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.

My most recent significant piece on this was a 2023 column in Governing magazine:

Changes in cities over the course of the last 30 to 40 years have greatly undermined local leadership cultures like the one which produced [Richard] Ravitch, a lifetime New Yorker. Among the biggest culprits was deregulation that led to corporate consolidation, particularly in banking, utilities and retailing. Back in 1980, the banks in most cities were locally owned and were limited by law to their home markets. Their CEOs were extremely powerful both in their companies and communities. And their personal professional incentives were aligned with those of their locality. The only way to grow their banks or electric utilities was to grow the community where they were based.

Today, many CEOs of once-local companies are branch managers of global firms. Their job is to sit on local boards and dabble in community relations, but they don’t really call the shots anymore. Companies that have remained locally based now typically have national or global reach, so the local market is just one element in a vast portfolio. In a more nationalized and globalized business culture, those who aspire to high corporate positions must take great care to echo standardized positions, particularly around ESG (environmental, social and governance goals) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). They are constrained by career considerations from taking any truly independent positions or actions.

Civic leadership has been democratized and diversified in recent decades. It’s no longer a small group of connected white male elites along with a Black leader or two, getting together in a room and deciding what to do. More inclusive leadership has brought many benefits — neighborhoods aren’t getting demolished for freeways today, for example — but has greatly complicated reaching consensus. With some exceptions like Dan Gilbert in Detroit or George Kaiser in Tulsa, few local business leaders today are able to step forward and assert leadership publicly or even behind the scenes. Civic leadership has been bureaucratized.

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times quoted me extensively on this, and also featured several other thinkers, in a more expansive treatment of the subject. The Christian Science Monitor also ran an interesting article in 2009 looking at this trend, focusing on Boston and Atlanta.

People have tended not to notice this shift, as it has happened slowly over many years. Although people - even the leaders themselves - in many cities sense that there’s a leadership deficit, they struggle to articulate what has happened and why specifically things are different today.

While it is easy to list major corporations that have been merged out of existence or gone bust, it’s not necessarily easy to see the impact on leadership composition and civic capacity.

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To shed more light on this, I was able to use Claude to help do some analysis I had long wanted to undertake, but was not able to do until now. I look at the composition of participants in civic leadership development programs over time so see what has changed.

I use Indianapolis as the case study here because I am most familiar with it. But there’s no reason to think Indianapolis is unique in what I found. I believe basically every similar sized city and even ones that are bigger are showing similar trends. Claude largely validated this when I asked for cross-regional comparisons.

Every city today has a variety of leadership development programs. These trace back to an original that was launched, I believe, in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. They took off in the 1970s and 80s.

Indianapolis had one of the earlier programs, known as the Stanley K. Lacy Executive Leadership Series, or SKL. While there are several other programs in the region today, SKL remains the flagship, most prestigious one. It was started in the mid-1970s, and program materials from it were used by many other cities to launch their programs. The first trade association group of leadership development programs (now defunct) was headquartered in Indianapolis and helped spread program ideas around.

I actually spoke to an SKL class a few years ago, and it’s a great program from what I see.

SKL publishes a list of every person who has gone through the program, over 1,000 of them it would appear. I have long wanted to do a study looking at how the profile of the participants in the program have changed over time, but it was too difficult a project for me to take on. AI tools like Claude now allow tasks like this to be done in minutes. While its analysis may not be rigorous enough for academic publication, its findings are illuminating.

Claude divided SKL into various overlapping eras in terms of its participants and moderators (cohort leaders). First was what it called the “Founding Era” (Classes I-X, roughly 1976-1986):

The earliest classes drew from the very core of the Indianapolis civic establishment — old-money families, major law firms, banking, real estate, and the emerging Unigov-era Republican power structure. The names read like a directory of the families who built modern Indianapolis.

…

This era’s participants were overwhelmingly white, drawn from corporate law, banking, real estate, and the major Indianapolis firms. The level of subsequent accomplishment was extremely high within the Indiana civic ecosystem — these people became board chairs, managing partners, and institutional leaders. But the scale was distinctly local and state-level.

Second was the “Maturation Era,” (classes VI–XV, roughly 1982–1991). This is when the program reached it apex, with several participants achieving national prominence (like former Bush Economic Policy Council Director Al Hubbard):

This stretch produced some of the program's most consequential graduates in terms of scale of eventual influence…This era shows the program at its peak institutional influence: it was selecting people who would go on to run major national organizations, hold senior White House positions, sit on state supreme courts, and lead the state legislature. The diversity was improving but still limited; the professional mix was broadening beyond pure corporate law into politics, media, and the nonprofit sector.

It then moves on to the “Middle Period”, (classes XVI-XXX, roughly 1992-2006):

The program continued to select solid civic leaders, but the peak concentration of "name brand" graduates begins to dilute somewhat. This is partly a function of time — many in these classes are now in their 50s and still building their legacies — but also reflects a broadening of the program's reach beyond the tight old-guard establishment….The classes get more diverse in this period — more women, more African Americans, more nonprofit and government professionals alongside the corporate lawyers and bankers. The professional profiles shift toward a more typical "emerging leader" mix: marketing executives, nonprofit directors, mid-career government officials, healthcare administrators.

Then there’s the Recent Era (classes XXXI–XLVIII, roughly 2007–2024). These people especially may not have had enough runway to fully rise to their career peak as of yet:

Several notable graduates emerge in this period, though the median profile is arguably more "solid mid-career professional" than "future titan."

Claude’s overall analysis of the trend:

The arc is clear:

The early classes (I–XV) drew from a concentrated, elite, old-guard establishment — the families and firms that ran Indianapolis through the Unigov era. The participants were already well-positioned by birth, education, or firm affiliation, and the program functioned as a kind of civic finishing school for people who were going to lead regardless. This produced an outsized concentration of nationally significant figures (Hubbard, Miles, Selby, Lytle, Bosma, Brooke).

The middle and later classes reflect a genuine broadening — more diverse racially, more women, a wider range of professions (marketing, nonprofits, tech, education, sports), more first-generation professionals rather than establishment heirs. This is a democratization of the program, and it’s arguably a good thing. But it also means the median graduate is a respected mid-career professional rather than a future national power broker.

The honest assessment: SKL's earliest classes caught the Indianapolis establishment at a moment of unusual civic concentration — the Unigov-era Republican coalition that deliberately built the city's sports, cultural, and business infrastructure was tight-knit, and SKL was essentially credentialing the next cohort of that coalition. As Indianapolis has grown, diversified, and become less dominated by a single civic power structure, the program has naturally evolved into something more broadly representative and less exclusively elite. The individual peak accomplishments are lower in the recent classes, but the program is arguably more representative of the city's actual leadership pipeline.

I then asked Claude to drill into the sector makeup of the participants, as it seems to have gone from corporate dominated to non-profit dominated. Here’s what it found:

Your impression is correct, and it's quite striking once you look at it systematically. The program has undergone a major compositional transformation — from one dominated by corporate and professional-services executives to one heavily weighted toward nonprofits, government, and what might broadly be called the "civic infrastructure" sector.

…

The program has essentially migrated from being a corporate credentialing mechanism — where the Indianapolis business establishment identified its next generation and socialized them into civic responsibility — to something closer to a nonprofit and civic-sector professional development program that happens to include some corporate participants.

This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does represent a fundamental change in what the program is. The early SKL was connecting people who already had, or were going to have, substantial private-sector economic power to the civic apparatus. The implicit theory was: “These people are going to run major businesses and control capital; we need to make sure they understand the city’s needs and feel a responsibility to serve.” The current SKL is more like: “These people are already working in community-facing roles; let’s give them a network and shared vocabulary.”

A civic leader friend of mine took this and ran it through ChatGPT to get some additional perspectives:

Old model: few people with massive concentrated authority. New model: many people with narrower, networked influence

Early SKL solved a key problem: “How do we make powerful people care about the city?” Modern SKL solves a different problem: “How do we connect people who already care?” Those are not the same.

You now have two largely separate ecosystems: 1) Economic Power Network and 2) Civic/Nonprofit Network. SKL used to bridge these two. Now it mostly sits in #2.

SKL has drifted from a power-alignment institution to a values-alignment institution. That’s a downgrade if your goal is influence over capital. It’s an upgrade if your goal is inclusive civic engagement.

Claude’s explanation for these shifts directly hits what I have long hammered about corporate consolidation, as well as the decline of the WASP Establishment. There are simply fewer locally headquartered companies in Indianapolis today, and thus fewer genuine corporate power brokers and “blue blood” heirs to populate this program if that were still the intent

1. The decline of locally headquartered corporate power. Indianapolis’s corporate landscape has changed dramatically since 1976. Many of the major firms whose executives populated early classes have been acquired, merged, or moved — the banking consolidations that eliminated Merchants National, National City, and others; the corporatization of old family businesses. The number of “major local corporate executive” slots available to fill has simply shrunk. Eli Lilly, Anthem, Cummins, and Simon Property Group still exist, but their executive ranks are more nationally recruited and less embedded in the Indy civic network.

The last bit highlights that merely retaining a corporate HQ doesn’t mean its executives relate to the local civic environment in the same way. The reason those corporations are likely still independent is that they became larger, more expansive national and global institutions.

Eli Lilly, for example, is a global juggernaut. It’s the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company. It’s notable that Lilly CEO David Ricks, who has spent a quarter century at Lilly and built his career there, does not appear to have gone through SKL. Instead, he was doing things like running Lilly’s China business.

Ricks operates at the pinnacle of global capitalism, and, frankly, it would be a misallocation of his time to spend too much of it on local Indianapolis affairs. And even though he runs the company, even he can’t take too much “political” risk in his local engagement, such as by pushing controversial initiatives. Or at least it would be potentially unwise to do so; he needs to be channeling his risk taking into Lilly’s actual business. Notwithstanding that, however, Ricks has arguably done more civically for Indianapolis than any other business leaders since the last actual Lilly family member. He’s in effect padded the coffers of the philanthropic Lilly Endowment by over $50 billion additional dollars - increasing its giving capacity by over $2.5 billion per year, much of it within Indiana.

The key is that the corporate landscape in cities has changed tremendously in the past few decades.

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Claude also highlights the growth of the non-profit sector - candidly, not necessarily a positive thing - self-selection bias, and a focus on DEI as factors driving these shifts. It also highlighted the shift in SKL from being run by the Chamber of Commerce (i.e, the business community) to a standalone non-profit (a civic sector NGO). This is a change that has occurred in other cities as well.

Changes in the composition of SKL are an indicator of changes in the composition of Indianapolis’ overall civic leadership more generally. There are fewer genuine mover and shaker types today, many more corporate functionaries and non-profit people.

The Final Four is being held in Indianapolis again this weekend. This is a legacy of the city’s efforts to use sports as an economic and civic development platform - originally to be “the amateur sports capital of the world” - in the 1980s. While the occasional city had hoped to use the Olympics as a brand booster, Indianapolis really pioneered the idea of American cities leveraging sports in the way we understand it today. It created the first ever city sports commission, the Indiana Sports Corp., for example.

People here have been asking for over a decade, “What’s the next sports strategy?” The reality is, there’s unlikely to be one. The leadership structure of Indianapolis and other cities today is less conductive to initiatives like that - which involve doing unique things that are not being done elsewhere, involving significantly political, civic, and financial risk. Not as many people today are able to take those risks and induce others to follow them.

It’s not that the people here are dumber or less competent than they used to be. But the entire economic and civic structure in which they are embedded is different. They are largely not part of old, influential families. They don’t run locally headquartered firms. If they do run local firms, those firms are part of a new era of globalized capitalism. There are way more of them who are part of non-profit type “stakeholder” organizations. And with the focus on inclusive leadership, there are just many, many more people involved.

The net result is ultimately lower capacity civic leadership.

Again, there’s every reason to believe this is now the norm in most places. I see the same trends playing out in Chicago and other cities I look at. The factors like corporate consolidation that help produce this operate at the national level, and so we should expect the impact to be pervasive (if not exactly the same everywhere).

Because our leadership problems today result in good measure from these kinds of structural factors, this suggests it won’t be easy to change things, at least at the local level.

Now, I don’t want to let our leaders off the hook entirely by suggesting everything is a result of outside forces. In my view, the Boomers have been incredibly bad at developing and empowering talent in subsequent generations, for example. Boomers want loyal soldiers in their own army, not to raise up people who might plausibly be generals in their own right some day.

Still, we have to recognize that structural forces are very much at play here.

Whatever the underlying causes, however, it’s clear that at the national and local levels, people do not even fully recognize the changes that have occurred in the nature of their leadership structures. There’s a sense that something is amiss, but not an understanding of what that is.

You can read Claude’s report on Indy’s SKL program here:

Skl Claude Analysis

176KB ∙ PDF file

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In closing, I’ll note that this kind of analysis shows the new capability space opened by AI. If I had wanted to do this kind of analysis without AI, it would have required enormous resources. I’d need people and money to track down who all the people in the various SKL classes were. Keep in mind, the organization only publishes a list of names by class. It doesn’t give titles, institutional affiliations, or even the year these classes took place. There are over a thousand people on the list, most of whom I’ve never heard of before. Even if someone much more knowledgeable and connected than me wanted to do this, it would be quite an undertaking.

With AI, I can just point Claude at the file, and it will do all the work for me. Perhaps it can’t identify every person on the list, but it can get a sufficient quantity of them to give a high level analysis. If the findings are interesting enough, someone could undertake a more formal study.

So much of the discussion around AI is around all the terrible things it might do or the ways it might harm people using it. But the possibility space opened by AI is endless. We have not yet begun to scratch the surface of the new capabilities that AI is going to put into the palm of our hand.

You should give it a try yourself. Take any historic list of people, run it through Claude, and see what interesting things it found. I ran a similar analysis of two long-running speaker series here in town, and also got really interesting and revealing results.

You now have the power to do things in minutes at nearly zero cost that even the most well-resourced institutions in town couldn’t easily pull off before AI. If you aren’t taking advantage of these capabilities, you are missing out on some very exciting developments in our world.

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Cover image: 2006 Final Four by Stepshep/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

We are living through a leadership crisis, but not for the reasons most commentators suggest.

The problem is not simply political polarization, institutional distrust, technological disruption, or economic uncertainty—though all are real. The deeper problem is that we are trying to solve twenty-first century civilizational problems with late twentieth-century leadership assumptions. Our models of leadership were built for a world of institutional stability, shared moral assumptions, and predictable change. That world is disappearing.

Across education, technology, family formation, religion, and civic life, the underlying assumptions that once gave coherence to society are weakening. Artificial intelligence is reshaping knowledge. Social media is reshaping identity. Institutions that once formed character now struggle merely to maintain trust. Anxiety rises even as material prosperity remains historically high.

These are not isolated disruptions. They are indicators of something deeper: we are not merely living through a season of change. We are living through a change of age.

Every such transition forces a deeper question beneath the practical leadership questions:

What kind of civilization are we now leading within?

One of the most illuminating ways to answer that question comes from an unexpected source—a civilizational pattern embedded within the biblical narrative itself. Not myth in the modern sense of fiction, but myth in the classical sense of sacred narrative that reveals ultimate meaning. It is a pattern that describes not only spiritual history, but the developmental arc of civilizations.

It is the movement from garden to tower to temple to city.

And it may be the simplest way to understand why leadership models that worked only a generation ago now feel increasingly inadequate.

Because we are no longer living in the same chapter of the story.

The Garden: When Meaning Is Received

The biblical story begins not in a city but in a garden. This is not accidental.

A garden represents ordered nature. It is neither wilderness nor machine. It is cultivated life within a structure that is received rather than invented.

In the garden, human beings do not create meaning. They discover it. They do not construct identity. They receive it. They do not invent purpose. They live within it.

The garden represents a world where reality itself is understood as gift.

Historically, most societies have operated within some version of this framework. Meaning came from tradition. Identity came from family. Moral structure came from religion. Social order rested upon shared assumptions about reality itself.

Sociologist Peter Berger famously described this as a sacred canopy—a shared framework of meaning that made life feel coherent and intelligible.

Leadership in such a world is primarily custodial.

Leaders preserve what exists. They transmit what has been inherited. Their responsibility is stewardship of a functioning order.

This explains why leadership literature produced during stable periods tends to focus on management, efficiency, and incremental improvement. These approaches assume something rarely stated but absolutely essential: that the underlying system itself is sound.

Garden eras produce managers because the world appears manageable.

Yet gardens contain a hidden fragility. They depend upon trust—trust in institutions, trust in moral order, trust in shared meaning. When that trust erodes, the garden cannot sustain itself.

This is when civilizations begin to build towers.

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The Tower: When Meaning Is Constructed

If the garden represents meaning received, the tower represents meaning constructed.

The Tower of Babel is one of the most psychologically revealing passages in Scripture. It is not primarily about architecture. It is about anthropology. Its defining declaration reveals everything: “Let us make a name for ourselves.”

Here we see the emergence of the autonomous self.

Meaning is no longer discovered. It is manufactured. Identity is no longer received. It is assembled. Community is no longer inherited. It is negotiated.

Control begins to replace trust. Technique replaces wisdom. Systems replace tradition.

This is the foundation of what we now call modernity.

Tower civilizations are extraordinarily productive. They produce science, engineering, markets, bureaucracies, and technological innovation. They scale. They optimize. They expand human capacity in remarkable ways.

But they also begin to thin meaning.

Because while systems can organize life, they cannot explain why life matters.

Cultural historian Philip Rieff warned that when cultures abandon sacred order, they do not become neutral. They become therapeutic. They begin organizing themselves around psychological comfort rather than moral formation.

Today we describe this condition as expressive individualism—the belief that identity is something we construct through self-expression rather than something we discover through formation.

This is the dominant anthropology of our time.

Leadership during tower periods becomes increasingly technical. Leaders become specialists. Expertise begins to outweigh wisdom. Competence begins to overshadow character.

The central leadership question shifts subtly but profoundly—from What is right? to What works?

For a time, this produces remarkable success.

But towers contain a hidden danger. They scale faster than wisdom develops. When scale outruns meaning, something inevitably begins to fracture.

And when enough fractures accumulate, towers give way to Babylon.

Babylon: When Meaning Collapses

If Babel represents the ambition of civilization, Babylon represents its exhaustion.

Babylon is civilization at peak sophistication and peak confusion. It is what happens when systems become powerful but purposeless, when technology becomes impressive but disorienting, when institutions become large but distrusted.

Babylon is not primitive chaos. It is sophisticated disorder.

It is what happens when a society knows how to do almost everything but no longer knows why it should do anything.

This is why late-stage civilizations consistently display similar symptoms:

Rising anxiety.
Deepening loneliness.
Falling birthrates.
Institutional distrust.
Identity confusion.
Loss of shared reality

Loss of reality itself.

These are not random social problems. They are meaning problems.

This is why our moment cannot be understood merely through economics or politics. At its core, it is anthropological. It concerns what it means to be human.

I have elsewhere described this condition as algorithmic nihilism—a society increasingly organized by powerful systems that cannot answer the most basic human question:

What is life for?

This is also why leadership feels unusually difficult today.

Most leadership models assume stability. They assume shared assumptions. They assume functioning institutions. They assume that improvement is primarily technical.

Babylon offers none of these conditions.

Instead, it produces what anthropologists call a liminal environment—an in-between space where the old order no longer functions but the new order has not yet fully emerged.

This is precisely the environment that produces the need for liminal leadership.

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Liminal Leaders: Interpreters of Reality

Liminal periods remove the maps people once trusted. This tends to produce two kinds of leaders.

The first kind of leader attempts to preserve outdated maps. They double down on familiar models. They attempt to manage decline rather than understand change.

The second kind of leader recognizes that the terrain itself has shifted. They become interpreters of reality rather than defenders of systems.

Liminal moments emerge when the garden no longer holds, the tower no longer convinces, and Babylon no longer satisfies. This creates a vacuum in which a different kind of leadership becomes necessary.

