Concerning the decline of our culture he says this:
In 1960, 8 percent of births were illegitimate .... Today, the rate is 40 percent. Liberalization of laws in the 1970s led to dramatic increases in divorce. Today, divorce is somewhat less common, but that’s only because fewer people are getting married in the first place.Strong words, but it's hard to argue with them especially if one has read Coming Apart.
Yet, as Charles Murray has documented [In his excellent book Coming Apart], the destructive trends in family life do not characterize the upper classes.
A neo-traditional ethic holds firm for people at the top, even as they promote the next stages of liberation, which will further disintegrate social norms.
Moral deregulation does most of its damage to middle-class and working-class Americans. If your mother has only a high school diploma and you were born in 2021, the odds are against your being raised in an intact home.
A similar class divide can be seen in chronic unemployment, lack of social involvement, and substance abuse. Our leadership class has worked overtime to liberalize attitudes, even to the point of enforcing a punitive political correctness.
The well-educated and well-off have the resources and resilience to navigate the new cultural landscape. The less fortunate are shipwrecked.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2020. It is telling that our policy response to COVID-19 was to shut down the country and spend trillions of dollars to ease the damage.
Meanwhile, our policy response to 100,000 dead from drug overdose—an epidemic that has killed nearly a million people since 1999—has been to legalize marijuana.
At this juncture, a bipartisan consensus obtains in our ruling class.
The rich and powerful believe that we live in a degraded and broken country filled with dependent and dysfunctional people. It’s interesting to note that angry voters agree.
They just differ about whom to blame for the all too real and very deep problems facing our country. And I submit that ordinary people, not the well-credentialed people running things, have the more accurate political philosophy. They see that a country becomes de-industrialized, degraded, and dysfunctional because its ruling class has failed.
Put simply: A fish rots from the head down.
It's the frustration of the middle and working classes that produced Trump's victory in 2016 and that frustration has surely increased given the sheer incompetence on display over the past ten months by the current administration.
Little wonder that Democratic analysts fear a disastrous mid-term election a year from now.
