Understanding Charles Murray’s Embarrassing Op-Ed
Part 2 of 2. Click here for the entire series.
Reading Charles Murray's slapdash article in yesterday's Washington Post, the thought occurs: how does an intelligent man and serious thinker produce such silly work?
How do you write that American "elites" are unfamiliar with the LaHaye novels, without noticing that LaHaye himself helped engineer the nomination of George W. Bush in 2000 and is by now worth many millions of dollars?
Or claim that Branson Missouri is unknown to elites without yourself showing any recognition of Glenn Patch, Branson's largest landowner and entrepreneur (and owner of the local airport - the only privately owned airport in the United States!)? If not a billionaire, Patch is next door to it.
How do you end up with a definition of "elitism" based on favorite TV shows and vacation preferences - and with no regard to money and power?
Let me hazard a guess - or a "thought experiment" as Charles Murray might say.
Murray is of course right that there exists an American elite. Murray may be right that this elite has pulled further away from ordinary people than the American elite of say 1960. Murray does not prove the case, he does not even try. But intuitively, Murray's case makes sense for a reason that Murray omits to mention: the American upper class of 2010 is so very much, much richer than the American upper class of 1960.
But here's another difference between the elites of 2010 and the elites of 1960: The current range of elites have done a much, much worse job of governing the country than did their predecessors.
For a decade, almost all the news from the nation's political and economic leaders has been news of failure and mistake. From 9/11 through the stimulus, we have careened from one mistake to another. The one success of the entire period from my point of view was the TARP - and even that success was only necessary because financial and political elites had steered us toward the worst financial collapse since 1931. Kudos to those who averted the worst catastrophe, but their work should never have been necessary in the first place. And even TARP leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth, because the price of rescuing the US (and world) financial system was another round of outsize financial rewards to those who had created the mess in the first place.
Now here's Charles Murray's intellectual problem, to which the Washington Post piece represents an attempt at solution:
The elites who created this havoc were both financial and political. They include the sort of people who staff the higher levels of the U.S. government - and the people who give to the American Enterprise Institute. Any real analysis of what went wrong in the United States between 2000 and 2010 would likely arrive at a great many conclusions uncomfortable to a scholar at AEI, as I can attest! So better not to arrive - better not even to start. So instead we get Murray's latest: a Style section lifestyle piece offered as social science