As an adjunct philosophy professor in the early 2010s, I taught excerpts from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. The course, “Introduction to Ethics,” was required for all students, and the only class I taught in my seven years at the University of St. Thomas. Needless to say, Coming Apart is not traditionally listed as a great work of moral philosophy. It sometimes happens, however, that adjunct professors get a little creative with their syllabi, once they realize they will be teaching the same course relentlessly until they quit or the sky falls. The book interested me, and I thought it would interest the students. It did.

　　Nearly everyone was engaged by Murray’s argument. I’m glad now that I taught it, because I now have clear memories of my early impressions, and also of the way the book’s cultural significance morphed and evolved as the Republican Party reinvented itself a few years later. By that time I had quit teaching, replacing the paltry income by instead contributing to right-wing media. So I was well positioned to watch as Murray’s “bubble quiz” morphed from a fun conversation-starter into a class-war weapon. I remember vividly the days when a piece on electoral politics could draw a flurry of accusations from readers demanding to know if I had ever even met someone who drove a pick-up truck. (I have! My father used to drive me to school in a pick-up, and my husband’s truck is parked in our garage at this moment. But perhaps the actual vehicles are beside the point?)

　　It was an iconic book for a tumultuous decade. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that Murray was in one sense prophetic, but in another way quite wrong. He saw the widening crack that is now a defining feature of America’s political landscape. That’s impressive. But he also misread America’s educated elites in significant ways, and accordingly made recommendations for cultural reform that now seem rather curious. Murray wanted elites to try harder to shape and maintain a common American culture that reflected their own values. He worried that they were too reticent to cast judgment on less-elite compatriots. Does that still sound right? The next crop of populists seized eagerly on Murray’s indictments of “bubbled elitists” while jettisoning all the complimentary and approving parts. Coming Apart now feels somewhat dated, but it’s worth revisiting nevertheless, as a cultural touchstone but also as a potentially helpful jumping-off point for a revised set of recommendations.

　　At this point, it’s hard to see a realistic path toward the common, middle-class culture that Murray hoped to recover. We certainly aren’t going to do that under the leadership of a shallow, technocratic elite. But it may not be so obvious today that we really need a common, middle-class culture. Perhaps cultural rejuvenation is still possible, under a different sort of cultural leadership. 

　　Remembering Belmont and Fishtown

　　For those who did not teach Coming Apart to several classes of undergraduates, a brief refresher may be in order. Using demographic data, Murray created two imaginary “towns” (of statistical persons), which he named “Belmont” and “Fishtown.” People with college degrees and white-collar jobs were placed in Belmont. People with no degree and a blue-collar or service job went to Fishtown. Murray then looked at statistical trends among these two imaginary towns, comparing 1960 and 2010. In Belmont, people were for the most part working steady jobs, establishing themselves as respectable citizens, and raising children in wedlock. Fishtown was rife with crime and illegitimacy, and its citizens had irregular, complex marital and employment histories.

　　Murray found as well that “Belmont” and “Fishtown” were far more segregated than they used to be. In 1960, people of different backgrounds and levels of education tended to intermingle more, going to different workplaces perhaps, but living in close proximity and encountering one another in parks, churches, or community organizations. By 2010, you could guess a lot more about a person based on their address, and especially their zip code. Murray explained this through a story about “assortative mating” and meritocracy. Smart kids were going to top universities, meeting and marrying other smart kids, and then raising their families in affluent neighborhoods where everyone had fancy degrees and good jobs. Murray found that an enormous percentage of the wealthy and highly credentialed were living in a few super-elite neighborhoods (the SuperZips) where they interacted primarily with other highly credentialed, wealthy people. As Belmont and Fishtown became increasingly estranged from one another, class resentment grew, and Fishtown struggled to maintain social cohesion. 

　　In the years after Coming Apart, educated elites did start preaching more, trying harder to transmit their views and lifestyle choices to others. The result was what we often refer to as “wokism.”

　　Murray wanted elites to get further outside their comfort zones, and learn a bit more about the culture of Fishtown. But this mattered to him especially because he wanted elites to make a stronger effort to “rebuild the guardrails” of polite society, imposing the sorts of cultural standards that would help the residents of Fishtown to stabilize. In particular, he wanted them to bolster the respectability of marriage and community involvement, and stigmatize unemployment, crime, and illegitimacy. Murray was anxious for elites to “preach what they practiced,” upholding a certain social-moral structure through their behavior and influence.

　　How does this book strike us today? Nearly fifteen years on, it’s obvious that Murray was right about many things. Nevertheless, paging back through it, it’s hard not to feel a bit of disappointment, not in the book so much as the right’s inability to move beyond it. Murray had predecessors, such as Christopher Lasch, but when Coming Apart hit the shelves his critique was still bold and helpfully provocative. It’s not anymore, and while I’d love to claim that years of wrestling with class concerns have given rise to a nuanced and constructive right-wing conversation, I’m not sure that’s true. It feels more like we weaponized Murray, and then got stuck on him.

　　Coming Apart Gracefully

　　Over the last several weeks, as the left marinates in despair and recrimination, familiar figures have taken the stage to scold progressives for being snooty and out-of-touch. An oldie but a goodie, maybe? Undoubtedly many of these criticisms are fair, but it all feels so tired and trite. They took the bubble quiz, okay? They know who Jimmie Johnson is now! Last fall, Tim Walz donned red flannel and pretended to like hunting, and the right just snickered and called him a phony. I can’t disagree. But if a performative tribute to low culture isn’t what we want, perhaps we should better articulate what we do want.

