Reddit reviews Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

Right-wing news sources are running with Ronan Farrow's assertion, in a panel on Real Time with Bill Maher, that Bill Clinton "has been credibly accused of rape." Clinton's exploits are old news, of course, but in the interest of not talking about Epstein, I don't actually want to talk about what Bill did or didn't do.

My question for the Motte is: does anyone have a good handle on the history of the locution, "credibly accused of rape?"

I feel like I've seen it a lot lately, though I first noticed it during the Kavanaugh appointment hearing. I found its epistemology extremely troubling at the time. To refer to someone as having been "credibly" accused of anything is to embed a question-begging assertion into what might be taken on the surface as neutral reporting. Traditionally, American news media avoids suits for libel by reporting the allegation of criminal acts. There are probably some interesting arguments for why they shouldn't even be allowed to do that, but set those aside for now; assuming we're okay with the news media reporting allegations so long as they are clearly labeled as allegations (and remember that by "okay" here I mean "should not be held liable in tort"), doesn't the phrase "credibly accused of rape" violate the rule?

After all, "credibly" means believably or plausibly. But the plausibility of an accusation is precisely what juries are supposed to determine in a criminal prosecution.

In fact the phrase "credibly accused" seems like a linguistic troll on the order of "it's okay to be white." It is an invitation for people to express disbelief, which is outside the Overton framing of "believe all women," and so it is a locution people generally allow to pass without comment. It seems like a sneaky way to shift people's priors.

So I think it is pretty clever, as rhetoric goes, but it seems like a relatively recently-weaponized phrase--

--until I check Google Ngrams, anyway. And then I notice that it was and is a common phrase in the discussion of Catholic clergy and sexual abuse (appearing e.g. here in 2007). In this context, "credibly accused" looks like a way of saying, in effect, "yes, we know that sometimes people make spurious accusations, but these don't look spurious and so we are giving them our full attention." But the epistemic problem still seems to be there: the word sounds like a way of saying "we are taking these accusations seriously," but--is it possible to take an accusation seriously without putting the burden of persuasion on the accused to, essentially, prove a negative? The "credibly accused," in short, are not merely accused--they are nudged into the territory of "presumed guilty."

So, I was able to determine to my own satisfaction that "credibly accused" (of sexual misconduct) was not a phrase invented for today's culture war battles, though the roots of its current popularity do seem to be in the 60s or 70s. But its current associations with sexual misconduct, I can't find a clearer history on. I do seem to recall seeing the phrase recently deployed against Donald Trump in connection with extant impeachment inquiries, also, but I can't find that article now, likely thanks to Ronan Farrow. So whatever its origins, it does seem to be steadily increasing in popularity.

But it does look like rhetorical sleight-of-hand to characterize allegations as "credible accusations." And I am left wondering when the phrase made the transition from "a way of distinguishing between spurious and plausible stories" to "a way of taking the victim's side." The timeline seems to very roughly track America's coming apart. If we assembled a list of similar rhetorically-weaponized phrases from today's culture wars and ran them through Google Ngrams or similar, would it parallel these charts?

Social networks especially for men have been on steep decline since the 70's. A highly accredited academic wrote about it a while back and he got shit for some reason because he partially blamed multiculturalism. Even if you dismiss the multiculturalism angle which I do his research was very well done and shows a bleak picture of the American social landscape. Charles Murray also wrote about this stuff in Coming Apart.

https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518974854&sr=1-1&keywords=coming+apart

I will add that the reason men have struggled more with this is because men's groups are exclusive rather then inclusive. Or rather the inclusiveness is based on some metric. I.e we all lift, or we all ride bikes together, or we all enjoy climbing. Female social groups are inclusive. You're welcome here no matter what you do as long as you don't do anything to rock the boat.

Surprisingly both groups are still hierarchical. Female social groups rank hierarchy by the most social person that distributes rewards with equal allocations. Male social groups reward the man that gives out the most the equitable shares.

