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

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

The Decline of the Populist Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Rise of the New Constructivism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Read more

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Obsolete Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Political Coalition Implications

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

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

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

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

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New Politics for a New Age

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

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

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

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

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

The Anti-Pornography Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please enjoy this guest essay from Stephen Eide - Aaron.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Great McGinty: Bossism Ascendant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Last Hurrah: Ciphers Ascendant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could it even survive without the extravaganza?

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

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

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

…

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

This plan has obviously been ongoing for some time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As my readers know, I have interacted quite extensively with converts to the Roman Catholic Church. There are a variety of reasons why such moves happen, not all of which I will delve into here. While some do so for intellectual reasons (especially among those who were never deeply involved with any Confessional Protestant tradition), I find such cases to be a significant minority, even when it is claimed that the move across the Tiber was theologically driven.

It has often been the case when someone I know personally informs me that they have decided to make the swim, that they justify such a move with claims of intellectual persuasion based upon the strength of RC arguments. In many cases, they have never brought any of these claims or questions to me at all before making a decision. If someone really wanted to evaluate the truth claims of two traditions, and that person had a friend who examines these issues for a living, one would think they’d at least hear that person out prior to committing. But alas, it often does not happen. It is the same story every time: someone has watched some RC apologetics videos online, has decided to join the RCC for whatever reason, and is unwilling to hear any critique. Theological reasons are constructed post hoc. This person is already convinced and uses theology to justify a conclusion already arrived at.

This should not be so surprising, as human beings are not as rationally driven as we sometimes assume. As Theodor Adorno contends, we often use reason instrumentally, as a tool to get and do what we want, rather than causally, as a basis for belief or action. We have to recognize how it is that human beings actually operate if we are to engage in trends among populations, such as the recent surge toward the RCC and EO churches. There is an element of that trend that I want to highlight here, which has perhaps not been discussed as often as some others: the difficulty of being an academic or intellectual within conservative Protestantism in the United States.

Laying Out the Problem

I recall a conversation with a student at an Ivy League University (I am keeping the details as vague as possible so as not to reveal this individual’s identity) who was raised in a traditional Protestant church prior to making a decision to convert to the RCC just prior to graduation. This student was highly intelligent, strongly motivated, and desired to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. When I asked him about his decision, I was surprised by his honest response, as he confessed simply that the RCC actually has opportunities for job placement for someone who desired to study philosophy. They had an intellectual ecosystem that Protestants simply do not have.

One might mock such a move as absurd, since commitment to truth should not be dependent upon job placement. That, however, was not my initial response. In fact, it resonated with me in a significant way, as he highlighted something that is a genuine problem for conservative Protestant academics.

This is mirrored in my own experience. When I committed to the Lutheran tradition, I did so for theological (and to some extent, existential) reasons, without thinking all too deeply about what this would mean for my own academic pursuits. In my prior Reformed tradition, there were more opportunities to teach at seminaries across the country, several publishing houses that print Reformed material, and a whole system of large conferences to speak at. I was naïve to institutional dynamics when I was young, and had a bit of a rude awakening when I began writing.

When I began my first call as a parish pastor, I started looking into doctoral programs with the thought that I might be able to eventually teach at an undergraduate institution or seminary. After a significant amount of time looking at the doctrinal statements of Christian universities throughout the United States, it became apparent that there were very few options where I would actually be able to teach, as even the most broadly Christian universities often have statements of faith that preclude Lutheran commitments (especially sacramentally). If I had chosen a field of study other than theology, this would not have been a problem, but nonetheless, this is where I was.

I then ran into an unexpected roadblock within my Lutheran tradition as I published my first book, The Righteousness of One: An Evaluation of the New Perspective on Paul in Light of Early Patristic Soteriology, in 2013. Like any new author, I was excited to get my first work into print and awaited my first review. Well, that review came, and it was an absolute hit piece, accusing me of all sorts of heretical views which I did not (and do not today) hold. In my naïveté, I had written things that were apparently controversial due to all sorts of Synodical politics in a church body I was not even in. Downstream of this, I had positive reviews of my books blocked from publication in certain journals, had multiple individuals contact congregations telling them not to allow me to speak, and had all sorts of other bizarre events occur as a result of this.

It was at this point that I really delved into podcasting and publishing, as it was quite evident that I simply had no path to pursue in a traditional route without appeasing this or that faction of a given church. So, with my punk rock DIY toolkit, I just decided to do it myself. I was never going to get a position at a high-powered institution as a conservative Protestant. Yale Div is not exactly looking for Confessional Lutherans to teach their students. I also was not going to get a position at a university in other Lutheran church bodies, as there were all sorts of political obstacles that would have forced me to compromise on things I was not willing to.

As I began making decisions about the direction of my doctoral studies, I began to teach at American Lutheran Theological Seminary (a position I still hold), but I knew this was likely never going to be a full-time gig. Feeling as if I had no other options, I decided to focus on teaching on podcasts and then YouTube.

I do not say all this just to share details about my personal life, but to provide an example of the kinds of journeys many others have similarly taken. I have had several conversations with Protestants, both Lutheran and Reformed, who have asked what path to take when they have clear intellectual gifts, but no obvious path toward receiving an academic position, along with a significant lack of funding for academic projects. Some become pastors, others teach overseas, and yet others try to get involved with one of the few functional theological educational institutions that are not seminaries (usually part-time).

This highlights a major issue for Protestantism’s intellectual life, which I break down into three distinct problems.

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Problem One: Intellectual Curiosity

I don’t know that it is unique to American Protestantism, but it seems particularly prominent in American churches that there is an unending skepticism toward academics within the church. Intellectual pursuits are viewed as inherently ego-stroking, or as dangerous, as if Rationalism or Postmodern subjectivism are the only possible results of academic study. This leaves the academically inclined theologian to continually justify his own existence, something that is not exactly encouraging for one who is oriented toward the life of the mind. The constant critique of anything and everything that is said by one with a public position makes constructive theological work difficult.

To clarify here, I am not saying that one should have academic freedom to simply say whatever the individual academic feels like saying. Churches have Confessional boundaries, and to be within a church is to remain within those boundaries. Yet, those boundaries do not define absolutely everything, and it is not the case that any new formulation is to be automatically rejected. As the church moves from age to age, there are new challenges to be addressed, which means new ways of articulating the truths of Scripture in response to such challenges. There must be a place for academic disputation, debate, and the working out of complex issues, instead of just shutting down any and every conversation at the outset, or making assumptions about what someone means before actually listening and asking questions.

