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.

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

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

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The Baby Boomers, a huge and overwhelmingly white generation, are starting to reach the later stages of life, while at the same time the number of children has been being born has fallen significantly. We’ve known these facts for some time, but their tangible impact on society is just starting to show up in the data and social trends.

For example, it was once so normal for births to outnumber deaths that demographers referred to this as “natural increase.” A place like Pittsburgh, with more deaths than births, was so unusual it attracted attention as an oddity.

Now most of America is Pittsburgh. Two-thirds of America’s counties, over 2,000 of them, had more deaths than births this year. A few years ago the Census Bureau renamed its “Natural Increase” data field to “Natural Change.” Here’s a map of those declining counties in red.1 The legend is total number of people.

The Decline of White America

Because the Boomer generation was so white, this demographic inversion is starting to show up in the overall white (non-Hispanic) American population, which is now actually declining in much of the country. Here’s a percentage change map of white population by county last year. (Multiply legend values by 100).

This is also about two-thirds of all counties. It is present not just in rural areas, but also in big cities. There are 56 major metropolitan areas with a population greater than one million people. Only 14 of them added white population last year, and most of those had very little white growth. The top percentage gainer was Greenville, South Carolina at 1.1%. Only two metros in the entire country added more than 10,000 new white residents last year, Nashville and Charlotte.

Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix are all big growth regions that are frequently discussed in the media as boomtowns. All of them have falling white populations - on a regional basis, not just in the central city. This is the rule, not the exception for growth cities.

This is not the image most people have in mind of what’s happening there. They probably think Dallas is booming with white middle-class families fleeing high tax New Jersey or Illinois. That may have been true 25 years ago. But while there might still be some of that today, it’s more likely a second or third generation middle class Mexican family fleeing California’s high housing prices, or new immigrants from India.

The steepest white population decline has been in large coastal elite metros like the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Miami.

While immigration is undoubtedly the necessary factor in America’s rising diversity, the white population is not getting “great replaced” - it’s dying off. It is self-liquidating, at least to some extent. This is increasingly the norm around the world, so there’s likely no reason unique this is happening to white Americans. But it is still happening.

Ryan Burge, the scholar of American religion, notes that further decline of Christianity in America is baked into the cake. The Boomers represent such a high percentage of church attenders that even if there were a true Gen Z religious revival, simple generational turnover is still going to produce large scale declines.

This applies more broadly as well. America will be much more diverse in the future. Even if immigration went to zero, simple generational turnover in light of falling birth rates means far fewer white people in many places in the future. The idea that a large share of post-1965 immigrants and their descendants will be deported is a delusional fantasy. It’s unlikely even a third of people here illegally will ever leave.

Our immigration regime has many serious problems, and mass immigration poses many challenges to our country. America is going to change significantly in the future to address those and accommodate itself to a more diverse population. Almost nobody really likes change, so that will be very uncomfortable for many people. It also won’t be without its legitimate problems or losses to our society.

But it’s nothing to fear either. America has gone through this in the past, and we all like being on the other side of it. Nobody really wants to go back to living in 1870 or 1790. That America would be a completely alien and unpleasant country to us socially, quite apart from the technology gap. As a modern American, I much prefer our own time and country.

There’s no guarantee we’ll successfully navigate this transition, but there are ample resources within the American experience to pull it off. I’m optimistic we can do it, and that our future can be great. Reform of our immigration system, including ending its many abuses and significantly reducing immigration levels for a period of time, would be a start. But real work lies in building a more cohesive society with our new more diverse, post-Boomer demographics. We need much more focus on how to create that.

Disappearing Children

Dealing with diversity isn’t the only reality of the birth dearth. We are also experiencing a significant decline in the number of children that’s hitting many places. Here, the figures are also stark.

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We flew out to Seattle, where we spent a bit of time before taking the train to Portland. After a bit of time there we rented a car and drove down to enjoy the natural beauty of southern Oregon and northern California, and to visit some of my family in Humboldt County. We flew back out of San Francisco, though didn’t really spend any time there - just enough to give my wife and son their first driverless Waymo ride to dinner.

Seattle and Portland are known as two of America’s most progressive cities. Both have built extensive transit systems. The sheer quantity of buses in Seattle is incredible. And Portland is famous for having built one of America’s first light rail systems.

I made a comment on X that there are seven Amtrak trains each way daily between Seattle and Portland, while there isn’t a single daily train between Chicago and Indianapolis, even though they are about the same distance apart.

This prompted the expected chorus of contempt from conservatives about how trains are a financial loser, are heavily subsidized, etc. This is of course correct as a financial matter. I’ve criticized any number of small city rail projects myself.

But the casual, contemptuous way conservatives dismiss trains and other left-coded ideas is an example of what James Patterson called the right’s “car dealer” mindset. It’s one that sees the world almost entirely through the lens of short term financial ROI, rather than long term goals, cultural influence, economic or institutional power, etc. It’s the worldview that underlies the evangelical business mindset. Many on the Trumpist right decry the focus on GDP as the sole measure of the economy, but what is the car dealer mindset but an expression of the selfsame principle? To a great extent, car dealers believe that man lives by bread alone.

While the exact merit of passenger trains is a legitimate topic of debate, the right’s car dealer mindset is why it is destined to be ruled over by people on the left from coastal cities. I obviously can’t prove this, but I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Seattle both has good transit and was the place where world shaping companies like Microsoft and Amazon were founded. Or that it was Portland that reshaped so much of urban America - America generally in fact - in its image when it comes to things like farm-to-table restaurants, coffee microroasters, microbreweries, etc. By contrast, the economic success of many red states has not translated into much broader power or influence.

