And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined

today again by Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, author of many important books,

Losing Ground in what was that 1984 and the Belkerve in the mid 90s and coming apart about four years ago.

I would say I'm not sure there's a social commentator who's written as many important books

over the last three decades as Charles so it's a great pleasure and honor to have you here and

you're going to explain the current moment right?

With that kind of introduction I suppose I'm obligated to.

Exactly right so what this is the very beginning of August of 2016.

People are, someone wrote something in the New York Times yesterday,

so giving you credit for appreciately seeing that this, the Trump or Trumpism, I guess, was going to happen.

Did you see it and what do you make of it? What is, how do we understand? Well, I knew that we were going to happen. Did you see it and what do you make of it? What is how do we understand?

Well I knew that we were going to have a problem with a white working class and actually I guess

I'll blow my own horn and say in 1993 for the Wall Street Journal, I had a long article called The Coming of the White Underclass.

And if you go back and read that, but this is not rocket science.

It simply was the trend lines for out of wedlock births among working class whites at that

point had been spiking upward.

They were at about the level they had been when Pat Moynihan sounded the toxin on black

out of wedlock births in the early 1960s and it did not

take much foresight to see the same kinds of social problems were going to attend what was happening

to whites.

But where we stand now in 2016 is

way worse than it was then. How do we get there? Yeah. Well and explain maybe very

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