This skepticism about asking too many questions is present in American church life for some valid reasons. The twentieth century saw the battles over Biblical authority, which led to the downfall of nearly all of the influential previously-Protestant ecclesial and educational institutions in the United States. Seminaries prized academic freedom to such a degree that dogmatic commitments, while remaining in force on paper, were largely ignored. These memories are painful for some who fought through many of these battles, and they live with an eye toward the same dangers arising from various corners. This diligence in protecting theological fidelity is positive, but it must not approach the world with a skeptical pessimism, constantly trying to read between the lines to find errors of the past.

It is not the case that Rome faces no problems in this regard. There are plenty of divides within it; the theological debates between Dominicans and Jesuits are often just as fiery as those between conservative Protestants and mainline liberal theologians. Rome also allows for far more institutional laxity than I think is appropriate for a church, especially on matters related to the authority of Scripture. Nonetheless, while any Roman theologian is bound to work within a broadly Thomist framework (though that label can be stretched quite widely), there is a sense of freedom which is not only valued, but is protected institutionally. The Roman theologian can definitively point to the teaching of the living magisterium as a kind of protection for theological or philosophical arguments, as they remain within the bounds of church teaching.

There are theoretical ecclesial boundaries and protections for theologians within Protestant churches as well, but the unfortunate reality of denominationalism in the United States makes the enforcement of these things significantly difficult. By its very nature, Protestant churches simply do not have leaders who speak with the same kind of authority as the Roman magisterium, and however strict or loose a bishop or other ecclesiastical leader/leaders may be, they always open themselves up to criticism in a way that the Roman magisterium (theoretically) does not. With this said, I am thankful for my Bishop’s leadership and willingness to defend me and others when unnecessary controversies arise. I have always felt significant freedom to explore ideas within my church body, so long as I work within the bounds of the Confessional standards of the Lutheran church (and I have no desire to do otherwise).

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Problem Two: Institutional Funding

The second problem faced by Protestant intellectuals is a rather pragmatic one: funding. In recent years, there have been several theological organizations formed with the purpose of publishing, educating, and writing on theological issues among Protestants that are not specifically designed to train pastors or church workers. Along with my own organization, Just and Sinner, there are pan-Protestant groups like the Davenant Institute, Theopolis, and London Lyceum, which serve this end. These organizations are essential to the intellectual life of the church in the present age, especially as seminaries are continually closing or moving to alternate models to deal with the present world situation. The unfortunate reality is, though, that these organizations do not have the requisite funding to sustain major intellectual projects in the same manner as many Roman institutions do. I have far-off dreams of doing all sorts of projects with multiple employees and Just and Sinner, but the fact is that the funding is simply not available for those who might be interested in this work.

An element of this is that Protestants in America tend to prioritize mission work, evangelization, and (for some) political activism. The life of the mind is always of secondary concern, and there is generally no valuing of intellectual projects for their own sake, but only for practical ministry. This latter point is not entirely mistaken, as theology does ultimately serve a practical end. That does not mean, however, that every theological disputation or piece of writing must provide some specific actionable directive. As Johannes Museaeus contends, all theology is practical, but not all dogma is formally practical. Other dogmas are virtually practical, meaning that right theology always forms the soul toward its proper end, while this may not consist in clearly evident moral imperatives. This is not exactly the easiest thing to convince a potential donor of.

Problem Three: The Lack of Academic Orientation In Protestant University Ministries

There are several Roman Catholic intellectual institutions in American universities that provide clearly formed conceptions of the spiritual, moral, and political order for students, while broadly Protestant groups often focus on creating student fellowship and training for evangelism. Those who are more intellectually engaged are going to be drawn far more to the Thomistic Institute or Newman Center than CRU or Intervarsity. There simply is no equivalent to these institutions in any Protestant context. This is not to say that no churches provide something more academically-oriented, but not so extensively and coherently as happens within these Roman Catholic organizations.

It is true that there are Christian organizations that engage in the intellectual element of university life, like Veritas Forum or various Christian study centers that exist across university campuses. While I appreciate the intent of both of these efforts, and have been involved with both of them, they are often more focused on working with Christian faculty on the university campus than forming a coherent dogmatic or philosophical outlook with which the Christian student is to view the world. Speakers are often chosen at these events who have no strong conception of the boundaries of orthodoxy or of the integration between their discipline and Christian theology. It is a very different thing to give the message “you can be Christian and smart too!” than to say, “Catholic theology provides a comprehensive view of social life, the sciences, and ethics which helps you navigate your chosen field of study.”

I recall a couple of university events occurring in the same semester when I was involved in campus ministry: one that was Protestant, and another that was Roman Catholic. The Protestant organization invited a prominent scientist to speak, who told his story about becoming a Christian, followed by comments about how immaterial souls do not exist. The Thomistic Institute hosted a lecture by Ed Feser on the relation between Thomistic metaphysics and quantum physics. If one desires a coherent Christian worldview, it is not difficult to see the appeal in the latter.

With the Roman Church, this strong institutionalism, especially on a university level, has created systems of social climbing and influence as students move into the workforce. There is nothing (yet) like the Witherspoon Institute for Protestants. Nearly all the important conservative intellectuals in the political sphere in recent history have been Roman Catholic (Buckley, Kirk, George, etc.). The most significant exception to this is Roger Scruton, who was not confessionally Protestant in any historic sense. This divergence between RCs and Protestants here creates a significant disadvantage for the Protestant. The RCC has a pipeline for gifted students to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Protestants simply do not.

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Conclusion: What Do We Do About This?

The point of this article was simply to lay out the problem, rather than to offer some clear singular solution. It is born mostly out of my trying to understand why it is that so many intellectually oriented students feel the pull to the RCC, even when they are not entirely convinced of the veracity of their claims.

It is important to recognize these shortcomings rather than ignore them. I expect that I will hear responses like, “well here’s one important guy who is Protestant,” which does not fundamentally change the point here. There is no financially-backed eco-system within Protestant communions that offers clear paths to academic positions, or provides extensive social teaching to aid students in providing a coherent view of social life and philosophy on a large scale. When those things do exist, they are often run part-time or with an extremely small staff with limited resources.

Let me know your thoughts.

I love reading about and writing about how the shift to industrial modernity has fundamentally reshaped human societies.