Explained more simply women give each person in the group an entire pie and the most popular is the one that finds the pie shop. Men work together to make a pie and the leader is the one who carves up the pie and gives it out fairly. I.e. the males that contributed the most ingredients or more involved in preparing the pie get bigger pieces. Men that take the pie all for themselves or give up the pie to others are considered too dominant or too weak.

This goes all the way back to male apes going on hunts while female apes stayed back and waited for meat to be brought to them.

Our modern society is shifted to favor the female schema over the male one and men will suffer until more balance is reached.

First off, I don't think it's helpful to take the hard position of "there is a war on boys/men" unless you can thoroughly argue that position. A "War" implies aggressors and defenders which puts people you're trying to convince on the defensive. Even if you believe it's true, taking such a hard position without having your arguments air tight just defeats your purpose. Even if you do have your arguments on point, it's easy for people to use a strawman to say you think women are oppressing men. Even worse they will take you as saying women seeking equality oppresses men, or that you're saying men are powerless, then dismiss your claims based on that misunderstanding.

I would recommend making a softer assertion along the lines of "the well being of men has been declining in the Western world." That softer claim is much easier to defend, just look at suicide rates, incarceration rates, education stats, life expectancy rates etc. Take an approach that is closer to "we are all int his together so we should all want both men and women to do well and right now men need help." That triggers the leftist desire for collectivism and cooperation.

Tucker Carlson is running a Men in America segment every Wednesday this month about how men are in trouble these days. He provides a ton of stats and statistics on the topic. I'll edit this if I can find links to the segments.

March 7 Tucker: Something ominous is happening to men in America

March 14 Tucker: Washington not worried about male wage crisis

With any of these books, I highly recommend looking up video interviews with the authors to get more information and to see how they condense their arguments.

The war against boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers.



Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters Paperback –
by Helen Smith PhD

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 Paperback – January 29, 2013
by Charles Murray


The gender gap stuff has been going on since the 1970s. Economist Thomas Sowell, student of Milton Friedman, has been explaining how asinine the claim is for decades. Here he is dismantaling it back in the 1970s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_sGn6PdmIo

[Here is another take down from more recently.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EK6Y1X_xa4
) This interview covers his book Economic
Facts and Fallacies, the chapter Male-Female Facts and Fallacies would be a good resource for you to read and take notes on concerning the pay gap myth. Here are some good quotes from that chapter.

>“History shows that the career paths of women over the course of the twentieth century bore little resemblance to a scenario in which variations in employer discrimination explain variations in women’s career progress.”

> “The proportion of women in professions and other high-level positions was greater during the first decades of the twentieth century than in the middle, all before anti-discrimination laws or the rise of the feminist movement.” Further, “There is no pay gap for full-time workers 21-35 living alone,” and, “As far back as 1969, academic women who never married earned more than academic men who never married.”

>In another study, from 2005, “Among college-educated never married individuals with no children who worked full time and were from 40 to 64 years old, men averaged $40,000 a year and women $47,000.” What, then, explains cases when the numbers tilt the other way?

Here is a transcript of the above interview. Here is a good one...

>Interviewer: Well, you're right. I'm gonna quote you again. "Among the many factors which influence male-female economic differences, the most elusive is employer discrimination."

>Dr. Sowell: Yes, that when you correct for all the various factors such as the number of hours worked, the continuous employment versus taking a few years out to have children and so on, you take all that into account, the differences between men and women become quite trivial. If you look at the academic world or as far back in 1969, women who were
never married and earn higher incomes than men would never marry. They became
tenure professor at a higher rate than men who would never marry. And then later on if
you look at the general population, if you take the women who are past the childbearing
years and they work continuously, their incomes were higher than men who would work
continuously and so on. So the difference is that not that the employer is paying them
differently, but that they have different characteristics.

