“In retrospect, perhaps it was a mistake to invite elites to “preach what they practice.”
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.
