Saturday Audience Participation
The intellectual commentariat has gone crazy over Charles Murray newest book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In the work, Murray discusses the increasing schism between the upper and lower classes, the masses unknowingly (or knowingly) self-segregating on the basis of intelligence and culture. In sum, Murray posits that the social classes and the cultural experiences of these classes have become more exact over time. The classes speak different languages, engage in different activities, and ultimately become less concerned with the notion of national solidarity.
I don't speak much about class because I take it as a given. Specifically, this blog seeks the celebration of the (largely white) suburban and small-town middle class. That's who I consider the venerable backbone of America and, unsurprisingly, it reflects my own upbringing. I'll of course extend my kinship to the respectable members of the working class, the kinds of families you see at air shows and running the local Mom and Pop shop.
Today's question: What was your childhood class? What class are you in now? Are you adept at socializing within different classes? Is the widening of the class gap really a bad thing? What class is the backbone of this country?
48 comments:
I'm squarely blue-collar and working class. However, I'm fairly adept at conversing with people of higher intelligence and I consider myself well read and of reasonable intelligence. My education is limited to junior college technical programs and not a classic liberal arts curriculum.
This division of classes that you reference is troublesome an indicative of our fractured society. This problem is only going to get get worse as time goes on. I sense, a new high-tech feudalism, coming into existence. The pitting of classes, genders, religions, political parties, races, and all other different and divergent groups against another.
Looking around, I see poverty right outside of luxury gated communities. America is quickly becoming like Brazil and Mexico. Soon, the wealthy classes will travel in armored vehicles to escape the risk of kidnapping; much like they do in South Africa?
The picture I see is bleak.
I grew up straight middle/middle (neighborhood was a mix of low level white collar workers and tradesmen types) and am now upper middle (neighborhood all degreed professionals). I can move easily in both of these social classes -- unlike many others who have gone this route, I haven't totally trashed my ties to the culture I grew up in, while augmenting it with UMC cultural elements as well.
What I see happening is pretty much what Murray describes: we're creating a hereditary cognitive elite class. We're already well on the way to this, a couple of generations in now. It's technically meritocratic, but due to highly assortative mating patterns (very smart, successful men and women marrying each other), the cognitive merits are becoming quite concentrated in the offspring of such people -- it's becoming a self-perpetuating cycle, to a large degree. Of course, this means we have a quite smart and talented elite class, but, as Murray points out, it also means that this class is very much out of touch with most of the rest of the country.
I live in the DC area, which is home to a ton of superzips and packed to the gills with cognitive elites. If I get in my car, however, and rive just two hours to the west, past, say, Winchester Virginia and into West Virginia, it's basically like a fundamentally different country - not just due to regional/local differences, but because that "cognitive elite world" simply doesn't exist there, and the cognitive elites themselves rarely go there and see this other world, either. There is a huge, gaping maw of a cultural divide hiding in plain sight, really. I don't think this will end well.
I just started reading the book.
Economically: child hood, middle class? My father was a senior NCO/ warrant officer, my mother a teacher. Started my adult working life as a private/ E1. Pretty much the bottom there. Top 1% before my divorce. I'm in the top 10% now.
I dislike the term working class. Every wealthy man I know worked his ass off to get there
Education; I've earned two degrees and a minor from state colleges. Middle class?
My cultural class, blue collar Southron, farm boy. I saw a lot of myself in the 1960's upper class he describes in the book. I drive American made cars, trucks and motorcycles. I drink Wild Turkey 101, 108 and Makers Mark bourbon, instead of wine or boutique beer. I hunt, fish, ride my horse, work on my own cars and tractor when I can, engage in the very blue collar sports of power-lifting and strongman.
I'm good at dealing with the upper class. Sort of. I hate the silly weak males it's full of, but I have worked for some very wealthy men who had class and treated everyone with respect. And I've seen the worse of the breed too. I have no problems getting along with suburban/ small-middle size town America. I get along well with nerds, and have come to respect them a lot.
I live in a very affluent county, and I don't see the class warfare stuff. I think it's because we share the same basic culture. Most men hunt, fish, watch NASCAR,football etc. I think the issue that divides isn't the money but the culture and I think that culture divide is dangerous.
The back bone of America is rural, small town middle class White folks. In my opinion, the "elite" don't bring much of real value to our nation
"we're creating a hereditary cognitive elite class."
