Decline of the English Working Class

Why has the white working class in America not decayed morally as fast as the English working class? My new VDARE column is online here. An excerpt:

Remember the tale of how to boil a frog? Just keep raising the temperature imperceptibly so the frog never notices it's being boiled alive. (Don't try this at home, kids.) Something similar happened in England, where society fell apart so slowly that elite opinion had time to get used to each new outrage.

In contrast, the U.S. murder rate doubled in just ten years—from 1964 to 1974. African-Americans served not as the frog in the pot but as the canary in the coalmine.

The welfare state took decades after its introduction in 1945 to corrupt the English. But the American liberal innovations of the 1960s, such as generous welfare for single mothers and shorter prison sentences, had such an immediately catastrophic effect on black morals that within a decade and a half, "liberal" had permanently become a term of abuse in American politics.

Way back in 1968, Richard Nixon ran on a law and order platform, somewhat like Michael Howard's in 2005. Granted, Nixon didn't do much about crime, but eventually the outraged public got its way. The quadrupling over the last third of a century of the prison population helped bring about the fall in crime in the later 1990s. The welfare reform of 1996 also has had a good effect on morals.

Class vs. Race. The central divide in Britain is class—in America, it's race. And that has had a little understood salutary effect on white working class Americans.

In England, the sons of maharajas were often more welcome at Eton and Oxford than the sons of fishmongers. Similarly, in the last couple of decades, blacks have been more welcomed into the working class in Britain than in America—because British working class identity centers on not acting like a toff. The entrance requirements to the working class are amiably relaxed—no need for "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" elocution lessons. If you like 'aving a pint with your mates at the pub while watching Arsenal on the telly, well, you're halfway home.

Likewise, English youth see the gangsta rap lifestyle as a bit of a lark (as brilliantly parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen's brainless wigger Ali G). In contrast, white working class Americans view it, based on the abundant evidence provided by American blacks, as a one-way ticket to prison and the grave.

America upper middle class white liberals constantly sneer at working class whites as racists. And, indeed, most respectable working class whites do work hard to prevent their children from absorbing black underclass values. Affluent liberals are so well insulated from poor blacks that they don't have to worry that their college-bound kids will take gangsta rap's ethos seriously. But poorer whites don't have that luxury.

These anti-black feelings among the white working class have helped keep their young from turning to crime.

For example, Chicago was the white crime capital of the world 75 years ago during Al Capone's day—before the Great Migration of blacks to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta. Unlike most Northern cities, Chicago has hung on to a sizable white working class.

But the descendents of the minor mobsters of Al Capone's era today disdain crime, viewing it as a "black thing," because, although blacks and whites are about equal in number in Chicago, blacks are almost an order of magnitude more common behind bars in the Windy City. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer