Hot Meat Injection

Watching Ross Douthat discover that the practical mores of the underclass are, well, practical, is as amusing as a twelve-car pile-up and just as messy. They must be seriously easing off the core requirements at Harvard, since the easy-spreading legs and loosey-goosey ways of the peasantry are as native to the English stage comedy as puns and breeches. Libertinage and moral rectitude are inventions of the aristocracy. The common people have always made do, and made the best, of what was available--to their credit, by the way. To paraphrase the youth of our day: moral philosophy is gay.

I don't have to tell you that Douthat misses the obvious implication of all this, which is not that the voices of the un-college'd crowd are under-amplified in the debating society of the so-called culture wars, but that a majority of Americans are non-participants in the great, ongoing farce that Douthat et al. imagine to be the national conversation, in other words, democracy. If marriage as an economic institution is disappearing--and it is--among the used-to-be-working class, then that is because it serves Douthat's class; whereas, in the industrial economy, married, single-earner households served a necessary and stabilizing purpose within the workforce, Money now views stability and mutual support within the lower orders as dangerous, not in the least because the bonds of family and community are the first steps to, whisper it softly, organization. Douthat laments the passing of the Catholic Church among the "ethnic working classs". He obviously fails to mention its corollary: the labor movement.