>Interviewer: So, the central variable and explaining economic differences between men and
women is not employer discrimination, not the rise of feminism, it's that women--it's
child rearing, marriage and child rearing, that's the variable.

>Sowell: Yes.

>Interviewer: As that varies, a woman's arrival or participation rate in higher level occupations
varies with that, that's—

>Sowell:Absolutely.

>Interviewer: Okay. Now in principle, you note, family responsibilities could be perfectly evenly divided between fathers and mothers. But that isn't the way it has worked in practice.
Quote, I'm quoting you again. "Since economic consequences follow from practices
rather than principles, the asymmetrical division of domestic responsibilities produces
male-female difference in income." Question, what are the policy implications of that?
If we become fixed on eliminating male-female income differences, is it the case that the
only choice, the only route for doing that is to involve the government in redesigning the
very nature of the family?










The Pay Gap Myth and Other Lies That Won’t Die
By THOMAS SOWELL

Thomas Sowell takes down the gender 'wage' gap


***

Milton Friedman - Case Against Equal Pay for Equal Work - Professor Friedman explains how support for "equal pay for equal work" helps promote sexism.

This is an interesting argument but to fully understand what he is referring to you need to understand that minimum wage laws have traditionally been used as a way to oppress weaker social groups.
If there is any work where being a man or being a woman makes an individual more qualified for a job or better suited to the job, then the only power the unsuited party has is to offer to work for less money. If you insist on equal pay though you remove that one economic incentive the less desired group has to convince someone to hire them, they cost less.

This is captured well in the generally true claim "No man hates another more than he loves himself." You can be the biggest racist or sexist in the world but it's very rare for that prejudice to be motivating enough that you would see your business where you derive your livelihood and the security of your children fail just to spite someone. There are so many examples of very racist people putting their prejudices aside in order to hire minorities simply because it's cheaper to do so. Establishing equal pay or minimum wage laws completely removes the economic incentive to put your own prejudices aside. They remove greed as a motivating factor for giving people opportunity.

Economist Walter E Williams has written a book on this called South Africa's War Against Capitalism based on his study of the country during apartheid. Milton is making a similar argument against equal pay as Williams did concerning minimum wage. Williams point was that if you have racism in a society where people are irrationality predisposed not to hire a certain group, then the only power that group has to get a job is to offer to work for less. That's why white, racist labor unions have always been the ones to push minimum wage laws when confronted by a minority population competing for jobs. You saw the same thing happen in the US when black men moved North and competed with white laborers for railroad jobs. The white unions pushed for our first minimum wage laws which removed the economic incentive from employers to hire minorities.

If you take the feminist argument seriously, that there is rampant sexism in certain industries, then it makes no sense to force those industries to pay women an equal amount. Rather than hiring them despite their sexism because they can pay them less, those employers will simply stop hiring women altogether because they hate women. To me this shows the irrationality of the claims that feminist make about sexism being the cause of a lack of representation in certain fields. It's not because of sexism but because of self-selection. In countries with higher levels of gender equality you see even higher rather of self-selection in jobs. There are far more women in tech in countries that rate low on women's rights. Russia for example.

Economist Walter E Williams - Minimum Wage as a Racist Tool 2:20

What about hearing him speak about his most recent (incredibly relevant) works?

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

Very highly received by scholars and non-academics, btw.

/u/jiveraffe gives a decent answer below, but I'll add to it. You see, it's not just about money, though money is a part. Charles Murray in his book Coming Apart (great, great read; quick, too) makes the point that smart, educated people such as yourself are living separated from the "common folk" in a thicker and thicker bubble. You are, in essence, a bit divorced from the reality of the average person. After all, you and all your friends are in STEM fields. Go here to drive the point home, the top fifty most common jobs in America.

I totaled the numbers, that's about 70 million jobs right there. I didn't spot anything even incidentally related to STEM, but that's the sort of stuff that most people do. And then consider that most of the so-called "STEM" jobs, aren't, so people such as yourself are even more rare than some statistics might show.

