Who can be surprised? In his NYTimes column today David Brooks extolls the latest book by Charles Murray, the wannabe gene expert and co-author of the discredited Bell Curve, which "proved" that blacks had lower intelligence than whites. Brooks writes about Murray's new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:
I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.
In his book, Murray argues that lower class whites have become IQ-challenged like their black brethren and, thanks to "government dependency programs", have abandoned conservative values that have proven so beneficial to the (overwhelming white) upper ruling class
In his review, Brooks avoids incendiary terms such as race and genetic determinism, using instead the concept of tribes:
The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
Poor whites and blacks embrace of culture of hedonism - thrust upon them by the 1960's counterculture - while the elite have stable marriages and a strong work ethic.
Using convoluted logic, Brooks (and Murray) blame a "liberal elite" in the top, affluent "tribe" for imposing the values of sloth and dependency on the poor, inferior, tribe:
Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.
Brooks neatly sidesteps Murray's underlying thesis, that the elite marry and reproduce among themselves, creating a superior gene pool. There's not much they can do for the poor whites and blacks, genetically disadvantaged, other than cutting all government "welfare programs" and forcing them to try and improve themselves through tough love:
There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs….[Liberals] will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth. -Charles Murray, Coming Apart
Murray's book is being promoted heavily by the Wall Street Journal and other business publications. His message plays into the GOP campaign and Newt Gringrich's attack on Obama the "food stamp president". Now the "thoughtful conservative" David Brooks has jumped on bandwagon. Hey, thanks for promoting this vile piece of trash, David!