Coming Apart-Charles Murray

Excerpt from Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010: Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America's working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty -- and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.

Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven't. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. "This growing isolation" of the elites, he writes, "has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power."
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And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious "nonjudgmentalism." Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama's infamous "clinging to guns and religion" comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about "low-sloping foreheads" in "the middle places" of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.

"Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture," Murray writes. "If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret." Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter -- and to understand why they do.