For the packed house at the American Enterprise Institute on the evening of January 8, Charles Murray needed no introduction. We were there to celebrate the 75th birthday of the author of Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart and to mark his transition to emeritus status at the center-right think tank where he has spent the last 27 years. But this party also had a twist. It was Murray, the guest of honor, who had brought a gift: a spellbinding address reflecting on his career, work, thought, and grim view of the American future.
“My whole career has been one wrong answer after another as far as the left is concerned,” Murray joked. He described growing up in Newton, Iowa, and his roots in Middle America. When he arrived as a freshman at Harvard in September 1961, he said, he was somewhat estranged from the manners and norms of East Coast university life. “A part of me always felt like an outsider and still does.” Four years later, he left Massachusetts for Thailand. He spent some six years there, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a social scientist. “I basically missed the ’60s,” he said.
It was while working in Thailand that Murray had what he called “epiphanies.” The first came early, as he sat in an office watching paper-pushers. The high rhetoric of progress used by development officers and bureaucrats, he realized, did not translate into concrete reality. Government activity was entirely superfluous to the lives of everyday Thai people.
The second epiphany came later. In interviews with villagers, Murray learned that the only things they expected from magistrates was for them to catch water buffalo thieves and ignore illegal distilleries. “What mattered in good government was intensely local.” The priorities of the functionary in Bangkok were removed from, indeed at odds with, the priorities of the farmer in the provinces.
These two lessons informed Murray’s studies at the American Institutes of Research, which he joined after receiving his doctorate in political science from MIT. A lifelong Democrat, his politics slowly began to change. “What was building up over those years was that I was getting very knowledgeable about social programs in the United States,” he said. The political right was alien to him nonetheless. Impressed by William F. Buckley Jr., he remembers thinking, “That poor guy—he has to hang out with conservatives.”
Murray’s early work caught the eye of Irving Kristol, “the Godfather,” who invited him to contribute to the Public Interest and connected him with benefactors who could help fund his research. By 1984, Murray had become a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, where he published his first major study, Losing Ground, a relentless and devastating empirical critique of American social policy. The book caused an uproar that helped launch the movement for welfare reform. “By the end of writing Losing Ground, I realized I was a libertarian.”
Losing Ground also marked the beginning of a pattern in his work. Every decade or so thereafter, as regular as the tides, Murray innocently would lob an intellectual grenade into the public square, sending the bien pensant left into hysterics and shifting the ground of debate.
By the late ’80s, Murray and his wife had moved to rural Burkittsville, Maryland, where he was deep into research for a book on the social consequences of IQ coauthored with Richard Herrnstein of Harvard. The then-president of the Manhattan Institute, Bill Hammett, was reluctant to be associated with what was sure to be an explosive and polarizing work. “I had essentially been fired,” Murray told me in a recent interview.
He landed at AEI in July 1990. His new colleagues included his sometime editor Kristol, Robert Bork, James Q. Wilson, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others. “It was a really interesting dining room to be in for luncheon conversations,” Murray told me. He recalled listening as Bork and Kristol discussed President George H. W. Bush’s attitude toward intellectuals. They agreed that Bush was defensive around scholars, whereas President Reagan hadn’t been. Intellectuals amused Reagan. Or so they thought.
In his 2014 book A Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, Murray told another story of those early years. One day he made a quick run to the office to pick something up. “I wasn’t going to be in the building more than 10 minutes, so I arrived wearing a flannel shirt and jeans,” he wrote.
As it turned out, Murray would spend much of his time working from home. His initial plan had been to spend a full day per week in the office. But soon he discovered that the collegial atmosphere of the building cut into his work. “The day I spent at AEI was the least productive day of my week,” he told me. Trips into D.C. became less frequent. Eventually, he didn’t require an office at AEI at all.
The fallout from the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 strengthened Murray’s regard for his employer. He previewed the book’s contents for AEI scholars and brass. At the end of the presentation, Murray recalled, Kristol leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, Charles, we’ll defend you—up to a point.”
