And Tim Challies also mentioned my piece on Christians and AI. His essay on AI and the democratization of competence is well worth reading in its own right.

Their Pandemic Lockdown Never Ended

The great data journalist John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times has a sobering article about how the pandemic lockdowns never ended for some people. He uses the American Time Use Survey to look at the social lives of young people. For most people, their level of social interaction rebounded from the Covid-era restrictions. But for those with the least social interaction, the lockdowns not only took away what little social interaction they had, but they never recovered from that loss.

That’s an astonishing drop, from over 20% of the day spent with others to almost zero. Now, this isn’t a longitudinal study, so this isn’t the same group of people tracked over time. Also, we can see that the trend was declining prior to Covid.

But it still shows something very bad going on. Burn-Murdoch writes, “On an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.”

He goes on to describe the highly unequal effects of the general decline in socializing among young people, saying, “Anti-socialising forces have had radically different effects on different young people. Many teens and young adults have lives that are just as socially rich today as they were a decade ago while others have become completely cut off.”

In my observation, Gen Z has a very strong divergence in the trajectories of its members. The best of Gen Z is the best generation of Americans in my lifetime. But part of Gen Z is deeply troubled.

Some people might think this group of socially disconnected people will become a base for ever more radical politics. I think it’s more likely they become another lost generation, spending their days in porn, pot, and sports betting.

In a related piece, Christine Emba wrote in the New York Times about how friendship has become a luxury good (gift link). She writes about the “Nobody to Call” study about completely socially disconnected men. It’s important context about what’s happening to the people in Burn-Murdoch’s graphs.

Also, a Sam Sifton newsletter (gift link) in the Times talks about pot use, especially by young people. He writes, “It’s highest, unsurprisingly, among those ages 21 to 34 — 37 percent of those men and nearly 34 percent of the women report using marijuana in 2024.” He also notes the growth in the number of Americans suffering from cannabis use disorders.

The Economics of a Shrinking World

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick published an interesting study about falling fertility. Much of it is very easy to read for the layman.

Part of the difficulty is that the bar any explanation has to clear is lower than it looks, because children come in integers. A cohort in which 15 women in 100 remain childless, most have two children, and one mother in six has three or four delivers a completed fertility of 1.8. Raise childlessness from 15 to 26, move 13 more women to a single child, and empty out the four-child families, and the same cohort delivers 1.3, the conventional threshold for lowest-low fertility despite three-quarters of women behaving exactly as before. Small changes in relative prices or opportunity costs, applied at the margin, are enough.

This math is one of the more important things to take away from the paper. It makes two key points. First, fertility happens in integers. No woman ever gives birth to 1.6 children. Second, overall fertility can drop significantly even the vast majority of women - three-quarters of them in their example - have no change in their personal fertility. Later they note an implication of this, “To reach [a replacement level fertility rate of] 2.1, a population needs many families with three or more children. Families stopping at two do not deliver replacement.”

Three popular candidates to account for the fall in fertility are shifts in preferences and social norms, smartphones and their effect on in-person interaction, and rising housing prices. It is too early to adjudicate among these. But, in our reading, smartphones accelerate the change in the TFR more than they cause it, and housing prices have an ambiguous effect because they make owners richer and renters poorer. We are left with shifts in preferences and social norms more by elimination than by conviction.

Thus, we will conjecture a more speculative possibility: modernity itself. We live in a society built around large organizations and formal credentials, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap, and that circumstance has created a mismatch between women’s position outside the home and men’s inside it. As modernity has spread everywhere, even to countries with low income per capita, fertility has also fallen everywhere.

If the modernity thesis is correct, it suggests that our techno-industrial development has exceeded or is mismatched with our human-social. We have not yet created a cultural or institutional environment that enables the levels of reproduction needed to populate the future.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

After the paywall, 40 first dates, “Sunbeltism,” a Catholic convert’s experience, and more. Note again that my “Best of the Web” link roundup will be paywalled going forward.

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The durability question is an important one. We are in a period of transition in America. The old arrangements of the 80s and 90s no longer seem fit for purpose to many. We have a long list of challenges to address: demographic transitions, China competition, social atomization and associated dysfunctions, etc. for which the old answers no longer seem as relevant.

Part of how that transition has manifested is in our political instability, and the gradual decline of our old political order. That decline is shown, for example, in the progressive rejection of old political norms and arrangements, such as how the filibuster has been weakened over successive administrations and the growth of party line voting on Senate confirmations for presidential appointments.

One part of moving beyond the transition period is the development of a governing majority that can implement the institutional changes needed to get America fit for the challenges of both today and tomorrow. I would define a durable governing majority as one that is able to hold the presidency for 12 years, have enough support in Congress to pass more than one or two significant pieces of legislation, and in which the minority party accommodates itself to a significant part of the new agenda.

I would define the Reagan-Bush era as a durable governing coalition. It wasn’t Republican hegemony and didn’t get everything it wanted, but it did get things done - and set the tone for another decade or more of similar approaches. The Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton largely kept the economic playbook, and even embraced Reaganesque ideas like welfare reform and tough on crime measures. We haven’t had another period like this in about 35 years. (I should not, however, that various parts of Trumpism like China skepticism are being more broadly absorbed even by people who don’t like him generally).

So what are the possible 2028 outcomes, and are they potentially durable ones? If we use the standard left-right spectrum as one axis, and a populist-institutionalist as the other, this produces a 2x2 matrix of basic outcomes. We will examine each in turn.

1. Neo-Socialism (left-populist). The first possibility is that a populism on the right is replaced by a populism on the left. This would be the insurgent neo-socialism now coursing through our cities, and also some states.

For 2028, this would involve a charismatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani type winning the Democratic Presidential nomination, then the general election. As Trump demonstrated, the Presidency is a viable path for an insurgent, populist candidate. A lot of “burn it all down” voters who were attracted to Trump may well, still disillusioned, vote for this kind of candidate. As with Trump, the Democratic establishment might not like this person, but I believe they would be much more supportive of a neo-socialist President than the Republican establishment was of Trump.

While this is a possibility in the 2028 presidential election, it would have a difficult road to entrenching itself as a durable governing coalition. Populism always seems to eventually fade. The number of true believers is also demographically narrow. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi notes that actual membership in the Democratic Socialists of America is 85% white and 80% people with college degrees (among those age 25 or older).

Hard progressivism has also already delivered bad results in some cities like San Francisco, which is already walking it back. Places like Portland and Seattle are not models they can point to in order to win votes nationally. Zohran Mamdani in New York is popular, but has only been in office a short time. While social democracy has demonstrated it can be a viable governing system overseas, I do not believe American neo-socialism is primed to deliver results at the national level.

Possibly there could be some state level traction for neo-socialist policies in places like California, with policies like its proposed wealth tax. We are also seeing some neo-socialists win statewide primary elections in select places, such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Angie Nixon in Florida. November will give us a read on what the broader public thinks of them. But even if neo-socialism does come next in the 2028 presidential election, I would think it’s just another oscillation rather than a durable political arrangement, again due to its demographic narrowness. Apart from that I also believe its ideas are mostly bad and won’t generate positive results for the country.

2. Left-Neoliberal Technocracy (left-institutionalist). This scenario is that the old Clintonesque Democratic establishment reasserts primacy. I don’t think it’s any surprise that it’s old Clinton hand Rahm Emanuel who is promoting this approach.

This time around, left-neoliberalism would be bolstered by an influx of corporate workers and upscale suburbanites of the type that have traditionally voted Republican, but who have already been abandoning the party as it shifts downscale and alienates this part of its traditional base.

This would be a movement friendlier to big business and tech. It would silently adopt various Trumpist positions like China skepticism, reindustrialization (at some level), and a weak stance on antitrust. It would keep the immigration tap open but do more border enforcement than previous Democratic administrations. It would reject wokeism and limit public moralistic scolding. It would also look to rebuild the old Democratic alliance with Silicon Valley, though there would certainly be a lot bumps and tensions in that project. What makes it a technocracy is that it would adopt a lot of wonky policy ideas from the “abundance liberals” and other such sources. There are a number of people developing ideas that could be adopted by this coalition.

Silicon Valley could adapt itself very much again to this milieu if it seems to be a winner. The urban chamber of commerce type establishments would love it, as they understand, even if they won’t say it, the immense amount of damage the so-called “Woke 1” era did to their cities. They are eager to get back to business and rebuild. In general, left-neoliberals would have a lot of institutional and media support. The “Never Trump” caucus would love it. However, it would have to find a way to defeat or contain the emerging neo-socialism to its left.

Where this group would also struggle would be to avoid the “everything bagel” type effects imposed by what Matthew Yglesias called the “Progressive Establishment.” I would also include “the Groups” (wealthy progressive lobbying organizations) here. These would have to be overcome to make this kind of center-left governance effective, such as in repairing the alliance with Silicon Valley and actually building things.

What would make this durable is if the realignment of business class people and interests from the GOP to the Democrats turns out to be large. Again, the trend has already been going this direction. This realignment would leave the Republicans as a structurally minority party mostly made up of the MAGA hard core - an ornery populist group that’s always with us in America - and remnant bourgeois elements, by which I mean people who personally own small and medium sized businesses like car dealers, road construction firms, manufacturing concerns, funeral homes, farms, cell phone store franchises, nursing home chains, etc. They have very personal stakes in policy with regards to their businesses and will reject the managerialism of this political arrangement. This Republican Party would receive support, as it does today, from segments of industries like finance that need it to check Democrat tax and regulatory efforts. But this wouldn’t be a party that could muster a consistent majority, particularly as the heavily white Baby Boomer generation passes on.

To be durable, the left-neoliberal technocratic governing class would of course also need to produce at least decent results for the country.

3. MAGA Popularism (right-institutionalist). This is the center-right version of left-neoliberal technocracy. A post-Trump candidate like Marco Rubio would take the legacy GOP program and update it with the parts of Trumpism that are actually popular. The people in this movement would moderate their previous support of mass immigration but reject mass deportations. They’d be basically pro-business and pro-trade, but far less dogmatic about it than the old GOP. They’d be less enthusiastic about muscular foreign policy interventions (though, like Trump himself, might find themselves doing them anyway). They’d reject Trump’s crass style in favor of a more dignified demeanor. They would be anti-woke, but also implicitly reject traditional social conservatism. For example, they’d oppose transgender participation in women’s sports but support gay marriage since both positions are popular. Compared to left-neoliberal technocracy, they’d be much more explicitly patriotic and pro-America.

This was in essence what Ron DeSantis did as governor of Florida during Covid. It was extremely successful and made him very popular, despite being elected initially by a razor-thin margin. DeSantis pivoted right when he decided to run for President, which did not serve him well. And he ran directly into the Trump buzzsaw. But the template is there.

I use Rubio as the example here because this is how he has positioned himself. I note that he has prepared the ground for distancing himself from unpopular Trump policies by pointing out that his job is to carry out the President’s policies (i.e., not necessarily what he would prefer himself). Still, as Secretary of State, he’s still tied to Trump.

This option becomes especially viable to the extent that neo-socialism and other forms of hard progressivism gain traction in the Democratic party. Left-neoliberal technocratic types would be willing to play ball with a moderate Republican in this mold. Many of them would silently approve of some resulting policies, such as a more anti-woke stance than any Democrat could probably openly implement. Again, the principle here would be the same: let’s get back to business.

It’s a lot harder to envision this as a durable coalition unless there’s some significant minority shift toward the GOP, in at least some segments, because Republicans are still very dependent on white votes - a demographically declining segment. While there was a shift towards Trump by minorities, basically all sizable minority groups still vote Democrat by a significant margin.

I don’t think minority attraction is a hopeless project. In particular, there are a lot of affinities between middle and working class Hispanics and whites, such as the desire for a “big-ass truck” pointed out by Josh Barro. But it’s speculative as to whether the GOP can actually pull this off. You don’t have to believe in the hard “emerging Democratic majority” thesis to recognize that demographics are a challenge for the GOP.

4. Trumpless Trumpism (right-populist). I am on record as believing that the right populist moment in America is nearing its end. However, I could be wrong, or right populism could continue for another political cycle or two. This would be the proverbial Trumpism without Trump. This is how JD Vance is positioning himself, as the heir to Donald Trump and his populist-nationalist movement.

In this scenario, a President Vance would likely restore a greater level of presidential dignity, end the corruption, and generally avoid some of Trump’s more erratic policies (such as the “Liberation Day” tariffs). It would remain very tough on immigration and trade, very hostile to the government bureaucracy and media, as well as continuing a general “America First” approach on foreign policy. How much Vance could accomplish would depend on the composition of Congress, as well as his level of desire to legislate.

The durability of this would depend on the ability of Vance and others to successfully replicate the personal bond Trump has with his supporters. I think this will be difficult to accomplish because so much of the Trump phenomenon is personalized. Also, right populism has already had a 12 year run as a political force if not as a governing majority (non-consecutive terms for Trump, a reliance on executive action and reconciliation bills, etc), and it is the nature of such things to decay. I’ve already written in more detail why I think the populist moment is heading towards its conclusion. But as I said, I could be wrong.

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Three things cut across these four scenarios.

First, all of these scenarios assume a certain continuity in conditions. There’s always the unexpected shock that could scramble the game board. We saw this with 9/11, and to some extent with Covid. These events can’t always be anticipated, but something like a genuine fiscal crisis or some kind of major AI disruption are certainly conceivable.

Second, the left options have a bit more inherent durability because they have the potential to make some hardball moves to entrench their majority if they gain a trifecta of the presidency and both houses of Congress. Abolishing the filibuster and admitting multiple new states to “gerrymander” the Senate could be on the agenda. They could also mandate universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, and prohibit voter id laws at the state level. They could amnesty every illegal immigrant. They would also have the nuclear option of packing the Supreme Court.

Republicans have a trifecta now and could abolish the filibuster. But they haven’t done it yet, so likely won’t. And their repertoire of potential actions is much more limited, basically consisting of mandating voter id nationally. They have no plan for states to admit. They have no equivalent to amnesty. They already have a majority on the Supreme Court. At the state level they have also already mostly done mid-decade redistricting, so there’s not much opportunity there either. They are also much more internally divided.

Third, there’s the specter of what I call “American Liquidationism.” This is a policy resulting from Boomer political capture, in which pandering to seniors becomes the policy core of whatever group ends up winning.

In this scenario, no benefits for seniors can ever be touched. In fact, more benefits might be added. And there would be additional policy choices to explicitly privilege seniors, such as property tax elimination, funded in part by disinvestment in the future (like cutting education spending). Nothing would be done to rein in our ballooning debt unless a true financial crisis occurs.

In essence, America would slowly liquidate its future in order to maintain present consumption by Boomers, who would be exempted from any shared sacrifice needed to address national problems. This is a path we’ve already been on to some extent. Our national debt has grown from $4 trillion when the first Boomer became president to almost $40 trillion today, with continuing deficits of almost $2 trillion per year. Trump said he would not touch senior benefit programs. And we see across the country increasing calls to abolish property taxes, often explicitly targeting seniors. This is especially the case on the Republican side but Democrats are getting in on it too.

