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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NYT: ‘Both Parties Kind of Get It Wrong’: The Young Men Who May Swing the Midterms (gift link) - Many Gen Z men who voted for Donald Trump are dismayed by his time in office. But they say they are not hearing an appealing pitch from Democrats, either

Priyanka Desai: The Millennial Midlife Crisis is Going to be a Barbell - Millennials are hitting the dip with no Corvette, no house, and, for the first time in consumer history, no appetite (see: peptides)

Oren Cass: ‘The Vibes Are Not Good’ - Two college students discuss America’s broadest challenges.

Helen Andrews: How Yuppies Changed America

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.

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

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.

Also, next Tuesday…

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Blue families certainly do exist. I live among them. Specifically, my family lives in the District of Columbia, where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90% to 6% in the last election. Essentially all the families in my kids’ elementary school are Democrats, and most are liberal Democrats. These families also have some remarkable features: marriage is virtually universal, while divorce is virtually nonexistent. Almost every kid is growing up in a two-parent married family. And if we’re going to highlight the general retreat from marriage and parenthood in Blue America, we should also look at the circumstances where Blue Americans buck the trend.

…

Given that Blue Americans tend to favor egalitarian gender roles over traditional gender roles, you might assume that deep-Blue families in a deep-Blue city like DC fall squarely on the egalitarian side. But that’s not what you see among the families in our social circle. Instead, you see a more surprising mix of egalitarian and trad lifestyle markers.

On the egalitarian side, virtually every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home mothers are unheard of, for the most part. Educational attainment is equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also fall on the egalitarian side. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only 9 kids out of 50 (18%) have parents with the same last name. If the traditional American default is for wives to take their husbands’ last name, these families cheerfully go the other way.

But on the trad side, income hypergamy is alive and well among these families. Most fathers out-earn mothers, and it’s rarely the other way around. To generalize slightly, there are three main career buckets among these well-educated DC parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the non-profit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle bucket, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. For example, among my kids’ close friends and classmates, there’s one family where the husband is a private-sector lawyer and the mother runs a literacy nonprofit. There is another family where the father is an engineer for a large tech company and the mother is a government lawyer. And another family where the father is a real estate executive and the mother is another government lawyer. Even in the one military family, the father out-earns the mother. And, yes, my wife and I practice some income hypergamy, too.

These families have other traditional markers as well. For example, they’re surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s another example of how if you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left. They are quite often the ones renovating historic architecture, reviving small towns or neighborhoods, patronizing the fine arts, conserving natural beauty, etc. As I once wrote, Vermont is the state that most embodies a certain conservative ideal that you see championed online. This can also extend to some family practices as well.

This might be one reason that conservative elites like Sohn very frequently choose to live in deep blue areas rather than ones where they’d be surrounded by Republican voters.

This piece also gets at something I’ve noted over the years, namely the inability of evangelicals to articulate a compelling role for women other than wife and mother. This is unappealing to those who have talents and inclinations beyond that, or who are single. This story about families on the cultural left - presumably most of whom are not evangelical - shows traditionalism (including religion for many) combined with a broader vision. I’m not saying its perfect, but it is showing in the real world marketplace that it has an appeal.

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Evangelicalism and the Single Woman

Speaking of evangelicalism and single women, a video clip posted on X from a book interview with Rebecca VanDoodewaard stirred quite a bit of controversy online. (You can also watch the entire interview). It’s about women and singleness.

VanDoodewaard articulates common positions here, so this is representative of a sizable strand of evangelical thinking. Ligonier, the outfit that posted this video, is a very large evangelical ministry. The latest 990 I could find for them showed a budget of around $25 million. This is not a fringe or niche organization.

I only want to note two things about it. First is the use of “idolatry of the family” language. I highlight this to show that I’m not inventing or exaggerating this language. In the face of declining family formation and fertility, evangelicals heavily stress that a strong desire by single people for marriage and children is often bad and sinful.

Second is the lack of any practical advice for single women who desire marriage to help them find it. Waiting for marriage is treated as an entirely passive endeavor. The only recommended actions are to not waste the time she is single, and instead deploy it for things like getting a graduate degree or working on her career or serving the church.

The contrast with the messages men receive is jarring. The foundational principle of the manosphere is self-improvement. It dispenses a vast array of practical insight and advice to help men get what they want and navigate life. This is also true of more mainstream figures. Scott Galloway’s book is full of it. Even evangelicals like VanDoodewaard’s husband dispense self-improvement advice to single men.

For women, the secular world likewise has a wide array of tactical advice and self-improvement tips to help women get what they want.

But the evangelical world doesn’t seem to offer its single women who desire marriage much beyond admonitions not to be too unhappy about their condition. Their hoped-for futures are being sold out, and by a class of leaders who are overwhelmingly married with children themselves - people who wouldn’t trade their own families for all the gold in Ft. Knox. We have to do better than this.

Related in NY Mag: Yes, Straight Women Are In Trouble

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The film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released 40 years ago. A decade ago I wrote an essay called “Gentrification on the Big Screen” contrasting it with The Blues Brothers, a film released just six years previously. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off contained many of the elements of gentrification and the Creative Class in embryonic form.

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WSJ: Making Sense of America’s Low Fertility Rate (gift link)

Ezra Klein: Your Kids Are Not Doomed (gift link)

Over the past few years, I’ve been asked one question more than any other. It comes up at speeches, at dinners, in conversation. It’s the most popular query when I open my podcast to suggestions, time and again. It comes in two forms. The first: Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face? The second: Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis the world faces?…But one thing I’ve noticed, after years of reporting on climate change: The people who have devoted their lives to combating climate change keep having children.

New Content and Media Mentions

I promised to specifically highlight the Youtube version of my conversation with Jacob Siegel about his book The Information State. I solved my upload problems and here it is:

I was mentioned this week in Real Clear Books and Culture, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and by Tim Challies.

New this week:

• From Titans to Technocrats - Today’s urban leaders are more polished, more inclusive, and more powerless than the Titans they replaced — which is why the hardest problems go unsolved

• My podcast this week is with Jacob Siegel on the 100-year rise of the information control state.

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

Cover image by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash.

The article representing the ascending top leg of the K was a great profile of a high tech industrial boom in Columbus (gift link) in the New York Times. It highlights the giant factories being built there by Intel and the defense tech startup Anduril. “Columbus,” the Times notes, “has been transformed. The metropolitan area has become a critical hub for advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence.” Founder Dennis DeMeyere says, “It’s wild. Everything is under construction. It feels like the Bay Area felt 13 or 14 years ago.” Manufacturing employment is up, growing 4.4% from 2021 to 2024. The city’s highly aligned and business friendly approach, dubbed the “Columbus Way” is credited for this success.

The descending bottom leg of the K was covered by Mark Barbash, a longtime veteran economic development official who is now retirement age. He warned in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed (free AOL link) that the Columbus Way is no longer fit for purpose in addressing the city’s major challenges. The city has 240,000 people living in poverty, about a fifth the population. Food bank visits have doubled since before the pandemic. Homelessness is at a record high. And housing prices have soared. What works for luring Intel can’t address these kinds of social issues.

Juxtaposed, these two pieces show the K-shaped society playing out in one city. A friend of mine describes Columbus as “60% Sunbelt, 20% Cleveland, 20% Appalachia.” Factor into that also that the city also has the second largest Somali refugee community in the United States, with an estimated 50-60,000 people, one that is experiencing social and economic integration challenges. It’s a mix of demographic and economic boomtown, combined with significant inequality and social challenges.

What’s happening that civic leadership seems so effective on headline economic matters, yet hasn’t been able to address the inequality or social issues highlighted? Barbash highlights, “Corporate leadership is less anchored to place, with executives whose networks extend far beyond the region and for whom civic engagement is no longer assumed to come with the territory.” And, “Growth no longer reliably creates broad-based jobs.”

These are true, but miss a more fundamental lack of economic alignment between corporate success, local success, and individual success for leaders today. And how Columbus’s leadership model has shifted, from one once led by Titans to one now organized around technocrats.

The Titans

I’ve highlighted many times the decline in civic leadership in America’s cities resulting from a combination of the decline of “WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment” type blue blood elites, and corporate consolidation that dramatically reduced the number of significant companies, and thus corporate leaders, whose economic interests were directly tied to the overall fortunes of the city where they were located.

In this older model, a relatively small number of tightly connected white male institutional leaders dominated civic life. In Columbus, this was the era of the so-called “Titans,” six particularly dominant city power brokers, as well as the constellation of other often intermarried, multigenerational Bexley-focused elites around them. (Bexley is an old money enclave city within Columbus, similar to Highland Park in Dallas). As Columbus Monthly wrote in 1989, “There are six. All are men; all are white. They are the people who can make a project move forward, or stop it in its tracks, if they so choose. They are the people who can weigh in, who run such strong institutions with such financial clout that they cannot be ignored in any decision affecting the overall community.”

In the era up through the Titans, civic alignment took place informally, through personal, and sometimes familial relationships. As Columbus Monthly said, “Politicians touch base with them; community leaders touch base with them, and they touch base with each other.”

Many of these older elites grew up together, went to kindergarten together, summered together on the same lakes. There were institutions like chambers of commerce and city clubs, but they were often supplemental to other longstanding personal ties. Prior to the 1980s finance revolution and deregulation, even CEOs who didn’t come from a blue blood background had businesses heavily tied to the fortunes of the local community, and with a lot of latitude to run their firms without activist investor pressure.

This group in Columbus was likely unusually cohesive and dominant because unlike many Midwest and Northeast cities, the Columbus elites never had to deal with ethnic political machines or similar rival bases of power.

This era lasted into the 1990s, when its economic and other bases fragmented. Two of the six Titans were members of the Wolfe family, which for at least three generations - over 100 years - had built the city’s dominant business empire. Over roughly a 35 year period they liquidated their holdings, starting with their bank (1984), then their brokerage (1998), the sale of the Columbus Dispatch newspaper (2015), and their local TV/radio group (2019). The Wolfe family still has a local philanthropy and some real estate, but is no longer “Titanic.”

Another was John B. McCoy, the third generation CEO of Bank One, the city’s largest bank that was once a major “super-regional.” McCoy had held basically every major civic position in town. Bank One was merged with First Chicago in 1998 and the headquarters moved to the Windy City. The McCoys are no more as a civic force, though the bank, now part of JPMorgan Chase, is still a huge local employer.

Two others were John Fisher of Nationwide Insurance, a mutual, and Frank Wobst of Huntington Bancshares. These were organization men, not family patriarchs. Interestingly, their businesses carry on in Columbus today, with Nationwide in particular a corporate anchor. One might naively think that a multigenerational family dominated business would be more likely to survive, but that’s not always the case. Neither Fisher nor Wobst had children of comparable stature in the city.

The last was Les Wexner, the upstart self-made man who built the Limited retail empire. While some spinoff brands are still in town, the Limited empire is not what it once was, and the elderly Wexner has been badly damaged by his deep ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

You can imagine similar dynamics playing out at lower levels in the hierarchy, dramatically reducing the economic base of personal civic power, and severing multigenerational traditions of leadership in the community.

This older leadership model also had something of a cultural underpinning of a “social gospel” ethos (or whatever you prefer to call it). In talking about the past, Barbash notes that Columbus’ “business, philanthropy, nonprofits, religious institutions and government worked from a shared playbook.” He explicitly lists religious institutions. There was a much more robust religious life and powerful religious institutions in that era, the remains of the “P” in WASP that had transformed into a sort of generic Judeo-Christianity in the postwar period.

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The Technocrats

From the 1990s into the 2000s, cities began to sense that the old model of leadership was no longer going to be viable in the future, and began to create new leadership institutions and structures to compensate. These organizations were designed to regionalize, organize, professionalize, and formalize civic leadership in an era where old informal and familial ties could not be relied on.

Today’s CEOs, for example, aren’t third generation patriarchs, but individuals often hired from out of town and who likely won’t be in the city for the long term. They are more completely reliant on formal institutions for mobilizing leadership connectivity since they lack the pre-existing ties of the older elite. In today’s world they also cannot treat their corporations as a personal fiefdoms.

These new leadership structures and institutions would be staffed by professionals to enable focused effort on key civic priorities like economic development. This was ultimately a technocratic elite, with both the CEOs overseeing these organizations and their staff achieving their positions through professional competence under meritocratic conditions.

In Columbus specifically, the key organization was the Columbus Partnership, the local CEO council, founded in 2002. There have been variations of these CEO clubs going back over a hundred years to groups like the Commercial Club of Chicago or the midcentury Allegheny Conference in Pittsburgh. But there was a wave of new or reorganized groups of this type around the same time and addressing the same leadership issues, including the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership (1999), the Atlanta Committee for Progress (2003), and the Itasca Project in Minneapolis (2004, now the Greater MSP Partnership). Notably, groups like the Columbus Partnership include CEOs of universities, foundations, and other non-profit civic groups as well as for-profit corporations.