That’s not to say that leftism alone is any way to run a city or a nation. There are always multiple forces that need to be held in balance, yin and yang, chaos and order. While the best balance is always situation dependent, overly collapsing into just one dimension usually produces bad results.

We see that also in both Seattle and Portland. These two cities have some of the worst homeless problems of any cities in the country. Portland in particular had an overwhelming presence of homelessness. My wife noted that this inverted the feel of public spaces in downtown. They have been so taken over by the homeless that it’s ordinary citizens who are made to feel like intruders there.

Both cities have also seen a stunning collapse in their downtown economies. Downtown Seattle’s office space is 36% vacant, and the Seattle Times paints a grim portrait of its future. I took this picture from the Space Needle. In the background you can see a second skyline starting to rise. This is Bellevue, a suburban municipality that is where business in the region is increasingly concentrated. It’s effectively an emerging second downtown for the region.

Portland was always a far less commercial city than Seattle, and its downtown has been similarly hammered. I saw little evidence of office workers in downtown Portland, and the city’s famed light rail system had few riders even at evening rush hour on a Tuesday.

These are cities that could use a much greater degree of business sense and focus on ROI. To be clear: they are not going down the tubes. Many parts of these cities are thriving and delightful to spend time in. The city of Seattle is at an all time record population high. But they have serious problems.

My friend Carl has two sayings that, while in tension with each other, each contain profound truth about the way the world works:

• “The market doesn’t care what I think.”

• “Government makes markets.”

The market is a real, powerful thing that renders judgments we can’t ignore. At the same time, we have agency to reshape the world and society as well.

Too many liberals think they can ignore the market. Too many conservatives think the market is all that matters, which is why they live in a world created and defined by others.

The Commodification of Urban America

This was my first proper visit to Seattle since the mid-90s. Back then, I flew out to visit a college roommate who had rented a U-Haul and moved to the city sight unseen.

I was blown away by the city on that first trip. I couldn’t believe how cheap it was compared to Chicago, for one thing. You could get amazing vegetarian food there for $7. My friend lived in the U-District. At a used bookstore there I found a science fiction book I’d been searching for since high school, maybe even junior high. There was an incredible video store called Scarecrow Video. They stocked rare import videotapes that you had to rent a special VCR from them to be able to play back on American TVs. Seattle was still known for its music scene, and I got to see one of my favorite Seattle bands, the Fastbacks, in concert at a small club when I was there. I was tempted to move there myself.

Similarly, I made my first trip to Portland in 2014, when the city was still considered an avatar of urban policy, and the TV show Portlandia was still in its prime. I was very impressed. I’m a very tough grader, and used to being disappointed when checking out places recommended by others. But Portland was the rare city that exceeded the hype.

Today, there’s nothing nearly as unique about either city. Certainly both have better consumer amenities than Indianapolis, but the gap is much, much smaller than it was in the past. Back in the mid-90s, moving to a tertiary city like Indianapolis would have been like getting sent to Siberia. Today, even in the Indy suburbs where I live, there are several establishments that would hold their own in Portland. You can get good coffee, food, trails, etc. basically everywhere now.

Also, the Internet made it super easy to buy basically any music you want, see basically any film you want, order any product you want. I don’t need to go into every random used book store I come across looking for a book I really want to read. I can just open my laptop and order it.

Yes, there are still some unique aspects to cities. I believe Seattle’s Scarecrow is still around, and will still rent you a playback device to watch a foreign videotape or DVD of films that have never been released in the US. But this sort of thing is much thinner on the ground than it used to be. There’s been an incredible commodification of the urban lifestyle experience in America in the past decade or so.

As a result, lifestyle is less of a draw to living in places than it used to be. We are back to more basic matters like cost, economic opportunity, and natural amenities - or state political climate. The places that still do have a very unique culture or amenities - think New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco - remain the ones that have a perennial intrinsic lifestyle draw.

Perhaps this indicates a sort of cultural exhaustion, or Douthatian decadence, on the left. If that continues, then perhaps it means the left isn’t as destined to culturally rule as I indicated above. If true, this commodification would represent an opportunity for the right to transcend the car dealer mindset and start positively reimagining the kind of country and the kinds of communities it wants to live in.

Thanks again for letting me take a week away with the family. Up on Thursday, I’ll have a look at the latest Census demographic data dump showing the decline of children and more.

Who are you?

It may be the most important question a person can answer. Increasingly, it is also one of the most difficult.

Modern culture tells us that identity is something we create for ourselves. We are encouraged to look inward, trust our feelings, and become whoever we choose to be. As singer Taylor Swift told graduates at New York University, “It is totally up to you.” For many Americans, this has become the defining creed of our age.

It is also one of its greatest illusions.

Identity is not invented. It is received. We discover who we are by belonging to something larger than ourselves. We learn our name in the context of a family, our purpose in the context of a community, and our place in history through the story of a people.

This truth reaches far beyond individuals. It applies to nations as well.

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, we find ourselves asking an uncomfortable question. Can you be patriotic if you do not identify with the nation’s story?

Who are we?

For generations, Americans shared a common civic story. We did not agree on everything, but we broadly agreed on the nation’s ideals, its history, and its aspirations. For most of our history this was shaped by a Judeo-Christian heritage and perspective. It was WASP in its origins. Those shared convictions formed the cultural glue that held together a remarkably diverse people.

