It’s no secret that America’s working classes - more broadly, those without college degrees and professional jobs - have been living increasingly socially dysfunctional lives. This was documented well by Robert Putnam in Our Kids and Charles Murray in Coming Apart.
Just as one example, America has the highest share of its children living in single parent households of any country in the world. This has profound negative consequences for our country.
One popular culprit for this is a decline in adherence to “bourgeois values” or bourgeois culture. We see these values described well in Amy Wax’s controversial Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed on the subject:
Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries. The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.
That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
Failure to valorize and adhere to bourgeois values is part of the conservative theories about the “culture of poverty.”
Bourgeois values are a modernized and secularized version of those of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic. For a deeper exploration of America’s traditional Protestant ethic, see my essay from last year:
Bourgeois values is actually a good term for them because they are associated with the bourgeois economy, that is to say, capitalism, particularly capitalism as it existed prior to roughly the Great Depression.
The problem is that America is now a post-bourgeois country, both economically and culturally. This poses significant challenges to those, such as myself, who want to both reduce social dysfunctions like drug abuse and generally elevate the health, flourishing, and productivity of our people.
I will trace this American post-bourgeois shift across three dimensions:
- From a Protestant to a post-Christian culture
- From a bourgeois to a managerial economy
- From a production to a consumption based society
Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Photo: cropped image from portrait of Benjamin Franklin, National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia in Public Domain.
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