　　In Coming Apart, the suggestion that elites should venture beyond their “bubbles” felt fairly benign, precisely because the book itself was remarkably free of class anger. Murray obviously admired both the educated classes’ talent and prudent life habits; indeed, his main concern was to make Fishtown more like Belmont! But in the intervening years, elites have done a great deal of preaching, shaming, and shunning, and this has gone rather badly. It certainly hasn’t moved us back towards a stable, decent middle-class culture. This should not really surprise us, because people standing on soap boxes tend to preach the things they believe. The inhabitants of Murray’s SuperZips never believed the principles he wanted them to advance.

　　The mistake is understandable in context. It’s perfectly true that the wealthy and privileged were in general the vanguard of the sexual revolution, gleefully tearing up established social norms that once bolstered order and discipline. (Sexual morals are the most obvious example, though the analysis could extend to etiquette, work habits, financial responsibility, and so forth.) Once they had experienced the chaos of the sixties, the divorce revolution, latchkey kids, and other delightful late-twentieth-century cultural innovations, the educated and affluent largely tacked back towards a “neo-traditional” lifestyle involving stable marriages, a strong work ethic, sound financial habits, and plenty of fiber (at least dietary, if not moral). Meanwhile, among the less-prosperous, employment rates stayed low, crime and illegitimacy high. Conservative cultural critics looked at this picture and asked: weren’t we right then, with our prescient warnings about libertinism and moral relativism? Now that you’ve found your way back to sanity, why not share your good fortune by helping to rebuild the old social norms? People need them.

　　It made sense within the neoconservative paradigm. Neocons were ever enthusiastic about bourgeois, middle-class uprightness, ideally bolstered by a staid religiosity. And this certainly looked like the ideal solution for Fishtown. The poor clearly pay a heavier price for weak discipline and imprudent life choices, not having a network of wealthy, connected people to bail them out of jail, co-sign loans, or call in favors if they need a new job. Life is harsher for the poor. A strong case can be made that the least elites can do is maintain a cohesive social world that instills good habits from childhood, instead of waiting for people to mess up and then dropping them into a maze of social workers, penitentiaries, and custody hearings.

　　Here’s the problem. America’s technocratic elites never really returned to tradition. They came back to a moderately-traditional lifestyle, but remain, in their commitments the most progressive, impious, and irreligious people in America. They are less likely than anyone else to go to church, pray regularly, or make major decisions drawing on wisdom from ancient faiths. As the most vocal champions of gender ideology, they obviously haven’t re-embraced traditional sexual morals. They view American history with a jaundiced eye, and express sympathy with casual lawbreakers. The elites of the early twenty-first century did reinvent a lot of wheels, but they did it primarily for practical reasons. It’s good to stay married because divorce is painful, impoverishing, and very bad for kids. Discipline and a strong work ethic facilitate life success. Good credit is key for establishing yourself.

　　Even the neocons may have built their platform on a thinnish metaphysical foundation. But the SuperZip dwellers were much worse. They bolster their commonsense traditionalism with all manner of practical supports: marriage counselors, gyms, financial planners, wellness and accountability programs, excellent schools, and of course, an ongoing stream of material incentives to make the discipline feel worth it. Neo-traditionalism isn’t cheap! Meanwhile though, material comforts can never quite quell the desire for meaning, so elites have gone searching for causes, which give them a satisfying sense of doing things that matter. They invest in social justice crusades, environmentalism, and politics. They stand up for racial and sexual minorities, panic over climate change, and try to stop the rise of fascism. They build guardrails against toxic masculinity.

　　It turns out, Murray’s clarion call was answered, in an unexpected way. In the years after Coming Apart, educated elites did start preaching more, trying harder to transmit their views and lifestyle choices to others. The result was what we often refer to as “wokism.” They were never going to preach a commonsense moral traditionalism, because they don’t believe in it. Even if we persuaded elites to make the plight of Fishtown into their cause, it’s hard to imagine life improving, because the strategies elites use to preserve discipline and productivity among themselves simply don’t work well for the less-prosperous. They’re too dependent on “support staff” and an endless string of incentives. It’s not feasible to supply that to everyone. (Even elites are arguably struggling with overproduction issues.) But ordinary people shouldn’t need high luxury or endless accolades to get jobs and stay married. People have done those things for centuries under conditions that even “poor” Americans would consider desperate. Ordinary people need church pews, not wellness programs. They won’t find too many of those in the SuperZips.

　　That Old-Time Religion

　　As the right basks in its recent ballot-box triumphs, I think it’s worth keeping in mind how rapidly electoral politics can shift. The right emphatically does not have a dominant lock on America’s political future. This shoe is likely to change feet in the foreseeable future, and it would be depressing indeed if the ultimate legacy of Coming Apart were a world in which the microphone is perpetually passed back and forth: first we fling epithets at the “bubbled elites,” then at the “deplorable rubes,” and on and on it goes.

　　I don’t hate technocratic elites. I think, like Murray circa 2012, that we need them. I’ve lived in societies where one expects to get food poisoning roughly every week or two, and where trains hardly make a pretense of running on schedules. I’d rather be here. I’m grateful for the people who grade our roads and keep our store shelves stocked, and I don’t much care what they eat or watch on TV. I don’t much care if they’re richer than me.

　　As cultural and moral exemplars though, our elites have failed pretty badly. The people who can help revitalize Fishtown are the ones still standing on firmer and more hallowed metaphysical ground. I’m thinking now about the sources of order and meaning that are older than wokism, richer than “mindfulness,” and more enduring than any accountability program. The great theistic faiths have weathered centuries and provided sustenance for people much, much poorer than almost anyone living in the United States today. Traditionalists, this is your hour. It’s time for some new preachers.