I want a job at the New York Times.  It is clearly a place that pays people to be stupid.  David Brooks gives Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 a very nice review.  Coming Apart claims that there is a big divide between rich Americans and poor Americans.  I like Charles Murray, and think he is frequently brilliant, but the heads up for him here is that there are always divides.  They’ve been by class, geography, politics, culture, etc.  To look at income and NASCAR in 2012, is awfully limited.

But I was talking about Brooks.  Brooks is horrified by the divide and has a rousing, and “NYT stupid,” conclusion:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

And there you have my post title.  In the years between WWI and WWII and Vietnam, the big mixer-upper was the draft.  No draft, no mixing up.  We don’t have a new cultural divide.  We have an old, 19th Century era cultural divide.

Some are thinking the draft might be a good thing, but I don’t think our military deserves to have foisted upon it a random sampling of the current younger generation.

By the way, if you’re thinking that this is an unusually sour and snarky post, even by my standards, you’re right.  Both Brooks’ column and Murray’s premise rubbed me the wrong way.

When I was at Berkeley, I had only a few decent professors.  One of them (who was really wonderful) taught a British history class covering the period from 1760 to WWII.  He taught us that the Industrial Revolution, though it started in England, petered out.  It lacked the ferocity and longevity that characterized the American version of that same Revolution.

The professor’s explanation for this phenomenon was the class system. Since British workers could not raise themselves out of their class — since they could not live in the fancier neighborhoods or wear the “upper class” clothes — their acquisitiveness quickly maxed out.  Getting together a small nest egg, making sure the roof didn’t leak, having enough food, and being able to go to the pub for a pint were their goals, and those goals were fairly quickly satisfied.  With the vast majority of citizens neither buying nor striving to buy, the pure capitalism of America, which allows people to work and acquire to their heart’s content, just never kicked in.

Certainly when I moved to England some time later, my own observations bore out this same principle, and that was despite the fact that I lived there in the 1980s, not the 1880s.  Working class kids didn’t want champagne, they wanted fake orange drink.  They didn’t want fine leather shoes, they wanted punk boots.  They didn’t want to travel the world, they wanted to binge at the pub.  Their tastes remained simple, so they had little need to work hard or invest or to be innovative.  Add to that the fact that the Government readily provided enough funds for these limited tastes, and you had complete stagnation.

I’m waffling on about this point because of a wonderful batch of paragraphs in an IBD editorial taking apart Obama’s Marxist economic views:

In arguing for a heavier mix of government, he assumes that capitalism unfairly favors the rich, almost exclusively so, and fails to spread prosperity.

“The rich in America have little to complain about,” he carps. “The distribution of wealth is skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age.”

Obama cites data showing a yawning gap between the income of the average worker and the wealthiest 1%. He thinks it’s government’s job to step in and close it — “for purposes of fairness” — by soaking the rich, among other leftist nostrums.

“Between 1971 and 2001,” he complains, “while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500%.”

But such a snapshot comparison would be meaningful only if America were a caste society, in which the people making up one income group remained static over time.

Of course that’s not the case. The composition of the rich and poor in this country is in constant flux, as the income distribution changes dramatically over relatively short periods. Few are “stuck” in poverty, or have a “lock” on wealth.

As I see it, aside from being fundamentally wrong, Marxism, to the extent it has a smidgen of rightness in it, applies only to Europe and other stratified societies.  It has absolutely no place in the social fluidity that is America.  I guess this rather obvious point is one more reason explaining why Obama’s European junket was so well received abroad, but left him with fewer fans at home.

Maureen Dowd is perplexed:  How can Barack Obama, who grew up with a poor, single mother, keep appearing to be the black John Kerry, an effete Ivy Leaguer, out of touch with the ordinary voter? In her mind, it’s all the problem of a low class black kid have overlearned his lesson when he was forced (poor thing) to move amongst the wealthy white:

It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.

I think Dowd is barking up the wrong tree.  It’s not about money.  It’s about class.  Obama’s mother may have opted for poverty, but that’s not how she was raised.  She came from what appears to be a solid working-class family, and was a college grad.  Her husband, Barack’s father, may have been a Communist, but he was widely traveled, well-educated and apparently extremely bright.  In other words, these two were the new intelligentsia of the 1950s/1960s.  That’s a class thing.  The fact that Mom was a nutcase who drifted into marital and economic insecurity doesn’t change the patina of style that her solid background, augmented by a middle class education, gave her.

I can say all this with a certain amount of confidence.  My father was a truly dreadful breadwinner, so we were always living on a very thin financial margin.  I didn’t lose my jackets or complain when my shoes got tight, because I knew that, absent a hand-out from my grandmother, I wasn’t in line for new shoes or jackets.  We struggled.  BUT….

My Mom’s background was incredibly upper class.  On her father’s side, they were minor aristocracy, a benefit of his ancestors having been Hungarian court Jews.  On her mother’s side, she was descended from a wealthy Hanseatic trading family, and her grandfather was a wealthy banker.  Whatever her parents lacked in money (the declining fortunes of WWI, the Depression and WWII), they more than made up for in oodles of class.  I grew up knowing that I could dine comfortably with the queen, even if I couldn’t afford a dress for the ball.  I too am utterly lacking in beer-drinking finesse.

Obama and his parents may not have had the rarified upbringing my mother did, but he did not grow up wallowing in either Southern Black Jim Crow poverty, or Northern Black Detroit or Watts poverty, both concepts beloved of liberals when they think about American blacks.  Instead, he grew up in the middle to working class, the child and step child of intellectual elites.  He then compounded that class-ist sin by going to only the finest schools.  He comes by his elitism honestly, and it has nothing to do with money, the lack of money, or his having run to or escaped from his African-American genetic legacy.