Moreover, I'd be willing to bet that your household income is, at minimum, 4 times the median household income.

My general point is that we all lose all sense of perspective when thinking about the world. Everybody thinks they're average, even the outliers.

Some of this has to do with the phenomenon that Charles Murray described in Coming Apart. In short, increasing social stratification, and the collapse of community and social capital among those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. That concurs with this study - Christians with less education are still more likely to consider religion important, but are also less likely to go to church.

So this isn't cause for celebration ("yay, educated people are still Christian, take that, people who believe that education causes secularization"), but rather a symptom of a disaster that's striking less educated people. As both Ross Douthat and Peter Beinart have pointed out, a post-religious right (and a post-religious politics in general) is cause for concern, for everyone.

Well, to borrow from Charles Murray, "Fishtown" just told "Belmont" to fuck off.

Literally a book:

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

Charles murray, author of the bell curve:

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

Although this focuses on the white working class, this is a critical component of the analysis

Camille Paglia, noted feminist:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/paglia-transgender-civilizations-decline/

These two would be considered fairly “oppositional” to each other

However, there is plenty of research from many think tanks showing the decline of the family and some possible reasons for it from AEI to Brookings

Edit/response: Your comment has corrected a factual error I have made. I'm not Canadian and thus I spoke from assumption based upon a shared British tradition. In this case, it's not the courts being stripped of power, but rather the bill is too vague and divests interpretation to the existing provincial policy. It is these existing provincial policies that are incoherent and ideologically driven. I think parts of my my point still stands thou, this is not a bill that empowers and strengthens marginalized people, it feels more like a token gesture to make politicians look like they're doing something.

As for "cultural elite", my line of thinking was influenced by Harris and Murry's conversation based on Murry's work in Coming Apart, where the experiences of those making decisions are so far removed from the realities of life for the masses that they find it impossible to see society through any ideological lens than their own.

I would also like to say I'm one of these ignorant "cultural elites", privileged with a educational opportunities that my peers missed out on. After a worrying rise of nationalistic/anti-immigration sentiments in our Australian election followed by Brexit than the US Elections, I was lost and confused. The education I received was failing in its translation and the utopia I though should occur never materialized. It was only though a chance encounter with Peterson's JRE #877 that I got the first big "Ah ha!" moment since I read "The GNU Manifesto" and "Manufacturing Consent" as an impressionable highschooler decades ago.

Peterson's lecture series on Personality and Maps of Meaning presented a nuanced, high resolution explanation for our current chaotic cultural and the forces behind them. He then presents a powerful set of steps that the individual can take that are grounded in practical psychology, evolutionary biology and mythic symbolism. For example, after almost two decades of education I have never heard anything as power as his explanation on why students should be taught to write.

Anyway, sorry for the long edit and thank you /u/Statistical_Insanity for braving the down-votes in this partisan sub-reddit. I hope you join /u/yahooyellow in subscribing and continuing to contribute. Lively, honest (and sometimes messy) intellectual debate is truly what the world needs more of.

> what are practical options to get out of poverty?

Save up enough to move somewhere where you can surround yourself with people who are better off and learn from them. My extended family is mostly hillbillies from West Virginia. The only ones to "make it good" were the ones who escaped the cycle by fleeing the state with family, friends, the military, or even all alone with nothing but a bus ticket, and an urgent desire to work as hard and long as necessary to break the cycle.

I am a child of a single mother who made that leap at enormous personal sacrifice, and am grateful to her for doing so.

Unfortunately, even making that move requires above-average intelligence. The technology economy has created an intellectual meritocracy. Since IQ is mostly -- or perhaps exclusively -- a heritable trait, we've in fact created a family-based caste system in the USA being spread in the name of "democracy" throughout the world.