The big x-factor is going to be whites who are cognitively equal to this new hereditary overclass, but who are economically excluded from its bubble, bearing the brunt of having to live among blacks/NAMs, and generally in a social millieu they find humiliating. I suspect some of the alt-right finds itself here already.
These x-factor whites may either be the seeds of a future revolution, or an agency of a rehumanization of America to its pre-Civil Rights days.
Class isn't relevant to me in any way.
". Soon, the wealthy classes will travel in armored vehicles to escape the risk of kidnapping; much like they do in South Africa?"
Soon? Carat-Duchatelet has been armoring Maybachs for some time.
"I dislike the term working class. Every wealthy man I know worked his ass off to get there"
Would you prefer the term lower class? I didn't think so.
http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/quizshowall.php?title=how-thick-is-your-bubble
Relevant test here
Also, after completing the test you will be taken to a video where Charles Murray talks about his working class roots. Paul Fussell also predicted the "Europeanization" and solidifying of the class system before I was even born in his Class book.
What class are you in now?
For readers below a certain age, it's probably better to ask what class their parents are from. I don't think anybody wants to admit that they're downwardly mobile.
Middle. Blue collar working class on my dad's side. Military and agrarian on my mom's side.
I can move pretty easily up and down the spectrum though I feel more out of place in swankier settings than in lower class ones.
My background is also middle but overall it's lower middle class.
Father's income from 1990 to now: 125k-150k. He's a middle class white with blond hair and blue eyes.
Mother is a low class minority. So overall that's lower middle class.
There's a noticeable IQ gap and Age gap between my mom and dad hehe.
I will be graduating from a public state university soon with no debt.
I earned a Statistics major and Math minor within 3 years. This year was all gen-eds so I could study for the actuarial exams. I consider myself of middling intelligence.
I got nice things here and there but nothing extravagant.
I also had enough money of my own to live in my own apartment(more like a small house) during college and get nice things here and there.
I am a 1%er, living in a Lowzip,surrounded by some BottomZips. That makes our household an extreme outlier. I prefer to regard our family as middle class, but with lots of discretionary money. O'Bama's haranging about the 1%ers makes me self-conscious, but I do *not* feel guilty about our wealth because we earned and sacrificed for it.
ok, i was born solid bourgeois bohemian but i gravitate towards the blue collar.
my paternal grandfather worked for the state department, paternal grandmother had 3 degrees (ba psych, ma psych, Edd) in the 50s (you know when women werent allowed to do anything). father--ba philosophy, ma psych, MD his brother--peace corps, MA international studies, worked in ambassadorial service as a cultural attache HUGE obama loving tranzi. his sister, MFA married a trial lawyer, their daughter hipster bright as hell just graduated from U of chicago
my mother however threw the peasant into the mix--my maternal grandparents were straight up polish jew peasants until the holocaust. when they came here my mother ACTUALLY lived in the "fishtown" in philadelphia that murray used as his model. however, my grandparents opened a grocery store and bought real estate and kept moving my mom up--the streets of fishtown stayed with her forever though she became a beatnik and has perfect whole foods, BoBo taste now and has an antique jewelry store
so, one side educated professional class, one side vulgar jew money--me? i went to private schools until i was kicked out in the middle of 10th grade. jake tapper was my classmate at akiba hebrew academy http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jake-tapper/story?id=127673
despite being raised in the bubble, and i still test very much in the bubble on murrays test, i have ALWAYS gravitated towards blue collar people and working class men--all of my mates have been uneducated and very very bright, the children of cops, firemen, nurses and teachers (thats a lot of the white working class in philly) i never had any ambition so i went to state schools that were my only applications for both my degrees and never cared. i live a cash poor, thing rich life with no concern for status signalling--what class am i? lol
Son of engineers working as a scientist at research university. No tenure and none foreseeable. My wife is from a blue collar family and holds the same kind of job. Our two kids are both, unfortunately, decidedly less smart than either of their parents. Downward economic mobility for them is all but certain, alas. Our household income is $110K before taxes. So, I figure, we are middle class in terms of income and upper middle class in terms of values and intellectual aspirations.
I'm middle-class with a lot of ethnic and financial mobility inbetween:
Father is a lower-economic class elite: black, S.side ghetto Chicago-raised; scholarship to Big 10 undergrad university, followed by med school; mother, white middle-class rural Wisconsin girl who also got academic scholarship to that same Big 10 school, where she met my dad.
