Charles Murray: I don’t do solutions very well

Conservatives can't win a bidding war on social reform. The implied lack of faith in personal responsibility conflicts with their founding ethos, often to the point of causing moral and intellectual confusion. Think the Republican's extreme stance on abortion and the crazy rape comments from Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

There is only one way back from nihilistic terminal decline and it's not a further, undignified descent down the rabbit-hole of political science. Paternalism and a calculus of success leveraging personalities and partisan bribes based on us-and-them demographics, only intensify the divisions, leading to even more desperate appeals for the state and technology to achieve the impossible.

As Murray contends, what matters has a metaphysical dimension.

"Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage, or the inheritance tax," he asks in Coming Apart.

"If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable."

A philosophical polemic against the scope and mission of modern government can be uplifting, unifying and rational. Human beings hunger for the sacred. Yet for something to be immeasurably precious, it must be forever beyond our physical and intellectual reach. In the end, it's not an empirical argument.

Such irony need not be a threat to our governing institutions. Politics will always involve the head and heart. The task of true leadership is to confirm the relative importance, to manifest an exceptional character and in the process inspire people to recall and reconnect to a common morality shrouded from science and reason. This was something Barack Obama promised but couldn't deliver.

"I have always believed that hope," said the President on election night, "is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting."

Obama feels obliged to invest this hope in self-absorbed politics, not people. His epistemologically arrogant base, limited as it is to a strictly material and ideological perspective, demand real outcomes, when the only big picture solution on offer, the only thing worth really fighting for, is the transcendence embodied in a leader brave enough to rise above the system.