Noah Millman, whose new blog at the American Conservative is well worth your time, raises a question about my qualified praise for Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart,” and particularly about my endorsement of Murray’s argument that the growth of a meritocratic elite has had negative consequences for the Americans who haven’t joined it:
I still want to hear the mechanism by which meritocracy causes trouble for the struggling working class. I’m assuming the mechanism is that the self-perpetuating “winners” of society come not to care about members of the working class, and conspire to promote their own interests to the detriment of those of the working class. But such an argument requires a view as to what that conspiracy consists of – how working class interests are frustrated in the real world. Are they prevented from organizing politically? Or forming unions to promote their economic interests vis-a-vis their employers? Are their wages being forced down by high levels of immigration, or by free-trade? Are taxes diverted to projects and services that benefit the meritocratic elite, and diverted away from areas that are predominantly working-class?
If I understand correctly, the argument Murray makes is that the negative impact is cultural. The “cultural elite” looks down on working-class culture, and at the same time the cultural elite declines to promulgate their own, more stable lifestyles as an aspirational goal for working-class families. To caricature the argument, if wealthy people drank more Bud and went hunting more often, working-class men would work harder to emulate the wealthy by staying employed and marrying their girlfriends …
I wouldn’t use the word “conspiracy,” but I do think that some of the specific examples Millman cites are on point: Among both liberals and conservative elites, there’s often an indifference to issues and problems that directly impact working class life but that cut against upper middle interests and concerns. (Democrats don’t like to talk about the costs of mass immigration, Republicans tend to focus all their tax-reforming energy on reducing marginal tax rates at the top, etc.)
That said, the core causal mechanism that Murray identifies has to do with the distribution of human capital rather than the meritocratic elite’s public policy priorities (or its taste in alcohol and recreational activities). The creation of an aptitude-based elite, he argues, has inevitably segregated America by talent: More than at any point in our history, the smartest people generally go to high school and certainly to college with one another, move en masse to “creative cities” after college, marry their fellow high achievers and then raise their kids in the cocoons of what Murray calls the SuperZips. The problem with this system isn’t that the meritocrats look down on working-class culture (though “Coming Apart” does get in plenty of digs at elite snobbery). Rather, it’s that the meritocrats don’t participate in working class culture, and that “assortative mating” and geographic clustering have deprived lower-income communities of the social capital (and with it, strong civic institutions, political influence, and so on) that the smart and diligent possess. In this sense, Murray’s analysis follows the late, great Christopher Lasch in arguing that meritocracy works almost too well: Plucking the best and brightest from every walk of life and then encouraging them to live in community almost exclusively with one another means that the rest of the country is deprived of people who otherwise would have been local leaders, local entrepreneurs, the hubs of local social networks, etc.
This explains why Murray’s general case for civic renewal at the end of “Coming Apart” includes a specific appeal to the new upper class, urging them to consider buying homes and joining local associations and raising their high-achieving children closer to the author’s blue collar “Fishtown,” and outside the cocoon of the SuperZIPS. This is not, to my mind, an entirely plausible vision; indeed, it has some of the same unrealism about human nature that you sometimes hear from those progressives who blame failed and failing public schools on the “selfish” parents who opt out of them (whether via private schooling or homeschooling or SuperZIP cocooning). And here again, as I said in my column on the book, I think Murray is far too dismissive of the public policy component in shaping the trends that he describes. (An America with easier commutes, more telecommuting and cheaper rents in SuperZIPs, for instance, might be somewhat less segregated by social and economic class.)
But as a diagnosis, I think his analysis of how meritocracy divides us is pretty much spot-on, and enormously important to understanding the state of our national life today. One of the epigraphs to my own book on Harvard and elite education was taken from Lasch’s “Revolt of the Elites: “Meritocracy,” it read, “is a parody of democracy.” One of the virtues of “Coming Apart” is that it demonstrates exactly what that means in practice.