The primary work of liminal leaders is not control. It is clarity.

They help people understand what time it is. They give language to what others sense but cannot yet articulate. They rebuild coherence where fragmentation has taken hold.

They become what every transitional age requires: architects of meaning.

This is why liminal leadership differs fundamentally from managerial leadership. Managers optimize systems. Liminal leaders rebuild foundations. They understand something essential that stable eras often forget:

Civilizational renewal never begins with policy. It begins with formation. Always. Because every durable society ultimately rests upon formed people.

The Temple: When Meaning Becomes Embodied

Alongside Babel, Scripture presents another building project: the Tabernacle and later the Temple.

Unlike Babel, nothing about the Temple is accidental. Every dimension, every material, every practice reflects intentional design. It is a place of sacrifice, reconciliation, encounter, and presence.

The Temple represents meaning not merely believed but embodied.

It reminds us that civilizations cannot survive on systems alone. They require institutions and practices that reconnect people to transcendent reality.

Yet the Temple also carries a warning.

When the structure becomes more important than the presence it was meant to house, meaning begins to drain away. Jesus confronted this danger directly when He declared: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

His warning remains relevant today. Institutions that lose their formative purpose eventually become performative rather than transformative.

This applies equally to churches, universities, corporations, and civic organizations. When institutions prioritize preservation over formation, they may continue to exist structurally while losing their civilizational purpose.

The City: When Meaning Is Rightly Ordered

The biblical story does not end with a return to a garden alone. Nor does it end with the abandonment of civilization. It ends with a city.

This is a profound insight.

The answer to Babel is not primitivism. It is rightly ordered complexity.

The New Jerusalem represents civilization brought back under moral order. Technology is not rejected. It is rightly ordered. Culture is not abandoned. It is redeemed. Power is not eliminated. It is stewarded.

This represents the final stage of mature leadership: stewardship.

The steward understands what the controller does not: We do not own reality. We are responsible for it.

The steward asks not, How do I control this? but How do I order this toward flourishing?

This is the leadership posture the next era will require. Not domination. Not withdrawal. But stewardship.

What Time Is It?

Every leadership challenge begins with diagnostic questions:

A garden moment requiring preservation?
A tower moment requiring excellence?
A Babylon moment requiring preservation?
Or a liminal moment requiring reconstruction?

The central mistake of our time is that many leaders are applying garden leadership to Babylon problems. They attempt to manage what must be reframed. They try to optimize what must be reimagined. They attempt to preserve what history has already moved beyond.

History shows something remarkably consistent: When meaning collapses, renewal begins with leaders who see clearly before others do. The future rarely belongs to the loudest leaders. It belongs to the clearest ones.

The Leadership Question of Our Time

Civilizations do not ultimately fail because they lose wealth, technology, or military power. They fail because they lose moral purpose.

Renewal never begins with scale. It begins with recovered clarity about what human beings are for. This is why the deepest leadership question in a change of age is not strategic.

It is anthropological.

What is a human being?
What is life for?
What is worth building?

Until these questions are answered, towers will only grow taller while confusion deepens. But when they are answered, something remarkable begins to happen.

Gardens begin to reappear. Not outside civilization. But inside it.

The Work of Liminal Leaders

This is the calling of liminal leaders:

To plant gardens inside Babylon.
To form people inside systems.
To rebuild meaning inside complexity.
To prepare the foundations of the next city before it is visible to others.

Because every lasting civilization begins the same way: Not with systems.
Not with power. Not even with vision. But with formed people who remember what life is for.

This is why the future will not ultimately belong to the most efficient leaders. Efficiency can scale systems. Only formation can sustain civilizations. The next era will not be led by those who can merely optimize complexity. It will be led by those who can restore meaning within it.

And every great city—every flourishing society, every lasting culture—begins the same way it always has: With leaders who have learned how to cultivate gardens again. For in the end, the future does not belong to those who build the biggest towers, but to those who remember how to grow gardens.

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isn’t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ­culture-shap­ing domains of American ­society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court. There are hardly any leading evangelical academics or artists. There are few evangelicals at commanding heights of finance. The prominent evangelicals in Silicon Valley can be counted on one hand. There are not even many evangelicals leading influential conservative think tanks and publications, despite the fact that evangelicals are one of the largest and most critical voting blocs in the Republican coalition.

I note that politics and business are two exceptions that prove the rule, although evangelical business elites tend to be clustered in profitable but prosaic industries with little cultural leverage.

One reason for this is that under the influence of dispensational theology, evangelicals have tended to overwhelmingly focus on saving souls, sometimes to the extent of deeming it the only thing of value. This development and its impact on approaches to vocation were traced by sociologist Andrew Lynn in his excellent academic book Saving the Protestant Ethic. I can’t do the book justice here, but at one point Lynn writes:

With the dire state of unsaved souls looming large in the imaginaries of the laity, those who dedicated their full-time work to spreading the gospel seemed to exhibit a higher and holier Christian life than those constrained by full-time non-ecclesial work. Fundamentalist writers endorsed what was effectively a two-tiered understanding of Christian vocations, severing their own beliefs from Luther’s spiritual egalitarianism….The result of such thinking was what might be called a “new clericalism” of fundamentalism, one that elevated evangelists, ministers, and particularly missionaries. Christian labor falling outside these occupations—and here, writers often explicitly included domestic and unpaid work—were only engaged in secondary callings.

…

But setting aside these efforts to steer conservative Protestantism in a different direction, there is strong evidence that vestiges of the fundamentalist work ethic persisted well into the twentieth century and even remain salient today.

Reading or listening to some famous evangelical books and sermons really illuminated for me that in evangelical culture, not only are “secular” vocations second class, but almost sinful to pursue. In this environment, an evangelical who aspires to achieve a top position in anything other than the soul saving business is probably being a bad Christian, if indeed he’s a Christian at all.

I want to highlight three of these today: David Platt’s Radical, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon’s Resident Aliens, and John Piper’s “Seashells” sermon.

Radical

David Platt is presently the pastor of McLean Bible Church in Virginia. He comes from a Southern Baptist background, and was previously the head of their very large international mission organization. His 2010 book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream became a huge bestseller. It is listed as having sold 1.4 million copies as of 2019, and certainly many more since then. The book spent 105 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

I don’t follow Platt regularly, so don’t have the full context of his ministry or teaching. He may or may not have updated his thinking since this book was published. But given that many people surely encountered him only through this book, I want to take a short look at what it has to say.

Platt criticizes Christians for pursuing the American Dream of middle-class bourgeois comfort, in favor of going all in on evangelism and poverty relief. He writes:

For the sake of more than a billion people today who have yet to even hear the gospel, I want to risk it all. For the sake of twenty-six thousand children who will die today of starvation or a preventable disease, I want to risk it all. For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all.

…

In the faith family I have the privilege to lead, I am joined by wealthy doctors who are selling their homes and giving to the poor or moving overseas; successful business leaders who are mobilizing their companies to help the hurting; young couples who have moved into the inner city to live out the gospel; and senior adults, stay-at-home moms, college students, and teenagers who are reorienting their lives around radical abandonment to Jesus.

One thing I’ve noticed about evangelical rhetoric is that it often avoids declarative statements that could be subjected to analytic scrutiny, and instead relies on patterns of language that invite the hearer to draw certain conclusions without actually stating them.

That’s the case with Platt here. I did not see him directly state that desiring a middle-class American lifestyle is objectively sinful, though he comes close with statements like “we have seen how the American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the gospel.” But everything he writes makes it seem like a bad choice.

Given that evangelicalism is a middle-class movement, that’s where he focuses his discussion. He didn’t say much about elite positions as such. But as we can see from this passage, he definitely includes higher end occupations in his critique. Wealthy doctors are selling property and giving the money to the poor. Businesses are reorienting to “help the hurting.” We don’t hear about, for example, a doctor whose research at a top medical school cured a terrible disease or who aspires to rearchitect the US healthcare system to bring down costs.

We see it as well in his example of a man who owns an accounting firm:

When I sit down for lunch with Steve, a businessman in our faith family, it’s obvious we have different callings in our lives. He’s an accountant; I’m a pastor. He is gifted with numbers; I can’t stand numbers. But we both understand that God has called us and gifted us for a global purpose. So Steve is constantly asking, “How can I lead my life, my family, and my accounting firm for God’s glory in Birmingham and around the world?” He is leading co-workers to Christ; he is mobilizing accountants to serve the poor; and his life is personally impacting individuals and churches in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe with the gospel.

In this telling, the man’s actual core accounting profession is not emphasized at all. It’s how he can somehow use that for evangelism and poverty relief.

Platt also stresses the imperative of every Christian prioritizing evangelistic mission work.

Jesus commands us to go. He has created each of us to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, and I propose that anything less than radical devotion to this purpose is unbiblical Christianity.

…

It’s not uncommon to hear Christians say, “Well, not everyone is called to foreign missions,” or more specifically, “I am not called to foreign missions.” When we say this, we are usually referring to foreign missions as an optional program in the church for a faithful few who apparently are called to that. In this mind-set, missions is a compartmentalized program of the church, and select folks are good at missions and passionate about missions. Meanwhile, the rest of us are willing to watch the missions slide shows when the missionaries come home, but in the end God has just not called most of us to do this missions thing. But where in the Bible is missions ever identified as an optional program in the church? We have just seen that we were all created by God, saved from our sins, and blessed by God to make his glory known in all the world. Indeed, Jesus himself has not merely called us to go to all nations; he has created us and commanded us to go to all nations. We have taken this command, though, and reduced it to a calling—something that only a few people receive.

This reminds me of a line I once heard at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Conference: “You are one of three things - passionate about doing missions, passionate about funding missions, or disobedient.”

Platt also appears to adhere to the theory that we change the world via conversion.

Regardless of what country we live in, what skills we possess, what kind of education we have, or what kind of salary we make, Jesus has commanded each of us to make disciples, and this is the means by which we will impact the world.

Whatever the merits of Radical in inspiring people to care more about the worthy causes of foreign missions and poverty relief, it’s hard to imagine someone under its influence aspiring to achieve some elite position in society in order to directly create tangible outcomes in the domains of creation. The general message of Radical is that this would be a bad and possibly sinful thing to do.

Resident Aliens

I couldn’t find sales figures for Hauerwas and Willimon’s 1989 book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. It was likely far less than Radical, but still into the six figure range. It too was very influential, especially with more intellectually oriented Christians across both the mainline and evangelical worlds.

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A way in which I do agree with my fellow panelist that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right – internet savvy, media savvy – who often are radicalized in that way – who “swallow the red pill” as the saying goes from the Matrix – when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media. It’s almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with both an outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.

One of those truths is that men, and especially white men, are actively and explicitly discriminated against by the institutions of our society in the name of diversity.

Jacob Savage just wrote what may be the most viral article of the entire year. Called “The Lost Generation,” it is about the way that Millennial white men have been discriminated against in prestige institutions.

While I don’t have access to Compact’s traffic statistics, just one tweet of this article by Matthew Schmitz has gotten over 25 million views so far, and racked up another five million just while I was writing this piece. This should give you a sense of the scale of this readership of this piece. It’s the talk of the Internet and has already been the subject of a Ross Douthat column in the Times.

Savage provides a powerful mix of story and eye-popping data that really illuminates this reality. In essence, the strong turn towards DEI in the post-Great Awokening world kneecapped the careers of many aspiring Millennial male creatives.

It starts with his own personal attempts to become a script writer in Hollywood:

The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”

We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.

They never did.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

When you think of the number of very talented white male script writers over the years, the fact that only 11.9% of lower level TV writers are white men is extraordinary.

He notes that, “In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.” This is also, of course, the year that I selected for the start of the Negative World. However you slice it, there was clearly a major cultural break in America sometime during President Obama’s second term.

He continues:

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

A number of creative fields and institutions have become majority, even overwhelmingly female. White women have arguably been the single biggest beneficiary group of DEI. I’m reminded of this famous photo of a Huffington Post editorial meeting from a while back.

The same has happened to various civic organizations I track. I looked at some local major civic groups here to quickly see the gender composition of their staff and they ranged from two-thirds to 80 percent female. Even our local tech booster group has a 75% female staff.

Savage goes on to track 2021 post-George Floyd hiring at major news organizations, and again we see an enormous female skew.

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”

With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The Atlantic’s hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

Other pipelines dried up as well. The alt-weeklies that gave misfit young men their start have shed them entirely. There are no white men on the editorial staff of the Seattle Stranger or on the staff of Indy Week. As late as 2017, there were six white men atop the masthead for the Portland Mercury. By 2024, there was just one: the Boomer editor-in-chief.

Of the white men who did get hired, one also can’t help but wonder what percentage of them were LGBT identifying.

It’s worth noting that Scott Galloway, whose book on manhood I looked at last week, actually boasts in it about how few straight men he hires into executive positions, saying, “Nearly 80 percent of my senior management has been women or gay men.”

Savage also highlights how the same trend affects other prestige occupations like academia:

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent)…Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent).

…

At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).

He notes that this is virtually universal in prestigious domains:

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines. Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013 alone—the same as the total number of white male millennials who’ve won since.

In 2014, two white male millennials were National Book Award finalists, including one winner; that year nine white male American artists under 40 appeared at the Whitney Biennial. But of the 70 millennial writers nominated for National Book Awards in the decade that followed, just three were white men. The “Big 4” galleries represent 47 millennial artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.

We might also, for example, think of the way that media outlets decided to start capitalizing Black but not white.

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Boomers Over All

Savage does a good job of honing in on how the impact of this has varied by cohort. Boomer, and to some extent Gen-X white men were already established in their careers when dial really got turned on this. Boomers were already tenured professors by that time. They were the senior leaders of these organizations while this was happening, and in some cases still are. For example, despite the huge shift towards hiring women and minorities at the Atlantic, the older Gen X white male Jeffrey Goldberg remains the editor-in-chief.

Thus the brunt of the diversity push fell largely on the Millennials. This was compounded by the fact that the Boomers won’t retire. Every old white male professor or executive means, roughly speaking, one less younger white man who will be able to get a job in these organizations.

There have actually been moves to make it easier for white male Boomers to stick around. Savage notes how mandatory retirement ages were abolished in universities:

“A big part of why it’s hard to diversify is the turnover is really slow,” a tenured millennial professor explained. “And that’s become worse now, because Boomers live a long time.” Many elite universities once had mandatory retirement at 70. But in 1994, Congress sunsetted the academic exemption for age discrimination, locking in the demographics of the largely white male professoriate for a generation.

The results:

Yale’s history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in hiring. Since 2018, they’ve hired four older white men as full professors—but among sixteen tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a white man. At 84, the Cold War historian John Gaddis isn’t even the oldest in the department. “The Yale history department at the time I arrived in 1997 was overwhelmingly white and male, if not yet millennial,” he told me in an email. “Some remedial action was long overdue.”

We’ve seen similar dynamics in evangelicalism, where the white male, largely Boomer “Big Eva” elites retained their power and prestige while becoming endorsers of DEI type approaches whose cost fell on younger generations of white men.

We can also think of Galloway here, the white male Boomer making millions of dollars a year while openly talking about how few straight men he hires.

Savage doesn’t go into detail on this point, but does hint at how mass immigration has interacted with DEI in pernicious ways. In effect, every single immigrant is privileged in this system above native born white men. In many cases their descendants will enjoy the same priority in perpetuity. (For Asians, it is a mixed bag. Undoubtedly, native born Asians face discrimination in things like college admittance, but foreign Asian students are loved by universities because they pay full freight, and largely Indian H-1B visa holders are strongly preferred over native born people as employees).

The white men who do get hired are often older and more established—or foreign. Several people I spoke with noticed that European white men don’t seem to face these barriers. The reason, one professor suggested, is they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an administrative sleight of hand: Federal education statistics (IPEDS) classify foreign nationals outside racial categories. In other words, a white European on a work visa doesn’t register as “white” in diversity metrics. Among new Ph.Ds with definite academic employment plans, white temporary-visa holders are nearly twice as likely as white U.S. citizens or permanent residents to secure tenure-track positions (61.0 percent versus 33.1 percent in 2023).

Confronting the Truth

I’ve seen any number of people pushing back on this.

One pushback is that Millennials were hardly the only victims of this. I’m sure many Gen X or even Boomers had some experiences with this. I have personally been told explicitly that I was not getting work because I was a white male, for example. But it’s important not to overly center ourselves. It really has been much worse for Millennials.

Believe it or not, there are also people out there still denying this is real or a major problem. An editorial writer for the Washington Post, for example, suggested this is limited to a very narrow set of prestige institutions, saying, “This is not an economy-wide problem.”

But actually, it is. Vast swaths of our corporate and institutional landscape brag about their diversity efforts and statistics. I suspect that, like me, large numbers of white men have been directly told they aren’t getting a job or position because of their race and gender. As as the troves of documents discovered by Chris Rufo and others show, people haven’t been shy about putting in writing that they discriminate against white men or create a hostile work environment for white men.

I’m sure people will pore over Savage’s stats with a microscope, too, looking for any way to discredit them. He previously wrote another widely read piece saying that no white man born after 1984 has ever had a piece of literary fiction published in the New Yorker. Somebody then found that one such person had been published. But does this change the underlying reality?

But beyond simple denial is the much larger phenomenon of people who simply refuse to acknowledge one of the fundamental experiences younger men have today.

Yuval Levin, writing a tribute to the recently deceased Norman Podhoretz, said that in today’s world, “Everyone runs from the seriousness and importance of living by the truth.”

I adopted as my first guiding principle for my newsletter the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn admonition to “live not by lies.”

It’s a lot easier to say than to do it though, because speaking the truth is often costly.

I’ve talked before about how roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women. While the exact percentage varies by study, this is one of the best attested statistics in social science. But I’ve never seen this statistic mentioned in sermon or book on marriage by a major evangelical pastor.

Similarly, have you ever heard one of them talk about discrimination against white men today? I haven’t seen it.

My observation from over a decade ago, from before I even started this newsletter, is that the average evangelical pastor is terrified of offending women. You can almost smell the fear on them.

Similarly, when it comes to things like what Savage discussed in his article, we see a lot of what looks like the fear of man.

Everybody has to pick their battles. I don’t think we are obligated to go around giving our take on every single subject, or even every nuance of every subject.

But when you talk frequently, and often loudly, about topics like marriage and racial justice, and never mention much less address very core and relevant facts, you are not being honest.

You also forfeit the moral standing to critique the people who are mentioning them. It’s easy for these people to criticize the manosphere, for example. There’s a lot to criticize. But there’s no reason to take many of those critics seriously when they refuse to confront the unpopular truths that the mansophere people, whatever their faults, are addressing.

It’s similar with race. If you are shrieking about the dissident right but not talking about the dynamics Savage exposes, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

I’m happy to denounce people like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. In fact, I’ve done it. I’m happy to highlight the bad things in the manosphere and such. Again, I’ve done it.

But I also try to make a point of explicitly talking about these elephants in the room. For example, I mentioned discrimination against white men in my Galloway review last week, before the Savage piece was published.

I don’t like to belabor these points or talk about them too frequently. This isn’t my main beat. But these points around race and gender are core to the experience of many young men today. And if we really want to put forth a more compelling message to disaffected young men, they have to be addressed.

They are also related to substantive problems people wring their hands about today. For example, under conditions of hypergamy/assortative mating and anti-male discrimination in high status employment, no surprise we see many college educated young women complaining about a lack of marriageable men. But the Boomers just want to yell at these younger guys to “Man up!”

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Putting Things in Perspective

It’s important to acknowledge these realities, but also to put them in perspective and not allow them to cause a root of bitterness to spring up in your life.

In my time in consulting, my tenure overlapped with that of the first woman to ever be promoted to partner at my firm. The corporate world was still very male dominated at that time. I lived through the era where the few female executives there were tended to be ultra-masculine “Iron Lady” types - because they had to work hard to convince male bosses that they were as good and tough as the men. There was long, of course, large scale explicit discrimination against blacks and other minorities - far worse discrimination than anything white men face today.

