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How Charles Murray (Almost) Predicted the Trump Era
🕑 Added 2025-10-15 10:30:03 +0000 UTCThis 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 designed 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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Comments
Matthew Pinas
I got 45. Which is accurate to describe the unique circumstances of a person from Chicago, whose father was objectively working class, but because of strong construction workers unions in Chicago, was paid like a person in the middle class.
Evan Sweeney
Who doesn't love an internet quiz! I got 47, with the quibble that I grew up in such a small town in MT that we didn't have any of the restaurant chains he asked about. I now live in Germany so I'm definitely not eating at Applebees these days (although I did work at one in college). Great Episode.
abby
I didn’t follow along closely with the quiz but I’m from and live in SW PA; though I am very educated and a little self selecting, I find myself in the strange situation sometimes of being lectured by true Coastal Libs™️ about what would play well in the hinterlands
abby
Thinking constantly about Wilhelm Reich’s point in the mass psychology of fascism that industrialization put enormous, rending and disorganizing stress on the nuclear family and the fascist movement in Germany succeeded in appealing *emotionally* to the ideological value of the nuclear family while doing nothing in political economic terms to support it
Jessica Newman
Score of 49. Much like Matt, this is due to a rural Kentucky working class childhood.
Yelram
score 38, while I know what you guys look like ... I imagine Sam as looking like the character Ted from the TV show " How I Met Your Mother" and Matt as looking like Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory".
mark o'hare
A 59, but why do I feel like I just signed up to get a phone call from some new friends I didn't know I had over at the Scientology reading room? I think the Observer Effect makes an appearance in all of Charles's libertarian "just measuring outcomes" bullshit.
Matthew Hall
55. A few thoughts: 1) I doubt Murray the great working class whisperer would be caught dead in a Greyhound depot, and I straight up cursed in rage as I considered the way in which he and his fellow goons have systemically worked to dismantle and undermine public transportation systems across this country, so tut-tutting educated people that they may not have deigned to ride a bus is real goddamn rich. 2) I have a graduate degree and I love Chili's. If one were closer than two hours away by car you bet your ass I would've TAKEN THE BUS to down an awesome blossom and their dope chicken fingers at least twice in the last year, and so I answered that question in an emotionally truthful way.
