Book Review: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010

 

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart is the book nobody on the Left wants you to read. It slices through the progressive myth that “we’re all the same, just more enlightened now” and shows, using data, not ideology, how America’s white working class has been culturally and morally gutted since the 1960s. Murray isn’t talking about race. He deliberately focuses on white America to remove the tired, lazy accusations of racism that leftists throw whenever cultural decay is discussed. And what he reveals is damning: marriage collapse, fatherless homes, falling male labour participation, drug addiction, and a loss of civic virtue, all while an insulated elite continues to thrive, marry, work, and pass on privilege to their kids. This book demolishes the Left’s utopian fantasy. It shows that values matter. The breakdown of marriage and community isn’t some inevitable by-product of “progress”, it’s the direct result of decades of cultural rot, fuelled by policies that subsidise irresponsibility and punish virtue. Murray proves that the elites, those who smugly tweet about “equity” from their gated communities, live by the very values they deride: stable families, hard work, church, and self-discipline. Meanwhile, the white working class is encouraged to embrace hedonism and victimhood, with devastating results. Coming Apart is a brutal wake-up call: the West isn’t falling apart because of economics, it’s collapsing because men stopped being men, communities stopped enforcing standards, and our cultural elite decided that moral judgement was the worst sin of all. Read this book if you want to understand why the Left’s social experiments have failed catastrophically. Then go and do the opposite: build a strong family, work hard, and live the virtues our ancestors once took for granted. This isn’t just sociology, it’s a battle plan for reviving Western civilisation.