The Columbus Partnership created an economic development organization now called One Columbus in 2010, and recruited ace economic developer Kenny McDonald from out of town - not some local scion - to run it. It was an enormous success, as the Times article illustrates. This is what most people today mean when they talk about the Columbus Way.

This era was also when we saw tremendous growth in the “NGOctopus” of non-profit groups. In Columbus this included Campus Partners (1995) and the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation (2002). But there was also an array of various more charitable type groups, typically organized around advocacy or service delivery with foundation or government driven funding, not the older associational or membership based models (see Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy).

It was also an era of broadening of leadership. Rather than six Titans, there are 82 members of the Columbus Partnership. It’s no longer just white men, but women and racial minorities as well. Various constituency groups throughout the city, if not directly represented in elite organizations like the Columbus Partnership, have a voice as “stakeholders.”

Religion, however, has faded significantly. In contrast with how he talks about the past, when Barbash talks about the future, religious institutions are missing. He wrote, “What is needed is a table where business, philanthropy, nonprofits and government align on strategy.” Columbus today is in fact among America’s least religious cities, ranking 7th in one such survey, one of only eight cities in the country where “unaffiliated” is the top religious choice.

The Limits of Technocratic Leadership

This second model of civic leadership successfully grabbed the baton from the older one. For a time, it has seemed to be as good or better than the old model. Cities like Columbus boomed or came into their own. Columbus, for example, is now a genuine big league city, with franchises in the NHL (2000) and MLS (1996). Columbus has never been a larger, more important, more influential city in America than it is today. In fact, it’s positioned as potentially the first Midwestern breakout city to join the Sunbelt boomtowns. If Columbus were a stock, I’d buy it.

The new system was also fairer in some ways. No longer, for example, would a freeway simply be plowed through an urban neighborhood. Leadership would be more inclusive, if not genuinely democratic.

However, as with corporate consolidation, some of this urban success story was not only a result of local efforts but also macro trends external to Columbus itself. Cities generally started to revive in the 1980s, with a big takeoff in the 1990s. This was the era of the so-called “super mayor” like Rudy Giuliani in New York, Richard M. Daley in Chicago, and Tom Menino in Boston. Is it likely that all these cities got amazing mayors at the same time, or that those mayors, who may well have been skilled, benefitted from a general shift in the urban fortunes?

As cities were coming back, the large Millennial generation started graduating from college and moving to urban centers. This turbocharged central city growth and spread it out beyond the elite centers. The Great Recession from 2007 to 2010 actually benefitted cities, as it inhibited people from buying houses and moving to the suburbs.

Columbus has been growing, but most of its stats are very similar to its neighbor Indianapolis, another sprawling state capital without a heavy industry legacy. Most likely both cities are being shaped by similar forces in ways that have benefitted them in similar ways.

Looking behind these positive trends, we can also see that the new technocratic leadership model has limits. Most importantly, the leadership class that comprises it is structurally weak. It no longer has the kind of real personal, economic, or social power that the old “Titan” style elites did. These leaders exist in a national or global, not local talent marketplaces. They are technocrats, not Titans. As a result they can only remain bankable within the marketplace to the extent that they reflect the current consensus of it, apart from any local needs or considerations. Their careers and positions are much more fragile.

This is the root of what Barbash is seeing when he wrote, “When the same handful of leaders decide everything, the answers tend toward the cautious and the incremental.” But that risk aversion is a core element of the technocratic leadership model, not a result of a handful of leaders making the big decisions. The Wolfes or Les Wexner in his prime could say or do anything they wanted, for good or for ill. We even see some legacy of that older today in select places, such as with Dan Gilbert in Detroit. Gilbert is another self-made man, one who poured billions of dollars into buying up and redeveloping downtown Detroit real estate, and moving key companies he controlled and their thousands of employees into those developments, at a time when that looked like folly.

Technocrats cannot take that kind of risk. Just as one example, look at the Covid era. In Columbus, like in most other cities, this class opted for an extended hard lockdown strategy, with very lengthy periods of school closures and work-from-home. It also pivoted to make BLM/DEI the central organizing principle of urban institutional life in the city for two to three years in the wake of the George Floyd killing. The Columbus Partnership turned hard into racial equity, with then CEO Alex Fischer saying, “If we keep it up week after week, month after month, year after year—I think we can change Columbus, and I think we can make a huge difference. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much energy, depth and commitment by a broad segment of our leadership, which is exciting.”

It’s notable that this is very similar to what leadership in other cities did, showing Columbus’ leaders following a national consensus, not local needs. And there was a very high level of local leadership unanimity in these choices.

Later, as the national consensus changed, Columbus’ leadership changed with it. As the DEI movement went into a partial retreat nationally, the Columbus corporate community mirrored that. There were also some attempts to rebalance on work from home, again in line with national trends.

Privately, many business and civic leaders will acknowledge that cities and their institutions “over-corrected” in the Covid era (as one such leader described it to me). Not that they should have done nothing, but they went too far for too long. This over-correction inflicted enormous harm on America’s downtowns and urban centers, such as in their office based employment base, likely setting them back a decade or more. Downtown office employment may never recover in some cities.

Columbus has been more fortunate than most here. It still has very high downtown office vacancy, but has been a leader in converting office space to residential. It as also not fallen prey to the hard left political insurgency that became so successful elsewhere.

But the key point is this: today’s post-Titan technocratic corporate leaders in Columbus must be risk-averse consensus followers. They mostly cannot step out of line no matter what the implications for their city. They probably can’t even have an honest public conversation about what happened from 2020 to 2022. In fact, one could argue that this is likely more true in Columbus than elsewhere, because cities that boast of their high levels of civic alignment, as with the “Columbus Way,” tend to be places where public dissent is frowned on or simply not done.

This is why the social problems Barbash notes are not being solved. Today’s urban civic leaderships mostly must follow the national consensus. That consensus is consistent with working to attract high-value employers. But the consensus moves on the matters Barbash cites are basically not solving those problems anywhere. To potentially solve them, Columbus leaders would need to undertake uncertain, risky, expensive initiatives that are not being done elsewhere. The degree of difficulty in doing that is high. Add to that the missing religious element that would have been more squarely focused on those social challenges, and you can see the difficulties.

What Barbash proposes is effectively doubling down on the technocratic leadership model: more convening organizations, more civic training for leaders less locally rooted leaders, etc. But this can’t overcome the structural problems, one resulting from the shift from Titan to technocrat. Solving that is, admittedly, difficult.

Barbash exhorts regional leaders by saying, “A region cannot be economically successful and socially strained at the same time and still sustain its growth. Eventually, one track pulls the other down.” But realistically, Columbus, like many other places, can probably continue powering ahead on its present success track even if the bottom leg of the “K” is struggling.

Rather than too much poverty, the main risk to Columbus today might be a macro change that puts the upper leg of its K-shaped economy at risk. If addressing that challenge required challenging the national elite consensus in some way, I’m not sure if Columbus’ leadership (or that of most other cities) would be able to do that. The way America’s urban leadership classes responded during the Covid era, in ways that really hurt their own cities and downtowns, should be a cautionary tale against thinking they’ll rise to the occasion in the future. Until yet another new model emerges, the technocratic approach to urban leadership will remain with us, with all the strengths and weaknesses that come with it.

It’s a really great book that traces the history of government attempts to control information flows, starting with the Progressive Era, Woodrow Wilson, and World War I and continuing forward to the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression and the the present today. Beyond complaints about censorship, Siegel gives constructive ideas for how we should be looking at information control in a digitally connected world in which there are in fact many foreign malign actors.

Here’s the Youtube version.

Here’s the reality I am thinking about: human beings are far wealthier than they have ever been and are, on average, living far longer than they ever have in the past. This is leaving vast amounts of wealth and power in the hands of people who are not merely senior citizens, but who are often well into their 80s or 90s.

He talks about the implications in terms of inheritance. I was particularly struck by his observation that if current trends continue, we may end up in a world where wealth is passed down from old person to old person to old person.

While lifespans have increased dramatically, our traditions for passing wealth through the generations have remained relatively static. In the early 1900s, when the average person died in their 40s or 50s, a man would most often be leaving an inheritance to his children when they were quite young. They were probably still in the years of grinding and building—the stretch of life when they had not yet reached their peak earnings, but when expenses were elevated as they bought and paid for a home, raised and educated children, built a business, worked their way up the corporate ladder, and so on. An inheritance came to them at the period in life when they needed it the most and when it would do them the most good.

Today, though, that same man may not die until he is well into his 80s or even 90s, which means his children may already be in their 60s or 70s when they receive an inheritance. In many cases, they will have already passed through the most difficult life stages and already stored up wealth of their own. Most of them will presumably add that inherited wealth to their own accumulated wealth, then pass it down a generation when they themselves are 80, 90, or even 100. It is not hard to imagine ever-growing sums of money being passed from one elderly generation to another, with a lot of that money never accomplishing much other than offering an ever-increasing sense of security.

He also shares his thoughts on how we should respond to this situation, so click over to read the whole thing.

Yes, Cheating Is Bad

Freddie deBoer is out with a new piece about why we should in fact shame students who cheat and hold them accountable for that.

After all, in every class there is that inconvenient kid who didn’t cheat, the kid who turned down the chance to use the easy machine and sat with the blank page and produced something worse than what the cheater produced, because that’s what learning looks like - it looks like producing worse things slowly until you can produce better things. Sadly that kid’s watching and learning, watching his peers and his teachers, and this white-knuckled dedication to never judging cheaters is teaching them the worst possible lesson. That kid sees the cheaters get the same grades, or better ones, and witnesses the adults who rush to explain that the cheaters are the real victim here, and that kid learns the actual lesson of contemporary American education: integrity is a sucker’s bet, a tax that only the honest pay. I don’t know if there’s a name for a moral system that consistently rewards deception and punishes cooperation, but I can tell you that it leads to a collapsing society, and we’re living in one. If it makes you feel better, those most responsible certainly aren’t the teenagers.

And this connects with what I’m constantly saying about education and how our romantic notions about it ruin everything: yes, we have to force students to be ethical and to not cheat, and this should not surprise us because the basic act of schooling is forcing students to do things. Coercion is at the heart of education.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Normalized cheating is an example of where bad social practices can drive out good. When people have to pay a penalty in order to do the right thing, only the most morally committed are realistically going to do that.

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Quakerism as a Superpower

Speaking of cheating and more commitment, I periodically bring up that in pre-20th century England, the Quakers were unusually successful in business, in part because in an era when “buyer beware” really meant just that, the Quakers were counterparties you could trust.

Will Manidis and Nabeel S. Qureshi wrote a great essay earlier this year taking a look at how this developed. (Manidis himself was raised Quaker). They note the unusual level of success Quaker businessmen had relative to their small numbers:

The Barclays, the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, the Clarks, and the Wedgwoods were all prominent Quaker merchant families. A religious minority that at its peak numbered almost 60,000 people in the country of 6 million – just under 1% – at that time produced an overwhelming share of England’s commercial and industrial infrastructure, so disproportionate that it still puzzles economic historians.

The Quakers were unusually honest, and unusually devoted to doing business fairly.

Quakers are a strange people….The Quakers earnestly enforced a near-militant allegiance to the truth. Through meetings, through discipline, through expulsion, a friend who cheated a customer or misrepresented a product faced not only civil liability but spiritual reckoning before his entire community.

Everyone knew this, and everyone could trade with them safely as a result. You could trade with a Quaker even across the ocean with minimal contracts because the contract was already written in something more binding than paper: a spiritual agreement. In a place like early England where transaction costs – entire apparatus of verification, enforcement, legal recourse – were extremely high, and which in turn made long-distance commerce expensive and slow, the Quakers were able to drive that cost to nearly zero.

The trust was inherited by the faith and carried into every transaction before the partners even met. Even things like fixed pricing were a Quaker invention. Before Quakers, commerce meant haggling. Every transaction consisted of a negotiation and every price was a contest. Quaker shopkeepers posted a single price and held it. You paid what everyone else paid. And you never worried about being cheated because the man behind the counter believed that cheating was a mortal sin, not in the casual way that most people believe in sins, but in the way where he ordered and structured his entire community and his life such that he could remain true to his word. Customers came in enormous numbers. Of course they did.

As America becomes a lower trust, more scam ridden society, I can’t help but wonder if this type of reputation for probity will end up paying increased dividends in the future. As much as I’d like to think it will, I also think we have to be honest that today’s world is still rewarding people who falsely claim to be disabled to get more time to take tests at Harvard, promote conspiracy theories, or “ensh*ttify” some previously reliable business experience. But it’s something to keep an eye on.

The Quakers also cultivated personal habits that were good for business, which you may recognize as being related to the Protestant work ethic.

Quakers also refused ostentatious behavior and conspicuous consumption. Quakers did not display wealth because display was vanity and vanity was a sin. What other businessmen extracted to furnish lavish estates and carriages and display the visible performance of success, Quakers treated as excess cash flows to reinvest in their businesses. They built for the long term because they understood their work to be stewardship, a core Quaker value. The businesses existed to participate in God’s purpose.