Grew up in city-adjacent suburb; joint-parental income ranging from about 100k to 250k over the years (and once dad finished his residency); however, pesonally and as a family, wealth is more of a 'reserve' than a tangible and evident display; e.g., very middle-class-looking home (suburban ranch-style); cars (mid-level japanese imports).
In terms of class-consciousness: I spent mny twenties and early 30s working beside many entertainment figures and executives who were millionaires, so i always felt slightly deficient in terms of income even though i was relatively well-off; to me, wealth=security: i'd much rather have a full and thriving investment portfolio and am willing to forego the low-series BMW, replaced by a fully-appointed Accord or Camry, etc. (lol!)
I was raised in a middle class home. Father had two MAs and worked for the federal government; mother had a high school diploma and went back to work as a secretary once my youngest sibling entered first grade (significant difference between parents in education and intellect and interests, also seen with their siblings and families i.e. PhD and vacation homes on one side and public housing, Post Office employees on the other). I remember when we got our second car and our first color t.v.
My husband was middle class (father was army officer) but had less money. His life was still quite similar to mine in material goods, but his high school/college experiences were quite different: I was raised on the east coast, went to a 7 sister school, overseas to grad school on a scholarship, and he spent his teen years in the Southwest, working at a gas station and attended (intermittently) a state commuter school. We ended up in the same profession, however, and have similar intellects, tastes, and interests.
By income alone, I suppose we are now upper middle class, but not in lifestyle (i.e. no big vacations and so forth) and our kids had less money and tech toys than their friends. We spent our money sending them to private schools. The older one is openly scornful of the pampered rich kids and the brainy nerds and aspires (with his genius IQ) to blue collar class (pickup trucks, cigarettes, etc.) but wants enough money to be independent and wants to live in the Northwest where there aren't many people.
I loved getting out of the D.C. suburban bubble I was raised in, and all my boyfriends were blue collar, working class. I feel comfortable with both extremes and feel the same contempt for the excesses of each (I've dealt with super-wealthy social register types who had their own pathologies, as well as dysfunctional working class who created their own set of troubles). The only group I generally loathe are the ethnic elites - the D.C./NY types and the Hollywood ones. With one it is all about credentials and ticket punches and the other it's all about psuedo-beauty and money, but both are insular and arrogant and deserve to go the way of the Dodo. Brendan is correct, it won't end well (nor should it).
What class of people were homesteaders and pioneers?
While they lived in extreme poverty for a time, many had superior intelligence, diligence, vision and character. For all their persistence, individual families ended up with hundreds of acres of very productive land and became what one would call independent businessmen. Some of my forbears were among these and their children and grand children quickly became middle to upper middle class. They were decorated officers in the military and achieved fairly high rank but short of admiral or general. I would say 90% of my extended family is at least top 10% in income and none of the rest are below top 25%.
in a class to myself.
"we're creating a hereditary cognitive elite class."
The big x-factor is going to be whites who are cognitively equal to this new hereditary overclass, but who are economically excluded from its bubble, bearing the brunt of having to live among blacks/NAMs, and generally in a social millieu they find humiliating. I suspect some of the alt-right finds itself here already.
These x-factor whites may either be the seeds of a future revolution, or an agency of a rehumanization of America to its pre-Civil Rights days.
Spot on
I'd consider the productive upper middle class, undoubtedly the backbone of America.
I'm talking the engineers, doctors, scientists, small businesses.
They're also the most taxed and beat down on, liberals count them as the 5% that they can tax the hell out of, while they make loopholes for the 1%. These people are too rich to pay low taxes and too poor to hire someone to help evade them.
I suppose I'm an outlier. My parents were (and are) farmers who didn't own their own land until they were about 50, so I think we were fairly poor. We didn't know it, though, because we were taught frugality and conservation. When we saw other kids with a collection of Star Wars figures or a TV in their bedroom, we thought their parents were rich and wasteful, not that we were poor.
My parents are both pretty smart. I don't know exactly how smart, but they had four kids who were all geniuses. I don't want to start an IQ argument here, so I'll just say that I could read a newspaper by age 5, and by fourth grade I tested above the 12th grade level in all the achievement tests they gave us at school. My brother and sisters had similar experiences.
