does not sell well, I'll personally recommend Murray as an advisor to Colonial Williamsburg or Disneyland - and Mr. Murray - you of course will be "free to choose" which one you fits you the best.
Not so long after I had finished reading Coming Apart, I attended a conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on the Renaissance of American Manufacturing, on March 27, 2012. One of the featured speakers was Gene Sperling, who is the Director of the National Economic Council in President Obama's administration. In his Keynote Speech, Mr. Sperling offered the assembled a surprising statistic on American manufacturing jobs, asserting that between 1965-1999 - not so much different from Mr. Murray's dateline brackets of 1960-2010 - the number of such blue collar jobs remained fairly steady: at about 17.3 million. Now that doesn't sound terribly disruptive, does it, something that might contribute to urban decline or diminishment of working class morale and values? Of course not.
But the real values for Mr. Sperling, like any establishment economist, are those that flow from capitalism's "creative destruction," its competitive innovations and products, its constantly chasing greater efficiency, and, as just a little aside, chasing those higher profits as well. And he wanted to reassure his audience that these jolts in greater efficiency- called productivity - don't destroy jobs, they create them.
So, in fact, when I heard Sperling speak, I had already been "fishing in the stream of deindustrialization" thanks to my astonishment over Murray's account of "white working class" decline in Coming Apart. The south "Pole Star" for the proles in his book is "Fishtown," a neighborhood of Philadelphia, one of the classic working class ethnic ones; at the opposite pole is the affluent upper-middle class town of Belmont in Massachusetts. Now the astounding thing about Murray's methodology is his absolute dismissal of deindustrialization's impact on the work ethic and morale of Fishtown's working class. To give you the sense of his schema, he remarks at one point that the divorce rate during the Great Depression didn't rise, so why would a comparatively little thing like the loss of good industrial jobs in the 1970's be an excuse to shun marriage and work?
Of course, in Murray's chain of causality, it's character that still counts the most, and the upper-middle class Belmontians have it but the proles in Fishtown have lost it. But there is no mention of Garry Wills' Bare Ruined Choirs (1974) in Murray's account, a shame, since a history of the decline of the Catholic Church surely must have had some effect on the predominantly Catholic working class. Murray certainly reminds us of the importance of Catholic institutions in trying to hold things together, certified by the stories he has Fishtown residents tell and that he chose to emphasize in his book.
In Murray's world, capitalism is a force of nature, unquestioned in its power and scope; people don't challenge it, they adjust to its rapid pace of change, or else...But might not the very products of capitalism - the auto, the pill, the credit card - for example - work to change morals and therefore character? Might the very productivity and abundance of capitalism require a shift in habits (Catholics will pardon the pun, I hope), say from the thrift and scarcity of a capitalism starting to free itself from the old medieval restraints in the 15th and 17th centuries, or the lost world of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson many centuries later - to the increased urgings to spend so that poor old Henry Ford could clear the model T's off the assembly line? And did not the car and the pill, along with the affluence advertised in Mr. Heffner's Playboy, contribute just a bit to the sexual revolution, which started - sorry, Mr. Murray - at least by the 1920's but did not reach full flower until the 1960's and most forcefully the 1970's? And wasn't that the decade that Gary Wills says the Catholic Church was coming apart, losing priests and nuns and Catholic schools at an alarming rate, with the Church denouncing the pill and proving that it was having great troubles adjusting to the changes in American society? So if one of the great religious foundations of American working class life was foundering, despite its strong conservative values...
Strangely also, he pays no attention to the tremendous impact of race (in this volume; previous ones I'll leave to longstanding controversies), with five million rural, southern black folks arriving in the northern and Midwestern cities, in what would become the "rustbelt cities," just at the time when they begin their decline - as Nicholas Lemann tells the tale in his 1991 book The Promised Land. And what sent them north in such numbers? How about a good capitalist invention: the mechanical cotton picker, c.1944 in the Mississippi Delta? It helped end sharecropping, thankfully, as a "way of life," if that is the right term. But the life the displaced black sharecroppers found in northern cities was not much to write home about. How can one write about white working class Philadelphians and not write about race; the city was race obsessed in the post-World War II world, which included the 1960's and 1970's? And am I suggesting at least a faint connection between Sperling and Murray in their minimization of deindustrialization's impact on the working class, on American urban history and race relations, just a whiff of the alliance between the American "Center and Right" on many matters economic? Yes I am.