The essay goes well beyond Quakerism, talking about the lack of moral purpose in today’s institutions, criticizing effective altruism, and much more. Highly recommended, so click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

As a follow-up to my recent piece on the lack of a playbook for marriage and the consequences of aging alone, Steve Eide sent me his 2024 piece from the Institute for Family Studies on how a lack of family can contribute to a risk of senior homelessness.

The Guardian: Euphoria mirrors the nihilism of a generation raised on Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue - A very good piece that’s in line with John Seel’s essay on nihilism with a business model.

Ross Douthat: Graham Platner and the Amoral Center (gift link)

Ryan Burge: The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ledger Doesn’t Balance

Anthony Bradley has a great piece on the coming reckoning for evangelical colleges.

New Content and Media Mentions

This week I got mentions from Conor Friedersdorf, Scott Greer, American Reformer and File 770.

New this week:

• There’s a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage. - The costs of putting off marriage and children don’t show up for decades — and by the time they do, the window to choose otherwise has often closed

• My podcast this week is with AEI Senior Fellow Brent Orell on how AI might be the next NAFTA.

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

Cover photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

For a long time I said I didn’t want to have kids. What that might mean for me down the road as I got older didn’t really register. It wasn’t a consideration.

I was in my early 30s when my grandfather died. I was sad, but it didn’t cause me to reflect on my own mortality. Then, when I was about 40, my grandmother got sick and was hospitalized. My mother called to ask me to come down and take shifts staying with her. Several family members did likewise, so she had someone staying with her in the hospital 24 hours a day.

When I was with her and looked at her lying in that hospital bed, for the very first time in my life it hit me. When I’m old and lying in that hospital bed, who is going to come stay with me? The answer was, nobody. Nobody would be coming to stay with me. That was a sobering thought.

In my observation, it’s not until people get to be roughly 35 years old that they gain the ability to really understand that they will change in the future, and to emotionally connect to the future story arc of their life.

Younger people know how much they’ve changed in the past - Oh, how much I’ve changed! How much I’ve learned! How much I’ve grown! - but not how much they will change in the future. Nor can they really emotionally relate to the later-in-life consequences of decisions made today.

I don’t think we ever fully outgrow these tendencies. We all suffer from the so-called “end of history illusion” in which we underestimate how much we will change in the future. But I do think there’s a transition around our mid-30s where we gain a sense of new perspective.

This has profound implications around decisions we make about two of the biggest elements of life: getting married and having kids. People make critical decisions about whether or not to pursue them at a time in life when they cannot understand that their desires may well be different in the future, and before they can emotionally connect to the full implications of the decisions they are making.

Beyond that, the positive consequences of forgoing these elements of life - more freedom, more fun - arrive immediately whereas the negative ones don’t show up for potentially decades. This is very unlike decisions around college or career, where real-world feedback arrives quickly if you make a mistake.

Add it up and it’s a recipe for many people to only have the magnitude of what they have done fully hit them at a time at which there’s only a limited runway to change course - or even when it’s too late.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal helps illustrate this. It’s a profile of Amy Kant (gift link), a non-profit fundraiser and artist in Massachusetts. She’s a single, childless, 65-year-old woman dealing with the health challenge of an extended recovery from heart surgery. The piece tells the story of how she arrived there.

Kant “didn’t set out with a master plan.” Unmarried, she “long cherished the freedom that came with being single.” In her 20s and 30s, her friends with kids envied her life. She was able to choose work that gave her time for her art rather than focus on making money. Still, she ended up with an MBA, a successful fundraising career, and significant retirement savings.

By her 40s she was starting to feel more strongly the desire for children, and even considered adoption. By her 50s, she regretted she hadn’t actually done it. Now, facing health issues, she’s forced to juggle her friend network to call on for help. The Journal says, “A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill. Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. Her friends have their own households to manage; some have already died.” She’s also worried about whether the amount she saved will really be enough, and struggling with what to do in making a will.

A financial person might talk about discount rates, and say that the value of 20 years of fun times a single, childless person has will outweigh the net present value of 30-40 years or more of regrets and challenges after that. But I wonder if Amy Kant’s younger self had known then what she knows now, if she might have been more intentional about making a plan to get married and have kids.

As the Journal notes, her story is far from unique. There are 12.5 million people aging alone, and that number is only expected to grow. This includes many men, who might have a much more challenging time of it than Kant, since they may well not have the close friends that she has been able to call on.

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In the past, getting married, and then having kids, tended to “just happen” naturally, without anyone having to have a “master plan.” It was part of the culture and rhythms of life, backed up by social pressures.

This is no longer the case. Family formation and fertility rates are in decline. There’s growing polarization between the sexes. People have soured on dating apps, which have become the leading way people meet. Terms like “heteropessimism” have emerged. Permanent singleness or childlessness is now socially normalized. Many people have sworn off marriage or having kids. One of the earliest subcultures of the manosphere was “Men Going Their Own Way,” those young men who explicitly argued against marriage as a bad deal. Others plan to defer marriage until after getting established in a career and gaining some enjoyment of life as a young single, the so-called “capstone” model of marriage. Parents may be as likely to advise against getting married too young as to wonder where the grandkids are. The evangelical church inveighs against the “idolatry of the family.”

The degree of difficulty dial on life has been turned up for younger generations. Kids growing up today can no longer expect the major elements of life like college, a career, marriage, or home ownership to arrive organically. They require much more focus, intentionality, and effort to obtain.

We become cognizant of this in some areas, like college. Parents and children today understand that good grades and high test scores are no longer enough. They know how to build a compelling résumé, what to put in their application essay, which schools they can realistically hope to get in. We provide young people with a script and guidance to give them the best chance of success here.

But we have not done this for other areas, notably finding someone to marry and have kids with. There’s still an expectation that young people will simply meet someone and fall in love. People rely on apps as their dating strategy. And there’s an implicit belief that there’s plenty of runway to get married and have kids. If anything, the capstone marriage model is the norm for the college-educated. The promise of fertility treatments seems to suggest to people that even the biological clock is not what it used to be.

Young people are thus left alone to fend for themselves in a world where dating is difficult, there’s growing polarization and conflict between the sexes - at a time when they are ill-equipped to understand the whole life implications of what they are doing. No surprise that coupling is in decline and fertility is falling.

We need to provide young people with the same sort of structure for finding a spouse that we’ve given them for getting into college. And they need to understand the degree of effort and intentionality required to get married.

One reason we have been hesitant to do this is that the traditional pressures to get married seemed overly restrictive and confining. Social pressure to get married makes those who are not, whether by choice or bad luck, feel bad. Making fun of “old maids” can be cruel. Some people legitimately aren’t cut out for marriage, or simply don’t want to be married (or have children). In a free country, that’s a choice we want people to be able to make. People in their 20s don’t like getting pressure from parents to get married and start making babies.

We aren’t going back to the old model of social pressures to channel people into conformity with a single life script. None of us really wants to go back to that world. Many people will be perfectly happy being single or childless for life. These aren’t for everyone.

But college isn’t for everyone either. Yet we educate our high schoolers on the economic value it can bring, the prestige of various schools, the likely career prospects of different majors, the realistic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do something similar for marriage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the college advice. We should let young people know that college is a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet large numbers of high quality singles who are potential future spouses, for example. And we should also stop mindlessly promoting the capstone model for marriage.

Marriage, if not for everyone, is probably for more people than the average twentysomething American might believe. We don’t want a 38 or 43-year-old person to one day suddenly realize where the road they are on leads and say, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

We can’t abandon them to make profoundly consequential decisions in partial ignorance. We must equip young people with the tools and knowledge they need to make good decisions that are made with the full awareness of what they are doing.

This is one of the best and most timely discussions I’ve hosted on the podcast, so I’d encourage you to give this one a listen.

First, author Michal Leibowitz describes the problem our higher education institutions have had:

The last few years have not been kind to American higher education. There are the academic problems: widespread artificial-intelligence-enabled cheating; digitally castrated attention spans; rampant grade inflation. There are the political tensions: the collapse of public trust; the protests, encampments and counterprotests that were so mishandled on college campuses after Oct. 7; now the Trump administration’s research funding cuts and threats. And there’s the demographic cliff, finally here…These challenges have, rightly, occasioned some soul-searching for American higher education.

…

These reflections are a start, but they ignore a core problem at the root of so many campus and social issues. It is not just that we lack civility and the capacity to respectfully disagree, but that many of us live as collections of strangers, each pursuing our own ends, and that our college education does almost nothing to develop the sense that what we do in our day-to-day lives resonates with people beyond ourselves.

Oh, our schools claim to foster community. They advertise residential communities and student clubs and intellectual fellowship. But, in reality, many are opaque bureaucratized customer-service institutions that offer students little stake in a common life.

She then goes on to talk about Deep Springs College, and how it’s different:

“We all, technically, legally own the place,” Will Xu told me last year. We were sitting at a picnic table on the campus of Deep Springs College, a tiny, experimental school in the California desert where he is a student. The White and Inyo Mountains were ringed around us.

The college was founded in 1917 by a hydroelectric tycoon, L.L. Nunn. Today, Deep Springs educates about 26 students each year, offering them a free, two-year liberal arts education on a working cattle ranch. Many go on to elite colleges like the University of Chicago. After Mr. Xu graduates in June, he plans to work in tech policy.

The students of Deep Springs are the sole beneficiaries of the Deep Springs trust. This college is theirs to look after and to safeguard.

This isn’t a symbolic position. Of course, millions of American students work part or full time while trying to get an education. But the students at Deep Springs have an unusual kind of responsibility for their collective lives: They work as cowboys and butchers, they mow the lawns, and they serve on the board of trustees, the curriculum committee and the communications committee. They staff a team of volunteer firefighters, responding to accidents on the twisting roads beyond the school. They help make the food that feeds everyone here — students, faculty, staff members and their families.

And they care for the animals that share the ranch with them — the chickens, cattle, pigs and horses. Rebecca McMillin-Hastings, who graduated last year, described the process of cleaning an infected wound on the flank of a dairy cow named Euclid: “You just kind of have to get your soap in your water and, just like, push on the wound. And it really hurts her.” She described throwing her entire body weight against the animal, knowing that she was hurting her, feeling that she was hurting her, but also knowing that it had to be done.

Students aren’t just mixing manual labor with intellectual studies. They are intimately involved in running the college, learning how to steward an institution.

David Neidorf has filled just about every role there is at Deep Springs College over his many years at the school: lecturer, professor, dean, vice president of operations, president and interim dean again. He told me that most students come here to live up to some kind of demanding ideal. “They wanted more responsibility than they’re going to get — for their individual lives, for their communal lives — elsewhere,” he said.

The students must choose not only which classes to take but also which ones will be offered to the college at large. They help to pick the professors and to run the admissions process, and are involved in ever bigger decisions about the future direction of the college, like whether to hire someone for fund-raising.

There’s a lot more in this great piece, including a briefer look at Berea College. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Is It All About the Phones?

Birth rates have declined substantially, not just in America, but around the world. This suggests that falling fertility can’t be related to simply US domestic factors, since the same thing is happening in a wide range of countries, with a diversity of cultural and religious backgrounds, in every region of the world.

John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times took a look at this, and suggests that the advent of the smart phone played a big role. First, he notes the global nature of fertility trends:

In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is now closer to one than to two. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero.

He then hits a point I’ve referenced before, namely that a decline in marriage/partnering rates at least partly underlie this, not merely an across the board fertility decline.

In previous decades, the world’s fertility rate went down because couples had fewer children. Now the main reason is that there are fewer couples. Had US rates of marriage and cohabitation remained constant over the past decade, the country’s total fertility rate would be higher today than it was 10 years ago.

A pioneering study by demographer Stephen Shaw shows that in the US and most high-income countries, the number of children that mothers give birth to is stable or even rising. But the proportion of women who have any children at all has fallen steeply in the past 15 years.

The decline in partnering among young people is really incredible, as his chart shows.

He goes through various explanations ranging from economic stresses to rising female accomplishment before dialing in on the key factor of the smart phone:

Dissatisfied with purely economic explanations, researchers are beginning to point the finger at a new culprit — the digital devices and platforms that play an outsized role in young people’s lives across the world.

Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo of the University of Cincinnati published a paper last month looking at birth rates through the lens of the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK.

The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The authors argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.

For example, US, British and Australian birth rates for teens and young adults were broadly flat during the early 2000s but began to fall markedly from 2007.

The same slide began in France and Poland around 2009, and in Mexico, Morocco and Indonesia around 2012. What had been steady declines in fertility in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal became precipitous drops between 2013 and 2015.

All of these inflection points coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones in local markets — as measured by Google searches for mobile apps.

In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn — a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.

Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, says it is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling”.

This is a longform FT “big read” piece that’s well worth reading in its entirety, if you can get past the paywall.