Some of today’s discrimination against men and especially white men is just Nassim Taleb’s “ergodicity,” namely things evening out over a long enough time horizon.

You don’t have to ignore injustices being done against you. But try to put them in perspective and avoid wallowing in self-pity. Fortune’s wheel spins around, and sometimes your number just comes up.

We also have agency. There’s a lot I’m not going to be able to achieve in life. There are a lot of doors that are closed to me. Some of them perhaps unfairly. But I can still build a life and have successes.

As I noted in a previous piece, the attacks against the very high agency A. M. Hickman reveal that a lot of young men don’t want someone proving it’s possible to build a life in today’s world. Because then they might have to try doing the same thing themselves instead of posting complaints all day.

Picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, getting back in the game, and never ever quitting or giving up even in the face of unfairness or injustice is part of what it means to be a man.

Ultimately, God is sovereign. We cannot guarantee success for ourselves by our own efforts. But that also means there are possibilities for the future that can arise from outside of ourselves, doors we didn’t even know existed that might open for us. God is not constrained to save by many or by few. So “blackpilling” is rarely warranted.

One thing you should do is resist being propagandized by manipulators. Much of our society, and the church, is trying to convince you that it’s imperative to focus on the particular issues of concern to them, often ones about very specific, favored demographic groups that they care about.

You can’t focus exclusively on yourself, but you have the freedom to decide for yourself what causes you care about the most. You also have just as much right to object to injustices committed against you as anyone else does.

You don’t have to passively accept a system that is putting you and people like you at a disadvantage.

Another thing to put into perspective is that in a diverse society, it is actually important that there’s some level of representation in our prestige institutions of the various groups that compose it. “Merit” as promoted today is not the only criterion of selection for positions.

In some cases, especially in creative fields like writing or music, positions are vastly oversubscribed because they are intrinsically desirable. In many cases such as when hiring for, to pick an example, a violin position in an orchestra, there are a huge number of extraordinarily excellent musicians to choose from. Some positions have an incredible number of very qualified people applying for them. That’s not everything to be clear, but it is some of them. In these cases, some extremely talented and qualified people are going to lose out. It’s inevitable.

Also, it’s hard to discern what “merit” means in many of these cases because there are no objective performance criteria. I would put humanities professors into this category. Unlike, say, chemical engineering, what is considered valuable in the humanities has a large subjective component. It’s similar for things like foundation boards or “genius” grants.

As I’ve written previously, having symbolic representation for the various groups that make up a society is an important civic good. That doesn’t mean we need quotas in proportion to our demographic makeup, or that qualifications should be ignored (particularly in safety critical roles or those with objective performance metrics like sales). But it is a legitimate consideration.

We have massively overcorrected on this point. It’s one of the factors that accounts for the civic malaise in all too many of our cities, another reality people won’t admit or talk about. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something important here.

Maybe you don’t like how diverse our society is, but it’s an actually existing empirical reality. We have to operate in the real world, not a fantasy one.

The Savage piece is superb, and hopefully opens a door to more honestly addressing this reality. If you are an authority in a mainstream or traditional institution, I hope you will have the courage to start talking about some of these difficult and risky truths.

He’s someone who has established a brand as a brash, bold truth teller. He’s a noted critic of big tech, for example. I have highlighted some of his work before. His style is manosphere-ish, and he’s leaned into that image. A serial entrepreneur and professor of marketing at NYU, the New York Times once called him a “Howard Stern for aspiring M.B.A.s and restless middle managers, offering listeners permission to have feelings and assert mildly politically incorrect opinions.” His audience reportedly skews male.

He’s out with a new book of advice to men called Notes on Being a Man, structured as a hybrid memoir/advice book.

I am not a regular listener of Galloway, but what I’ve observed about him - and this book is very consistent with that - is that in line with the NYT saying his views are “mildly” politically incorrect, his statements are not actually especially controversial. He has adopted a brash style, but strategically channels his provocations into places where it is safe to do so, and avoids those where he might get into real trouble.

For example, he’s a rabid Never Trumper. He’s all in 100% on the claims that underpin DEI. In his new book, he makes a point to repeatedly to discuss racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, and discrimination against gays. But he never discusses any discrimination that white males such as himself might be experiencing today.

He notes that he was initially rejected from UCLA when he applied, and rightly so because his high school record wasn’t great. But he was able to get in on appeal due to his troubled family background:

There was an appeal process. It involved writing a one-page letter. I sent it in, and nine days before classes started in September, the phone rang. UCLA had reviewed my transcript, and despite my mediocre grades and SAT scores, they were letting me in, as I was “a son of a single mother and the great state of California” (no joke, those were the exact words). We’re going to give you a shot.

He says that getting into UCLA was the most important thing that ever happened to him.

State-sponsored education is who I am and how I got here. My admittance to UCLA is singular. No other event or action has had a more positive impact on my life and the lives of people around me.

Galloway never mentions the obvious: there is no way a white kid like him would get into UCLA today. His entire future life trajectory of success would likely have never come into being were he starting out 25 years later. He might well have ended up dead in a gutter from a drug overdose instead.

He wouldn’t even have to frame a discussion of this in an anti-DEI way. But the fact the doesn’t even mention it, and thus is willing to take the credibility hit from failing to address something that is a core aspect how American society affects a plurality of young men today - namely discrimination against not for white men - shows his extreme aversion to saying truly politically incorrect things.

You know what I call this? A stroke of genius. And we can see it in the gushers of money flowing into his bank account.

Galloway is clearly a world-class marketer. He’s been able adopt the manosphere, provocateur style but in a manner that’s brand safe, and thus much more readily monetizeable than most other men’s podcasters.

I’m not sure why more people haven’t followed the Galloway playbook. There are many immensely talented, charismatic podcasters who positioned themselves outside of the sweet spot for monetization. Perhaps they really do believe controversial things. Maybe they are too addicted to provocation and edginess. Or maybe they just lack Galloway’s message discipline.

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Galloway’s Personal Ethos

Does Galloway himself really believe the things he says? There’s every reason to believe he does at some level. I’m sure he really is on the center-left as he says.

But we can’t be sure, because judging by this book, Galloway does not have a moral code, at least not as traditionally understood. This isn’t just because he’s an atheist. There are atheists who live by a strong personal moral code. Rather, his ethics appear to be almost entirely instrumental. The reason to do something is not because it is right or wrong but because it works.

Galloway, for example, thinks it’s not cool to treat other people poorly. At the same time, he doesn’t regret doing it when it worked to his advantage.

A good example of this is his first marriage. He married young. After making a pile of money in the dotcom era with companies like Red Envelope, he says saw that he had the opportunity to live the wealthy playboy lifestyle and wanted to spend some time doing it. He realizes this was a failure of character:

My own divorce was my first big personal failure—a failure of character. She, Margaret, was a wonderful person—salt of the earth, kind, ambitious, and really attractive. We were together from the ages of twenty-three to thirty-five, very much in love, very compatible, and together we built a really nice life. You scored out of your league, Scott, people always said. After business school, we got married. We were both working hard. We bought a great house in San Francisco, had great friends, a great life, and were starting to think about kids. It was a good first marriage, probably better than most enduring marriages.

Despite having a good marriage, the temptations to have another round of sowing wild oats were too great:

Back at home, it hit me: I wanted to be single and wealthy and living in a New York City loft, partying at Lotus and Pangea, vacationing in St. Barts, and occasionally advising a hedge fund. Maybe that made me a bad person; I don’t know. So I did the (again, incredibly selfish) math and concluded I needed to spend the next five to ten years scratching that itch. Basically, I broke a promise.

But how does he feel about having done this?

Getting divorced was the hardest decision I ever made, but also the smartest. It sounds harsh, but if I’d stayed married, my resentment would have infected everything. I would have become a serial infidel, an unkind, self-absorbed, untrustworthy husband.

…

I don’t regret getting divorced, but that moment in the counselor’s office is to this day the most I’ve ever hurt another person. Margaret went on to marry a really nice guy and have a kid. We both ended up better off, and a lot happier, too. [emphasis added]

His own personal pleasure trumped any moral consideration. And in effect, he says he’d do it again if he had the opportunity to do it over.

There’s no reason to think that Galloway would think of truth telling - or pretty much anything else - as a moral standard that one needs to live up to even when it’s personally disadvantageous. The reason to be honest would simply be that it’s the best policy in terms of your own personal outcome over the longer term. But there’s no reason to think Galloway wouldn’t lie for personal advancement if he felt it was necessary.

I don’t recall anything in the book suggesting that there are hard and fast moral rules of behavior, except perhaps implicitly those political correctness items like discrimination.

Reading Galloway’s book, I kept thinking that he reminds me of a bit more mature version of David Portnoy. Both are ambitious, entrepreneurial, and highly successful. Both reject traditional moral codes. Both are known for being generous to other people (a good point for both of them). Portnoy’s hedonistic approach is reminiscent of Galloway’s earlier days, which he doesn’t repudiate, but has simply moved on from into another life stage with a different set of (more refined) pleasures.

Galloway is certainly not a man to model your life after. And who knows what he really believes deep inside.

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Remarkably Good Advice

Having said all of the above, Galloway’s advice is overwhelmingly good. I mean really good.

It is impressive the extent to which he has downloaded all of the manosphere thinking and “bro science.” The book is a fountain of useful advice.

For example, he talks about getting plenty of sunlight exposure. He also talks about fitness and working out as foundational. He advocates a mix of cardio and strength training. For cardio, he proposes a polarized mix of low intensity and high intensity. These are in line with best practices.

He also adopts the P3 “protect, provide, procreate” model for masculinity. This is something that’s very aligned with healthy historic practice, and especially the work of anthropologist David Gilmore in his book Manhood in the Making (Galloway should have credited the people he drew it from, either Gilmore, or someplace like Brett McKay’s huge Art of Manliness site, which I believe is what really popularized the “P3” language).

He talks about being on TRT (testosterone replacement therapy), which is also very common for men his age. I don’t endorse this personally, and have made a choice to avoid it. I think it can have iatrogenic effects. I suspect Jeff Bezos blowing up his marriage is likely in part due to TRT, for example. But it’s a standard manosphere element, and Galloway deserves credit for acknowledging that he’s personally doing it, something many people hide.

He tells men that they should be kind (even though he isn’t always this way himself). He says that shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help. He talks about college still being important. He talks about the role a band of brothers plays in challenging you to step and meet the test of manhood (such as by actually asking women on dates).

There’s a firehose of this kind of material, mostly very accurate and useful.

One thing he doesn’t talk too much about is business and career, which is curious for a guy whose biggest successes have come there. This is an example of how the book overall doesn’t really work as a memoir. For one thing, his life was pretty prosaic, lacking the harrowing experiences that often make for popular memoirs today. You’re a child of divorce? Welcome to the club. He doesn’t talk much about his marriages, which is a matter of policy for him. I think that’s great actually, and in fact have the same policy. But it puts the juiciest stuff off limits. And he also doesn’t talk too much about his actual lessons from business (though perhaps he’s done that elsewhere). I’d really like to read an explicitly business memoir from him.

Still, his business/career advice in there is quite good. For example:

The slope of the trajectory for your career is (unfairly) set in the first five years postgraduation. If you want the trajectory to be steep, you’ll need to burn a lot of fuel. The world is not yours for the taking but for the trying.

He talks about how working at least one service job in your life is great training for business and life generally. He talks about doing what you are good at rather than following your passion. He talks about the importance of certifications and credentials. Again, mostly very good advice.

For a fully mainstream book on masculinity, Galloway’s is the best I’ve seen. It’s probably even better in terms of its advice than what you’d find out there on the internet, as he’s already pre-filtered out most of the garbage and fake news.

Galloway is definitely not going to appeal to serious religious or political conservatives. But in terms of practical advice for men under the age of 40, it’s hard to beat this.

This book is perfectly designed for the professional, metropolitan, apolitical to center-left male. Or to people who are looking to “graduate” from Barstool Sports into something more mature (in a sense, at least). This is a market that’s underserved, and Galloway figured out how to capture it.

It’s sad that there isn’t a really good book written from a conservative perspective that has practical advice that’s as good as what you can get from Galloway.

I’ve always said what most credentializes these manosphere figures is their giving true information and advice that works - and which their audience is not getting from traditional authorities like pastors, parents, politicians, and teachers.

When a young man gets advice on how to meet (or have sex with) women from a podcaster or blogger - and it works! - he is going to think that guy is a prophet. It’s the ultimate credential. (This not infrequently also produces rage against traditional authorities who lied to him about this primal area). And that leads to these young men imbibing the moral worldview of these manosphere figures as well.

Similarly, there are serious defects in Galloway’s moral worldview, but they are likely to be adopted by readers who find the advice accurate and useful - and who find his views simpatico with their pre-existing self-oriented ethos.

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The Problematic Exceptions

There are two key areas where Galloway steers young men wrong. The first is his philosophy of what we might called “smart hedonism.”

Rather than saying that you shouldn’t get smashed in college, shouldn’t watch porn, shouldn’t do drugs, and shouldn’t sleep around, Galloway affirms these are all good things for young men to do, but that men need to keep from taking them too far, and avoid getting addicted. Galloway himself straightforwardly says that he watches porn and enjoys it (though sometimes has struggles with it), and consumes “edibles,” for example.

In a sense, Galloway is being realistic here. It’s easy for older men like us to tell young men not to do these things. But let’s be honest: we did them. The reason we don’t now - in his case, not to the same extent - is more due to us simply getting older rather than some great moral enlightenment on our part. Let’s be honest, there’s some hypocrisy in telling young men not to get drunk when you were at the bar every single night in college and in your early career.

The problem is that when we provide social approval to vice, the brakes come off. We’ve seen this with gambling, especially sports betting, and also with pot, where even the NYT is sounding the alarm on psychosis in teenagers, etc.

It’s important to maintain an atmosphere of social disapproval on these things in order to keep them from spiraling out of control or into addiction. It’s unfortunately likely that at least some men following Galloway’s approach will end up addicted to drugs or some such sad event who may otherwise not have done so if we’d kept up the old approach of telling people not to do these things.

The second point is that he flirts with advocating the evangelical “servant leader” approach to dating, marriage, and fatherhood.

This is a straightforward result of his inability to make any politically incorrect statements about women. For example, he says that women initiate 70% of divorces - to his credit, something pastors rarely do - but talks about it exclusively in terms of unhappy couples being able to separate and “literally saving the lives of women shackled to abusive men.” He also says women “bear the brunt” financially in divorce. And of course his own divorce was by his own admission him dumping his wife for selfish reasons.

The idea that women sometimes unjustly divorce their husbands for selfish reasons somehow doesn’t rate a mention that I saw. That’s hard to sustain in an era of female divorce fantasy books selling big numbers and getting gushing reviews in the major press. Nor does he seem inclined to view family court as producing injustices against men. He acknowledges women typically get custody, but seems to suggest it’s mostly because men don’t want it. “It’s harder if you’re a divorced man, as moms are granted custody of the children 80 percent of the time. (Dads, I might add, seldom request full custody, for a variety of reasons).”

Basically, he’s not allowed to talk about women behaving badly.

He also does the routine where he talks about where women are better than men or contribute to men, but not the reverse. The only thing I noticed him talking about where men perform better was in the physiological realm of denser bones and stronger muscles.

And he talks about manhood, particularly when it comes to marriage and children, in terms of unilateral sacrifice and service. For example, he says, “Your goal is to provide surplus value, to offer more than you’re given without keeping score.” He also expects men to abide by retro standards of behavior from the past:

Women may be killing it at work and in higher education, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that men still have more economic opportunity and that the gender pay gap exists. So, men, pay for women if you can.

…

Even if a woman outearns you, your protective instinct should kick in. If you can afford it, pay for meals, also movie and theater tickets, coatrooms, taxis, everything but her car payments.

…

A second arguably sexist idea—a man should always hold a door open for a woman.

Suffice it to say, he doesn’t expect women to abide by any of these older standards. This is the manosphere’s “two sets of books.” Men are expected to live up to their responsibilities under the old system (though without the benefits that they received from it), while women are emancipated from their responsibilities and allowed to adopt a modern behavioral standard instead.

In his emphasis on giving money to women, Galloway even veers towards telling men to act like what the internet would call a “paypig” for the modern, successful, emancipated woman.

Sacrifice and service are part of what it means to be a man - a big part. But manhood cannot be reduced to that, and they need to be kept in their proper place and properly ordered.

He also offers a selective view of ideas like honor:

Etiquette books aimed at men historically emphasized honor, leadership, and sacrifice. Young men were encouraged and expected to facilitate conversation, avoid controversy, and serve as champions, lovers, and protectors of women.

Part of the idea of honor was that a man was expected to avenge insults to his own. Even the United States, we used to have things like dueling as a result.

I don’t think we should go back to dueling. But nor should men be expected give the same exact kind of treatment to women that would have been expected back then. We live in the 21st century, where gender relations and other social norms are quite different. Those old etiquette books are fun to read, but we aren’t leaving calling cards at each other’s houses anymore.

If we want to say that we should go back to the past, we can discuss that. But then women’s roles and expectations for women would need to be on the table as well. I don’t think Galloway wants to go there.

But with these notable exceptions, Notes on Being a Man has a lot of positive, accurate, and useful advice for men. If you can avoid being drawn into Galloway’s moral worldview, it’s very much worth picking up and reading. Recommeded.

Cover image: Scott Galloway by Xuthoria/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Retaining the ability to produce physical goods is important even to 21st-century economies. We do need to ensure that we are producing strategically significant materials and products domestically.

But real economic progress comes through technological innovation, productivity improvements, and entrepreneurship.

The Decline of Entrepreneurship

I want to focus on entrepreneurship specifically. A lot has been written about a long-term decline in entrepreneurship. Here’s a chart from a 2020 Joint Economic Committee report on the topic.

The report notes, “Declining business formation is well documented in the academic literature, which also finds young firms are less likely to become highly productive growth firms, especially since 2000.”

I have visited many urban leaders around the country and spoken at many economic development events. A consistent theme is a desire for more startup businesses, and the perception that there are significant barriers to this today.

Not all declines in entrepreneurship are necessarily bad. Having more consolidation can lead to fewer, larger, more productive and efficient firms. We are no longer a nation of mom and pop operations. As much as I like the “small, local, independent” shop, there’s a reason why those went away.

The Spirt of Adventure

Still, there does seem to be something that’s changed in the American character with regard to entrepreneurship. Part of it is the loss of what I call “the spirit of adventure.”

Consider Amway founders Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel. When they were 14 and 16, they were commissioned to drive two trucks cross country by themselves from Michigan to Bozeman, Montana. I’m not sure how that was even legal.

Later, after college, they decided to go sailing around the Caribbean, even though neither of them knew how to sail. They bought a boat and tried it anyway. The boat sank and they had to be rescued by a passing ship off the coast of Cuba. But rather than returning home defeated, they spent the next five months exploring Latin America.

The pair also tried out a number of businesses before starting Amway. They started a flight school, even though neither of them knew how to fly. They ran a drive-in selling burgers, a toy factory, and some kind of import/export business. Probably other things, too.

There’s a link between being willing to try sailing around the Caribbean when you don’t even know how to sail and starting all these businesses, one of which eventually hit it big.

It strikes me that people of that generation were just more likely to do things like this. In his book The Vanishing American Adult, Ben Sasse tells the story of how his father, as a teenager, used to head up to Canada with friends every summer. They would spend a week canoeing around remote lakes, fishing, and dodging bears. They slept on one island and put their food on another at night to protect themselves. No older adults, no GPS, no cell phones.

I don’t hear nearly as many stories like this from Americans today. Where I do hear them is from immigrants.