“We knew there would be a reaction because IQ raises so many hackles,” Murray told me. “But I thought we had handled it so well that we’d be praised for taking these difficult topics and making it possible for people to talk about them.” Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen.
Intelligence is a combustible subject on its own. Discussing it in relation to race—even if done briefly in a classically liberal, pithy, open-minded, inconclusive, understated manner—is like lighting a match inside an Iraqi ammunition depot. Making matters worse was Herrnstein’s death from lung cancer right before publication. Murray would have to defend their work on his own against caricature and calumny. “I had thought I was familiar with being vilified,” Murray said.
Boy, was he wrong. Murray was tarred as a racist, a eugenicist, and a quack. The insults and accusations varied. What remained constant was AEI’s support. “Chris DeMuth,” president of AEI until 2008, “never batted an eye.” Over time, the furor over The Bell Curve calmed down. By the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency, Murray had begun receiving invitations to speak on college campuses once again. His books on libertarianism and on human accomplishment in the arts and sciences were well received. And when Coming Apart was published in 2012, Murray found that his reputation had been largely rehabilitated. “I was no longer a villain on the left,” he told me. It wouldn’t last.
If there is a theme to his work, Murray said, it is to be found in “the intersection of happiness classically defined and public policy.” Human beings, his data show, find meaning in family, community, vocation, and faith. In his early work, Murray also believed in the power of incentives. If the intrusive, centralizing, bureaucratic structures that crowd out civil associations were reduced or abolished, he argued, human beings would flourish. “When I wrote Losing Ground,” he said in his speech at AEI, “I was still optimistic about the malleability of human beings.”
That optimism has faded in recent years. Murray’s research into IQ and the heritability of traits lessened his faith in economic carrots and sticks. “I was depressed by the evidence that a lot of bad things are hardwired by adolescence and maybe even before that.” Coming Apart depicted white America irreparably divided by education and class, and America’s common culture replaced by antagonistic bubbles of rich elites and aggrieved workingmen. This was four years before the 2016 election.
Murray’s By the People (2015) went further. It told the story of how New Deal Supreme Court decisions systematically replaced the Constitution of the Founders with an administrative state that is undemocratic, unaccountable, invasive, expansive, and for all practical purposes lawless. The intellectual climate also had changed, Murray said, and this time for the worse. Recently Murray has been ostentatiously disinvited from speaking engagements on college campuses and, when allowed to speak, become the subject of violent protests.
“Essentially, it’s over,” he told me. He wasn’t referring to his time at AEI. He was referring to the American experiment in self-government.
“This is what old guys do,” he said. “They get dark and pessimistic.” He told the audience at AEI, “You are, I fear, akin to a remnant,” sheltering the idea of human freedom in an ignorant and authoritarian epoch. One reason for his retirement, Murray went on, is that it is better to shine a light than to curse the darkness, and he spends much of his time these days cursing the darkness.
What does retirement mean for Murray? “More time to play poker.” Time to study religion alongside his wife, a serious Quaker. And time to write. “I’m working as intensively on the current book as I have on any,” he told me. A look at the calendar suggests Murray is due to shake up the policy world for a fourth time. “People on the left have to realize that when you take someone and say all the nastiest things about them, there’s no downside to what they write next.”
As I left AEI, I couldn’t help thinking that Murray’s pessimism was somewhat at odds with other remarks he had made during his valedictory address. He admitted he was “strategically optimistic” because he found it unthinkable that young people used to the freedom of the digital age would submit to government control and standardization. “Sooner or later, the wheel is going to come around.” The social sciences, he went on, are about to be revolutionized by findings in neuroscience and genetics. It will be a thrilling moment.
What he is far too modest to observe is that this youthful remnant of social scientists toiling away in the dark will have something Charles Murray did not: the power of his example.
Matthew Continetti is editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
