Jeb Bush
blows the dog whistle. Asked if policymakers could "help turn back" a "rising tide of family breakdown," Bush answered:
"Absolutely, there is," Bush, a likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said. "It's not exactly the core. My views on this were shaped a lot on this by Charles Murray's book, except I was reading the book and I was waiting for the last chapter with the really cool solutions — didn't quite get there."
Later in the interview, Lowry asked Bush what he likes to read. Again, he cited Murray.
"I like Charles Murray books to be honest with you, which means I'm a total nerd I guess," Bush said.
In case you're not attuned to the "Charles Murray" dog whistle, here's Andrew Hacker in
The New York Review of Books listing a couple of Murray's greatest hits:
Charles Murray has written another book about race. Much as The Bell Curve argued that many human beings of African heritage were genetically less intelligent than most whites, so Coming Apart addresses the deficiencies of Americans of European origin. He charges large swaths of “white America”—his designation—with indolence, self-indulgence, and failing to understand the nation’s “founding virtues” of honesty, industriousness, marriage, and religion.
The large swaths of white America Murray finds deficient are the ones in the bottom 30 percent of the income ladder, naturally. According to the
Southern Poverty Law Center, Murray uses:
... racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor. According to Murray, disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior. Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action and the Department of Education, arguing that public policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that cause unequal social and educational outcomes.
In short, Bush is saying "I'm a racist who also thinks poor white people deserve poverty—basically I'm for the supremacy of rich white dudes—but I like to put an intellectual veneer on it."
