Read: Educated Americans paved the way for divorce—then embraced marriage

The question is why. Carlson fingers bad public policies, market forces, and cultural developments for eroding the economic, social, and cultural foundations of family life in working-class America. In particular, he thinks federal policies are partly to blame for the decline in manufacturing jobs and in less-educated men’s wages. Because women still seek men who earn a decent wage, these declines in turn have led to a “drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow—more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.”

Carlson’s last key argument is simply that elites are complicit in all of this. They have flourished in today’s postindustrial economy, profited from policies and corporate moves that keep them at the top of the economic order, yet seem to evince little authentic concern that the currents they have ridden to success are undercutting the fortunes of those lower down the ladder. The “very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married,” he said, adding, “This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage.”

Carlson’s conservative critics argue that the TV host is barking up the wrong tree. While acknowledging that “a series of tectonic cultural” and economic changes—from the “mass-scale loss of religious faith” to a shift away from manufacturing—have destabilized American family life, French faults working-class and poor Americans for their own troubles. In the final analysis, “the primary responsibility for creating a life of virtue and purpose rests with families and individuals”—not government programs or elites. Shapiro adds, “If we fail to make virtuous decisions on an individual level, we can’t blame that on tariffs or payday lenders.”

Granted, no matter what obstacles you face in America, you’re more likely to overcome them if you believe that you’re in control of your own life and follow what has been called the “success sequence”—getting at least a high-school degree, working full-time, marrying, and having children, in that order.

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Yet it’s possible to recognize the value of personal agency and nevertheless admit the extent to which the stagnation of working-class wages and increases in job instability for less-educated men have stemmed from elite policy choices. Appealing to a lack of virtue on the part of the poor or the working class is at best a category error, and at worst an all-purpose rhetorical device for neutralizing responsibility on the part of elite policy makers.