I can’t help but contrast the intentional and highly physical formation of young people at Deep Springs College with the more purely digital formation shaping most of our young people today - a formation with profound consequences for their lives and our society, as the FT piece shows.

Related in the NYT: They Started I.V.F., Then Split. Now Who Gets Custody of the Embryos? (gift link)

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Catholic vs. Protestant Culture

Another interesting data post from scholar Ryan Burge sheds additional light on Protestantism as a superior engine of human capital development.

I’ll start with Burge’s conclusion:

What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right now.

Let me state this a different way: in Protestantism, there’s a high standard for the laity. They are expected to both believe the full teachings of the church, and put them into practice in their own lives. Whereas Catholicism, practically speaking, has much lower expectations of the laity. Culturally, lay Catholics feel free to dissent from the teachings of the church.

If this is true of theological matters, how much more is it true of secondary matters such as the famed “Protestant work ethic”?

Burge illustrates this by looking at social conservative beliefs. He has previously shared data showing that Catholic views on social issues are often not aligned with the teachings of their own church. This drew critiques from Catholics who argued that these results were only because he’s including nominal Catholics or some such. His new post attempts to take that critique seriously.

So let’s test out this idea that Catholics are just as socially conservative as evangelicals by pulling in both things that we’ve learned. I am going to show you three graphs: the entire sample of evangelicals and Catholics, only weekly attenders of those two groups, and finally only weekly attenders who also identify as politically conservative. That way we can control for those differences as much as possible.

There are some very interesting charts in there, but I’ll just share this one. It’s the share of people who believe pre-marital sex is always wrong. I think this is an interesting point to look at because while believing that will make someone look culturally retrograde or strange, it’s not one of those “third rail” issues that can get you cancelled.

Even when looking at just weekly white attenders who are conservative - and keep in mind, that excludes the larger share of Catholics vs. Protestants who attend weekly but aren’t conservative - still less than half of Catholics believe pre-marital sex is always wrong.

Evangelicals are far from perfect when it comes to believing their church’s nominal teaching, let alone practicing it, yet Catholics score worse. Again, being unable to convince even half of its regular, explicitly conservative attendees to even believe its own teachings, I’d argue Catholicism is much less likely than Protestantism to function as a broader engine of human capital uplift. Protestantism is more transformational of people’s beliefs and practices.

Catholicism has many positive attributes, as I’ve highlighted in my book and elsewhere, but this is an area where Protestantism shines. The decay of Protestant culture is thus very consequential for the country, and its role cannot be plausibly replaced by Catholic culture, even were some great religious transformation to occur.

There’s a lot of great material in Burge’s post, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

I should note that this analysis only looked evangelicalism. Mainline Protestantism may have lost some of this traditional function. It’s a bit harder to say using the same analysis, since many of these churches no longer promote traditional moral teachings, at least not with any vigor.

But mainline Protestantism is a repository for other virtues that are in increasingly short supply in our country. Just look at Burge himself. He’s an archetype of the high-minded mainline Protestant man who is interested in truth, fairness, and getting it right above merely championing his own team or cause. If you read him, you know that his analysis is not sectarian. He may not always be right. He’s not above criticism. But you see all too few people even trying these days. The production of this type of person is another thing Protestantism historically did well in America, and we feel keenly today the loss of that ethos.

What It Takes to Shape Culture

I wrote earlier this week about the meaning of the cancelation of CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But there’s another lesson to learn from this. CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted this picture of the staff of Stephen Colbert’s show gathered on the Late Show stage:

This prompted an outpouring of contempt from conservatives, who mocked what they see as the show’s bloated staff, and how it was losing an estimated $40 million per year on a budget of $100 million.

I’m sure the show could have been produced with fewer staff on a leaner budget. But this is consistent with a longstanding observation that I’ve had that conservatives have no idea the amount of talent and money it takes to produce compelling and impactful media and cultural products. Hence, their efforts are chronically understaffed and underfunded, limiting their broader cultural impact.

Best of the Web

In last week’s digest, I mentioned conservative institutional neglect of libraries. A librarian wrote to me to agree that few conservatives become librarians. But he did want to point me at the Association of Library Professionals, a new association of librarians who want the profession to stay true to its historic mission and avoid the turn towards social activism.

Samuel Abrams/AEI: Civic Knowledge Is Returning. Civic Formation Is Not.

NYT: What to Know About the New Obsession With Testosterone (gift link) - From politics to influencers and beyond, the hormone is being used not just for medical reasons but in pursuit of a new masculine ideal

WSJ: More Dads Are Scaling Back at the Office for Kids and Housework (gift link) - College-educated men lead the way among dads sacrificing hours at work for time at home

The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, one of the most prestigious awards in film, went to “Fjord.” This film is apparently about an evangelical family from Romania that moves to Norway, where child protective services tries to take their children away from them. It’s very interesting to see a film with this theme win such an award, and I wonder what the political subtext is. (For example, is the real meaning a commentary on how the much larger Muslim immigrant population of the Nordic countries are treated?) But interesting regardless. I hope this film shows near me so I can go see it.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from Fortune magazine and from Tim Challies. I was also a guest on the Immanuel Network Podcast.

New this week:

• Stephen Colbert Didn’t Get Cancelled - Mass Culture Did - From 55 million to 6.7 million viewers in 34 years — and what that tells us about the end of America’s shared mass-media, mass-consumer culture

• Nihilism with a Business Model - The gig economy didn’t just change how we work. It changed how we imagine ourselves. A guest post by John Seel.

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

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One of the reasons our country features a lack of civic cohesion and a high level of political polarization is the fragmentation of our previous mass-media, mass-consumer common culture. This fragmentation resulted from new technologies, such as cable television and the internet, as well as structural economic changes that helped set the upper middle class apart from the rest of society.

That old common culture started emerging in the early 20th century with the dawn of Hollywood and radio, but it crystallized after World War II, particularly with the coming of television.

In this world, with three or four TV networks, at best a handful of newspapers in any given city, a limited menu of local radio stations, a small number of book stores - and no internet - Americans basically watched the same limited number of TV shows, listened to the same handful of musical genres, etc.

There was a genuine national common culture in this world, in which Americans coast to coast shared at least some key cultural touchstones and references, even if there was along with this local and regional specific cultures as well. These might include TV shows like M*A*S*H, or news programs and personalities like Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News, or a late night talk show host like Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show on NBC.

Younger people can’t relate to the degree of cultural mindshare someone like Johnny Carson once had. We can see in this the size of the audience for his final show, compared to those of David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. Johnny Carson drew as many as 50-55 million for his final show. David Letterman drew 13.8 million. Stephen Colbert had only 6.7 million viewers - in a country with 80 million more people than when Carson signed off the air. Colbert’s audience would no doubt be bigger than this if we included social media clips, but it’s clearly the case that he’s no Johnny Carson in terms of cultural reach.

Everybody knew Johnny Carson. Even the people who didn’t watch his show regularly had at least seen it on occasion, and knew some of his recurring gags like Carnac the Magnificent. CBS struggled to find anything to compete with Carson. ABC opted out of fielding a direct talk show competitor, and instead focused on news with its well-regarded program Nightline.

In this mass media environment, news and entertainment companies needed to appeal to the broad middle of America. They couldn’t afford to be overly politicized or too niche. It was just good business sense. What’s more, they might well find themselves in political or legal hot water if they did get too political or controversial, as broadcasters operated on spectrum licensed by the federal government. Because not just anyone could start a competing broadcaster due to the limited spectrum available, there were certain standards imposed on those who held the licenses.

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In addition to a mass-media culture, we also lived in a mass-consumer culture. Americans mostly bought the same basic mass market consumer products from the same limited number of major purveyors, with only a handful of truly rich people enjoying a differentiated experience.

America largely did not have “artisanal” products like coffee from a local micro-roastery or beer from a micro-brewery. The number of breweries, for example, hit its low in the 1970s and 80s. People bought mass market products from chain stores. Americans had certain shared lifestyle and consumer habits in common, though again with some local or regional flavor under that.

The Baby Boomers and Generation X were the last generations formed in this mass-media, mass-consumer common culture environment. Thus they are the only ones with real first hand knowledge of “old America.”

The great American common culture fragmented in the 1990s. Cable television led to an explosion of different channels, that might be explicitly or implicitly segmented by age or other demographic characteristic. The Internet turbocharged this fragmentation.

America thus went from three TV networks to “57 Channels and Nothin’ On” (1992) to 257 channels and nothing on to no channels at all. Everyone now has their own algorithmically curated social media feed.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was itself in part a product of this fragmentation. CBS launched it as a platform for David Letterman. Letterman was the host of NBC’s Late Night, which aired immediately following Carson. But he was passed over as Carson’s replacement in favor of Jay Leno, at which point CBS hired him to launch a competitor. The number of late night talk shows only proliferated from there. Now the entire format is in decline along with linear television itself.

Americans no longer share a media diet. The way to survive in this market is to create content that reaches a specific niche. For Stephen Colbert, that was comedy for a heavily Democratic audience. For a figure like Jordan Peterson, that was young men who felt adrift the modern age.

I’m amazed at people with huge followings that most people have never heard of, such as Tik Tok stars with millions of followers. But that even includes people in the traditional media. A former Bravo TV personality named Jeff Lewis hosts a radio show on SiriusXM with a seven figure audience of passionate fans who call themselves “Chumps.” He’s basically Howard Stern for middle-aged women. But my searches show that he’s barely ever mentioned on Twitter.

Because this environment is so competitive, would be media personalities have to focus on grabbing attention, which often means extreme content, lowbrow antics, conspiracy theories, partisan red meat, etc. Today’s media figures don’t have the luxury that the old dominant networks did of creating content that was designed to meet certain standards, or even to occasionally be educational or somewhat uplifting to the public. They have to hustle hard everyday. As Colbert’s cancellation shows, even big traditional media companies can’t afford to run financial losses on a show forever anymore.

Americans simply share much less media in common than they used to. Perhaps only the Superbowl remains as a unifying media phenomenon. Though even here the halftime musical act this year was someone that many Americans had never heard of before even though he’s a global megastar.

Add to this changing consumer habits. There’s a lot of talk about a K-shaped economy, in which the top income earners are doing ever better, while the rest fall behind or decline. But this bifurcation started taking place in consumer culture as well, also hitting hard in the 1990s.

This is illustrated by Charles Murray’s “Bubble Quiz,” designed to help affluent knowledge elites in America know if they are living in a bubble. (Answer: probably). He asks questions such as: Have you ever purchased Avon products? During the past year, have you ever stocked your fridge with a mass-market American beer? How many times have you eaten at restaurants like Applebees, Denny’s or Ponderosa?

As with middlebrow media content, some of the traditionally middle class consumer landscape has also disappeared. The department store went into steep decline, while luxury boutiques on the one hand and value brands like Wal-Mart on the other expanded. Online retailers like Amazon allow for a nearly infinite variety of products to be ordered by people in different market niches.

The upper middle class knowledge elite has different consumer habits, different folkways really, than the rest of America. Americans no longer inhabit the same consumer universe in the way they used to, though the fragmentation here is likely less than for media specifically.

In today’s media ecology, and a bifurcated consumer culture and folkways, social solidarity and a political middle ground are simply harder to find. Stephen Colbert is a product of this environment much more so than of “media bias.” Johnny Carson himself would be struggling on late night TV in today’s world.

Watching Johnny Carson or drinking Maxwell House in common doesn’t necessarily mean two people would be fast friends or vote the same way. But they’d at least have some experiences that would provide a language for them to relate to each other. And for politicians or others to reference when appealing to them. (Knowledge of the Bible, another similar cultural touchstone, has also dissipated).

That old mass-media, mass-consumer common culture was inevitably time bound. It was created by a particular set of media technologies and a particular industrial landscape, in an era when America was demographically homogenizing due to low levels of immigration.

But it shows how we were able to create a shared layer of “thin” culture - I would call this part of the “Human-Social Stack” - that worked well for our country in conjunction with the “Techno-Industrial Stack” of new media technologies like television and the explosion of modern consumer goods.

Today’s techno-industrial acceleration of the internet, social media, now AI, and globalization have disrupted the cultural glue such as a shared media and consumer experience that made the old system function, but without building a replacement capable of filling the same role. Our human-social leg has not kept pace with our techno-industrial one. No surprise we are seeing social and political stresses as a result.

Sociologist James Davison Hunter observes that America is “a nihilist culture without nihilists.” This is because culture shapes individuals long before individuals shape culture. Culture is more than the sum of the beliefs and values of individuals, rather it is the reigning ethos and logic of the institutions that shape our lives. Most Americans could not define nihilism. Few have read Friedrich Nietzsche, its great prophet. Yet increasingly we live as though transcendent meaning does not exist. We behave as if there is no sacred order beyond personal desire, emotional satisfaction, and economic utility.

Human beings are shaped less by abstract arguments than by rituals, habits, and systems of daily life. Our practices disciple us long before our philosophies explain us. Here is where our human-social formation attention should be placed. We are heavily impacted by the environments we work and live within.

