Can The Working Class Be Saved?

[saveliberty]

The New York Times:

NYTimes

 

Op-Ed Columnist

 

Can the Working Class Be Saved?

 

 

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A food pantry in Reading, Pa., one sign of the breakdown in American life. Despite the partisan divide, there are some practical solutions.

By ROSS DOUTHAT

 

Published: February 11, 2012

 

 

 

CHARLES MURRAY’S “Coming Apart,” the book that’s launched a thousand arguments this winter, is a brilliant work with an exasperating conclusion. What’s brilliant is Murray’s portrait, rich in data and anecdote, of the steady breakdown of what he calls America’s “founding virtues” — thrift and industriousness, fidelity and parental responsibility, piety and civic engagement — within America’s working class, and the personal and communal wreckage that’s ensued.

 

 

Go to Columnist Page »

 

 

Ross Douthat’s Evaluations

 

The columnist’s blog on politics and culture.

More From Evaluations »

 

Related News

• A Lightning Rod in the Storm Over America’s Class Divide (February 6, 2012)
  

Josh Haner/The New York Times

 

Ross Douthat

Readers’ Comments

 

Share your thoughts.

• Post a Comment »
  
• Read All Comments (35) »
  

What’s exasperating is what the author suggests policy makers can do about the social crisis: in essence, nothing.

 

Or at least nothing realistic. Instead, Murray argues that our leaders should embrace his own libertarian convictions, scrap all existing government programs (and the dependency and perverse incentives they create) and replace them with a universal guaranteed income. This is a fascinating idea; it’s also fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities. Which means that it’s divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis that Murray so vividly describes.