The Wall Street Journal Editorials
In Defense of Joe Six-Pack
June 5, 1995
Those who debate the impact of affirmative action and other social
programs are fond of making distinctions among white Americans along
professional and geographic lines while avoiding the tinderbox of
ethnic distinctions among whites. But differences among white ethnic
groups are huge, fed by cultural tradition, the time and geography
of migrations to the country, and not insignificantly the tendency
of white Americans to discriminate against other whites in favor of
their own class and culture. In 1974, when affirmative action was in
its infancy, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research
Center published a landmark study, dividing American whites into 17
ethnic and religious backgrounds and scoring them by educational
attainment and family income. Contrary to prevailing mythology, the
vaunted White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were even then not at the top.
A Greater Variation
The highest WASP group - the Episcopalians - ranked only sixth, behind
American Jews, then Irish, Italian, German and Polish Catholics.
WASPS - principally the descendants of those who had settled the
Midwest and the South - constituted the bottom eight groups, and 10 of
the bottom twelve. Educational attainment and income levels did not
vary geographically, as for instance among white Baptists (who
scored the lowest overall) living in Arkansas or California, a
further indication that these differences are culturally rather than
geographically based.
Family income among white cultures in the NORC study varied by
almost $5,000 dollars, from the Jewish high of $13,340 to the
Baptist low of $8,693. By comparison, in the 1970 census the
variance in family income between whites taken as a whole and blacks
was only $3,600. In addition, white Baptists averaged only 10.7
years of education, which was almost four years less than American
Jews and at the same level of black Americans in 1970. This means
that, even prior to the major affirmative action programs, there was
a greater variation within "white America" than there was between
"white America" and black America, and the whites at the bottom were
in approximately the same situation as blacks.
These same less-advantaged white cultures by and large did the most
to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering
educational and professional regression as they tamed the
wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a
democratic way of life that later white cultures were able to take
advantage of without paying the price of pioneering. Today they have
the least, socio-economically, to show for these contributions. And
if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas now
evincing the greatest resistance to government practices.
It would be folly to assume that affirmative action has done
anything but exacerbate these disparities. The increased
stratification and economic polarization in American life since 1974
is well-documented. In the technological age, with the shrinking of
the industrial base, the decrease in quality of public education,
and the tendency of those who "have" to protect their own and to
utilize greater assets to prepare them for the future, the
divergence in both expectation and reward among our citizens has
grown rather than disappeared. The middle class has shrunk from 65%
of the population in 1970 to less than 50% today. Its share of
aggregate household income declined by 5% from 1968 to 1993, while
the top five million households increased their incomes by up to 10%
a year. A similar rift has occurred in the black culture, with
dramatic declines at the bottom and significant gains among the top
5%.
Because America's current elites are somewhat heterogeneous and in
part the product of an academically based meritocracy, they have
increasingly deluded themselves regarding both the depth of this
schism and the validity of their own advantages. The prevailing
attitude has been to ridicule whites who have the audacity to
complain about their reduced status, and to sneer at every aspect of
the "redneck" way of life. In addition to rationalizing policies
that hold the working class male back from advancement in the name
of an amorphous past wrong from which he himself did not benefit,
the elites take great sport in debasing the man they love to call
"Joe Six-Pack."
And what does "Joe Six Pack" make of this?
He sees a president and a slew of other key luminaries who excused
themselves from the dirty work of society when they were younger,
feeling not remorse but "vindication" for having left him or perhaps
his father to fight a war while they went on to graduate school and
solidifies careers.
He sees a governmental system that seems bent on belittling the
basis of his existence, and has established a set of laws and
regulations that often keep him from competing. His
ever-more-isolated leaders have mandated an "equal opportunity"
bureaucracy in the military, government and even industry that
closely resembles the Soviet "political cadre" structure, whose sole
function is to report "political incorrectness" and to encourage the
promotion of literally everyone but him and his kind.
He sees the meaning of words like "fairness" cynically inverted in
the name of "diversity," while groups who claim to have been
disadvantaged by old practices, and even those who have only
recently arrived in the country, are immediately moved ahead of him
for no reason other than his race. In one of the bitterest ironies,
he is required to pay tax dollars to finance the special training
for recent immigrants even as he himself is held back from fair
competition and the "equal opportunity" bureaucracies keep him from
receiving similar training, gaining employment or securing a
promotion.
He sees cultural rites buttressed by centuries of
tradition - particularly the right to use firearms and pass that skill
to future generations - attacked because many who make the laws do not
understand the difference between his way of life and that of
criminals who are blowing people away on the streets of urban
America.
He watched the Democratic Party, once a champion of the
worker-producer, abandon him in favor of special interests who
define their advancement mostly through the extent of his own
demise. To him "diversity" is a code word used to exclude him - but
seldom better-situated whites no matter the extent of his
qualifications and no matter the obstacles he has had to overcome,
The Republican Party, to which he swung in the last election, has
embraced him on certain social issues, but has yet to support
policies that would override the tendency of elites to simply
protect their own rather than reverse the travails of affirmative
action and the collapse of public education.
Out of the Casualty Radius
Finally, he sees the people who erected and continue to enforce such
injustices blatantly wheedling and maneuvering themselves and their
children out of the casualty radius of their own policies. A smaller
percentage of whites in academia and the professions is acceptable,
so long as their children make it. The public school system is
self-destructing, but their children go to private schools and
receive special preparatory classes to elevate college board scores.
International peacekeeping is a lofty goal, so long as their
children are not on the firing line. Continuous scrutiny is given to
minority percentages in employment, but little or none is applied to
how or why one white applicant was chosen over another.
Faced as he is with such barriers, it is difficult to fault him for
deciding that those who make their living running the government or
commenting on it are at minimum guilty of ignorance, arrogance and
self-interest. And it is not hyperbole to say that the prospect of a
class war is genuine among the very people who traditionally have
been the strongest supporters of the American system.
