Thomas Edsall on Charles Murray

This link to Thomas Edsall's blog, "Campaign Stops," at the New York Times website, gets you to a very fine assessment of the political influence of Charles Murray on American social policy.  It reviews the impact of his former books, especially Losing Ground as intellectual grist for the Reaganite assault on the social safety net inherited from the New Deal Era.  The main thrust, however, is reserved for the already-buzzworthy Coming Apart which only recently was published.  As with his earlier work, Murray goes right after the key premises of liberal or progressive policy thinking.  In this case, he does so by focusing on whites' experience in the US over the half century from 1960 to 2010.  (The deliberate detour around race is no doubt a product of the fallout from The Bell Curve, in which Murray and his coauthor, the now-deceased Harvard Professor of Psychology, Bruce Herenstein, claimed to show that IQ was inherited and, since it was at the crux of the achievement gap between winners and losers in our society, it was basically impervious to the effects of interventionist social policies.) 

In Coming Apart, the case is made again that the differences between winners and losers over the past half century are due principally to "intractable" differences in worldview -- work ethic, intelligence, morals -- between the better-educated 20% of American caucasians and the woefully "under-socialized" 30% of American whites.  Unlike their college-educated cohorts, the bottom-feeders are a pathetic lot, unmotivated and unprepared for productive lives, unmindful of social norms that used to operate powerfully to minimize out-of-wedlock births and repeated dependence on the public dole.  Students of political economy, especially to disappearance of manufacturing jobs that has inexorably accompanied globalization, will have some difficulty with Murray's overly-dispositional bias.  But without such a bias, he has hardly a case: one cannot argue for the elimination of government-supplied public assistance unless the alleged beneficiaries of public benefits are deemed no better off -- and typically worse off -- with such policies in place as opposed to trashed in the ashcan of history.

For Murray, the most interesting message to emerge from his plumbing of the depths of misery among elements of American society hovering at the margins of poverty is his admonition to the winners "to preach what they practice."  Rather than remaining reflexively tolerant in the face of society's cast-offs, the successful should trumpet the values that Murray believes brought them the lifestyles that they have attained: Murray knows how to provoke his progressive readership.  The Edsall essay cites a three-part response to the volume already in print by the foreign policy intellectual Russell Mead, who is hardly a paragon for progressive thought.  Given the real-world political impact that these ideas are already having, it is hard to deny the warrant that Murray's volume has as a candidate for Capstone consideration.  Toward that possible end, here's the link to the Edsall essay:

OPINION

February 12, 2012

Campaign Stops: What to Do About 'Coming Apart'

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

How should we respond to the diagnosis of America's ills offered by Charles Murray?

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/what-to-do-about-coming-apart/?emc=eta1