Today, much of that glue has dissolved and is being consciously deconstructed by many institutions that shape the perception of public reality.

Instead of identifying primarily as Americans, many people now identify first by race, class, gender, political party, or ideology. Our common story has been replaced by competing stories. We have forgotten the larger narrative that once united us. Some in the spirit of postmodernism disbelieve grand narratives, others in the vein of post-postmodernism are now skeptical of whether any such grand narrative ever existed. In a culture of shared civic nihilism, a birthday celebration is proving to be a celebration without a nation to celebrate, a verb without a direct object.

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington warned that a nation cannot endure without a common culture and a shared understanding of itself. Democracy depends upon more than elections. It depends upon citizens who believe they belong to the same national story.

Public education once embraced this responsibility. John Dewey argued that schools exist not only to teach skills but also to prepare citizens by passing on the values, traditions, and habits that bind a society together. Whether one agrees with all of Dewey’s philosophy or not, he understood an essential truth. Every generation must intentionally hand its story to the next. As Ronald Reagan stated so clearly, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.”

Consider a child growing up in foster care who does not know his parents or his family history. Such children often wrestle with profound questions of identity and belonging. They ask, “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit?” Those questions are not answered by a birth certificate alone. They are answered through enduring relationships and a shared story.

Nations are no different.

A people who forgets their history eventually lose confidence in their future. When a society no longer knows who it is, it struggles to know where it is going.

America’s 250th birthday should be more than a celebration of fireworks, BBQ, and parades. It should be an invitation to recover our shared civic story. Not a sanitized story that ignores our failures, nor a cynical story that remembers only our sins, but an honest story that tells the truth about both our achievements and our shortcomings.

Healthy families tell their children where they came from. Healthy nations must do the same.

If we fail to recover that story, we may gather on the Fourth of July to sing “Happy Birthday,” but we will do so like guests at a stranger’s party, celebrating a nation whose identity we no longer understand, whose name we can’t articulate.

A people without a shared story cannot remain a united people. Before America can renew its future, it must remember who it is. Recalling this point will make all the celebrations on July 4, 2026 worthwhile.

Suburbs are often unfairly maligned as lacking the qualities that make cities great. But one place that criticism can be fair is in the area of sacred space. There most certainly is sacred space in the suburbs, but usually less of it than in the city both quantitatively and qualitatively. In fact, the comparative lack of sacred space is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the suburb that makes it “sub” urban, that is, in a sense lesser than the city.

Lewis Mumford put it this way:

Behind the wall of the city life rested on a common foundation, set as deep as the universe itself: the city was nothing less than the home of a powerful god. The architectural and sculptural symbols that made this fact visible lifted the city far above the village or country town….To be a resident of the city was to have a place in man’s true home, the great cosmos itself.

Mumford was onto something here in positing how great temples and such distinguished the city as unique.

What Is Sacred Space?

Mumford also hints at what makes something truly sacred space. We should clearly distinguish between what is merely public space and truly sacred space. The key to sacred space is the linkage to the transcendent. That is, sacred space connects us to something beyond or bigger than our surroundings, our present existence, and even ourselves.

Here are three ways sacred space can do that. It can:

1. Connect us to a larger spiritual or religious reality, as in our Mumford example. This is the most obvious case.

2. Serve as a locus or repository of the culture and traditions of a people.

3. Be a temporal connection between the present and the past and/or the future.

As one example, consider the Indiana World War Memorial in downtown Indianapolis.

This building is of course a symbol of the bedrock American values of that community and the willingness of its people to die to defend them yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Thus it is both a cultural repository and a temporal linkage.

Also note the use of neoclassicism, and the echoing of the design of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The use of neoclassical architecture anchors Indianapolis and Indiana firmly within the 2,500 year history of Western Civilization, as a link in a chain of peoples connected by shared, timeless values and extending backwards and forward throughout time, thus achieving a sort of immortality. This building is a statement of the permanence of this community, its people, and their values.

We can also think of a radically different space such as Times Square, and how it has played host to so many civic celebrations and traditions over the years such that it has become not just a local but a national repository of our culture. The ball dropping on New Year’s Eve is an obvious example. But consider also this iconic photo.

This is one of the most famous pictures from the war era and I don’t think it’s any surprise it was taken Times Square.

How Suburbs Are Comparatively Lacking in Sacred Space

Let’s apply the definition of sacred space to the suburbs. Yes, suburbs do have war memorials and culture and traditions and churches, but in general these are qualitatively different from what is found in the city core. Here are three reasons why.

1. Suburban traditions and spaces are often ephemeral and generational. When I was in high school, everybody liked to go to a place called Down Home Pizza in Corydon on the weekends. And that was something kids from every high school in the area did, not just those from mine. Today that place is long gone. And the kids are doing something else, whatever that may be. In fact, it’s amazing how many of the places and traditions from my high school days are already gone after only 25 years because of physical and economic changes in the community such as restaurants and stores going out of business.

This happens in the city too, like when the department stores went under, taking their white-gloved tea rituals and the like with them. But to a much greater extent than the city, suburbs rely on commercial establishments as focal points of shared experience, and by their very nature those tend to come and go. And suburbs have not to nearly as a great a degree established truly trans-generation rituals and spaces.

2. Lack of transcendent scale. This is also something Mumford hints at. The “human scale” is a big buzzword in urbanism today. Contrary to what many say, the suburbs actually do a pretty good job of the human scale, especially from an automobile era perspective. But a unique essence of urbanity and often of transcendent experience itself is what we might call the “anti-human scale.” British writer Will Wiles put it this way:

The “human scale” only tells part of the story of the city — after all, this can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole.

