Two Americas, growing apart: Charles Murray offers a better way to think and talk about class.

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 - Book review

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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray, Crown Forum, 400 pages, $27

UNLESS YOU LIVE in a cave, you know the controversial work and reputation of Charles Murray. Losing Ground, published in 1984, proposed eliminating welfare as we knew it and became the template for conservative welfare reform. The Bell Curve (1994) proposed that America is sorting itself relentlessly by IQ, and that race is an intractable part of the picture. The unjustly neglected In Our Hands (2006) proposed cashing out most federal subsidies and programs and focusing on making government less intrusive rather than just less expensive (a better plan than conservatives' current one of wishing the New Deal out of existence). In between Murray found time for a libertarian manifesto, a history of the Apollo space program, and a survey of human creativity. Like him or not, he has written many original books.

Coming Apart, his latest, is not one of them. There is almost nothing original or new in it. And I mean that as a high compliment, because what is new is rarely true.

With the recent death of James Q. Wilson, the last than of 20th-century political sociology has passed from the scene. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Aaron Wildavsky, Samuel Huntington, Mancur Olson, Edward Banfield, Seymour Martin Lipset: They and a handful of others reframed pressing national issues in ways that transcended ideology. Of today's practitioners, only Murray has the same flair for the big idea at the right moment. But he is more eclectic than the previous generation: more eccentric, more contrarian, more ideological. He courts controversy and sometimes pushes too far. He and I are friendly acquaintances, and I recall a conversation years ago, when The Bell Curve was still on the drawing board. After he sketched the argument, I urged him to excise the material on race and IQ. If you include that, I told him, no one will notice anything else in the book. He replied that the element of race was too important to omit, and whether or not people wanted to hear about it, they should. When the book came out, I was not happy to be proved right.

Coming Apart is different. Very different. Now within sight of 70, Murray calls the book "my valedictory on the topic of happiness and public policy," and possibly "my valedictory, period." What he has done, this time, is to ditch the contrarian persona and stay squarely within the bounds of the conventional and the known. Still more surprising: Far from inflaming a sensitive debate, he has found a way to defuse one. By coloring so resolutely inside the lines, he has found, at last, a compelling, attention-getting way to tell a story about class in America.

What is that story? American culture and society are bifurcating, Murray argues. At the top, you have the Whole Foods people. These are what he calls "the new upper class" and what I think of as two-two-two-one people: households with two college degrees, two incomes...