The latest of the Conversations with Bill Kristol series, a wide-ranging discussion between our boss and Charles Murray, is particularly fascinating. (You can find it, along with all the earlier conversations, at the website sponsored by the Foundation for Constitutional Government: conversationswithbillkristol.org.)
You should, as they say, listen to the whole thing. But here are some excerpts to give you a taste. The two were talking of the American dream and the American way of life. “What we used to substitute for nationalism was the American way of life,” said Murray, a phrase “which now I’m sure is used only sarcastically or in a lot of cases historically, as what people used to say.” But “60 years ago, ‘the American way of life’ had meaning.”
He continued: While “there are lots of different meanings that could be assigned to it, a great deal of it had to do with the dignity and importance of the common man, and the dignity and importance of the family. If you did a few basic things in the United States, you were as good as the richest man in the country. That was really believed.
“The idea that you weren’t supposed to be upper class. America doesn’t have an upper class. We have regular Americans and people who pretend to be an upper class like the New York 400. They’re the anomalies. The real American rich people are out there in Cleveland and Des Moines and Topeka and so forth. Yeah, they have companies, but they’re members of their lodges and they engage in community activities.”
Since that time, Murray continued, we have seen “the creation of a real honest-to-God new upper class, which is also characteristic of mature civilizations that have evolved into a layer cake. In our case, the layer cake was driven by a few good things, such as giving people of all abilities a shot at a good education. That’s a good thing, but it also tends to create a new upper class, which a number of us have commented upon, and now exists as a class that sees itself as better than the rest of the country, better able to make decisions for the rest of the country, and also enjoys a culture of their own.”
Traditionally an upper class “sets the standard for the rest of society. Whether it’s Roman civilization or Victorian England,” the upper class “were the ones who said this is the way decent people are supposed to live. It should embody virtue, and the new upper class saw it as their responsibility to live that way themselves and to say that’s the way that you ought to behave. We have none of that. We have what I like to call ecumenical niceness as the code of behavior of the new upper class. . . .
“I’m reminded of a saying of Irving Kristol’s that I cherish and repeat to myself like a mantra on occasion. I was talking to Irving about this, and I’m sure he said it to people besides me. He said, ‘Yes, the country is going to hell, but it will take a long time, and we can enjoy ourselves in the meantime.’ That’s pretty much where I feel right now.”
There’s much more where that came from—on the current political situation, on the vindication of Murray’s most controversial book, The Bell Curve (1994), and on his 2006 book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, which has just been republished this summer in a revised and updated edition. You’ll want to listen to the whole thing (look for the “Charles Murray II” link at conversationswithbillkristol.org).