To be clear: our immigration system is not working for our country and our people. We need stricter enforcement of our laws around it, and large reductions in legal immigration. But most immigrants as individuals are great people. With the official number showing that there are around 50 million foreign-born people in the country, there are more than a few bad apples in the bunch. There are a whole lot of horrible people in there. But that’s still a minority as a share of this very large population.

Some of their stories can be inspiring. I knew an architect in New York who grew up in Bulgaria. She had a burning desire to get out of her village and come to America and make it big. But she didn’t have enough money to go to college in America. Eventually, she saved up enough money to pay for one year of school at Texas Tech. She flew to Lubbock, and, being broke, she started walking from the airport to the college. A local guy in his pickup saw her dragging a suitcase down the side of the highway and gave her a ride to campus. Somehow, she figured out how to pay for her entire degree.

I don’t know if she’ll ever start a business, but many immigrants do. One reason is that international migration itself is an entrepreneurial act.

How many Americans do things like this today? Some, to be sure, but my impression is that it’s much less common than it used to be.

There are a number of trends that work together to suppress the spirit of adventure in America. One is the aging of our society. Older people are just less adventurous and dynamic than younger ones. That’s the cycle of life. But there are others that affect even younger people today.

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Helicopter Parenting

The first is the rise of helicopter parenting. It’s no secret that children today have far less freedom and far less unstructured time than previous generations did. My Generation X was the last generation of “free range kids” who could be out and about on our own without parental supervision.

Today, parents can get arrested for letting their kids walk to the playground at the end of the block by themselves. It’s not just that the police and child protective services will do this but that there’s an army of busybodies out there just waiting to call the cops on parents doing things they don’t approve of.

Children today also spend much more of their time in structured, programmed activities versus spontaneous play with peers. Declining childbirth rates also mean there are just fewer peers to play with.

Everything about the way kids are raised today discourages them from being adventurous. Except, of course, for participating in specially curated adventures selected and programmed for them by others for developmental enrichment.

Digitization

For the youngest generations, digitization also plays a role. Simply put, today’s young people are finding their adventures in the virtual world, not the physical one. They aren’t driving a truck cross country at age 14. They are too busy spending hours on Roblox or TikTok.

Many parents think this is a good thing. There’s still a perception that the primary dangers to children are in the outside world, from things like child predators or school shooters. They underestimate the extent to which the real dangers today are in the digital world. They’d be happier if their kids spent hours per day online than if they drove a truck cross country, went fishing off the grid in Canada, or went sailing in the Caribbean.

The Regulatory State

A third factor is our metastasizing regulatory state. There’s an expression on the internet that, “You can just do things.” Unfortunately, today we too often can’t just do things.

Previously, when we wanted to build a new road, we just built it. We built the Hoover Dam in the 1930s without even being entirely sure how we were going to build it. We put up the Empire State Building in just a bit over a year.

This kind of freedom definitely came with costs. Highways did incredible damage to many urban neighborhoods, and displaced untold thousands of people who had no voice in what happened to them. Deaths on job sites and in factories were common. Eleven people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. Pollution reached extreme levels, with the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland infamously catching fire.

It was reasonable for our society, as it got richer, to become less tolerant of such things. But the result was an extreme culture of safetyism, citizen voice, veto points, judicial activism, and regulation that makes doing almost anything extremely difficult and costly. It can take a decade to even get permission to build a new highway these days.

One reason that so much entrepreneurship has gone into the digital world is that it has been one of the few areas without this regulatory thicket. In fact, we passed many pieces of legislation to do things like exempt online platforms from liability for user-generated content, exempt e-commerce from taxation, etc. No surprise, this industry boomed.

Today, the regulators are now circling the digital world as well, such as the many interest groups that want to essentially set themselves up as overseers of the AI industry.

While perhaps this is more directly related to entrepreneurship itself than the spirit of adventure, along with helicopter parenting, this has instilled a mindset of having to ask permission in order to do anything, of compliance over adventure.

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Credentialism

Then there’s the rise of credentialism. Starting with my generation, the script for success in life became to go college and get a job at a large, prestigious white-collar employer.

Post Generation X, competition to get into college grew enormously, and the cost did, too. Thus, children growing up are channeled from an early age into a tedious process of résumé building and following the script to get into the right college, which will then get you into the right job.

In this environment, anything that doesn’t contribute toward getting into a higher tier of college is viewed as a poor use of time. Entrepreneurship in this environment is only something you’d do to burnish your résumé to get into Harvard. Just as one example, I periodically read articles in my town newspaper about high schoolers who have created some non-profit. While the cause may be nominally good, it seems likely that the real reason they are doing it - and pitching the story to the media to validate the project - is for college application purposes.

This environment breeds a mentality of compliance, script following, and cynicism. It doesn’t create an environment for genuine adventure or doing things that are truly off script.

Even the process of high-value entrepreneurship seems a bit scripted today. You buy a hoodie or whatever the uniform of the day is. You put together your pitch deck with a hockey stick diagram and total addressable market. You get angel investors. You issue SAFEs. You apply to accelerators. You do your seed round, series A, series B, etc. Capital tends to flow into approved types of businesses. (Think about how it took Elon Musk’s success with SpaceX to catalyze investibility in that sector).

There’s a lot of value in having standardized processes and lingo. Obviously, huge value is being created via Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. But from the outside, it does look somewhat designed to imitate the kinds of scripts that now dominate life paths.

Nevertheless, the tech world seems to be one of the last places left where people with an adventurous spirit are attracted. I think about Luke Farritor, the DOGE staffer who decoded a charred papyrus from Herculaneum that had been buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. A Bloomberg profile of him was designed as a hit job but managed to make him seem incredibly cool and exactly the kind of person we need much more of in America. (If you can’t access the article, I excepted it in a previous weekly digest).

Recovering the Spirit of Adventure

Farritor is an example of how Americans can still have that spirit of adventure. What we need to do is awaken it in our people, and certainly to stop snuffing it out. We need less structured parenting and more free-range kids. We need to put down our phones. We need to recognize that the scripts are increasingly not working, so maybe we need to blaze trails for new pathways.

Recovering the American spirit of adventure is a key part of restoring dynamism and entrepreneurship to our society.

Cover image: Luke Farritor by HeaB/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

One of Taylor’s points, aimed at Calvinism especially, is that Protestantism “excarnated” Christianity. In the Incarnation, God becomes a flesh and blood human being. By contrast, excarnation empties Christianity of embodied aspects, in broad sense.

In essence, excarnation reduces Christianity to a set of propositions one believes, and a set of inward dispositions of the heart. What makes something “sacred” is not an attribute of the thing itself, but rather the spiritual motivation behind it.

Famously, in Protestantism, sacred vocations such as monasticism are rejected. Instead, all vocations are considered as sacred callings. The sacred aspect of one’s vocation comes not from the work itself, nor from some sacralizing act such as consecration, but rather the fact it the Christian is doing it for the glory of God.

I’m sure this overstates things, but there’s clearly something to it.

We see this in the way that much of the evangelical world prioritizes correct doctrine to the exclusion of basically all else, and often defines a good or true church overwhelmingly in terms of doctrine.

Clearly, correct doctrine is very important. Many of the New Testament epistles were written to combat false teaching or bad doctrine. Jude says to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

One of the most terrifying verses in the Bible is Romans 10:2, where Paul says, “They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” In other words, there’s a point at which people who are zealous for the true God are nevertheless unsaved on account of defective doctrine. That should speak to the importance of getting it right.

But this is far from the only thing stressed in the New Testament. After all, you know who has perfect doctrine? Demons (James 2:19). And Paul also famously writes, “If I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” Unity in the church - embodied community - is also a huge theme in the New Testament, one that Christ himself directly links to the willingness of people to accept the gospel (John 17:21).

One implication of excarnation is that contemporary Protestants de facto believe that doctrines and practices are free floating principles that can be adopted without connection to the human community that created, embodied, and sustained them.

This is one of the weaknesses of contemporary American “Anglicanism.” From what I see, the overwhelming majority of people in the Anglican Church in North America are converts. That’s true of most of their clergy as well.

Can you really have Anglicanism in the absence of a material heritage of Anglican community? The real historic Anglican church in the United States is the Episcopal Church. Now, it’s true that the Episcopal Church has largely abandoned traditional Christian doctrine. And perhaps no mainline denomination is more hostile to traditional believers than the Episcopal Church.

But can you simply take the historic doctrine and liturgical practices of the Church of England, and implement them in a community of people who are almost all adult converts, and end up with genuine Anglicanism?

When I raise this point, ACNA people are quick to note that a few Episcopal dioceses moved over. Other individual Episcopal congregations have managed to join as well. And there are also churches whose origins are in various African immigrant populations that also have a historic link to Anglican practice.

These are certainly solid links to Anglican historical practice in parts of the ACNA, but it does not seem that most people in the ACNA world are especially connected to that.

It’s the same with the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in the northern US. It is essentially all converts to Presbyterianism. And the clergy appears to be mostly converts as well. Remember: Tim Keller himself was an adult convert to Presbyterianism.

I have made a point to attend and watch as many mainline Presbyterian churches as I can. One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture of mainline Presbyterianism is completely different from that of the PCA I’ve experienced. In fact, the cultural differences are often more significant and noticeable than the theological ones. These northern PCA churches have much more in common with mainstream evangelicalism than with historic Presbyterianism in my view. This is one reason they have been unable to form elites or fulfill other functions that mainline churches used to perform.

(The PCA in its Southern heartland may be very different, and quite a number of churches there were mainline congregations that split off. Covenant PCA in Nashville only dates to the 1980s but feels very Presbyterian. So what I say about the PCA only applies to what I’ve seen in the north).

Could a group of people with no history as Presbyterians take the Westminster Confession of Faith, the catechisms, and the Book of Church order, and begin practicing real Presbyterianism?

To some extent yes. In other ways, probably not. So much of human institutions and culture is tacit. It’s in the things that aren’t written down. And it’s in the way that things which are written down are understood and practiced.

And even easier thought experiment to illustrate this would be to ask whether someone with no Christian background who picked up a Bible and read it would be likely to derive what we think of as Christianity from it? I think it’s highly unlikely. I very much doubt they would come up with Nicene trinitarianism, for example.

Obviously, these are extreme examples to help illustrate the idea I’m talking about. The point is that the embodied aspects of our beliefs are very important. Christianity is much more than just believing correct intellectual propositions (though of course it includes that).

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There’s an analogy to the the various claims that America is an idea or a creed, and thus that anyone can become an American. There’s certainly a sense in which this is part of the truth. There is a creedal aspect to America. Immigrants have come here and become productive members of society. And even if they personally never fully assimilated to American culture, their children and grandchildren certainly would to a great extent (though not without changing American culture in the process, of course). During World War II, for example, Italian-American soldiers who participated in the invasions of Italy discovered that they were not actually as Italian as they had thought, and were much more American than they had believed.

At the same time, if America is an idea, then it should be possible to recreate America in the absence of Americans. Imagine if we replaced all the native born population of the country with newcomers, all of whom gave assent to the American creed. Would it still be America? Again, certainly not.

Guest contributor Benjamin Mabry noted that our constitution is a written document. But American government and political life is not merely a reflection of our constitution and laws but of our embodied way of life. He said something to the effect that, “The real constitution is us.”

You can bring newcomers into a community, but at some point, when the ratio of newcomers to cradle members reaches a certain point, assimilation breaks down and the reverses direction. This is part of the reason why people in boomtown cities like Austin will claim that their town has “lost its soul,” lost what made it special.

This also happens to religious communities. Someone on Twitter yesterday posted a now-deleted tweet saying that the large influx of converts into some US Orthodox parishes was likely to overwhelm and transform Orthodoxy in America unless the priests were very insistent on making their catechumens understand that they are totally ignorant, and most of what they think they know is actually wrong.

I know a woman who was raised Catholic but converted to Orthodoxy after marrying a Greek American man. She asked how long it would take to fully assimilate into the Orthodox church and was told it would probably take ten years to rewire her brain and culture from Catholicism to Orthodoxy.

But would she assimilate at all if instead of being one of a few converts in a church full of lifelong Greek American Orthodox people, she joined a parish that was 75% converts?

The Catholic church in America is probably majority cradle Catholics, which gives it the ballast necessary to assimilate converts, and to ensure that the sensibilities of converts don’t come to dominate the church. But I wonder about the traditionalist Catholic movement. How many people in these Latin mass parishes grew up in a Latin mass environment (or were even raised Catholic at all)?

Now America is a protean, dynamic nation. People don’t stay rooted in old traditions to the extent they do elsewhere. We move around, change churches, change professions, reinvent ourselves. It’s a country whose people and institutions are always being remade, even where the forms remain.

This is who we are. It’s not bad to be in a church full of converts.

But we should recognize the implications of that. Too many people seem to truly believe that they are authentic bearers of a historic Christian tradition - in some cases that they are the only legitimate bearers of that tradition - simply because they affirm certain confessions and practices.

They may be carrying part of that tradition, but it is admixed with a significant amount that is new. The result is something that’s very different than what came before, something that’s potentially even in conflict with material parts of the historic tradition one has adopted.

Again, that’s not all bad. There’s a lot about the past I don’t like. But we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about what we are doing just because we have the correct doctrine (or think we do at any rate). Christianity is an embodied faith.

For further reading, see my essay on how modern evangelicalism is culturally alien to historic Protestantism.

Cover image: Westminster Abbey by geo pixel/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0

Aaron Renn’s recent article in Compact entitled “The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism” points at a major aesthetic fissure in the broader Right between several factions of potential-elites and the Republican base in America. It is a topic that he’s also discussed in the past on his own Substack. These articles illustrate the way that the attitudes, preferences, and lifestyles of the Republican Party base are fundamentally disconnected from those of the various groups who claim to speak for the “Right” as a whole, from Establishment Conservatives to the New Right.

Meanwhile on X, @realmikeglynn posted this tweet in response to a fashion comment. “No. The short sleeved shirt and tie put a man on the moon and is found in most every airliner cockpit. America is an aerospace republic – and here we respect the short sleeve shirt and tie.”

This post made me think about Renn’s four categories and realize that there’s something of a gap in his account of cultures. Where are the astronauts? I don’t mean the science-fiction depictions of sparkling rockets, but the gritty 20^th Century test pilots and Air Force officers. In which aesthetic vision can you find John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin? Into which category do you put Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff? What kind of elite aesthetic is represented by Vannevar Bush or General Hoyt Vandenberg? Retro Americana doesn’t seem to possess continuity with the America of the Arms and Space Races, yet Techno-Futurism doesn’t acknowledge the continuity it does have with America’s aerospace past. Something has happened in modern American culture that prematurely severed a line of imagery and aspiration defined by these kinds of ideals.

I’ll admit to growing up in a cultural backwater. Despite being 3 years old when the Challenger exploded, killing America’s romantic attachment to space travel, I grew up with astronauts for heroes, dreaming of growing up to get an engineering degree and work for NASA. My childhood heroes, when they weren’t wearing Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo spacesuits, wore the short-sleeved shirt and tie that Mike Glynn refers to in his post. Despite having two parents with Masters degrees, a grandparent with a Ph.D., and a great-grandparent with a Div.D., I grew up in a family and community where the Industrial aesthetic of the mid-20^th Century lived on. I still have [parts of] the original LEGO Space Shuttle set from the late 1980’s. When the USAF unveiled the F-117 in the early 1990s, my father bought me a model of the newly unclassified stealth fighter. Most importantly to me, my father was one of those GS pay scale men in a short-sleeved shirt and tie who built and maintained the great works of a nation built out of concrete, steel, gears, pipes, and pumps. The people today who praise and revere Ronald Reagan in the pages of elite Conservative magazines fail to remember that Reagan was the president of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Ohio-Class Nuclear submarines, and the heyday of Tom Clancy novels. If I didn’t grow up to work for NASA, I remember telling myself, being Jack Ryan would be a good second choice.

However, the rest of the country was moving on. Beginning with the Challenger disaster, compounded by the blossoming deficits caused by an out-of-control welfare state, the descent of major American cities into drug-and-crime fueled suicide, and then cementing itself with the end of the Cold War and 1990’s culture of consumerism, the Aerospace Republic aesthetic began to fade. There were brief moments of revival during the First Gulf War, when Patriot missiles and Stealth fighters caught the imaginations of American youth, but by the time that George W. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, later known for the Orion rocket, there was little to no public interest. The malfeasance of the Bush Administration turned the U.S. military from heroes on the cutting edge of the defense of the Free World into, at best, dupes being used to make unprecedented profits for multinational corporations and spread far left propaganda throughout the Third World.

By the 2010’s, Obama’s NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, giving an unpublished speech to the UAW workers at NASA’s Michoud Space Center, commented that he was ashamed of his work as an astronaut because of how wasteful the Space Shuttle program was. That money could have been put to better use relieving poverty or fighting global climate change, he argued, which is why NASA’s new mission was moving away from manned spaceflight and towards atmospheric and climate research. John Glenn might have been a Democrat in the 80’s, but he was certainly not the Charles Bolden type of Democrat. The Left has just as much severed themselves from this tradition as the Right, to the point that astronauts like Glenn and Aldrin, indeed spaceflight itself, are associated with right-wing politics. For some inexplicable reason, however, none of the major right-wing factions embraces this rich field of cultural symbols, with the exception, perhaps, of MAGA.

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Renn’s discussion of the Four Conservative Aesthetics in America emphasizes the gap between the present-day elite aesthetic visions and the MAGA aesthetic. That gap results from the premature death of a preceding culture in which rockets, jets, high-tech military vehicles, space ships, and the men who made these things possible were considered high-status. In America’s Cold War culture, horsepower was not gauche, big was indeed better, and the National Review could boast about the latest in American military technology being deployed in Kosovo just a couple of pages before their latest poetry reviews. The MAGA culture of guns, boats, trucks, horsepower, and muscle retains some continuity with the Cold War America of the recent past. It certainly commoditizes these things far more than we did in the 20^th Century, and disconnects them from the key themes of national mission, greatness, and the beckoning horizon of the frontier. However, a Ford F-150 or Ram Heavy Duty flying over a rock escarpment while a screaming bald eagle fires an AR-15 possesses one thing in common with the Cold War Aesthetic that the Retro America aesthetic cannot claim, despite its explicit claim to represent the “old” America: MAGA aesthetics preserve the cultural confidence of 20^th Century America.

What Renn calls Retro Americana is the aesthetics of a culture in defeat. From the Challenger explosion, to the intractability of our decadent welfare state, to the key cultural defeats of the Iraq War and Great Awokening, Retro Americana is a retreat into the past because it has accepted these defeats as fundamental to America’s character.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s parody, Team America: World Police, portrays the Cold War culture of America as fundamentally absurd, highlighting the abominable Bush administration’s abuse of American patriotism after 9/11. Rather than acknowledge that the disaster of the Iraq conflict was the fault of a particular set of men, from Bush to Rumsfeld, and from Boot to Frum, they put the blame on American culture itself, distancing themselves from the symbols and signifiers of a nation in its ascent. The cultural and aesthetic similarities of the elite right and left are not accidental but a result of intelligent and sensible people looking at the disaster of the Bush Administration and giving in to despair.

Renn is correct to see a deep, underlying problem in Retro Americana aesthetics. Between the collapse of America’s cities in the 1970’s and the crisis of identity that began with the Fall of the Soviet Union, many American right-wing elites have essentially given up on America’s future and retreated into a fabricated vision of the past. The right-wing elites’ retreat to small-town America isn’t Mayberry nostalgia, which is a phenomenon of the lower-middle-class’s regret at the loss of high-functioning, high-trust working class communities. Counter-elites wouldn’t be caught dead in a town like Mayberry where the most important question is where your great-grandpappy was buried and where highly mobile educated workers are politely yet firmly shunned. Retro Americana aesthetics on the New Right are a compensation for the fact that they’ve lost the traditional home of America’s right-wing elite: the regional urban hub. Retro Americana is the aesthetic of a people in exile, singing by the banks of the Euphrates about the temples of their fathers. When our cities imploded, those with wealth fled to the blue enclaves which could price out social dysfunction, while the rest of Red America transitioned to what we recognize today as the exurban model.