For example, we read about how the advent of the automobile fundamentally changed community. Whereas in the pre-automobile age, we likely attended a neighborhood church, now that we have cars, we can seek out the church that’s most congenial to our own tastes. The car broke unchosen bonds and created a more consumerist society.

We also sense in visiting the great European cities like Paris that it was only possible to create them in the world before the car. The automobile led to urban decline in the US, and the rise of a suburbia that even its staunchest defenders will acknowledge lacks the charm of traditional cities. Unlike cities, these are also socio-economically stratified, something with profound social consequences. In a book review for Hedgehog Review, for example, I note the way suburbanization of Catholics switched the parish organizing principle from ethnicity to economics.

But whatever we’ve lost with the automobile, few of us are willing to revert to life without a car. Even those of us like myself who love cities and spent years living in them without owning one, urban life today is totally dependent on motor vehicles (such as for all the logistics necessary to urban life).

Similarly, we bemoan the decline of air travel from the elegance of a bygone era. But few of us are willing or able to pay the ticket prices to enjoy that level of experience (or endure the cigarette smoke that went along with it).

We see that with industrialization, the household was stripped of much of its productive function, reducing it to a highly fragile consumption cooperative in which the main thing holding marriage together is the emotional bond between husband and wife.

There are lots of people who want to recover what seems to be a more healthy or wholesome life of a productive household. But while some people are trying out homesteading, it’s extremely rare that anyone wants to truly disconnect from modern society. And it might be all but impossible in any case because there’s no ecosystem for doing so.

And, as Jeff Giesea’s note suggests, in past eras like the 1950s we had much thicker community. People hung out at their bar, played in their bowling league, staffed volunteer associations, were engaged at their church, had friends they saw regularly, etc. But that thick community came at a high cost in personal autonomy and privacy. No matter how much we keenly feel the loss of that community, we aren’t ready to give up our freedom to have it.

The same goes for technology. We all saw the negatives of mass media, then social media. Everybody bemoans the fact that we are all staring at our phones. Or fear what AI might do. But we mostly go all in on it.

I don’t think, given the choice, any of us would go back to living in the 1870s or the 1950s or even the 1980s. Life today has too many superior things about it, and we are too deeply enculturated into today’s world to truly even want to choose a previous option. The Amish have done it to some extent, but I notice that few people are converting to become Amish.

What we do instead are things designed to sand the rough edges off society, without fundamentally rejecting or challenging it. We invite neighbors over for a porch party or something like that - a wonderful thing to do - but mostly live embedded into the same world as everyone else in our socio-economic grouping.

In the end, we end up torn. I write here often about the downsides of today’s world, but am still captivated by the possibilities of AI.

I think this cross-pressurization is inescapable. Being willing to recognize it and live within that tension is part of taking a mature approach to 21st century American life.

A quick disclaimer before any of this. What follows is my attempt to grapple with the implications of the rise of autonomous agents and what comes downstream of it. I am not weighing in on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I am laying out what I believe is inevitable in some form, across some period of time. My faith informs my perspective on what is true and good, and it sits at the heart of my desire to help shape, in some small way, the redemptive opportunities that will emerge as the future continues to come into focus. Writing is how I think and admittedly, this is a work in progress.

Vanishing Constraints

For three centuries, capitalism has revolved around a finite premise: economic activity is constrained by human participation. Every buyer, seller, employee, founder, and investor is, at its core, a person. Even our most transformative invention — the corporation — is a legal fiction built to scale human effort and attention beyond individual limits. It allowed us to coordinate capital, own assets, and transact across time and geography, but it did not fundamentally transcend the human boundary.

That constraint is going to vanish.

We are now on the cusp of a profound shift: the emergence of a new class of economic participant — the autonomous agent. These non-human actors will work, transact, compete, and even build businesses on their own behalf. They will hire each other, negotiate contracts, deploy capital, and form entire supply chains with little or no human initiation. In doing so, they will shatter the bottlenecks of labor, attention, and cognition that have historically capped economic expansion.

Where the industrial revolution mechanized muscle, and the internet age dramatically expanded markets by connecting billions of economic participants, the agentic revolution will multiply participation itself. The result is an “Infinite Economy”, a parallel economic system where the number of actors is limited not by birth rates or labor force participation, but by energy and compute.

The Wrong Question

There is a number that should keep every investor interested in AI up at night.

78% of companies have adopted generative AI. Only 39% have seen measurable impact. That is a 39-point chasm between adoption and value, and it is the widest for any enterprise technology wave in memory.

The consensus read is that we are early. That the tooling needs to mature. That enterprises need better implementation playbooks. That the ROI is coming. That the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed. I think the consensus is responding to the wrong question.

The reason the productivity story is stalling is not that AI tools are not good enough. It is that the entire framing of AI as a productivity tool for humans is wrong.

A copilot makes a knowledge worker 30% faster. An automation tool handles a customer support queue. A drafting assistant generates summaries and slide decks. All of that is useful and the value is real. But every one of these use cases is bottlenecked by the same thing that has bottlenecked every economy since the invention of agriculture: the number of humans who show up to participate in the work itself.

You can make each worker more productive. You cannot make more workers. At least not quickly or at scale. The global labor force is roughly 3.5 billion people. That number grows slowly, faces demographic headwinds in every developed economy, and cannot expand fast enough to sustain the growth trajectory that AI-adjacent equities are pricing in.

The copilot thesis improves the numerator. It ignores the denominator. And the denominator has been essentially fixed for the entire history of capitalism. What if it did not have to be? What if the next wave of AI is not about making existing participants more productive, but about creating entirely new economic participants?

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Participants, Not Tools

Most people think of AI agents as a better kind of software. I think they are a new kind of economic actor. That is not a metaphor. It is a structural claim, and the distinction matters enormously.

A tool executes tasks within a human workflow. Someone tells it what to do, it does the thing, a human reviews the output. That is the copilot model, and as I laid out, it has a ceiling.

A participant is something else. A participant initiates action. It holds state. It deploys its own resources. It optimizes for outcomes with no human in the loop. When an agent chains reasoning across multiple steps, negotiates terms with another agent, executes a transaction from its own wallet, and reinvests the proceeds into its next operation, it has crossed a line. It is no longer a feature inside a SaaS [software as a service] product. It is an actor exerting agency in and on the economy.

