Spiked: Charles Murray, "America Against Itself"

   This is pretty interesting. Here's some of it:

Collins: Do you see the culture divides and trends you identified in Coming Apart as contributing to the rise of Donald Trump? 

Murray: Yes, I do. There are two developments. First, if you look at those people who are out of the labour force – what I call the ‘new lower class’ – they are no longer participating in the major institutions of American society. To put it crudely, I think they look upon Trump as sticking it to the man in a way they find gratifying. But I think they also look upon this as entertainment. I’m exaggerating to some extent, but there’s a sentiment of ‘well, this is a really interesting reality show, look at what this guy is getting away with, with all his outrageous stuff – let’s see what happens next’
Then you have other people in the white working class who are getting married, holding jobs, playing by the rules – and they are pissed as hell. They see all of these shenanigans among the elites, the Wall Street types, for instance, with their 20,000-square-foot mansions. And most aggravating of all, they have to suffer the cognitive elite’s incredible smugness and condescension. The elites don’t even bother to hide this condescension towards the white working class. They are constantly making fun of rednecks, of evangelical Christians. And they talk about ‘flyover country’, as if nothing between the East Coast and West Coast really makes any difference. Indeed, cognitive elites are contemptuous of the working class. At the same time, working-class people, trying hard to makes ends meet, are being faced with an awful lot of competition for work from an influx of low-skilled, immigrant labour – an influx that the elites have encouraged and done nothing to stop. So, are they angry? Yeah. And is Trump a vehicle for expressing that anger? Absolutely.

And some more:

Collins: I was thinking about how, in Coming Apart, you explore how the elites seek to distance themselves from the working class. They eat so-called healthier foods, they have different child-rearing practices, and so on. Then, from afar, they preach their preferred ways to the working class, as if they know better. The elites may no longer preach traditional civic virtues, as you note in Coming Apart, but they are still preaching, in a way. Only now they’re preaching about health, parenting and other things. 

Murray: They are preaching. They are legislating. They are creating policies. The elites (on both the right and the left) do not get excited about low-skill immigration. Let’s face it, if you are members of the elite, immigration provides you with cheap nannies, cheap lawn care, and so on. There are a variety of ways in which it is a case of ‘hey, it’s no skin off my back’ to have all of these new workers. The elites are promulgating policies for which they do not pay the price. That’s true of immigration, that’s true of education. When they support the teachers’ unions in all sorts of practices that are terrible for kids, they don’t pay that price. Either they send their kids to private schools, or they send their kids to schools in affluent suburbs in which they, the parents, really do have a lot of de facto influence over how the school is run.
So they don’t pay the price for policy after policy. Perhaps the most irritating to me – and here we are talking about preaching – is how they are constantly criticising the working class for being racist, for seeking to live in neighbourhoods in which whites are the majority. The elites live in zipcodes that are overwhelmingly white, with very few blacks and Latinos. The only significant minorities in elite zipcodes are East and South Asians. And, as the American sociologist Andrew Hacker has said, Asians are ‘honorary whites’. The integration that you have in elite neighbourhoods is only for the model minority, not for other minorities. That’s a kind of hypocrisy, to call working-class whites ‘racist’ for doing exactly the same thing that the elites do. It’s terrible.

   Of course, as anyone on the left will tell you, CHARLES MURRAY IS A BIG FAT RACIST BECAUSE REASONS... But, then, as we've also been told, everyone is a big fat racist...so...Murray's no worse than any of the rest of us poor sinners born with the ineliminable super-sin of racism in our souls... Deny that you've got it, and it just means that YOU ARE A SUPER DUPER RACIST.

   Anyway, the contempt point is a really good one. I completely agree. The "elites" loathe lower-class whites, and, as Murray notes, they don't even bother to hide it. Contempt is a powerful damn thing.