Remember the alienated working class?
If my memory serves, the U.S. establishment took an interest in MAGA Land’s discontents for about nine months, beginning in mid-2016 and ending a month or two after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a period that roughly coincided with Hillbilly Elegy’s climb atop the best-seller charts. Thereafter, the media and talking heads went back to ignoring or demonizing the social bloc that had propelled the Orange Man to the White House, an approach that persists to this day.
But before Trump’s rise was anything more than a gleam in the reality-TV star’s own eye, one thinker saw trouble brewing among the lower orders and tried to warn the nation. I’m speaking of Charles Murray, whose prophecy came in the form of the 2012 book Coming Apart: The State...