Conversations with Bill Kristol Guest: Charles Murray, scholar, American Enterprise Institute Table of Contents I: 0:00 – 5:55 II: I: (0:15 –) KRISTOL: Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to CONVERSATIONS. I’m very pleased to be joined today again by Charles Murray, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, author of many important books: Losing Ground – when was that? 1984? – The Bell Curve in the mid-90s, and Coming Apart, about four years ago. I would say, I’m not sure there’s a social commentator who’s written as many important books over the last few decades as Charles so it is a great pleasure and honor to have you here. And you’re going to explain the current moment, right? MURRAY: With that kind of introduction I suppose I’m obligated to. KRISTOL: Exactly right. So what – this is the very beginning of August of 2016. People are – someone wrote something in the New York Times yesterday giving you credit for presciently seeing that Trump or Trumpism, I guess, was going to happen. Did you see it, and what do you make of it? MURRAY: I knew that we were going to have a problem with the white working class, and actually, I guess I’ll blow my own horn and say in 1993 for The Wall Street Journal, I had a long article called “The Coming White Underclass.” If you go back and read that – but this is not rocket science, it simply was the trend lines for out-of-wedlock births among working-class whites at that point had been spiking upward. They were at about the level they had been when Pat Moynihan sounded the tocsin on black out-of- wedlock births in the early 1960s. It did not take much foresight to see the same kinds of social problems were going to happen to whites. But where we stand now in 2016 is way worse than it was then. How did we get there? KRISTOL: Explain maybe very briefly, what is way worse? What indicators would you cite, if I said, “I don’t know, the country seems to be in decent shape”? MURRAY: For most of you who don’t hang out in working class communities, or who grew up in one but haven’t been back to visit recently, you will probably be shocked. The reason you’ll be shocked is that a town that you knew 30 years ago, 40 years ago, as a town of intact families and no more serious drug problem than some beer and marijuana will now find meth use is a huge problem and increasingly heroin use. You will find on the order of 18 percent of the single white males in that community of working age who are not even looking for work. That’s a lot of people. You will see single-parent families all over. You will see children who are not performing well in school, who are delinquent. 350 WEST 42ND STREET, SUITE 37C, NEW YORK, NY 10036 Basically, Bill, you can take all of the things that social scientists were shaking their heads over about the black inner city in 1970s and 80s, and all of those things are happening in white working-class America now. It’s really, truly, not only unprecedented, but it’s of a different nature than the problem of the black inner cities for a very brutal reason. Blacks constitute around 12 percent of the American population; non-Latino whites, depending on how you define it exactly, but we’re still looking at high 60 percent, around 70, a little bit lower than that. That’s a group that’s about four times as large as the black population. When you get social problems of the magnitude that they now experience, you’ve got a crisis that dwarfs those of earlier decades. KRISTOL: And it really is unlike the problems Italian immigrants had 100 years ago, and the Irish, you read about – there were riots and they had drinking problems and so forth? MURRAY: The reason it’s different is that with those Irish, and those Italians, you still had communities that functioned in terms of marriage, in terms of the norms for men working, in terms of taking care of your kids. Not that they didn’t have problems. Italian communities, Irish communities, and for that matter, Scotch- Irish communities, to get to my forbearers, often drank too much, and men hit their wives too much. There were problems. But the communities were functional in basic ways. KRISTOL: How do we get to that situation? MURRAY: It’s really with the advantage of hindsight, of course. Pretty simple. White working-class community – in the book Coming Apart, I use Fishtown, which was a working-class community in Philadelphia, now gentrified. KRISTOL: Yes, I was thinking – I saw Philadelphia in the Democratic Convention. Yeah, it is actually different. MURRAY: The Fishtown was a classic, old, been-there since the revolution, white working-class community. If you were in a Fishtown or one of the many counterparts throughout the United States, and you were a guy, you probably had a pretty good manufacturing or other kind of blue-collar job. It didn’t make you rich. The UAW kind of union jobs really were a pretty small portion of the labor force, but you had a good job. You put a roof over your family and put food on the table; you had a wife, you had a couple of kids. All of this did a couple of things. One is it provided the family as the unit of organization of the community, which is real important for reasons we can come back to. But also, it gave you a real status in that community. You were one of the good guys. A guy your age who wasn’t supporting his wife, wasn’t taking care of his kids was a bum. He didn’t have status you did. Then, you get the 1960s. You get the Pill in the early 1960s, Sexual Revolution. You get the sudden preoccupation of the Democratic Party with blacks in the middle of the 1960s, which continues. In the late 60s, it adds women. In the 70s, late 70s, it’s already beginning to add gays as the objects of the elite liberal affection and concern. White working-class guys not only are saying, “What about us?” They’re actively the objects of scorn of the liberal elites. They are sexist, they are racists, and later they’re homophobic. They’re violent. They’re guilty of abusing their wives and children, and in all sorts of ways, nobody stops to say, “Most of you guys are still the salt of the earth, you make America go.” There was none of that rhetoric. There were lots of things that were dislocating; plus, you got women going into the labor force. All at once, the economic dependence that women had on men has gone away. What happens if I leave? Maybe not so much because not only is the wife making money, maybe she’s making more than you are. 2 Then, along comes Reagan, and they like Reagan’s rhetoric, they like his patriotism. Oh by the way, a lot of these white working-class guys had also been veterans of Vietnam. And when they came home, they couldn’t wear their uniforms because they wore their uniforms on leave they were spat on, so that goes into it. Reagan appeals to them. They start voting for the Republicans, that coalition holds together for a while. Things don’t get any better. They aren’t making more money. Their wages are pretty stagnant, and their communities are starting to break down. That’s when you start to have the guys who are still holding down jobs, but you have the other guys who maybe had an accident at work parlay that into disability, now don’t work at all even though they could. You have guys working enough to qualify for unemployment benefits who then takes the next three of four months off. You watch around you; people of color or women who get big settlements from employers because if they’re fired, they charge that they’ve been harassed or racistly fired. So they are, really, if you’ll pardon the technical term, pissed off by 2016, and who can blame them? You had in this though two very different components, and I’ll wrap up this here. You still have – you still have working-class guys who are playing by the rules. Who are getting married, taking care of their kids, working hard. We live in a part of the country where we know people. We actually hang out with a lot of people of the kind I’m talking about, and there are a whole lot of people who are doing the right things. There are also a whole lot of people who fit the other description I gave. The problem is they’re in the same communities. So it’s not as if the guys who are playing by the rules still live in functional communities, it’s only the bad guys who don’t. The whole thing is festering. KRISTOL: Was it inevitable? I think the good-faith efforts – presumably, let’s leave the liberals aside – by Clinton on the Democratic side and Reagan and Bush on the Republican side, all of whom thought they were speaking to these people and probably honestly thought they had policies that would help them.