A few weeks ago, a law professor at Penn co-wrote with a law professor at the University of San Diego an op-ed in the Philly Inquirer entitled “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture”
She has a point regarding valuing education, hard work, and marriage, but oh boy does she gloss over a lot of bad things to get there. She could have easily made an argument without courting controversy, which makes me suspect that she wanted people to be outraged. It’s certainly gotten her name out there, hasn’t it?
Isn’t the Bourgeois" culture what Americans still aspire to be a part of?
Isn’t that why, despite some inherent problems, why so many people still want to come here?
If this version of the American Dream has been replaced, what have we replaced it with?
The Wax and Alexander opinion seems to romanticize a vision of the late 1940s to early 1960s where the promoted “bourgeois culture” were supposedly almost universal. Whether it was actually almost universal is another question entirely.
That it ends with the following:
seems guaranteed to incite a reaction by suggesting that multicultural environments are somehow undesirable and incompatible with the promoted conservative social values.
What is interesting is that many immigrant populations come closer to these conservative cultural values than the overall native born American population. Yet many of those who claim to favor these cultural values are also quite politically hostile to immigrants.
The reality of the cultural experiences may have been different for many groups, but I don’t think there is much doubt that the values expressed were widely shared among all Americans until the late 1960s, as evidenced by public opinion polls at the time. That is clearly no longer the case.
During the 1950s, a surprisingly large percentage of the American population was living in abject poverty, often with no access to things like electricity, telephones, schools. Poverty was heavily weighted towards the elderly, and the South. Were those people being polled? Mexican migrant farmworkers? African-Americans? I’m not certain the polls were designed to capture what they thought.
The bigger problem I have with 1950s nostalgia – which is at the root of an awful lot of right-leaning ideology – is that it rests on a completely artificial, evanescent state of the world. Except for North America, the industrial capacity of the entire developed world had been almost completely destroyed, and was only slowly coming back into production. In addition to WWII, revolutions had disrupted political systems all over the world. No attempt was being made to identify or to internalize the environmental costs of production. Little or no attempt was being made to help impoverished communities improve, or to record their experience. So, sure, if you were a working white American during that period, life was pretty great, but you were blissfully unaware of the misery elsewhere (including the future) that was financing your prosperity.
Sorry I don’t have time to do the research for you, but as I recall polls from the 1950s by Gallup, etc showed substantial support among all groups for generally accepted values as then espoused. That is consistent with the practices of everything from the NAACP to the Southern Baptist leadership convention. Our of curiosity, do you know many people in their 70s and 80s (so the young adults in the 50s) who don’t or did not share those values, regardless of race, or religion? I know a lot of varied people in that age group who agree there was once broad consensus on these issues which has dissipated.
It’s not accidental that most traditionally “bourgeois” communities throughout history and geography are also the most chauvinistic, narrow-minded and intolerant. So I don’t buy this argument. In this, as in many other other areas, we need to strive for balance.
However, the popular modern sport of hitting anyone you don’t like with racism (or sexism) accusations makes me shiver. Read the history of literature and press in the Soviet Union in the 1920-30s, it will seem uncannily similar. Writers who were suspected of bourgeois sympathies and were not obviously aligned with the then-politically correct ideology were made to publicly renounce their sins if they wanted to be published or have a job (or survive - but that would come later).
And, again I ask, what have we replaced it with?
Does anyone doubt the article’s authors’ description our our alarming social problems:
violence, addiction, homelessness, pathetic public education options, lack of motivation and professional skills in young people, unaffordable housing, racial tensions, garbage and human waste defiling city sidewalks and roads …
I often find myself saying to my kids,“It didn’t use to be like this.”
I think there have been a number of recent books (Maybe hillbilly elegy?) That have asserted that it is the white middle class rejection of bourgeois values that explains much of the social dysfunction around us.
Maybe these values are rejected because they are are seen as becoming more and more unattainable.
So people stop making the effort and things fall apart.
Hillbilly Elegy, if anything, seems to advocate for a correction back to the traditional work ethic and self-reliance in the context of a supporting community.
Indeed, there seems to be a correlation between lead emissions from the tailpipes of cars using leaded gasoline and crime years later when the lead-exposed children became teenagers.
I do. I believe if you do a fair comparison of our situation today to our situation in the 1950s with all communities considered, things are not so clearly worse today. How many people today lack shoes? Electricity? Talk about “pathetic public education options” – how many people today have no public education option at all? Those were endemic issues in many regions of the country in the 1950s. Racial tensions and violence? Does lynching count? Garbage on the roads? There was a reason for the ubiquitous anti-litter campaigns that began in the 60s.
In terms of crime rates, most people of age to be parents of high school and college students today grew up in an era of much higher crime rates (1980s to early 1990s). Now, crime rates have fallen back considerably (as of 2015, total back to late 1960s levels, violent back to early 1970s levels, murder back to early 1960s levels), but people still seem to think that we are in the peak of the crime wave (1991) or that crime is even worse than then.
You want to call OUR time a PC culture? Sure, you didn’t throw “racism” at anyone you didn’t like but you know what you did throw? “COMMIE!!!” And many people lost a lot more than their reputation. It cost careers, families, and lives. People fled the country because they were afraid of HUAC. Journalists and educators were shut down and feared criticizing the government out of fear of becoming a target.
50s was also a time of intense fear. People legitimately believed an atom bomb could be dropped any time and that fear was used to control many aspects of the population. Example: THIS is a large part of the reason why there was such respect for “authorities.”
This was still rampant among MANY populations in the 50s. You know how a VERY certain segment of the population did really well? Massive government handouts to white men.
Want to go back to that? I’m all for a massive expansion of the welfare state that gives everyone the same opportunities.
The people screaming the loudest to go back to the 50s are also the same people who don’t want to implement the taxes to do so.
Also, in terms of “pathetic public education options”, remember that, in the 1950s, in many areas, some students were intentionally given inferior public education options compared to others in the same city or school district. There was a famous 1954 Supreme Court case on the subject.