Coming Apart

Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, is a must read for concerned citizens of this great country. His tome charts a widening chasm between the upper and lower classes, who have always been separated economically, but now occupy different zip codes and cultural patterns.

He uses Belmont and Fishtown as socioeconomic foils. The former is inhabited by the new middle-to-upper class, who complete college, find work as professionals, get and stay married, raise children, attend church on Sundays, and perpetuate a positive cycle for their posterity.

Fishtown, on the other hand, is populated by what was formerly known as the working class. Here, high school graduation isn't a given, marriage often ends in divorce, or increasingly, never occurs. Out-of-wedlock childbearing is the norm, steady work is as elusive as the ambition to find it, and the prevailing secularism leaves starving souls.

It wasn't always this way. Murrary uses JFK's assassination in 1963 as an artificial turning point, arguing that four things have always accounted for American exceptionalism: marriage, religiosity, industriousness, and honesty. Since 1963, Belmont has walked the traditional walk, but Fishtown has left these values at the proverbial pier, leaving devasting economic consequences ashore.

Unlike Murray's earlier books, Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, he focuses exclusively on white Americans in Coming Apart. While he argues and later demonstrates that the aforementioned trends bridge skin color and ethnicity, he manages to remove the racial baggage that too often dominates the culture wars.

You may recall defamed former Democratic presidential contender John Edwards' admonition about "two Americas." Murray would agree with this surface statement. However, Edwards didn't point to cultural renewal as a means of bonding these strangers in the night. Murray comes up empty, too, other than his argument that the residents of Belmont should openly encourage the fellow citizens of Fishtown to model their good behavior.

Murray is labeled a conservative by the MSM, but he is at heart a libertarian, thus the crux of his failure to offer plausible paths forward in conquering the problems he so ably illustrates. As a lover of liberty, libertarianism admittedly has great appeal, but it stands incapable of confronting society's ills, because like liberalism, it discounts culture. Just as $1.5 trillion of annual federal and state spending on social programs have failed to ensure an equitable distribution of wealth, laissez faire leaves the masses begging for bread.

Both David Brooks and Clarence Page, in their review of the book, spoke of potential bonding experiences between residents of Belmont and Fishtown through mandatory national service, whether in the armed forces or Americorps. While this would admittedly help us understand one another better, it wouldn't address what continues to tear at the seams of our society.

The answer must come from within, but government isn't helpless in this cultural rebuilding effort. Both sides of the aisle need to embrace the two-parent family as the best predictor of the next generation's success. Policies should encourage wedlock and discourage illegitimacy.

Faith-based institutions have long provided charitable services in this country, and are the great mobilizers of civic participation in this country. They need more than the half-hearted embrace given to them by Bush 43 and must be defended from the war that the current administration has declared upon them.

We must also reward work. Government perpetuation of cradle-to-grave dependence is indefensible five decades into the Great Society's failure.

Crime must be punished, white collar and street violence alike. Bankruptcy should be more difficult to declare, and foreclosure shouldn't be as easy as leaving the keys under the door mat and driving away.

My prescription is admittedly tough love, but what works in Belmont merits replication in Fishtown. By embracing the key tenets of American exceptionalism we can reweave the great national quilt.