Analysis Of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State Of White America

The most important way as to how the elite continues to control power is through the media. In Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010,” he speaks about how there is a new upper class made up of people in notable positions in society. This new upper class is composed of the narrow elite and the broad elite, in which the narrow elite has an effect on the culture, politics, and institutions in the nation while the broad elite only has an effect on the local level. While the elite once lived in neighborhoods that were slightly more mixed in terms blue collar and white collar success, they now live in what are considered Superzips, which are areas in which the 95th to 99th percentile of the most successful and well educated Americans live. White Americans constitute for 82% of Superzip inhabitants, compared to 8% Asian, and

This finding affirms that oppression is indeed genuine collective behavior in the sense that it is grounded in processes of social influence and collective coordination of actions…indeed, as argued elsewhere, the present-day hostility toward immigrants appears to be driven primarily by intragroup processes (Smith & Postmes, 2008), and the aims of their oppression consequently have less to do with keeping them down, so much as advancing the positions of particular subgroups within the high-status majority (Postnes, 2009).
This means that while some of today’s elite may not be prejudiced towards immigrants, as long as they are not in the same class they will suffer from the brunt of the elite’s actions when they push forward their agenda. It is in this way that doctrinaire liberals who are a part of the narrow elite and live around the Big Four can affect American culture and the media, in which they fight against racism but can still covertly push programs that would disadvantage immigrants and other