(Note: This was originally published in the March 29, 2012 edition)

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on March 16, the well-known political scientist Charles Murray points out that there has been a fundamental cultural change in recent years and, as he argues in his latest book Coming Apart, it threatens to shred the basic fabric of our national culture.

Specifically, it has to do with the growing divide between America’s upper and lower classes. Progressive pundits argue we have lost our common culture because U.S. business has shipped manufacturing jobs overseas and weakened the ability of labor unions to protect workers’ pay and benefits. While Murray acknowledges that union jobs at big companies provided good wages in the 1960s, he claims “they didn’t drive the overall wage level in the working class” and therefore do not explain today’s rising number of dropouts from the labor force, or what Murray calls “the new lower class.”

In his 1984 book Losing Ground, Murray blamed this phenomenon on the growing welfare state and the increasing economic independence of women. Murray argued that, as women found they needed men less during the 1970s, the social status working men once enjoyed as breadwinners diminished. The new cultural norm became the single mom serviced by the feckless male lover.

George F. Gilder had warned about this a decade before in his 1975 book Sexual Suicide: “What is happening in the United States today … is the steady erosion of the key conditions of male socialization. From the hospital, where the baby is abruptly taken from its mother … to a job that, particularly at vital entry level positions, is often sexually indistinct … In the end his opportunity to qualify for a family—to validate in society his love and sex through becoming a husband and provider—may be jeopardized.”

In Coming Apart, Murray describes this outcome as a fait accompli. “Whether because of the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period from 1960 to 2010.” The sexual revolution, he argues, made things worse because it allowed men to have sex without getting married. “In such circumstances,” he observes, “it is not surprising that male fecklessness bloomed, especially in the working class.”

This, then, is what Murray sees as the true cause of “the new lower class” problem in America. It’s not about class struggle or the allegedly widening gap between the rich and the poor; it’s about our lack of respect for others. As Murray explains, “It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are.”

To fix this cultural problem, Murray says “we must change the language that we use whenever the subject of feckless men comes up.… Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer. Equally important: Start treating the men who aren’t feckless with respect.” This raises the even broader question of how we Americans want to define ourselves—as a culture of honor and mutual respect or as a culture of helpless captives and fools.

Laura Hillenbrand’s truly remarkable book titled Unbroken, about American bomber pilots who survived the horrible ordeals of Japanese POW camps during World War II, provides a compelling answer: “Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.”

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