The sheer scale of something like the Indiana War Memorial, which is a very imposing structure inside and out, renders it qualitatively different that your average small scale suburban memorial. This is true not just physically but also in terms of the humanity represented. That memorial stands for an entire state, not just a single town. Which is the same reason there may be more suburban school kids who have visited their state house or the US Capitol than their local village hall. There’s a reason the US Capitol and Lincoln Memorial and such have such powerful resonance. They represent an entire nation and a vast sea of humanity. Cities also participate in this scale effect.

3. Low quality religious architecture. When it comes to the most obvious category of sacred space, the church or other religious building, the suburbs also fall flat.

The average suburban megachurch is an architectural horror show. The best of them generally rise to the level of an upscale corporate conference center. The worst are like “That 70’s High School”.

Someone once said that all sin results from failing to believe one of the “4 G’s” about God, namely, God is great, God is good, God is gracious, and God is glorious. Applying that to religious life generally, in modern Evangelical churches, God may be very good and gracious, but he’s doesn’t seem all that great, and he’s certainly not very glorious. This is religion that can inspire good works, but not great ones. There’s no trace of the overwhelming glory of God in nearly any of these structures. There’s no longer a faith like the Lutheranism of Johann Sebastian Bach that can inspire the greatest works of human artistic achievement. Because modern suburban church architecture is so poor and so disposable, it diminishes the impact of sacredness in the space.

The recent stories about the sale of Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral, designed by Philip Johnson, brings to mind an exception that proves the rule.

Unsurprisingly it was the Catholic Church that bought it. Unlike Protestantism, Catholicism has had a stronger theology of place. And they’ve always used architecture and art as a way of telling the story of the gospel. Though obviously not in this case, they’ve also used Gothic sort of like neoclassical architecture as a way creating a sense of permanence and linkage to an everlasting, eternal church.

So sacred space is one area where the suburbs really are deficient versus the city. But how important is this? Metropolitan areas today are mosaics. In an ever more complex and competitive global economy, every part of a region, city and suburb, needs to know its role on the team and bring it’s A-game. Just as there’s no need for every job to be located downtown, there’s no need for every major piece of sacred space in a region to be replicated in every suburb. Downtown does just nicely.

This is one reason that while economically the core may no longer dominate a region, a healthy center still plays a key role in overall regional vitality. That’s because it remains home to things like the major pieces of sacred space such as war memorials and cathedrals that bind a region together and give it civilizational permanence, meaning, and purpose beyond the mundane.

Conservatives post pictures of Mitt Romney, his wife, and many children and grandchildren to show the superiority of their family values. Liberals may well tout the marriage of Barack and Michelle Obama to do the same.

On the other side, conservatives will criticize liberal divorce memoirs, or cases like that of Adele, who divorced a husband she admitted was a good man who’d done nothing wrong, in an openly stated pursuit of her own happiness she knew would hurt her son. Liberals in turn will mock red American families like that of Sarah Palin, whose teen daughter had an out-of-wedlock birth, and who herself ended up divorced from her husband of 31 years.

Each side likes to point to the other’s failures as proof that their own approach is superior. But what they really show is changes in our society – economic changes, moral changes, and social atomization – that show up in different ways in Blue and Red families because of their distinct failure modes. We have to distinguish these changes and their consequences from the family models themselves.

A good definition of the Blue Model and Red Model families comes from Williams College professor Darel Paul in his book From Tolerance to Equality. (Paul also includes a third model he calls Creole that I will not discuss here).

The Blue Model marriage sees family as a partnership between two individuals for the sake of shared life-long projects that may include developing a common domestic life, having children, saving for retirement, advancing one or both careers, or pursuing shared lifestyle preferences. The critical relationship is that between the two partners. I use non-gendered language here because the Blue Model of marriage does not see biological sex as relevant to the fundamental structure of the relationship. As mentioned, this does not mean that individuals in this kind of relationship may not also desire biological children with an opposite-sex spouse or that Blue Model marriage negates sexual preference. What it means is that the meaning of the relationship is not grounded in those things. Critics of Blue Model marriages misconstrue this as hedonistic, but Blue Model relationships have aspirational meaning. Marriage is understood as a serious, long-term relationship meant to provide security and sustain life-long projects, especially those which allow personal self-actualization and creative expression. In such marriages, the spousal relationship forms an explicitly equal pairing of individuals seeking to be their best selves together. Blue Model family structure requires a high socio-economic status to function effectively and may fail when resources are strained between competing projects.

The Red Model marriage sees family as the primary social unit in a wider community which is primarily biological in character. A man takes a wife in order to have children within a context of related families in an extended community. This is the model that Aristotle describes in The Politics when he states that the family is the basic unit of the tribe and the tribe is the basic unit of the political community. The fundamental structure of this relationship is the household, a community of a husband, wife, and children. Its primary form of expansion is reproductive, as children leave the household to form new households that are networked to the original through bonds of kinship. The Red Model, unlike the others, includes grandparents in its structure as part of the extended kinship network. Even when households are not related by blood, kinship is the defining symbol of community. The Evangelical metaphor of “church family” illustrates this principle. In Red Model marriages, the Patriarch has a central symbolic position as the unifying principle of household order and provider of stability, even if he does not in fact practice that role, with the rest of the family “belonging” to the father. Red Model families are the most diverse in terms of socioeconomic status. Personality characteristics contribute more to Red Model failure than socioeconomic status; failed Red Model marriages are common even among the upper-middle class while they can frequently be successful among the working class.

