The right's newest welfare queen is white. And from Philly.
Charles Murray, a right-wing polemicist, spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, argues that the white working class is oppressed by its own backward culture. And in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he uses Philly's Fishtown as an exemplar to make generalizations about white workers.
He laments the decline of the "Founding virtues" of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion amongst the rabble, as compared to the Boston suburb of Belmont, where "successful people in managerial and professional occupations" live. Unconcerned with the wealthy's "virtues" of hypocrisy and greed, he misses that the decline in "industriousness" parallels a decline in actual industry.
There are many fewer good jobs today in Fishtown and Kensington, the epicenters of the city's deindustrialization since the 1950s. Crappy service jobs with low wages and few or no benefits have replaced secure union manufacturing jobs.
Murray's 1984 book Losing Ground argued that welfare is the cause of poverty, stoking Reagan's make-believe stories about Cadillac-driving welfare queens and, later, the abolition of welfare by Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans. Ten years later came The Bell Curve, in which Murray posited that poor people are poor and that many black people are poor because they are genetically wired to be stupid. (A thesis that incidentally contradicts the one in Losing Ground.)
Murray's solution in Coming Apart? Rich people should "voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms," becoming missionaries among savages. He imagines some halcyon past where Americans of all socioeconomic strata shared "a civic culture that embraced all of them." But working-class prosperity was the result of the labor movement's victories and New Deal reforms.
What rich and poor Americans before the New Deal "shared" was class warfare.
Murray's analysis is wrong. Take the current Fishtown community mobilization to save St. Laurentius Catholic School, an institution embattled not because of bad morality but because of the violence of deindustrialization and suburbanization — and very bad church hierarchy behavior.
The Republican Party built its majority in part by scapegoating poor blacks. But business elites and professional ideologues never liked working people of any hue.
