Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?—David Frum - The Daily Beast

Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?—David Frum - The Daily Beast: :

A piece by my favorite conservative, David Frum, taking apart a book by Charles Murray

1) It's historically wrong to describe the "founders' conception of limited government" as if there existed some group called "the founders" who broadly agreed a vision of government that more or less corresponded to contemporary libertarianism.

2) As a matter of fact, if you announce that there can exist no possible information that might change your mind about abortion, the death penalty, marijuana, same-sex marriage, and the inheritance tax, then yes you are an unreasonable person—or anyway, an unreasoning one. I've changed my mind about same-sex marriage as experience has dispelled my fears of the harms from same-sex marriage. If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I'd change my mind about marijuana legalization. And so on through the list.

3) But here's the most important point of all. I tramped through a lot of the same research that Charles Murray presents here when I wrote my history of the 1970s, How We Got Here.

As I looked backward and forward in time, however, I had to face this awkward fact: America became more culturally stable between 1910 and 1960 as it became less economically and socially libertarian. As it became more economically and socially libertarian after 1970, America became culturally less stable:

"The greatest generation was also the statist generation. Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering."

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