Know Your Enemy - How Charles Murray (Almost) Predicted the Trump Era

Matt and Sam read Charles Murray's 2012 book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010."

Duration: 1h 32m
Broadcast on: 15 Oct 2025
Audio Format: other

This episode is the second in our occasional series on important, controversial, or unusually relevant conservative texts from the recent past. Here we take up Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. With its focus on the ascendence of a new "cognitive elite," cultural divides, and the pathologies afflicting working and lower class whites, the book might seem prophetic of the Age of Trump — but the reality is more complicated. Murray's oversights, it turns out, are as interesting as his insights. We walk listeners through Murray's account of how America "came apart," take the test he provides to see how thick our class/cultural bubbles are, then rip into the moralizing prescriptions with which he concludes the book. Along the way we discuss Murray as an emblematic success story of the right-wing welfare state and intellectual pipeline, revisit his obsession with race and IQ, and more!

Sources:

Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012)

— Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (2003)

— Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984)

Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'? Charles Murray," New York Times, Oct 9, 1994

Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016)

Pew Research Center, "Religious Landscape Study," Feb 26, 2025

Quinn Slobodian & Stuart Schrader, "The White Man, Unburdened," The Baffler, July 2018

"Do you live in a bubble? A quiz." PBS Newshour, Mar 24, 2016.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

all right welcome listeners to episode 122 of know your enemy i met sitman your podcast cohost and i'm here as always with my great friend sam other bell who just has returned to new york city from visiting our intrepid producer jesse bernaman at his home in montana sojourn to the mountain west you're lucky i didn't walk off into the wilderness and make a new life for myself and you also got to see where the magic happens jesse's his lair yes his lair surrounded by weird keyboards and synthesizers that he uses to make his music i think when he did the first of his albums where he you know played all the instruments on the record i called him as being akin to like a deranged one-man band deranged doesn't even begin to describe yes but it was great montana was great jesse and kathryn and baby may it was great to see them next time we got to get them out here so we can have a know your enemy summit on your roof that's true well speaking of deranged people yeah this episode is the second in our book series an occasional series where we pick a text written by a conservative intellectual figure on the right that we think is unusually interesting or important or has something to say to us now and we chose for our second book charles mary's 2012 book coming apart the state of white america 1960 to 2010 at the start of this episode we give you a fair amount of biographical information about mary and a fair number of handholds before we actually get to the substance of coming apart so um sam why don't you just tell listeners what this book is about why we chose to devote this time to it before we get some other matters sure well the the thesis of this book is pretty easy to summarize this based on five decades of statistical and qualitative research charles mary is going to tell us that there is a new upper class and a new lower class among white people which have become perilously divergent in their cultural mores their values their life ways and that this is having a distorting influence on the american project it's not such a wild thesis especially like in the wake of the financial collapse the idea of a yawning gap between a new upper class and a lower class was not a totally novel idea it wasn't the only one talking about it but of course mary he approaches this these questions with his own pecadillos and preoccupations distinctive preoccupations i think would be uh the term i would use to say it delicately you might say the title coming apart it has two meanings right so the white underclass is unraveling but the country as a whole the kind of common culture unity real world imagined that mary describes that has been blown apart too yeah that's what this book is it's interesting that it covers roughly the same period of time as the christopher called well book that we did on our first book episode which makes for an interesting contrast yes both begin with the kennedy assassination essentially yeah man boomer brain serious boomer brain well sam you'll show we get some housekeeping items yeah as always we're grateful to our partners at dissent one thing they do in sponsoring the podcast is provide free digital subscriptions to dissent if you subscribe to know your enemy on our patreon for ten dollars a month you can do that patreon.com slash know your enemy of course for that ten dollar amount you also get access to our discord and of course as always for five dollars a month you get access to all of our bonus episodes and i have to say given where the country is at right now that is where sam and i we often kind of try to make sense of what's happening you know our rank punditry musings on the state of the country uh so mega yeah so please do subscribe and go on this journey with us well and as always you want to thank our intrepid producer jesse brendan man thanks jesse and well Epstein who does the music for the podcast yes and you know every once in a while we do ask listeners to rate and review us especially on the apple podcast feed it does help supposedly feeding that algorithm but also it's a way to not let the trolls win that's right there's one star reviews i'm now dumber for having listened to this uh don't let them win well should we get to this conversation yes here's our close read of charles mary's 2012 book coming apart the state of white america 1960 the 2010 enjoy enjoy all right samu i'm very excited for this episode because we are known as book nerds and this is the second in an occasional series we're going to do about a key conservative book like the previous time with christopher caldwell's book that we did on the kind of the aftermath of civil rights legislation and various judicial opinions this is the second in that series in its charles mary's

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam read Charles Murray's 2012 book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010."