Focussing analysis on suburban "middle class" America is probably important for limiting the scope of the new Bush regime, for finding its weaknesses, and blunting its confidence.
Disappointing and disliked though Alan Wolfe may be, is there not a way of finessing his analysis? In Marxist terms the "middle class" is part of the working class, though materially privileged and with intensified bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology. Its members believe fiercely they have a justified right to be selfish, because of their moral superiority, but is this not the epiphenomena of how individuals all try to differentiate themselves, expressed in a particular socio-economic context? For all his limitations Wolfe seems to have affirmed some sort of collective conscience, although his method of interviewing may have taken much of these protestations at face value, and minimised the selfish component.
As for sex, it is progress if people accept homosexual behaviour as part of the range of human sexual behaviour, even if the taboos remain relatively robust for them in their own lives. That at least shows some psychological mindedness.
Perhaps the problem was not so much that Wolfe failed to observe methods of quality research as that his analysis was not dialectical. It is indeed odd to invoke "Evil" to explain a chain pattern of mass murder. Murders of young people by young people have been part of history, like atypical sexual behaviour. It suggests though that the investigator may have been trapped by the ideology of the sample he was analysing, to think it is totally outside the frame of reference.
Kelley referred to a
>fundamental core of opacity of human action and social events
My sense is that teenage massacres can really only be understood at a deeper level of the interaction between psychological and social processes. IMO some of the explanation should draw on evolutionary psychology but not in a reductionist way. More it is about how teenagers can go through a process of differentiation that is in some sort of manageable equilibrium with the society around them. Their parents, despite Wolfe's survey, are unanchored too, and all their protestations about evil will not remedy that.
Part of the remedy does involve control of the capitalist gun industry. But more it involves the "middle classes" accepting that a materially relatively privileged lifestyle does not protect them from the complex contradictions of being interdependent in a fragmented society.
The demographics of the USA are swinging away from Bush's electoral base. I would suggest co-opting Wolfe's current sphere of interest but in a more dialectical way, and warily.
Chris Burford London