Rebellion against this ostensibly meritocratic system and the intellectual elites self-interestedly promoting it as "equal" creates predictable populist sentiment ranging from the relatively benign, incompetent reign of Donald Trump to the genocide of suspected intellectuals by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

How does this relate to financial independence? It's in the best interest of anyone investing their money and intending to retire early to foster a stable society that can consistently profit and innovate. The society we've created is one with rich technologists at or near the top of the heap and a growing chasm of outrage dividing the political spectrum. How does one promote a financially-independent viewpoint in a way that enhances personal futures without destroying the social fabric that allowed its creation?

I would say all of the above, but I'm unsure on economic security. There is no demographic group that is poorer today in real terms than they were a generation ago, even if they aren't advancing near as fast as we would like.

There is a general consensus that getting married improves one's financial position, due to the division of labor and generally lower time preference that come with such a relationship. The nature of our current welfare system doesn't help - in controlled experiements were families randomly receive welfare, those receiving payments break up at a higher rate.

Charles Murray's recent book "Coming Apart" deals with exactly this sort of topic:

http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

I think that internet has likely advanced these trends. In the 'real world', even with traditional values on the decline, there are still heavy social pressures to live certain lifestyles, and it's hard to move just to get away from the judgement of your neighbors. At the same time, if you're living a responsible married life focused on the future, you're also likely to be surrounded by people with similar values who reinforce your chosen path.

Moving life online has had the effect of accelerating 'liberal' values. Reddit is the best example of the internet formula in action, but the effect is the same almost everywhere. Attention is allocated very intensely, breifly, and semi-randomly. Speed is rewarded over quality. Outside of the smaller subreddits, the top posts are lowest-common-denomenator content that can be upvoted fast. It seems plausible to me that those who are coming of age in this culture will have relationships in a similar fashion, especially as those relationships are just more content experienced digitally.

At the same time, the positive community effect is being subverted. Any judgment can be avoided, and any validation obtained, on the social networks of the web. To the individual, all lifestyles are now effectively laid out on the table in front of him, with none being consistently labeled as 'the right way'. It should not surpise us that when short-term satisfaction is presented as an equal choice to long-term committment, few choose the longer-term option. (This has been studied as well). It is especially harder to keep to the 'slow' lifestyle when the internet offers an endless stream of other people living the 'good' life right now. Saving for retirement or future kids is not a very attractive option when you're bombarded with images of your friends new cars or vacations.

Your dad reads Charles Murray and other conservative/libertarian social scientists, too?

Well anyways, here's a NRx reading list I'm slowly making my way through...

​



Introduction

The Dark Enlightenment Defined*
The Dark Enlightenment Explained*
The Path to the Dark Enlightenment*
The Essence of the Dark Enlightenment*
An Introduction to Neoreaction*
Neoreaction for Dummies*

Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell*
The Dark Enlightenment – Nick Land*

The Neoreactionary Canon

The Cathedral Explained*

When Wish Replaces Thought Steven Goldberg *

Three Years of Hate – In Mala Fide***

****

The Decline

We are Doomed – John Derbyshire*
America Alone – Mark Steyn*
After America – Mark Steyn*
Death of the West – Pat Buchanan***
The Abolition of Britain – Peter Hitchens

****

Civil Society and Culture

Coming Apart – Charles Murray
Disuniting of America – Arthur Schlesinger
The Quest for Community – Robert Nisbet
Bowling Alone – Robert Putnam
Life at the Bottom – Theodore Dalrymple
Intellectuals and society – Thomas Sowell

****

Western Civilization

Civilization: The West and the Rest – Niall Ferguson
Culture Matters – Samuel Huntington
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization – Ricardo Duchesne

****

Moldbuggery

Mencius Moldbug is one of the more influential neoreactionaries. His blog, Unqualified Reservations, is required reading; if you have not read Moldbug, you do not understand modern politics or modern history. Start here for an overview of major concepts: Moldbuggery Condensed. Introduction to Moldbuggery has the Moldbug reading list. Start with Open Letter series, then simply go from the beginning.*

****

​

yeah, the way I see it is that colleges should select the applicants who are both the most qualified and who will mutually help to create the best collegiate experience for their classmates. Racial quotas don't seem to have any rightful part in that, but affirmative action (which I agree with to some degree, though I think maybe it isn't executed very well and may actually be harmful in some cases, as when people are put in situations where they cannot succeed) has skewed the proportions somewhat.

