Donald Trump vs. Family Values

In 2012, the midway point of the Obama era, the conservative thinker Charles Murray published a long lament of the experience of white America, titled “Coming Apart.” Murray, two decades earlier, had co-written the notorious book “The Bell Curve,” and had become the emblem of the noxious theory that race and intelligence were linked; the memory of that episode dominated the reaction to his new book. But there was something new in “Coming Apart,” having to do with Murray’s horror of discovery. His argument was that if you cleave the great mass of white Americans in two, based on the wealth of the places they live, you find radical differences in experience. The wealthy white places, which Murray collectively called “Belmont,” are full of coherent neighborhoods, families, and lives. The poor white places, which he named “Fishtown,” were all loose ends. Divorce and single-parent households were endemic, and so were high-school dropouts. In Belmont, the disruptions to the family were a phenomenon of the seventies, quickly corrected; in Fishtown they kept escalating. The same conditions that conservatives had insisted were marks of moral decay in black neighborhoods turned out to be persisting in white ones. To Murray, the residents of Belmont, whom he saw as mostly liberal, seemed beset by an “ecumenical niceness,” a failure to denounce the moral collapse on the other side of the tracks, to acknowledge that something had gone terribly wrong.