This approach could also be somewhat incorporated into any of my four scenarios as, unfortunately, it actually seems to be pretty popular. It would make a productive transition to a prosperous future much harder to pull off, in part because of the dire financial condition in which it would leave the country.

Which option actually wins in 2028 is of course unpredictable. If I could predict the future I wouldn’t be writing here, I’d be running a hedge fund. But in terms of durability, the scenario that looks to me to be the most likely candidate to be a durable governing coalition is left-neoliberal technocracy. This is because it has the highest potential of creating a realignment in which traditional Republican constituencies like suburbanites continue shifting left. It also has the most intellectual firepower devoted to developing implementable policy ideas. And it would have the backing of media and most institutions.

This political alignment would give it the opportunity to address America’s structural challenges like the debt, falling fertility rates, our defense-industrial complex, competition with China, social atomization and a lack of civic cohesion, navigating the AI future, and various inequalities in our society (e.g., geographic inequality). Doing this would require that it overcome the Progressive Establishment and the Groups, reject American Liquidationism, and avoid excessive catering to business lobbies. Then there will always be the possibilities of unexpected or unwelcome shocks that would have to be successfully addressed. And of course, they’d also have to make good decisions themselves, which is far from guaranteed.

These are all easier said than done. But it is making the difficult and uncertain institutional changes needed to put the country on a sound footing for broad prosperity in the coming decades that will be the true measure of our success in navigating the American transition. We should hope that whichever political faction does in fact win, they are successful in starting to address this task.

Given their self-conception of sturdy American virtues such as thrift, hard work, and sobriety, you’d think the GOP would be at the forefront in opposing Big Weed and online gambling. But too many in the party of “family values” have become partisans for the vice economy.

…

There is nothing conservative about a government that signs stablecoin bills while working-class men max out credit cards on parlays. There is nothing populist about a regulatory apparatus that protects Polymarket’s revenue and lets insider trading run wild. There is nothing Christian about canonizing THC dispensaries, sportsbooks, vapes, and AI mistresses as the patron saints of liberty.

This is true, but also a reflection of the changing culture. An anti-vice attitude was a product of a Protestant Christian culture that is long gone in America. Thrift and hard work are hardly American values these days, certainly not in the way they used to be. It’s no surprise that the rapid metastasization of vice in America happened after 2014, when I noted America entered a truly post-Christian Negative World.

Political parties exist to win elections. We should expect them to go where the voters are. Appeals to “that’s not Christian” aren’t going to be heeded. Empirical facts about the damage these new engines of vice are doing aren’t likely to move people that much either, although there will probably be some rearguard actions by some Republicans. My own state of Indiana has resisted pot legalization so far, for example.

The reality is that young men, and Americans generally, do want this stuff to be legal and normalized. Demoralized men aren’t going to want to give up what seems like a form of psychic relief to them. And promoting vice goes along with the GOP’s new downscale image.

The good news is that, as we typically do, we will likely file down some of the sharper edges of the vice revolution. Laws requiring age-verification to access online porn are part of this. I’d expect more regulation of online sports betting and pot as well. But as with no-fault divorce and smart phones, this retrenchment will likely leave legalized vice firmly in place. Down the road that could change, as America does oscillate between periods of more permissive and more restrictive public morality. But a shift like that is not evident anywhere yet.

Not every conservative is ready to give up, however. Scott Yenor wrote a piece for the American Mind arguing for a national greatness agenda for regulating pornography.

And here’s some good news in the New York Times. Problem drinking is in decline (gift link). This seems related to the overall decline in alcohol consumption. This news is good, but only as long as this isn’t a result of people shifting from alcoholism to being the proverbial pothead.

Changing Times

American Reformer has been making some significant changes. Dan Strand is the new editor-in-chief, and the journal has been relaunched on Substack. I have contributed an essay looking at the perennial online question of whether we know what time it is. I argue that we have reached a shift in times from disruption to construction.

What time is it? This is one of the most important questions to answer correctly. There’s a season for everything. Too many people want a single approach that’s good for all times and all places. But having timeless principles doesn’t mean having one go-to strategy or action in every situation.

America is in a liminal space, where the old is increasingly decaying but the new has not yet been fully formed. While there is still tremendous uncertainty, now is the time to build for the future….Back in the 2010s, forces that rendered many of our political and institutional arrangements increasingly unfit for purpose were already at work.

….

A period of disrupting legacy beliefs, approaches, political views, and institutions was necessary to make room for those seeking to address the pressing new realities of the 21st century.

However, disruption itself cannot be the goal. And many of the disruptors were unsuited to building new institutions to address the problems they highlighted. It is one thing to read a manosphere blog to learn the truth about attraction that your parents, pastors, or teachers never told you. It is quite another to build a society on the morals of Andrew Tate. Questioning authority has led all too many influencers to become purveyors of conspiracy theories.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Going forward, my “best of the web” roundup in the Friday digest is going to be behind the paywall. This is where my specially curated selection of the best and most interesting pieces I found this week lives. This week I highlight pieces arguing that capitalism productively channels masculinity, critiquing a study claiming that men’s failure to help with housework is causing a birth rate drop, chronicling the closure of the formerly open Internet, and more.

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An evangelical media company called the Gospel Coalition is taking the opposite approach, doubling down on human mediation in a world that’s heading towards AI saturation. They believe it will give them a competitive edge, saying, “What will be worth human readers’ time will be the distinctly human words protected from the dead-eyed, neutering effects of AI.”

Justin Lester and TGC show two emerging Christian approaches to artificial intelligence. These represent middle-class and upper-middle-class responses respectively, one actively embracing, the other techno-skeptical.

I divide new technology into three main layers. The creation layer pioneers the underlying technology, such as neural networks for AI. The platform layer turns the technology into a viable platform that can be built on by others, such as the personal computer or the AI model companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. The application layer builds on platforms to deliver end user value, such as a store’s e-commerce shop or my publication here on Substack’s platform.

With some limited and notable exceptions, American Christians are largely absent from the creation and platform layers. But where they have excelled is in the application layer of actually using technologies and platforms. Every new technology seems to come with a set of religious entrepreneurs who are able to master it and build major institutions or brands off of it.

Father Charles Coughlin built an audience of tens of millions of radio listeners. So did Billy Graham with his “Hour of Decision” broadcasts. Televangelist figures like Pat Robertson became major national figures thanks to their mastery of TV. Earlier, in the 1950s, Archbishop Fulton Sheen won an Emmy award for his TV program. Mark Driscoll built one of America’s largest and fastest growing churches in Seattle in part through becoming an early effective podcaster and user of web 1.0 technology. As you can see from these examples, it’s a mixed record in terms of quality. But Christians were certainly in the game.

The Aggressive AI Adopters

We should expect AI to be no different than previous technologies when it comes to Christians effectively leveraging it. Indeed, we are already seeing pastors leaning into applying this technology and what it can do for them, like the above-mentioned Justin Lester of Friendship Baptist Church in Vallejo, California, the subject of a major New York Times profile (again, gift link). Lester has been a modernizer, innovator and aggressive adopter of technology in general.

The focus of this story is how he used AI to build a “digital twin” of himself that members can turn to for counseling 24 hours a day, including during times when Lester himself is not available:

In the last year, Lester and hundreds of others have brought A.I. into its most human form yet by transferring their thoughts into data and building online replicas of themselves. The digital twins can answer in the real person’s voice and apply their thinking on demand for anyone who wants to chat online or call….Lester cloned his voice and trained his digital twin using almost two million words of his sermons, podcasts, books, text messages and emails. For the last several months, it had been publicly available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mimic his bent toward optimism, his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual slang, but it did more than just regurgitate what he had already said. It mapped his thinking onto new conversations to provide advice around the clock for people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked.

I’m not going to lie: the idea of creating a digital twin creeps me out. But his parishioners are using it. And he’s helping other pastors create digital twins of their own. This one only seems set to spread more.

Lester is from the black church tradition, which is stereotyped as very traditional, something the article hints at. But here we see the black church on the forefront of sophisticated technology adoption.

His approach to technology also seems consonant with the evangelical group I’ve classified as the “seeker sensitives.” This group is basically the megachurches, often serving middle- or even working-class audiences in the suburbs. Their pastors, like Lester, tend to be highly entrepreneurial, and attuned to cultural trends. Hence, they will likely be quick to experiment with AI. While they may not jump straight to something like a digital twin immediately, once that idea becomes more socially validated, I could see it really taking off. In any case, this type of pastor seems most likely to view AI as a potentially useful tool for spreading the gospel and their religious work generally.

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The Techno-Skeptics

Not everybody in the Christian world is so bullish on AI. There’s a strong contingent who are AI skeptical, and somewhat techno-skeptical generally. This group is well-illustrated by the recent AI policy pronouncement from the Gospel Coalition (TGC). Written by Brett McCracken, it is titled, “Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity.”

The piece lists TGC’s guidelines for use in writing that appears on their site. Writers are not to use AI for “ideating, researching beyond a basic fact search, organizing, writing, or editing beyond a basic spelling check.” This is one of the stricter AI policies out there. But in light of the various scandals around AI text that have afflicted even big-name publications, it’s entirely reasonable for media outlets like TGC to set pretty tight guardrails for now.

What’s notable about this announcement is not the actual policy, but the rationale. It starts off with an extreme denigration of AI writing:

It’s an offense to the word “writing” to apply it to AI-arranged words and sentences. What AI produces is an impressively polished, usually helpful, sometimes cheeky string of words. But it’s just instantaneous pattern recognition and data organization. It’s soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing. It’s aggressively efficient, speedily rendered, sycophantic information. But it’s not writing.

Their AI guidelines explicitly say that they have “a low view of AI.”

They also spiritualize their anti-AI stance. McCracken writes, “For Christians, writing is a holy calling and an act of worship (worship is something AI cannot do).” And, “Christ’s incarnation is instructive here. God didn’t reveal himself in a conceptual, virtual, zeros-and-ones sort of way. He took on flesh. Embodiment matters.” And, “Our stance isn’t just strategic for TGC. It’s crucial for the broader Christian mission.” TGC editor-in-chief Collin Hansen posted that he’s making this decision “out of theological conviction.”

I am extremely skeptical of their spiritualized claims here with regards to writing. From a wisdom perspective, I also disagree with their overly negative and narrow view of the uses of AI in the writing process. Where their approach has much more to commend is when it comes to things like pastoral counseling. Their incarnational arguments would be much stronger if directed against something like Lester’s digital twin disintermediating the human relationship with a pastor. The Apostle Paul’s “You know what manner of men we proved to be among you” is what the digital can’t provide.

The important point for us to note here is the strongly AI-skeptical stance being taken. This general posture of techno-skepticism seems to be the default position of the evangelical group that I’ve labeled the “cultural engagers.” These are highly educated evangelicals in the professional-managerial class who are often concentrated in the center of big cities, as well as evangelical colleges and media outlets.

The techno-skeptical stance also seems to be the default in the Roman Catholic world, both in the church hierarchy, and also their lay intellectual classes that parallel the evangelical cultural engagers.

Exploring the AI Future

To summarize, when it comes to AI, and tech generally today, American Christians are mostly absent from the creation and platform layers. They have historically been excellent at applying technology. When it comes to AI, what we might think of as the middle classes of Christian leadership are aggressively adopting it, whereas the upper middle class is very skeptical, and sometimes very opposed to AI adoption.

I’ll caveat this by saying that these are general observations. In a fast moving world like AI, it’s difficult to get stable hard data on this. But there is a Barna survey that finds pastors are rapidly adopting AI. About 50% of them are using it for ideation. A third are using it for research, graphic design, small group questions or administrative tasks. (It’s not necessarily the same people for each of those). Notably, almost a quarter of pastors are using it to write sermons, and only 13% aren’t using it at all. Pastors are more skeptical than the flock about AI - but they are using it anyway.

Again, let’s not over-extrapolate from examples. But I do think Justin Lester and TGC represent two different approaches to AI that are emerging out there, even if the class and group alignments aren’t perfectly clean. If half of all pastors are already using AI for tasks that are prohibited by TGC’s editorial policies, this suggests the approach of more aggressive adoption is winning out. This is what we would expect if seeker sensitives were AI embracers whereas cultural engagers were AI skeptics, since there are far more of the former than the latter.

What does the future look like in terms of how Christians, and Americans generally, will use AI?

My professional history is as a technologist. I spent 20 years developing custom technology solutions (i.e., in the application layer). I was a very good software developer. I’ve solved previously unsolved technical problems, for example, such as figuring out how to automatically recover good data out of corrupted gzip backup files. That one even saved someone’s files at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I understand technology, am comfortable with it, and am not afraid of it, even if I recognize its potential to disrupt my own work. In general, I’m very bullish on AI. The reality is that going back a long time, many new technologies have created a moral panic, including something as innocuous as the bicycle. We should be aware of that, and avoid allowing ourselves to fall prey to one with AI.

But you’d have to be a fool not to recognize the potential threats AI poses. I am most troubled by the pending intersection of AI with transhumanist ideologies. Far sooner than we think, we’ll be faced with the challenge of cyberization, or the direct integration of technology with human biology and consciousness. Elon Musk is clearly a transhumanist, for example, and it’s no accident he’s both running an AI company and a company trying to build a direct brain-computer interface. It is this, not the almost quaint idea of AI doing our writing for us, that is the real threat to our humanity. This is where the absence of Christianity and Christian thought from the creation and platform layers of technology finds its real life consequences.

But as with the existential risk posed by nuclear weapons, where we were not able to uninvent the atomic bomb, but had to learn to live with it, we are not going to uninvent AI either. We will have to navigate the world with it.

Most likely, we as a society will spring forward until we run into significant problems that cause us to checkpoint, retrench a bit, and move forward more cautiously - but without going back. This seems to be our pattern.

We rushed headlong into large scale industrialization during the late 19th century, then had to tame the beast to make it work for us. This included everything from safety regulations to antitrust to the labor rights movements.

This also happened with no-fault divorce. A heedless Boomer rush into divorce produced the Gen X latch-key kids. Some of the more intentional parenting of Millennial children was a response to this gap. But notably, we didn’t get rid of easy divorce.

It’s similar with social media and smart phones. We’ve seen some of the problems they’ve caused, especially for minors. Now they are being banned from schools, and more limits on them are being imposed. But we aren’t getting rid of them.

Some sort of arc like this seems likely with AI too. It would be nice to think that we’ll move forward into an AI future with everything “aligned,” as the AI safety people put it, in advance. That doesn’t seem likely. Most likely we’ll hit a lot of bumps along the way, but will ultimately find ourselves in a workable equilibrium from which few of us would actually want to go back to the pre-AI world even if we could.

Appendix: How I Use AI

Given my largely pro-AI stance, people have been asking, or even demanding, to know how I use AI in my own writing. I’m happy to tell you. Although I have not yet done it, I would have no problem with using AI to draft functional documents for me - job descriptions, RFPs, contracts, technical documentation, etc. A lot of writing is purely utilitarian, and there’s no reason not to use AI for it.

I do not use AI to write the words in my pieces here or for other sites. As someone who is a rule-follower who even drives the speed limit, I fully comply with any AI policies of any sites I contribute to in my writing for them.