This reality helps explain one of the most overlooked developments among younger generations today: the rise of what might be called gig addictions.

A hard truth facing recent college graduates is that the American economy no longer reliably delivers what previous generations were promised. Recent graduates now experience unemployment rates significantly higher than the national average. Underemployment among degree holders has climbed above forty percent. Meanwhile, most graduates leave school carrying substantial student debt into one of the weakest entry-level labor markets in decades.

This produces more than economic anxiety. It produces existential instability.

When your only options are working in the fast-food industry (underemployment) or live at home with your parents (unemployment), it is understandable that finding quick fixes in the gig economy are a logical option. Some of these options may not be the best for you, but reality has not made the best option an easy or attainable default experience for many. Reality points in other self-destructive directions: the white-collar hustle of sports betting among young men and OnlyFans postings among young women. Before judgment should come some measure of understanding as this is a cultural condition before it is a personal behavior.

One of the defining features of modern economic life is the rise of the gig economy. The gig economy is an economic system built around short-term, flexible, and often digitally mediated work in which individuals earn income through temporary tasks, freelance labor, side hustles, or platform-based services rather than stable long-term employment. Increasingly, younger generations no longer imagine work through the older categories of vocation, profession, institution, or long-term career. Instead, work is experienced as fragmented, temporary, transactional, and endlessly flexible. Drive for Uber. Deliver for DoorDash. Sell products online. Build a personal brand. Monetize your following. Create content. Manage multiple side hustles simultaneously.

At one level, the gig economy reflects an understandable economic adaptation to a rapidly changing technological environment. But every economic system eventually shapes not merely how people make money, but how they imagine reality itself.

The gig economy does not simply create gig work. It creates a gig mindset.

And that mindset is increasingly reshaping the moral imagination among younger generations in deeply consequential ways. At the center of the gig mindset is the assumption that nearly everything can become monetized, optimized, and converted into market value. Everything and every experience are now for sale. The self itself becomes a platform.

Consider two rapidly expanding phenomena among young adults: men are increasingly addicted to online sports betting, and women are increasingly posting on platforms such as OnlyFans. These two are deeply connected manifestations of the same cultural logic. Together they speak to the contemporary challenges of human-social formation.

The level of sports betting involvement among college-age men has risen dramatically over the past several years and is now considered a significant public health and campus-life concern. Recent research suggests that roughly 58%–60% of Americans ages 18–22 have participated in sports betting, while among college students specifically, estimates rise as high as 67% participation on some campuses. More concerning than participation alone are the addiction indicators emerging among young men. Approximately 10% of men ages 18–30 now show behaviors consistent with gambling problems, compared to about 3% of the overall adult population. Gambling is becoming a major problem among college age males.

Online sports betting transforms competition, risk, and uncertainty into perpetual digital monetization. Young men are increasingly drawn into algorithmically engineered gambling ecosystems operating continuously through their phones. Every game becomes a financial opportunity. Every moment becomes speculative risk. Every emotional high becomes chemically reinforced through dopamine-driven cycles of reward anticipation.

The danger is not merely financial loss. The deeper danger is psychological formation.

Sports betting trains young men to experience life itself through the lens of volatility, stimulation, risk, and immediate payoff. Patience erodes. Discipline weakens. Work and reward become psychologically disconnected. Slow formation loses emotional appeal compared to instant speculative excitement. The result is not simply addiction but habituation into instability.

Not to be outdone, young women have their own onramp to gig addiction.

The same logic appears differently but relatedly in the rise of platforms like OnlyFans among young women. In 2019, the site featured approximately 350,000 creators. That number today, in part thanks to Covid-19, is over 4.1 million. Approximately 1.4 million American women are now creating content on OnlyFans. This represents one out of ten women in the college age cohort, depending on the methodology used.

One can think of OnlyFans as Uber for pornography. But its cultural significance is more than the normalization of pornography. It reflects shifts in our culture toward the monetization of identity, direct-to-consumer sexuality, the “creator” economy, and the blurring of public and private lives. The average OnlyFans creator does not make a lot of money, but the promise that they could and the normalizations of the thinking behind the platform make it increasingly common and attractive on college campuses.

New York City-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert warns about the concerning trend. “Psychologically, it offers instant gratification, attention, validation and income all at once. Those same rewards can create dependency and affect self-worth. Students risk tying their identity and confidence to clicks and subscribers. What is framed as independence often masks a deeper vulnerability.”

The deeper issue is not merely morality in the narrow sense. It is the view of the person being fueled by economic realities and the resulting rituals. Today’s America teaches young women to view their bodies primarily through the lens of monetized visibility. The body becomes detached from covenant, transcendence, mystery, and sacredness. It becomes economic inventory within an attention marketplace. But if the view of the body is already so detached, why not make money from this detachment?

This is why both sports betting addiction and OnlyFans participation emerge from the same cultural soil. Both reflect the convergence of technological acceleration, digital capitalism, fragmented identity, weakened institutions, declining transcendence, and algorithmic monetization.

The gig economy intensifies this because it conditions people to think of life itself transactionally. Everything becomes a hustle. Every talent becomes potentially monetizable. Every hobby becomes side income. Every interaction becomes economic opportunity.

The older idea of vocation quietly disappears. Vocation implied calling, stewardship, a contribution to something larger than oneself. All of this is dissolved in the gig economy.

This helps explain the growing emotional exhaustion among younger generations. Constant self-monetization is psychologically draining. One must continually perform, market, optimize, and compete for attention within digital systems engineered to produce insecurity and comparison.

What makes this especially dangerous is that the system often disguises itself as empowerment. Flexibility appears liberating. Monetization appears entrepreneurial. Visibility appears validating. But beneath the surface many young adults increasingly experience fragmentation, emotional detachment, and quiet despair. They are becoming economically connected while existentially unmoored. When everything is for sale, utility is everything, and nothing is sacred, they end up with a condition of commodified nihilism.

The answer is not merely stricter rules or louder moral outrage. Church-based finger wagging is not going to help. The deeper need is the recovery of a larger story of human dignity rooted in creation, embodiment, and transcendence.

Previous pushbacks against gambling and pornography are typically framed as individual moral failures. While this is partially true, the challenge is far more than this. This behavior is located within a nihilistic cultural context where this kind of plausibility and normalization dominate. To narrow prohibitions to individual morality is to ignore the forest for the trees.

Young adults do not simply need restraint. They need meaning larger than the marketplace. Until that meaning is recovered, gig addictions will continue multiplying. Human-social formation needs more than an individualistic response. We also need to attend to the structural and cultural realities that give these behaviors their rationale. Working to recover the dignity of the person and the dignity of work in this setting must be our starting point.

Cover image: OnlyFans model Annie Knight via Expert on Nothing podcast.

Buying these teams and keeping them local would be a rounding error on the net worth of multiple Silicon Valley tech figures. Yet things like this don’t even seem to be on their radar.

Contrast this with Mel and Herb Simon, founders of what’s now the largest shopping mall owner in the country. The Indiana Pacers were originally an ABA team, maybe the most successful of the ABA franchises. They were one of four ABA teams that joined the NBA when their league closed. The Pacers struggled in the NBA. In the 1970s they had to hold a telethon to sell enough tickets to save the team from closure. In 1983, the Pacers were still not financially viable, having gone 20-62 the previous season, playing to mostly empty seats. They were going to either go out of business or relocate.

Then Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut asked the Simon brothers to buy the team. Even though it looked like a bad investment, reputedly one of the Simons said to the mayor, “I guess I have to do this, don’t I?” They bought the team for $11 million and it’s still in the city today. The team and its arena have played a key role in Indianapolis building one of the nation’s most lucrative franchises in hosting major sporting events.

This also turned out to be an incredible investment for the Simons. The Pacers are worth an estimated $4.2 billion today, far more than the total Simon family net worth back then.

Today’s tech elite need to expand their vision of their civic role, locally and nationally. Delivering amazing new technologies will always come first. But with the rewards of that come obligations that are not always freely chosen.

Sometimes you choose your duties. Sometimes your duties choose you.

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Conservative Institutional Neglect of Libraries

Apart from public schools, libraries are arguably the most important government formation institution for children, and even adults. Libraries are well known for being very culturally and politically leftist in their orientation. But this is not a case where the left had to “capture” an institution. It is one that conservatives have largely neglected.

People say “conservatives don’t read.” That’s not entirely fair. There are segments of the conservative world that are very into books. Christian homeschooling family types are big users of libraries around here. But I think it’s fair to say that liberals are more interested in books than conservatives, which we see in the very leftist skew of independent bookstores as well.

Conservatives don’t typically become librarians, even though this could be an ideal profession - similar to teacher - for a significant number of conservative or religious women. It’s not a field that is valorized or put into the imagination of conservative children.

I’m also not aware of a single scholar in the conservative think tank or policy space who is chartered with studying libraries and developing policies for them as their main job. Stephen Eide is the closest person I know of, and he has a great essay on libraries in the new issue of National Affairs. But this is mostly a personal passion project for him and is not the focus of his day job. Perhaps this lack of conservative policy interest is because there’s little federal policy action, or because there are no conservative funders willing to underwrite library policy research.

Given the importance of libraries as a formation institution, conservatives should have greater interest and engagement with them.

In light of the Yglesias post above, it’s worth noting that America’s library system was originally built out through the generosity of the Gilded Age elite Andrew Carnegie. Many Carnegie library buildings are still standing, and some are still even used as libraries.

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Personal Standards in Today’s World

How to raise general standards and elevate our people without imposing crushing and cruel judgments is one of the challenges of our age.

Liana Graham and Scott Yenor have an interesting essay in First Things on repentance and forgiveness in a pornified age that illustrates this in one domain of life:

In 2012, one of us asked two dozen young conservative women in San Diego—most aged twenty-five to thirty—whether they were married. Only one was. When pressed for reasons, the answer came quickly: “The men are addicted to porn.” That moment revealed a quiet crisis. If committed, attractive, faithful young women hesitate to marry because of pornography, the pro-marriage project is in deep trouble.

…

Today, women rightly sense that many men under forty have warped expectations shaped by endless visual novelty. They are jealous, suspicious, and increasingly unwilling to risk marriage with men whose loyalties seem divided. Porn explains why women are more skeptical about and less interested in marriage and dating than men. Porn is a significant source of conflict in nearly 20 percent of married and engaged couples. For more than a third of women, frequent porn use is a marital deal-breaker.

…

Women are encouraged to be tolerant of male sexual impurity today because some girls have gone wild. For nearly every porn video there is a female “porn star.” Call Her Daddy, a podcast where the girls brag about getting around, is wildly popular. Women are reading erotica, watching more porn than in the past, and posting highly suggestive and borderline pornographic photos of themselves on social media. At best, women today are torn between the desire to settle down and have a family and the career pressures of feminism, extraordinary sex positivity, and a dating culture built on premarital sex.

Today’s world, where many of the standards of the past are pervasively violated and thus long gone, puts people, and institutions, in a bind who want to set a higher bar than what society has on offer.

Porn is an obvious example. A woman who demands a man who doesn’t watch porn, at least on occasion, is going to narrow her pool of prospects considerably. Similarly, you see many men on the internet proclaiming women damaged goods because of their “body count,” but if they insist on only marrying a “debt-free virgin without tattoos,” they are setting a standard that excludes a majority of younger single women.

Men and women can make those choices, but they come with greater tradeoffs than would have been the case in the past. As Graham and Yenor put it:

Before the sexual revolution, men and women could more easily hold one another to high standards of premarital conduct, but these novels instruct us not to glorify the good old days. As sixty years of sexual revolution have compromised both men and women, both must balance standards with realistic expectations.

I’ve also noted similar effects in other domains. It’s hard for anyone to be too judgmental these days when it comes to things like substance abuse problems, divorce, a suicide, etc. because everybody’s family now has somebody in it - maybe more than one somebody - with big life problems.

Best of the Web

WSJ: How Defending Prostitution Became a Progressive Cause (gift link) - ‘Sex-worker’ rights have become a rallying cry on the cultural left. But not everyone agrees that the sex trade should be getting a pass.

More Births: A shocking new study finds that the desire for children has collapsed among young people in China

Scott Greer: The Irrelevance Of Pro-Lifers - America has largely moved on from abortion, to the chagrin of people who make their living off the issue. Note: Greer is a dissident right figure who likely doesn’t care about abortion personally.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

New this week:

• The End of the Moral Majority - The pro-life movement is one of the first casualties of a political architecture built for a country that no longer exists

• My podcast this week was with Seth Barron on the left’s institutional capture of institutions.

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Cover image: New York Public Library by Vallue/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal, “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem.” Pro-lifers like her are upset he has appointed abortion supporters like Robert F. Kennedy to key positions in his administration, is allowing mail order abortion pills, and is leaving abortion policy to the states.

