The rise of the Amero-pessimists: two political thinkers, a liberal and a conservative, believe America is headed toward inexorable decline. There are good reasons to believe they're both wrong.

• Author: Teixeira, Ruy
• Position: 'Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010' and 'The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity will Remake American Politics' - Book review

Coming Apart: The State of

White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

Crown Forum, 402 pp.

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The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity

Will Remake American Politics

by Thomas Byrne Edsall

Doubleday, 256 pp.

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What do liberal journalist Thomas Edsall and conservative scholar Charles Murray have in common? They both think that America is going from bad to worse and that prospects for the future look remarkably bleak. Call this view "Amero-pessimism," a rising trend that includes broad sectors of both the left and the right.

Of course, these two writers embrace their Amero-pessimism for quite different reasons. For Murray, as he writes in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, it all started in the 1960s. In fact, Murray supplies us with an exact date when things started going wrong: November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot and the first day, according to Murray, of the cultural transformation of the decade. It's been all downhill since then.

Before this date, everybody did what they were supposed to do: they worked hard, got married, and, over time, prospered. Class divisions weren't much of a big deal. Rich and poor tended to eat the same food and watch the same TV shows. So what if some people had a bit more money than others? We were all bound together in a common culture with common values.

Since that fateful November day, however, American society has been coming apart. Under the baleful influence of a relativistic, anything goes, sixties morality, America's work ethic and honesty have been destroyed; the commitment to religion and the institution of marriage has been all but lost. As a result, the less-educated bottom 30 percent of whites have seen their economic and social fates diverge radically from the well-educated top 20 percent of whites. (Weirdly, Murray dubs the former group "Fishtown," in honor of a white working-class Philly neighborhood on the banks of the Delaware River; the latter group is named "Belmont," after a tony Boston suburb.)

It is a segment of Belmont whites--comprising perhaps 5 percent of the U.S. population--who make up what Murray believes is the new upper class. These are the folks who hold the most powerful managerial and professional jobs in our social institutions and really run the country. Unlike in the good old days, they live in a culture that is separate and distinct from the rest of America (think upscale coffeehouses and restaurants, gourmet food stores, "green" consumer goods, National Public Radio, "serious" movies and TV), and they even live together in the same places, huddled together in what Murray calls "SuperZips," where they can escape the unrefined masses, send their kids to good schools, and marry each other. Oddly, it is this very same new upper class that most fervently embraces the values of the 1960s--and yet they are doing very, very well.

And why are they doing so well? Simple: they're smarter! According to Murray, the sorting mechanisms in our technologically advanced society have become ever more efficient at ferreting out the cognitively gifted among us (elite colleges play a big role) and slotting them into positions where they can reap the market's...