Two caveats. First, a model is an image of something that doesn’t exist, but which clarifies an essential structure found in many observations. Real families exemplify behaviors and characteristics in common with others, reflecting these archetypes. However, a couple who predominantly expresses blue qualities may still have a thick relationship with extended family and a couple expressing red qualities may still be interested in building shared assets. Second, the notion of which model is “best” is irrelevant. The “best” model presumes a set of values which is inherent to the system of models itself. The act of having a marriage or family that manifests characteristics of these models is itself a valuing-act giving priority to the principles expressed therein.

I wish to point to three major insights which we can derive from Paul’s models. First, they help us distinguish the consequences of a family model from the effects of socioeconomic status. Social and economic stratification places enormous strain on Blue Model marriages, whose downwardly mobile practitioners find themselves unable to successfully achieve the projects which define their partnership. As projects compete with one another for a shrinking pool of resources, the partnership becomes strained and breaks because this competition becomes not merely a conflict of preferred outcomes but of the identities of the partners. The result is the failed Blue Model: divorced, middle-aged, middle-class professionals with highly constrained budgets in high-cost localities who go on to form long-term, yet ultimately finite, relationships. Or financially squeezed people in those places who must marry late or never at all. Blue Model marriages also fail when the couple’s desired projects change or no longer cohere, as those shared projects were the basis of their life together.

While socio-economic stratification does contribute to Red Model failure by reducing the income, and therefore social status, of the Patriarch, I’d argue that the breakdown of traditional social relationships is far more significant. The archetypal failed Red Model marriage, blended families and serial divorce, is the result of the lost purpose of family life as a household community among others. The common narrative today, that Red Model wives feel undervalued as mere wives and mothers, glosses over the fact that a career is the only source of socialization available to a woman who lacks extended family and friendships due to worker mobility and the rise of “bedroom community” suburbs. Loneliness is a known source of self-destructive and antisocial behavior. Likewise, intuiting the meaninglessness of atomized family without an intergenerational purpose, Red Culture husbands retreat into worlds of entertainment, consumerism, or pornography, becoming contemptible and failing to serve as the unifying symbol of a reproductive household community. It is the meaninglessness of family life, in both cases, which destroys Red Culture families.

Second, by emphasizing the phenomenon of failure rather than the models themselves, we can disambiguate the pathologies of modern society from culture-war preferences. The argument over whether Blue or Red Models are “better” is useless. They are seeking to achieve two different things. On the other hand, socioeconomic status or modern moral decay explain more about social problems than which of these two social models is preferred. Poverty obviously harms both styles of family, though is more destructive to the Blue Model. Not only does it strike at the heart of a marriage grounded on mutual self-expression, but poverty is highly correlated with low impulse control and inability to actualize long-term objectives.

On the other hand, personal vice is far more damaging to the Red Model, whose authority is grounded on the charismatic legitimacy of the Patriarch. A Blue Model husband can be forgiven his vices, so long as they don’t disrupt the larger projects of the marriage, because the purpose of the marriage is the actualization of a set of goals. Bill Clinton’s womanizing didn’t destroy his marriage to Hillary, for example. Blue Models can compartmentalize vice within a certain threshold because the relationship model is based on a certain amount of individualistic self-determination. However, a Red Model husband’s vices violate the communal characteristic of a family whose resources should be used for the good of all the members. For him to waste resources on gambling, alcoholism, or consuming pornography is a violation of the moral order of the family. The normalization and mainstreaming of vice today is thus particularly harmful to the Red Model family.

Both Blue and Red Model family structures rest upon a certain moral baseline involving self-control and low time preference. While the Blue Model emphasizes certain shared explicit and implicit projects, and the Red Model emphasizes a generalized good of the whole, both become destabilized by adults who are incapable of controlling their appetites or planning for the future. Even in a Red Model family, the parents must organize family resources towards securing retirement and promoting one or both careers. Even in a Blue Model family, a child cannot be reduced to a project but quickly begins to create new needs and goals of his own within the context of the family unit. Failure in these things drives the lumpenization of the lower-middle class, the regression of lower-middle-class people into self-destructive and criminal behavior patterns, regardless of family formation culture.

Lastly, articulating the models permits us to see the way that the family formation crisis contributes to cascading failures across the whole of society. The pressure that the modern economy puts on young and middle-aged workers to become mobile generates disruptions in family formation, driving failure modes like delayed marriage, divorce, and social atomization while putting pressure even on successful families to adopt certain cultural norms even when maladaptive to one’s own situation.

One group particularly vulnerable to this tendency is elders. The Blue Model has no structural purpose for grandparents. They are presumed to continue their own projects after their children leave, but are reliant on high incomes to sustain their lifestyles. This might have been sustainable when the Blue Model signified wealth, but today’s growing cohort of middle-class elders has become a potent political force behind the wealth transfers to the retired and the gerontocracy of American politics.

On the other hand, middle-class Red Model grandparents may find themselves pushed into Blue Model roles when their children move away for jobs. These elders may be unprepared or unable to support themselves in retirement, or willing but unable to assist their children with the burden of raising their grandchildren. Disconnected from families, elders require more expensive care, cling to high-paying positions long past retirement age, inflate the cost of real estate, and exacerbate downward mobility for all generations. Family formation is a systemic phenomenon, and the effects on one generation roll into all the others.