Yet today, at 35-42 years old, we're all lower- to middle-class, making enough to pay the bills in a small town, but not enough to live large. We all seem to have chosen staying close to family and doing things we like over making money. We could all be making a lot more if we'd decided at 18 (when we were being courted by every college in the country) that we wanted to be rich, and headed into a field like medicine or law. But I'm doing freelance computer programming and tutoring while running a nearly non-profit Catholic gift shop, and the others are similarly puttering around doing jobs that they like, that pay enough. (I prefer to call it a choice, rather than say we're just lazy.) So I guess we're exceptions to the rule of the cognitive class division that Murray is talking about.
I've lived in towns from 200 people to half a million, as well as in the country where my nearest neighbor was half a mile away, and one thing I've noticed is that there's a lot less stratification in the small towns. When your entire K-12 school only has 300 kids, it's hard to form a lot of cliques based on wealth. By the time you divide up into groups like jocks, nerds, punks, and artists, there just aren't the numbers to break it down any further. In a town of 500, there are rich people and poor people, but not really rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. Some rich people might cluster together on a block, but they can't be more than a few blocks from the poor people, because the town's only so big. The banker can't live more than a mile from the guy whose house he just foreclosed on, and their kids may be friends.
Only cities make it possible for people to segregate themselves by race, class, ideology, and so on, until you get elites who simply never spend time with anyone who thinks differently than they do.
My family's a bit odd. My father is definitely from the upper middle class, since both of his parents were college grads, and his father had a PhD. My mother's parents came from lower-middle-class, blue collar backgrounds, and my mother was the first in her family to complete college.
As for ourselves, we skirt the line between the middle class and the working class. My father, who also has a college degree, works in manufacturing, which has pretty much made our circumstances an uphill battle against economic forces that are impoverishing the manufacturing sector. I have typically done whatever work was available to get extra funds, whether on the factory floor, when such work was available, or in service industries (the downside being that I haven't had time for internships, which is probably going to bite me in the ass when I graduate).
Overall, I expect that my lack of family connections and the fact that all the internships that get one into higher-tier career tracks are off-limits to me due to financial constraints (My parents can't pay for me to live in an expensive city residence while I work an unpaid internship at a prestigious firm) will consign me forever to the lower middle class.
At least I'll have a college degree in a fairly practical field, so I probably won't be an unemployed lumpenprole, I've avoided going into too much debt in college (<$5000, which is good by today's standards), and I am fairly frugal by nature, so I won't have too much trouble living on a modest income.
I would add that White America seems to be moving apart racially as well as culturally. There is a definite trend among upper-class white men towards intermarrying with Asian women (Asian male-white female couples, which are rarer, have even higher SES), and toward white Hispanic and non-Hispanic intermarriage, while intermarriage among the lower classes of whites is with blacks or dark-skinned Hispanics.
Extrapolating these trends into the future, one can easily envision a future US that looks like a cross between Hawaii, with its Eurasian upper class and native underclass, Mexico, with its whiter-looking upper class and Indio underclass, and Brazil, with its white upper class and its black and mulatto underclasses.
Looking at life in these places (outside of tourist areas), it seems a rather bleak future, but at least it's not Zimbabwe.
My own family was old UMC (going back many generations) and now ranges between middle class and managerial elite.
For generations, we did things like own small banks and businesses, and found the Junior League in a small midwestern town. Some of us were traders at the grain exchange in Omaha. After WWII, my grandfather established his own family in a small town in South Texas, helped found what became the major regional hospital, and was the county medical director for decades. Other close relatives became head of the local Catholic school, and the president of a major local bank. We were intimately tied to the community, respected, and often genuinely liked by people of every social class.
That whole social structure was a holdover from an earlier age, and simply disintegrated during the 1980s. The hospital became an impenetrable, corporate institution. The Catholic school closed for lack of students, the bank was bought and branched, eliminating any position of real local authority. My family moved to the big city, found well-paying but geographically rootless careers, and sent their kids to the best colleges to become equally rootless professionals.
I was never able to adapt to the new class arrangement. I was viscerally repelled by the Murray's "elites" when I first encountered them at prep school and college, and my opinion of them has only grown worse since.
I get along best with working to middle class Americans.
By Paul Fussell's class metric I'm high middle class, not upper middle class, but the high part of the middle class.
