By the time that Charles Murray sat down to write this book, he had decided that he’d had enough. During the process, he confides in the acknowledgments, his wife had been a touch worried about him: “‘No more mister nice guy,’ I would say ominously, and then disappear back into my lair.” Once she read the finished manuscript, though, she concluded that she’d been overly concerned.
It is quite the trick to call for substantial civil disobedience but to do so without ever worrying the reader, but Murray has pulled it off. In By the People, he appears as a mild-mannered Howard Beale, sticking his head out the window of the social-sciences train and announcing, with frustrated resignation, “I’m not going to take this anymore!” In so doing he joins a long line of American rebels who have contrived to take up literary arms against the established order, and to reclaim their birthrights from Leviathan. If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors, it’s your lucky day.
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