“Black and white workers were all faced with diminishing work opportunities,” Cherlin observes.

Suddenly it was harder for anyone to get a job for his son at the Point and at factories around the country. Black and white workers were all faced with diminishing work opportunities, and a job taken by a black applicant seemed like a job taken away from a white applicant. The simultaneous onset of legally enforced labor market changes and the globalization and automation of production quite probably amplified the reactions of whites. The co-occurrence of the easy-to-see increase of the hiring of black workers and the hard-to-understand deterioration of the economy encouraged white workers to blame the former for the latter.

Black workers, even though they faced many of the same employment hardships, experienced the benefits of the civil rights movement, gaining equal protection before the law in 1964, statutory enforcement of their right to vote in 1965, and protection against workplace discrimination — most notably when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, prohibiting hiring and workplace practices which, whether intentionally or not, had an adverse “disparate impact” on blacks.

From 1970 to 1994, the share of black American families making between $50,000 and $74,999 in inflation-adjusted dollars rose by 3.9 percent, and the share of black families earning $75,000 and above grew by 5.7 percent, both significant increases.

Thus black workers have, and have had, grounds for optimism: “although racial discrimination surely has not been eliminated over the ensuing decades,” Cherlin notes, “black workers are aware that conditions have improved.” He adds that civil rights laws “led to a relative improvement in their labor market position.” A 2012 Pew poll asked respondents “when your children are your age, will their standard of living be worse, the same or better than yours?” A plurality of whites, 42 percent, said worse, and 31 percent said better; among blacks, 56 percent said better and 25 percent said worse. The comparatives speak for themselves.

Even as blacks experienced the benefits of the drive toward racial equality, which many whites saw as a form of reverse discrimination, the liberal cultural agenda began to champion “expressive individualist” and “rights oriented” values. Many working-class whites saw these values as destructive of familiar hierarchies in which they were accustomed to hold a privileged position.

In this way, multiple legal, economic and cultural developments began to overlap.

You can see this convergence in another trend Cherlin describes, the transition, beginning in the 1960s, of younger adults from what he calls a “utilitarian self” to an “expressive self.” The utilitarian self, according to Cherlin, accepts “conformity to external standards — which included doing what your supervisor at work told you to do.” This conformity was essential for industrial work, “which required self-discipline and the suppression of feelings such as alienation and anger.”

The expressive self, in contrast, “emphasizes one’s feelings and emotional satisfaction and the pursuit of a personally fulfilling life.” For the less educated, however, the kind of low-skill, low-wage jobs available to them offered little or no opportunity for self-expression.

The expressive self has been a central element of postmodern liberal thinking. But, Cherlin writes,

What no one expected was that less educated young adults in the U.S., many of whom are still struggling to ensure an adequate standard of living, would show signs of making the transition before they had achieved affluence.

The conversion to liberal self-expressive priorities, then, can be seen as reducing the satisfaction of the less educated as they adapt to the drudgery of service work. The cultural resistance to curbs on individual autonomy also coincided with the divorce revolution of the early 1970s, with a generalized resistance over the past half-century to restrictive social norms, and with the growing percentage of white children living with unmarried mothers without college degrees. The disadvantages of single-parenthood and nonresidential fathers now add to the struggles of the white working class.