America: Cultural Third World Country

Rod Dreher has a interesting and fairly extensive analysis of an important article at the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray, introducing his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 . The results of Murray’s diagnosis show that America is a cultural Third World country:

The problem Charles Murray diagnoses is real. He offers no real solution. I can’t see that its possible within libertarian philosophy to come up with an effective solution. Murray needs to read Alasdair MacIntyre, who doesn’t have much of a solution either, but who at least understands the profundity of our cultural brokenness. This cultural Third World to which America is descending — by which I mean a society in which the ultrarich live radically segregated from the masses — seems to me to be an outworking of ideas and trends that have been at work for a very long time.

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