CHARLES MURRAY HAS lost interest in changing anybody’s mind. When the author of Coming Apart wants to substantiate some assertion that few would dispute—usually one demonstrating how differently life is lived by Caucasians at the bottom and the top of the income distribution in America—he harvests statistic after statistic to the point of tedium. But when Murray reaches any conclusion that his readers might quarrel with, he turns strangely diffident. Here’s where I go with this, he says with a shrug. Others would make a perfectly reasonable case arguing the opposite, he says. It’s a free country.

If this sounds like humility, it isn’t. A humble author wouldn’t devote more than half his nine-paragraph acknowledgments section to thanking himself for writing various earlier books on related topics that helped refine his thinking. Nor would a modest author conclude, at the end of his book, that it doesn’t really matter what those reasonable-sounding others deduce from today’s available evidence because future evidence will prove the author right. Thus Murray, writing about the “European model,” at first concedes magnanimously that, “If you think that providing economic equality and security are primary functions of government,” then “you can easily find evidence on behalf of social democracy.” But a few pages later Murray breaks the bad news that these European welfare states will eventually bankrupt themselves. Americans “will have a chance to watch these events unfold before our own situation becomes as critical, and the sight will be a powerful incentive to avoid going down the same road.” A prophet without honor in his own time, Murray is serenely certain that posterity will thank him for telling hard truths his contemporaries didn’t want to hear.

Murray’s book has taken some unfair criticism for ignoring lower-to-middle-income African Americans and Latinos. Murray focuses on white America not because he doesn’t care about non-whites, but rather because he wants to describe various self-destructive behaviors afflicting the working class—he doesn’t call them “pathologies,” but that’s more or less what he means—without drawing accusations of racist victim-blaming. That has been an occupational hazard for Murray ever since he coauthored, with Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in 1994, which attributed much of the achievement gap between blacks and whites to what Herrnstein and Murray claimed was blacks’ inherent and genetically-based mental inferiority. The scholarly community was near-unanimous in finding Herrnstein and Murray’s evidence on this point unpersuasive and their conclusion repugnant.

Coming Apart excludes non-whites from its discussions of unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, and other troublesome social indicators, but at the end of the book Murray recalculates his findings to demonstrate that in nearly every instance the same dismal patterns hold within the colorblind proletariat. (The only notable exception is the incarceration rate, which shoots way up when you include blacks.) Murray’s larger point is that the social problems he describes extend to all the have-nots, and they aren’t driven by race or ethnicity.

We are, Murray posits, two nations: one a pampered and clueless but high-functioning meritocratic elite, and one a bruised and resentful and low-functioning working class. Murray can’t resist caricaturing the elite as largely a bunch of NPR-listening, New Yorker-reading, Galapagos-cruising liberal nitwits, but he concedes that most of the conservatives who inhabit America’s upper tier are similarly out of touch with proletarian culture. To prove this he subjects his readers (by definition almost certain to be upper-tier) to a quiz, with questions like “Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?” and “Who is Jimmie Johnson?” The primary purpose is to force readers to recognize that they inhabit a privileged cultural bubble. (Give yourself a gold star if you know that Johnson won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series five times consecutively.) A secondary purpose is to exempt Murray from the class myopia that he describes, thereby establishing his bona fides as a tour guide through the class divide.