That brings us, however, to the question of just how destroyed family and civil society are in America today. Himmelfarb sees in the United States a dominant culture corrupted by the elites, while a subsidiary culture of two-parent families, usually religious, is valiantly trying to rear its children right and to adhere to traditional moral standards. One Nation, Two Cultures presents a variety of evidence to support this view. But disaggregation is the key to analysis of American social trends, and disaggregation by socioeconomic class suggests that the upper levels of society are the least depraved. Illegitimacy, perhaps the single most important social problem, is overwhelmingly concentrated in the lowest socioeconomic levels.
Divorce is more common among the working class than among the affluent.
It is the children of the affluent who are being sent to the most demanding schools and for whom educational and occupational expectations are the highest. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and child abuse are concentrated in the lower classes. None of this is meant to exonerate the intellectual elites small subsets of the upper socioeconomic levels from Himmelfarb s critique. But there are signs that the moral pendulum has begun to swing in the right direction for the upper three-quarters of American society and that many of the most pernicious elements of elite culture in academia are spent forces. It isn t fair that the same elites who so cavalierly threw bombs at the American culture a few decades ago are among those who find it easiest to recover from the damage they did, but such may be the case.