More from Frum's review of Murray's book:

Here is where it seems to me that Charles Murray is most deeply wrong.

He insists Americans are facing an unprecedented situation. That is not true. We have been here before. In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, we also saw increasing concentrations of great wealth—at the same time as many working Americans, moving from farm to city, suffered the pain of moral dislocation and social breakdown. Crime, prostitution, and drunkenness ran then at least as rampant as the analogous ills run today.

And in those days too, there existed writers and thinkers who insisted that these trends represented the necessary consequences of ineluctable social consequences. Murray's claim that the "reality that has driven the formation of the new upper class [is that] brains have become much more valuable in the marketplace" has its almost exactly precise analogues in the writings of Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner.

There was however at least one hugely important difference between those days and our own. Back then, the lower class, rather than sink meekly into its immiseration, periodically erupted in violent strikes and riots. American labor relations in the period from 1880 through 1920 were the most violent on earth. In 1901, an anarchist murdered President McKinley; in 1919-20, a bloody wave of bombings culminated in an explosion on Wall Street that killed that killed 38 people and wounded 400 more.

Many elite Americans decided something had to be done. Yes, they engaged in a great deal of the lecturing and scolding recommended by Charles Murray. (See Part 3 of this review.) But they also worked to find ways to ameliorate conditions for working Americans. Violent strike-breaking went of style, to be replaced by gentler managerial practices. State governments enacted wage and hour laws. Even the federal government acted to enforce national food safety standards in 1906. This was the famous Progressive era. Although there was much about Progressivism that we'd rightly reject today, there was much that could stand rediscovery and renewal.

From part 3 of David Frum's generally excellent review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart:

Back in 1962, no individual American controlled a national television network, as Rupert Murdoch does today. (The legendary William Paley owned only about 10% of the stock of CBS.)

Back in 1962, it was considered shocking, and even frightening, for an extremely rich man like Nelson Rockefeller to use his fortune to gain political office.

Back in 1962, most political donations were kept secret. But when it came to light after Watergate that insurance magnate W. Clement Stone had donated $2 million to Richard Nixon's two presidential campaigns, Americans were scandalized. In 2004, by contrast, the John Kerry campaign and related organizations collected $75 million from only four donors.

Charles Murray deplores our present state as a betrayal of the founders' vision of the country. I am not certain of what the founders as a group would have thought about affluent people taking safaris to Africa. My guess is that Benjamin Rush would have disliked it, while Benjamin Franklin would have been untroubled—but who knows?

But here's what we do know: almost unanimously, the Americans of the 1790s agreed that vast inequality of fortunes—at least as between white men—were inimical to Republican government. Here for example is Noah Webster, writing in 1790 (I've corrected his idiosyncratic spelling):

The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.

....

The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property. It is not necessary nor possible that every citizen should have exactly an equal portion of land and goods, but the laws of such a state should require an equal distribution of intestate estates, and bar all perpetuities.

It's worth noting that Noah Webster was a Federalist, not a radical Republican. What he wrote there would have received nods from almost every member of the founding generation, John Adams most emphatically, but also the aristocratic Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson went so far as to endorse a progressive income tax in a 1785 letter to James Madison.

(And here you thought the idea came from Karl Marx, or possibly Saul Alinsky.)

Republican government rested on a broad equality of fortunes: that was conventional wisdom in the founding generations.