How Charles Murray (Almost) Predicted the Trump Era

This episode is the second in our occasional series on important, controversial, or unusually relevant conservative texts from the recent past. Here we take up Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. With its focus on the ascendence of a new "cognitive elite," cultural divides, and the pathologies afflicting working and lower class whites, the book might seem prophetic of the Age of Trump — but the reality is more complicated. Murray's oversights, it turns out, are as interesting as his insights. We walk listeners through Murray's account of how America "came apart," take the test he provides to see how thick our class/cultural bubbles are, then rip into the moralizing prescriptions with which he concludes the book. Along the way we discuss Murray as an emblematic success story of the right-wing welfare state and intellectual pipeline, revisit his obsession with race and IQ, and more!

Sources:

Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012)

— Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (2003)

— Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984)

Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'? Charles Murray," New York Times, Oct 9, 1994

Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016)

Pew Research Center, "Religious Landscape Study," Feb 26, 2025

Quinn Slobodian & Stuart Schrader, "The White Man, Unburdened," The Baffler, July 2018

"Do you live in a bubble? A quiz." PBS Newshour, Mar 24, 2016.

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