On the other side, the harbingers of Techno-Futurism are explicitly globalist in orientation, rejecting the links between their present projects and the nationalist heritage of the Space Race and the Cold War. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX could not have succeeded in any other nation of the world, specifically due to America’s aerospace culture, and yet SpaceX portrays itself as a trans-national entity, striving towards trans-planetary status.

Whereas Renn focuses on the atheistic and materialist elements of techno-futurist aesthetics, its distinct West Coast brand of post-nationalism is an explicit flight from its dependency on the American national project and the vast hinterland that provides the material needs of the West Coast. Mars and the Asteroid Belt are, for now, psychological projections of resentment at the technocrats’ reliance on steel, power, water, food, manpower, and security from the Heartland, manifesting out of a stymied desire to discard the political obligations that emerge out of that dependency. We already see the European Union licking its chops at the hope of draining the life-blood out of America’s tech industry, but they aren’t being restrained by clever AI algorithms or successful rocket experiments. Those Barbary Pirates of the cyber waves are only restrained by the same type of men who dealt with the first group of lawless thieves who felt entitled to prey on the international lanes of commerce. Of the four aesthetic cultures identified by Renn, Techno-Futurism is the most fragile, shunning its natural ally in American Nationalism and aesthetically catering to the globalists who would destroy its project out of spite, ideological resentment, and greed.

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Working class people are not against farm-fresh food or artisanal products. Renn’s remarks on that topic might betray a lack of familiarity with rural life; In Middlesboro, Kentucky and Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, we have plenty of farmers markets, kitschy used clothes stores, local butchers, and weekend street fairs, despite being two of the poorest counties in America. There’s also nothing inherently incompatible between elite right-wing culture, industrial society, and rural life. However much they deny it, few elite right-wing men that I’ve met can deny the power of a V-8 all-American muscle car or the allure of owning 25 acres of pristine hardwood bottomland with a convenient boat launch and plentiful whitetail. The differences in consumption patterns may not be altogether due to preferences but also to environment. It’s easier to be a motor junkie in the exurbs, just like it’s easier to sustain kitschy businesses in a denser town. The elite men of Cold War America show us examples of men who were conservative, fashionable, educated, and enamored with the symbols and goods of industrial modernity. They could aspire to great feats of human technological achievement yet were not ashamed of their nation, nor aspired to escape it. Only a great nation can build the wonders that techno-utopians dream about, and only the greatness of a future-oriented mission can consummate the nationalism of Retro-Americana.

What can we take away from this? Aesthetics are intertwined deeply with lifestyle, and any convergence on the Right toward a single mode of cultural expression will involve a willingness to shift away from the lifestyles to which these groups have become accustomed. So long as they are convinced of their own defeat, retro-Conservative elites will not stray out from their Blue America enclaves. So long as techno-Cons continue to ignore the fragility of their existence and the political razors-edge they walk, they will feel no need to build deeper roots in the American project. So long as higher-density communities are trapped in the liveable yet unaffordable or affordable yet unliveable dichotomy, the bulk of Red Americans will continue to prefer exurban life. The absolute refusal of our political elites to let people protect themselves from the 1-2% of the people who make life impossible for everyone else will perpetuate our system where either money, the police state, or distance are necessary to preserve a decent life for decent people.

To borrow from Charles Murray, neither Belmont nor Fishtown are healthy places to live and neither will generate a humane culture. Restoring a truly American community for American people, elite and popular, must come first before we can generate a unified American culture and aesthetic.

Bridging this gap, however, is going to require effort by those who have the resources and agency to do the work. Right-wing politics needs to re-center on the core mission of civilization: providing a decent life to decent Americans, and bringing down the hammer on the monsters in our midst who deny others the right to live peaceably and honorably, be they violent criminals or parasitical globalist corporations. Working-class Americans can’t learn to appreciate the goods of small-town life, goods in which their ancestors all partook, if working class towns are cesspits of drugs, crime, and failing public services. They’re not going to move to communities filled by foreigners who refuse to abide by the basic norms and decencies of our society. Likewise, intellectuals and elites who sneer down their nose at the very symbols which defined America during the Cold War need to get over themselves, place the crisis of the 21^st Century into its proper context, and stop posing at sophistication in order to “pwn the poors.”

I get it, I’m naturally at home in these circles. I’m a college professor. My ideal birthday present is a book; I bought three by Tom Wolfe, Robert Nisbet, and Lee Kuan Yew last week. I have copies of neoclassical paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Juan Ribera y Fernandez in my house. I bring a non-English language Bible to church on Sunday. Nonetheless, America is an aerospace society. We’re a technological society. We’re a modern society. Rockets, muscle cars, Starships, stealth bombers, and fricken bald eagles shooting AR-15’s out the window of a Dodge are as American as apple pie. Those who aspire to elite status are doomed to fail if they cannot come to terms with the reality that our national identity and our aerospace frontier are inseparable. America rests on the shoulders of a great colossus, and that colossus wears a short-sleeved shirt with a tie. If you’ve got a problem with that, as 20^th Century right-wing aesthetes of defeat Albert Jay Nock and Allen Tate did, Europe is that-a-way.

People talk today about creating a political movement around the “multi-racial working class.” But this class, and its politics, already exist. The political parties have just not yet found a way to connect with it.

The history of Northwest Indiana, my family’s southern migration from western Kentucky, and my own childhood on the fringe of the nation’s once murder capital, Gary, Indiana tells the story of the evolution of the multi-ethnic working-class, the issues they face, and what matters to them.

I grew up in Northwest Indiana in a small mill town called Lake Station, founded around 1850. It was at the terminus of the first train through Lake County, but the community failed because George Pullman decided to locate his sleeper train cars on Chicago’s South Side. The city was renamed East Gary in 1908, just two years after the founding of the City of Gary, where J.P. Morgan removed the dunes from Lake Michigan and built the world’s largest fully integrated steel mill. It was part of the world’s first billion-dollar company, U.S. Steel. East Gary was marketed as a suburb for steel executives, but the plan didn’t work, and the city failed again.

Over the next 15 years, Gary became a destination for 50+ different ethnicities, primarily uneducated men from Eastern and Central European poor countries. World War I prohibited the immigration of workers from European nations that were at war with the United States. During the Great Steel Strike of 1919, Inland Steel, located next door in East Chicago, recruited Mexicans to the area as strikebreakers. In Gary, the founder of the local chapter NAACP helped organize interracial solidarity during the strike.

Two years later, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration again. U.S. Steel then went on to aggressively recruit southern whites and blacks to fill the gap but also to stop unionization.

After 150 years as subsistence farmers in western Kentucky, my Papaw’s family moved to Gary where he gained employment in the Sheet & Tin Mill at U.S Steel in the late 50s. It was dirty and dangerous, but it was one of the few places where blacks and whites worked together. The local history is well covered in Ruth Needleman’s book Black Freedom Fighters in Steel. “People helped each other, and a guy would come up to you and ask for a dime or nickel, and if you had it, you’d give it to them, white or black.” As one family member recounts, Papaw did the same; he regularly invited black union colleagues to work on their cars and never charged them for even the parts, much less the labor.

After the 1959 steel strike, the longest in U.S. history, my Papaw, his wife, and two kids bought a house next door in the much more affordable and agrarian-feeling East Gary.

The community already had a significant Polish, Slovak, and Croatian contingent. Still, the migration of southern whites and some Mexicans to the area was so intense during the second wave in the late 1950s that the township had to build a new high school in an emergency. We are called the Ingots in honor of steelmaking, and our mascot is Joe Macarac, a Croatian steelworker hero of folklore.

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As Gary began to decline from imports, automation, and white flight after the election of the nation’s first black mayor of a major city, East Gary returned to its original name, Lake Station, in 1977. There are claims this was driven by racism; however, as a historically heavily Democrat voting city, in 1984, the locals voted for Katie Hall in the three-way primary, the first black woman to represent Indiana in Congress.

After my Dad graduated from River Forest, he followed Papaw’s steps into Gary Sheet & Tin, but he was laid off during the mass consolidation of the industry in the 1980s. That decade shows Chicagoland and Gary losing more black population than anywhere in the nation, a story rarely written about.

A generation later, Mamaw and Papaw retired back to Crayne in Crittenden County, KY, and gave my Dad and uncle that little 864 sq. ft. home. I was raised in the same house, which sat on “the color line,” which included Mexicans and Puerto Ricans along with multi-ethnic and multi-racial folks. Interstate 65 separated and segregated us from the city of Gary, which by then had been coded for ‘black,’ which meant poor, and dangerous.

When I was a kid in the 1990s, Gary was the murder capital of the nation for multiple years running. In 1997, my Dad and I traveled to the Black Oak neighborhood, the city's original multiracial now only white-majority neighborhood, to help one of his Hungarian friends build a house. On our way over, I saw both prostitutes and drug dealers in broad daylight. This flew in the face of what I witnessed on TV, as all of my favorite athletes, musicians, and actors were black.

Perhaps it’s part of the crude steelworker language from earlier generations or a product of the time with ‘Parental Advisory’ labels on music albums, but we used ethnic and racial epithets toward each other with impunity at school. When you’re all part of the same social class, owning a particular stereotype is humorous because it is at least partially true. My peers were known by hyphenated ethnicities, from Mexi-rican to Polish-Mexican and a personal favorite, Czechoslovakian-Mexican or “Chex-Mex.” Others were so mixed that 23andMe DNA testing still can’t figure them out. Today, I couldn’t guess the ethnic or racial background of my peers’ kids.

Most importantly, these groups have done a good job retaining their religious and ethnic identity, as noted by the area’s Orthodox churches and events like Pierogi Fest and Serb Fest. My sister married a Greek and subsequently became Greek Orthodox. My friends had such pride in their heritage I never even heard the word “Hispanic” growing up, much less terms like “LatinX” dreamed up by out-of-touch elites. My first job in 1999 was doing dishes at a purely Polish Catholic reception hall in the one-square-mile town of New Chicago. It connected to a church where the hardest working 70-year-old ladies I met regularly told Polish jokes. Magnetized to the side of the industrial kitchen fridge was a Polish (square) rolling pin.

When I graduated high school in 2003, River Forest was 60/40 white ethnic majority. However, our state representatives and state senators were always black Democrats from Gary. Throughout college and a few years after, I serviced the steel mills as an engineering contractor based on the west side of Gary.

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Working Class Pragmatism

As documented in Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, the elites created the concept of race in the 1700s not only to promote the slave trade but also to drive identity politics, giving poor whites the fictitious belief that at least they were better than anyone with darker skin. They have been using such rhetoric to divide working-class people of all types in their quest to maintain power and control.

The working class isn’t buying it anymore.

The politics in communities where I am from don’t neatly orient along traditional party lines, and working-class voters there are driven by what a politician will do, not what demographic groups they belong to. In 2019, Lake Station was the first city in Northwest Indiana to elect an openly gay mayor by a 2:1 margin. He’s half Mexican, quarter Irish, quarter Italian, a Democrat, and a person I consider a friend. The working-class community was far more interested in what he could do for the city in his 9-5 than what he did in his personal life 5-9. Interestingly enough, he won re-election in 2023 by over 22 points yet was wrapped by two Trump victories amongst the city’s voters in 2020 and 2024.

During the summer of 2020, I served as the commencement speaker at River Forest on a socially distanced football field while COVID-19 raged. The valedictorian was a black female, and the salutatorian was a Mexican female who delivered part of her speech in Spanish. With Indiana’s school choice program, today, over 25% of the student body (nearly 500 kids) at River Forest commute from outside the school district, with the largest number coming from the City of Gary. It would seem counterintuitive to move one’s kid from one poor public school system to another, but I firmly believe River Forest has a unique culture that is superior to others. It’s a melting pot of working-class Americans, unified by the ideology of hard work and perseverance, not a victimhood mindset based on identity groups. The school is now just 35% white, and despite increasing free and reduced lunch tickets, the kids continue to outperform their poverty.

My (non-southern maternal side) grandma still lives in Lake Station, and I visited her every time I return home from the East Coast. On one trip back, I decided to drive around my home precinct, Lake Station 11, where I took pictures of over 100 American, a few Mexican, one Puerto Rican, and one Confederate flag. There is something to be said about the patriotism of this multi-ethnic working class. They still believe in America, while the elites treat the nation as irredeemable based on transgressions of the past.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Washington, D.C., where I lived for the past eight years until the end of 2024. Despite the many row houses surrounding the Capitol, I never saw an American flag on private property but instead, the virtue-signaling flags of various hyper-niche victim groups working-class people couldn’t name.

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The Bill Bishop book The Big Sort came out in 2008, but it continues to give us insight into how Americans have been moving around the country and self-selecting communities based on more than just jobs and economic status but also political beliefs. I watched my neighborhood, Navy Yard, become the most gentrified yet racially segregated place in the city despite the hypocritical rhetoric of progress spouted by locally elected leaders. In a city that’s never seen a recession, the elites couldn’t name a working-class person, much less understand their issues. They love to quote (near) useless macroeconomic data like “GDP” and “Consumer Spending” but don’t understand that statistics do not indicate how the individual or family is actually doing.

Blue-collar folks are anchored to their place of employment. They can’t just pick up and leave with their remote jobs, so the working class is more ethnically integrated than ever. The higher-ups in white-collar and remote work are clustering into homogenous, segregated group-think. They create undefinable concepts like “non-binary” so they can “relate” to actual groups who have faced historical discrimination in our country.

It is the elite, particularly on the left, who started the culture wars, because they didn’t have any material needs to survive. The population of my family’s ancestral homeland of western Kentucky peaked in 1900 and has been in a slow decline since. The ruling class destroyed their historical economic anchors of tobacco and coal with no plan for a replacement, then called them ‘privileged’ while dismissing their faith as ‘primitive’ and ‘close-minded '. That’s exactly how their politics went from 80% Democrat for nearly 200 years to nearly 85% Republican within the last 25. This transition is well covered in the 2022 book, The Fall of Kentucky’s Rock. Because the elites never touch down in fly-over country, they don’t even recognize, much less respect, that 25% of those ‘rural rubes’ are now non-white.

For the millions of people who migrated to the industrial north during the 20th century looking for a better life, many of their jobs were eliminated by more than just automation. Poor trade agreements with countries with no labor or environmental laws are unfair not to mention some of the unlimited subsidies foreign governments provide to particular industries. Wall Street got richer while the Main Street of many small communities across the country evaporated. Today, all those people are looking for a good job that is stable, a safe community, and the ability to raise a family while obtaining home ownership – perhaps the core pursuits of what many would call the American Dream. Their daily concerns are far more practical, not ideological.

Identity politics is division and it is fatiguing. A race to the bottom as to “who has it worse” is not good for anyone. The working class doesn’t have the time for it anymore.

Interestingly, both Rizzi and Burnham were Marxists by heritage. Rizzi’s book is about how in the Soviet Union the bureaucracy had replaced the aristocracy and bourgeoisie as the exploitative class. So while references to Burnham and the managerial revolution are a mainstay on the right today, managerialism was originally a left wing concern, and indeed there’s a long history of leftist critique of bureaucracy.

The problem for critics of managerialism is that managerialism has been inevitable under the conditions of modern society. Managerialism fundamentally arose because of the revolution of size and scope. The dawn of the railroads and the second industrial revolution created the first large scale organizations. Prior to around 1835, there were only a handful of organizations that employed even more than 100 people.

As large organizations grew that involved vast geographic scope, vertical integration, complex technology, and large numbers of employees, the techniques of management needed to be developed to run these huge organizations, whether that be the Pennsylvania Railroad, Standard Oil, or General Motors. Industrialization created gigantic cities like New York and Chicago that required large amounts of infrastructure and management to function. Big business and big cities led naturally to big government, a necessity to stave off oligarchic control of the country.

The managers eventually became a class that across all these organizations effectively controlled the country and reaped outsized gains. This wasn’t just for large organizations either. The Washington, DC urbanist Richard Layman used to say of local government there that, “Big government remakes little government in its own image.” The same is true for other organizations. The managerial revolution and the managerial mindset penetrated even small organizations like churches. I previously hosted a podcast with Chris Schlect about the managerial revolution in American churches.

So long as we have these large organizations, getting rid of managerialism has been impossible. That’s why, for example, one of the fiercest critics of managerialism, the paleoconservative writer Sam Francis, came to the conclusion that the American “soft” managerial regime could only plausibly be replaced by a “hard” managerial one (translation: fascism or something like it).

Enter artificial intelligence. For the first time, AI offers the possibility of managing large scale, complex entities without a correspondently large and independent managerial class.

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Let’s be clear, we are talking about the future. But given what we have already seen AI demonstrate, there’s every reason to believe it is possible at some point.

Even basic algorithmic management is already facilitating this shift, a transition to what I previously labeled “impersonal” (as opposed to bureaucratic) authority. Consider Uber. Uber drivers don’t report to a boss that assigns work. They are directed by an algorithm. True AI, such as driverless car technology, then replaces the driver altogether.

Managerialism is replaced when this same process is applied to managers. AI will start to replace managers and technicians by taking over the basic administration functions. AI also, critically, might “Uberize” the remaining managers and technicians, subjecting them to impersonal, algorithmic control from the senior most levels of an organization.

While the exact details are of course hazy, and the future cannot be predicted, AI looks to be a centralizing technology. It may well restore, validate, and extend the power of senior executives over organizations by eliminating or disempowering managers.

Imagine a world in which much of the US government bureaucracy has reached an advanced stage of impersonal AI management. This alone would restore immense power to the elected President and White House. Future Presidents would have far fewer problems with career civil servants attempting to sabotage or subvert their agendas.

When you think about this more broadly, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the cure (AI) may be worse than the disease (managerialism).

For example, we already face increasing challenges in speaking to an actual human customer service agent when dealing with many companies. There may come a day when it’s simply impossible, that we are completely subjected to algorithmic relationships. We may not even know what entity actually stands on the other side of that interface.

This isn’t just theoretical. Investigative reports out of Atlanta, which is one of the biggest markets for large-scale investor-owned housing, found that some tenants didn’t actually know - and couldn’t figure out - who their actual landlord was. Interactions were basically through a collection of outsourced service providers, and almost entirely mediated through technology. Hence tenants found it impossible to get problems fixed (yet could still be easily evicted if they failed to pay the rent, since like many red states, the deck is stacked in favor of slumlords in Georgia).

AI isn’t required for this to happen, but AI enables it at a scale and extent that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

China’s surveillance apparatus, social credit score system, and full digitalization of society also shows how these technologies allow vast social control over a population.

The “AI doomers” worry about a Skynet-like system that might kill or enslave humanity, but the most likely negative outcome is AI excessively empowering dictators or an oligarchic class.

If you think billionaires or imperial Presidents wield too much power today, wait until our fully AI enabled world.

Additionally, one corollary of this kind of AI driven centralization is that it might lead to additional geographic centralization of culture and the economy. Much has been made of the so-called “rise of the rest” in terms of growing technology and startup ecosystems around the country, or people moving away from the coastal elite cities. But the core AI companies are in San Francisco.

Cloud technology and open source were decentralizing forces, enabling lots of cities to create ecosystems of software-as-a-service companies. But it may well be that ecosystems built around putting wrappers on AI engines will not be viable. This would hurt secondary and tertiary technology clusters.

It’s possible that a fully AI driven world is one in which a handful of cities really are command nodes of the overall country and economy. The tendency has already been for the highest value functions to get pulled further up the geographic hierarchy.