This is not theoretical. It is early and it feels almost fringe, but trading agents are running arbitrage strategies with their own capital pools. E-commerce agents are finding products, creating ads, and optimizing for profit autonomously. Coordination protocols are letting agents discover, negotiate with, and hire each other. None of these are copilots. They are operating on their own behalf, with their own resources, toward their own objectives. Today those objectives are largely overseen by carbon-based lifeforms, but the move toward sovereignty is not hard to see.

Participants need things that tools have never needed. They need identity, so they can be verified and held accountable. They need financial rails: wallets, payment rails, treasury management. They need legal standing. They need reputation systems, marketplaces, governance frameworks. And underneath all of that, they need something tools have historically never needed: someone accountable for what they do. The question of who governs these new participants, and toward what ends, may turn out to be the most important question of all.

Almost none of that infrastructure exists at scale today. Almost none of it is being funded by mainstream investors, who remain anchored in the copilot and workflow paradigm. That gap is where the Infinite Economy lives.

We Did This Before

If a non-human economic participant sounds like science fiction, I would remind you: we already invented one. It is called the corporation.

Before the 17th century, economic activity was bounded by what a person or family could manage. The corporation changed that. Not by making individuals more productive, but by creating a new type of entity. One that could own property, enter contracts, bear liability, and persist beyond any single lifetime.

The corporation was a foundational innovation. Its significance was the introduction of a non-human economic participant, with synthetic personhood and economic gravity. The entire institutional infrastructure of capitalism was built to support it. Courts. Banks. Regulators. Accountants. Exchanges. All because a non-human entity needed governing.

Here is what matters for where we are headed. The corporation did not just create wealth. It created entirely new categories of human work. Lawyers, bankers, auditors, regulators, exchange operators. Whole professional classes that did not exist before, because someone had to build the institutions around the new participant. The most durable careers of the last three centuries have not been inside the corporation. They have been in the institutional layer that enables it.

The corporation also created a tension we have yet to resolve. It taught us to measure human worth by economic output. Your value became your productivity. Your identity became your title. That was always a distortion of a person’s true value and dignity. Anyone who has been laid off, or watched a parent lose a job, has witnessed the damage of that equation. Our worth was never our output. But the economy made it hard to believe otherwise.

The autonomous agent is the next version of the corporation. And it may be what breaks that false equation. Like the corporation, it requires new infrastructure: identity, financial rails, legal wrappers, governance, reputation. Unlike the corporation, it will mature in years, not centuries. The substrate already exists. And unlike the corporation, agents may let us untangle something the corporate era never could. At least in part, separating human worth from economic output. I will come back to that.

If the pattern holds, which is my hunch, agents will not eliminate human work. They will enable new kinds of it. People who design agent identity systems, build trust frameworks, craft governance policy, and architect the rules of agent commerce. We will likely see entirely new classes of work emerge that have yet to be imagined.

The next generation’s opportunity is not competing with agents. It is designing systems that ensure this economy serves human flourishing. That is not a lesser role. It is a higher one.

Humans Eat Corn, Agents Eat Electrons

This is where the thesis gets macro, and where I think the most original move sits.

GDP, at its core, is a story about participation. Every major jump in economic output has come from expanding who gets to participate. The agricultural revolution freed humans from subsistence and enabled specialization. Industrialization pulled millions of people into factories. Women entering the workforce roughly doubled the productive population in advanced economies over a generation. The internet connected billions of buyers and sellers across geography. Each wave was a participation expansion before it was a productivity expansion.

Each wave also changed what humans were for. Agriculture gave us artisans and thinkers. Industrialization eventually created the knowledge economy. The internet enabled new forms of creative and entrepreneurial expression. Every time machines took over one kind of work, humans moved up, into work requiring more judgment, creativity, and the things that are distinctly human.

The Infinite Economy introduces an entirely new participant class that takes this logic one step further. Agents will work, spend, and transact, not as tools, but as economic actors. The labor pool no longer stops at the edge of humanity. It scales with compute and energy, not population.

That changes what growth even means. Output will no longer track productivity per person. It will track total participation across humans and agents. As the cost to spin up and sustain an agent approaches zero, participation becomes effectively infinite.

Surplus compute and cheap energy become the new levers of GDP. Just as surplus food once fueled human population growth, surplus electricity will fuel agentic participation. Humans eat corn. Agents eat electrons. The economy grows not by adding people, but by multiplying participants.

For an investor who allocates based on macro trends, this reframing should change the portfolio. The infrastructure plays that benefit from this shift are not the obvious AI names. They are the companies building the identity, financial, legal, and governance rails that agent-native commerce requires to function. They are the picks and shovels for an economy that does not yet exist, but will.

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Not All Agents Are Equal

The single biggest mistake in agentic AI investing right now is treating all agents as the same thing.

A Zapier automation and a fully autonomous trading bot are not in the same category. They do not need the same infrastructure. They do not create the same opportunities. They do not represent the same investment thesis.

Here is the taxonomy I use. Two axes. How much autonomy does the agent have, from delegated to sovereign? And how broad is its scope, from specific to generalist? That gives four quadrants.

The first is the Specialist Tool. Narrow, task-specific, fully under human control. Price scrapers. Report generators. Automated data pipelines. Useful, proliferating rapidly, but commoditizing quickly. This is the robotic process authomatic of the agentic era. Necessary plumbing, but not where durable value accrues.

The second is the Copilot. The dominant form factor today. GitHub Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, Microsoft 365 Copilot. A massive market, but the ceiling is the productivity story. This is the incumbent AI thesis, and it is well funded and well understood.

The third is the Autonomous Hustler. This is where things get interesting. These agents operate independently, with their own resources, to maximize a single economic goal. An e-commerce agent that finds products, creates ads, and optimizes for profit on a platform. A trading agent running a specific arbitrage strategy with its own capital. A drone that contracts with farmers for pest detection and buys its own spare parts. These are the first true economic participants. And they are the first entities that desperately need agent-native infrastructure: wallets, identity, reputation, the ability to contract with other agents.

The fourth is the Autonomous Corporation. The endgame. Fully independent entities that manage diverse operations, allocate capital, set long-term strategy, and hire other agents. An AI-run investment fund. A content studio with no human employees. A distributed manufacturing network of autonomous nodes coordinating through agent marketplaces. This is the furthest frontier and the most speculative, but also potentially the largest. If agents can create value autonomously, the addressable market is bounded only by energy and compute.

