Trump, Trade, and the Tragedy of the Working Class Moynihan’s warnings on family breakdown echo louder than ever, as cultural decay—not just trade policy—lies at the heart of America’s working-class collapse. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/trump-trade-and-the-tragedy-of-the-working-class/
Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the first serious attempt on the part of social scientists to analyze and evaluate the collapse of the traditional family in American society. On March 1, 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor released a report written by then-Assistant Secretary (and future Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) on the dissolution of black families in America. That report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” was both groundbreaking and enormously controversial. Sixty years later, the study remains groundbreaking. However, its conclusions are, sadly, no longer especially controversial, having been corroborated by endless data spanning decades and extending to every race, culture, and creed in the country. At some point, the rescue of the American family will either become a serious and urgent focus of societal action, or it will prove the undoing of the great American experiment.
Among other things, Moynihan noted in his report the existence and the pervasiveness of black poverty and the correlation between that poverty and the breakdown of the black nuclear family. In an attempt to explain why black economic advancement lagged behind both political advancement and the economic fortunes of other ethnic groups, Moynihan examined reams of data and endless studies on black family life. And what he found—a paradox which came to be known as “Moynihan’s Scissors”—was” that welfare and male unemployment in the black community no longer appeared to be nearly perfectly correlated, as they were in the past and in other populations.
As it turned out, male unemployment was diverging from welfare outlays because the family was breaking down. In other words, welfare made it possible for women—black women, in this case—to survive and raise their children without the children’s father present in the home. In turn, the absence of the father from the home became necessary for the collection of welfare. A vicious circle had been created, and it was exacerbating black poverty tremendously.
Although Moynihan was accused of “blaming the victim” and attempting to shift responsibility for black poverty away from racism and to that which he called the “pathologies” of ghetto culture, time eventually proved his research and conclusions to be essentially accurate. By the mid-1980s, data conclusively confirmed his assertions and predictions regarding demographics and poverty statistics. The dissolution of the black family and the correlation between family structure and income had essentially fostered a permanent black underclass that was poor, poorly educated, subjected to the myriad pathologies consistent with pervasive poverty and fatherlessness in children, and had little hope of breaking this toxic cycle of poverty and family breakdown.
Unsurprisingly, in the roughly four decades since Moynihan’s warnings were confirmed, the plague of family breakdown and persistent poverty has shed its racial dimensions, becoming a severe and interminable pattern across race lines. In 2013, the Urban Institute released a study called “The Moynihan Report Revisited,” which not only documented the ongoing turmoil in the black community but also noted the spread of the broken-family underclass.
Not coincidentally, the UI report was issued roughly a year after the publication of Charles Murray’s landmark book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray, for the record, is one of the finest, most creative, and most rigorous and thorough social scientists working today. He is also a pariah among the intellectual crowd for having had the gall to report honestly his findings with respect to race, poverty, and so on. In any case, Murray demonstrated rather conclusively in his book that the black family was merely the canary in the coal mine. What had happened to black working-class families by the 1960s also happened to white working-class families, only at something of a time lag. Specifically, Murray wrote:
In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites ages 30–49 in both Belmont [educated, upper middle class] and Fishtown [white working-class] were married—94 percent in Belmont and 84 percent in Fishtown. The unquestioned norm in both neighborhoods was marriage. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in Belmont and Fishtown. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage among prime-age adults stabilized during the mid-1980s and remained flat thereafter, standing at 83 percent in 2010. In Fishtown, marriage continued a slide that had not slackened as of 2010, when the percentage of married whites ages 30–49 had fallen to a minority of 48 percent. What had been a 10 percentage point difference between Belmont and Fishtown in the 1960s stood at 35 percentage points in 2010. The culprits — divorce and failure to marry in the first place — split responsibility for the divergence about equally…
In 1960, just 2 percent of all white births were nonmarital. When the Vital Statistics first gave us the mother’s education in 1970, 6 percent of births to white women with no more than a high school education—women with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. Or to put it another way, 94 percent of such births were within marriage. By 2008, 44 percent were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6 percent of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1 percent in 1970.
By 2010, in other words, the phenomenon that was first noticed as the tragedy of the black family had fully become the tragedy of the working class.
I mention all of this today for a reason, namely because it provides important context for the current debate over President Trump’s trade policies, which are intended to help revive the (lower) middle and working classes, which have been “hollowed out” over the last several decades. The culprit in the narrative embraced by the president and his supporters is “globalization” or the “post-war global order,” both of which have encouraged the offshoring of once-ubiquitous American manufacturing jobs, benefitting the upper and upper-middle classes while crushing the rest of the country.
There is little doubt that the policies of late globalization have hurt the American working class. This is especially true of the decision to normalize the People’s Republic of China as a global trading partner. The CCP is and always has been manifestly and irredeemably corrupt and deceitful in all matters, including trade.
At the same time, the bulk of the evidence we have—dating back 60 years to Moynihan—suggests that the overwhelming majority of the damage done to the American working class is the result of cultural forces, often in conjunction with woefully misguided and deleterious domestic government policy. To be sure, this is damage that can and should be undone, but addressing it will require more than challenging eight decades of trade policies. It will require challenging nearly three centuries of moral and cultural orthodoxy.
In the meantime, President Trump and his supporters should adjust their expectations accordingly. Nice, high-paying manufacturing jobs would be great for the country, but they’re not likely to fix the giant hole in the American middle class.
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