All of this is not a guaranteed outcome. And the possibility of it doesn’t mean that we should attempt to suppress AI technology. Had someone seen the downsides of managerialism and put a halt to the second industrial revolution, most of us would still be subsistence farmers. The gains far outweighed the losses. It may well be the same with AI. I’m personally leaning into AI and am looking forward to seeing what it can do.

But I can tell you this: get ready. The age of impersonal authority is already upon us. Will an AI powered post-managerial America be far behind?

Cover image credit: Sam Altman of OpenAI by TechCrunch - CC BY 2.0.

Just as one example, America has the highest share of its children living in single parent households of any country in the world. This has profound negative consequences for our country.

One popular culprit for this is a decline in adherence to “bourgeois values” or bourgeois culture. We see these values described well in Amy Wax’s controversial Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed on the subject:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries. The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Failure to valorize and adhere to bourgeois values is part of the conservative theories about the “culture of poverty.”

Bourgeois values are a modernized and secularized version of those of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic. For a deeper exploration of America’s traditional Protestant ethic, see my essay from last year:

Bourgeois values is actually a good term for them because they are associated with the bourgeois economy, that is to say, capitalism, particularly capitalism as it existed prior to roughly the Great Depression.

The problem is that America is now a post-bourgeois country, both economically and culturally. This poses significant challenges to those, such as myself, who want to both reduce social dysfunctions like drug abuse and generally elevate the health, flourishing, and productivity of our people.

I will trace this American post-bourgeois shift across three dimensions:

• From a Protestant to a post-Christian culture

• From a bourgeois to a managerial economy

• From a production to a consumption based society

From Protestant to Post-Christian

America was 98% Protestant at the time of the founding and deeply embodied an Anglo-Protestant, Calvinistic culture. While Weber’s Puritans were the English Puritans, not the American ones, his analysis does broadly describe the austere, self-controlled, industrious, energetic, and expansionistic American culture that tamed the continent and perhaps more than any other built the modern world we live in today.

These values and behaviors were ultimately rooted in religion. As that religion dissipated, so did those values. French writer Emmanuel Todd views this collapse of Protestantism as a crisis for the West. I previously wrote an essay that went into some detail on his views.

Todd divides the story arc of religious decline through three states: active, zombie, and zero.

• In the active state, people still attend church and practice Christianity, living out the habits and values of their religion.

• In the zombie state, regular church attendance and genuine belief are lost, but the habits and values of religion remain.

• In the zero state, not only do people no longer believe of practice religion, but the habits and values of religion have disappeared.

Todd does not give specific dates for America, but implies that the active state ended by around 1900. The zombie state lasted from around 1900 to 1965. Then there was a transition phase from zombie to zero state that ended in 2015. Todd identifies the legalization of gay marriage as the definitive sign of our arrival at a religious zero state.

Seen in Todd’s framework, bourgeois values are the values of zombie Protestantism. They are post-religious but continue forward the habits and values of American Protestantism. It’s notable that the period in which Wax says bourgeois values reined supreme, the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, fits well with this framework. (Church attendance was high in the 1950s, but religiosity was shallow).

It should not be surprising that as we’ve transitioned towards a religious zero state, bourgeois values have decayed and finally collapsed. Public discourse often overemphasizes sexuality, overshadowing other cultural shifts. If you look at the post-2014/15 world that I label the “Negative World” and Todd calls the zero state, we see things like the rapid proliferation and cultural normalization of gambling, the legalization and social acceptance of drugs (and the opioid crisis), and widespread adoption of tattoos. The elimination of usury laws, the proliferation of payday loan stores, the growth of consumer debt, and more predate this but not by a huge amount. Along with this we also see a decline in the work ethic properly so-called, one that affects both white and blue collar workers. The growth in the number of prime working age men who are not in the labor force or school is an example of this. And of course we have declining family formation and birth rates.

While the specifics of what our society looks like are contingent, now that we’ve arrived at a definitely post-Christian culture, we should expect that the bourgeois values associated with zombie Protestantism would largely disappear. And they have.

It’s true that there are still high levels of church attendance and religious belief in America. And of course, as people like Tom Holland have documented, there’s still a lot of Christian influence on Western values. Nevertheless, we did hit a watershed moment sometime circa 2015. As I wrote last year in the essay linked above, even American evangelicalism itself is culturally post-Protestant.

In this environment, restoring bourgeois values is a challenge to say the least.

From a Bourgeois to Managerial Economy

Apart from religio-cultural changes, there was also a profound change in the economic structure of the country. This is related to James Burnham’s idea of the managerial revolution.

As I said, the bourgeois economy was a capitalist economy, but it was pre-managerial, dominated by business owners. Prior to the advent of the railroads, and especially the boom of the second industrial revolution, the American economy was dominated by homestead type agricultural households. Other business was almost exclusively in the form of small sole proprietorships or partnerships that were linked together via market transactions.

After the Civil War there was a revolution in size and scale in America. Large industrial concerns replaced much of this small scale infrastructure. This led to the development of modern management (bureaucracy) as we know it. Cities exploded in size as well. Big corporations and big cities meant government got big and managerialized as well.

Still, until the early part of the 20th century, the large industrial concerns that emerged were still in many cases run by a founder or controlling shareholder. And America still had many smaller, independent businesses such as shops. Until 1920, the majority of Americans also still lived in rural areas. The “family farm” was still arguably the way a plurality of Americans lived.

All of these people, from industrial titans to small shopkeepers to farmers, were a kind of bourgeoisie. They owned their own business or livelihood, of whatever scale. This began to breakdown in the 1920s, through the Depression and then the war. In the post-World War 2 era, America had transitioned from being a nation of people who worked for themselves, to a nation of people who worked for others. While this was a slow gradual shift that can’t be dated to specific moment in time, I’d argue that there’s a significant difference between in 1920 (still primarily or heavily bourgeois) and 1950 (predominantly managerial).

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this transformation in his book White Collar (1951).

Democratic property means that man stands isolated from economic authority; class property means that, in order to live, man must submit to the authority which property lends its new owner.

The right of man ‘to be free and rooted in work that is his own’ is denied by the transformation of property; he cannot realize himself in his work, for work is now a set of skills sold to another, rather than something mixed with his own property. His work, as Eduard Heiman puts it is ‘not his own, but an item in the business calculation of somebody else.’

The centralization of property has thus ended the union of property and work as a basis of man’s essential freedom, and the severance of the individual from an independent means of livelihood has changed the basis of his life-plan and the psychological rhythm of that planning. For the entrepreneur’s economic life, based upon property, embraced his entire lifetime and was set within a family heritage, while the employee’s economic life is based upon the job contract and pay period.

Secure in his world, the old entrepreneur could look upon his entire life as an economic unity, and neither his expectations or his achievements were necessarily hurried. In his century, he had the chance to feel that his effort and initiative paid off, directly, securely, and freely. Some entrepreneurs no doubt continue to experience that old feeling, but the bourgeois rank and file is today locked in a contest against all of big capitalism’s ‘secondary modes of exploitation,’ and many of them fail. For the population at large, the idea of going to work without an employer is an unserviceable myth. For those who nevertheless try it, it is frequently a disastrous illusion.

This applies to blue collar as well as white collar workers.

The person who no longer owns his own “means of production” but is dependent on others, on the system for his livelihood is post-bourgeois, whether he is part of the managerial class or the working class.

As Mills notes, this produces not just an economic but a psychological shift in the people. Among other things, it produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control. Post-bourgeois attitudes are very different from bourgeois ones. The transition to the managerial from the bourgeois economy opens the door for bourgeois values (the Protestant ethic) to be replaced.

This way for this was paved by a third transition.

From Production to Consumption

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There’s a game theory puzzle called the Prisoner’s Dilemma that helps explain this. Two criminals are being held by the police in separate cells. If neither of them talks, they both get off with a light sentence. If one of them talks, but the other does not, then the one who talks gets off completely while the other gets a heavy sentence. If they both talk, then they both get a moderate sentence.

Though both criminals are better off if neither talks, the only logical move for both of them is to confess. Thus both of them end up with a heavier sentence than if they’d both stayed silent.

While not exactly the same, there’s a sort of analogous logic regarding institutions. We’re all better off with strong, well functioning institutions. To create and sustain that would require participation and investment from most of society. But given the state of all too many of our institutions, the only logical move for many people is to abandon them, or take some other negative stance such as exploiting them, attacking them, etc.

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We can model institutional engagement with this matrix. It has institutional performance on one axis, and the ability to influence an institution on the other. This leads to four separate strategies: Defend, Participate, Reform, and Exit.

1. Defend. For those institutions that are high performing, and where a person has a high ability to influence the institution, the logical strategy is to try to defend the integrity of the institution to preserve and enhance it as a high functioning part of society.

2. Participate. In those cases where the institution is high performing, but a person has limited or no ability to influence it, the strategy is to participate in the institution. Stay engaged, but don’t make any attempts at change or influence.

3. Reform. Where an institution is functioning poorly, and a person has a high ability to influence it, one logical strategy is to try to reform the institution, to fix it so that it becomes high performing.

4. Exit. When an institution is functioning poorly, and a person has a limited or no ability to influence it, the logical strategy is to exit or abandon the institution if possible.

Obviously, there’s a continuum here. It’s not always obvious what institutional performance is good or bad enough, or how much ability to influence is high enough or not high enough. But this gives a basic overview.

While this matrix shows institutional engagement strategies, it also shows the boxes as equal sized. But there aren’t equal numbers of institutions in each of them.

Realistically, most people have very little ability to influence the bulk of the institutions in their lives. And I think there’s a widely shared belief that many of our institutions have serious problems. How many fall into that category, which ones they are, and for what reasons are all subjects of debate. But people seem to agree that we have a problem.

If we scale the axes based on this, we get more proportional sizing. Here’s an illustrative version.

For most people in a large share of cases, the rational move is Exit. This goes along with Albert Hirschman’s (author of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty) observation that Exit has a privileged position in American culture. We see Exit in the case of public schools. Many people have abandoned them in favor of home schooling or private schooling.

So we’re in a scenario where we need institutions, but the only logical move for most people is to turn their backs on them.

I’d like to find a way to regenerate our institutions but recognize that I - and most of you - can’t do anything about most of them. So my own writing tends to be pulled in multiple directions on this.

As with my matrix, perhaps the best approach the average American can take is institutional triage. Try to defend and actively participate in high functioning institutions - which still exist in large numbers, thankfully - while exiting from poorly performing institutions where you can, and generally seeking to insulate yourself from the consequences of institutional failure.

This doesn’t necessarily move society in a better direction, as with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it’s the logical move for the average person.

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My model also sheds light on the approach being used by President Trump’s DOGE initiative (Department of Government Efficiency).

Zooming in on my Reform quadrant, we can see that there are times when people have a lot of influence over an institution, but not enough to successfully reform it.

We see this again in our public schools. Poorly performing urban districts have proven stubbornly resistant to reform, even though there are elected officials who theoretically control the schools and are very motivated to improve them.

So what the bipartisan education reform movement did was to start supporting charter schools. They used their influence in order to build exit ramps out of the mainstream public schools into an alternative institution set. In Republican states this has gone even further with the “fund students not systems” model in which families can take their state education funds to private schools as well. Both Democrats and Republicans have been using their influence over educational institutions to incrementally dismantle them.

In the case of the Trump administration and DOGE, he faces a federal bureaucracy staffed almost entirely by Democrats and which is implacably hostile to his agenda. This is not an auspicious environment for reform. It doesn’t seem very likely that the bureaucrats are going to start marching to a different tune just because the politically appointed leadership tells them to. It’s much more likely that they would use every tool in their arsenal to actively resist or delay.

In this sort of environment, there’s strategic logic to the idea of using institutional influence to simply terminate or downsize the institution in question.

Consider the US Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America. Just as one example, during the 2020 campaign, while Trump was actually still President and his appointee was in charge of the agency, it ran what can only be described as a get out the vote campaign ad for Joe Biden. You can watch it for yourself in this Politico piece. (When Biden took office, he reversed the disciplinary actions against the people involved and actually rewarded some of them).

Michael Pack, Trump’s appointee to run the US Agency for Global Media, wrote about this as part of an op-ed describing his experience, in which it proved to be impossible for him to actually direct the agency.

This time around, the Trump admin took a different approach. He ordered Voice of America shut down. All of his moves will be litigated to the nth degree. But it’s much more likely that Trump will succeed at shutting things down than reforming them.

Undoubtedly this strategy throws away a lot of good with the bad. But that’s a reason why leaders shouldn’t allow their institutions to become subverted or politicized.

If you’re the one who planted the tares in the first place, then you’re not in a position to complain when a lot of wheat gets thrown out along with them.

Put this all together, and we can see why things continue to trend in the wrong direction when it comes to our institutions. Game theory type logic encourages people to defect from institutions. And all too many of our institutions appear to be impervious to reform efforts, making destroy or deletgitimize an attractive option.

I am on record as saying we need an institutional refresh or reset. But how do we accomplish that? There’s no easy or obvious answer. Those of us who value institutions and their importance should be devoting most of our energy to thinking about how to create a strategic environment in which an institutional reset becomes possible.

You can also read some of my previous pieces on institutional reform.

The recent debate about H1B visas ignited a firestorm as tech magnates, notably Elon and Vivek, and their immigrant workers denigrated the talents and capabilities of native-born Americans. Economically, are these “skilled” immigrants predominantly a way to lower wages or a critical source of talent for American competitiveness? Is American talent effectively “tapped out” or do we do a poor job of cultivating it?

Aaron Renn, in his former life as a consultant who was involved in corporate cost-cutting efforts, who was “in the room when it happened,” firmly believes the latter, having observed the motives and actions of the organizations in utilizing these visa programs. They are designed to repress wages for entry and mid-level worker bee positions, not a scalable source of elite talent.

My personal experience agrees with Aaron’s observations. I have found in my businesses that it is not difficult to find 99th percentile talent (as objectively measured on reasoning tests) among non-elites in the heartland, as our economy is massively inefficient at identifying and developing talent. With the death in the early 1970s of IQ testing for entry-level employment due to disparate impact concerns, white-collar employers were forced to launder their need for objective talent identification through higher education.

Universities are allowed to discriminate based on heavily g-loaded college entrance exams and proudly display their average score ranges as an indication of their students’ abilities. The university a person attends becomes a marker of their perceived ability. While this doesn’t seem to affect average earnings much — the top-scoring students tend to earn about the same regardless of where they attend university — many of the most elite institutions provide a pedigree for the top, most elite jobs of our society. Eight out of nine members of the Supreme Court, for example, attended Harvard or Yale, and Barrett attended Notre Dame. None attended a state school. It is still true that for truly elite positions, pedigree matters.

More importantly, these schools have some of the best faculty, and small class sizes dedicated to cultivating talent. Since they admit some mixture of new, raw talent and established elites, the networking between the two helps raw talent develop social connections to elite networks, something unlikely to happen at most large state universities.

To what degree, then, are these top colleges objectively identifying and cultivating talent?

Using National Merit As a Proxy for Talent Repression

It occurred to me that an objective way to assess this is the National Merit program, which publishes extensive data on the students who qualify and their college destinations. It helps that the program is better for identifying talent than SAT or ACT scores for several reasons:

• The National Merit Scholar Qualifying Test (NMSQT), somewhat of a misnomer, is a modification of the scores achieved by high school juniors on the PSAT calculated by doubling the verbal component relative to the math. The top 1% or so of scorers in each state are awarded semifinalist status, and 95% of these advance to finalist when confirmed by an SAT score within 100 points or so of the equivalent PSAT score. Some squawk about the emphasis on verbal scores, but the academic literature is pretty solid that verbal ability better predicts success outcomes than math ability, though both are important.

• Since the PSAT is administered once1, on a uniform test date, it is a more accurate assessment of ability for large populations2, as students cannot take it more than once, and since administered by schools directly, is less prone to cheating by corrupt proctors or stand-in test-takers using fake IDs. If you don’t think this happens, you’re very naive3. The whole country of Korea had their SAT scores cancelled, and again, that’s only when the cheating was widespread enough to be obvious.

• In general, the PSAT is administered before most students engage in significant test prep, and is more like the old SAT in using tricky questions on Algebra I level math to assess ability more than achievement.

• At the population level, standardized test scores are the best indicators of academic ability and job performance, far superior to less objective techniques such as interviews, high school GPAs, or extracurricular activities.

So where do National Merit Scholars matriculate? The most recent report from National Merit shows us:

Overwhelmingly, National Merit Scholars matriculate to large state schools where they are awarded generous scholarships4. The #1 destination is the University of Alabama, which provides the following benefits to finalists:

That’s not only a full ride, but free housing, an extra $4,000 per year, and also a 5th year that will allow many students to complete a master’s degree. That last one is extremely strategic on Alabama’s part, also building up the competitiveness of their graduate programs by keeping these students in the state and their programs.

Bama is a smart operator here, applying the same principles to academic recruiting as they do to their football program. Also notable is their matching of pageant scholarships. One wonders exactly what they’re up to in just straightforwardly recruiting a smart, good-looking student body. This is a cunning long-term investment in their alumni base, as both brains and beauty are predictive of life success. Not to mention that the median white-collar professional can live like a king in Huntsville or the nice suburbs of Birmingham compared to a hovel in NYC or SF, even if it means giving up any hope of being elite.

With the growing Kardashian-grade social cachet of “Bama Rush,” — nothing seems to attract the attention of young women like a cutthroat social competition, and the boys like a good football team for similar reasons — Alabama, and SEC schools in general, are starting to see massive matriculation from the Northeast. They’re becoming a haven for smart, athletic kids from wealthy families who want to opt out of the Ivy admissions rat race, which is increasingly the province of Paris Gellar types willing to jump through the hoops setting up fake nonprofits, fake extracurriculars, and crafting social justice narratives in their essays, or else academic grinds that Vivek seems to think are the true elite (more on that later). Long-term, if the Ivies tolerate this, they will lose their cachet. It’s social proximity to smart jocks like the Winklevosses, not one-dimensional grinds, that makes the Ivies desirable.

In the meantime, however, it is a disservice to these talented students that they are either a) rejected from the Ivies and equivalent schools for DEI reasons, or b) aren’t offered comparable scholarships, particularly guaranteed scholarships that remove the risk of applying. Many of these students from lower middle-class families won’t even bother applying because of the perceived cost, as even if tuition is heavily discounted or waived the cost of housing alone often exceeds the cost of state universities. For many students, this means unnecessary debt.

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Elite Universities As Social Insurance Programs

One way to see elite private universities, particularly second-tier ones, is as a form of social insurance. Because direct testing of employment applicants is legally questionable and frankly distasteful to most business leaders5, many people who graduate from these universities have a form of blindness in sourcing talent. They are prejudiced against smart graduates of large public universities, limiting themselves to hiring only from the small, inbred network of elite ones. Ben Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, tells of his almost not hiring an extremely talented sales executive because, despite his massive success at other companies, the candidate had attended the University of Southern Utah for undergrad.

One problem is that the people who graduate from elite universities aren’t as elite as advertised. These institutions recruit a mix of students, some highly talented, some for DEI reasons, some who curate applications that overstate their actual talent, and others who are well-connected to alumni or donors. Even Harvard has a famous “number” — i.e. the donation, in the millions, where one’s mediocre kid can get admitted. Well aware of their perceived bottleneck on talent, Ivies and others trade their cachet to camouflage the middling kids of the elite among their most talented students. And if graduates of Ivies aren’t all that talented, on average, it can look like, if one believes they are the sole source of world-class talent, that there is a general shortage of talent6.

This blindness can make people from elite backgrounds underestimate the available talent, and of course, it’s a convenient blindness if this is a cover for hiring H1B immigrants at cut-rate wages. That these workers are essentially indentured servants and cannot look for other jobs is even more attractive to employers. To use Trump’s language, if they quit they have to “go back” to where they came from. They can be abused, overworked, and underpaid with no recourse.