To summarize, by examining family formation and marriage cultures as sociological phenomena instead of tribal markers, we see that many of the problems with modern American marriage culture are cross-cutting across Blue and Red. While the pathologies may manifest in different expressions, there is a common root in debased moral cultures, social stratification, and economic globalization. This is not to say that there aren’t consequences to choosing one or the other in one’s personal life or even to societal outcomes as a whole. However, the tribal bickering over which is “best” ultimately fails to reveal why all seem to be failing at this time and what can be addressed in the short term to put everyone on a better footing moving forward.

Cover image: Adele by Kristopher Harris, CC BY 2.0

This week I’m featuring several stories about meaning and formation - and what happens when we don’t have them.

The Self-Optimization Cult

Derek Thompson is a former Atlantic writer who left for Substack. He co-authored the widely discussed book Abundance with Ezra Klein, which I’d love to get him on the podcast to discuss at some point.

He has a great new piece out on self-optimization that asks, when does it become unhealthy to become overly obsessed with health?

The [Oura] ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

He talks about the decline in alcohol consumption, then writes:

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides (injectables that affect inflammation and gut health and are also the “P” in GLP), and the continued growth of supplements. More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life. A record 77 million Americans belonged to a gym or studio in 2024, up 20 percent since before the pandemic. Running clubs on the fitness app Strava nearly quadrupled in 2025 alone. If you don’t believe the industry data, perhaps you’ll believe the federal government: according to the American Time Use Survey, Americans today exercise and play sports more than at any period on record.

He links this obsession with health and personal optimization to declines in socializing.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism. At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming—and I am positive that these are highly social events for at least some of their participants—nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

I’ve drawn a distinction between what I call the Techno-Industrial Stack, or Acceleration, and the Human-Social Stack, for Formation. With his focus on topics like Abundance, Thompson seems mostly focused on Acceleration. But he’s also attuned to Formation questions as well. So far as I know, he’s not a religious person, but he sees how previous eras of self-improvement derived from a religious or moral background that channeled them in pro-social ways that transcended the isolated individual.

These earlier iterations of self-improvement drew their power from religion, community, or characterological projects to promote civic virtue. Temperance, for example, was not just about individual health; it was a social movement to improve the culture, to rescue women and children from alcoholic husbands, and to build a better republic. (That it failed in myriad ways is not to deny that some of its goals were virtuous.) The Muscular Christianity movement of the 19th century paired New Testament virtues with an ethic of manly strength in a way that wouldn’t be so out of step with modern MAGA and MAHA machismo.

But the age of the Enhanced Self is different, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s—including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners—but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self. For all its sins, the temperance movement was focused on national change. But the typical adherent to the Enhanced Self—say, a 50-year-old with a peptide stack and a Whoop—is not trying to improve the country. He’s just trying to improve his score.

The history of alcohol abstention offers another way to see how the Enhanced Self is a truly modern phenomenon. For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection.

He goes on to talk about what he calls the “three pillars of the enhanced self” and “enhanced selfishness.” There’s a lot of good material in there, so I’d encourage you to click over and read the whole thing.

I’ll just conclude with some of Thompson’s final thoughts about the meaning of death in our culture.

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgård once wrote that an irony of the modern world is that we are obsessed with cultural representations of death and yet terrified of the real thing…At bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition toward death—thinking about death, calculating distance from death, worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god. Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and company-and-book-inspired Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives. But when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic—how much time will this drink cost me? how much time will that supplement buy me?—many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

We live in a world where all too many people have lost a belief in the transcendent, or connection to any larger sense of cosmic or moral order and meaning. This kind of purely materialist condition produces an outlook that is at some level nihilistic. Perhaps some people can find that larger sense of purpose and meaning from immanent matters like relationships. But empirically, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

Again, read the whole thing.

Forming Priests

I saw the trailer for a three-part docu-series called Traditio, after it made a stir on Twitter. It might have been the most impressive piece of Catholic content I’ve ever seen, so I decided to watch the first installment, which was about the formation of new priests.

This video was put out by SSPX, which is a traditionalist Catholic sect that is viewed as “canonically irregular” (in reality, de facto schismatic) by Rome. This video has drawn 1.1 million views, which is incredible. You can see why this group is successful just from watching this. A Catholic friend wrote to me, “You have to wonder why a tiny and controversial traditionalist order is able to put out a more appealing documentary on the Catholic Church than one of the Church's larger institutional arms. Robert Barron's Catholicism series was nice but nothing like this.”

The two-tier system in Catholicism, with its concept of higher spiritual vocations, lends itself to a heroic conception of the priesthood. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to hear these young seminarians talk about devoting their whole life to the fullest to something bigger than themselves. You also learn about the rigorous, intense, and holistic six-year process they have to go through to become a priest. It’s very institutional and communal as well as individual. Though not discussed in the documentary, apparently only a small minority of initial seminary enrollees make it all the way to ordination.

I’m cueing this up to a ten minute section on the SSPX US seminary in Dillwyn, VA. I highly recommend sampling at least this section. Be sure to turn on the subtitle captioning.

It’s very impressive, even if listening to these young men talk about their conception of what the priesthood is reminded me once again of why I’m Protestant.

The Political Economy of AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted some interesting thoughts on AI. His take is related to Brent Orell’s admonition to make sure AI doesn’t become the next NAFTA in terms of its human, social, and political impact. Nadella writes:

The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see. If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it. There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.