Seems to me when folk’s use the term working class what they mean is the poor, who are usually not working. It’s a leftist term that implies everyone else is part of a leisure class. When I was poor I did not mind being called poor, or lower class. I knew that’s where I was at that point in my life and I wouldn’t be poor forever. Every adult I knew started off poor/ lower class but were no longer poor because they worked.
There probably isn’t a good term to use. I put more value on work than wealth so the working poor would be an ok term, but I’m sure it’s “insensitive”. The poor/ lower class people I know have a lifetime track record of bad decision making or they are young and just starting off. That will become less true as the USA continues to pay the economic price for liberalism. And it will be White men on the wrong side of the bell curve who pays most of that cost
We have a new global aristocracy now. Banksters, international CEOs and their board members, and their accomplices in the government are worth hundreds of millions of dollars each and are getting richer and more powerful by the minute. They are totally unopposed. Their wealth and power outstrips the rest of ours by such a wide margin that we effectively have only two classes now, the ultra-mega-super-rich and everyone else.
Their wealth and power outstrips the rest of ours by such a wide margin that we effectively have only two classes now, the ultra-mega-super-rich and everyone else.
You're being an economic reductionist (and in the process sounding a little leftist too).
My background lies in the somewhat fuzzy middle ground between working class and middle class. Both my parents had college degrees, my father was a never-too-successful building contractor and my mother a teacher. Most of my schoolmates had fathers, and sometimes mothers, who weren't as well educated but earned good money in the heavy industries that dominated the city's economy at the time. Combined with my father's generally dismal earnings, this meant that my schoolmates' families were quite frequently better off in money terms than mine, though except in a few cases the gap wasn't large and some were quite a bit poorer.
It is as ridiculous talking about white class problems in genocidal, Liberal New America as it was talking about class problems in Nazi occupied Poland. Priorities. You can't separate the economic and social problems of the white lower classes from the race war that is being waged against them. The class problem is at the top with the upper middle class on up participating in this war for class and personal profits. Murray pays some lip service to upper class responsibility (who, after all, hold all the power in this country and administer political correctness), but in truth it's him waving the white flag, blaming the lower classes who have the least responsibility for the decline of America so that he doesn't have to confront the racists in power and risk losing his income.
"Race has nothing to do with these problems . . . [White Americans] have no excuses, they aren't recent immigrants who don't speak the language, they don't have the legacy of slavery" - Charles Murray on NBC. What a load of shit. The legacy of slavery! Full grovel mode.
Jesus Christ Supercop:
Class isn't relevant to me in any way.
CH:
in a class to myself.
Fascinating...
Borderline white trash. Southerner. Wish I wasn't. Always suspected I'd be happier as a New England WASP, or even maybe a NY/Hollywood Jew.
Oh well.
Between upper-middle and upper class, leaning towards the latter. Parents had a household income of $2 million (Australian dollars, $2.1 million US dollars) per year. Ancestors on my mother's side (who came from Europe during the 1940s) were from the aristocracy. Father's side have been in Australia since the late 1700s and most have been either doctors or businessmen. Everyone in extended family has at least a bachelor's degree - medicine, law, commerce, or a combination thereof. Have always lived in the Australian equivalent of a 'superzip' and attended an elite school. We are, as mentioned by someone else, wealthy but not so rich that high rates of taxation (slightly lower tax rates here than in the US) are not a problem.
I feel more comfortable around the top couple of percent, as I have never had much experience to speak of with anything else. In Australia, the wealthy are far more conservative than their US counterparts, with the wealthiest areas just about universally favouring the centre-right Liberal Party by extremely large margins. As such, there are fewer problems with associating with the Australian "elite".
I must qualify this with the fact that I am far more traditionalist than I am "biocon".
My background is pretty strange. My dad's background was white trash all the way. He grew up on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin and moved to Chicago with his parents in the early 1950's when the farm failed. He was an a compulsive gambler, convicted felon, ex-con and registered sex offender (one of the women he molested was his sister, my aunt) who drove a taxi for most of his life because he wasn't stable enough to hold down a better job. My dad had a "lazy eye" (i.e. an eye that did not track but just sort of lolled off to the side) until he was about 35 and had an ophthalmologist repair it. Oddly enough, none of that prevented my dad from being a major womanizer. Women loved him and he slept with hundreds of them over the years.