This is a huge benefit to employers, as a major cost in any business is turnover, particularly in California, where non-compete and non-solicitation agreements are statutorily unenforceable for American citizens free to seek another job. Because they are cheaper, they also allow corporate bureaucrats to more easily inflate headcount to justify their own promotions, a principal-agent problem I covered in my review of BS Jobs, and these workers, as a serf class, are less likely to compete with them for these same promotions.

The ability to have employees who cannot quit, essentially a one-way employment contract where the employer can still fire at will, is a huge business advantage. This advantage may even make these employees more desirable despite their middling talent levels compared to native labor. A trained, middling-ability employee who can’t leave is, in some roles requiring more training than aptitude, more desirable than a super-talented employee who can, or who will demand promotions instead of being content in a line worker role. Whether this is desirable in the American economy generally is a political question, but not publicly defensible, which is likely why we get all this hand-waving about a “talent shortage.” Following the money, the reality is employers who don’t want to lose their cut-rate serfs.

Part of it may simply be a cash-flow problem.

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The New Entrepreneurs

The recent Twitter blowup on H1B with Vivek and Elon also lacks economic context. As I explained in my post last year on Elon, he is a great man playing the game as it is presented to him. The “game” in this case is the greatest Bubble of all time, and perhaps a permanent bubble, as I further explained in my post on the glut of capital.

Part of this game is that neither Vivek or Elon are entrepreneurs in the same sense that Henry Ford was. Neither have ever returned a dime of dividends to investors7, and run or ran businesses with poor financials when evaluated on a cash basis. Vivek mostly never even served real customers, given he cashed out of a failing biotech company before the failed patent he purchased with investors’ money failed a fifth time in clinical trials8.

Elon creates real products, but the glut of capital, and the laws of physics in disfavoring a less dense source of energy for locomotion9, make that difficult to do profitably. Take, for example, Tesla’s most recent annual cash flow statement, as opposed to GAAP “earnings.” Tesla spent $2.4 billion cash more than it made from operations, and to cover the gap took on debt and issued new stock, diluting shareholders. It is a cash-poor business.

Businesses like this need cheap labor to avoid running out of cash and would fail if they could not hold down wages for technical labor through H1B (and wages at the entry level tend to depress wages up the scale as well). Elon probably doesn’t see a way to pay his engineers $150k a year starting salaries in the high-cost metros where he does business, and his best engineers multiples of that, without running out of cash.

Now, it’s important to note here that startups or low-margin growth businesses have another way to pay employees when short on cash: stock options and equity grants, which also incentivize sticking around with a vesting schedule. However, since H1B serfs can’t leave and have their immigration status tied to the company, there’s less of a need for this kind of compensation, which is extremely attractive to tech founders by avoiding the “D word” — dilution. The conflict of interest here is obvious since the entire source of these founders’ wealth is usually tied up in their company’s stock value.

It’s important to note that most entrepreneurs must bootstrap and run businesses for a cash profit. Only a tiny sliver of the most privileged closest to the money printers, e.g., the Harvard and Stanford networks, can tap into venture capital willing to lose money in hopes of flipping an IPO on public investors, so it’s extremely rich for this most privileged caste — pun intended — to then demand serf labor on top of their superior access to undisciplined capital. On a cash basis, your local dentist who owns his practice is a more successful entrepreneur than most of these people.

So take their arguments about H1B being essential to American greatness with appropriate skepticism for the self-interest involved. Absent bubble economics, massive money printing, and depressed wages, we’d have different entrepreneurs solving better problems as indicated by the production of cash profits more proportional to market capitalization, and those businesses could afford to pay native employees market compensation.

Another angle on this is how so many tech founders have piled on with Elon’s call for more immigration. Elon, of course, is one of the few tech guys working on real-world problems. Most of these guys run businesses that provide marginal social value.

One tech CEO who chimed in (with a misleading comment comparing engineer wages in high-cost-of-living metros to the American median) was Aaron Levie of Box. Box is a file storage platform, basically Dropbox or Google, with more APIs bolted on to provide compatibility with corporate bloatware. No one would miss Box or half its competitors if they didn’t exist. They provide literally the most commoditized tech service imaginable, storing and downloading files, and as one can imagine in a commodity business, the profit margins are thin.

Yet tech guys like Levie glom onto Elon, who does hard things in the real world, to ensure cut-rate labor keeps their barely profitable apps running. Box, for example, has never paid a dividend and has over a billion dollars in cumulative negative earnings since its IPO. Not everyone has to run a world-changing business, and providing file storage is a useful service, but it’s not worth violating the social contract with native American workers to keep their lights on.

It might even be a blessing in disguise for society that these firms don’t recruit more heartland talent. At the margin, more of our smartest people should be working for Koch Industries in Wichita or drilling for oil in Midland, adding to our standard of living, and in metros where family formation is affordable, rather than coding another Silicon Valley me-too app for one of these cash-burning “entrepreneurs.”

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Developing America’s Native Talent

Self-interested “talent shortage” rhetoric aside, what would a national talent development initiative look like? Some argue admissions should be based solely on test scores, the only objective measure of merit among students from different high schools and backgrounds, especially given the massive grade inflation of the past 30 years.

I’m not as convinced of this due to the runaway, increasing gap between the averages of Asian students and everyone else on SAT scores over the last two decades. Obviously, academic aptitude has not changed this quickly. Many attribute this to extreme test prep culture, which became more effective as the SAT was revised to become less “discriminatory” and thus more preppable.

Vivek, weighing in on the recent controversy, agrees that the issue is not so much IQ but rather work ethic and achievement:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.

…

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

Vivek here invokes stereotypes, which aren’t necessarily inaccurate but rather represent statistical tendencies with many individual exceptions. Some native American students are boring grinders, and some immigrant students engage in traditional, well-rounded American leisure activities. Since not everyone who reads this column is a “very stable genius,” making that disclaimer is important. But to answer Vivek’s criticisms I must respond by citing stereotypes, so here goes. No offense is intended to those who fall under exceptions.

First of all, Vivek’s argument, to the extent he is talking up his own cultural background, is inherently fallacious. India is well behind the United States in Nobel prizes (even excluding immigrant winners) and Olympic medals per capita and still struggles developmentally, requiring US travelers to take malaria prophylactics before visiting certain regions.

Richard Hanania, who piled on the pro-immigration side of this debate, loves to mock West Virginia, but in that state, there are no documented deaths from dysentery (infectious diarrhea), because America’s so-called “low human capital,” to use Hanania’s term, has mastered century-old sanitation technology in even our smallest, poorest municipalities. Whereas in India, preventable diseases like this kill over 100,000 children annually. Indian immigrants to the USA represent a tiny sliver of the most talented among a billion-plus population.

Further, it’s doubly misleading in comparing an elite subculture to American culture as a whole. It’s not pot-smoking high school dropouts who these immigrants are competing with, but rather the best and brightest graduates of our domestic engineering schools. As Charles Murray has documented, the decline in American social outcomes (as measured by drug use, sexual incontinence, etc) is almost entirely among the working and lower middle classes. These are serious problems that need addressing but are not germane to Vivek’s criticism. If anything, the native middle and upper classes are working harder than ever due to the declining need for generalists in middle management and competition from skilled immigration, an economic game of musical chairs as parents fret about their children’s ability to avoid downward social mobility.

Second, Vivek is peddling a false dichotomy between nerds and jocks. While the kids pursuing obscure trivia competitions like math olympiads and spelling bees will tend to be one-dimensional nerds, the social science literature is clear that athletics participation is associated with academic achievement and intelligence, as Geoffrey Miller pointed out. Further, being socially competent, and not solely skilled in academics, is predictive of lifetime earnings, as one study demonstrated that participating in college fraternities (and presumably similar social orgs) enhances lifetime earnings despite lowering grade point averages.

There’s more to life than grinding out math problems at Kumon after school. Western culture has always valued a balance among mental, social, and physical pursuits, and it turns out that it pays to do so! Maybe Vivek should be more a student of American culture than a critic given America’s and the broader West’s historic accomplishments.

Nevertheless, Vivek’s point stands generally for the individuals in question, in that there are immigrant subcultures that certainly work harder on high school academics than even the norm for the brightest American students. This leads to a philosophical question about achievement vs. aptitude. Is it better to source high achievement externally (directly, or indirectly, via the children of high-effort immigrants) or search internally for high aptitude?

Consider two students, both of whom have 1500 SAT scores. Student A comes from a grind culture where test prep is a family tradition starting at 10 years old, accompanied by hours of after-school tutoring. Student B is a football player from a rural high school with precociously good grades who “gets” math and verbal concepts despite deficient instruction at his high school, and who took one practice test before walking into his SAT on a Saturday morning after the Friday Night Lights.

Which student would most benefit from an elite education? Clearly, Student B, whose score reflects higher aptitude, i.e., higher achievement with less effort. In fact, this was the original purpose of the SAT, to identify high-aptitude students who did not attend elite Northeast prep schools. In some sense, students who overly prep for the SAT are showing fake aptitude relative to their scores.

That used to not be a problem because the old SAT was notoriously difficult to show any efficacy of test prep. It required only basic reading and math skills at the Algebra I level and derived its difficulty not from advanced procedural algorithms, which can be taught, but rather from requiring students to demonstrate a deep understanding of verbal and quantitative nuance. Getting this right in admissions testing is a subtle science.

Measuring aptitude is quite easy when stakes are low and one only wants population-level estimates. For example, a simple ten-item vocabulary quiz called Wordsum is sufficient to estimate IQ for large groups in national surveys, when participants aren’t incentivized to study beforehand.

But high-stakes testing for individuals is an extreme application of Goodhart’s law: any useful measure loses its utility once it becomes a target for those being measured to hack. Almost all human knowledge is g-loaded absent incentives, but most of it is g-hackable. And the new SAT works perfectly well for students who do not overly prep, but fails when their scores are compared to those who do.

Strangely, of all test items, vocabulary is most g-loaded for native speakers of a given language, particularly English given its gigantic inventory. This may seem counterintuitive, for surely “disadvantaged” students would lack vocabulary due to fewer opportunities, or less verbally adept parents. However, this fails to account for the role that intelligent students play in fostering their own environment.

A rather famous example is that of Oprah Winfrey, who, despite growing up in Jim Crow Mississippi, managed to read most of the books in her tiny local library. High-aptitude individuals like Oprah, even in relatively deprived environments, usually manage to get their hands on reading material, which their curious minds crave for sufficient stimulation, given their voracious appetite for knowledge, and their brains vacuum up information easily and store it away efficiently, building vocabulary. Today, these theoretical disadvantages are even smaller with unlimited free reading material available online.

The hated analogies and antonyms of the old SAT were generally test-prep-proof types of questions. Given 50,000 English words, the addressable analogies and antonym space numbers in the billions, a number of relationships impossible to study in advance, beyond reading widely for pleasure and understanding the basics of how analogies and antonyms work. Similarly, the old quantitative comparison items on the math section allowed the testing of a deep understanding of basic math concepts rather than students’ more preppable computational abilities.

Getting rid of these older items in the name of disadvantaged groups has ironically attached a higher yield to the test prep efforts of the most advantaged and grinding students. And some students have to work in high school, or choose to play sports, and simply can’t or won’t grind for hours after school on narrow academics.

Perhaps the modern test most similar to the old SAT is the LSAT for law school admissions. Unlike the GRE or SAT, it retains a full-range difficulty level where almost no students achieve a perfect score, and it tests purely for logical and verbal aptitude, not legal knowledge. Unlike the new SAT, where extreme test prep has led to runaway gaps between students from grinding cultures and everyone else, the LSAT shows performance (p. 24) between groups consistent with the broader academic literature of low-stakes aptitude testing, i.e., excessive prepping does not help performance.

This difference is subtle but important. Eminence in one’s field requires more of an ability to respond to novel situations than overstudying existing knowledge, and high-aptitude students can catch up on high-school-level achievement in a semester or two of freshman classes. Especially if DEI is now illegal, it is extremely important that our meritocracy reflects the right kind of merit, expending scarce elite educational resources on well-rounded students with aptitude rather than those simply willing to grind. At least, that seems more like the American way than the opposite. We want to reward and develop talent that delivers results in novel situations, not simply rewarding linear functions of effort.

It’s clear elite universities want to admit well-rounded students with an inherent desire to learn instead of outcome-focused students who care more about what’s on the test, and the best way to achieve this objectively and without accusations of bias is to pressure the College Board to reform the SAT back to its old aptitude-based format. Children of certain immigrant cultures will still likely outperform native Americans due to simple selection effects, but it won’t be a runaway gap due to extreme test prep efforts, and elite universities can maintain their cachet with fewer Winklevosses heading to Tuscaloosa for a four-year bacchanal.

Further, schools ought to value participation in high school athletics more highly for admissions and scholarships. Team sports in particular teach people skills and frustration tolerance on a physical level and produce a balance between brains and brawn that enhances practical cognition rather than book learning.

Students with athletic backgrounds have higher lifetime achievements and are more likely to be the most successful, generous, and loyal alumni. A particularly creative scholarship might feature a weighting of something like 1/3 grades, 1/3 standardized test scores, and 1/3 the students’ performance on a modified NFL combine relative to a minimum qualified floor in each category. If some students over-prep for the latter by becoming extremely physically fit, so much the better!

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Eliminate Disparate Impact

Perhaps the most powerful change, which could be achieved with some combination of executive, legislative, or judicial action, would be the elimination of the disparate impact “back door” of proving discrimination against protected classes. If we wish to punish discrimination — and there’s an argument, advanced by Rush Limbaugh and others, that irrational discrimination is self-punishing enough in the marketplace in that businesses deliberately choosing suboptimal employees for non-economic reasons will suffer competitively — then we must at least return to the common law standard of mens rea before interfering in the job market. That is, only conscious, intentional discrimination should be subject to federal sanctions, consistent with the letter and spirit of the Civil Rights Act.

Disparate impact is the source of companies’ anxiety about the racial makeup of their workforces despite equal-opportunity hiring practices. This relates indirectly to the H1B issue. While Indian or East Asian immigrants do not advance goals of increasing the “underrepresented,” they have the virtue, under the DEI regime, of being not white males. When reporting totals as required under federal law for larger employers, these employees at least don’t count against them, whereas, in how the law is applied, every white male hired represents potential evidence for a discrimination claim.

Freed from the need to outsource cognitive testing through university pedigrees or worrying about disgusting nose-counting of employee demographic characteristics, businesses would be free to develop their own independent standards and internal training programs and more widely source employees without worrying about the ethnic background of potential talent. There’s no obvious reason why many jobs should require a college degree and could not be taught on the job in apprenticeship-like models. Young people could start families sooner without wasting four years of their adult life and the burden of student debt.

Let the market figure it out. There’s a huge incentive to undercut the profligate university-industrial complex.

Cover image: Vivek Ramaswamy by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

Two internet furors this week shed light on this question. One is yet another round of controversy over Andrew Tate after he appeared on a big podcast. (Ben Shapiro provide some background on this if you are interested, but in brief, Tate is an extremely popular but very toxic influencer accused of sex trafficking in Romania). A large number of pastors and others were outraged about Tate, which of course they should be.

The second was a debate over whether young people - implicitly, young men - should lean into working in service class jobs. This was triggered when Chris Rufo suggested young people should get a job at Panda Express, where they can make $70K as an assistant manager and have a career path to store manager making $100K.

The Rufo Panda Express furor illuminates a huge range of complex and interrelated issues that are often overlooked in the simplistic debates over matters like whether to work at Panda Express. It even sheds some light on the appeal of Andrew Tate.

Should frustrated young people just take a job at Panda Express? There was a major online rift on this point, interestingly within the online new right/dissident right crowd. I always love it when controversies divide people in unexpected ways. It exposes fault lines we didn’t know were there.

In this case, the Rufo side basically argued that young men are entitled and lazy. They want to sit back and complain and demand high status and high paying positions be handed to them on a plate as a matter of entitlement. The other side accused Rufo and company of promoting the proletarization of young men, especially white men.

I don’t have a comprehensive, integrated answer to this myself, but there are a wide range of considerations that illuminate why debates like this have been such a huge part of culture and politics.

1. Spiritual Boomerism

The Chris Rufo position is an example of what Stephen Wolfe called “spiritual Boomerism.” This is Boomerism as a state of mind and style, whether or not held by someone of that specific generation.

It is very familiar to anyone who grew up in an evangelical church or men’s ministry. Spiritual Boomerism is the philosophy that underlies every hectoring “Man up!” lecture delivered by some traditional authority.

One definition of the Spiritual Boomer style: A person, typically a man, who has achieved high status/success/home ownership/secure retirement/marriage speaking down from his lofty heights towards those who don’t have them and saying something like, “You just need to do what I did when I was your age” or “You just need to stop complaining, get to work and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

People appeal to Spiritual Boomerism because it contains elements of truth. If you want to succeed, you actually do have to work and work hard. Everybody has to pay their dues. You’re not entitled to success. Every generation has to earn it all over again. A lot of young men do need something of a kick in the pants. Having a job is much better than not having one. Previous generations were willing to do what it took - think about the Joads migrating to California in The Grapes of Wrath - in ways many young people today aren’t.

However, Spiritual Boomerism lacks empathy. It doesn’t have skin in the games of the people being talked to. It isn’t cheering them on and genuinely hoping that they succeed. It fails to acknowledge the role that good luck played in the success of the people delivering the lectures. It doesn’t truly wrestle with the changed circumstances and difficulties facing young people today. It doesn’t realize that the old success scripts don’t work in the same way they used to. It doesn’t give a practical roadmap to achieving real success.

That’s what online influencers provide. When he was emerging as a guide to young men, Jordan Peterson used to challenge them. “Clean your room, Bucko” or “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” But he also made sure young men saw that he cared about them. That he understood their pain. That he was on their side. He didn’t just view them as the problem but as people who mattered in their own right, people whose hopes, dreams, plans, and aspirations mattered too.

Rod Dreher wrote about Peterson, after an incident in which a young, disturbed man at one of his events rushed the stage looking for help, “I was really moved by the way Peterson handled himself here — moved, but not surprised…Devoting hours to hearing him talk really did reveal to me why he has such a following, especially among lost young men. Whatever flaws Peterson has, he leaves no doubt that he really cares about the people he’s trying to reach.”

Online influencers also give a practical roadmap to getting somewhere. Rufo’s original tweet suggested someone who stays to build a career at Panda Express. Online influencers would talk about how you can use a boring job at Panda Express or elsewhere as a source of 9-5 income while you work on self-improvement, your side hustle, or launching a business. They’d probably also highlight how to use the 9-5 to gain skills that are transferrable to running a business. They might start with Panda Express, but they wouldn’t end there. They would talk about how no matter how low you are now, you can rise and become a champion. (Rufo himself - whom I generally like by the way - did later talk about how he used low wage work to help him produce his first film, but it got much less play than the original tweet).

Some of this is a classic self-help advice schtick, or even a predatory grift as with Tate’s “Hustler University” where the assignments were to post Tate video clips on Tik Tok. But there’s a way this can be done legitimately as well.

Whatever truth it contains, Spiritual Boomerism is a proven loser in actually getting young people to follow its advice. Few people respond positively to finger wagging.

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2. Spiritual Boomerism is directed at white men only

While this debate was mostly talking about young people in general, it’s clear that the people being talked about are young white men. They are overwhelmingly the target of this kind of rhetoric - and they can see it.

Again, we’ve seen in this in the evangelical church, where men are told to “Man up!” but women are told to remember they are “daughters of King.”

It’s similar in the broader world. There’s endless rhetoric, many programs, and big money devoted to encouraging women and minorities to elevate their sights, to go to college or grad school, to become one of the “women in STEM.” The talent and potential of immigrants are endlessly extolled. It’s only young white men who get these sort of lectures.

