The Right-Wing Propagandist Charles Murray Exposes the Truth About Conservatives -- They Hate Poor People, White and Black

The article first appeared in the Philadelphia City Paper. Click here to read more great content from them. 

Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.

Murray published summaries of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 in the Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the “Founding virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses “Fishtown” as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with “no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.”

Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of “successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation’s economy, media, intellectual life, and politics.” Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.

He says that the real Fishtown went from “a tightly knit, family oriented, hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-fighting blue-collar neighborhood” in the 1950s  to a “a neighborhood that had experienced the decline of industriousness among males, the drop in marriage, rise in nonmarital births, rise in crime, and falling away from religion” today.

He fails to note the the decline in “industriousness” parallels a breathtaking decline in actual industry. 

Thanks to deindustrialization there are far fewer good jobs today for people in Fishtown than there were in his 1950s glory days. While Occupy Wall Street condemns corporate greed for fueling Gilded Age-style income inequality, Murray blames working-class people in places like Fishtown for their problems.

Fishtown, and the broader neighborhood of Kensington of which it is a part, have been at the epicenter of the city's deindustrialization, a process that began in the 1950s and wiped out what was once The Workshop of the World. It is hard to know to what degree Murray is a cynical liar and to what degree he really believes it when he says, referring to the 1980s and 90s, “These reductions in work hours occurred in years when men could find work for as many hours as they wanted to work.” 

That was not the case in Fishtown, and it was not the case for most of working class America: crappy service jobs with low wages and few or no benefits replaced secure union manufacturing jobs.

His argument that religious piety is the key to working class well-being also rankles. The U.S. has much less “social mobility”―the ability, for example, of someone born poor to make it out of poverty―than European countries like Denmark, a country that happens to be one of the least religious countries in the world. But whatever.

Murray might be a hack, but he's far more than a run-of-the-mill crank: his books have impact. Losing Ground, published in 1984, argued that welfare is the primary cause of poverty, stoking Reagan's make-believe stories about Cadillac driving welfare queens and later, the virtual abolition of welfare by Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans in 1996.