I am the first person on my dad's side of the family to attend college. My cousins all have blue-collar jobs; one is a pipefitter, another a secretary, the third a long-haul trucker, and the fourth is a single mom. She also used to be a falcon trainer at Medieval Times restaurant (really); I am not sure what she is doing now.
My mom was the daughter of a banker from New York City and the grandaughter of a Wall Street lawyer. Most everyone on my mom's side of the family attended Yale College, going back six or 7 generations, although my grandma attended Wellesley and her dad attended Amherst and Columbia Law School. (Like many WASP aristocrats of that era, my maternal grandparents were second or third cousins, so their family trees actually converge once you go back a couple of generations.) When she was 12, my mom spent three months touring Europe with her grandparents. They sailed from NY to Europe on a luxury ship (the SS United States) and stayed in luxury hotels the whole time. If you were to meet my mom, you would not guess that she comes from such a privileged background. She is loud, uncouth, and slovenly. At one point during my childhood she weighed at least 300 lbs. (She's 5'2".)
How did my parents wind up with one another? It's simple, my mom is nuts. They met when my dad drove my mom, in his cab, to the local race track. My mom was dating a jockey at the time in her quest to find "Mr. Wrong" and drive her buttoned-down Eastern relatives crazy. My mom finally succeeded in that quest; I'm the proof.
Counter-intuitively, my dad was an excellent father and a very good person who cared about me a great deal and spent lots of time with me. My mom is a crazy bitch. We are not close.
I grew up in a lower-middle class exurban community. Because my dad was a member of the working class, as opposed to the lower middle class, I got hazed a lot. I dealt with this by fighting anyone who made fun of my background, and that minimized the hazing but did not stop it altogether. (The other kids' parents would say negative things, too. The high school I attended had a large "industrial arts" program and emphasized athletics over academics.
I went to a commuter college for the first year and almost flunked out after the first semester. I thereupon realized that if I didn't get my act together, I'd be flipping burgers for the rest of my life. and applied myself academically. In the middle of my sophomore year I transferred to my state's flagship public university.
Because the state university I attended was a good one, and because I scored in the 99th percentile on the LSAT, I was able to attend a top five law school (NYU) and was also admitted to several Ivy League law schools. (Cornell and University of Pennsylvania.)
(Cont'd)
Today I work in an upper-middle-class profession and, while not a member of the "1%" myself, deal with the members of that group daily.
I can socialize with members of all classes, although it took me over 10 years to learn how to socialize with privileged people. It was really tough going because I am not that socially adept, and also because experienced a great deal of culture shock at first. But I worked at it and eventually learned the necessary social skills.
Today most privileged people I encounter are shocked when the learn of my background. I am honest about my heritage, although I do not make a point of telling people about it, so people have usually known me for a while before they find out about my background, and they are almost always shocked. Last weekend I mentioned it in passing to a couple of the other dads at a birthday party. One of the dads is the president of a major television production company (everyone here has seen his shows) and his jaw literally dropped open when I made an offhand reference to my background. I've known him for a couple of years and he didn't have a clue. Interestingly, blue collar people generally recognize me as one of their own.
To be honest, I really don't think that one social class is "better" than another, or the "backbone" of the country. There are good people in all classes. It is generally true to say that lower classes are highly dysfunctional and self-destructive, while the upper classes are effete, over-educated, and out of touch. But there are good, solid people in all classes.
That said, I do think the upper classes are more prone to believe in wacky ideologies, such as far-left liberalism, that are very destructive when implemented. They also value academic credentials and "prestige" far too much. Because the upper classes are so influential, their naive and foolish beliefs do a great deal of damage. The lower classes are less susceptible to that sort of foolishness, and their instinctive affinity for religion and tradition usually serves them very well.
Privileged people would be much less susceptible to fantasy ideologies if they would spend a few years in their late teens or early 20's working on a farm, driving a truck, or serving in the military before attending college, but these days hardly anyone from a priviliged background does that. Ironically, the un- and under-employment that a lot of today's kids are experiencing upon graduation will probably help them develop a more realistic worldview.
The fact that the classes are growing farther apart is a very bad thing. Privileged people can benefit from the down-to-earth perspective of the lower classes, and the lower classes can look to the upper classes for example of how to behave. I hope that the classes will grow closer together in the future.
