But let’s face it: my strategy does not have more chance of working than Putnam’s does. The parsimonious way to extrapolate the trends that Putnam describes so well is to predict an America permanently segregated into social classes that no longer share the common bonds that once made this country so exceptional, accompanied by the destruction of the national civic culture that Putnam and I both cherish.
What irritates me about many of the people who write about these kind of social problems is that they always find a way to twist it around such as to blame the competent people who have their s**t together as the cause of the problem.