Coming Apart

Charles Murray argues that between 1960 and 2010, white America split into two new classes so different in their behaviors, values, and lived experiences that they threaten what he calls "the American project": the founders' vision of a self-governing society in which free individuals voluntarily solve collective problems. Murray restricts most of his analysis to whites to demonstrate that this class divergence exists independently of racial dynamics, though he broadens the picture in a later chapter.

Murray opens by establishing November 21, 1963, the day before President Kennedy's assassination, as a symbolic baseline. He describes an America of limited consumer choices, cultural homogeneity, and broadly shared norms. Marriage was nearly universal, divorce rare, and nonmarital births among whites stood at only three percent. Ninety-eight percent of civilian men in their thirties and forties were in the labor force. Murray acknowledges serious problems, including racial segregation, the subordination of women, and poverty, but emphasizes that rapid economic progress had fostered a general sense of improvement. He identifies forces already in motion: the birth control pill, the civil rights movement, the feminist and environmental movements, and the baby boom generation reaching adolescence.

In Part I, Murray traces the formation of a new upper class, defined as the most successful five percent of adults in managerial and high-prestige professional positions, roughly 1.4 million people (about 2.4 million including spouses). He distinguishes this group from earlier elites, noting that the mid-twentieth-century Establishment was culturally diverse; the cabinets of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy included sons of farmers and factory workers. The new upper class, by contrast, shares an increasingly homogeneous culture.

Murray identifies four forces behind this class's formation. First, cognitive ability became far more valuable as the economy grew more technologically complex. Second, the resulting concentration of wealth enabled spatial and cultural isolation. Third, a college sorting machine concentrated the most talented students into elite schools with extraordinary speed: Harvard's mean SAT verbal score jumped from 583 in 1952 to 678 by 1960, and by 1997, just 105 colleges absorbed 74 percent of students scoring in the top five percent on standardized admissions tests. Fourth, cognitive homogamy, the tendency for highly educated people to marry one another, intensified. The share of couples in which both spouses held college degrees rose from 3 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 2010, concentrating cognitive ability across generations.

This new class developed distinctive norms around health, diet, media consumption, child-rearing, and work that cumulatively produced deep cultural separation from mainstream America. Murray shows how residential segregation reinforced this separation, creating a composite index of education and income for every zip code and defining "SuperZips" as those in the 95th through 99th centiles. These zip codes average 63 percent college-educated with median family incomes of $141,400. Forty-four percent of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale graduates live in SuperZips, with massive clusters around Washington, DC; New York; San Francisco; and Los Angeles. Murray includes a quiz testing readers' familiarity with mainstream life, covering topics like military service, chain restaurants, and Branson, Missouri. While acknowledging the class's contribution to technological innovation, he contends that reducing income inequality would not dissolve its cultural isolation, which is driven by shared tastes rather than wealth.

In Part II, Murray frames his analysis around four "founding virtues" he argues were historically understood as essential to the American project: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity. Drawing on the founders and early observers like Alexis de Tocqueville, the French analyst of American democracy, Murray contends that all agreed limited government could function only with a virtuous citizenry. These virtues were transmitted through schoolhouse socialization, particularly the McGuffey Readers, widely used textbooks that taught civic values from the mid-nineteenth century through World War I.

To track changes in these virtues, Murray creates two fictional neighborhoods. "Belmont," modeled on the affluent Boston suburb, represents all persons with at least a bachelor's degree in high-prestige or managerial occupations. "Fishtown," modeled on a white working-class Philadelphia neighborhood, represents all persons with no more than a high school diploma in blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar jobs. Most analyses focus on adults ages 30 to 49.

The data reveal dramatic divergence across all four virtues. In marriage, the gap between Belmont and Fishtown widened from about 10 percentage points in 1960 to 35 by 2010, with Fishtown falling to 48 percent married while Belmont stabilized near 83 percent. By the early 2000s, fewer than 30 percent of Fishtown children still lived with both biological parents when the mother reached age 40, compared to about 90 percent in Belmont. In industriousness, the percentage of prime-age white males not in the labor force tripled, concentrated among the least-educated men. By 2008, only 60 percent of Fishtown households had someone working at least 40 hours per week, down from 81 percent in 1960, while Belmont barely changed. In honesty, the imprisonment rate for Fishtown residents rose from 213 per 100,000 in 1974 to 957 per 100,000 in 2004, while Belmont's rate remained negligible. In religiosity, Fishtown's religiously disengaged population grew from about 38 percent to 59 percent, while the religiously active core shrank to just 12 percent.

Murray supplements these statistics with ethnographic evidence from Fishtown itself. Residents describe normalized teenage pregnancy, men who refuse available work, rising petty crime, and the fading authority of the Catholic Church. Combining measures of economic failure, single parenthood, and civic disengagement, Murray estimates that the proportion of Fishtown residents problematic for civic culture rose from 10 percent in the late 1960s to 33 percent by 2007.

Murray argues that these trends matter because the founding virtues correspond to the four domains through which people achieve deep satisfaction: family, vocation, community, and faith. General Social Survey data show that when people score high on all four domains, reported happiness is similar in both neighborhoods. But because these domains have deteriorated in Fishtown, self-reported happiness there declined from about 33 percent in the 1970s to 22 percent in the 2000s, while Belmont stabilized near 40 percent. Drawing on sociologist Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, Murray documents a parallel collapse of social capital: By 2004, 75 percent of Fishtown residents belonged to no social organizations, and only 20 percent said others can generally be trusted, compared to 60 percent in Belmont.

When Murray expands his analysis to include all racial and ethnic groups, the trends are nearly identical. He concludes that the nation is divisible by class, not by race.

In his final chapter, Murray presents two alternative futures. In the pessimistic scenario, the new upper class has become a "hollow elite," its members practicing marriage, industriousness, and community engagement in their own lives but refusing to advocate these values publicly, substituting what Murray terms "ecumenical niceness," a broad tolerance that replaces explicit moral standards. The new lower class continues to expand, and the American project gives way to a European-style welfare state. In the optimistic scenario, a civic Great Awakening occurs, driven by European fiscal collapse, scientific advances vindicating traditional understandings of human nature, persistent poverty despite massive transfer spending, and the resilience of American ideals. Murray calls on the new upper class to advocate openly for the virtues its members already practice and to recognize that engagement with fellow citizens of all classes is more rewarding than an insulated life.