Monday and Tuesday of this week, I wrote about the culture clashes between the first, second and third cultures at work in this country. The first is the traditional American culture that founded this nation and spread it from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond to Alaska and the islands, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and others such as the Virgin Islands.
The first culture is one of work, innovation, independence and reverence of God. The second is the child of those who detest the constitution because it limits and restricts their ambitions for power and dominance. They have a groups of dependents who have been enslaved by this would-be dictators. Collectively, they are statists and crony socialists.
The last culture is an import, islam. We opened our borders for the oppressed who sought freedom. Many came to this country since it’s beginning nearly 240 years ago. Most of those who came assimilated into the American culture and prospered. The third culture will not. They wish to impose their culture upon us; to make us subservient to them. Another form of slavery.
As I roam the internet, I’m finding more and more who also see these culture clashes. Their viewpoints and observations differ slightly but they still support my theme of growing culture clashes.
The article below by Michael Barone appeared on the Investors Business Daily editorial page. It’s well worth reading.
If you were listening reasonably carefully to last week’s Republican presidential candidate debate, you heard Rick Santorum say, “Charles Murray just wrote a book about this.”
The question was about Santorum’s remarks on contraception, but his answer addressed the broader issue of “the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America.” That is indeed one of the subjects — but only one — of Murray’s new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 to 2010.”
Murray is a distinguished social scientist, a brilliant miner of data and a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute. And he is no stranger to controversy.
His 1984 book “Losing Ground” helped inspire welfare reform in the 1990s. His 1994 book “The Bell Curve” (co-authored by Richard Herrnstein) drew spurious charges of racism, which is perhaps one reason why he limited “Coming Apart” to whites.
…
Murray’s argument is that we have seen a significant decline among whites in what he considers America’s founding virtues — industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity — over the last 50 years.
That decline has not been uniform among different segments of the white population, however.
Among the top 20% in income and education, Murray finds that rates of marriage and church attendance, after falling marginally in the 1970s, have plateaued out at a high level since then. And these people have been working longer hours than ever.
He labels this group Belmont, after the upscale Boston suburb.
Barone is writing to present the contrasts between Romney, who he includes in the Belmont group, and Santorum, who is in the Fishtown group.
In Fishtown, he reports, one-third of men age 30 to 49 are not making a living, one-fifth of women are single mothers raising children, and nearly 40% have no involvement in a secular or religious organization.
The result is that the children being raised in such settings have the odds heavily stacked against them. Santorum made this point vividly, and Mitt Romney chimed in his agreement.
These findings turn some conventional political wisdom on its head. They tend to contradict the liberals who blame increasing income disparity on free-market economics. In fact, it is driven in large part by personal behavior and choices.
They also undermine the conservatives who say that a liberation-minded upper class has been undermining traditional values to which more downscale Americans are striving to adhere. Murray’s complaint against upscale liberals is not that they are libertines but that they fail to preach what they practice.
The rest of the article continues to compare the similarities and differences between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. While that is an interesting topic for another post, it diverges from the center-point of this one.
What Michael Barone presents is more evidence of the continuing culture clashes across the country—economics in this particular study, but that study does support the theme of contradicting cultures in motion. The two groups Murray studied are really subsets of the first culture, or the traditional American culture. Change is being imposed on these two groups by the second and third cultures, economics, and government regulations that support a contrary agenda.
Infighting, such as we’ve seen between the “Belmont” ‘Pub establishment and the “Fishtown” candidates of Santorum, Gingrich, Cain and Bachman are a manifestation of segment clashes within the first culture.
Those must stop.
The Beltmonts, the establishment, views those of us from Fishtown with as much disdain as do our mutual enemies from the second and third culture. We are dividing our efforts fighting one another allowing the others to win.
That must stop.
The establishment must understand they are outnumbered by the Tea Parties. We will not be assimilated into the establishment collective because we see little difference between that establishment collective than those we oppose.
In contrast, we of the Tea Party, need the organizational base of the establishment. The establishment needs us because we are their base and we will be ignored at the establishment’s peril.
There can no longer be divisions between Belmont and Fishtown. If we are to survive, if we want to return this nation to its conservative roots and the vision on the founders, we can no long support this internecine warfare. We must merge to win our common view. Or perish.
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