The Real Problems Facing America Are Cultural
Not Economic or Even Geopolitical
As Yascha Mounk explained recently, over the last twenty years, America has grown shockingly wealthy. Our per capita GDP has left most of Europe behind. And those gains have not simply gone to the rich, because our inequality “is only modestly higher than that of Britain… and only moderately higher than that of Germany.”
Despite everything we’ve heard about the free-market fundamentalists running Washington for the past forty years – and, as the narrative goes, inequality soared, the middle class hollowed out, and worker compensation never climbed above 1970s levels – Americans of all socioeconomic levels have benefited from the massive rise in nationwide prosperity. As readers will no doubt be aware, the middle class has grown smaller in recent years because more people have climbed up into the upper class.
Meanwhile, Scott Lincicome has explained both that American manufacturing output is as high as it has ever been (albeit, with the growth often in high-end products such as aircraft), and that we don’t lack for manufacturing jobs for those who want them. Unemployment stands around 4%, and America’s biggest challenge with manufacturing jobs is finding people to fill them. It turns out that plenty of people like the idea of manufacturing jobs for other people. But not as many people like the idea of manufacturing jobs for themselves. Moreover, service jobs on average pay better than manufacturing jobs, and have higher job satisfaction.
But as Yascha Mounk noticed when he pointed out America’s economic success, people don’t want to believe any of this. Many are angry when you try to point this out to them. Why? Because most of us know that something is wrong. We know that our country is struggling right now in a variety of ways. We see the dysfunction in our politics, the division in our society, and the loneliness in the lives of people we know, and we conclude that all is not well in America. We want to blame this on something, and so many of us turn to economic explanations, because these explanations give us reasons that sound right, along with potential policy solutions and sometimes someone to blame.
But the problem with economic explanations isn’t merely that they are false. It is that in seeking to address them, we ignore the real causes of our troubles. We could make ourselves twice as rich as we are today, but if we do not look to the underlying sources of our discontent, we would be just as precarious as we are today.
Before I turn to these causes, it is worth dispatching one other red herring. Our geopolitical position is not what it was twenty years ago. But we still have an enviable place in the world. We are still the most powerful country in the world. Our closest rival (China) is on the cusp of a demographic crisis which looks insurmountable. Our rivals are all plagued by problems deeper and more serious than ours. And to paraphrase Lincoln, all the armies of the world could not take one drop from the Mississippi River by force.
Then What Is the Source of Our Problems?
Quite simply, our troubles are cultural. This is an unsatisfying answer, because cultural problems are much thornier ones to address, and often cannot be solved by public policy. But it is also unsatisfying because in the case of an economic or geopolitical source, we could conceivably say that this situation in which we find ourselves was something which had been done to us. But if our problems are cultural ones, our situation is something we have done to ourselves.
Tellingly then, perhaps foremost among our cultural problems is the erosion of personality responsibility, once the defining quality of the American character. We have become quick to look for others to blame when things go wrong for us. The bases of each party clamor about grievances. Politicians in both parties see their roles as finding scapegoats for their audiences. In rural and urban America alike, individuals jockey for status as victims of greater and greater perceived oppression. Unlike those ancestors of ours whom Tocqueville observed, we no longer solve problems in our communities by organizing ourselves to take action. Like Tocqueville’s French contemporaries, we instead look to the government for help.
We have become more collectivist in our outlook. Instead of treating other people (and ourselves) as individuals, we identify them as members of a class comprised of all those persons who possess the same immutable characteristics of race, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, and disability status. We define other people as representatives of categories, rather than as moral agents in possession of natural rights and dignity, made in the image of God. We look not to our deeds for our identities, but to those traits we share with millions of other people who come from the same intersectional background as we do.
We are also a licentious culture. When even public conservatives speak casually about masturbation and promiscuity, we must realize just how far we have fallen.
We celebrate vice. There was a time when it was understood that legal prohibitions weren’t the reason you didn’t gamble or use drugs, but rather that the legal prohibitions reflected an underlying societal prohibitions against those behaviors. A time when baseball stadiums had signs that read, “No gambling.” Today, we admire those men like Donald Trump who flaunt their lack of character, who sleep with porn stars when their wives are nursing babies, who cheat in business and at golf, who lie openly rather than lying behind our backs.
These are not problems which education can resolve. More courses on ethics will not cure the rot in the heart. C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.” In 1943, he already perceived the trickles which would only turn into a torrent in the intervening eight decades. “We laugh at honour,” he wrote, “and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” And people honestly wonder how we ended up with a president like Donald Trump.
