I agree with Ross Douthat that Yuval Levin's review of Charles Murray's new book is among the most perceptive so far. It helps unpack the argument, while pointing out its weaknesses. To wit:
At the very least, he does not clearly show whether or how the trends at the top are driving those at the bottom.
What Yuval argues is that the moral collapse at the bottom has its own rationale and its own challenges. Getting the elite to proselytize the virtues of later and more durable marriage or thrift is not likely to change much, except as a rhetorical tool to decry elites, which itself is an avoidance of a core cultural problem among the working poor. This is a piercing summary of our problem:
The left wants to re-create [mid-century post-war] America by re-creating the activist state and the powerful labor unions that characterized it, but this stands to make economic dynamism very difficult. The right wants to re-create it by re-creating the economic dynamism it achieved, but this stands to make social cohesion very difficult.
I suspect that Obama is less ambitious: and sees education reform as key. Ross, however, takes aim at the very institutions that once fostered family cohesion and individual responsibility among the poor: the institutional churches. His forthcoming book, Bad Religion, explains more fully the failure of modern Christianity in America to live up to its much more illustrious past. (It's a brilliant piece of work.) I think it takes some courage and intellectual integrity to put church, not state, at the core of our moral and social problems. And this is a courageously true statement:
So far as Murray’s argument is concerned, I think that religious institutions are both one of the areas of American life hit hardest by elite self-segregation (you can’t pastor a church in suburban Buffalo from a corner office in Washington D.C.) and one of the few areas where it’s plausible to imagine his call for elites to leave their cocoons and live among the people actually being answered.
Institutions are only as strong as their personnel, and the major religious bodies in the United States have struggled mightily since the 1960s to attract large numbers of the best and brightest (and, indeed, large numbers period) to the ministry. This isn’t just a Catholic problem — the Protestant denominations, which allow clergy to marry and often ordain women, have had the same difficulties drawing in and keeping talent — and it’s a hard trend to reverse: In the scramble for money and status that we call meritocracy, a career in the clergy offers little of the former (save to megachurch-builders) and less of the latter than it used to.
But at the same time, religious belief offers one of the most few motivators that might be potent enough to persuade a high-achiever to choose a life outside the SuperZips. (Just ask Ignatius of Loyola, or Francis of Assisi, or …) And even in their weakened state, our religious institutions — with their flar-flung networks of parishes and ministries and schools in need of leadership — offer a more plausible mechanism than most other professions for seeding middle America with the talented and energetic.
The Dish 