In his essay, “The New American Divide,” Charles Murray provides a more in depth look into the large gap that separates the classes in America, both financially and culturally, and how it has evolved over time. From the beginning, he emphasizes the dissolution of a “common civic culture” as previously widespread values such as marriage and a hard work ethic become less commonly held among the greater American populace. Even though the gap in wealth has always existed in America, in earlier eras there still existed a sense of cultural equality among the classes, or at least among the non-Latino white population. He states that Americans pride themselves in the idea of a cultural equality between all citizens; however, Murray feels that this cultural equality is decreasingly true since the 1960s as citizens of contrasting classes have evolved differently over the decades from 1960 to 2010.

Murray defines this common civic culture as “a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work, and religiosity” that most Americans, if not all, of all social classes share (Murray 348). Murray states that over the past fifty years, this civic culture has progressively fallen apart and a new upper class as well as a new lower class has emerged. This new upper class has advanced educations, shared opinions, and specified preferences that set them apart from mainstream America, as compared to the new lower class that is “characterized not by poverty, but by a withdrawal from America core cultural institutions” (348).

To illustrate the growth of this gap in the classes, Murray creates two fictional neighborhoods called Belmont and Fishtown, each representing either the new upper class (Belmont) or the new lower class (Fishtown). In Belmont, people have at least a bachelor’s