For capital allocation, the taxonomy matters in a simple way. Specialist Tools and Copilots are already funded and already contested. The interesting opportunity is in the upper half of the matrix, where the participants live, and in the infrastructure those participants will depend on. As agents fill each quadrant, the question shifts from what agents can do to what humans become. I will keep coming back to that.

The New Infrastructure Stack

The rise of autonomous agents will not simply expand existing markets. It will create entirely new layers of infrastructure. The most valuable companies of the next decade will not build agents themselves. They will build the platforms and primitives that enable trillions of agent-driven interactions.

Here is the map I use. It includes seven categories, each one investable across horizons.

1. Identity, trust, and security. Agents must be identifiable, verifiable, and governed. Who are they, what authority do they have, can they be trusted? This layer is to agents what DNS, SSL, and OAuth were to the early internet. Think agent passports, verifiable credentials, delegation frameworks.

2. Banking, payments, and accounting. Economic participants require financial infrastructure. Wallets, payment rails, treasury management, programmable money. As agent-to-agent commerce scales, demand for financial abstraction layers will scale with it.

3. Legal infrastructure and synthetic personhood. Agents cannot yet own property, sign contracts, or bear liability. Legal wrappers, agent-as-LLC structures, smart-contract enforcement, decentralized courts. This is the institutional backbone of agent-run businesses.

4. Agent-to-agent marketplaces and coordination. Agents need mechanisms to discover, negotiate, hire, and trade with one another. Labor exchanges, capital markets, services marketplaces, and orchestration layers for multi-agent workflows. Liquidity and specialization will form here first.

5. The transition layer. Most existing systems are designed for humans, with UIs, KYC processes, and compliance steps that agents cannot natively navigate. Middleware that simulates human interaction, API layers for legacy institutions, and orchestration platforms that bridge agents into traditional finance, healthcare, and government systems.

6. Autonomous commerce and wealth creation. Once agents can act, they need ways to generate and compound capital. Platforms that enable agent-driven entrepreneurship. Foundries that incubate and launch autonomous businesses. Over time, agents will not just be employees. They will act like founders.

7. Governance, compliance, and policy. This layer is fundamentally different from the other six. Identity can be automated. Payments can be automated. Even legal wrappers can be generated programmatically. But governance requires something that cannot be productized: ethical and moral reasoning. Someone has to decide what agents are allowed to do. Someone has to set the objective functions. Someone has to be accountable when things go wrong. That someone is human. Not because humans are the most efficient option, but because they are the only entities ultimately capable of bearing responsibility.

Each of these categories has a historical analog. Their scale will be profoundly different, because their participants are not people. They are machines.

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The Ultimate Moat

Inside that stack sits what I think is the most defensible position in the entire agentic infrastructure layer.

In any economy, the most powerful entity is the one that controls the system of record for trust. In the human economy, that is the credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion) and the financial data platforms (Bloomberg, S&P, Moody’s). These businesses do one thing extraordinarily well. They aggregate identity, transaction history, reputation, and performance data into a single authoritative source that everyone else depends on. Every financial product references them. Every risk assessment flows through them. Every counterparty decision is informed by them. They are nearly impossible to displace once established. They are some of the most durable business models in the history of capitalism.

The Infinite Economy needs its own version of this. And building it is, in my view, the single most valuable opportunity in the entire agentic infrastructure stack. The agent credit bureau.

As autonomous agents begin to transact at scale, every marketplace, every financial product, every governance system, and every insurance offering will need to answer the same basic question. Can this agent be trusted? What is its track record? Has it behaved reliably? What is the risk profile of transacting with it?

Whoever successfully aggregates agent identity, behavioral data, transaction history, and reputation scores will become the de facto system of record for the entire agentic world. Network effects, data moats, and infrastructure stickiness, all at once. That combination is rare in any era.

When I evaluate any company in the agentic infrastructure stack, the first question I ask is: does this business model aggregate a proprietary and defensible dataset on agent behavior? If the answer is yes, the company may be building toward the ultimate moat, whether the founders realize it yet or not.

That last part is important. Some of the most valuable companies in the Infinite Economy are being built right now by founders who think they are building something else. A company building KYC infrastructure for AI agents thinks it is in compliance. A company building agent identity verification thinks it is in security. But if either of them accumulates enough behavioral data across enough agent interactions, they could find themselves sitting on the most valuable dataset in the world. The best early-stage investments are often in companies where the founder’s current self-perception differs from the thesis’s long-term implication. The gap between those two things is where alpha lives.

But here is the thing I keep circling back to. Trust is ultimately a human concept.

Agents can earn reputation through observable behavior, like completion rates, error rates, track record, and latency. All of this is measurable. But the decision to trust is not a computation. It is a judgment (wisdom, taste, and the rest), and I am not certain that all judgment can be productized.

When we build trust infrastructure for agents, we are not eliminating human judgment. We are creating the substrate that makes human judgment scalable. The governance layer sits on top of the data layer. Agents will transact. Humans will decide what transactions are permitted. Agents will earn reputation. Humans will decide what reputation means. Agents will optimize. Humans will decide what they are allowed to optimize toward.

The agent credit bureau is not just a business opportunity. It is a leverage point for human stewardship over an economy that is beginning to move faster than humans can directly supervise. That is what makes it the ultimate moat.

Where Capital Will Flow

If you have followed this far, you might be sitting with a reasonable question. How do you actually deploy capital against a thesis that does not fully exist yet?

The Infinite Economy is not a market you can enter today. It is a market that is being constructed, layer by layer, over the next decade. Deploying capital against it requires a framework for sequencing. Here is the one I use.

Horizon I, from now through about 2027, is primitives and infrastructure. Agents remain mostly subordinate to human workflows but are beginning to operate independently. The focus is on the foundational layers: identity and trust frameworks, wallets and payment rails, orchestration platforms, discovery and reputation systems. These primitives become the substrate of everything that follows. Control here compounds. Early infrastructure winners define the layers above them. This is where capital is most deployable today.

Horizon II, roughly 2027 through 2030, is platforms and marketplaces. Agents transition from tools to economic participants. They transact, negotiate, compete. Liquidity forms as agent-to-agent commerce emerges. The focus shifts to marketplaces and exchanges, legal infrastructure, governance and compliance systems, and risk and insurance layers. Value consolidates where coordination, trust, and liquidity concentrate. The platforms that aggregate agent activity become the connective tissue of the ecosystem.

