Essay on the New American Divide by Charles Murray
- Explain why Murray constructs fictional versions of these places and why he limits his data set to non-Latino whites ages thirty to forty five.
The New American Divide is an article published by author Charles Murray in the Wall Street Journal and other internet and physical publications. It talks about the great cultural inequality that has existed in the United States since the 1960s. According to Murray, “the ideal of an American way of life is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion, and the upper class becomes more isolated” . It talks about the general cultural and social trend that the United States of America has been following since the 1960s. It is important to recognize that the trend line of majority of the social and cultural factors he discussed in his work started from the 1960s and ended in 2008, the year before the United States’ financial markets collapsed due to severe asset illiquidity which triggered a global financial crisis creating ripples across the entire world economy’s financial markets, among other industries affected. The idea behind setting such timeframe in his study is so that he can weed out the possible external factors that existed prior to the 1960s and after the great financial crisis. The start time (1960), for example, was selected because it marked an era where a significant number of social and cultural reforms have been implemented while the period where his study ended (2008) was chosen because Murray thought that the effects of the great financial crisis would most likely blur his analysis of America’s cultural and social deterioration. Specifically, he chose the year 2008 as the end point of the trend to avoid mixing up the effects of the various phenomena that happened during the latest recession with the effects of the variables, factors, and trends he discussed in his work. This is one of the many evidences that Murray takes the data gathering part of his work seriously.
Theoretically, there are more than two divisions of America’s social or cultural classes; however, since the focus of Murray’s article was not really the social classes but the gap that allegedly exists between the new upper and the new lower class, having two distinct points of comparison would indeed prove to be the easier to understand choice to make. Specifically, he chose to use the fictional community of Belmont to describe the social class that comprise 20% of the while American population of the U.S. aged 30 to 49 years old; and the fictional community of Fishtown to describe the social class that constitute about 30% of the white American population in the U.S. aged 30 to 49.
At one point in his article, he used the following statement “I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the United States have become; cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity; I Specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement” .
This is the answer to the second part of the first essay question. To explain it further, the main reason why he used the non-Latino whites as the main target population in his article is to weed out the possible conflicts and discrepancies that may arise if he was to use two or more cultural groups (aside from the non-Latino white that he already mentioned) in his study.
Talking about and studying phenomena associated with two or more cultural minority groups can be considerably more complex compared to doing the same thing with a single cultural minority group only. To sum it up, the reason why he chose this particular population group as a focus is so that he could create a well-controlled environment from which he could draw more valid and reliable conclusions.
- Discuss the logic and the rhetorical effectiveness of these strategies
It may be safe to say that Murray worked so hard to make his article entry in The Wall Street Journal easier to understand from the readers. It may also be safe to say, from the point of view of a skeptic, that one of the reasons he did so is so that he would not have to conduct a highly intensive data gathering campaign just so he can literally compare the different factors and variables that exist between each of America’s real and non-fictional communities and or social classes.
In his article entry for the Wall Street Journal, it can be remembered that he featured a discussion of only two American communities or social classes each of which depict either the new higher or the new lower class. Additionally, these two American communities were a product of fiction. The most possible answer to the question why he chose to present information gathered from two fictional American communities instead of from the various real and non-fictional American communities is so that readers would not be overwhelmed by the amount of data they would most likely see.
Considering that he did not conduct any form of data gathering procedure that targets America’s real social communities, the information he presented to the readers may well be considered to be fictional as well. This means that the use of fictional U.S. communities may have been a bad idea in terms of the logical and rhetorical effectiveness because he did not exactly show how he gathered the data he presented considered that the populations or communities he studied were fictional. It is however worthwhile to note that authors of other entries about the gap between the elite and the lower social classes in the United States have come up with almost similar findings. In one article by Smith (2014), he stated that America’s wealth gap has corrupted the nation’s system of justice, fostering a legal schizophrenia that harshly prosecutes the poor but practices selective leniency on Wall Street” .
On a more positive note, Murray’s decision and or strategy to use non-Latin white Americans aged 30 to 49 as the focus of his analysis of the gap between the two fictional American communities’ trend of social and cultural deterioration was effective both logically and rhetorically. This is because by doing so, Murray has effectively weeded out the different possible factors and or variables that may have clouded his analysis of the gap between the alleged new upper and new lower class in mainstream America.
The only problem that his overall strategy has is his use of fictional American communities. Specifically, he did not clarify how he was able to observe and obtain information from two fictional American communities? Does this mean that the information he presented were also fictional? How exactly did he study and obtained information from two fictional American communities or social classes? These were some of the important questions that he failed to answer that presents as a logical and or rhetorical limitation of his work.
Works Cited
Murray, C. „The New American Divide.” The Wall Street Journal (2012): 01. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.
Smith, H. „The Divide: American Inustice in the Age of Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi.” The Washington Post (2014): 01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-divide-american-injustice-in-the-age-of-the-wealth-gap-by-matt-taibbi/2014/04/11/66a1e7c8-b291-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html.