@ the anon talking about economically excluded high-iq whites
economic exclusion is part of the problem, i think social exclusion might be bigger. it seems like there is no place in the world for high-iq non-progressives
Father from rural AR, mother the daughter of Italian immigrants. He earned a BA, she taught cosmetology. We did OK, got out of the big city in the 70s. Me, blue-collar for nearly 40 years, always a step ahead of the NAMs. It's a struggle, but poor by no means.
always a step ahead of the NAMs
The best definition of the life of an ordinary white American since the Civil Rights betrayal.
You know, we don't have to live this way.
> What was your childhood class?
My father's side is New England Yankee middle class Protestant, grandfather was a school teacher who got expelled from Harvard for painting the John Harvard statue Crimson (nothing to do with politics, mind)
Mother's side mostly New York Jewish neurotic intellectual, though grandfather was the bastard offspring of a German-American mother and an Ashkenazic traveling salesman.
The result was two urban bo-bo parents with graduate degrees, father in theatre and mother in art, but transitioning in their 30s to semi-rural life, the former toward real estate and the latter mental breakdown, respectively. In other words, lower middle-class, but with grand gestures toward the elite.
> What class are you in now?
Underachiever, works with "books".
>Are you adept at socializing within different classes?
Depends on how often I bother to shave. The SWPLs are my people, but I read too many of these blogs to get invited back.
>Is the widening of the class gap really a bad thing?
I haven't seen remedies that are more palatable yet.
>What class is the backbone of this country?
The four folkways of Albion's Seed still resonate more than class when trying to ascertain this nation's saving grace.
@ the anon talking about economically excluded high-iq whites
economic exclusion is part of the problem, i think social exclusion might be bigger. it seems like there is no place in the world for high-iq non-progressives
I'm a "high-IQ non-progressive" myself, as are my parents. Not being a liberal definitely prevented my father from making as much money as he could have, by sapping his confidence to demand wages that better fit his work quality. It has also definitely harmed my own confidence to interact with the world.
My way of slipping through the cracks for self-survival is to work in intellectual pursuits that don't involve political correctness, such as hard sciences, and do non-PC and anti-PC activities as hobbies. My peers are mostly secular liberals, with a few conservative Protestants. I find that if people like you intrinsically, they'll overlook some anti-PC gaucheness.
Being "racist", however, is definitely a third rail, unfortunately. But even that varies; black men don't care (they actually seem to enjoy chatting with white guys that they can make racial jokes and remarks with), but SWPL women get VERY upset, very easily.
I feel there is a growing "learned" resentment of the upper classes by the blue collar workers. If this continues it's not going to end pretty.
I grew up in a family with a self-made (and self-destroyed and then self-made again) father, and a smart, middle-class mom.
I cast off much of my mother's snobbery and find I can do well with just about everyone. Giving credit where it is due, so did mom for the part as she aged.
My only uncomfortable moments are: country clubs, and extremely fancy "dinnah pahties". Country clubs because they seem full of vacuous people with nothing to say and lots of words to say it; "dinnah pahties" because I feel completely out of place among people with whom I have nothing in common, and fed food that is way beyond my strikingly middle- to low-class tastes.
"The big x-factor is going to be whites who are cognitively equal to this new hereditary overclass, but who are economically excluded from its bubble, bearing the brunt of having to live among blacks/NAMs, and generally in a social millieu they find humiliating. I suspect some of the alt-right finds itself here already. "
I agree. I'm not done with the book yet but the one thing that stood out to me was the insulated, self-verifying liberal culture cited in the colleges of the "elite".
I also think that throws a wrench into the self-sorting thesis he presents. If you are smart but bored in highschool, or don't care to get involved with politically correct activities, you'll probably know that there will be no place for you at Harvard. You aren't "that type" unless so pathological you fake it all just to get in....in which case the liberal culture will be aborbed for the same reasons.
The other thing that stuck out, was the list of cognitive elite occupations are essentially non value-adding functions. Lawyers, financiers and politicians do nothing to generate the things that improve standards of living. They are necessary evils just like mid-level managers or human resource departments. The rise and auto-sorting of these functions in the book corresponds to the increased leverage and trade defecits. So, I wonder how much of this is only sustained by the massive borrowing the country has done since around 1980.
The next revolution will come as a backlash to the policies the elites will implement to save their "entitled" positions as the house of cards that I believe supports them comes crashing down. We're getting close.... I think by 2020 the financial jig will be up. What happens after that is unpredictable.
