Why is Palin's "Real America" turning into a giant slum?

David Frum just might be the smartest conservative in the media today (assuming Glenn Beck isn't just pulling our leg). Earlier this year, he wrote a post that has since become somewhat famous. The subject was whether socially conservative working-class whites are still the backbone of the GOP:

Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.

The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.

Take a look at Table A17 in this report by the Educational Testing Service. Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.

And all of these rates continue to rise at a brisk pace...

It is marriage that creates culturally conservative voters – and young downscale Americans are not getting married. When they do marry, they do not stay married: While divorce rates among the college educated have declined sharply since the 1970s, divorce rates among high school graduates remain ominously high.

The socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage – and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.

I have to admit that, living in my little bubble of college-educated upper-middle-class types, I've kind of missed this trend. I think a lot of conservative elites have too; they seem to think of downscale white America as a bastion of church-going, marriage-respecting, Joe Sixpack types. Actually, working-class white America is starting to look a lot like...well...like working-class black America, but with worse fashion sense.

Anyway, I must admit that I have no good theory as to why working-class white families are disintegrating. My sense is that lots of white people in the 70s and 80s moved out to the suburbs in order to preserve their families, since families are more affordable in the 'burbs and the opportunities for adultery are fewer. And I've also theorized that many of these suburban whites started voting conservative during this time period because they didn't want urban libertine sex culture following them to their family-friendly suburban refuges.

If so, they failed. The conservative nightmare of universal divorce never came to pass; instead, what we got was young working-class people having kids without ever getting married. Was it urban sex culture after all? Did libertine values follow Joe Sixpack out to the 'burbs via late-night cable TV and the internet, and lure his kids into lives of pleasure-seeking debauchery? Or was economics the culprit? Did stagnating incomes, increasing inequality, and decreasing mobility make marriage economically pointless for the non-college-educated? Or is there some third force at work? And if so, what caused those ills in the first place - Republican policy, skill-biased technological change, globalization, or something else?

Whatever the culprit, I think we can agree that this trend is a bad thing. It seems to me that it could entrench the American working class in intergenerational poverty - a permanent suburban slum-dwelling underclass. All the ills that we see in poor black communities will soon be race-neutral. (At least this should shut up the people who claim that African-American social ills are caused by deficiencies in black culture or genetics!)

As to the political effects, I think David Frum is right; these suburban white slum-dwellers are unlikely to pull the lever for Republicans. They're unlikely to pull the lever for anyone. And of course that's a good thing in the short term, since the Republican party is currently dominated by dogmatists and power-seeking leeches. But in the long term, the rising apathy of a previously politically active segment of American society is going to be bad news for our democracy.

I don't know what has caused the white working class to follow the black working class into the trap of irresponsible no-future lifestyles. But we need to find an answer. The answer is not a pastor in a megachurch berating poor whites to trust in Jesus. It's not conservative school-board nutsos taking science out of textbooks. It's not faux-pious Republicans bowing their heads at the National Prayer Breakfast, or Bill O'Reilly yapping about traditional values for an hour on prime time.

I don't know what it is, though. No diagnosis means no cure.