Dannenfelser says Trump’s approach means “the movement as we know it is finished.” She’s right that it’s finished. But it’s not Trump who ended it. It’s the American public. The movement to ban abortion stalled not because of him, but because abortion bans have been shown to be a loser at the ballot box. We now know that a majority of Americans want abortion to be legal.

Abortion has been on the ballot several times since the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, and the pro-abortion position has dominated in terms of results. I can only identify two cases in which the anti-abortion position won a majority of the votes, in South Dakota and Nebraska.

There’s also a wide belief among analysts - even among opponents of abortion themselves - that abortion was the reason Democrats significantly over-performed in the 2022 midterms. This was a shock result in an election that should have otherwise been a “red wave.”

In this voting climate, Republicans are not going to line up to support social policies that are proven political losers. The pro-life movement is not prepared for this reality, and their reaction makes it clear.

An Obsolete Architecture

The pro-life movement is not a one-off exception. It’s just one early example of a much larger institutional challenge facing social conservative movements and organizations in coming years. They were largely created during a period from the 1970s through the 2000s on two founding assumptions that are no longer true: that traditional morality was still held to by a majority of Americans, and that the way to ensure their triumph was through Republican politics.

I call this combination moralistic-majoritarian politics. It’s moralistic in that it believes its positions are moral absolutes, so compromise is impermissible. In abortion, this means abortion is murder and thus must be stopped at almost any cost. It’s majoritarian in that it is structured around winning political victories in electoral politics, which comes with the implicit assumption that its beliefs are broadly popular in society.

With abortion, moralistic-majoritarian politics works, in theory, like this:

It’s no surprise that moralistic-majoritarian sounds like Jerry Falwell’s flagship social conservative organization Moral Majority. In my “three worlds” framework, this is a relic of the Positive World, in which Christianity is in decline but still viewed positively by society. In this era it was plausible - if not necessarily accurate - to claim that social conservatives still spoke for the American mainstream. The theory was that the secular left had been getting its way through institutional capture and procedural manipulation, but that their ideas weren’t actually held by most people.

Fast forward and America is now in a Negative World, where traditional morality and social norms are now expressly repudiated on a range of issues extending far beyond sexuality matters like abortion. This shift in the religious culture of America is one of the most important parts of the American transition now under way.

In this new, Negative World America, moralistic-majoritarian politics fails because social conservative positions are not actually supported by a majority of the people. Hence efforts to ban abortion lost momentum quickly after the repeal of Roe vs. Wade as this became clearly evident at the ballot box.

This is particularly hitting the pro-life movement because it has an audacious goal, and abortion is a particularly polarizing issue that has been subjected to repeated direct ballot box tests. But similar reckonings are coming for churches and denominations, Christian colleges, and other such groups and movements.

Despite what you are reading about a vibe shift, packed Catholic masses, or a Gen-Z religious revival, generational turnover is only going to accentuate this trend, eroding the demographic base of support for banning abortion. As Ryan Burge has noted, each generation is less religious than the last, and with the large and very religious Boomer generation set to pass on, this will produce a steep decline in the number of religious conservatives who are the base of movements like opposition to abortion. There’s no prospect of moralistic-majoritarian politics succeeding anytime soon, except on marginal or popular matters, or on a very temporary basis.

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Political Coalition Implications

Moralistic-majoritarian politics on abortion - or other social issues - is a problematic fit for today’s Republican Party. Social conservatism was never that popular with the dominant libertarian/classical liberal and foreign policy legs of conservatism’s proverbial three-legged stool. Populist or MAGA conservatives are more interested in cultural conservative policies like immigration than social conservative ones like abortion. Add to these abortion bans being a proven electoral loser, and GOP politicians are going to pivot away from the issue.

The pro-life movement has done itself no favors within the Republican coalition by attacking Trump, and even opposing him during parts of the 2024 campaign, as prominent pro-life activist Lila Rose did. Politicians are never going to be fully comfortable with people who view themselves as on a holy crusade, and these behaviors are only going to further marginalize the movement.

Some pro-life people in one state I know complained to me that pro-life groups had been marginalized during their state’s process of developing abortion restriction legislation. I used to be puzzled by this, but after seeing how people like Marjorie Dannenfelser and Lila Rose conduct themselves, it now makes sense to me.

Pro-life groups have also lost credibility through many years of claiming polls showed that the public was on their side or was trending their way. This turned out to be completely wrong. Yet these organizations continue to publish what they claim are favorable polls. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America still maintains a polling dashboard. Live Action recently touted that a “new Pew poll shows gains in pro-life sentiment.” People are going to treat claims coming out of these groups with increasing skepticism - as well they should.

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New Politics for a New Age

The travails of the pro-life movement augur for a new kind of politics for religious conservatives: prudentialist-minority.

It is minority politics in that it recognizes that their moral vision is not presently accepted by the majority of the public. It is prudentialist in that rather than taking an all-or-nothing stand on moral absolutes, it accepts that in a fallen world, politics will always fall short of a perfect moral standard. It asks what the most reasonable and realistic approach to improving the general welfare is right now in light of the present culture, public opinion, institutional and political realities, etc.

A prudentialist-minority approach recognizes that change is a long-term, probably multi-generational game, and that trends are running against the preferences of religious conservatives. Thus the first imperative is to sustain moral integrity within your own community. Then, while achieving what victories are possible within the realm of prudence, working to change hearts and minds in society over time. This project requires a broad-spectrum set of initiatives.

The left did this. The book The Sexual Revolution was published in 1936. The Summer of Love was in 1967 - 59 years ago. Today we are still going through the outworking of ideas and efforts ongoing for nearly a century. And sexual liberation proponents are still aggressively working for cultural, not just legal change. Christianity has pulled off similar changes over time, as with the early church itself and the abolition movement. So it has this tool in its toolbox as well.

The pro-life organizations no doubt feel they were playing the prudential coalition game, but when it came to be their turn to get what they wanted, the GOP pulled the rug out from under them. This is understandable. Still, keep in mind, they did get their biggest ask delivered, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. But when it came time to then ban abortion, the times and public sentiment had changed. The GOP took big swings at this in some places, but electoral reality intervened. It’s not the Republican Party’s fault that the public was much less supportive of banning abortion than pro-life groups had led it to believe. It’s a different world today post-Dobbs, and post-referendums on abortion.

The Anti-Pornography Example

The religious right has already made this shift from moralistic-majoritarian to prudentialist-minority in at least one important area: anti-pornography activism. Not long ago, religious conservatives wanted to ban porn. Legally and culturally, that turned out to be a loser. No surprise, as Politico put it in 2018, “the GOP gave up on porn.”

In response, anti-porn activism changed its approach. Some organizations rebranded around opposition to sex-trafficking, a more popular cause. Porn itself was rebranded as a personal moral failing that needed to be opposed and disciplined inside the church. Non-religious couples today might happily be watching porn together at home, but the church was not going to accept porn for its own members.

The ubiquity of minors accessing hard core pornography on their smart phones opened a door to renewed political action. Nobody wants 11 year old boys having access to this material. So state legislatures have passed popular laws requiring age verification for access to porn. This won’t keep the likes of Pornhub out of those states forever, but it does show the kind of policy advances that are possible when there’s broad popular support for them. Prudentialist politics doesn’t necessarily mean you get nothing. And over the long term, who knows what shifts in public beliefs are possible?

I expect that it will take some time before the pro-life movement adjusts to this new reality. The current moralistic-majoritarian approach is deeply rooted in the pro-life ecosystem. The moralistic side of that is not a political ploy, but a deeply held moral conviction, one mostly aligned with historic church teaching. This conviction need not change in order to adopt a new political approach, but in practice it inhibits adopting one. The movement has a lot of older, long-time leaders and funders who are unlikely to change course at this stage of the game. The realities of demographic decline in the church have yet to become fully manifest to them.

But ultimately a new approach will be forced on them, if only to stave off irrelevance. Other religious conservative groups and movements should take note and adjust before they encounter their own crisis.

Cover image: Donald Trump with Marjorie Dannenfelser and others in happier times in 2017.

From “defund the police” and anarcho-tyranny in New York City to open borders, the erosion of assimilation, and the battle over American identity, we talk about what has happened to key institutions and domains of life as they have been transformed to advance political ends.

First, the New York Times recently published a list of their top 30 living American songwriters. It was a source of tremendous controversy and discussion, which of course makes it a huge success from the Times perspective.

One of the critics of the Times list was the popular and very knowledgeable music Youtuber Rick Beato, who recorded an interesting short video looking at the background of the Times critics who selected the list:

Beato notes the prevalence of Ivy League and elite degrees among the critics, pointing especially the lack of any degrees in music. Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica went to Harvard and got a B.A. in English, for example. I ran the list of six critics through Claude, which indicated none of them have any formal musical training.

I don’t think one needs to have a degree in music or be a musician to be an effective pop music critic. But Beato’s complaint about the Times critics’ educational backgrounds does illustrate something about the changing nature of education and meritocracy in America.

It used to be that prep schools and elite colleges took people who were already destined to become top leaders due to family background, and formed them with a particular ethos. Now those schools provide those who would not otherwise likely become top leaders with the credential that allows them to obtain those positions.

We call this new system meritocracy. But listening to Caramanica complain about white male songwriters and dismiss Billy Joel, I ask myself: is he really the best person in the entire country in understanding and writing about pop music such that he should be a major critic at the New York Times based on merit? When I see that over 700,000 people watched a Rick Beato video breaking down some subtle elements that make Toto’s “Africa” a megahit, or note that almost 300,000 people subscribe to the deeply knowledgeable Ted Gioia here on Substack, I’m not convinced.

It’s great for Caramanica that he got that gig. I’m sure he has real talent or he wouldn’t be there.

But this illustrates the way that our present system of credentialing, filtering, and elevating people is not producing the results we would necessarily expect from a system that’s supposed to be organized around skills, competence, and merit.

The next piece will take a deeper look at this topic, looking at the question of what the right model is for elite formation and structuring.

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The Best Model for an American Tech Elite

Palantir’s Alex Karp wrote a widely-discussed book called The Technological Republic about the role he advocates Silicon Valley play in our society. I previously highlight a review essay by Tanner Greer that is very critical of Karp, and which lays out a history of the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern aka WASP Establishment that he views as the real model of fusing new technology with national development and leadership.

Geoffrey Kabaservice at the Niskanen Center did his doctoral dissertation on the last generation of the WASP establishment, which he adapted into an excellent book I’ve mentioned before, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment.

He is out with his own long and interesting essay interacting with Greer. He is something of a friendly critic, arguing that instead of the Gilded Age establishment, it was actually the later 1940-1970 establishment that provides a better model for Silicon Valley.

Greer’s analysis of the Eastern Establishment offers real insight into the realities of power and influence in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that same analysis also complicates his argument in significant ways. Taking a page from E. Digby Baltzell — the sociologist who popularized the term WASP — Greer describes this establishment as the postwar fusion of a New England-centric patrician class with a rising group of industrial magnates…Baltzell believed that American society benefited from the creation of this establishment. In his view, the wealthy industrialists reinforced the power and standing of the upper class while also putting them in touch with the realities of a modernizing world. At the same time, the upper-class code of conduct operated as a check on the magnates who otherwise might destroy the republic through their greed and lust for power.

Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account is overly New York centric, and downplays the important role played by the Boston tradition:

Grant, however, emphasized: “Most important, Union forces had struck a major blow for freedom and equality.” Greer’s account, in my view, generally underestimates the importance of moral and egalitarian ideals (including the principle of racial equality) in the formation of the post-Civil War leadership. He believes that “The key city in [the Eastern Establishment] constellation was always New York City,” and that the scholarship of historians and sociologists like Baltzell “is distorted by its focus on elites in lesser Establishment cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.”

But this is to dismiss the genuine struggle within the establishment, throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, between American commercial impulses embodied by New York and the ideals embodied by Boston. Conservatives who believe that politics is downstream from culture should consider how the post-Civil War histories written in Boston, for example, influenced Americans’ perceptions of national identity and national priorities. Historian Mark Peterson has demonstrated how the South’s defeat in the Civil War allowed Boston “to put its impress on the future of the United States,” not least by enabling Boston’s pioneering historians (including Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley) to construct new narratives.

Kabaservice is critical of the brand of rapacious capitalism practiced by Gilded Age elites. He also points to conflicts within the governing class of America, such as over the scope of corporate power:

And while many people believe the late 19th and early 20th centuries to have been a laissez-faire era, governments at all levels (including local and state as well as federal) took action not only to support economic growth but also to limit corporate excesses. Landmarks along this path included antitrust legislation and regulatory action, civil service reform, and the institution of progressive taxation as well as the creation of a rudimentary social welfare safety net. The Supreme Court affirmed the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, and Congress created the Federal Reserve two years later in order to ensure the nation would not have to depend on the good graces of individual bankers to survive the next financial panic. Many of these initiatives were advanced by Republicans with the support of GOP presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, which calls into question the idea of an all-encompassing political establishment.