Trump isn’t the cause of our problems and he isn’t the only symptom, or even the worst offender.
We have a double standard for the famous, which fuels the populism which plagues us today. Celebrities talk openly about drug use and face no consequences while ordinary citizens are thrown in jail. Our highest-ranking cabinet officials and military leaders brazenly mishandle classified documents in every administration, while having the gall to court-martial grunts and DOD civilians for accidentally taking classified material home. Our too-big-to-fail financial institutions can gamble with other people’s money, because when their bets fail, it will be the taxpayer who is left holding the bag.
In addition to all this, secularism has proceeded apace until we have been well and truly freed from religion, freed from all meaning and depth and transcendence in life. We achieved it: the naked public square. And it has made us spiritually sick, desperately unhappy, and unmoored from anything solid.
This decline of religion has further eroded another embattled institution. We may not have an economic problem in America, but we definitely have a marriage problem. Over 40% of first marriages end in divorce. Almost two in five babies are born out of wedlock, a number that rises to over two-thirds for black children. Of all the sources of our current discontents, the dissolution of the traditional family may be the most important.
Finally, we have even become less physical. We are plagued by an obesity epidemic, and we increasingly isolate ourselves both from in-person interactions with other people, and from the cold, unpleasant outdoors. This may seem marginal, when listed after all the others, but it taxes our healthcare system, contributes to rising rates of chronic pain, and makes us more unhappy.
It is easy to blame technology for some of these problems. And, to be sure, technology bears some of the blame. But technology only gives us what we want. It only exacerbates those flaws which already exist within us. For American society, the internet only exposed cracks which were already there.
What Is to Be Done?
Anyone who tells you they have all the answers is deluded or lying. I don’t have all the answers. I do believe that there is very little that government at any level can do about the situation, although there are perhaps a few things governments (federal, state, and local) could stop doing. But on the whole, this situation is one we are going to have to figure out ourselves.
I'm not the first to identify any of these cultural problems, nor others like the decline in fertility or the lack of male role models for boys. But I don't share the optimism many cultural critics have for commonly proposed solutions. A boom in industrial jobs won't lead to a boom in stable families when the problem we face isn't a lack of jobs on which to support a family, but a culture that no longer believes in the family. To repeat: roughly 40% of all births in the United States are out of wedlock. That figure is even higher for the lower-middle and lower classes. A manufacturing revival can't cure a problem that wasn't caused by a manufacturing decline, but by a steady, decades-long war on marriage and the traditional, two-parent home. Better job security from unionization won't lead to more childbearing by young people who have come to believe human beings are a plague upon the planet.
A national program of conscription for 18-year-olds won't solve a societal dearth of patriotism by teaching young people the value of sacrifice. Patriotism was higher in America in the decades after the establishment of the all-volunteer military than it was during the contentious years when young men were drafted by the tens of thousands to make great sacrifices for their nation in Vietnam. Proponents of national conscription point to Israel, but the reason Israeli patriotism is so high is not because all Israeli young people serve in the military (they don't), but because Israeli young people know they have something worth fighting for. And many young Americans believe that we don’t. America has a patriotism problem not because we lack something worth fighting for, but because many young Americans have been brought up to believe that our nation is at best no better than other nations, and at worst a stain upon the history of the human race. A national year of service won't undo eighteen years of living in a culture which no longer believes in itself.
The truth is that Americans should be happy. We are living through the best years the human race has ever known. As more of the world rises up out of poverty, there will be less suffering and greater opportunity for all. And if we continue to trade freely with the rest of the world (which, admittedly, seems increasingly unlikely), we will be the cause of that rise from poverty, even as we make ourselves wealthier here at home.
But all of that will mean nothing if we continue to tear ourselves apart, by tearing at those very things which uphold the freedom and prosperity we know – the family, patriotism, personal responsibility, individualism, religion, civic virtue, character, and public morality. In that same speech I cited earlier, Lincoln said that as free men and women, we must live for all time or die by suicide. Another great American, Charles Krauthammer, told us more recently that decline is a choice.
I don't have the answers to the situation that plagues us. But I do know that if we have brought it on ourselves, then it's possible we can remove it, too. And at the end of the day, there isn't anyone else who can do that for us. It may not be easy, nor even likely. But I believe it's possible. As long as we recognize the sources of our troubles, and who is to blame: us.
Mr. A, in such fee words you explained so much. One by one, it is up to each one of us to set the example of how to live a virtuous life and succeed. Take care.
Such few words.