Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?
by David Frum Feb 6, 2012 11:45 AM EST
Charles Murray's new book does not provide an adequate explanation for the collapse of the white working class.
Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put.
To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy:
A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report:
The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.
When he publishes his report, somebody points out: "You know, there was a hurricane here last week." The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, "I'm writing about housing, not weather."
Coming Apart details the social problems that have overtaken the poorer half of the white American population over the past generation. This population is less committed to the workforce than its parents and grandparents were. It has more trouble with the law. It has more children outside marriage.
None of this information comes as news to anybody. Social observers have been making these points for years. The novelty of Coming Apart is Charles Murray's remarkable—and telltale—uncuriosity as to why any of this might be happening...
Here is the book's one discussion of the idea that the social troubles of lower-class America might be related to the (rather notorious) economic troubles of lower-class America. It's such a revealing and fascinating statement that I will quote at length, both on the passage's own merits and to ensure that the argument is given its full context...{he quotes at length, I won't ~ Tia} ...Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market...
...How you can tell a story about the moral decay of the working class with the "work" part left out is hard to fathom.
But that's not the limit of Murray's uncuriosity. There are two other limits, both striking, and both contained in the book's subtitle. The first is the word "America."
Coming Apart contains not a single reference to the world outside the United States. Yet the decline in the life prospects of the less-skilled is not a uniquely American phenomenon...
The second limit to Murray's curiosity is revealed by his time limit: "1960 to 2010." Suppose instead Murray had looked at the whole past century, rather than just half of it: 1910-2010. He'd have found a different and even more suggestive trend: a white working class that became more law-abiding, more temperate, more familial and more civic-minded between 1910 and 1960 and then ever less after about 1970.
Which would raise the question: So if "the 1960s" are responsible for the post-1970 deterioration, what was responsible for the pre-1960 improvement?
Murray does not want to face this question, because it might require him to reconsider elements of his ideology—something he declares himself unwilling to consider...
...As a matter of fact, if you announce that there can exist no possible information that might change your mind about abortion, the death penalty, marijuana, same-sex marriage, and the inheritance tax, then yes you are an unreasonable person—or anyway, an unreasoning one. I've changed my mind about same-sex marriage as experience has dispelled my fears of the harms from same-sex marriage. If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I'd change my mind about marijuana legalization. And so on through the list.
..But here's the most important point of all. I tramped through a lot of the same research that Charles Murray presents here when I wrote my history of the 1970s, How We Got Here.
As I looked backward and forward in time, however, I had to face this awkward fact: America became more culturally stable between 1910 and 1960 as it became less economically and socially libertarian. As it became more economically and socially libertarian after 1970, America became culturally less stable:
"The greatest generation was also the statist generation. Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering."
Murray nostalgically regrets the lost America of his 1950s Midwestern boyhood. But to describe in any true way how that America was lost would require a reckoning of how that America was made. Unwilling, as he acknowledges, to submit his politics to the check of uncongenial evidence, Murray prefers to avoid encountering the evidence that might shake his politics...
Here's Our Mr. Brooks Finds Another Very Important Thinker
By Charles P. Pierce
Occasionally, Moral Hazard, the Irish setter belonging to David Brooks, goes wandering out of the clubroom of the Young Fogies Club and down the hall into the library. It is more peaceful there. Nobody is quoting Edmund Burke. Nobody is throwing together their Guys We Wish Would Run For President fantasy teams. ("I'll bid $150 for Mitch Daniels!" "Trade you Bobby Jindal for half of Chris Christie!") Moral Hazard finds it a more peaceful place. He even gets a little reading done from time to time. A few years back, in his wanderings, he came upon a book called The Bell Curve. It was co-written by a fellow named Charles Murray. Moral Hazard read three pages, licked his nuts in careful contemplation, and realized that the whole thing was an academic gloss on the notion that black people are inherently inferior to white people. Jesus, thought Moral Hazard, who only that morning had been thinking how much he'd rather be a bomb-squad dog in L.A., my life could be a lot worse. I could belong to this guy. Then he walked back to the club room.
This morning, Moral Hazard thought back sadly about that day. Murray has written another book and Master has written another column. This was already a terrible day, thought Moral Hazard, who looked around at floor level for a pair of Weejuns to which he could do the most horrible things. And then this:
I'll be shocked if there's another book this year as important as Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." I'll be shocked if there's another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.
(I'll be shocked if Brooks cites the actual title of the book, because it's sort of what the poker players call a "tell." Oh, he doesn't? Okay, I will. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Arrooogah, arroooogah!)...
Chances are this'll be an entertaining interview.