Book Review: Coming Apart by Charles Murray - Businessweek

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/book-review-coming-apart-by-charles-murray-01192012.html

Charles Murray, the conservative sociologist, has written an incisive,
alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American
society. No sense withholding the punchline: He thinks we're in
decline. The American rich are living cloistered and isolated lives,
depriving the mainstream of their fraternity, their wisdom, and their
skills. A growing number at the other end of the socioeconomic
spectrum are dropping out in another respect—abandoning work, family,
and community. At risk is what Murray affectionately terms the
"American project." To Murray, the key to self-government is the
modifier "self"; American democracy, he says, can never be stronger
than the cumulative strength of character of its individual selves. A
government whose citizens lack what Murray terms "the founding
virtues"—virtue being one of the unfashionable terms that Murray
reclaims with delight—might as well be a dictatorship. It will lack
participatory vigor, civic energy, and a sense of inclusion, without
which even the Constitution becomes a dead letter.
---SPSmith