For my own writing here, I do use AI extensively in developing it. I use it to help research and pressure test my ideas. I use it to provide editorial feedback on my drafts. I use it to anticipate objections or subject my arguments to critique. I use it for fact checking, as well as spell and grammar checking. I use it to develop my article titles (note: traditionally, authors never selected their own headlines, and still don’t in almost all publications). It helps me with art direction, to pick a good cover image for some of my posts. I’ve used it on occasion to generate those images, such as for this post. I use it to take my power point mockups and create more attractive designs. I use it to create audio voiceovers of my posts. The one piece of writing it does for me is to draft podcast show notes, largely because if I feed it a transcript, it can automate the otherwise time-consuming task of coming up with a good chapterization.

If I worked for a major publication like the Atlantic, I would have editors, art directors, graphic designers, fact checkers, podcast producers, and maybe even research assistants to help me with my work. As an independent writer without the financial resources to hire people for those tasks, and without the personal skills in some of them, AI is incredibly empowering in helping to close those gaps.

Cover illustration: AI generated.

We about about generational change, corporate consolidation, changes in how philanthropy operates, the K-shaped economy, and whether our city - and by extension our national - elites really need to solve social problems in order to succeed.

This is really important material for people who want to really understand what’s happened to leadership in our country and especially in our communities.

Well, today the online right media ecosystem is in increasing disarray. It’s suffering from major problems with audience declines (gift link), internal conflict, and many of its core personalities going completely off the rails.

Meanwhile a new online left media ecosystem is rising, one that’s more successful than the right in important ways.

Substack was once seen as a right wing platform, with all the associated demands that the platform start censoring people that you’d expect to come with that. To their great credit, Substack didn’t censor. But the left has now become dominant on the platform. Virtually all the largest political Substacks are on the left, though the Free Press remains number one. This is a legitimate free market outcome.

Inc. just profiled the incredible success of the Bulwark, originally started as a Never Trump site by Bill Kristol, but which has become a politically left “resistance lit” empire. The Bulwark has 140,000 paying subscribers, has a large Youtube presence, and is profitable and on track to do $30 million in revenue this year. Even if they received algorithmic help we aren’t aware of, getting 140,000 people to pay money is a big accomplishment. And they appear to have done it without the huge marketing spend that built up the Free Press.

It’s particularly notable that the Bulwark appears to be pulling away from the Dispatch, also founded as an anti-Trump outlet, but which is still a conservative publication. They’ve executed very well, but the their last confirmed paid subscriber number was 45,000 - excellent, but far behind the Bulwark, and with a comparatively tiny Youtube presence. (To be fair, the paid subscriber number was from a year and a half ago, but I’m skeptical that they grew by 3X in that time).

Many on the right think these kinds of left wing people and publications only exist because they are propped up by donors or media conglomerates. People used to believe this about Jennifer Rubin at the WaPo, for example. But when she left for Substack, she racked up 350,000 free tier subscribers in two weeks. Clearly, she actually did have a following. And with tens of thousands of paying subscribers, she’s doing very well for herself.

The fact that so many people are willing to pay money for these sites not only makes them sustainable, but gives them independence from the Democratic establishment and donor networks. This is causing big headaches for the party, as the AP documents.

“The ground has been made fertile for an anti-establishment media politics, where it just wasn’t quite there with the voter base in those previous cycles,” Peck said. Even older, moderate liberals, he said, have started to ″throw their hands in the air and look for alternatives.”

YouTube accounts like ”Secular Talk” and “Breaking Points,” streamers like Hasan Piker and new digital journalism organizations like More Perfect Union and The Lever are among those that have seen their audiences multiply. Grim said Drop Site has amassed 800,000 free and 60,000 paid subscribers since launching two years ago — more than he’d anticipated.

The left too is losing trust in mainstream media institutions, and turning to influencers and these new media outlets. This independent left wing media played a big role in boosting the insurgent progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who just won his primary. It will likely continue turbocharging insurgent candidates.

The rise of a powerful alternative left media infrastructure is in some ways a reversion to the status quo ante. A collection of bloggers known as the “Netroots” played a big political role in the early 2000s and through Obama’s 2008 victory, though largely faded away with the decline of the Blogosphere 1.0. I personally remember how getting a link from one of these bloggers like Atrios would explode my traffic. They were bigtime.

What’s different today is that subscription infrastructure and revenue sharing on platforms like Youtube create a large monetization engine for these kinds of sites.

In a sense, this reversal is normal and to be expected. Opposition media thrives, well, when in opposition. The Netroots emerged during the Bush era, the new left online media sites during the Trump one. With Trump in power, we’d expect online right media to decline.

Still, this shift in audience and financial firepower in online media from right to left is going to play a major role in coming election cycles, both within the Democratic party, and with interparty competition. And a key is that on both sides, we’ve seen the growth of a powerful, independent online media that’s not beholden to traditional party institutions or funders.

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Seminary Sorting

The great decline of our institutions is affecting more than just the legacy media. It’s rippling through every corner of our society. One domain it is also upending is Protestant ministerial training.

First Things magazine’s Protestant Mind newsletter had a very interesting piece on trends in seminary education. Traditional residential seminary programs are in big decline, particularly in mainline seminaries, but also evangelical ones. Mainline seminaries have also largely dried up a source of serious scholarship. However, total seminary enrollment has held up as people shift to online programs and other “non-conformist” schools that seem to be offering a kind of trade school model of education.

These trends are the result of responses to three broad shifts that occurred over the past two decades: a generational shift, an ecclesial shift, and an educational shift. Most of the scholars who defined the late twentieth century have either retired or passed away, resulting in a generational shift. Closely related is an ecclesial shift away from mainline dominance and toward non-conformist approaches. Finally, the blending of digital and physical spaces coupled with the rise of Learning Management Systems (LMS) has resulted in an educational shift. This educational shift hit older, freestanding seminaries with a large physical campus the hardest. None of these trends in isolation explain the current moment, but together they offer a narrative as to why some seminaries have declined while others are growing.

The rise of these non-conformist seminaries parallels the rise of non-denominational churches as the new demographic center of American Protestantism. Again, this is similar to the shift of political commentary from institutionalized to deinstitutionalized voices, even as the overall supply of it remains high.

It’s a fascinating piece for those who are interested.

Religious Leaders as Gateway to the Community

I recently interviewed Mark Barbash for the podcast. He’s a long time economic development person who has worked for mayors of Columbus, Ohio, and also for a previous governor of the state. My essay on how local civic leadership shifted from titans to technocrats was inspired by his writing, so I wanted to interview him about it.

I’m posting the episode Monday, but here’s a clip where Barbash talks about how, when he worked for a former mayor of Columbus, their first stop in any community when they planned something that would affect it was to visit religious leaders there.

The decline of religious commitment and institutions has implications for how political leaders are able to engage with urban communities. It’s also well known that in low-income neighborhoods, pastors and such have long served as key community leaders as well.

And the substitution of non-denominational or non-conformist churches and ministers for traditional denominationally embedded ones will also change the relationship of churches to their communities. It likely presages churches that, even to the extent they are still around, are much less connected institutionally to the rest of the community.

Demoralized Men

The Institute for Family Studies released the second installment of their “America’s Demoralized Men” report. It includes chapters on social connection, and alienation and distress. Here again, we see evidence of weak connectivity to institutions, and much else besides.

One thing that struck me was how few friends even young men ages 18-29 have. Almost 10% of them are completely friendless, which is not a good place to be. No surprise, a large share of that group, 43%, feels lonely all or most of the time. And another 34% of young men have just two or fewer friends. I might have expected this to be more characteristic of men later in life.

In terms of alienation, a significant share of young men have negative views about their future prospects. About half do not think they will be able to achieve the American dream, and the vast majority believe ability and hard work are not the most important factor in how you get ahead in America.

But on the plus side, most young men feel ambitious and have a lot of confidence in themselves. Put these together and it’s easy to see the formula for the “hustle bro” lifestyle that I see so many young men turning to. If you believe the system is rigged or the deck is stacked against you, but have high ambition and self-confidence, turning to some kind of hustle, say crypto, is a somewhat logical choice to make. It’s aligned with the recent WSJ reporting on how people are looking to find some kind of passive income scheme.

Click over to read the whole report.

Best of the Web

WSJ: Pastors Using AI to Help Write Sermons Grapple With Where to Draw the Line (gift link)- A divide is growing over AI-assisted preaching in American churches; ‘Martin Luther is rolling over in his grave.’ - I have a forthcoming essay on this topic.

WSJ: Helicopter Parents Are Co-Piloting Their Adult Children’s Careers (gift link) - Mom and dad are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their kid’s behalf, and even lurking just off-screen on Zoom calls

The Atlantic: The Great Romance Slump (gift link) - Why are so few young people finding love?

If you missed it, check out my essay from earlier this week on the curse of the right.

FYI: Sometimes WSJ gift links will not bypass the paywall for you. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about this.

The Verona intercepts revealed that McCarthy was right about significant communist penetration of the US government, but his infamous Wheeling list of card-carrying communists was basically fabricated.

It’s often the case that where there’s a strong institutional consensus around an issue, or where a tight-knit community of insiders controls an organization or movement, it takes a certain kind of person to challenge that.

At some level, that kind of person has to be disagreeable enough to engage in a fight that likely comes with strong social penalties. They may also need to engage in tactics that violate various social conventions or tacit arrangements, because those established ways of doing business are in part designed to preserve the status quo, prevent any reform or change, and inhibit dissent.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued, “In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground.”

In my experience, it doesn’t always work that way. Very often, calm appeals to reason have no effect, and can even draw bigtime blowback anyway. Incumbent elites and institutions very frequently don’t allow even the most reasonable, calmly argued disagreement to get a hearing, and indeed still perceive it as a threat.

For example, the presbyterian pastor and academic James Wood wrote a very calm, mild article asking whether the strategy of superstar evangelical pastor Tim Keller was still the right one for today. He was very appreciative of Keller in it. He got viciously attacked anyway.

Hence the rise of the disagreeable provocateur as change agent.

The problem is, as Gobry notes, this disagreeableness tends to be associated with a variety of other negative behaviors and crackpot beliefs.

One of my dictums for life is that what got you here won’t get you there. The skills that make someone a good staffer don’t necessarily make him a good manager. And the way someone managed a team or department may not be what it takes to succeed at the executive level.

Few of us are fundamentally able to change how we operate or engage, however. I notice this online, where I observe that few online figures are able to successfully pivot when changing times call for it.

Thus, the disagreeableness that makes someone an effective outsider critic is typically intrinsic to their personality. They aren’t able to turn it off, even at the point where it becomes a liability to themselves and their cause.

Which of course brings us to Donald Trump.

A number of issues animated the Trump phenomenon, including opposition to immigration, global free trade, and wars. Underlying these was a sense of a threatened identity and social position.

As political scientist Eric Kaufmann has noted, immigration has basically never been popular in America. So that issue predated Trump. Likewise, there was strong opposition to trade deals like NAFTA, so there was a popular base for this as well.

These issues were foregrounded in 1990s-era populism. Pat Buchanan’s presidential runs in 1992 and 1996 were based around them. His “culture war” speech at the 1992 RNC sounded very Trumpian themes.

Buchanan was a flawed person with personality quirks to be sure. But he was a devout Catholic and a gentleman as well. Likewise, H. Ross Perot ran for president as an independent in 1992 on some of these issues, particularly trade. He was a quirky person but also a self-made billionaire known for his moral rectitude. He lost, but won 19% of the vote in the election, which was remarkable for an independent candidate. John Anderson only got six and a half percent in 1980.

Not only were Buchanan and Perot defeated, but their ideas were categorically rejected by America’s ruling elite. In fact, those elites proceeded to press the pedal to the metal on immigration and trade.

When the public was once again roused over these issues, they came with a new standard bearer, Donald Trump. Trump far outclassed Buchanan and Perot in terms of political talent and charisma. He’s unlike anything we’ll likely see again in our lifetimes. He was also willing to say or do anything to win, no matter how badly it transgressed norms.

In the absence of suppressed but popular ideas, Trump would never have been viable. Likewise, without Trump and his style, those ideas would once again have been successfully suppressed. Trump possessed unique personal talents combined with politically salient issues - a package previous populists lacked.

But despite his claims that he could “be more presidential than any of them,” Trump has proven unable to change styles once in office. He is who he is.

Elements of Trumpism have been absorbed into the governing consensus. Nobody is going back to a pro-China position. After his first term, industrial policy continued with the CHIPS Act was passing. Huge chip plants are going up and opening in America. Rebuilding at least some critical industries is on the agenda. Mainstream leaders agree that the woke era went too far.

But as with McCarthy, Trump’s flaws risk discrediting many of his ideas, and harming some of his followers and supporters.

It’s strangely common for people to nail their colors to the mast in defense of these kinds of flawed people. William F. Buckley co-authored a book defending McCarthy, for example. Or look at the recent trend toward a Richard Nixon revisionism that completely exculpates him.

These people sometimes end up suffering the most. Some people who took the risk of working in the first Trump administration came out and couldn’t find jobs. Others were subject to various persecutions. There are people who are not among those cashing in off the second administration that are nevertheless willing to stake all of their own personal capital on defending Trump (as opposed to simply seeing and supporting him as a transactional vehicle for achieving their own goals, as the big money people do).

Buckley might have gone to bat for McCarthy, but he also went on to institutionalize anti-communism on the right in a very non-McCarthyite register. He even played a key role in later expelling the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. And he didn’t start personally acting like McCarthy. But that’s what a lot of people in GOP land have done when it comes to Trump.

For example, in one incident, a Blue Angels jet flew too close to spectators. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s response to this was to post, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.” Navy Secretary Hung Cao said, “Flight debrief complete. No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom!” These senior figures can’t even take aviation safety seriously. (Fortunately, the Navy itself did).

Outside of Washington, GOP candidates keep getting crazier and crazier, something dissident-right writer Scott Greer called the “insane clown party” effect. This may be popular with GOP primary voters, but when we are talking about imitators rather than the genuine Trump article, it isn’t likely to work with the public at large. As I’ve noted many times, highly educated people and institution leaders are particularly turned off by this kind of low-class behavior.

This creates the conditions for Democrats to not just retake power and roll back much of Trump’s agenda, but to see his issues discredited once again. In the absence of the canopy provided by the truly unique political talent of Trump himself, some of his supporters and imitators might suffer the same fate. Gobry’s tragedy of the right repeating itself is an all too imaginable future if Republicans stay on their present course.

Renn Report 2q26

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Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched.

I was in Seattle last month myself, and posted some reflections. The World Cup was in town, so it was vibrant - and perhaps the city cleaned drug addicts out of the some areas. But Pioneer Square and the U District were overrun with very disturbed people.

Under the philosophy known as “harm reduction,” some cities have effectively done much more than legalize drugs. They have allowed public drug dealing and consumption, and in some cases are actually underwriting it with city resources. While some programs like needle exchanges probably have some public health value, the net result is to make these cities extremely unpleasant or even unlivable for ordinary people, and especially families with children.

