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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

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Charles Murray

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“It is a fact of history that no king could push his people into war as rapidly and as fluidly as George Bush or Barack Obama. And this cannot be dismissed as a technological issue brought about by progress. It stems directly from the configuration of power structures. Here we must emphasize the difference between a stratified society and the modern egalitarian regime. In the latter, the state has direct authority over each individual or group, and this is true primarily because all have been reduced to one dead level. Access to one member on any single level implies access to all. In the stratified framework, however, the authority of a man at the uppermost level does not imply access to any other level beyond that which happens to be immediately adjacent to his own. He does not subsume command of all that falls below him in the vast hierarchy. He sits on the top rung, indeed, but his arms aren't any longer than yours or mine, and so he can only grasp at the next rung down from his own. The medieval king could command his dukes, but he could not command their knights. He could draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his own estate (which was not much larger than a duke's), but he could not draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his dukes' estates. In this way the monarch had no effective way of exercising direct dominion over anyone but the dukes themselves. Any influence on the peasantry was indirect, as a result of convincing the nobility of the justness of his cause. It was open to them to refuse in a way that no American governor can refuse mobilization of his population for a military engagement.”

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“Don’t bother to have your thugs break into my house when you give me an out-of-town assignment, Ms. Jones,” James Ed said. “They won’t find anything. My tape will be in safekeeping at Farmer’s Bank.”

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“Inevitable pickup trucks complete with full gun racks, chainsaws, fishing poles, and big, sneering dogs in the back, line the streets and parking lots. Meek murmur of autumn skies, Ford and Chevy outfits to roll through town, as people get ready for a long, gray, foggy winter, big, four-wheel-drive pickups with snow blades attached, the box loaded down, with a high stack of cordwood topped by a huge elk carcass, to go disheartened in the midst of wretched weather, cold, raw, continually snowing.”

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“Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five. "Oh, Ethan, it's time!" she cried. He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to leave you now?" "If I missed my train where'd I go?" "Where are you going if you catch it?" She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his. "What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one now?" he said.”

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“At last, we arrived home. Indian Vale. The house my father had built that had become mine and that one day would be my daughter’s, if she chose to stay in the area. She wouldn’t, though. Why should she? The young people here moved somewhere else as fast as they could, and the old folks withered away and died. The factories vanished and the mines and mills sank into the ground, and in their places were erected fast food joints and furniture rental places and pawnshops. Sometimes I hear places like where I live called “Real America,” and I know it rankles some folks—city folks, mostly—something awful, and I wish I could tell them it’s only done out of politeness. That it’s only people saying nice things about the dying.”

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