The author isn't blaming the elite for the trend. In fact, he acknowledges that it has impacted all strata, even though the impact is greater at the lower end. What he's saying is that family stability is no longer a universal value. The thesis is that the elite set the fashion. He writes:
"Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant."
When you say that "low-income whites tend not to care for what the highly-educated and affluent think," there may be something to that at some level, but I think these are trivial levels. The elite make the laws and rules and systems, and we all live with those. I think that is beside the point, though. It's not that the elites are saying, "Start a family and stick with it," and therefor everyone else is acting out in protest; it's that the elites are not saying it.
"It's not that the elites are saying, "Start a family and stick with it," and therefor everyone else is acting out in protest; it's that the elites are not saying it."
I'm not sure what you mean here, though--like, my point is that elite rungs of society saying "Start a family and stick with it" is simply going to be irrelevant to a lot of the people the author is talking about. Would you disagree?
Like, operationally, what difference would it make? Would unemployed, lazy, drug-addled fathers unmarried to the mothers of their children get their act together if Obama had said they should more when he was POTUS? If professors at Stanford or Harvard or Brown started writing academic papers that touted this as correlated with success?
I think this is more than me just being sassy here; the author has, IMO, failed to articulate a nexus between the problematic behavior he is calling out and the on-the-ground results he laments.
The hints contained in the article about what he seems to think or imply a better situation would like just don't seem...realistic. E.g., the UN lady vocally and openly supporting stable family units and this making it into the final product of whatever they were doing--it just strikes me as nakedly preposterous that anything contained in a UN report would have a real impact on the individual behavior of anyone in America.
And I get that that's a very isolated example and that the aggregate effect of all those little interactions and omissions may be real, large, and worthy of serious attention. I just don't see the fundamental link between the phenomenon and the problems he is concerned with.
Again, I think the ultimate issue with the article is that the people he is talking about already aren't trying to strive by the criteria of whatever mixed-bag of societal values we do have. Middle-class and higher, people value education. In terms of children, they are having them later and later in life (outside of certain communities, usually religious, but sometimes ethnic/racial in general). People generally value work and they value taking care of their families. So the people in the article are already failing to take heed.
Indeed, most of us don't seem to need some distinct and clear societal emphasis on not having a kid out-of-wedlock at age 21 after having not tried to pursue either higher education or some stable trade/skill. If anything, I can't think of any group that doesn't stigmatize this. Even the groups he is referring to in the article don't need to be told that's not the proper way; it's just sadly somehow become normalized for them.
No, I don't really disagree with that. If it were just elites shouting down, then you're right. It was the manner in which it used to be conveyed that matters. The mass media is no longer propagating that messaging in the way it had been for past decades. Pop culture celebrated families, especially in the age of television, from the '50s through the '80s. There were some hangers-on in the early '90s, like Family Matters, Full House, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but it was waning.
The contemporary messaging is very positive about nontraditional lifestyles. The people who control the media are the elite, and the messaging is delivered via pop culture stars.
I don't know which way the influence actually flows, but I think this is what the author is getting at, and it not too far out there if you ask me.
As someone both from a somewhat conservative immigrant background who is basically a coastal elite type myself, I think that statement is not particularly accurate or insightful. My main point of contention is that low-income whites tend not to care for what the highly-educated and affluent think anyways. Absurd to blame the "educated and affluent" for lower-class abandonment of their own cultural values.
"Social change has swept through America so thoroughly that the head of the “conservative” party is a three-times-divorced man of little character. But that illustrates my point."
I think that has more to do with hypocrisy and is symptomatic of deeper cultural and moral problems erupting among "conservatives" both rich and poor.
"It’s the rest of America that most needs a supportive culture that tells men that by getting a job, any job, and supporting their family, they can attain a measure of that same dignity."
These cultural groups can have that with or without the help of "elites". Again, they don't like elites. The article cites some anecdote about a UN meeting--these people tend to not even want the UN to exist. They don't know about the UN does, nor do they really care. No outcome of that meeting would sway their behavior.
Ultimately, the issue isn't that somehow the culture of "[t]hose who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder" is failing these people. These people have failed themselves, some might argue in part precisely because they would rather NOT mimic what the people are the apex of the social ladder do. These people of course love to place the blame elsewhere, particularly on immigrants, but ultimately their culture has become degraded and their moral fabric destroyed from the inside.