Drug addicts have taken over parks and playgrounds, making them unsafe for families to use.

I walked around the block to the Hoa Mai playground, named for a Vietnamese flower that signifies rebirth. City workers had installed gates to keep drug users away, but at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, I counted 27 people smoking drugs and nodding off. No children were in sight.

In some cases, parks and playgrounds are literally closed and fenced off because of the amount of drug-related activity. Drug addicts are also menacing children going to and from school. Here’s a story from Burlington, Vermont:

A Burlington High School student told me that her teachers have instructed students to avoid eye contact with dealers and users. A week earlier, she said, an addict had trailed her home after volleyball practice. She broke into a run, yelling for help, and the person eventually turned away.

It’s a remarkable article, and you should read the whole thing.

This type of progressive politics and governance dysfunction is the result of decades of the hollowing out of leadership and civic life in cities. The loss of leadership capacity deriving from corporate consolidation, the disappearance or significant diminution of old-money families, managerialism, and other factors is one I’ve told many times. The Covid/BLM era dramatically accelerated this.

The result is that there is no longer an ecosystem of powerful civic actors and institutions that provide checks and balances against bad or extreme ideas like these. At best, these people and institutions work behind the scenes to mitigate problems. They rarely speak in open opposition these days outside of a few cities like San Francisco.

At the same time, the hollowing out of civic life among the citizenry has produced an apathetic electorate that barely bothers to vote in many places. The old voluntary associations and such used to represent constituencies cities had to pay attention to. Instead of this old civic fabric we now have NGOs that are top-down directed by politically motivated donors, often on the far left.

So there’s less stopping far-left politicians from getting elected, or standing in their way once they do, than there used to be. Yes, Oregon rolled back drug decriminalization, and San Francisco voted in a new mayor who’s been much tougher on open air drug dealing and consumption. But it took extreme circumstances to generate this correction.

Radical politics are not just a product of the alienation of young people. They are also an effect of the decline of local companies, institutions, leadership, family life, religion, political parties, etc. This decline has tangible consequences in the real world.

I’m not going to claim this is the only factor underlying the challenges facing cities. Economic forces are very large as well, for example. But most urban problems are partially downstream of this.

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When Girls Join the Boy Scouts

One of our institutions that’s been in a long-term decline is scouting. Both the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have seen membership decline significantly over many years. The Boy Scouts in particular have had internal institutional trouble, with a large-scale abuse scandal and the departure of the LDS Church from participation.

One way the Boy Scouts responded to this decline was by admitting girls. The program was actually renamed Scouts BSA. Many girls seem to be taking advantage of this which is striking given that the Boy Scouts’ glory days are far behind it and it’s already in steep decline - arguably a sinking, scandal-plagued ship.

Erica Song wrote this month in the New York Times that this entry of girls has been a triumph. She writes about her own experience with a son and a daughter in scouting. Her son started in Cub Scouts, and her daughter was in the Girl Scouts. She describes what happens next:

When the Boy Scouts of America voted in 2017 to welcome girls into its core programs, I described Cub Scouts to my Girl Scout troop of 10 girls. Seven of them made the switch and have never looked back.

Song frames this in explicitly feminist terms as a triumph for girls. Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men posted that it’s unfair that girls get to participate in boys’ organizations while maintaining their own girls-only ones as well. It’s courageous of someone in his position to say this.

But the debate over girls in scouting misses a critical element. Why are men’s spaces and organizations higher status than women’s in our society? In part, it’s because women themselves believe that those are the superior option. The girls of Song’s Girl Scout troop themselves judged their own organization inferior. No patriarchy made them do it or was stopping women from making the Girl Scouts as awesome as they want it to be. And yet they joined the Boy Scouts anyway. Women desire to be where men are, to do what men are doing, to join in male spaces.

With occupations, once the share of women reaches a certain level, men sometimes exit them. The field then often suffers from a drop in pay and status (which some argue is because employers devalue women’s work). Will something similar happen to the Boy Scouts? The fact that boys were already exiting before the girls showed up makes this future seem possible. Perhaps boys shouldn’t run away when girls join one of their spaces. But if it’s truly the content of the Boy Scouts that’s attractive to the girls, as Song suggests, boys leaving shouldn’t affect the desirability and status accorded to it by the girls. We’ll have to watch what happens.

Marrying Up

Women are performing better than men in some domains like higher education and selected professions. Sociologist Wendy Wang explores in both the data and her own personal experience how this creates challenges for those women in the marriage market.

She starts by talking about how women have tended to want to marry up in terms of status and income, and how her own mother had explicitly given her that advice. With so many women being professionally successful and making more money than men in many cases, this makes it harder for those women to find men who make as much or more money than them.

She cites a 2019 study that used the actual incomes of married couples to create “synthetic husbands” for unmarried women. Wang observes, “The ideal [synthetic] husbands earn about 58% more than the pool of unmarried men who are actually available, and they are also more likely to be employed and hold a college degree.” There’s a gap in the pool of unmarried men even at the base level of just being employed and having a college degree, to say nothing of income.

Wang observes, “The mismatch is clear. There simply aren’t enough single men for single women to marry up. If women want to marry, someone has to marry an equal or marry down.” It looks like even under a purely assortative-mating preference - marrying someone equal to yourself - there’s still a deficit.

This is forcing many women to either remain single or marry down. However, marriages where the woman earns more than the man are significantly more likely to end in divorce.

The Cut, New York magazine’s women’s publication, has an interesting article exploring some of the frustrations Gen Z women who date down have with boyfriends who are unemployed or underemployed.

Since the dawn of paychecks, women have made less than men. But while the overall wage gap persists, some Gen-Z women are living through a more hopeful reality….A few years ago, a Pew study found that in a handful of cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., young women are actually earning more than their male peers. With that extra money they are also buying almost twice as many homes as young men and saving for retirement at higher rates. Women of this generation are more likely than any other time in history to date a man who makes less than them — or who makes nothing at all.

Young men, I assumed, must be humiliated by this state of affairs, their masculinity in tatters. But for the most part, they seem comfortable with being pampered and paid for — maybe a little too comfortable.

The article provides numerous examples of these relationships, such as Naomi’s:

Naomi’s worst fear was turning into her boyfriend’s mother. But in truth, the 24-year-old paid for everything, helped him with his résumé, and made sure he was looking for jobs. He reassured her that he’d make some changes, like going to therapy and showing up on time when they hung out. Instead, things got worse. While she cobbled together a six-figure income working two retail jobs, he talked about applying to law school while lying in bed at her apartment on the Upper East Side, watching Reels on his phone.

It’s not hard to imagine that these kinds of dynamics are part of what’s behind falling rates of family formation and fertility. As with institutional decline, this is already starting to have real, tangible effects in the economy and elsewhere.

Best of the Web

Joel Kotkin: Scientists Who Believe in God Are Challenging the Expert Atheist Establishment - There is a growing view that a creator may be behind major discoveries being made in science

Ryan Burge: America is undergoing a vibes revival (WaPo gift link).

The statistical measures of American religiosity don’t actually point toward a significant uptick in religious belief and practice. Instead, a number of data points seem to support the notion that what the U.S. is experiencing is a vibes revival. The public’s sense that religion is roaring back is completely disconnected from what’s actually happening in America’s pews.

WSJ: America’s Big Cities Are Rapidly Losing Kids - The number of children is falling across the U.S., but the decline is especially pronounced in big metros

The Urban Institute, which, as the name implies, is a think tank focused on cities, just put out a study called “The Case and Means for Family-Friendly Core Cities.”

NYT: Even in Utah, Land of ‘Big Love,’ Families Are Getting Smaller (gift link) - Forget tradwives. When it comes to plummeting fertility rates, Utah is leading the country.

American Institute for Boys and Men: From awareness to action: Boys and men in U.S. policy - A good roundup of action in the states when it comes to policies designed to help boys and men.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a link this week from Tim Challies.

New this week:

• Why the Left’s Own Thinkers Predict New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani Will Fail - The modern American city is structured to attract capital, not to defy it.

• The Reckoning Is Here - A Thanksgiving sermon in 1868, a demographic reckoning decades in the making, and the civic role the mainline church used to play

• Where Is Politics Going Next? - The recording of this month’s Zoom discussion, exclusively for Members.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

As I note at the beginning of the recording, I am planning to launch a quarterly reader survey that will allow me to meas…

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However, a number of left-wing thinkers have provided powerful ideas of their own that can help us understand, within a left-wing framework, why the “socialism in one city” of DSA leaders like Zohran Mamdani is unlikely to succeed in its policy ambitions.

First, consider the larger ambition of the DSA, which is for the traditional socialist aim of public ownership of the means of production. Their constitution says, “We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production.” This is a problem right there. In an article on the separation of the economic and the political in capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood shows the difficulty. Under feudalism, political and economic exploitation are united. The lord directly extracts uncompensated labor on his own demesne from the serf, for example. In capitalism, the political and the economic become separated. Economic exploitation, from a left point of view, happens in a domain separate from politics properly so-called. It seems to be a natural phenomenon like the weather, not a political one. (If you read this essay, skip to the section “The ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism”).

While politics can still intrude into the economy, it’s often only to support the capitalist structure of the economy, which is thus at least partially insulated from political interference. In the United States, for example, the sanctity of private property and the inviolability of contracts are written into the Constitution. Thus, achieving the DSA’s objectives would require overthrowing the constitutional order. In fact, we see that they recognize that and explicitly call for overturning core elements of the Constitution, including abolishing the Senate, and eliminating the separation of powers by making the executive and judicial branches subject to the legislature in a quasi-parliamentary setup.

Mayors like Mamdani are thus extremely limited in what they can accomplish. Mamdani can’t expropriate the grocery stores of New York under the US Constitution. He can only open new city-owned ones in competition with them. But that competition will happen on capitalist terms. In a notoriously low-margin business like grocery, this will certainly be loss-making, requiring significant public subsidies to sustain them. (Rent regulation is one area Mamdani does have control over, but we’ll see how his actions here fare in the courts).

This was the same dilemma facing many historic American socialists, such as the ones who gained power in Milwaukee in the early 20th century. Their response was “sewer socialism,” literally building sewers in the city. This proved to be a very useful thing to do, and not socialism at all by our understanding. Many socialists of that era were critical of it for just that reason.

Mamdani likes to describe himself as a sewer socialist, but opening a handful of money-losing grocery stores isn’t it. His other ideas, like free buses and day care, will also require large sums of money. He wants to tax the rich to pay for these, but will discover that’s easier said than done.

To understand why, we can turn to Wendy Brown’s essay “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Brown notes that by “liberalism,” we mean two things: political liberalism (as in “liberal democracy”) or economic liberalism (in the European sense of a market-centric approach). In theory, it is possible to have political liberalism with some kind of Keynesian social democratic system rather than market-driven economic liberalism.

In her view, neoliberalism, rather than merely the adoption of liberal economic principles, is a normative rather than purely economic project. It seeks to actively reconstruct mindsets and institutions in all domains of society to operate on the principles of the market actor. She writes, “Neoliberal rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player.”

This extension of market logic affects not just institutions, but even individuals themselves. She writes:

Other evidence for progress in the development of such a [neoliberal] citizenry is not far from hand: consider the market rationality permeating universities today, from admissions and recruiting to the relentless consumer mentality of students as they consider university brand names, courses, and services.

Her emphasis here is as much on the universities as on the students, but I think of how much of childhood today - from “enrichment” activities to extracurriculars to a student starting a non-profit or “doing research” - is structured around the competitive activity of getting into various schools. Or think about, for example, how we often think of ourselves as having a “personal brand.” Social media puts us in a competition for eyeballs, and encourages people to treat what would have been their private life as content to be monetized. We see finding a spouse as participating in a “relationship market.” The Wall Street Journal talked about how young people are now tracking and evaluating their dates using a spreadsheet. We now conceive of our lives in market terms, as producers and consumers, to such an extent that we aren’t aware of it. It sounds completely natural. It is a deeply ingrained psychology.

Brown notes that this has profound implications for our public life, in that it undermines the idea of the demos, and thus political liberalism itself (Her later book on this topic was called Undoing the Demos). She writes:

The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself among various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is rather a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers . . . which is, of course, exactly how voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.

Part of the appeal of Mamdani-style neo-socialism is precisely in its attempts to restore the idea of the citizens as a political community in a particular place joined by bonds other than just transactions. Conservatives can laugh at his talk about the “warmth of collectivism,” but the feeling this speaks to is echoed in many conservative critiques about the decline of institutions and voluntary associations, churches, family formation, having children and other sources of extra-market meaning. The loss of these “havens in a heartless world” is clearly harmful to society, leaving people atomized, alienated, and open to more radical politics. Conservatives often valorize these kinds of associations, but don’t have a program to revive them on par with, for example, their ideas about how to structure the economy or the administrative state. They tend to be treated as cultural items that exist beyond the realm of policy or outside the ability of any intentional, structured program of civic renewal. Mamdani’s politics speaks to this need. It’s unsurprising that his supporters view his approach and program as one of moral renewal. Portraying his appeal as merely about “free stuff” is a mistake.

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Unfortunately for Mamdani, under neoliberal logic, the state itself has been reconstructed as a market actor. Brown says:

The state itself is enfolded and animated by market rationality: that is, not simply profitability but a generalized calculation of cost and benefit becomes the measure of all state practices. Political discourse on all matters is framed in entrepreneurial terms; the state must not simply concern itself with the market but think and behave like a market actor across all of its functions.

Brown emphasizes the national government here, but the same applies to an even greater degree to municipal government. The Chicago socialist labor lawyer and activist Ramsin Canon examined this in a 2013 essay called “The Mayor as Entrepreneur-in-Chief”:

What we’re feeling viscerally, but seeing from too close to appreciate, is the logical end of decades of neoliberalization of government, which has transformed a managerial state into an entrepreneurial one. Our Mayors are now “entrepreneurs-in-chief,” and the result is that governance has been transformed from a participatory process of pooling resources and regulating behavior for the public good into one of government by private negotiation and enticement of capital through competition between states, cities, and even neighborhoods.

Canon points to changes in federal policy that reduced funding for critical urban needs. One might note the end of federal revenue sharing in the 1980s, money cities had broad discretion over how to spend. Federal aid is now typically very restricted in what it can be used for, and is often project-oriented. The federal government now gives only capital grants to transit agencies, for example, whereas it used to supply operating support as well. Canon also cites trade policies that subjected cities to greater economic competition. One could add that state and federal law typically severely limit the kinds or amounts of taxes municipalities can raise in any case.

With limited general support from the federal or state government, cities are forced to mostly rely on their own revenue sources, primarily taxes and fees. And each city finds itself competing in a marketplace with other cities for businesses and residents who can pay those taxes. They must behave entrepreneurially to creatively raise revenue without affecting their competitive position when it comes to taxes, and to attract investment. This often involves transactions like privatization - Chicago’s asset privatizations being a major subject of Canon’s essay - or techniques like tax abatements or tax increment financing (TIF). Conservatives tend to deride the latter as corporate welfare, but miss that there is a legitimate competitive element between locations that businesses are leveraging to extract concessions. While factors like talent dominate, there’s seldom just one viable choice of where to invest, and subsidies do matter on the margin.