Think about what happened in the first phase of globalization where entire industrial economies were hollowed out by outsourcing. The GDP numbers looked fine on the surface, but the displacement was real and the consequences are still being felt. Let us not bring that dynamic into the AI era, with a small number of AI systems capturing all the economic returns, while entire industries find their knowledge commoditized right out from underneath them.

In my view, our priority has to be building a frontier ecosystem, not just a frontier model, so value flows broadly across every company, every industry, and every country.

Nadella’s company does not have its own frontier model, so this is somewhat self-interested. Nevertheless, it does get at the potential for political disruption if there’s too much industrial and labor force disruption.

Globalization primarily hurt industrial workers without college degrees. AI appears to be more likely to impact the higher educated. This group of people is much more able to mobilize politically in favor its interests, so the political impact of AI driven white collar disruption could actually be much greater than that of blue collar displacement.

The Future of Online Intellectual Discourse

Very popular economics writer Noah Smith has some interesting reflections about being an online intellectual in an age of populism and AI, wondering if anything he writes matters anymore. He notes that being an intellectual is a liability in an age of populism.

This [Trumpist] state of affairs will eventually end, of course. Whoever succeeds Trump won’t have his cult of personality, and will have to rely on ideologies and ideas that will be ripe for debate. And if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, ideas will be back on the table, as they were during the Biden administration.

But even on the left, the trend is away from open intellectual debate. Zohran Mamdani and the other socialist candidates who are winning primary races in blue cities are interested in ideas, but only from people within their own clique. Leftism in America is fundamentally a factional movement disguised as an ideological one; bloggers who aren’t on the team will simply be ignored, except for the occasional denunciation.

This is just populism. Populism isn’t really about doing stuff that’s popular; it’s about putting factional and tribal conflict above the national interest or the general public good. The goal is always to “own” the other side, and economic and social outcomes become subordinate to that goal.

Intellectualism thrives in times of relative social peace. This isn’t one of those. Hopefully, the tide of populism is receding in America, but the experiences of other countries suggest that these times of factional struggle can go on for a very long time.

This is completely correct. I’ve noticed that America is now factionalism all the way down. There’s very little of the high-minded spirit that used to exist - or at least was aspired to - in the era in which a mainline Protestant ethos still shaped the country.

Smith goes on to talk about AI, the impact of Substackification, etc.

I’m of course interested in this because I work the same territory. The reality is that every aspect of our society is very dynamic. I’m not going to be able to keep doing the same thing I’m doing now for the next 20 years, anymore than anyone else in this economy is. We all have to figure out how to adapt with the times. I was pleased to see that the tool he used to track influence in AI weightings has me in the top 4%. That’s not bad. My influence will increasingly show up via the output of AI models. In fact, I’ve noticed rising referral traffic from AI chatbots at the same time traditional search traffic is going down.

Even though it’s a bear market for high-minded intellectualism, that’s what I’m going to continue to aspire to create. My goal is to help people build lives, institutions, and a society that flourish in today’s world. My focus is the human, cultural, and institutional foundations of that flourishing. I want to be committed to discerning and aligning with the truth, providing deep insight you can’t get anywhere else, building up not just tearing down, and trying to be constructively forward looking during a time of American transition. I want to model the kind of person and thinker we need to see in this world. I don’t always get it right, but I at least want to aspire to that.

I hope you value what I do. And I hope you’ll financially support me by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. Paying subscribers are the only way that I’m able to continue doing what I’m doing. Thanks so much for your support.

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New content from me this week: The Evangelical Business Mindset - Evangelicals are remarkably good at making money and remarkably bad at turning it into cultural power.

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Cover image: Bryan Johnson by Katriece Ray/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

In my essay on the lack of an evangelical elite, I noted that business was an exception that proved the rule. Despite being almost a quarter of the national population, there are few evangelical top academics or artists, university or foundation presidents, but there are many top flight evangelical entrepreneurs and business leaders.

This evangelical business success hasn’t translated into cultural influence, however. One reason is that evangelicals are concentrated in profitable but prosaic industries like restaurants, retail, or oil and gas. They rarely run key companies in culture shaping industries like high finance, technology, or major media.

One might argue that they’ve been gatekept out of culturally influential domains. I’m sure that’s true to some extent. But the way evangelicals are taught to think about business plays a key role too. Evangelicals have a business mindset problem.

Businessman and influencer Nick Huber has crystallized and articulated this mindset in a very clear way through a model he touts called the “sweaty startup.”

Huber grew up in Southern Indiana and went to Cornell, where he was All-American in track. He co-founded a valet storage company while there. He started by personally working up a sweat, writing ads with chalk on sidewalks and slinging boxes, eventually growing the company to the point where he could sell it for seven figures. He’s now in the self-storage business, and owns a cluster of related services firms. And he’s built a large online following as an influencer touting his approach to entrepreneurship. Huber is a high-agency man with a clear philosophy of business.

His philosophy explicitly rejects the swing-for-the-fences venture capital startup model of disruption, innovative products, the search for Thiel-style de facto monopolies, and 50X hockey stick returns. He also says to avoid going into fields like medicine where you are tied to a money-for-your-personal-time model.

Rather, he argues the secret to success is to go into a prosaic business where lots of companies are already making cash money right now, the funding required to enter it is low, and startups can become cash profitable almost immediately. This especially includes home services businesses like pressure washing, cleaning grills, HVAC, etc. Like Huber, you start out personally hustling, maybe as a side gig. Print up some flyers and write ads in chalk on the sidewalk for a pressure washing business, for example. Do the basic things that matter extremely well in terms of calling customers back promptly, delivering on your promises, etc. Start by renting the pressure washing machine to keep capital costs low. Then grow, grow, grow. Leverage technology better than others in these kinds of businesses. Hire great talent to let you scale without killing yourself. Use offshore labor when you can. (Huber also owns an offshore staffing agency).