Now let me add a personal touch on this topic of industrial decline and working class morale, stemming as it also does, in part, from my role as a commentator on Jefferson Cowie's fine book, Stayin' Alive: the 1970's and the last Days of the Working Class, in my essay Pre-Occupied of November 28, 2011.
I grew up just outside Trenton, NJ, another once significant old manufacturing city, whose industries peaked, like Philadelphia's, in the 1920's! Although knowledgeable commentators tell us the reasons for the declines were somewhat different, the effects were not so dissimilar. If you grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, or indeed, any deindustrialized city, it will be worth your while to visit with John T. Cumbler's A Social History of Economic Decline: Business, Politics, and Work in Trenton, 1989. It conveys a very different approach, and set of values towards the problems of the working class, than Murray's Olympian detachment.
Thus I've seen the physical sites of these old manufacturing areas, and Newark's and Camden's as well. When I first glimpsed Camden in the early 1970's, having just graduated from college, it looked like the photos of Berlin in 1945; there was that much physical devastation. I last saw Philadelphia's industrial ruins in the late 1980's, from an unusual train ride cutting across the city (and not from the more famous "Main Line's" view, which is bad enough) that offered a startling view of some of the factory districts. There is no other way to put it: it was a post-apocalyptical industrial landscape of abandonment, ready for filming the French Connection II (or is it III now?), and not matched in writing until the eighth chapter of Don DeLillo's Underworld in 1997.
Perhaps someone could send Gene Sperling, (and Charles Murray) too, editions of Camilo Jose Vergara's photographic works, American Ruins and The New American Ghetto, just to remind him what he's obscuring in those statistics. So much pain, so much loss, but let's not get emotional, let's let the cooler economic heads prevail: the number of manufacturing jobs was just about the same over the 35 years of muffled agony, 1965-1999.
We can talk about all the other factors contributing to the decline of the work ethic and self-discipline in the blue collar white world, the cultural factors, as Daniel Bell has done in his classic Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but let's leave them out for now: the view of the physical wreckage is enough to convey a sense of what went on...and it's bad enough just by itself. But I'll give you the numbers that Murray avoids any mention of in his book, and that Sperling obscures from his high altitude flyover, taken from Walter Licht's brief but moving little online essay about Philadelphia's industrial history, with the nostalgic title "Workshop of the World": in 1953 Philly had 365,500 industrial jobs; by 1977 it was down to 168,400; and by 2008, it was down to 29,800! Here's the link at [...]
So here's my take, fellow readers, and citizens. As we look back over our shoulders from the economic wreckage of 2012, and dare we say too, the cultural wreckage, over the time period when Charles Murray says the working class lost its values, we would do ourselves, and the complexities of history, and change, a big favor by asking: what was the relationship between economic change, when we went from a "River-Rouge model" of vertically integrated industrial capitalism, to our contemporary one, the one of "flexible accumulation," vastly dispersed thanks to the neoliberal model of globalization, where those sturdy blue-collar workers today, if they are lucky, can work at half-the pay - $15 dollars an hour, and far fewer benefits - than their 1970 brothers and sisters did - and cultural change, where the very messages of business through its advertising - messages to all of us - are to spend and consume like there is no tomorrow; and come to think of it, there may well be no tomorrow, for tomorrow your job may be in China. Now, Mr. Murray, that's a little different perspective - and set of values - than those of the "Founding Fathers," don't you think?
My advice to you though, readers, if you want to begin to unravel why things have gone so badly for those in the middle, and the bottom of our society, then start with Jefferson Cowie's "Stayin' Alive," and then also work in David Harvey's" The Condition of Postmodernity," (1990). They'll fill you in on that complex interaction between economic and cultural change, and the price we all pay for the "inhuman pace" of it.
That characterization I have taken from Wendell Berry's 2012 Jefferson Lecture, given right in the face of the Washington establishment on April 23, 2012. I have to wonder if either Gene Sperling or Charles Murray were in attendance, and if they were, what they thought. I can tell you this, though: at least one of Murray's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, would be pretty horrified at the national landscape of today; the one, where, in Berry's terms, the "nation and its economy will conquer and destroy the country."