Canon puts it like this:

Why not raise property or luxury taxes, or institute a city income tax, to make up the deficit [during the Great Recession instead of privatizing its parking meters]? Why not divert money from the TIF districts?

See above; Chicago is no longer a political community, it is an economic entity that is in competition with other cities in the region, in the state, across the world. In that mental framework, tax is cost, or price. You raise prices, you drive away your clients. In the case of the neoliberal city, the client is the developer, the investor, the employer. The federal government and the state are not going to give the city any real money; they are not investing in infrastructure, or education, or social welfare in any real way, the way they did up through the late 1970s and 1980s. The name of the game is “growth” through enticement of capital. And capital plays the game perfectly. [emphasis added]

I note again that the opposition between “political community” and “economic entity” here does not include the other forms of community that have badly atrophied, ones that used to create thick webs of identity, belonging, meaning, and non-neoliberal forms of life in cities: religious communities, fraternal societies, bowling leagues, etc. Political community is not the only alternative to the naked marketplace.

The implication here, however, is that today’s neo-socialists can’t just tax the rich or big business in order to fund their dreams. Taxation levels are disciplined by a competitive marketplace. Cities that tax to make investments that can generate a return, say on a needed piece of infrastructure, or some amenity that will attract high-end residents, will do well. But levying taxes in order to subsidize money-losing grocery stores is likely only to worsen a city’s competitive position, undermining it fiscally. As Brown also noted, the basis of governmental legitimacy in today’s world is often deeply tied to the delivery of economic growth, so policies that lead to an exit of business or declines in investment have a big affect on public sentiment, even in liberal cities like New York.

There’s nothing intrinsic to municipal government that necessitates this fiscal regime. One could imagine cities being heavily funded by federal or state intergovernmental transfers, insulating them from the need to operate in this mode of fiscal competition. On the left’s own account, capital has constructed this environment to ensure that cities are subjected to these kinds of market pressures for its own benefit.

The net result is that Zohran Mamdani’s room for maneuver is very limited. His legal ability to raise taxes is constrained by the state. Gov. Kathy Hochul isn’t giving him the billions of dollars in tax increases on the rich he wants. Even if he could raise taxes significantly, at some point the market would render a judgment on that. The fact that several deca-billionaires left California when a proposed wealth tax was put on the ballot shows that. Hence he’s reduced to trying to target immobile capital, as with his pied-à-terre tax on non-primary residences in the city. But he’s not going to be able to finance free buses with that - notwithstanding that it’s the state-controlled MTA that sets bus fares anyway, not the city. Undoubtedly New York City has leverage to raise taxes in a way that few other cities do. More workaday cities that imitate New York’s policies are likely to see very bad results. But even New York’s leverage is not unlimited, particularly when taxes there are already high.

As with Chicago, the go-to move Mamdani is already making is the financial gimmick, such as deferring pension payments. This isn’t likely to end well if it continues in New York, either. Even some of his fellow socialists described his failure to fully fund pensions as advancing a “Wall Street austerity agenda.” Even if he’s able to fund his priorities for a time, and the public is delighted, it will be at the price of so compromising the city’s financial condition that, like Chicago, it will find itself subjected to a regime of involuntary austerity that leaves services worse off than they were originally, and hobbles the city’s ability to invest for potentially decades to come. The city isn’t there yet, but establishing a pattern of deferring pension contributions is not a place the city wants to go.

Mamdani is already discovering the limits to his own power that are built into the nature of municipal government in America, the way that state governments and other entities constrain what he can do, and the relentless pressure of the marketplace. His socialism in one city project is simply not viable in terms of being able to accomplish its objectives so long as America’s cities are subjected to a regime of neoliberal competition through being required to self-finance their operations via local revenue raising.

In other words, the idea that the marketplace constrains the ability of someone like Mamdani to do what he’s promised to do isn’t a conservative fever dream; it’s a simple reality of how capital operates in America today. Supporters might argue that what they are doing is building a broader national movement that will achieve its objectives, but urban leaders who promise the moon and don’t deliver will soon find their movements discredited, as the reversal of Covid-era hard progressivism in many cities will already attest.

Cover image: New York City subway fare gates by Ray Raimundi / MTA, CC BY 2.0

While Indianapolis would surely have gotten a library at some point regardless of Edson’s sermon, this story goes to show the role that tall-steeple mainline churches played in the civic life of their communities. Second Presbyterian was founded in 1838, with the famed Henry Ward Beecher as its first pastor. For over 150 years it has been the establishment church in Indianapolis, and it is one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the country. Bill Hudnut, who became senior pastor of Second Presbyterian in the 1960s, went on to serve a term in Congress, and then become a four-term mayor of the city who is largely credited with its early downtown revitalization and other important accomplishments.

The current senior pastor of Second Presbyterian, Rev. Chris Henry, has a podcast called Faithful Discourse, and I was delighted to be his guest for an episode that was released last week.

This podcast is a good introduction to my work on religion, including my “three worlds” model, for those of you who are newer here and aren’t yet familiar with it. But even for those of you who are, we discuss a number of important topics, such as demographic transition. As a parallel to the church, I tell the story of my experience attending opera, where I could see 25 years ago that its very old audiences were going to create a vacuum one day. But since it was still sold out, the problem wasn’t yet manifest. Now it is, and companies like the famed Metropolitan Opera are in real trouble. This same pattern is hitting or soon will hit many of our institutions. The reckoning is finally here. I also note how even younger-skewing organizations can have similar challenges, using the example of my experience the Gospel Coalition conference. It was packed and had big energy, but I didn’t see many Generation Z people in the room.

We also talk about the factors underlying the decline of the mainline churches, and the return by some younger people to more traditional liturgies, my relationship to Tim Keller, and much more.

A lot of people have written off mainline Protestantism as a lost cause, or even bidden it good riddance. The demographic trends there are certainly not good. But America has not found any replacement for the roles it played in society, such as in the moral formation of a community’s leadership and as a nexus of civic action.

There’s a really great video with this one, so while the audio is in my podcast feed, I recommend watching it if you are able.

New York magazine had an interesting story on the rise of Vanderbilt as a prestige university that helps shed light on this. It’s an illustration of the compounding geographic advantage of the South over less dynamic areas of the country.

Back in the 1980s, people and businesses moved to the South because it was cheap. The facilities companies located there were often back office operations facilities and the like. Over time, that compounded and the South began to draw more headquarters, with cities like Houston among the top centers for Fortune 500 HQs. Now, the South’s rise has started compounding into growing prestige as well. You can think about ultra-wealth and high finance pouring into South Florida, top Silicon Valley players like Elon Musk going to Austin, and non-country music celebrities choosing to base themselves in Nashville.

The steep rise in the desirability of SEC schools is part of this. Vanderbilt is a bit unusual in the conference because it is a private school, but as a case study it is still instructive.

Over the last few years, Vandy, as it’s affectionately known, has become one of the most desired and admired schools in the country. At a time when only 42 percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, and as other schools face a spate of crises — an increasingly antagonistic White House, the existential threat of AI, administrative uncertainty about how to handle student protests — the university has emerged as a bit of an apolitical fantasy land. It accepted just 2.9 percent of regular-decision applicants, and although its overall acceptance rate won’t be available until late August, a university official told me it’s expected to be about 4.8 percent, which would make Vanderbilt almost as hard to get into as Yale was last year. The school consistently ranks in the mid-teens in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual lists of best colleges.

The author notes that this is a sea change from when he attended there:

But this reputational makeover has been in the works for decades. I know this because I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2004, back when 38 percent of high-schoolers who applied to Vandy got in — and watched from afar as the university spent the next 20 years becoming fancier, less southern, and considerably more selective. It had a plan to become popular, and that plan worked.

As with trying to aggressively lure companies, Vanderbilt aggressively targeted high prestige students from Northeastern prep schools, as well as top Jewish talent:

The brunt of Vanderbilt’s recruitment strategy was focused on the Northeast, specifically on high schools that sent a lot of students to Ivies. “I’d been visiting those boarding schools when I was at Brown: Andover, Exeter, etc. So I started doing that,” Gee said. He also began “targeting Jewish students,” as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002, explaining that “Jewish students … make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life” and were key components of his “elite strategy” of turning Vanderbilt into a direct competitor of the Ivy League.

This is an inversion of the midcentury era. Instead of putting quotas on Jewish students, they are actively recruiting more. It was a smart strategy.

Part of its plan to lure them in involved getting rid of Southern identity elements that might be considered retrograde:

Not everyone was comfortable going to school in the South. “My grandparents were like, ‘It’s not the same down there. You need to be careful,’ ” Taylor Thompson, who is Black and grew up in Chicago, told me. So Vanderbilt became less southern. In 2002, the university stripped the word Confederate from the name of one of its dormitories. “We had a growing Black population, and a number of students were uncomfortable staying in the hall, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s rename it,’ ” Gee told me. The decision caused an outcry among a certain type of white southerner — in fact, Gee says he made the name change without consulting the university’s full board of trustees because he believed it would disapprove.

People think that the South is the last region of the country that still has a historic, authentic culture, or that it is steeped in Lost Cause-ism or clinging to its past in other ways. In my observation, it’s basically the opposite. No region is more ready to jettison its past in order to make more money (or win football games). Try getting people to change something in New England or the Midwest and you can really see the difference. The extreme generic sprawl of Southern cities shows how unsentimental they are when it comes to this. The battles over Confederate monuments and the like show this dumping of history in progress - and the preservationist arguments usually seem to turn out to be a minority position.

There were many other initiatives the school undertook, such as reducing the role of the Greek system in campus life. I can’t possibly do justice to all their strategies and the entire article here, but I do want to also highlight their push to open campuses in elite coastal locations like San Francisco, New York, and West Palm Beach.

The university announced that it would invest $300 million in athletics, redesigned its logo, and committed to opening four additional campuses that would extend the university’s reach beyond Nashville. Last year, it finalized a 99-year $44.3 million lease with New York’s General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal Church’s oldest institution of this type, taking over its campus in Chelsea….To expand its presence in the tech scene, Vanderbilt also purchased the campus currently occupied by California College of the Arts, a private art school in San Francisco that was running out of money. A third campus was planned for West Palm Beach (it’s for people who want to go into finance or aerospace).

This article shows the growth and prestige flywheels that the South has operating. Nashville, pretty much a backwater 35 years ago, became a hot city. Being in a hot city makes it easier for Vanderbilt to recruit higher-rated students, which raises its prestige, whic then accrues to the prestige of Nashville, and so on.

The same effect is in action with these coastal elite cities. Their economic clout and prestige attract prestigious or rising schools like Vanderbilt or Cornell to set up shop there, which makes them even more desirable, etc.

This article also shows the high levels of ambition and dynamism that characterize the growing cities of the South. I’m reminded of the former CEO of the Charlotte Chamber once saying, “To understand Charlotte, you have to understand the scale of our ambition. We don’t want to be number two to anybody.” They want to grow, to change, to rise in stature.

This spirit of boosterism and dynamism once characterized America in general, but it is largely absent from much of the country today. Restoring dynamism in America generally, and reversing those geographic inequalities, is going to require injecting a more ambitious and dynamic spirit into those left-behind places. This can be hard to kickstart because the people who’ve chosen to remain in them like things the way they are, whereas the South has many newcomers who aren’t wedded to the past there at all.

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The Coming American Population Bust

But a more dynamic attitude alone is unlikely to turn around left-behind places. That’s because demographic decline in the United States will exacerbate geographic inequalities. It’s harder to attract people when there are fewer people being born, or even future people period. And as I’ll explain, it might well make places like Nashville and Vanderbilt even stronger.

Demographer Lyman Stone had a recent op-ed in the New York Times where he talked about how the population bust is coming sooner than we think (gift link).

If America’s population does decline, it will strain our entitlements system, damage the economy, reduce innovation and entrepreneurship, and cause serious labor shortages. But the majority point of view — held by major institutions like the Census Bureau, the United Nations and the Social Security trustees — is that the United States probably won’t face population decline until the 2080s, or even beyond 2100.

That forecast is far too optimistic. The more accurate projection, which I outlined in a recent report for my organization, the Institute for Family Studies, sees the American population beginning to shrink in the 2050s. It is a forecast so grim, it could upend American budgeting and, thus, American politics.

Modern industrial capitalism does not seem to function well in the absence of growth. It’s not just recessions. Places that demographically stagnate or decline typically start to become distressed, which often precipitates a downward spiral. Significant fixed costs that become more burdensome per capita or per household with decline are a part of this.

Stone is very pro-immigration I believe, but he doesn’t believe immigration can solve the problem:

There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office. Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home.

Stone also believes birth rates will continue to decline rather than stabilize, meaning population forecasts are too optimistic:

Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050 and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman…What evidence supports these predictions? Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years, an entire generation. They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.

It’s a grim forecast, and Stone argues that only interventions equal to the scale of the problem can turn things around:

Closing a gap this size will not happen through a few thousand dollars of tax credits sprinkled on young families; we have tried pocket change, and pocket change has failed. It will take serious money aimed at the people doing the work of raising the next generation of Americans, an end to the marriage penalties woven through our tax and welfare codes, a surge in building family-size houses on par with the one during the last baby boom and a culture that treats children as a future worth having rather than a lifestyle expense. Those are big asks, but they are things Americans can achieve if they set their minds to it.

Click over to read the whole thing.

What we see in places with demographic decline is that population concentrates in fewer remaining zones of dynamism and opportunity. Look at Japan, for example, where people poured into Tokyo as the countryside saw the emergence of ghost towns.

Demographic decline might thus actually benefit places like Nashville and regions like the South that are well-positioned to be the last man standing. Simply put: demographic weakness will make it very difficult to address geographic inequalities, in addition to the other challenges it will pose to the country.

The Draw of Eastern Orthodoxy

We read a lot about young people, especially young men, turning towards Eastern Orthodoxy. This short clip by Paul VanderKlay, who is a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church (Dutch Reformed) from Sacramento, sheds some light on that phenomenon, and also a mode of public engagement I want to highlight.

In brief, Orthodoxy offers both historically-rooted solidly, and also an immanent experience. I thought his comparison of Orthodoxy to Pentecostalism in terms of experience was particularly interesting.

This shows how VanderKlay is a good example of the high-minded Protestant man. He fits the bill of what I’ve called the New Trustee archetype. Notice his desire to get at the truth, not just propagandize for his own position. He has a generosity of spirit in noting what is praiseworthy in Eastern Orthodoxy, and acknowledging the downsides of his own tradition.

While certainly not limited to Protestants, there’s something about the way Protestantism, with its belief that everyone needs to read and understand scriptures themselves and the lack of belief by its denominations that they are the one true and infallible church, particularly forms people in this way. This is a spirit that we associate especially with the mainline tradition.

Best of the Web

WSJ: Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream (gift link) - One thing I’ve noticed about Gen Z is that many of them are deeply allergic to traditional 9-5 employment.

