On the Mass Popular Delusion that Charles Murray Knows Something About Inequality, Populism, and the Troubles of the White Working Class

I respect Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna (RAK) as an editor, writer, and thinker. But he’s glaringly wrong about Charles Murray.

Writing in advance of the Hoover Institute’s event on populism and inequality featuring Charles Murray and Frank Fukuyama, RAK makes a few basic criticisms. First, he argues that Murray and Fukuyama are too similar to really hold a debate. The speaker series promised contrasting viewpoints and RAK feels cheated. Second, RAK argues that Murray is not qualified to discuss the topics at hand, and hints that he must have been invited for some other, hidden reason, since his expertise (mainly his 2012 book Coming Apart) is so clearly inadequate. Murray, of course, is the author of The Bell Curve, a book that generated immense controversy for its chapter on race and intelligence. RAK sets aside the questions of race and racism, however, and so I will too. But he has made more than enough claims about Murray’s other work to keep us busy.

First, RAK writes that Murray is not “that politically different from Fukuyama.” “Both men are conservative,” he tells us, “and their views on these particular topics are not very radical.” He adds that, “Fukuyama and Murray have each written about populism and inequality, differing slightly in their diagnoses of the cause for their rise in America.” Put together, the accusation is clear: Fukuyama and Murray are two bland conservatives who will not bring debate to campus, as Hoover promised. The unstated subtext is that the Hoover Institute doesn’t want debate, but rather seeks to expose the campus to conservatives.

These claims can be dissected without too much difficulty. First, note that even if both speakers were conservatives, that would not by itself crush debate. A debate between a social conservative and a fiscal conservative might be exceedingly fruitful. Even a debate between two social conservatives of different stripes could be explosive in a way that the last Hoover event, which featured the right-wing Peter Thiel and the liberal Reid Hoffman, was not.

But RAK is also wrong on the facts: “Both men” are not “conservative.” Murray is a libertarian who advocates for widespread civil disobedience and for a universal basic income (UBI). Fukyama is a former neo-conservative who can probably now be described as centrist or center-right. He endorsed Obama in 2008. Noticeably influenced by Kojève and Hegel, he is nobody’s idea of a right-winger. To call one of these a “conservative” would be an oversimplification. To call them both conservatives and leave it at that is just misleading.

Nor do they both take similar approaches to the issue at hand. Murray works through the social scientific data, constructing a story through charts and studies. Fukuyama, on the other hand, comes at the issue from the vantage of political theory, worrying about the roots and health of American social order and governance. True, they both see our inequality as problematic. But I suspect RAK will be surprised by just how different they view the causes and solutions of the problem.

Next, why does it matter that their views on inequality and populism “are not very radical”? RAK mentions this a few times, but I do not understand why he thinks it is a critique. Besides, Murray’s views are pretty radical. In placing culture before economics (I am oversimplifying here) in his explanation of the woes of the white working class, he is certainly at odds with much of his field. His critique here (which could be called conservative) casts social liberalism as having facilitated the social breakdown of poor communities while rich ones benefitted and blames government policies for accelerating the decline of those poor communities by replacing their functions. At Stanford University, and really at most liberal institutions, that view is damnably radical.

Yet RAK insists that Murray has nothing exciting to say. He treats the judgment of a few researchers that Murray’s speech on these topics was “decidedly middle-of-the-road” as authoritative. (Never mind that those researchers also found that “Mr. Murray’s speech was…[not]even particularly conservative.”) But this gets us to a more important point: If it is true that Murray’s arguments are no longer so controversial, this is in fact a sign of the great success of the book he wrote, Coming Apart.

At the time, Murray was mocked for his concern with the social decay of the white working class. Paul Krugman’s assessment for the New York Times was typical. “Reading Charles Murray and all the commentary about the sources of moral collapse among working-class whites,” Krugman began, “I’ve had a nagging question: is it really all that bad?” His conclusion was that it wasn’t. “So here’s a thought: maybe traditional social values are eroding in the white working class — but maybe those traditional social values aren’t as essential to a good society as conservatives like to imagine.”

The decline of the values of the white working class isn’t so important to our society as a whole? Maybe there’s a reason Hoover invited Murray and not Krugman: While a great many liberals wrote off Murray’s argument about the troublesome drift of the lower classes in 2012, the picture looks quite different after 2016. Murray’s insights may have become more conventional, but only because so many other people were proven wrong and changed their minds.

With these objections out of the way, we can get to RAK’s most daring claim: “Charles Murray doesn’t deserve to be called a leading thinker on these topics.” He even goes further, asking why Murray was invited to speak in the first place, asserting that, “It certainly couldn’t have been for his expertise.”