One of the points Baltzell makes is that the WASP establishment stood as an affront to the Marxist conception of class. Here you had a class in which its own class interests did not straightforwardly determine its politics. There were people of different parties and different persuasions within the establishment itself. This ability of the establishment to make space within itself for high-stakes conflict, while regulating the conduct of that conflict, and ensuring its participants retained personal relationships and ties, was one of the establishment’s core functions. In our age of no-holds-barred, zero-sum, winner-takes-all political and cultural wars, we feel keenly the lack of this establishment function today.

Kabaservice here also emphasizes what I call the “human-social stack,” focused on making sure that techo-industrial acceleration worked well for America and Americans broadly, not just a narrow stratum of industrialists. So much focus today is on how we accelerate new technologies, build more housing or energy, etc. But the social structures and institutions in which this is embedded and deployed are of equal importance.

In general, Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account makes the establishment appear too unified and monolithic.

He also argues that the Great Depression did not mark the establishment’s decline as Greer claims, but that it continued into the postwar era. In this, I should note that Greer follows Baltzell, who sees the decline of the establishment in the 1930’s, viewing its postwar reflowering as, in his words, an “Indian summer.” Kabaservice writes:

There is no doubt that the Depression did discredit the Republican Party and many of the policies it had upheld since the 19th century, which the considerable majority of Americans came to believe had brought on the economic collapse and which offered few solutions for the widespread misery that resulted. Some Old Guard Republicans continued to cling to Gilded Age nostrums. But the party as a whole moved toward moderation during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, endorsing parts of the New Deal social welfare safety net as well as policies to educate and empower the workforce — and the result from 1940 to 1970 was both a much faster rate of growth (measured in output per person) and a more egalitarian and cohesive society than in the period from 1870 to 1940.

The Eastern Establishment pivoted in response to the Depression, away from knee-jerk association with the GOP and toward the model of Henry Stimson and his acolytes, who offered dedicated public service to both Republican and Democratic administrations as an expression of placing the interests of nation above class. Although many today would dismiss this idea of noblesse oblige as a myth, it was reinforced by the high rate of World War II casualties among graduates of elite prep schools and universities as well as the service of dollar-a-year men in government and the wholesale conversion of American industry to wartime production. The postwar era also saw the movement toward meritocracy in Ivy League universities under leaders like Harvard’s James Conant and Yale’s Kingman Brewster Jr., largely because they believed that elite institutions had national responsibilities that transcended the interests of the class into which they had been born.

I see two basic models of thinking about governance modernization in America. One is the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. The other is the era from 1933-1964, running from the New Deal through to the postwar institutions (like the UN and NATO) to the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, America was creating a new set of institutions to deal with new challenges. Kabaservice is very enamored of the latter era.

FDR is an archetype of the kind of leader who can operate within the American cultural and political tradition, and yet still carry out major institutional reforms. Not everything he did was positive, obviously, but transformation was definitely necessary.

But Greer’s choice of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era may be a better parallel to our own time due to the rapid development of disruptive technologies with the potential to radically reshape society, depending on how AI turns out. Our Silicon Valley style startup world that can create stupendous wealth and power for founders is definitely more akin to that era than say the 1950s “organization man” one.

Kabaservice also has to reckon with the fact that in his preferred era, the establishment failed to accomplish the most critical thing it needed to do, namely perpetuate itself.

Also missing within the accounts of Greer, Kabaservice - and me - is a look at the streak of self-critique and even self-loathing within the WASP class that emerged in the early 1900s. This is over-emphasized by non-WASPs with an ethnic ax to grind, like Michael Knox Beren in his book Wasps, and I have not yet come across a good modern treatment of it.

Greer and Kabaservice agree on a key point that is very relevant today, namely the importance of the establishment being willing to make personal and class sacrifices for the sake of the nation in order to perpetuate their own dominant position.

Tanner Greer is correct that the Eastern Establishment played an outsized role in American history over a decades-long span because it aligned industrial wealth, political power, and a culture sustained by upper-class rituals and institutions. But what made the establishment durable — and indeed gave it legitimacy — was less lockstep agreement on political issues than an ethos that subordinated class interest to national interest. At its heart was a compromise that involved not just the negotiated mutual absorption of two rival groups but their adjustment to a higher national creed. The New England aristocracy allowed the “crude but vital America” into its ranks, while the industrialists agreed to Puritan-inspired limits on their pursuit of profit at all costs. The establishment that emerged did, at its best, prove willing to incorporate talented outsiders, to adhere to an ethos of disinterested public service, to abide by norms of liberal democracy, and to build institutions that ultimately undermined its own dominance — even while helping to make the United States the most globally competitive society the world had ever seen.

This echoes Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in his Prison Notebooks:

Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.

This is a critical element missing from the worldview of Silicon Valley elites, Wall Street financiers, and other would-be dominant groups like “the 9.9%” upper middle class.

You can click over to read Kabaservice’s entire essay.

Related: The newsletter Upper Middle - targeted at the anxieties of the urban upper middle class - has a fun online game called “The Elite Game” in which you try to perpetuate your ruling class over the generations by deciding which people to include or exclude.

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New Content and Media Mentions

I got a link this week in Ross Douthat’s New York Times newsletter. And the crew at Theology Pugcast had an interesting discussion about my essay on the link between the decline of Protestantism and the decline of literacy.

New this week:

• There Is No Boomer Succession Plan - How a generation that didn’t form its successors is structuring around its own absence

• The Three Ages of Boss Rule - The era of political machine bosses is remembered as one of corruption. It was also one that mastered important parts of politics and governance that we’ve forgotten. A guest essay by Stephen Eide.

These are the kinds of human-social formation questions about flourishing life together that are not being discussed enough in an era focused on techno-industrial policy matters like housing policy, building codes infrastructure. Both are necessary for navigating periods of American transition, as Eide shows.

Please enjoy this guest essay from Stephen Eide - Aaron.

Between roughly the Civil War and World War II, most American cities were at some point dominated by a boss and his machine. The term “boss” referred not only a powerful politician, but one who acquired, held and exercised power outside the channels dictated by law. Progressive reformers fought the bosses for control of American city government for over a century. The Progressives ultimately won, or, at least, the bosses lost.

All this is well known. What is less well known is that the entire history of bossism is contained in three films: Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (the origin), Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (the peak), and John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (decline).

Gangs of New York: How Tammany Hall Civilized New York City

Gangs of New York (Gangs) takes place in New York City during the Civil War. Its plot concerns the war between Irish and nativist gangs for control of lower Manhattan. Both lose, leading to the rise of Tammany Hall, whose innovative manner of conflict resolution laid the foundation for modern New York. The ward heelers replace the warlords and the rigid identities of immigrant and nativist are dissolved. That’s how New York was tamed.

The film’s most memorable character is Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), the nativist gang leader bent on keeping the Irish down. A primitive man, Bill resembles Homer’s Cyclops in that he has only one eye and maintains his political authority through the open threat of violence. He’s the sometimes ally of Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent), who functions as Tweed’s liaison to the slums of lower Manhattan.

In Gangs’ moral order, Boss Tweed represents progress. Tweed’s understanding of progress means thievery on a grand scale (rigging contracts for a new courthouse vs. exacting tribute from pubescent pickpockets) and bringing the Irish into the fold. Tweed tells Bill that to rely purely on violence is crude and inflexible, and he vows that Bill won’t last if he doesn’t adapt. Bill is less greedy than Tweed, and more principled in his own (bigoted) way. He’s ferociously independent, but also fatalistic. Bill knows that Tweed is right that his days are numbered. Nonetheless, he will go down fighting.

But the debate between Bill and Tweed is really a side show. Gangs’ main action concerns the struggle between the Irish and natives. The Irish are if anything even more primitive than Bill. They live in torch-lit caves, they are vengeful and as bigoted towards blacks as Bill’s crowd, and they reject the Civil War. Unlike Bill, the Irish have a bright future, but they, too, have bitter truths to learn. They seem to think that they can be New Yorkers without also being Americans. They are wrong. Scorsese asserts this by making the film’s climax not the 1863 draft riots themselves but the Union Army’s brutal suppression of them. The Army forces the Irish to submit to the legitimacy of the Civil War, and, by extension, the unconditional obligations implied by American citizenship. (Nation-building, 19^th-century style.) Becoming American means becoming an American citizen, and citizenship implies renouncing the right to pick and choose among one’s obligations, and not least during times of crisis. Scorsese is slightly less clear about what becoming less Irish and more American will mean for the Irish than he is about the nativists’ education. But, at bare minimum, it means that they too will have to become more tolerant and capable of solving their conflicts through politics instead of violence.

Tammany did not itself vanquish the gangs (which were real by the way-see Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York (1928), on which the film was based, and Tyler Ambinder’s Five Points (2010)). That task required guns and muscle. But, in providing a ready-at-hand political alternative to the gangs, Tammany answered the question: What next?

What is the purpose of city government? It is not only to provide basic services such as education and street-cleaning, but to manage conflict. Government is much more than just a fee-for-service arrangement. Humans tend to disagree about the true and the good, which produces conflict, which we need politicians to manage for us by means of persuasion, intimidation, flattery, deal making, and so forth. Politics will always be with us and we will always need politicians.

The urban party machines excelled at managing conflict. If we believe that honest, rational debate will be inadequate to resolve most conflicts, then something else will be necessary to prevent government from being rendered completely impotent and to minimize the potential for violence. In most functional democracies, that “something else” has been a party system. Centuries of political experience strongly suggest that a democracy requires some form of organized mediation to recruit and vet candidates for office, and then, when in office, provide them with the support they need to be effective. “Parties are as natural to democracy as churches to religion” (James Q. Wilson).

Scorsese seems to understand these virtues of boss rule, while remaining aware of its corruption and vulgarity. Gangs argues that boss rule was an improvement over what came before: the gangs were just as corrupt, more violent, less enlightened, and, most crucially, pettier. Modern New York for Scorsese is, above all, a great city. Tweed was not a great man, but, according to Scorsese, Tweed’s political system provided the conditions for New York’s future greatness.

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The Great McGinty: Bossism Ascendant

The Great McGinty (McGinty) takes place in an unnamed American city sometime in the first half of the 20^th century. Its plot traces the title character’s (Brian Donlevy) rise from the soup line to the governorship by means of his skills at repeat-voting, fighting, bullying, carousing, wisecracking, bid-rigging and spending public money wastefully. “The boss” (Akim Tamiroff) gives McGinty his initial break and then directs his rise. McGinty chafes under the rule of the boss, and hilarity, and McGinty’s downfall, ensue. The third major character is McGinty’s wife (Muriel Angelus), his moral guide, who bucks him up to reject the boss.

McGinty depicts boss rule at its height, when it seemed almost the natural form of American city government. Sturges gives us the fully-developed specimen. All of the essential features of Progressive age city politics are in evidence:

First, the boss was often not the mayor. Of the 20 municipal bosses surveyed in Harold Zink’s City Bosses in the United States (1930), 19 held some public office of some kind, but only two were mayors. There was no reason for the boss himself to be the mayor, since it was a ceremonial position with no real power. The office now known as the “strong mayor” did not become common until well into the 20^th century. Progressive reformers strengthened the office of mayor by wresting fiscal and administrative authority away from the local legislature and lengthening the term of office. This left no choice to the boss but to become mayor. What few bosses have emerged to dominate urban politics since WWII have all been mayors. Examples include Richard Daley pere, Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo, and Newark’s Sharpe James.

Second, machine politics was genuinely democratic in the sense that it enabled men to rise from exceedingly humble beginnings to positions of high authority. In this respect, a real life equivalent of McGinty would be Harry Truman, who owed his career to Tom Pendergast, the notorious boss of Kansas City.

Third, the lines between reformer and boss could be sometimes blurry. McGinty is first elected as a reform candidate (“Down with McBoodle! Up with McGinty!”). Wise bosses were highly sensitive to public opinion. They sometimes had to run candidates who were just distant enough from the machine to be considered graft-free. This practice was known as “perfuming the ticket.” Problem was, such candidates did not always stay in line when they got into office. Sometimes they chafed like McGinty did.

Fourth, women hated grafters. The Progressive-era movements for women’s suffrage and municipal reform were practically indistinguishable. Women getting the vote dealt the bosses a grievous blow.

McGinty is a satire and therefore anti-boss. Sturges certainly expects us to like McGinty, the boss and the gang, and McGinty does eventually redeem himself by breaking with the boss (on top of earning the love of a good woman), but to say that his deep engagement in machine politics required redemption implies that bossism was a rotten system. The audience’s proxy is McGinty’s wife. She loves him, but she certainly doesn’t love his politics.

At the same time, Sturges depicts a world in which bossism as such is not seriously under threat. No fundamental structural reforms are at hand, just the occasional defeat at the polls and visit to the hoosegow.

