This week, the National Marriage Project is releasing a study charting the decline of the two-parent family among what it calls the “moderately educated middle” ”” the 58 percent of Americans with high school diplomas and often some college education, but no four-year degree.
This decline is depressing, but it isn’t surprising. We’ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming a new normal. This gap has been one of the paradoxes of the culture war: highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.
But the Marriage Project’s data suggest that this paradox is fading. It’s no longer clear that middle America does hold more conservative views on marriage and family, or that educated Americans are still more likely to be secular and socially liberal.
This really isn’t difficult. The Baby Boomer college kids created a free wheeling society of drugs sex and narcissism. They were enormously successful, so that when they graduated and entered the work force, they took their passion for self indulgence with them. They prospered, settled in the suburbs, and had a bunch of kids who acquired Mum and Dad’s tastes and excesses. They divorced like cells splitting, as mum and Dad did. The business world, which sold them endless junk, and the ad world, which touted it, naturally sold the whole package to the blue collars who had neither the money nor the cultural support to endure the same self indulgent life. The children of the well heeled prospered and grew more conservative, so their divorce rates went down as their incomes went up – but they still smoked plenty of marijuana.
The blue collar world, absorbing the worst of the trickle down vices and lacking the brains, the education, the social context, money and the job market to mitigate them, decays steadily while they hold on to the shreds of their old ethos, which is now little but opinions blindly held. They are not, however, liberal, though their vices are the same as their social superiors , they are merely corrupt and quite unable to help themselves. Meanwhile, the liberal and comfortable point at their vices and say, “Look at the social decay and then listen the hypocritical opinions they hold. We’re not the problem THEY are.
We have a GOOD social record.”
But the blue collar worlds are cultural Smerdiakovs, aping their betters to their own harm. Larry