The Cut: 11 Rounds of IVF, $250,000, and No Baby - Clinics are seeing more patients over 45 trying to get pregnant. It’s not as easy as celebrities make it look

Harper’s: Republican Machines - Can the GOP save the humanities? - An interesting article about the rise of “civics centers” on college campuses. I previously interviewed Paul Carrese, who was the founding director of the center at Arizona State, the model for these departments.

WSJ: China Is Devastating the Last Stronghold of German Industry (gift link). Europe is now experiencing the same industrial disruption from Chinese competition that the United States went through.

New Content and Media Mentions

My article on the New Trustees was reprinted in the Free Press.

I got a mention from Rod Dreher and Patrick Brown.

I also wrote an article this week on the end of the populist style in American politics.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Peabody Library at Vanderbilt University by Dansan4444/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

For the last few years, however, I haven’t had a strong sense of where the country is going next. We’ve been in a liminal period, a period of transition. That’s in two senses. The first is the bigger, longer arc I’ve labeled the “American Transition,” in which the country is shifting from one institutional order to another yet to be defined. The other sense is about the shorter term cultural, political, and religious moment. In this liminal moment, it hasn’t been clear what’s coming next.

But now, I’m getting a sense of where things are headed. Though it still has some time to play out, it looks to me like the populist moment is coming to an end in America. In its place we’ll likely see multiple things, but one is what I call a “new constructivism,” one that is already present and growing.

The Decline of the Populist Style

When I say populism, I’m referring to three things, a style, a movement, and a program. The populist style is highly combative, very confrontational, hostile to elites and institutions, typically anti-intellectual, abrasive, often transgressive of established norms and ideas, and often with a revolutionary affect. A populist movement, in the mass media age, weds this style to a reciprocal bond of personal affection and loyalty between a popular mass and a charismatic, often outsider political leader. A populist program typically involves policies designed to benefit the popular classes or satisfy their preferences, usually at the expense of the interests of the powerful, wealthy, or big institutional incumbents. 19th century populists wanted free silver. Trumpian populists want America First.

I believe the populist style, in particular, is going to be fading soon, along with the populist movement. I expect the movement to be played out by 2030, and the style even sooner. Though in part this is because the populist program has succeeded in many areas. Why do I say this this?

First, high-intensity social movements always die out because people can only sustain a fever pitch for so long. Populism in particular has always burned itself out. The 60s social revolutions and campus protests, 70s left wing terrorism, etc. also faded. The Covid craziness faded. The populist style is no longer fresh, cool, or edgy. It’s gotten stale and is less entertaining. People are doing normal things again, like watching the NFL - whose ratings bottomed out early in the Trump era but have fully recovered - or seeing The Odyssey.

This loss of the entertainment factor has caused populist influencers to shift in more extreme and sometimes bizarre directions. Populism is losing coherence and fading in the online right. I know a number of people in various parts of the populist online right world. Many of them are disenchanted with its current state and want to find a way out.

But even just looking at public information, we can see people like Candace Owens, who previously worked for multiple legitimate conservative organizations, go completely off the rails. She’s not the only one. Conspiracy theories abound and are a staple of today’s online right discourse. There have also been a number of scandals involving online right influencers saying things in return for undisclosed payments.

It’s gotten to the point that online right influencers themselves are complaining about it. The dissident right writer Scott Greer is an example of this. He coined the term “insane clown party” to describe what’s happened, and recently inveighed against the GOP’s “freak streak” in the American Conservative.

There’s still a market for this style. But that style is increasingly unmoored from any populist political movement. And it’s clear that it only appeals to a minority of the country.

Second, the populist style has already persisted longer than it otherwise would have because of the unique skills and success of Donald Trump. Early 90s populism, fueled by similar issues, faded much faster. Donald Trump was a far more talented vehicle than either Pat Buchanan or H. Ross Perot - and he won. That Trump’s two terms were non-consecutive has extended his timespan of influence.

Trump is a world-historical figure. He is the indispensable man for this era of right populism, the charismatic leader that made it a movement. After his departure following the 2028 election, no one can plausibly fill his role. Look at would-be successor JD Vance, for example. Vance is in full apology mode over a statement he made about “childless cat ladies.” Trump would never have apologized for that. In fact, he said much worse about women, and managed to deflect criticism by saying, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” It isn’t just Vance who can’t pull off what Trump does routinely. No one else can either. We will probably never see Trump’s like again. Trump’s departure will drain the energy from populism as a style and movement, and remove the protective umbrella that has allowed people in his orbit to get away with imitating his style. Neither Trump’s talent nor his personal bond with his supporters is transferable to a successor.

Third, populism succeeded in mainstreaming its ideas, making the populist style itself redundant. If populism as a style and as a movement is fading, in part that’s because populism as a program has succeeded. It can be difficult to remember how constrained the Overton Window was in a year like 2014. And how many now-commonplace ideas were relegated to the fringes of the internet. Some type of large illegal immigration amnesty was the bipartisan elite consensus. Questioning the role of trade with China in displacing American workers was ridiculed by economists. No one was talking about intersexual dynamics in close to the manner that the manosphere did.

Today, the GOP seems to have largely admitted that war was a mistake. The China Shock paper in 2016 forced the economics profession to re-evaluate the effect of Chinese trade. Now, everyone in America understands that China is a competitor and a major challenge for the country. That won’t change when Trump is out of office. It may be his most durable legacy. The bipartisan CHIPS Act is starting to reshore semiconductor manufacturing, and other initiatives like securing critical mineral supplies are in progress. Center-left policy entrepreneurs like Richard Reeves are now talking about the problems of boys and men. Words like “hypergamy” are now in the mainstream media.

In short, on a host of issues, populism won, either in having its issues adopted, as with China skepticism, or at least in breaking the embargo on its ideas.

That’s a problem for the populists, because they are no longer needed to carry the torch for these issues in the way they used to, and they haven’t developed new ones to replace them. On new and emerging topics like AI, populism is active as a negative force, but has no alternative vision it is supporting. There’s no “America First” or “Make America Great Again” for AI, merely standard-issue NIMBY opposition to data centers. The march of history means that America is starting to move on from the issues that animated populism towards a new set of issues that will be less aligned with the populist style, or at least right-populism of the variety we’ve experienced.

Populism not only succeeded with its ideas, but also with disrupting institutions. A great example is in the evangelical world. The religious establishment there known as “Big Eva” has been a longtime target of populist attacks. It still is. But today, Big Eva can barely be said to exist. Its dominant figures are almost entirely gone, lost to either scandal, death, or retirement. Its institutions are shells of what they used to be, and wield nothing like the power and influence they once did.

The question now is how to renew America’s institutions or what to build in their place. This is where populism does not have an answer. It’s a mode of critique, not of construction. Now that needed disruption is accomplished, the public will rapidly become disenchanted with populism’s ability to take the next needed steps.

Indeed, the inability of today’s populism to actually deliver the goods after accomplishing disruption is part of why the public is souring on it. A different mode of engagement is required to carry the project forward.

For all these reasons the populist style seems likely to fade. Indeed, the disenchantment with populism is already evident in many things we see. The question is then what comes after it.

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The Rise of the New Constructivism

What arises in place of the populist style is yet to be determined, and probably won’t be a single thing. But I’m seeing signs of a new style I call the “new constructivism.” It’s people trying to think seriously about reform and new ideas needed to actually address America’s challenges.

Fifteen years ago, there was a high degree of satisfaction among American elites with the governing consensus. Today, as in the late 1970s, there’s a growing shared sense in America that fundamental reforms are needed. I sometimes get invited to bipartisan, off-the-record salon discussions on various topics, and it’s amazing how much agreement there is on the problems and the need for change. This is a sea change.

During the populist era, we’ve seen the emergence and growth of new voices and institutions working on tangible ideas for the future, ones that address some of America’s core challenges and which are not simply a recapitulation of the pre-populist consensus.

I’ll highlight again American Affairs magazine, founded in 2017. Every issue is filled with detailed, wonky pieces very relevant to our country today. The current issue has an article on how to pay for electricity infrastructure investments, lessons from the Plaza Accords on how to address trade deficits, and revitalizing the Export-Import Bank. Do I always agree with these? No. But there is always significant, constructive analysis and ideas.

And again I’ll highlight Richard Reeves, a center-left policy entrepreneur who saw many of the problems facing boys and men that the manosphere and populist elements had identified, but who has taken them forward in a constructive, politically palatable register. His 2022 book Of Boys and Men, and his follow-up organization the American Institute for Boys and Men, provide diagnosis, but also ideas for reform that governments might actually adopt some day. He is taking this topic into rooms populism will never get into. Separate from Reeves, the Institute for Family Studies is looking at family formation and fertility trends, and making specific policy recommendations for how to increase both.

The Institute for Progress, founded in 2022, is another voice. It’s one of a group of newer, acceleration oriented organizations I could highlight. Its mission is to “accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” They sponsor the Statecraft podcast, which hosts practitioners for detailed discussions on how to make government work better. They also recently related a Transit Abundance Playbook with a collection of discreet, implementable ideas, such as increasing the required spacing between cross-passages in subway tunnels. These are eye-glazing to some, but are the kinds of ideas necessary to start bending the construction cost curve downward.

A bipartisan collection of voices focused on housing issues has developed a range of reformist ideas. This includes people in the so-called YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard) movement, as well as the “Abundance Liberals.” They are promoting rule changes such as allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs, aka “granny flats” or “carriage houses”), allowing so-called single-stair buildings, or reforming America’s outlier elevator regulations. This movement has gained traction both in state houses and in Congress, which recently passed a new bipartisan housing reform law with many positive elements. This world also gets a lot of coverage in the major media.

It’s not just wonky policy ideas but also people doing things. Mark Cuban started his Cost Plus Drugs online pharmacy in 2022 to bring prescription costs down, for example. Civica Rx, founded in 2018, is attacking the same problem from the other side as a non-profit generic drug manufacturer that combats shortages and price gouging. Bobby Fijan founded the American Housing Corporation in 2024 to build prefabricated row homes to both drive down costs and to create more family friendly housing typologies.

These kinds of constructively focused voices and initiatives have been emerging, and are seeing their mindshare grow. The people are often new on the scene, or newly focusing on these topics. And the organizations tend to be new as well. They are not focused merely on seeking a restoration of the political, policy, and cultural environment from before populism, but are actively engaged on new topics or with new ideas.

To be clear, legacy organizations and personalities are also engaging in developing these kinds of new ideas. It just tends to be newer organizations and movements like these. And the key is that it is not just about trying to revive Reaganism or the Obama moment or the proverbial “dead consensus.” It’s about how we address today’s problems, whether that be through old ideas, updated ideas, or completely new ones.

This kind of constructivism isn’t present in every key topic area. Immigration discussion continues to largely be driven by ideology, for example. That issue is more of a zero-sum battle between incompatible visions of the American future. But in many areas, we’ve seen a growing turn towards a constructive approach to the issues, even when many differences among the players remain.

I expect the new constructivism will continue to grow as a style. It is not yet a program, because its output is mostly discrete, point ideas unrelated to an overall coherent agenda (although the idea of an “abundance agenda” is an attempt at one). It’s also not yet a movement because it is not wedded to a party, political candidate, or effort apart from some individual items like YIMBYism.

New constructivist thinking is also unbalanced. It is more extensively developed and has a more robust ecosystem on “acceleration” topics - how do we build more housing, electric infrastructure, transit, data centers, AI, etc. and build it faster and cheaper? It’s less developed on the “formation” side around faith, family formation and fertility, gender, institutions, etc. But more techno-industrial acceleration without the human-social formation to bring our people along with it may well only lead to a recurrence of populism, maybe a rising left-populism this time.

I’m personally making a skin-in-the-game bet on new constructivism as the best way to engage today. While I engage on acceleration topics, it’s the under-developed formation areas where there is the most need and I think I can add the most value. So that’s where I’m directing my focus. In a sense, this is a continuation of what I’ve already been doing. “Build up, don’t just tear down” has been a guiding principle of my newsletter since the very beginning. But I’m now operating on the belief that a new constructivism is the emerging mode of American public discourse. I got the manosphere, the “Negative World”, and Trump right. We’ll see in the coming years if I got this one right as well.

Cover image: TSMC Fab 21 in Arizona by Hunter Trick/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

By July 2020, 52% of young Americans age 18 to 29 lived with at least one parent, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. It was the first time a majority of young adults in the country had lived with parents since the Great Depression. That share has likely dropped since then, but for some people the arrangements have stuck.

Almost half of adults under the age of 30 are living at home today, down a bit from the pandemic year of 2020 but up 12 percentage points since 2019.

The actual level is probably overstated, since the data doesn’t distinguish parents living with children - which has likely also increased due to our aging society - from children living with parents.

The high cost of housing is a big factor. But some of them aren’t doing it out of necessity but out of choice:

Samantha Stobo was fresh off a breakup and unable to afford her Manhattan two-bedroom alone. So the 29-year-old decided to move in with her mom in Miami until she could get back on her feet. She told herself it would only take a few months. Now 33-years old, Stobo has no plans to move out. “I thought it was going to be temporary,” Stobo said. “But it’s been three years now, and I love it.”

This seems to be leading to a change in social norms in which the stigma of living at home is declining:

Young people say that living at home in 2026 doesn’t carry the stigma it once did because of how unaffordable life has become….Far from hiding it, some now broadcast their lives as “stay-at-home daughters” or “stay-at-home sons” on social media. Stobo says posting about her mother-daughter living situation on TikTok has earned her a friendly comment section filled with others in the same position—and makes her some money. “No one ever judges me,” she said. “The conversation tends to be more like, ‘That’s awesome, and I bet you’re saving money.’”

Living at home for a time to pay off college debt, help save for a downpayment, etc. isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But living at home is in line with other trends showing a failure to launch among younger people, or greater delays in achieving the markers of traditional adulthood.

Traditionally in American culture, kids left home early. This goes along in part with our entrepreneurial, go-getter spirit. It’s true that in other cultures like Italy, it’s common for unmarried children to live with parents for an extended period of time. But those are not particularly dynamic societies either.

One of the factors related to housing prices remaining high, and especially a lack of affordable family housing, is that Boomer retirees are increasingly not downsizing as expected. Instead, they are often upsizing. The Wall Street Journal also had another interesting piece (gift link) about this phenomenon.

Well-off boomers are increasingly upsizing their homes as they age, either buying bigger ones or financing additions to their existing properties. They are building guesthouses for family members and gourmet kitchens for entertaining, alongside such features as high-end grab bars and first-floor primary bedrooms for aging in place. In the process, they are rewriting the rules of retirement and aging, when people are expected to move into smaller homes to save money.

Boomers make up the largest share of home buyers in the U.S.—an aspect of a housing market that is out of reach for younger buyers, but well within the economic powers of an older generation that controls the bulk of the nation’s wealth. Downsizers account for a slightly larger share of older home buyers, but the upsizers are quickly gaining momentum.

Not only are they buying large homes with 3+ bedrooms, they are often doing so in towns with the best school districts, pricing out families. This is a good thing in some ways, as these are often parents moving to be closer to children and grandchildren. But it still adds to the pressures on young families in buying a house, and one in a quality school district. I previously wrote a piece looking at this specific issue that may be of interest.

