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

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

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

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

Can Scouting Still Raise Boys?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click over to read the entire essay at the Dispatch.

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On Demographic Transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of the Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Content and Media Mentions

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

New this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Decline of White America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disappearing Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “Government makes markets.”

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

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

The Commodification of Urban America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are you?

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

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

It is also one of its greatest illusions.

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

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

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

Who are we?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nations are no different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis Mumford put it this way:

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

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

What Is Sacred Space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Suburbs Are Comparatively Lacking in Sacred Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover image: Adele by Kristopher Harris, CC BY 2.0

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

The Self-Optimization Cult

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, read the whole thing.

Forming Priests

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

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

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

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

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

The Political Economy of AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Online Intellectual Discourse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

Best of the Web

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.

NYT: Behind Every Dad Bod Is a Healthy Dad Brain (gift link) - “When it comes to brain health and mental fitness, becoming a father is one of the best things you can do.”

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.

Read more

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.