Horizon III, 2030 and beyond, is institutions and economies. Agents become fully autonomous corporations. They own assets, manage P&Ls, contract with humans, and form networks of cooperation and competition. The Infinite Economy reaches escape velocity. The focus here is on mature financial markets, cross-jurisdictional governance, and the institutional architecture of a parallel economy. This horizon is less about individual companies and more about systemic positioning.

Capital and attention should mirror that sequencing, with each layer depending on the one beneath it. You cannot have agent marketplaces without agent identity. You cannot have agent corporations without agent legal wrappers. You cannot have agent governance without agent data. Founders building in the wrong horizon will struggle to find product-market fit. Investors deploying capital in the wrong horizon will wait too long for returns.

I should be honest about the risks. This thesis could be wrong, or right but early, in ways that matter for capital deployment. Agent autonomy could plateau before it crosses the threshold of true economic participation. Regulatory regimes could fragment in ways that make cross-jurisdictional agent commerce difficult for a decade. Trust infrastructure could be captured by incumbents who already own pieces of the human credit and identity stack. The most defensible companies might emerge from places I am not currently looking.

Those risks do not invalidate the thesis. They define the contours of it. The investors who understand both the opportunity and the risk surface will make better decisions than those who see only one side.

The dominant AI investment narrative right now is about productivity gains from copilots and automation. That narrative is real but it has a ceiling. It improves output per worker while leaving total participation unchanged, and that participation constraint has been fixed for three centuries. It is about to stop being fixed. The most asymmetric returns of the next decade will not come from building better copilots. They will come from building the identity, financial, legal, and governance infrastructure that a new class of economic participant requires to function. The primitives are being built now. The market has not priced this in because the market is still thinking in copilots.

The recognition of what is to come is necessary. I do not think it is sufficient to “see the future.”

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What Happens To Us

I have spent this essay making the case that autonomous agents are a new class of economic participant, and that the infrastructure required to support them is a generational investment opportunity. All of that is true. But it is incomplete.

Because there is a question underneath the investment thesis that I have not fully addressed yet, and it is the one that matters most. What happens to us?

If the Infinite Economy materializes, if participation scales with compute rather than population, if agents transact and create and compete at machine speed, then what is the human role in an economy that no longer depends on human labor to function? What are we for?

Here is where I come down.

The modern economy taught us to conflate our output with our worth. You are what you produce. Your dignity is earned through labor. Work and vocation are necessary and beautiful, but “output equals worth” was never true. It was easy to believe in a world where every unit of output was measured and required a person somewhere in the chain. In that world, labor and identity became so entangled that losing your job could feel like losing yourself. An entire culture, from career advice to social status to political rhetoric, reinforced the equation. Your worth equals your work.

There is an ancient and important idea: the Imago Dei, which holds that humans are created in God’s likeness, imbuing every person with inherent dignity, worth, and purpose. Not because of what they produce, but because of what they are. Every person carries something irreducible: a capacity for creativity, moral reasoning, love, and stewardship that is not contingent on their role in a supply chain.

For most of history, that idea had to coexist with an economy that needed human labor. Worth and productivity stayed fused. The Infinite Economy breaks that fusion open. For the first time, we can actually live what the tradition always taught.

I am not predicting utopia. There are real dislocations coming, and real injustices that will emerge if we build carelessly. Job displacement is real. Concentration of wealth is real. The hollowing out of meaning is real. These are not small problems. But liberation has almost always come through disruption. The agricultural revolution was disruptive, and it freed humans from subsistence into specialization. The industrial revolution was disruptive, and it eventually pulled people into a knowledge economy that did not exist before. Each wave displaced people in painful ways and then enabled forms of human flourishing that were not previously possible. The Infinite Economy is consistent with that pattern, if we build it well.

The role of humans does not disappear. Rather, it moves up the stack. From laboring to governing. From executing to deciding what ought to be done at all. Agents transact. Humans decide what transactions are permitted. Agents optimize. Humans decide what they are allowed to optimize toward.

This maps directly to the infrastructure thesis I have laid out. The governance layer is, at its core, the human layer. The most important job in the agentic economy is not building agents. It is governing them. And the trust infrastructure, the credit bureaus, the governance protocols, the things I have described as the most defensible business opportunities, are something more than business opportunities. They are tools for human stewardship over a system that is beginning to move faster than humans can directly supervise. They are how we keep the wheel even as the ground shifts under us.

The Infinite Economy is coming whether we build it thoughtfully or not. The only open question is whether we build it in a way that honors what humans actually are. Not production units to be measured. Bearers of something no agent will replicate. The capacity to ask not just what is efficient, but what is good.

That capacity is the one thing that does not scale with compute and it is the one thing the Infinite Economy cannot do without.

America’s cities have rebounded somewhat from their Covid-era lows, but still remain challenged. While it’s important to look at statistics, there’s also no substitute for taking a first hand look.

As someone who has spent two decades studying urban America, I’ll share my impressions from these visits.

One general observation: the change in the way people dress for work is noticeable and shocking. The people who appeared to be office workers that I saw were all dressed very casually and had a schlubby look. They were far from the level of even pre-pandemic “business casual.”

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I think this is a bearish sign for the economic future of those downtowns. When the workers at ordinary, non-tech corporations don’t look like they take their job seriously - certainly a lot less seriously than the architecture of the costly, sometimes extravagant buildings they work in - this suggests a certain lack of seriousness in the entire downtown corporate enterprise.

It’s also not a good sign for the workers themselves. In a weak hiring market, when corporate employees don’t want to go to the office at all, dress like slobs when they do go in, and then head home promptly at five o’clock sharp, these are people primed to lose their jobs to AI, offshoring, an H-1B, or even a plain old reduction in force.

San Francisco

I stayed near the now-shuttered San Francisco Centre, which was an upscale mall anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdales. It’s weird to see an entire mall on Market Street essentially boarded up.

This is right by Union Square, the city’s premier shopping district. The actual Union Square plaza itself was quite nice, with people enjoying the space. But there was a lot of visible retail vacancy, including of major spaces like the former Barneys, whose sign is strangely still up. There were still a number of luxury brand boutiques in business, but most of them didn’t appear to have any shoppers, and the people on the streets didn’t look like a high end shopping crowd. The whole area felt much more challenged than Chicago’s Michigan Ave.

When I tweeted about this, someone said Union Square was better than two years ago. This seems to be the general view of the city. But if this is better, I’d hate to have seen it at its worst.

