Charles Murray, someone who makes his living by thinking and appreciates its grandeur as a guiding force, recently had a firsthand encounter with a mob of college students insisting instead that fury should rule the day.
I am tempted to generalize about a sickeningly spoiled, intellectually betrayed younger generation out to announce its moral superiority by way of moral thuggery. That goes too far. We’re talking about 100 people. But they symbolized more than themselves. Something significant is indeed going on. And it is pathetic.
The setting for this story is Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt. Murray, a libertarian author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, had been invited to speak at the school by libertarian students, and no wonder.
A few years back, he had written an amazing book that as much as predicted what we witnessed in the 2016 presidential election. It was called “Coming Apart” and was about an upper-middle class more and more separated from a white working class letting go of self-reliance, industriousness, marriage and religion. A nation once unified in its norms was no more and the result was gated communities over here and increased poverty, crime and family dissolution over there.
