That's his argument in a nutshell, folks. Coming Apart argues that the decay of marriage, the growth of long term unemployment among all the whites not in the 1% is due to their straying from the virtues of industriousness and family. His solution? Have that 1% lecture the 99% percent on how everyone should be as good as they are.
As Murray moves from show to show, as his argument that the poor deserve their fate because they are lazy and immoral, every major publication, I have yet to see anyone challenge him on this. Fareed Zakaria will call him 'controversial' and then let him proceed with his talking points. David Brooks of course spent a whole column gushing over him.
At no point does Murray, or his many interviewers ever challenge him with the obvious -- he has it exactly backwards. As Bertholt Brecht wrote in The Three Penny Opera "First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics." For the past 40 years, the middle class lifestyle has steadily eroded. Benefits cut, wages stagnated, jobs exported, ever more education -- with the cost and time for that -- required just to stay afloat, then finally overleveraging, ruin.
The real moral problem is that corporations/plutocrats will without any moral sense export whole industries abroad to places where labor laws and environmental protections are non-existent, that they demonize the poor, demonize unions, that they then have the utter gall to lecture the rest of us on how their success is a product of virtue, of 'industriousness' as Murray loves to repeat, whereas the hardships we increasingly endure from their rapaciousness are really our fault because we are not as good as they are.
The Supreme Court ready to deny that there is anything like the greater good, as we are seeing in their deliberating on the Affordable Health Care Act, a boy gunned down as he strayed near a gated community on suspicion of being poor and black, its all part of the War on the Poor, an expression of the Republican view that the poor are such by their own fault and the rich deserve everything they get as a divine reward for their virtues. Sociopaths, whether corporations or people, always find a way to blame their victims.
Mr. Murray -- you are half right. This country is indeed coming apart. But that is not because people are abandoning the virtues of hard work and family. It is because the very people you are petitioning to bring the 99% to the light are the ones who sold them out without the least moral compunction. You'd be surprised how virtuous people are when they have a livable wage and a future. Increasingly, we don't. The War on Poverty has been replaced by a War on the Poor.
That's it short and sweet -- Republicans believe the non-rich are immoral, and that's THEIR problem, and the rich are enjoying God's bounty because they live right.