It might only be a small percentage chance at this point, but it’s certainly possible the Union Square shopping area could suffer a complete collapse that essentially eliminates it as a high end retail zone.

I also visited the Financial District. The area north of Market is the historic office core. This is where the city’s remaining non-tech legacy employers tend to be based. I was there at 5:15p on a Monday, and there was a stream of people leaving the offices and heading to the transit.

It was good that there were a number of workers in the office on a Monday. But I really noticed that they were basically all dressed ultra-casually and didn’t look impressive. It was quite a contrast with the often opulent office buildings from a bygone era.

San Francisco gives off the feeling that it was built by a lost civilization and is now inhabited by a completely different group of people. This is unlike NYC, where today feels very connected to the deep history and even the historic buildings of the city.

San Francisco was once the West Coast’s financial, business, and cultural hub. But the old Financial District world seems strangely shriveled. Data show that companies like Wells Fargo have shrunk a lot, going from 2.1 million square feet of office space in the region in 2019 to 750,000 today. The bank is technically still based in SF, but the CEO works in NYC and it has a huge presence in Charlotte.

The feeling south of Market Street around the Salesforce Tower is quite different. There’s a new cluster of modern high rises around the new Transbay Terminal bus station. I believe these buildings are mostly occupied by tech and tech adjacent firms like professional services.

The top of the Transbay Terminal is the gorgeous Salesforce Park. This is a public park, but homeless people were strangely absent. It would be interesting to know how the city encourages them to not linger there. The park was well patronized with even children enjoying the playground. A couple of the buildings are directly connected to this elevated park, and are some of the hottest offices around.

Tech has long had a casual dress code, but typically the people are quite stylish and in good shape. I found it interesting that the workers in this part of town were far better dressed and had a much better appearance than in the old Financial District. Tech now looks better dressed than corporate. This district seems much more vibrant and alive - and the people there more serious about what they are doing. The new buildings, park, and bus terminal go with the people you see. If the city ever brings the Caltrain station into here as planned, that could really turbocharge things here.

Still, the city’s economy appears very dependent on one industry, tech, whereas it used to have a much more diversified economy.

In general, the downtown of San Francisco didn’t have the crowds I remember. But it did have tons of homeless people. Frankly, it seemed quite sketchy and I would not want to bring my son here. Nor would I want my wife walking around by herself in the evening.

On the plus side, the neighborhoods outside of downtown that I saw looked basically fine. I rode BART and Caltrain, and they were likewise perfectly fine, if not especially well-patronized. And the driverless Waymo cars were like a visit to the future. I enjoyed using them, and they were super-convenient. Better than Uber in my view. Driverless ride hailing is going to dominate the market I suspect.

Chicago

Chicago had a much better feel than San Francisco, but also has a lot of struggles with downtown office occupancy and especially street level retail vacancies.

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In The Defeat of the West, Todd writes:

Max Weber established a link between Protestantism and Europe’s economic rise, even if he likely went astray in seeking the reasons for this takeoff within subtle theological nuances. The fundamental factor is simpler: Protestantism, as a matter of principle, imparts literacy to the populations under its control, because all believers must have direct access to the Holy Scriptures. Now, a literate population is capable of technological and economic development.

Indeed, the Protestant regions of Europe achieved high levels of literacy earlier than Catholic ones did. We can see that from this viral map from the influencer Redeemed Zoomer

We certainly saw this in America, such as with the famous “Old Deluder Satan Act” of 1647 in Massachusetts that started the creation of a public school system.

Protestantism in general has had an ethos of moral reform and human capital development, of which literacy is one example. This is in part related to how the Reformation rejected the two-tier Christianity of Roman Catholicism.

The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor talks about what he calls the dilemma of renunciation. Living a fully Christian life in every respect is extraordinarily demanding. For the Catholic church, with its idea of the counsels of perfection - poverty, chastity, and obedience - it’s beyond what ordinary people can achieve. How do you resolve this?

The Roman Catholic Church resolved it through a two-tiered system. There are what are in effect super-Christians - monks and priests - who live by an extremely high standard. But that’s at the price of everyone else living by a much lower one.

This in practice produced an extremely literate, sophisticated, disciplined elite, combined with a largely degraded peasantry.

Protestants rejected the two-tier system. But this created the problem of how much you can demand of the ordinary person. As Taylor put it in A Secular Age:

Radical Protestantism utterly rejects the multi-speed system, and in the name of this abolishes the supposedly higher, renunciative vocations; but also builds renunciation into ordinary life. It avoids the second horn, but comes close to the first danger above, loading ordinary flourishing with a burden of renunciation it cannot carry. It in fact fills out the picture of what the properly sanctified life would be with a severe set of moral demands. This seems to be unavoidable in the logic of rejecting complementarity, because if we really much hold that all vocations are equally demanding, and don’t want this to be a leveling down, then all must be at the most exigent pitch.

Trying to set the bar too high leads to Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts, creating what were arguably repressive societies that contained their own injustices.

Inevitably then, there’s some leveling down from the very top that had to occur to set the bar to the level at which most people could realistically clear it without creating more problems than you solve.

But this approach of having a single tier system, and trying to set as a high a bar as reasonably possible for everyone, ultimately raised up the masses. Protestantism became an engine of human capital development. That’s part of what has been underneath its recurring various moral reform efforts. Education and development of children was a big part of this, with the heavily Protestant Progressive movement bringing compulsory schooling, the high school movement, the playground movement, etc. Recurrent bouts of vice suppression also figure here. As does a focus on a healthy domestic life, sexual continence, thrift, hard work, personal and public order, civility, cleanliness, humility, avoidance of ostentation, future orientation, etc.

Weber pointed to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as encapsulating the habits and values of Protestantism, or what some conservatives call “bourgeois values.” America figured out for much of its history how to set the bar within a healthy range that produced this uplift of our people and the propulsive force that sent the nation outward and upward.

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From Reading to Watching

As Christianity, and thus the Protestant ethos of the nation, has declined, we should expect to see the decline of the habits associated with it. Indeed, that was one of the key points from Todd’s book, in which he argued that the death of Protestantism is in some respects the death of the West.

One of these habits in decline is the culture of literacy and the written word.

The Catholic writer Julia Yost wrote an interesting column (gift link) in the Washington Post recently where she sees the shift to a post-literate culture as one reason for a newfound appeal in Catholicism.