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The Last Hurrah: Ciphers Ascendant

The Last Hurrah’s protagonist Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) is based on Boston’s James Michael Curley. We know this because of the many details drawn directly from Curley’s eventful life and career: Skeffington’s longstanding feuds with his city’s Cardinal and with the bluebloods, his personal dislike for FDR, his uxoriousness, his considerable charm and rhetorical skills, and the fact that he’s an old man running yet again for mayor in a predominantly Irish New England city.

Skeffington’s final campaign forms the plot of Hurrah. Its events transpire in the mid-20^th century, contemporaneously with the film itself (1958) and the book on which it was based (by Edwin O’Connor, published in 1956). Skeffington loses, to a young, upwardly-mobile Irish American put up by the local WASP establishment.

Times have changed since Skeffington entered politics in the late 19^th century. TV and radio have replaced flesh-pressing and spontaneous, street-corner oratory. The city is wealthier, and some of that wealth has reached the Irish, Skeffington’s traditional base. Their wealth has made them less resentful, rendering WASP-baiting demagoguery less effective than it used to be. Skeffington is aware of these changes, but he’s still convinced that one last victory is in his grasp. He believes that all it will take is a mix of charm, intimidation, patronage and loyalty, but events prove him wrong.

Skeffington’s is a personal machine. Bosses created machines, not vice versa. All urban machines depended on the leadership from a strong boss. We see this in the fact that we tend to refer to most of the important machines by the names of the boss who gave them life and influence (Pendergast, Hague, Crump). Tammany Hall, which did manage to last a long time and transcend the leadership of individual bosses, was the exception, not the rule.

And in that he controls the machine and not vice versa, Skeffington may be said to be his own man, the genuine article. He may be a bit of a grafter, but, in Hurrah, he’s not the candidate beholden to special interests. That would be McCluskey, Skeffington’s nebbish opponent. The film argues that, for all their faults, decline of Skeffington and his like heralded a more inauthentic form of politics. (The phrase used in Hurrah the novel is “a generation of ciphers.”) Politicians would thenceforth be packaged, handled and promoted like so many different brands of soap. The backlash against scriptedness and inauthenticity we see in the appeal of candidates such as Herman Cain and Ross Perot. These are not great men, but, in that authenticity is surely a condition of greatness, the decline of Skeffington’s ways portends the decline of greatness in city politics.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Hurrah depicts the last stages of unity and reconciliation projected by Gangs. The subtitle of The Last Hurrah could be The Revenge of the WASP. Skeffington finds himself fighting against both the new Irish middle-class and old money Protestants. His moment seems to have been a blip, a brief transition phase in American urban history. By the film’s conclusion, history has come full circle and ethnic conflicts are resolved in a way that could never have happened while blueblood-baiters like Skeffington remained in power.

It’s somewhat difficult for the audience to appreciate how Skeffington could have lost to McCluskey. Based on what we are shown, the latter seems like a total boob. But we’re not the voters. To the increasingly affluent second and third generation Irish-Americans, Skeffington comes off as uncouth, just as he always did to the WASPs. They want a mayor that mirrors their conception of themselves: young, well-educated (in a conventional sense), nicely (not nattily) attired, and untainted by unsavory connections and loyalties.

In their classic study City Politics (1963), Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson argued that this trend was general among ethnic voters in the American city at mid-century. Yes, Jews still preferred to vote for Jewish candidates, Irish for Irish candidates and so on, but:

[t]he candidates must not be too Polish, too Italian, or too Irish in the old style…[N]owadays, the nationality-minded voter prefers candidates who represent the ethnic group but at the same time display the attributes of the generally admired Anglo-Saxon model. The perfect candidate, then, is of Jewish, Polish, Italian, or Irish extraction and has the speech, dress, manner, and the public virtues-honesty, impartiality, and devotion to the public interest-of the upper-class Anglo-Saxon (p.43).

According to Hurrah, the Progressives were far less consequential in bringing down the bosses than two other factors. First, New Deal social welfare programs devalued the soft and hard currencies with which the machines purchased the immigrant vote (this thesis is advanced more explicitly in the book than the film). Second, the rising tide of prosperity produced the lace curtain Irish, who were wealthier, younger and less angry than their parents and grandparents who had composed Skeffington’s base. There are Progressives in Hurrah, who provide important leadership and money, but this was a battle that they had been waging for decades. Why did they prove more successful at this moment? Because the Irish were ready to move on.

Conclusion

Gangs, McGinty and Hurrah set the standard not only because of their combination of historical accuracy and artistic merit, but because they are actually about politics. David Simon’s The Wire is probably the most highly-regarded recent treatment of city politics. But Simon doesn’t take politics seriously. The Wire holds that the real life of the city occurs in society, not government, and that politicians and their policies and institutions cause more problems than they solve.

Aside from the 2004 Gangs, most of the first-class filmmakers and writers in our own time tend to look past city politics. No one makes movies like these anymore. Perhaps the triumph of the Progressive vision of municipal reform made city politics less colorful. Hurrah portends a future of McCluskeys. But the problem cannot be purely for lack of material: there is nothing McCluskey-esque about Rudy Giuliani, Baltimore’s William Donald Schaefer, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell and Providence’s Buddy Cianci. All made great copy, and yet they seem to have been largely overlooked by our more serious poets, filmmakers and novelists.

America needs to both navigate through generational turnover, and start rebuilding its leadership capacity.

A recent article in the New York Times on the future of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute annual gala (gift link) sheds light on how some institutions and leaders are thinking about this transition to post-Boomer leadership.

Simply put, they aren’t planning for there to be one. The existing Boomer head of the Met Gala, longtime Vogue magazine supremo Anna Wintour, age 76, is sticking around. And the plan is that by the time she’s done, the gala will be financially superfluous.

The piece starts by asking about the future of the event given its high profile stature, very high dollar take, and high wattage leader in Anna Wintour.

For years, as the Met Gala has grown ever bigger, blanketing social media with pictures of guests in their finery, smashing cultural fund-raising records, teetering on the line between fabulous and ridiculous, the questions and controversies surrounding New York’s “party of the year” have likewise proliferated.

Could the shindig, nominally a benefit for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, get any more high-profile? When most of the country was struggling, should any institution be charging $100,000 a ticket for a party? And perhaps most important: What would happen when Anna Wintour, the evening’s mastermind and the woman who transformed it from a typical charity ball into an attention-guzzling juggernaut, retired?

…

What made the Costume Institute an anomaly in the museum ecosystem was that it raised most of its money via a party — one that had increasingly overshadowed almost every other activity of the museum itself, and that, like Wintour’s daytime employer, Condé Nast, seemed increasingly reliant on her presence and power. And though Wintour has been quick to say she is not going anywhere, she is 76 and last year relinquished day-to-day control of American Vogue to focus on her role as Condé’s chief content officer.

“Anna Wintour is not replaceable,” said William Norwich, the editor for fashion and interior design at Phaidon Press and a former editor at Vogue. [emphasis added]

This story is deeper than the Met. It illustrates a pattern of how many Boomers have led in American institutions. Wintour is a legendary editor. She was known as a fashion kingmaker and worked with a stable of photographers she helped make famous (or in some cases, more famous). But she is not especially notable as a developer of equivalent editorial talent, and seems not to have produced anyone who could plausibly succeed her at the Met Gala.

That failure seems characteristic of very top tier Boomer leaders. From what I’ve observed, they saw themselves as talent developers, but were unable to successfully create successors or protégés of similar accomplishment.

Two additional examples will illustrate. Mitch Daniels is widely seen as the greatest political leader in recent Indiana history. He was a transformational two-term governor. He gained national press for a successful transformational tenure as president of Purdue University. He was touted as a potential Presidential contender. He is associated with a leadership development program that bears his name, showing his commitment to the subject. Yet none of his protégés have come close to equalling his record. This is a big contrast to Daniels’ own mentor Richard Lugar, who not only helped develop Mitch Daniels himself, but multiple other very high impact local civic leaders whose names are not nationally known.

Another example is the legendary urban pastor Tim Keller, builder of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church and the de facto creator of evangelicalism’s modern urban church movement. He invested a lot of personal time and money to train the next generation of pastors, something clearly very important to him. But none to date have become leaders or had impact on a similar scale.

It’s not obvious why this happened with Boomer leaders, but it’s worth studying in more detail. I have noticed that top Boomer leaders, like Wintour, tend not to surround themselves with people who might ever plausibly equal or upstage the boss someday. Or who have their own ideas. They want people who will completely subordinate themselves to the boss’ ambitions and vision. They also seem to believe that they alone have what it takes, which might account for why many of them hold on to their positions for so long.

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Returning to the Met Gala, it appears that for quite some time the Met has realized it is not sustainable. Part of this is because it is the very nature of such events to rise and fall. Especially in fashion, we should be expecting things to be going in and out of style.

But Met leadership also recognizes that it simply will not be possible for anyone to plausibly fill Wintour’s shoes. What do you do when your leader is irreplaceable?

Their solution appears to have been underway for some time: save enough money from the last days of Wintour into an endowment so that the Costume Institute never has to raise funding again - or at least nothing like what it does now.

Would the brands and people willing to pony up these exorbitant sums to be in one another’s orbits instead pocket the money [after Wintour is gone]? And if so, what would that mean for the future of the Costume Institute, a department that has been almost fully dependent on the gala as a source of its annual funds since the party began, in 1948?

Could it even survive without the extravaganza?

It turns out the museum itself has been quietly working on an answer.

“Since 2016, we have been putting some money that we raised for the gala aside into a quasi endowment,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, said this month.

And by 2030 — possibly as soon as 2028 — the Costume Institute will have saved enough of a nest egg to potentially support its own basic operations for the foreseeable future, no matter what happens in the greater museum economy or with the gala itself.

…

Though [Costume Institute curator-in-charge Andrew] Bolton and a museum spokeswoman said it was museum policy not to discuss specific department finances, and though the Met does not break out such numbers in its annual report, they did acknowledge the Costume Institute fund had been formally created in 2016 and was, like most of the museum’s endowments, run by the Met’s investment and development teams…Still, some back-of-the-envelope math is possible. Given that the operating budget of the Costume Institute is approximately $5 million a year, it would most likely require an endowment of between $100 and $130 million. (According to the American Alliance of Museums, 5 percent is the average draw of an endowment fund.) The gala has raised $166.5 million over the past 10 years, so subtracting the operating costs and the amount that goes directly to the Met would suggest there is approximately $106 million in the fund (a bit less if there were unusual expenses one year). This year’s gala added a record-setting $42 million to that sum, so if the party continues on the financial trajectory it has set for another two to three years, that would easily ensure enough capital in the fund to allow the department to essentially live off the interest going forward.

This plan has obviously been ongoing for some time.

To some extent, this is a smart move. The Met recognized that there was no next generation leader that could sustain the event at its current level. So they created an endowment to sustain the Costume Institute without pressure on Wintour’s ultimate successor to continue raising huge dollars via the gala every year is a good idea.

Tim Keller’s succession plan at Redeemer Pres had some similar attributes. After he officially retired as pastor, he used his star power to conduct a large fundraising campaign that no successor could plausibly pull off - about $100 million. He also split his church into three separate, smaller church entities with shared services between them. I said at the time, and still believe it, was a really great plan. There simply wasn’t, and in his case perhaps never could have been, a successor with the kind of star power and competence necessary to sustain the enterprise in its previous form.

It seems likely that many institutions will follow a variation on this path: maximize the return on current Boomer leadership, while structuring around a future with a diminished role for leadership - and possibly the institution itself - once the Boomer leader is no longer there.

This is actually the right move in many cases. When there’s no obvious high stature successor, or institutional sustainability is in question, institutions where it’s feasible should be thinking about this kind of approach. (This was not necessary, however, at Purdue, where Daniels recruited a solid successor in Mung Chiang, someone who was largely formed at Stanford and Princeton, outside of the Daniels ecosystem).

However, there’s another side to the Met Gala story specifically. Wintour took over an event tradition nearly 50 years old. She transformed it into something bigger and bolder than anything her predecessors could have conceived of. But she also squeezed much of the juice out of it such that when she in turn does ultimately hand the baton to a successor, it’s likely destined to diminish rather than continue growing. Her successor will never have the ability to do what Wintour herself did with it, regardless of how talented that successor might be. As Bolton, who is Gen X, put it cryptically, “It’ll be interesting to see how it’s going to evolve.”

This reminds me of how at a partnership I used to work for, as soon as the last Boomer made full partner, they IPO’d the company and capitalized all the future returns for themselves. Future generations would never get the opportunity previous ones had. Or think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back.

As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become over-optimized around a single person (or generation), no matter how talented, in ways that sacrifices the long-term trajectory of the institution or future generations.

Part of leaving a place better than when you found it means making sure its future stewards have the same or better opportunities than you had. Our failure to do that in America writ large - or at least the widespread feeling that we’ve failed - is why so many people think the American Dream is dead.

Perhaps the most important part of getting through the American Transition is to reset the game board here, so that people think they are on a personal, institutional, and national upward escalator extending behind and ahead of them through time.

Cover image: Anna Wintour by UKinUSA/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

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