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The Loss of Ambient Belonging

The housing story is about private space, but part of the dynamic underlying this is what’s happened to our public and semi-public ones.

Jeff Giesea just walked the Camino de Santiago, a popular pilgrimage route in Spain. After the experience he wrote a piece talking about “ambient belonging,” the loss of which contributes to our loneliness epidemic:

On the Camino, belonging wasn’t something I had to work for. It was just there, like the weather. Every pilgrim climbed the same hills, slept in the same albergues, and nursed the same blisters. We recognized one another by the scallop shells on our packs and the dust on our shoes. When I was alone, I’d walk up to a table of pilgrims and ask, “May I join you?” The answer was almost always yes. The Camino didn’t make friendship automatic, but it made conversation almost effortless. Belonging was in the air.

I call this ambient belonging. Ambient belonging is the degree to which an environment lowers social friction between people. It’s not the thick, durable belonging we find in family, lifelong friends, or close-knit communities. It’s a social atmosphere where membership is presumed and connection requires less effort.

Ambient belonging is about the level of friction involved in establishing connection or relationships:

In April, I argued that the loneliness crisis is really a belonging crisis and that belonging is structural. Ambient belonging names the ingredient that makes connection easier in some environments than in others. It changes the question from How do we make friends? to Where is friendship easiest to make? Belonging becomes a design question, not just a psychological one.

That realization is making me rethink my own life. Maybe my belonging deficit isn’t just a personal failing but also a function of my lifestyle and environment. I felt more ambient belonging in my walkable neighborhood in Washington DC than I do in my car-dependent one in Florida. Back then, I walked to work and was a regular at neighborhood bars and coffee shops.

He also makes an important point about the role money plays in ambient belonging:

Money cuts both ways. It can buy us out of ambient belonging through McMansions, remote work, private rooms, and frictionless convenience. But it can also buy us access to it through private clubs, schools, camps, churches, and experiences that create repeated contact and shared identity. As more of American life has become private, ambient belonging is often something we buy our way into.

This is related to our K-shaped society. There have been many reports about the growth in pricey private clubs in cities like New York. As civic life has declined, trust has eroded in our society, and it has become difficult to enforce standards of behavior in public spaces, money has come to play a key role in two ways. First, it allows people to buy insulation from environments whose ambience is negative or undesired. Second, it then allows people to buy into privatized ambient belonging, at the private club, for example. Those without money cannot pull this off as easily. They are stuck where they are.

Related to the K-shaped society, the WSJ also has a piece on how Las Vegas became a luxury destination (gift link). More and more businesses are now oriented towards serving the people with lots of money, ones often insulating themselves or buying private or semi-private ambient belonging.

The Public Intellectuals America Needs

My essay earlier this week on the New Trustees drew quite a bit of interaction.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that it was, “An epoch-defining essay. Wholeheartedly agree.”

Farrell Gregory of the Foundation for American Innovation shared some interesting thoughts on moralizing:

I’m not sure about the distinction that he draws between public intellectuals having “moral weight” vs moralizing. In his description, he seems to associate moralizing with scolding people who disagree with you. I’m not a fan of scolding, but maybe this distinction is just stylistic or rhetorical. I do appreciate the weight Aaron places on having humility, respect for opposing arguments, and having an even temperament.

That said, if he uses moralizing to describe the zealous (or even over zealous) advocacy for moral truth, I personally don’t see the issue with a public intellectual being moralistic. We don’t have nearly enough.

A strongly-held view of mine is that we should be far more concerned about indifference, self-interest, and tolerance for suffering among public intellectuals. I don’t think we have nearly enough people (especially professionals in DC/SF/NY) who are overly strident. My favorite Will Manidis [line] is, “We live in age of great moral panics about things that don’t matter and zero moral outrage over some of the most egregious societal sins we’ve ever seen.”

It takes some restraint on my part not to retweet it on a daily basis in response to a constant barrage of evidence: scams, anti-social behavior, gambling, corruption.

Contra Aaron, I don't think we have nearly enough moralizing. It is insufficient to carry a personal moral weight. if you are a public intellectual, you should be in a state of moral outrage over modern public virtue.

These are good points and I agree with much of what he says. I’m personally not going to stop calling out the problems with normalization of gambling, for example. In my piece was reacting against what I often see, which is moralizing or demonizing directed at one’s opponents or people one does not like. Moral language can work well for the public intellectual, but it depends on how it’s used.

Titus Techera also wrote some reactions, and the piece was linked by Doug DeVos and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Best of the Web

X user @smirkley posted a graph suggesting that Trump voters will inherit the earth because they are having more kids, and the gap is widest among the youngest voters.

An interesting new academic study looks at divorce in households where the woman out-earns the man. Among their findings is a very consistent international trend in which female breadwinner couples are more likely to separate than male breadwinner couples.

Institute for Family Studies: America Was Built on Taking Risks. Today’s Teens No Longer Do

Ryan Burge: The Purists Are Losing: How American Catholics Are Rewriting the Rules - American Catholics increasingly see moral doctrine as a matter of individual conscience rather than church teaching.

The Gospel Coalition: The Little White Church Is Empty - on the struggles facing rural churches.

Jake Meador: Is the era of mere Christianity over?

New Content and Media Mentions

In addition to the New Trustees discussion, I also got a mention in Commonplace.

New this week:

• The Public Intellectuals America Needs - Americans no longer trust institutions. They trust individuals. That makes a certain kind of thinker a critical national resource

• My podcast this week was with NYU professor Arpit Gupta on whether AI can save cities from the “urban doom loop.”

• And my podcast for Members only is about the new vibe shift - where I see culture and politics going next.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: John Delano/Wikimedia, CC BY

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That world is gone today. The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant. Not only are official voices not trusted, but being in a position of authority today often makes the skeptical trust you even less.

People today feel left to their own devices in picking the voices they should listen to. Influencers and outsider voices are now often the authorities of choice, whether that be on personal health, relationships, or media. Even when those people are part of a major legacy institution, it’s as individuals that people trust them.

In short, trust has been devolved. People no longer have a default in trust institutions; they trust and follow individuals they’ve personally selected. People don’t believe something just because it was published in their local newspaper. They believe it because they trust the individual who said it. Because there’s no longer an institutional layer of vetting and review, the choices people make on whom to trust have a big impact on how our society functions.

This environment makes those public intellectuals who apply to themselves individually the same standards of truth, rigor, public spiritedness, etc. that we used to rely on the institutions to supply a critical resource. That’s because the individual with a following is now a structural element in our society. So it’s not just that these public intellectuals are people individual Americans or leaders can trust, but they are supplying important support columns that disappeared with the decline of institutions in America. They are particularly needed as America passes through a period of transition in which the new and renewed institutional structures we need to build are not yet in place.

I’ve noticed that I keep turning again and again to certain public intellectuals that I find particularly compelling and fit this bill: Ross Douthat, Richard Reeves, Tanner Greer, Ryan Burge, Julius Krein, and others. Or someone I don’t know as well will write an op-ed or essay that resonates with me in the same way as those people’s work.

I’ve often wondered if there’s a set of characteristics these people share. I’ve concluded that the answer is Yes. There is a common disposition or ethos that I sense. A common set of attributes.

We can call the people who exhibit these traits “The New Trustees.” A trustee is a person who controls property for the benefit of someone else, or for a charitable purpose. It’s not just that a trustee can be trusted. A trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to the beneficiary and must act in the beneficiary’s interest. It used to be that society as a whole relied on institutions - steered collectively by boards and executive teams - to be these trustees for our national conversation. Today, individual citizens appoint their own individual trustees. Being selected by someone as their trustee comes with big responsibilities. It means duties like loyalty, care, and good faith. The public intellectuals I am talking about have that kind of relationship to the work that they do, and to the society whose benefit they are working for.

A few caveats. Calling them the New Trustees does not make them an actual social grouping. They are not a board of trustees. They are not an institution like the Bauhaus or an actual community of people like the Inklings, although some of them know and interact with each other.

I also am not intending to provide a definitive grouping of names, a gatekeeping list of who’s in and who’s out. Rather, I’m writing about a sensibility that many people share and to which anyone can aspire. The people I mention are examples, but this essay does not even include all the people I personally can name that would fall into this category.

It’s also about public intellectuals specifically, not people engaged in other fields like politics, even if some of those other people might share a certain affinity.

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The overall ethos is one of a high-minded approach to ideas, one that’s truth-seeking, constructive, forward looking, and seriously engaged on some of the most serious issues facing our land. The eight attributes I identified are:

1. They are engaged in the genuine pursuit of truth. The impression that strikes you when reading one of the New Trustees is the high-minded pursuit of truth, something I’ve written about before when it comes to Ryan Burge, the scholar of religion. He’s trying to get it right, not just push a particular agenda. Or think about Emily Oster’s work on Covid in schools. Or Peter Moskos’ work on policing.

You see this pursuit of truth in the seriousness of their analysis, their scrupulous fairness, and their use of independently verifiable data. They also aren’t afraid to change their minds or admit where they got something wrong when facts or changed circumstances warrant.

They are primarily analysts not activists, but are not merely detached observers without an agenda. However, they state their agendas and loyalties openly. Richard Reeves believes there are serious problems facing boys and men, and wants America to address them, while expressing his commitment to women’s empowerment as well. Ross Douthat is a serious, conservative Catholic. You don’t have to parse these people’s writing like a Bill Clinton speech, wondering what the hidden agenda is, or how the definition of “is” (or whatever) is being used to manipulate you.

In their commitment to truth, they don’t shrink from saying where they think their own people have problems or are not getting it right. Geoffrey Kabaservice, for example, champions the old moderate Republicanism, but not without acknowledging its problems and limits. Conversely, they’ll recognize the virtues and good ideas of their opponents or sometimes even enemies.

In short, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the New Trustees is that they feel a fiduciary responsibility to the truth, and to the people who’ve placed trust in them to provide it.

2. They deliver constructive insight, often with an “owned framework.” A big reason I return again and again to these thinkers is that they help me understand the world. Reading Tanner Greer write on America’s original techno-nationalist elite or how the 19th century’s voluntary associations actually shaped those who participated educated me and sharpened my own thinking on these issues. Dan Wang wrote just one annual letter per year from China, but it was eagerly awaited by many because each one was brimming with insight. Julius Krein’s writings on the financial incentives underlying the industrialization question shaped my thinking on this topic.

They don’t just provide insight, but it’s on important topics, and is very relevant to helping us understand and navigate our world. They not infrequently include ideas that, if implemented, would move the ball in the right direction for our nation.

In terms of owned frameworks, Melissa Kearney educated America on the “Two-Parent Privilege.” Ryan Burge helped people see “The Nones.” Ross Douthat gave us the “Decadence” label to make sense of the cultural stagnation we see around us. Or think about the “Grand New Party” idea he and Reihan Salam developed nearly two decades years ago. Brad Wilcox is the best known promoter of the “Success Sequence.” They are giving us insight, frameworks, and a language to understand and navigate our world.

Extending this still further, some of them have built products or their own institutions around their frameworks, such as Reeves’ American Institute for Boys and Men. Krein created American Affairs. Greer was the founding director of the Center for Strategic Translation (focused on understanding China, now part of the Council on Foreign Relations).

3. They have moral seriousness without moralizing. In keeping with the idea of a fiduciary responsibility, the New Trustees believe the stakes are high in what they are talking about. It matters for the lives and futures of individuals, and also the nation. The future of religion in America matters. The future of boys and men matters. The decisions we make on education and policing matter. Our political economy matters. They matter to individuals, but also the future of America itself. You can feel that moral weight in the way they approach their topics. They think these things are very important. You can often feel the sense of urgency, and also the desire to get it right.

At the same time, they aren’t scolds. Even a strongly exhortative essay like Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him!” doesn’t demean the readers, or attribute evil motives to those who disagree with her. I only once noted her hitting out at readers who might disagree with her. She also frankly acknowledges the tradeoffs and downsides of a woman settling for someone other than the man of her dreams. You can also see here especially the honesty about her own situation, basically telling women to act now before they make the same mistakes she did and end up like her.

4. They have class-traitor courage. The New Trustees are willing to say difficult things that could cost them money or status among people that they care about, whose opinion matters to them and affects their future.

This is one that is not always straightforward to discern. Very often, people who seem to be criticizing their own team are really criticizing a rival faction within it. They won’t suffer much if it at all among the people whose opinion they actually care about. In fact, they may gain status with them, or with outside parties whose support would be valuable.

We always have to be alert for when rhetoric or actions are really inter-factional conflict. That sort of thing is very different from someone like Melissa Kearney writing about the two-parent privilege and taking heat. Or Peter Moskos, who recently wrote, “I’m basically not invited to Lefty spaces anymore because [flips through file] ‘I think police are necessary in a civilized society and we should work hard to make police better.’ And I’m a liberal lifelong Democrat.” When Tanner Greer included a very critical review of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic as part of his techno-nationalist elite essay, he risked alienating powerful people in Silicon Valley, potentially the entire “tech right,” people who could potentially be an important source of money and patronage to him.

At the same time, these people are not being offensive for its own sake, or to brand build off controversy. They are not waving an unpopular fact like a red cloth in front of a bull. They aren’t trying to smash the Overton Window by being provocative. If anything, they are striving to be measured and nuanced, to present the truth in a way that hearers will actually accept. They are willing to stand and take the heat for what matters, but aren’t gratuitously playing a heel, or trying to be perceived as a “renegade” or a “heretic.” They are hoping to actually influence people to make moves.

5. They aren’t pandering or captive to their own audience. The New Trustees are also willing to challenge their own audiences. They aren’t “influencers.” They aren’t putting on a show for clicks and superchats. They aren’t trying to maximize their audience size and revenues, and by and large aren’t running their own huge platforms. Ross Douthat has a large audience in part by virtue of being at the Times, but he’s an exception that proves the rule. They write (or publish) serious works for serious people who are also interested in getting it right and don’t mind being challenged from time to time. Julius Krein’s American Affairs is paradigmatic here.

6. They have a generosity of spirit. You’ll often see these people say and do things that show a sort of generosity or magnanimity that’s all too rare today. For example, they’ll associate with people it might be risky to associate with, or reference and build up less prestigious people.

Richard Reeves came on my podcast and appeared on stage with me at an event. There’s not much to gain for him in doing things like that, and it potentially exposes him to being attacked. He would have been well within his rights to calculate that coming on my podcast wasn’t important enough to his mission to make it worth it. But he did it anyway. I’ve seen him do the same for others, even on occasion taking far greater risk than that.

Similarly, when Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote a long response to Tanner Greer’s essay on the techno-industrial elite, one that made some significant criticisms, Greer called it the best engagement with his piece to date. People in the pursuit of truth recognize the same in others, and respect it.

Or I think about Emily Oster, who took a contrarian stand on Covid and schools, arguing for keeping them open. She was vilified for this at the time. Even though she was vindicated by events - almost everyone now accepts that schools were kept closed too long - rather than take victory laps and taunt or attack those who had criticized her, she wrote an essay instead calling for a “pandemic amnesty.” She was once again vilified for her trouble.

