Charles Murray is amongst the greatest social annalists and interpreter of our time in the US. He has a gentle fearlessness to expose realities that no one else will dare mention and also introduces solutions.
Coming Apart, Coming Together | FrontPage Magazine
By Daniel Greenfield On April 11, 2012
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” Yeats wrote in his famous poem. In Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”, it is America itself that has come apart and his work chronicles the undoing of a virtue-based national exceptionalism.
“Coming Apart” would not be as shocking if it were not for a political and academic establishment that is unable to speak about the problems of the working class except in terms of class warfare and racial discrimination. Murray boldly upends the formula that social problems arise from economic problems and that these can only be solved with more social welfare programs. Instead of holding the upper classes accountable for not paying enough into the system that subsidizes the welfare state, he instead holds them accountable for disrupting national values, while maintaining them communally.
While the class warfare model links social ills to an economic deprivation practiced by the rich on the poor, Murray looks instead at a values deprivation which has led to statistics such as a marriage rate of 83 percent for the white upper middle-class and only 48 percent for their working class contemporaries. This has created Two Americas divided not by wealth, as defined by John Edwards in the economic realm, but divided socially by the segregation of communities and the stratification of values.
The music video for Billy Joel’s song, “We didn’t start the fire” followed an idealized young couple from their working class beginnings to middle class prosperity and then through the decay of the sixties and the seventies. But while the couple in the video remains together through bra burnings, draft card burnings and drug experimentation, in real life that was where the fire started and the ashes of that fire can be seen in the statistics that Murray lays out for us.
Murray’s model of Fishtown and Belmont, two neighborhoods representing two classes, shows that an economic gap is an insufficient explanation for the social problems of working class communities. In 1960, a working class neighborhood was only 10 percent behind the upper middle class neighborhood in its marriage rate. Fifty years later after the conflagration that undid the nation’s collective value system that gap had more than tripled to 35 percent.
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