That last claim intimates that there is some other reason why Murray was invited. This reason is left unstated, but can be assumed to be suspect. In fact, the truth is not hard to find. Niall Ferguson, who is organizing these events for Hoover, has been quite public about why he finds Charles Murray to be a valuable voice for our times. In a January 11 profile of Ferguson in the New York Times, the Hoover fellow explains that, “the must-read book for Trump’s elections and presidency remains Charles Murray’s astonishingly prescient “Coming Apart.”” Ferguson also wrote column for The Times of London in 2016 in which he called Murray’s book “prophetic” and credited it for identifying “the stark social division that is defining this year’s presidential election.”

RAK’s claim that Murray “certainly couldn’t have been [invited]for his expertise,” then, is prima facie wrong. It seems very likely that Murray was invited exactly because he detailed in his data-rich book from 2012 what came as a shock to the rest of us in the 2016 election.

This leaves only one point left remaining: that, regardless of what Ferguson or Hoover may have thought, Murray “doesn’t deserve to be called a leading thinker on these topics.” This claim is at least plausible: Ferguson may well be wrong, and Murray may well be a derivative, bit player in the field.

To support his argument, RAK cites a few reviews of Coming Apart. One is from Timothy Noah, a left-wing journalist and MSNBC contributor. RAK is rather infatuated with Noah, and writes that he wishes Stanford invited him instead. But if his concern is rigour, expertise and originality, why invite Noah, the journalist, instead of Murray, the social scientist? Next, he cites the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait, who freely admits he hadn’t bothered to read Murray’s book. I am not sure what we are supposed to care what Chait thinks. Next comes Andrew Hacker, a liberal professor who criticizes Coming Apart for the standard reasons. Finally, RAK devotes an incredible amount of space to David Frum, described as a “Republican speechwriter and commentator.” Frum is supposed to “disabuse anyone of the notion that the only critiques of Coming Apart come from the left.” This is a classic example of what is colloquially knows as the Reaganite “even the liberal New Republic agrees…” fallacy from the 1980s. You see, RAK neglects to mention that Frum has been seriously alienated from the conservative movement since 2008, having left or been pushed out of the American Enterprise Institute and National Review, and had become the left’s go-to conservative to quote against other conservatives. “Even the conservative David Frum agrees…” is something of a stock joke on the right.

RAK’s attempt to show trans-partisan dismissal of Coming Apart fails. All he shows is that a few liberals (including those who didn’t read the book), leftists and ex-conservatives thought the book was wrong or unoriginal. A closer and fairer look at the book’s reviews from 2012, however, tells a different story. For an unoriginal book, this one sure set off a firestorm. Writing in the New York Times, conservative columnist Ross Douthat called Coming Apart “the book that’s launched a thousand arguments.” He described it as “a brilliant work with an exasperating conclusion” and praised “Murray’s portrait, rich in data and anecdote, of the steady breakdown of what he calls America’s ‘founding virtues.’”

A quick Google search reveals that the New York Times published no fewer than 5 articles about the book in 2012, and then included it on its coveted yearly notable books roundup. Douthat, it turns out, was not alone. David Brooks, moderate conservative columnist, wrote in the New York Times that, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.” He concedes the point that RAK so pushes, that “Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society,” but he quickly adds what RAK misses: “What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.” The heterodox libertarian economist Tyler Cowen agreed and wrote, “It is unpopular because it disrupts current moral narratives about economic and social decline, as much on the right as one the left.” An article in the NYT’s book review section further dissected the book, calling it a “lightning rod in the storm over America’s class divide.”

If the book was as “unoriginal,” “unremarkable,” and “middle-of-the-road” as RAK thinks it was, why was it such a lightning rod? Why did it garner such attention and so sharply divide people? Why did The Atlantic reprint excerpts from the book? Why was it praised in The Economist? Clearly many people thought the book was important and insightful. Perhaps these people thought that Murray, a social scientist who had already written intelligently about the cognitive divergence in America and the socially deleterious effects of types of government assistance to the lower classes, had produced a detailed and effective portrait of the drift of the white working class. They were alarmed by his warning of the consequences that might follow from such a divide.

Is it really a mystery why now, after the 2016 election, some people think Murray is a guy worth listening to? The Wall Street Journal recently published a column from Murray on “Trump’s America.” Professors and student groups from around the country have invited him to speak on his book, now six years old. The American Enterprise Institute held on event, aired live by C-SPAN, with Murray and J.D. Vance on the decline of the white working class. Bill Kristol brought him on his interview series. David Brooks again returned to Murray’s book to help understand the present moment.

Niall Ferguson and the Hoover Institute are evidently in good company in looking to Murray for analysis of the populism, inequality, and divisions we now recognize in America. If RAK still believes that, even though Murray’s book was explosive and highly notable in 2012 and is now being revived for its prescience in 2018, it has little to offer us, he needs to make that case substantively. The burden is on him and cherry-picking a few book reviews will not satisfy it.

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Elliot Kaufman is a senior editor for Stanford Politics.