7. They are defined by what they are for, not what and whom they are against. The New Trustees are occupied by their own ideas and agenda, and far less by opposition to particular ideas, people, or movements. Richard Reeves is pro-men but is not anti-feminism, for example. Ross Douthat will strongly criticize Donald Trump, but he’s not a “Never Trumper” whose work is all about trying to get Trump. As with Douthat here, these people will make criticisms of others, sometimes strong ones, but it’s not an organizing objective for them.

8. They have an even temperament that shows self-mastery. In a world where the way to gain attention is through histrionics, intentionally provocative statements, online feuds, erratic shifts in position, etc., the New Trustees tend to have a very measured style. Richard Reeves has a mantra at the American Institute for Boys and Men: “Keep it boring.” Tanner Greer is dispassionate in style. For some, this may be a cultivated style, but even if so, it shows discipline. At the same time, their public class-traitor courage shows that they don’t treat respectability or public approval as the organizing principle of their lives. The truth wins out over “what would the neighbors think?”

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Not every person I mentioned necessarily exhibits all eight of these characteristics. You can think of them as describing an ideal type rather than an individual person. But these are the characteristics I often see in people doing the work I find to be the best, most insightful, most thought provoking, and most aligned with what America needs today. And these traits do very often occur together in a cluster with people. There’s some kind of high-minded spirit that correlates them.

Again, I’ll note that this essay is designed to describe that ethos, not to be an exhaustive list of people who exhibit them or to define a club or group. I could list more examples right now.

So if you see yourself in these attributes, that’s excellent. I know at least some of you should. They are also standards that anyone who operates as a public intellectual can aspire to live up to, and my hope is that it’s not used to define an exclusive group, but to channel a broad range of people in a productive direction.

I can’t help but measure myself against them. I have to ask myself where I have work to do. I’m not a rhetorical bomb thrower, but should I be even more measured in my speech, for example? Am I too critical or scolding of some other groups? My aspiration is to be one of the public intellectuals America needs, so I want to continue looking for ways to elevate my own game. I can use this list myself to help me evaluate what I’m doing or writing.

I also want to distinguish the New Trustees from what I’d call their “false friends.” In foreign language learning, “false friends” are words in two languages that look the same but actually mean different things. For example, the English word “library” and the French work “librairie” look very similar, but in French, a librairie is a bookstore whereas a library is called a bibliothèque.

There’s a group of people who are false friends in this language sense to the New Trustees. They are superficially similar, especially in style, but critically different in substance. They are people who have a moderate, controlled, respectable demeanor. They are often smart, and I find myself in agreement with the vast majority of what they write. They aren’t bad people by any means.

And yet, they seldom provide any genuine insight. You can read them and agree with what they are saying, but seldom gain any important new knowledge about the world. What seems like their public courage is usually directed against people who aren’t their actual peer group or tribe, but often a rival faction. Although they may have their own positive agenda, they are also motivated by opposition to people, ideas, or movements. They rarely display generosity of spirit (only show it in conspicuously narrow ways towards select people who are only to their right or only to their left). And they can be highly moralistic scolds at times.

As with my eight New Trustee attributes, this complex of traits often goes together in my experience. Ask screening questions: do you sense that fiduciary duty towards the truth? Look for evidence of the generosity of spirit or where it was not demonstrated, or whether someone seems to be particularly driven by opposition to something or someone. And so on. It’s the general pattern here that matters. In particular, I have noticed that once someone becomes an “anti,” the amount of insight they generate plummets. You can almost see the light bulb turning off.

I’d also again highlight the difference between the New Trustees, who are primarily public intellectuals, and those who are engaged primarily in other fields, such as activists, politicians, or legacy institutional leaders. You may have noticed that I did not include any “Abundance Liberals” on this list, even though I admire many of them and some of them legitimately embody some of these principles. They have coalesced around a particular political program, and are engaged in inter-factional maneuvering with the Democratic Party to promote it. They now have to undertake that work in the register it requires. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but I am classifying them as a different genre of actor.

I do believe there’s a set of positive character and behavioral traits that we need to see more of generally - ones not specific to the public intellectual world. In fact, I’m developing an essay on that which is the major new piece of research on which I’m engaged.

While I am working on that, I hope you can use these attributes of the New Trustee as a guide to helping you understand the public intellectuals you follow. We should be supporting people who are seriously and high-mindedly working on the key areas we need to get right to build a prosperous America on the other side of this period of transition. We do need to renew and resest America’s institutional infrastructure, but in the meantime the individual authority increasingly reigns as the locus of citizen trust. So it’s imperative we see public intellectuals who faithfully carry out the trusteeship such reliance implies.

Cover image: The caryatids of the Erechtheion by Harrieta171/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

I was delighted to get him on the podcast this week to talk about the future of cities in the world of AI. Is there still an urban doom loop? Why can office buildings be selling for pennies when housing prices are through the roof? Can cities replace commerce with tourism and fun? Will AI bail our cities? For those of you interested in the future of cities, this one is a must listen.

I was also delighted to be asked to contribute to a First Things symposium on places that people associate with America. I wrote about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

And when it comes to America 250 celebrations, I’d like to specifically highlight this superb “speech” by Ross Douthat in the New York Times (gift link).

If you liked my piece this week on the end of cool cities, you might also enjoy my more detailed reflections on Portland, Oregon that I posted as an article on X.

If you are in Southern California, you might be interested in this forthcoming event at Chapman University on science and religion. It’s coming up on July 24th.

Can Scouting Still Raise Boys?

The Dispatch ran an interesting essay by LuElla D’Amico on the Boy Scouts, and the downward trajectory of her son’s troop.

A few weeks ago, the Scouts BSA troop my 11-year-old son belongs to faced a decision. With many of its older scouts graduating, there were not enough adult volunteers to keep the all-boys troop running as it had—or even to send all of its younger scouts, including my son, to summer camp this year. For an 11-year-old who had spent months looking forward to camp, the disappointment was palpable.

Our local issue is indicative of a larger trend. Between 2019 and 2020, scout membership fell by 43 percent—from nearly 2 million youth to around 1.1 million. Faced with this reality, our troop's leaders and families, like many others, found themselves confronting a difficult question: What would it take to preserve this community for the next generation of scouts?

One proposal quickly rose to the top: convert our traditional boys-only troop into a “Family Troop,” or one that included both boys and girls.

The organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts is one of the many core social formation and educational institutions in the country that has gone into major decline. Some of this is demographic - there aren’t as many young boys as there used to be. But there are other general and specific factors at work. Institutions are in decline generally. The Boy Scouts had a major sexual abuse scandal. And participation in institutions like the Boy Scouts likely no longer carries the cachet - say for getting into college or getting a job - that it used to. A young striver may be better off from a college application perspective creating their own (quasi-bogus) non-profit rather than becoming an Eagle Scout. I noticed that my local newspaper has more profiles of people doing the former than the latter these days.

The Scouts have responded by doing basically what mainline Protestantism and any number of other institutions did. It evacuated its traditional religious core, adopted standard issue liberal positions du jour, and started allowing girls to join (in the way the mainlines allowed female clergy). This isn’t likely to work out any better for them than it did for the mainline churches.

D’Amico talks about some of what she hoped to gain for her son from scouting, especially exposure to a range of high quality adult male role models.

Part of the reason we chose my son’s troop was that I wanted him to grow up around different types of men whose lives were worth imitating. As I write this, I find myself thinking about those men: our easygoing scoutmaster who leads with the type of confidence I wish I could emulate; the engineer who can fix nearly anything and throw an ax to boot; the retired pilot who seems to know every trail and tree on our hikes; the student-athlete Eagle Scout who comes home from college to mentor younger boys. From them, my son and his troopmates learn about masculinity.

Of course, my son is also learning what it means to be a man from his father. But fathers have never raised children alone. Plus, it bears mentioning that, while my family is in a two-parent home, today nearly one-third of American boys are growing up without a father in their house– and that boys as a whole are struggling across nearly every educational measure….

Now, it matters that my son is also surrounded by extraordinary women leaders. He is taught by women at school, sees women lead in our parish, is encouraged by aunts, grandmothers, and cousins, and—though he’ll have to render his own verdict on this last one someday—is mothered by a rather strong personality. What is far rarer in contemporary American life is a community of unrelated men who voluntarily give their evenings, weekends, and vacations to boys simply because they believe that young men are worth investing in. Teachers are paid. Fathers have obligations. Scout leaders choose to be there.

These are things that would, to some extent, be compromised if her son’s troop decided to admit girls, something that’s already happening across the country. I will let you read the entire piece to find out what happened.

I don’t want to suggest that change wasn’t needed in the Scouts. It was. Or that they needed to double down on being “based” or something. That wouldn’t work either. But its actions, none of which were anything other than conventional wisdom, are signs of an organization where the fire has gone out, structural integrity has failed, and which has turned into yet another piece of institutional flotsam drifting downstream.

The Boy Scouts today can’t turn boys into men because it isn’t run by men or in accordance with masculine principles. Part of being a man is about making your mark on the world, not just having the world make its mark on you. It’s about having agency and the ability to, when necessary, defy convention and external pressure and withstand the heat for doing so. Nothing about the Scouts suggests that the organization itself operates on that principle.

Yuval Levin emphasizes how our institutions form us. How are the Scouts forming boys? When the DEI wave swept America, the Scouts made a DEI badge a requirement for Eagle Scout. Four years later when there was pressure from the new the Trump administration, they reversed that decision. What do these decisions teach the boys who’ve been part of scouting? By the very way it operates itself, the Boy Scouts forms boys into men who believe the way to get ahead in life is to go along to get along, even as the institution you are responsible for is in steep decline.

D’Amico also has some interesting thoughts on the stay or leave question when it comes to declining institutions:

Too many essays about scouting end with the same refrain: It isn’t what it used to be, so I’m leaving. Sometimes, that’s the right decision. Institutions can lose their way, and there are moments when fidelity to conscience requires us to walk away. But increasingly I wonder whether our first instinct has become departure rather than stewardship. Progressives are often criticized for believing institutions can simply be rebuilt from scratch. Yet conservatives sometimes make the opposite mistake: assuming that once an institution has changed, it is beyond salvaging. Both forget that institutions become what people make of them. Stated simply, institutions endure only when people remain long enough to preserve what is good and patiently reform what is not.

I don’t believe there’s any single right answer on the stay or exit question. I’ve heard from many people who still say their local Boy Scout troop is doing amazing things. If you feel confident that it works for your family, then by all means stay. Don’t let my pessimism cause you to leave. And showing institutional loyalty is itself another kind of lesson being imparted to our children.

I’m also mindful of Redeemed Zoomer’s thesis about the mainline churches, that their future belongs to those who show up. He argues that if younger theological traditionalists are the ones sitting in the pews, they’ll eventually inherit the keys. That may or may not be true, but it does show that decline, once it reaches a certain stage, opens up new possibilities.

But RZ has a concrete vision of change and renewal. Staying in a failing institution without such a vision to me seems questionable. Staying in order to “sustain institutions,” as D’Amico argues is sometimes what’s needed, is not in itself a solution to institutional decline. These institutions are troubled not simply because of numeric or financial decline, but because of what they’ve become and what they are doing - and because they are no longer fulfilling the necessary functions we once relied on them to carry out. A vision or program of institutional reset is a critical component of institutional loyalty. In a absence of that vision, and the fortitude to pursue it, exit begins to look like a better choice.

Click over to read the entire essay at the Dispatch.

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On Demographic Transition

The Boy Scouts are just one institution feeling the pressure from demographic decline. In a follow-up to my piece yesterday on the demographic implications of low birth rates, here are a couple of interesting videos exploring other aspects of the fallout.

The first is a conversation with the interesting and creative thinker Samo Burja of Bismarck Analysis on gerontocracy and what to do about it. One of the key points is that we need a revolution for the young but not a revolution of the young. Because by the time youth revolutionaries succeed, they are no longer young. See: the Boomers

Burja is always worthwhile to listen to. You definitely won’t get standard issue thinking from him.

The other is this three-minute “Comeback City” promotional video for San Francisco. It feature’s a number of bigname people like Stephen Curry, former mayor Willie Brown, and Joe Montana. It strikes me as very desperate, like something a Rust Belt city would have produced.

But what’s really noticeable is the demographics portrayed, which are also traditional Rust Belt. The video features overwhelmingly white and black people, even among its non-legacy celebrities, as if it were representing America of the 1980s or something. In reality, San Francisco is down to only 6% black population. But it’s over 36% Asian, equal to its white population, something you’d never know from watching this video. (And also 17% Hispanic).

This shows that even in very liberal cities, leaders really don’t get it in their gut how different America’s demographics are than what they were a few decades ago.

Best of the Web

There’s an interesting research project and report on friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees. It’s called “Nobody to Call.” You can read commentary on this at the American Institute for Boys and Men.

NYT: Where Testosterone and the Bible Are the ‘New Punk Rock’ (gift link) - Thousands of men and boys gathered in central Washington for masculinity, Christianity and right-wing politics

Rob Henderson/City Journal: Want More Babies? We Need More Friends - If Americans are to revive our sagging national birthrate, we must rebuild the ordinary social structures that made children thinkable and natural

NYT: Is Kidmaxxing the Ultimate Status Symbol for Ultimate Wealth? (gift link).

Birthrates in much of the developed world are at record lows, but there’s one demographic group that’s exploring new frontiers of fertility: ultrawealthy men. Deploying nearly limitless resources, a small number of them are reproducing at such an extraordinary scale and pace that they’re exploding previous notions of what a family is. At a moment when so many people say they feel priced out of having even one child, these adventures in prolific fatherhood are emerging as a stark example of inequality made flesh.

The Gospel Coalition: Why Every Society Needs Faith - A nice review of In Good Faith by Ryan Avent, a great economics writer I’ve followed for nearly two decades.

Avent’s In Good Faith achieves something genuinely difficult: a synthetic account of human belief, cultural evolution, and social meaning that takes religion seriously without being religious. He writes candidly about his own losses and uncertainty, giving the book an unusual intellectual honesty.

NY Mag: The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA - For J.D. Vance and his co-religionists in Washington, faith is a powerful means of ascent - “In some ways, conservative Catholic networks in Washington function like the Communist Party in China. You don’t have to be a member. But if you’re ambitious and want to get ahead in your career, it surely helps.”

The Wall Street Journal profiled Redeemed Zoomer and his quest (gift link) to retake mainline Protestantism for traditional Christianity, and the New York Times has a great profile (gift link) of friend-of-the-newsletter Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Rachel Lu and from Twin Cities Business magazine.

New this week:

• The End of the Cool City - What a trip to Seattle and Portland taught me about commodified cities, collapsing downtowns, and why conservatives keep losing the culture they refuse to build

• The Revenge of “Keep Portland Weird” - My X essay on the city

• Most of America Is Pittsburgh Now - Deaths now outnumber births across most of the country — and the effects are just beginning to arrive.

• Happy Birthday, Whoever You Are - On its 250th birthday, America no longer agrees on who it is — and a nation that forgets its story cannot stay one people - A guest essay from Dr. John Seel.

• My Member only Zoom session this month was on the future of churches.

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Cover image by Noah Wulf/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0