===

Geographic, racial, and ethnic diversity may also play a role in creating a better campus experience-- I've been reading Coming Apart and it covers how most of the cognitive talent in the US groups itself into Super Zips (really wealthy zipcodes usually bordered by equally or nearly as wealthy zipcodes), and that those elites are also producing a disproportionate amount of the cognitive talent in the next generation (I believe this is true across all races). So selecting merely on cognitive ability would lead to a disproportionate amount of people raised in this new elite bubble being admitted into the top tier colleges, which would probably have negative effects on the campus experience. It's a tricky issue.

The after effects, sure. But I don't think you can make the case that racism is the primary thing keeping black people down today. For example, take the period between the civil war and the civil rights act of 1964. Black people advanced socially in that time period much more quickly than in the period since the civil rights act, despite the fact discrimination was both legal and extremely common, at least in the south. This tells me there's something else going on. You can see a lot of the problems that plague the black community also plague some white communities, namely crime, poverty, and drug use. Charles Murray writes about said white communities here. And they appear to have similar causes, poor work ethic, single parenthood, and so on. As Thomas Sowell points out,, black culture and redneck culture aren't as dissimilar as you might think.

I don't really know. My guess would be something described by Charles Murray in his new book (https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X): essentially, there is a segment of the country who is practicing stable, traditional paths of structuring their life like long term stable marriages, raising children in two parent households, etc, and there is a segment of the country which is not, and the former group is building a virtuous cycle, while the latter group is stuck in a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon likely has many many causes, but I suspect some of which are the decline of religion and the lack of alternative value systems to replace it in certain smaller communities, the prevalence and ease of escapes from socially-bonding activities like video games and drugs, the dramatic restructuring of economic activity away from traditional jobs to more dynamic creative type jobs.

The US is a much bigger place than the European countries, with a smaller social safety tradition, so these differences are probably more exaggerated in the US.

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X

I found this book to be very interesting on the topic. It doesn't set forth a specific solution, but does a good explanation of how we are coming apart in America.

>Guns were fine pre-brown invasion. The gun violence problem is directly and indirectly because of the Browns. They are committing most of the violence and brown diversity is a black cloud over all of society that creates despondence and erodes social trust everywhere.

Only partially true. Yes, the increased racial diversity in our society is contributing to the lack of social trust, as proven by Robert Putnam's work - which in turn is corrupting the morality and mental health of White people. But White culture itself has gone to shit in America, as proven by Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Both of which were largely caused by Jews [1][2][3][4][5]. White people have been morally corrupted and demographically and economically assaulted by Jewish-backed intellectual movements like liberalism and neoconservatism, and so they're increasingly turning to despair by becoming drug addicts, committing suicide, and lashing out at our pozzed society by becoming mass shooters.

> What does "relentlessly pro-immigration" mean?

Call everyone who's for immigration restriction a racist? Basically if you think Trump "disqualifies" himself by suggesting that illegal immigrants be deported you're prob. a progressive extremest.

> Who, specifically, is giddy about "replacing" the population of the USA?

Progressives who want a one party state, based off demographic changes? Kind of people who write these articles?

> No. We don't have the evidence to justify this conclusion.

I'm sorry you don't think we 'have evidence' to say that " those who don't see PC as a problem are the group most likely to also be in favor of it?" Wouldn't this just be common sense?

Do you think people who do see PC as a problem are likely to be in favor of it???