"Their wealth and power outstrips the rest of ours by such a wide margin that we effectively have only two classes now, the ultra-mega-super-rich and everyone else."
I agree with you but probably for the wrong reasons.
It's not the wealth or income that truly matter for this distinction, it's how they're used. As this financial crisis has repeatedly shown, the bankster elite use thier positions for economic rent seeking.
I have no issues with a successful trader or money manager making a hundred million a year. I do have a problem with those who do so through regulatory capture.
In that sense, I think there are still 3 classes but the bottom 2 are equally powerless. I propose a class definition of:
High: Earn through economic rents. The rules are setup to keep the money coming in unopposed and if things start looking bleak, get the rules changed again.
Middle: Earn money passively through investments, royalties or highly scalable activities (leasing patents, selling software, owning cash-flowing real estate). However, do not have the pull required to protect themselves from rent from the hgih class.
Low: Earning power limited by hours in the day. Young doctors, farmers, secretaries, engineers&scientists working for organizations that own patents to anything they create.
In this way, income is not as important as HOW wealth is used or earned. Middle and Low class have different financial results but are equally powerless in a country like ours with no true rule of law. They are the crop harvested by the high class...which is why the rhetoric focuses on income or wealth. Can't have the rubes figuring out what's really happening can we?
This also feeds into the homogenous morality and culture cited in the book. In the beginning, there were no avenues for economic rent. Hence everyone was forced to act morally to ensure their own economic survival. After the civil war, power was consolidated enough that the devious could start the large scale shenanigans, hence the rise of the robber-barrons, the grandfathers of today's high class in the sense Iv'e defined it.
In Murray's telling of things the "upper-class" are the good guys and the "lower-class" are the misfits and losers.
In reality the upper-class and lower class bear a strong resemblance to the Eloi and the Morlocks of H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine.
Extrapolating these trends into the future, one can easily envision a future US that looks like a cross between Hawaii, with its Eurasian upper class and native underclass, Mexico, with its whiter-looking upper class and Indio underclass, and Brazil, with its white upper class and its black and mulatto underclasses.
There's a big stumbling block to this scenario coming to pass in the US - our prevailing ethos of liberalism, which means in practice anti-white racism. The people of Mexico, Brazil etc seem to be fine with a whitish ruling class in a mostly non-white country. It's impossible to imagine such a thing happening in America's future. Whites are hated in majority-white America: they won't be loved and accepted in minority-white America.
Extrapolating these trends into the future, one can easily envision a future US that looks like a cross between Hawaii, with its Eurasian upper class and native underclass, Mexico, with its whiter-looking upper class and Indio underclass, and Brazil, with its white upper class and its black and mulatto underclasses.
Steve Sailer has opined that, except in enviroments where natural selection prohibits it such as primitive tropical cultures, fair skinned will always rise to the top because it is a sexually selective trait in females. In so much as competence and ability are inheritable, powerful men will mate with fairest females and overtime, coupling wealth and power with fair skin complection.
-Pi
I was raised by two intelligent, philosophically minded but rather impractical parents, growing up in an atmosphere where words counted for everything. The neighborhood started out mixed middle-class, became more and more working class, and eventually was occupied largely by Indian immigrants.
I acquired many upper class, or perhaps I should say academic, tastes without the money to fulfill most of them. Went to a state college (when you could still find serious non-ideological scholarship in them), but my degree was hardly one to open doors for me.
In some ways I feel more comfortable with educated, but not necessarily rich, people. But many of those whose interests intersect with mine have had their values destroyed by the Marxist "long march through the institutions." White working class members (what's left of them) often seem to be in touch with traditions I appreciate -- more so than my fellow "intellectuals" -- but I have zero interest in NASCAR, hunting, football, and other pursuits the white proles dote on.
In short -- I don't fit in with any particular "class," though I can respect certain aspects of all of them, even the allegedly stuffy middle class that is also disappearing in our new Third World America.
I took the 'Murray Test' and got spooked by its accuracy - even though I am British born, white, from the lower-class part of northern (formerly industrial) England.
Both folks factory workers, I futzed around for many years, associating with arty-farty, liberal types (and a smattering of gays), traveling & hitchhiking around Europe and the Middle-East - but always being proudly independent. Worked my way up into middle-management (helped by a good degree, taken as an adult) before marrying a Mexican and settling in her hometown.
It's the journey that matters, even if the destination is important.
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