Jim Manzi, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes in National Affairs:
The new normal, however, is different from the old normal. To begin with, certain strands of the old bourgeois consensus have frayed, and others have simply disappeared, at least for some parts of the population. The wealthier and better-educated segments of our society, for example, have re-established the primacy of stable families and revived their intolerance of crime and public disorder. But they have combined this return to tradition with very non-traditional attitudes about sex, masculinity, and overt piety.
More important, while affluent and educated Americans are returning to the traditional family model, the poor and less educated are not. The gap between rich and poor today is also a gap in cultural norms and mores to a degree unparalleled in our modern experience. The overall divorce rate, for example, exploded in the 1970s, but has since returned to just about its 1960 level for those with a college education. For the less educated, however, the rate has continued to climb — and women without high-school diplomas are now about three times as likely to divorce within ten years of their first marriage as their college-educated counterparts.