> I'm having trouble following your argument. Are you saying that Democratic Party candidates are to the left of the party's voting base?

I don't know how I can state this more clearly than I did:

If these is no gap in attitudes beliefs between progressives and their voting base why results of the answers to a simply question about political correctness differ so largely between 'ultra-progressives' and the majority of Democratic voters?

This question shouldn't be a difficult one to comprehend.

> Who are these "extreme progressives" you keep referring to? It seems like you're using it as a stand-in for more well-to-do progressives.

I'm not, I'm talking about specifically the group outlined in the Atlantic article.

> Why might well-to-do progressives see PC as less of a problem? I can think of a few explanations that have nothing to do with "extremism."
>
>Perhaps well-to-do progressives are more likely to be educated on the subject of systemic oppression.
>
>Perhaps well-to-do progressives are more likely to be neoliberals who care more about social/identity issues than economic/structural issues.
>
>Perhaps well-to-do progressives, more likely to have been exposed to different types of people and a greater variety of perspectives in a higher education setting, are more likely to be sympathetic to "political correctness" insofar as it means trying to be considerate of what offends other people who aren't like them.

A) More likely to buy into the theory of 'systematic oppression' that downplays the importance of cultural or genetic differences between populations for a conspiracy about white power structures.

B) This one is likely true, but doesn't really counteract my point. One can still be 'extreme' and 'outside the mainstream' while not being a socialist/far-left on economic issues.

C) Most of the evidence suggests the opposite, that they are more likely to be ensconced in an echo chamber, largely out of touch with the lives of less privileged Americans due to their effective isolation ("Coming apart" being perhaps the best documentation of this).

I feel like I am repeating myself at this point but even if your particular, biased take is true, it doesn't really counteract my central point - there is every reason to believe that progressive policy makers are out of step with the majority of Americans on many, many issues.

> The fact is, we don't know. So my conclusions are just as valid, and probably a great deal more so, than yours.

Your conclusion that "We can't say that those people who are least likely to say PC is not a problem, are also the group that we can logically assume is most likely to be in favor of it" is a conclusion we cannot make assumptions about?

I think we may have reached the limits of the usefulness of this discussion.

The topic specifically says "DC Bars". A bazillion comments are talking about drinking. People from flyover country are amazed that it's socially acceptable to drink during the workday, but apparently this is not a big deal in DC. You just defended it yourself, and when I pointed it out, you suddenly changed the topic to restaurants. WTF?

> on an afternoon for lunch. I'm drinking. Gasp.

I'd get fired if I came back to work from lunch with alcohol on my breath. The fact that you consider it normal speaks volumes about how out of touch you are.

>I see you've never been poor! It doesn't work like that - when you are hand-to-mouth, you are highly stressed (for obvious reasons), and the stress of any such situation pretty much negates the ability to make foresightful long term plans - this is basically human psychology/physiology.

And yet sixty years ago, despite any demographic cross-section of the U.S. being poorer, this wasn't a problem. Marriage rates were higher among the lower class and single mothers were rarer.

I've become tired of this obscurantism and denialism surrounding the social issues of the poor. Yes, I'm sure in any cross-section of the United States, the poor have it worse, and are more stressed out and so forth. I don't doubt that in psychology, stressed people make worse decisions. That still doesn't explain the disparities of the world around us.

The United States, despite its problems, still has the richest poor people in the world. They work fewer hours on average than they did in generations past, and live in healthier environments. Despite this, I'm to believe that the reason they're all making worse life decisions than their grandparents is because of the crushing stress of their relative poverty?

People poorer than them, even living in an age without plentiful condoms and legal abortion, managed to have fewer kids outside of marriage and say together. At some point we must dispense with vague appeals to the miasma of poverty - this is about values, institutions, and a civil society in disrepair. The white working class has become totally disconnected in their values and behavior from the generations that came before them. They aren't lacking money; They need shame, discipline, and the fear of god.