(The Federalist)
Racial stalemate stems partially from distorted memories of what catalyzed revolutionary change. Refashioning the 1950s through the fantastical lens of the 1960s, many in the New Left hallucinated that white men seeking to satisfy sexual urges without guilt were like black people resisting the Ku Klux Klan and state-imposed repression in the Deep South. Promiscuity and sleaziness were seen as allies of black liberation rather than as social traps.
Kevin Phillips’ 2002 book “Wealth and Democracy” graphs what happened to wealth inequality starting in the 1970s. For several decades, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, poverty had been high but income inequality had been low. Between the 1970s and 1990s these trends reversed. Official poverty rates dropped but the statistical gap between the wealth of the uppermost American elites and the middle class ballooned to the frightening scale of the Gilded Age. Racial inequality reflected this trend. By the 1990s, median household wealth for whites was $18,100, contrasted against $200 for black families and $0 for Latino families.
Marxists contend that this slide could be traced to expansion of multinational corporations and globalized “late capitalism.” Equally valid but often ignored is the objection by social conservatives: The Eisenhower years saw a powerful chastity culture, which resulted in stable households. This enabled families to amass private equity in homes, savings, and automobiles.
Although the children of these 1950s parents ended up reveling in no-fault divorce and rampant promiscuity, the nest eggs trickled down as family inheritances. White families by and large enjoyed the lasting benefits of 1950s chastity culture, whereas most of today’s Latino families did not have ancestors in the country by the 1950s; their parents or grandparents immigrated to an America that was already sexually decadent and plagued by divorce.
Black families of the era were prevented from reaping the benefits of Christian chastity because of institutionalized racism. The civil rights movement shattered the apparatus of Jim Crow, but the sexual revolution shattered the stable culture that would have allowed them to build what white families built during the Eisenhower era.
Read the full article HERE.
Read the full article HERE.