Last night I finally watched an entire episode of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” the redneck minstrel show on TLC. It was awful, but I enjoyed it in an Ignatius-at-the-Prytania way. I won’t be watching it again. My mother stopped by while it was on, and mentioned that my father won’t let the show be watched in his house. I know why, too: because it offends him that the show sets up working-class Southern people like him for ridicule. He doesn’t for a second live like the Honey Boo Boos, or esteem their values. In fact, just the opposite. Back in his day, there was a strong taboo among working-class white people against that kind of behavior. But it’s fast leaving: what used to be stigmatized among white people of all classes as “white trash” behavior is becoming normalized.

Mama June, the matriarch, is 33 years old, and has four children by four different men, none of whom she married (Honey Boo Boo’s daddy, an ex con they call Sugar Bear, is shacking with them now). She has reportedly been in the welfare system all her life. What struck me most about this, from a sociological point of view, is this model of family formation — a strong matriarchy, fatherless children, men minimally involved in their children’s lives, the family supported in part by welfare — has long been a black thing. But as Charles Murray documented so persuasively in “Coming Apart,” this is increasingly the new normal for lower-income white Americans. Long post follows, below the jump, if you’re interested.

Out-of-wedlock childbearing for white working class women was 6 percent of all births in that demographic in 1970; in 2008, it was 44 percent. For college-educated white women, the number today is less than 5 percent, up from 1 percent in 1970. David Brooks wrote about this phenomenon:

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses. Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness. It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

Which brings me to a recent conversation with N., a white Southern liberal friend. It’s been on my mind lately. N. voted Obama last time, and is voting Obama this time. Her family isn’t rich, but they make enough to employ a cleaning lady. The cleaning lady is black, and lives in her Southern town.

N. and I were talking about Mitt Romney and the 47 percent. I mentioned that I thought lots of conservatives hear “47 percent” and think “shiftless minorities,” when in fact many working and middle class whites depend on some form of government assistance too. N., naturally, agreed, saying that a just society provides a baseline of security for all its members. I agreed with that, telling her that I know people — white people — who are barely scraping by, and who would be in a world of trouble if not for whatever they were able to get from the government. I don’t begrudge them that.

Then N. said something interesting. She said that her cleaning lady is constantly desperate for money. N. said she gives her extra when she can, but the cleaning lady’s dilemma is what you might call a systemic one. The cleaning lady is not married, and had a number of children outside of wedlock, as is the cultural norm where they live (where I live too). N. said there’s no way that the woman, hard as she works, will ever get out of poverty with so many kids, and no husband. N. said the woman’s life is such a mess, and is a mess in large part because of bad choices she has made, and continues to make.

“When conservatives hear ’47 percent,’ they think of people like her,” I said. “It’s not the whole story by a long shot, but that woman is real. You can’t deny it.”

“Sure she’s real,” my friend said. “You really can’t deny it.”

By “you can’t deny it,” we both meant that the cleaning lady is a person who lives, and has lived, in a way that is irresponsible. But this woman was formed in a culture in which the things that keep her life impoverished and chaotic were normative. Another friend of mine, a middle-class white woman who taught in an all-black public high school in a poor part of Louisiana, said that what struck her the most about the kids in her class was how they didn’t expect to do better. They were passive and fatalistic. All of them, she said, seemed to assume that they were either going to get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, and be involved with the welfare system. And this mentality is spreading rapidly among working-class whites — which is to say, it’s ceasing to be a racial thing at all.

Megan McArdle wrote the other day: