Murray identifies what he calls the "founding virtues"—marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity—that were once shared by all Americans and held us together in a common culture. That culture was still intact on November 21, 1963, the day before the Kennedy assassination that Murray chooses as his benchmark. In graph after graph drawn from the sociological literature, he shows how these four qualities have deteriorated—not among the college educated, who spend most of their time disparaging those virtues, but in blue—collar communities where people are rarely educated beyond high school. By way of illustration, he applies this data to two real places, Belmont, an upscale suburb of Boston dominated by college graduates, and Fishtown, a working-class neighborhood on the fringe of Philadelphia where the once strong ethic of marriage and family is now falling apart.
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Although the sexism in the 1960s-1970s was pretty bad and certainly not acceptable in modern comics, it hasn't been replaced by a coherent value system. There was a deep morality in Silver Age comics, which "went without saying". There is now no morality in American comicbooks, leading to content that would have once been restricted to lame pornographic comics like Lady Death, Top Cow etc. but which has now infected all comics coming out of Disney and Warner.
Cheesecake is all well and good, but not when it is served as main course at every meal.
Likewise the lack of American Exceptionalism in comics from Disney and Warner strips American superheroes of one of their central attributes- the absolute confidence in the American way that directed all of their efforts. Without that confidence, what is left?
