The underlying theme of, well, just about everything since the financial crisis of 2008 has been who controls our lives. It is not just who is to blame for the big mess, but who is the secret cabal, this 1% or fraction thereof, pulling all the strings with such diabolical power and unhappy results.
Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, is the vogue rightwing faux-sociology analysis of the new elite, whose wealth and power hold such sway in the US. Murray's elite are a fey, Ivy League, pretentious bunch (that is, Obama). In contrast, the many recent leftwing accounts since the financial crisis ascribe such elite power to crafty bankers and mendacious corporate types (that is, Romney).
In Murray's view the latte-sippers and high SAT-scorers have been able to step into a power vacuum because everybody else in the country – that is, the heretofore stolid middle class – is on drugs and mired in their dysfunctional family lives. The shift here in the conservative analysis is that it's not just blacks who are shiftless, but the great majority of whites, too. (Because of myriad social programs, black people may even have an advantage.) Fat white people are the problem. What used to be called, in a sub-genre of racism, "poor white trash", now dominates the middle class.
But Murray's real obsession is the new elite. This is hardly the first book that focuses on the American ruling class, although Murray acts like it is, dismissing all former American ruling classes as so rarefied and remote as to be irrelevant. His main point – a pretty hoary one, too – is that the elite, or, really, the upper middle, has a separate culture far from the middle middle and lower middle, and that it is so distinct and totemic and fetishistic that it has forged a whole new class, with behavior, aspirations, assumptions, options, possibilities, tastes vastly different from those of ordinary folk.
Part of his point is that this is no longer a little elite sitting atop a vast hoi polloi, but a vastly expanded class of Medicis, mandarins, and myrmidons.
More people having more power and more money could obviously be considered a type of good news, or a silver lining in an analysis of wealth disparity. But Murray feels the issue is contrast: the world is divided between the cool and not cool, talented and not talented, fit and not fit, smart and dumb, lackadaisical and hypercompetitive. While this might seem like a meritocracy, it is not, because, more and more, these two groups look like two races: people separated by look and culture. There is, Murray argues, practically a DNA change: you get born into coolness and talent.
Murray's dire view is further colored by a sense of moral collapse: the topmost people aren't God-fearing because they are too arrogant, while the bottom group have lost their way on account of sloth and permissiveness.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts, by Susan Cain – a book about, well, quiet people – is more faux sociology, which, although without political rancor or subtext, joins Murray in an assault on the values of the dominant class.
Quiet defines the ruling elite as spinmeisters and media whores, in contrast to salt of the earth who shun the spotlight, as well as the need to be heard. It is not only the fat and the dumb who have problems in contemporary America, but the reticent. They are both oppressed by the more socialized, both barred from full participation in the decisions of the community, because of this new apartheid based on personality. Excluded from the new ruling hegemony, they grow ever fatter and ever quieter.
Quiet, by the way, has astoundingly reached No 3 on the New York Times bestseller list, as, I can only assume (it's a particularly gassy read), part of a backlash by, well, quiet people, against the loud 1%.
In a sense, both of these are no so much sociology, even of the faux type, but rather conspiracy books, proposing to tell us what unseen forces and inexplicable characters are running our lives. (Malcolm Gladwell's books do the same thing, but with a positive and buoyant view.) And, too, they are novelistic, inventing archetypes – or warring with other archetypes.
Murray's olive oil-dipping elites are, in essence, the same people we saw, for instance, in Charles Ferguson's documentary about evils of Wall Street – except Ferguson's elite are carnivorous vulgarians. Quiet's wise introverts might otherwise be the repressed, fearful, paralyzed types that they've mostly been portrayed as since Freud came along. Murray has reconstructed a new eastern elite (however broader he has made it), without even a nod to the rise of the new, larger-than-life Sunbelt power and personalities. Susan Cain extols what she believes is a widespread desire for privacy and reserve without accounting for the hundreds of millions of people regularly publicizing themselves on Facebook.
Murray and Cain are deeply nostalgic. Murray's is a bloodless, sniveling, ritualized upper class (that is, the sort of upper class that the bighearted everyman on the block might easily make fun of); Cain, in her idealized world, has created a heightened sense of discretion and propriety (orderliness is what she really values). Both books evoke a simpler, smaller, more neighborly world. In Murray's, a fifties-type of middle class is an equitable power paradigm (pay no attention to women, black people, gays); in Cain's reflective rather than reactive paradigm, no one raises their voice, avoiding upset and conflict.
At any point of radical transition – the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1950s and 1960s – you might have found these sorts of books on the bestseller lists: laments about speed, competitiveness, dislocation, and hubbub. The plaintiveness can hardly be missed: what about the people who are left behind? In the cataclysm of industrial transformation, what about the people left on the farm?
Modernity hurts. In a world of strivers, operators, and entrepreneurs – and especially when the economy comes roaring back to life – who remembers the forgotten man? We know the answer.