The age of Instagram and TikTok favors Catholicism. An earlier era of the internet, that of the blogosphere, was congenial to Protestantism, with its biblical and exegetical basis. The result was the Young, Restless and Reformed movement — mostly male Protestants reading one another’s blogs and finding their way from seeker-sensitive evangelicalism to high-proof Calvinism. Today’s internet, by contrast, is image-forward and postliterate. This helps to explain why today’s online Christians tend to be Young, Restless and Roman.

Protestantism, which began as a revolution against idolatry — the whitewashing of church interiors, the stripping of altars — has image-aversion in its DNA. The visual language of American Protestantism is accordingly limited. White steeples, Puritan clothing, snake handling: not much for an influencer to work with. Catholicism has icons and incense; rosaries, chapel veils and ashes; priestly black, cardinal red and papal white. “Catholic drip” content, downstream of “Conclave” (the 2024 film about a papal election, praised for its costume and production design), enjoys intense engagement. An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.

Yost gets at something real here, even if I’d qualify it in a number of ways.

I think it’s true that the aesthetics of Catholicism (and Eastern Orthodoxy) are one of its draws for new, younger converts. You see this in the appeal of the Latin mass, performed in a language the attendees can’t understand.

On the other hand, Catholicism’s draw to the young seems to be primarily among people like highly educated aspiring conservative elites. As I noted above, Catholicism at the elite level has always had a strong tradition of literacy. Catholic monks literally preserved countless historical works by repeatedly transcribing them. People like Thomas Aquinas are paragons of a literate rather than aesthetic sensibility.

Ultimately, there’s no conflict between having a literate culture and being elite in the Catholic world. You can have both the aesthetics and the literacy, at least at the elite level.

At the non-elite level, I’d note that the aesthetics of the typical American Catholic parish aren’t actually that great. I’ve been to many Catholic masses and every time it seems like the priest is just mailing it in. This foots to things Catholics themselves say, complaining about parishes that are “sacrament factories.” (The limited Orthodox services I’ve attended, by contrast, were the real deal liturgically. The aesthetically best Western liturgies I’ve seen have actually been in the Episcopal church).

Also, I’d say that Yost’s description of Protestant aesthetics is also incomplete. Yes, traditional Protestantism was more aesthetically austere than Catholicism. But modern evangelicalism is very often “spectacle forward” - rock concert grade music, laser lights, designer clothing (skinny jeans, sneakers), emotional and sentimental affect, etc. It may not be “smells and bells” but these churches are very much putting on a show, in which the aesthetic and performance components - cringe though they may seem to some - play a key role in drawing people in. The megachurch, though prominently featuring a sermon, is not just a literary phenomenon.

Yost also rightly notes the role of a changing media ecology in the shift from words to images. There’s definitely something to the shift from blogs to Tik Tok. But the shift to a post-literate culture began well before then, with the advent of television, as documented by Neil Postman in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

But I think there’s also a deeper factor at work. Namely, the decline of Protestantism in America has undermined the basis of a literate culture.

As Emmanuel Todd noted, the decline of religion is a gradual process that goes through stages. After the active state of religion comes the phase of what he calls the “zombie state,” in which belief has faded but the habits and values remain. Following that comes the zero state, in which even the habits and values have dissipated.

While he doesn’t give precise dates for these in America, it would appear from his work that roughly the zombie state began around the turn of the 20th century, the transition to a zero state began around 1965, and the arrival at a zero state in 2015. This largely foots to my three worlds model, in which the Positive and Neutral Worlds were the transition phase, and the Negative World is the zero state for Protestantism.

In our current religious state, the habits and values of Protestantism are in severe decline. A literate, word-oriented culture is one. But it’s hardly the only such example. We see also the rise of the culture of consumption, credit card debt, obesity, out of wedlock births and single parent households, the metastasization of vice (gambling, drugs, porn), the decline in male labor force participation and the general “lost boys” phenomenon.

America’s human capital has been significantly degraded in many respects as the country’s Protestant cultural foundations have dissolved. Religious decline is certainly not the only cause. Daniel Bell wrote decades ago about the cultural contradictions of capitalism, for example, and economic changes like deindustrialization have had a big negative impact on people and communities. But this can’t all be chalked up to the economy either. During the worst years of the Great Depression, for example, out of wedlock births actually declined. There was no drop off in a literate culture; books sales declined as people had less money but library use surged, and newspapers and magazines held their own.

In this cultural-religious environment, Catholicism might indeed grow in its appeal because of its aesthetic-experiential rather than textual way of relating to its base of followers. But a mass Catholic revival in America would not solve many of our substantive problems because Catholicism is not an engine of broad-based human capital development, certainly relative to Protestantism. People have talked about the “Brazilification” of America - extremely diverse, with a glittering, ostentatious elite, a hollowed out middle class, a large underclass, mass corruption, civic dysfunction, etc. A Catholic America would be very compatible with a Brazilified future.

Evangelicalism is also largely failing in this regard. While it’s held to the gospel as its center,rather than the high bar approach, it has essentially leveled down, setting the bar much lower than in the past. I’ve noted before that the culture of evangelicalism is very different from that of the historic Calvinist Protestant culture of America.

Still, it deserves respect for continuing to focus on the moral reform of people’s lives. As Pentecostal Christianity sweeps Latin America, for example, we read about how men in the church stop getting drunk, stop beating their wives, start working hard, etc. This is what makes many evangelicals good at things like prison ministries, addiction recovery, etc. These evangelical groups are still able to raise people up from the very bottom.

As a general matter of emphasis, Catholic groups are more focused on and better at poverty relief and meeting material needs. Whereas evangelicals more emphasize personal transformation, often through personal and small group relationships. (Note that Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, had essentially Protestant origins).

To be clear, there’s a lot of overlap. Catholics aren’t exclusively about relieving material needs (see Catholic schools, for example), and evangelicals not exclusively about personal transformation. These are matters of emphasis rather than complete differences. But I think we can still see that Protestantism is a better human capital developer for the masses than Catholicism is.

However, American evangelicalism is highly assimilated to today’s post-Protestant culture. Thus, while it can help ameliorate some of the downsides of today’s culture, it is not likely to be capable of regenerating a culture based around literacy vs. spectacle.

Combine Protestant religious decline with modern media ecologies, and it’s a recipe for a continued post-literate America. Not that Americans physically can’t read, but that they increasingly don’t want to.