Another book that tries to explain what happened to the country over the past 50 years or so is Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, written by Charles Murray in 2012. I read it back then. The book compares what white Americans are like in 2010 compared to their characteristics in 1960. Specifically, Dr. Murray uses the day before the Kennedy Assassination (Nov. 22, 1963) as the jumping-off point that began the 1960s in the United States.
His main point is that in 1960 we were one united civic culture that shared values and experiences, but that now we have diverged into at least two major civic cultures, with the 5% elite who run things being very out of touch with the other 95% of the population.
These people on top cannot empathize with the needs of truck drivers and blue collar workers and people who cannot find work. Murray cites a passage from one of the best books ever written about our nation:
“Local freedom…perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.” – Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840
“That’s not true anymore.” - Charles Murray
Murray uses two places to make his points. One is Belmont, MA, and the other is Fishtown, a neighborhood of Philadelphia. In the 1960s, Belmont and Fishtown weren’t that different in terms of employment rate, marriage rate, divorces, high school graduation rate, single-mother births and such. Belmont had more professionals and was a bit more affluent but not by much. Fifty years later, Belmont hadn’t changed that much except for an explosive growth in average income, while Fishtown basically disintegrated as the manufacturing jobs left town as documented in Tightrope.
All of these books make a good case that we have a lot of work to do as a country. Racism is a major blot and an entrenched problem but it’s not the only challenge. Many people will attribute our problems to the current occupant of the White House. It’s not that simple. These issues developed over many decades. The authors of these books, conservatives and liberals, consistently point out how our presidents and political leadership consistently failed to get serious about fixing our ingrained problems.