This approach is sweaty up front, but ultimately allows you to make money to fund a good life without having to work extremely long hours. This lets you spend time on what matters: family (Huber is a big believer in getting married and having kids), friends, church, community, hobbies or other things you enjoy or are passionate about, etc.

I like and resonate with Huber because he’s from rural Southern Indiana like me. While he grew up in a very Catholic town and I don’t know his actual religious affiliation, he talks just like a low-church evangelical Protestant. He says things like, “80% of the experience of a church for me is about the pastor and the messages,” and talks about his wife’s “church groups.” The business mindset he espouses is very evangelical, but is culturally dominant in heartland American places like Southern Indiana regardless of one’s personal religion.

While Huber is a business guru not a cultural analyst, his sweaty startup formula is implicitly based on assumptions that are what you see in the typical evangelical approach to business. Its key elements:

1. The purpose of a business is making cash money. It’s not changing the world, finding a source of meaning, or doing what you love. It’s strictly utilitarian.

2. The purpose of making money is to live a good life. This is defined in terms of the middle-class American Dream (bourgeois success), including being an active member of church. It aspires to a country club membership or a bass boat, but not necessarily plutocrat money or an ostentatious lifestyle.

3. The ethics of a business come from how its profits are used. While evangelicals believe business must be conducted ethically, the type of business one is engaged in or how it directly interacts with and shapes the world are not major considerations. Any legitimate business - say self-storage - is ethically equivalent to any other. How you spend your money, such as on Christian missions, is what matters most.

4. The business orientation is implicitly localist. Even if one of these businesses becomes a very large national company, it would likely do so via some sort of franchise type approach (either literally or figuratively) that is local market centric. The manner of life this business is intended to support is also localist.

This model creates what the writer James Patterson called the “car dealer” mindset, and what Patrick Wyman called the “local gentry,” identifying them as a core constituency of the Republican Party. Businesses Wyman highlights include farms, cold storage facilities, construction companies, McDonald’s franchises, and yes, car dealerships. These differ somewhat from Huber’s list in that many of them are based on owning scarce assets that limit competition, as with car dealers themselves. But presumably Huber would also suggest establishing a moat like that at some point if you are able. The business outlook they inculcate is similar for most of them, with some exceptions (like farming, which often is a source of identity). Their political aims are typically pecuniary, such as favorable tax and regulatory treatment, especially at the state level (e.g., state franchise laws).

Few evangelicals explicitly think in sweaty startup terms. Few would embrace it as an ideology. Many might take exception with some of Huber’s approaches, such as heavy use of offshore labor. But they very much share this business mindset. It is how their churches and communities form them to think and act.

We see this from the fact that evangelicals churches themselves are often implicitly operated as just such a sweaty business. We know there’s already a large constellation of successful churches, which is a sign that this is an attractive market to enter. Think about how evangelical church plants then start. New church plants print up flyers and do low-cost outreach marketing. They start in a rented facility like a school or strip mall where the pastor and volunteers do literally sweaty work like setting up chairs and the sound system each week. They typically do receive a sort of venture funding from a sending church, denomination, or church planting network, but must attract attendees and start generating donations quickly to become self-sustaining. The pastor is functionally a business operator hustling to keep small-to-medium-sized enterprise alive and grow it. The church planting model in general is about expansion through new localist “franchises.” The landscape is dominated by these types of entities rather than the longstanding “institutionalist” model of the mainline churches that traditionally supplied America’s Protestant elites.

Whether this religious culture shapes the evangelical business mindset or whether a pre-existing heartland culture shaped the church isn’t clear. But at a minimum they reinforce each other. Because this culture is so rarely talked about explicitly in the way Huber does, it’s invisible.

The evangelical business mindset isn’t bad. In fact, it’s actually the most rational model for the average aspiring entrepreneur. The sweaty startup approach is a far better way to achieve most people’s ambitions than swinging the bat on some low-probability Silicon Valley startup. Being willing to swing that bat usually requires motivations beyond money and lifestyle anyway. Elon Musk is the world’s first official trillionaire, but he organized his businesses around colonizing Mars, not just accumulating money.

The real question is why evangelicals produce so few people with those kinds of ambitions. The lack of this in part comes from their subculture over-converging on the sweaty startup type approach as a business mindset. What works well for individual evangelical entrepreneurs and business leaders here ends up collectively undermining evangelical cultural influence in the world at large.

But this dovetails with the larger evangelical cultural ecosystem. The overwhelming evangelical theological and missional focus is on saving souls. This lends itself to thinking of business as primarily about making money to fund missions, reinforcing the sweaty startup mindset. Business is not seen as culture-shaping in its own right. Then add to this the way that evangelicals approach church as an entrepreneurial endeavor. The very way evangelicals do church can form them into a sweaty startup business mindset.

The net result is a lot of evangelical money and success, but not much cultural power. People who run major media companies or technology firms or activist hedge funds view them as forms of leverage for influencing other institutions and the culture at large. For evangelicals, business is merely a way to generate cash, which is then deployed into localist endeavors or explicitly Christian mission. It doesn’t have to be this way. But until evangelicals are able to name and define their business mindset, as Huber does, they won’t have the awareness of what they are missing.