It would be interesting to see if the people talking about these kinds of jobs would be willing to qualify their advice to specifically direct it to young women, or the lower income minorities. In my experience, even conservatives only do this indirectly, such as by talking about the “culture of poverty.” But it’s notable that in this logic a young inner city black man who fails to exhibit what they call “bourgeois values” is in essence a victim of culture - an outside force he didn’t create and isn’t responsible for.

People are willing to admit to the role of outside forces and structures in shaping the outcomes of women and minorities in ways that they are not willing to do for young white men.

3. Social class is an important reality.

Yes, money matters—you need it for a house, for marriage prospects, for stability. But in today's America, social status also matters. Its importance has only gone up in recent decades.

Inequality and divergence have been defining features of our era. As economist Tyler Cowen put it, “Average is over.” This has produced a two tier environment in which the top 20-25% of society is doing very well, but the bottom 75-80% is struggling not just economically, but personally and socially.

This has bled through into geography. Charles Murray has talked about how America’s elite have concentrated into monolithically upscale “super zips.” Some regions like Nashville are boomtowns, while others like Flint are mired in decline and struggles. Back in 1990, economist Robert Reich labeled this “the secession of the successful.”

In a world increasingly resembling a barbell distribution of winners and losers, it’s critical to end up in the winning group. Taking a job at Panda Express puts you at high risk of being socially grouped with the losers.

For example, being the store manager at Panda Express might make you marriageable, but marriageable to whom? A man (or woman to some extent) in this position will be largely frozen out of marriage to someone with a college degree. Your marriage pool gets reduced to those without degrees. (And if you do have a degree and are working in a Panda Express, you are still going to be seen as a loser by a lot of women, no matter how much money you make. Maybe even if you own the franchise).

There are also career implications. If you have a job at Panda Express on your résumé after college graduation age, this will be a huge black mark in attempting to get any white collar or higher status job in the future. (Retail is actually the one industry where this might not fully be the case, as retailers put a high premium on store experience in hiring corporate employees. I’m not sure how this applies to the quick serve restaurant sector, however).

Also, the kind of middle class neighborhood in which one could afford to buy a home off an income of $80-100,000 is not what it used to be. As documented by scholars as diverse as Robert Putnam and Charles Murray, middle and working class communities are characterized by pervasive social dysfunctions such as unstable marriages, out of wedlock births, drugs, etc. The main reason to seek to live in a super zip today is to isolate yourself and your children from this kind of dysfunction. And again, if you don’t have a college degree and work in the service sector, this is your dating and marriage pool.

The type of small town environment I grew up in isn’t what it was then. Even if economically it is objectively more prosperous, socially it is a very different matter.

Let's be clear: Most Americans won't get college degrees. They'll work in jobs like retail, manufacturing, and distribution. These are honorable jobs that keep our society running. Working at Panda Express is dignified work.

But let’s not pretend that there aren’t profound, long term implications of ending up working at Panda Express compared to white collar employment. It’s completely understandable why someone would be hesitant to commit to a choice that has a high risk of permanently miring them outside of the upper middle class - and everything that comes along with that.

Conservatives who urge men to skip college, go into the trades, move to a small town or other such choices rarely reckon with or disclose the real implications of those choices.

4. Downward mobility

It’s difficult and painful to go backwards in life. Deflating your lifestyle or lowering your social status is very unpleasant.

Boomers did very well compared to their Greatest Generation parents. Lots of people raised in Boomer or Generation X homes got to experience the fruits of their parents’ upward mobility.

It’s completely understandable why someone raised in an upper middle class or solidly middle class environment would loathe the idea of downward social mobility. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.

Downward mobility is a reality of life. There’s something to the idea of shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. But it’s understandable why people would hate that or be in denial over it. Failing to show basic sympathy for why people would feel this way is another form of Spiritual Boomerism.

This is one of the outworkings of the dysfunctions of our society. Downward social mobility - the key word being social, not just economic - is a feature of today’s America.

Not only should we be aware that people are experiencing downward mobility, we should be aspiring for them to have upward mobility. The American Dream isn't just about your kids retracing your steps—it's about them reaching heights you never could. As John Adams famously wrote:

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

This is missing from Spiritual Boomerism, which at best wants new generations to retrace the same path as their own. We ought to be doing everything possible to elevate our people - and see it as a failure on our part if we can’t push the next generation to greater heights than we achieved.

I want to see Generation Z soar, not have to struggle for years to put in place a basic foundation on which to build a life. Again, we have to deal with reality. And for some people, that’s going to mean service or blue collar work. But we should at least be aspiring for people to reach great heights. There’s no sense of this aspiration for the next generation to have it better in Spiritual Boomerism.

Andrew Beck talked about this point as well, highlighting not just the social and economic aspects, but the spiritual ones of seeking higher purpose:

What is missing from this "job" discourse is a hard truth: Young men in the West want purpose and belonging more than anything else. A reason to work and live. They are not bemoaning purely a lack of possessions and absence of comforts, but of zeal.

The aversion to menial, purposeless work for the sake of a modern middle-class lifestyle has been trending upward since the early 2000's. [Note: among progressive women as well as conservative men - ed.] It is perhaps why the elder generation—the largest generation ever—has spent so much energy trying to supplement the Western workforce with men from less developed societies who strive and sacrifice greatly to obtain a slightly elevated standard of living. That elder generation worries that no one will maintain what was built by their fathers, who sacrificed so much to get to where their children could be at ease and enjoy the spoils. But a large cohort of men from these younger generations wish to build upon that foundation and ascend higher than their forbearers.

What "success" means for a young Western man, however, is the freedom to do something they care about—something they can pursue and sacrifice for… to be zealous! Gaining independence gives them bandwidth to seek this path of ascension. It is a desire for spiritual fulfillment they act upon, not one for material possessions. We must address this vacuum of zeal in our work and pay more heed to those desires of spiritual fulfillment in our men.

Part of being a man is to face the world as it is rather than as we’d like it to be. Sometimes, we do have to suck it up and take a terrible job we hate. Sometimes we don’t have, and may never have, the opportunity to pursue higher purposes.

But we should at least recognize the goodness and legitimacy of having the desire for those things.

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5. Changing generational preferences

Lots of people operate on the assumption that younger generations have, or should have, the same preferences as their own. But every generation has a different set of preferences, and it’s not all bad for them to pursue theirs.

Let’s remember, the Boomers were very different from their own parents, and the preferences of the Boomer generation massively reshaped society. We should expect that this process is only going to continue.

I will give one example: young people seem to put much more stress on having schedule flexibility than having a “steady job.”

I talked to a consultant who did interviews of employers and residents in an industrial city. Owners of manufacturing companies there said that it was difficult to recruit young workers. This included companies with excellent pay and benefits. One of the firms was a unionized manufacturer with pay of around $90,000 a year.

But the young people in that community don’t want to work in a factory, and they don’t want to be tied down to a clock punching schedule. Their preference is to drive for Uber or Doordash, where they can make money on their schedule.

That sounds nuts to me. But who am I to tell them how they should live their lives? If they are working and paying their bills, do I really have standing to tell them to take that factory job? The idea of having some autonomy and a gig that allows you to make cash but also the schedule flexibility to be working on your own business or creative endeavor can actually make a lot of sense. Maybe they’d actually rather deliver for Panda Express than manage it.

Older generations can have a perspective on the choices younger people make, but we have to be willing to understand, acknowledge, and respect their perspectives and preferences as well.

Guys like Tate or others of his ilk are tapped into young people’s preferences and what they want to hear. That’s why there are so many popular “hustle bro” podcasts. I’ve heard my Uber drivers listening to them. It responds to the cultural orientation of this younger audience.

6. The cultural contradictions of immigration restrictionism

It tends to be dissident right types who reject the idea of working at Panda Express. Yet this is the group that is most hostile to immigration and supports mass deportations.

In this world, native born Americans, including white men, would have to be doing a lot of the low prestige, lower wage jobs currently performed by immigrants. And I’m not just talking about assistant manager. We’re talking manning the deep fryer.

Now, in a zero immigration environment, many of these jobs would simply disappear. Much of the vast array of personal and household services provided to the upper middle class would just go away if there weren’t underpaid, exploited immigrants to perform them. But we’d certainly still have a wide range of service jobs.

Idaho is one of America’s least diverse states. I’m always struck when traveling there how service jobs that are mostly done by immigrants and minorities in other places are done by white people there. For example, when I’ve stayed at the Monarch Motel in Moscow, the housekeeping staff was made up of young white women (who appeared to be college students).

It’s very interesting to see that many of these are jobs Americans will do in the right circumstances. At the same time, if you want to stop immigration, Americans are going to have to do them.

These people have not reckoned with the full implications of a hard restrictionist position on immigration.

From Panda Express to Andrew Tate

There’s a path from Spiritual Boomerism to the rise of men’s influencers like Tate, just as there’s a path from society’s unwillingness to address legitimate populist concerns around immigration, trade, and wars to populist political eruptions.

As I said in my recent podcast with Matthew Continetti, I see populism as a societal warning indicator like the oil light in your car. If the oil light comes on, you’ve got a problem you need to fix. If you don’t fix it, you’re going to end up with a much more serious and expensive problem. The populist solutions may not be the right ones, but the problems are real.

There’s a similar effect at work in the men’s influencer space. The rise of these people is telling us something is wrong in how society and its institutions relate to young men. But there has not been any correction, so things progress towards the toxic.

It’s important to reject the simplistic narratives of Spiritual Boomerism and engage more seriously on these issues in ways that take account of the truth that’s in those narratives, but also recognize the complexities of life and society today. And ways that have a sense of empathy and genuine concern for the young people in our society, their preferences, ambitions, and experiences.

Rather than just telling them to Man up!, how can we actually help them get there?

Cover image: Panda Express in Hell’s Kitchen NYC by Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0

Hearts and Spades are both classic trick-taking card games that share several similarities but also have distinctive differences in objectives, gameplay, and strategies. In Hearts, there is no trump suit; however, players aim to avoid capturing hearts and the Queen of Spades due to their penalty points. In Spades, the spade suit is always the trump suit, outranking all other suits and adding a strategic element to gameplay. If you are playing a game of cards, it is imperative to know which game you are playing.

In the age of Trump, many Christian intellectuals have been playing spades, when the game is hearts.

In a long-form column following Trump's re-election, Christian historian John Fea wrote a provocative essay advising Christian intellectuals on how they should "think, write, and speak" in the re-emerging Age of Trump. There have been few harsher and more prolific critics of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement than John Fea, David Brooks, and Peter Wehner. Personal friends all. The 2024 election demonstrated that their writing was not publicly persuasive. Trump was framed as a civic cancer, a "threat to democracy," and their work as Christian intellectuals sought to be in the words of legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny, "moral chemotherapy." But as John Fea notes with alarm, "The disease lingers." The treatment failed.

Fea has the good sense historically, to take a step back and call for Christian intellectuals to "reassess how we do our work. What should we write and speak about in the Age of Trump? And how should we do it?"

He calls for a greater degree of understanding, and a better bedside manner than just prescribing the moral chemo pill. He continues, however, with the same condescending attitude toward "Trump supporting neighbors" as the progressives who use words like "deplorables" and "garbage." The movement is uniformly cast as being anti-intellectual and uneducated bumpkins, the very kind of people, the Christian historian reminds us, that the nation's founders Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson warned would destroy democracy. There is little here that will build bridges to those who see reality through the contrasting MAGA frame. This approach appears to me to be a rhetorical non-starter.

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Consider the context of our body politics today. It is starkly divided, partisan to a fault, unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt to the other side, and bathed in a pervasive collapse of social trust. This is augmented by a rhetorical social media environment where intellectual silos are reinforced, and black and white thinking prevail. Nuance and compromise are viewed as toxic. And finally, we are in a negative world where faith-based or faith-oriented public assessments to civic problems will be viewed with decreasing plausibility. People's political frames are reinforced and hardened day by day.

A premise of this hardening by the MAGA populist movement is that certain sectors of American public life are not to be trusted: corporations, academics, entertainment, and media (collectively, "the elite"). In this public conversation, then, Christian intellectuals and academics—"elites" all—start with a rhetorically losing hand. Before they say a word, they are not trusted and their views discounted by their populist opponents. An appeal to academic bona fides, as Fea does in his essay, only serves to dig a deeper rhetorical hole: "don't abandon highbrow outlets." Condescension and hubris stop the debate instantly in this context.

This much is certain. What Christian intellectuals have been doing is not working. It is not having the desired public persuasion so desperately wanted and needed. It seems unlikely to date that the Democrats will learn anything about the public or their approach to the public from their election loss. Christian intellectuals or thought leaders might be in a better position to do so. I would suggest that we need is a deeper stand back than what Fea advocates if we are to find the common ground on which we can begin to gain rhetorical traction and positive outcomes.

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There are lessons we can learn from Democratic strategist and Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff as well as from University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Even deeper than culture war dynamics, we are living a world where our perceptions of reality are entrenched in two contrasting frames. In this world, there is no neutral third place outside this binary political framing. This is in part to blame on the fact that the media as well as most evangelical religious leaders see the public only through a political lens. It doesn't matter whether it is Fox or MSNBC, every single topic is reframed as being political. This political reductionism is both unfortunate and inaccurate. Discerning intellectuals know that culture is upstream from politics and religion upstream from culture. And yet, we tend to make our arguments narrowly within the limited and less consequential downstream political frame. We are locked into dealing with symptoms rather than causes, superficialities rather than substance.

Lakoff tells us in his important primer, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, that when the facts don't fit the frame, the facts bounce off and the frame stays. Such has been the experience of anti-Trump pundits. You cannot get people to change frames through reasoned argument—a failed assumption of Enlightenment rationalism. People change frames through the engagement of their imagination—by being captured by a new compelling story, a new visual horizon, and a provocative image. At this, Trump is a master ("Fight, fight, fight" photo, working at McDonald's, and driving a garbage truck) and against long-odds, a hostile press, and billions in negative advertising, he prevailed. Rather than getting sucked into responding to Trump's social media posts, which Lakoff warns Democrat and media critics places them within his chosen frame (a tactical advantage), they need instead a strategy of reframing the debate themselves, when necessary, by telling a new and more compelling story.

There are lessons here Christian thought leaders can learn. As Christian intellectuals living in a "cross-pressured" world, we need to learn rhetorically how to deal with contrasting and intractable competing frames. A direct assault will not and has not worked here any better than Lee's Pickett's Charge. We need rhetorical discernment not academic hubris.

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Additionally, Trump is a symptom but not the cause. To attack the symptom is to avoid dealing with the cause. Here sociologist James Davison Hunter's insight is prescient. There has been extensive and thoughtful discussion of his latest book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis. (See Aaron Renn’s writeup about the book and interview with Hunter). But the more pressing and relevant piece is his Hedgehog Review essay, "Culture Wars: The Endgame." Here he makes two important claims. First, culture is more important than politics in understanding our civic ills and second, the seemingly binary division between progressive and conservative is an illusion. Both share a common culture of nihilism. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy in a culture war, Hunter writes, nihilism is. This culture of nihilism is not a field of play, by definition, where character or principle is held as a high value.

The implications of his analysis are even more foreboding, in that most of our attacks on the alternative framings whether Biden or Trump are only serving to deepen our shared nihilism. Our good intentions are making things potentially worse. Hunter concludes, "Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists." This is a slightly softened version of Philip Rieff's critique of our "deathwork culture." This is not an argument that there is a moral equivalence between the nihilism on the left and right, only that there are such cultural forces at play both passive nihilism (the loss of meaning) and active nihilism (the will-to-power)—that we are "running with nihilism"—is beyond debate. The resentments of identity politics are evidence of this as are various forms of cancel culture and rhetorical demonization.

Hunter concludes:

Which is where, increasingly and tragically, we are headed, given how polarization underwrites our common nihilistic culture. Let me be clear: This is not an argument for the moral equivalence of left and right. Nihilism does not manifest itself in the same ways on the left and the right. Nor do the authoritarian tendencies find the same expressions on both ends of the spectrum. Rather, the point is that nearly all partisans share a common culture rooted in identitarian tribalism, fueled by ressentiment and guided not by differences over shared ideals but a fervid determination to annihilate the opposition—indeed, the evil enemy—in the never-ending contest over position and power. Until we take the measure of this challenge, we will fail to understand the depths of democracy's crisis.

There is a civic cancer but it not the one we have been addressing with our "moral chemotherapy." Moreover, our past treatments have only served to accelerate its spread. We've been playing political spades when the game is cultural hearts. We're dealing with a much deeper problem than we have wanted to admit. This is Hunter's thesis in Democracy and Solidarity. Cultural nihilism comes in many forms. Hunter mentions passive nihilism, which is the ubiquitous loss of meaning (quiet quitting and deaths of despair and the like) and active nihilism, which is the more well known Nietzschean will-to-power coupled with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

Artistically this was expressed at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics. It was a commercially funded choreographed event that alternated from French transgressive decadence to American Hollywood spectacle. If the opening of the 2024 Olympic ceremony is taken as a symbolic event indicating the state of Western culture, then its central themes were proof of Hunter's analysis.

We also see glimpses of it in Trump's cabinet nominations—a tactical combination of political pragmatic destroyers and technologically innovative utopians, scorched-earth political partisans all. The contours and feel of the Trump and Biden administrations are vastly different. Yet the underlying cultural assumptions about why and how we do civic life remain the same. We face a serious civic problem in a social media context that makes facing the culture of nihilism enormously difficult in that we are predetermined to avoid listening to each other without a hermeneutic of suspicion. I assume the same to the reception of this essay.

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As Christian intellectuals in the Age of Trump, we're going to have to reframe our analysis, rethink our approaches, and revive fresh answers. As Christian thought leaders we have work to do. Without assuming this is the definitive word on the subject or that I have any business making suggestions to Christian thought leaders, here are some implications from combining Lakoff and Hunter's assessment of our cultural moment.

First, we need to start addressing civic problems at their headwaters. We must stop addressing political problems without first acknowledging their cultural sources. We need to stop addressing cultural sources without also addressing their religious and metaphysical foundations. We need to focus our analysis upstream, adopt a headwater strategy.

Second, we need the courage to move beyond mere social description to social prescription. To the degree that we only speak about what is, limiting our analysis to a scientific methodology that can only address what is, then we abandon any consideration of what ought to be. The erasure of cultural ought’s is the playground of nihilism. Hunter explains, "All cultures up until our own have been, in their origins and evolution, an address to some ultimate authority." This is what has been abandoned—any sense of civic transcendent ought’s. This is unprecedented in human history and consciousness. To write books of social analysis that are merely descriptive without strong statements about what ought to be, which rules them out of most academic publications, is to further concede the ground to nihilism. This is a common academic malpractice—analysis without solutions.

Third, we need to reengage our civic imagination. If the crisis is one of meaning, then using reason as the antidote to meaninglessness is to miss the mark. C.S. Lewis defines imagination as the organ of meaning, and reason the organ of truth. Michael Ward adds, "Once the imagination has determined that the thing at hand is meaningful, we can then begin to judge whether its meaning is true or false. Before something can be either true or false, it must mean." Christian thought leaders are prone to left-hemisphere rationalism, disinclined to address the antecedent crisis of meaning with the imagination. Reason and the imagination are not opposed to each other, but imagination necessarily needs to proceed reason. Ward explains, "We should think of reason as being like a tree and imagination as being like the ground in which it grows. Reason rests upon, indeed relies upon, imagination, as a tree roots itself in the ground.... Reason can't survive without imagination."

We cannot address the challenge of nihilism without a robust engagement with the imagination. The solution to meaninglessness is not more data, facts, and arguments, but a new story and/or an encounter with beauty.

The culture of nihilism has two sides the "why" side (meaning) and the "how" side (will-to-power). On the "how" side, if we demonize our opponents, resort to victimhood and grievance, play the game as high-octane culture warriors, we are acting as "functional Nietzscheans" and serving the culture of nihilism however well intended we might be in advocating for our beliefs.

As Christian thought leaders it appears that we have been playing the wrong game in the wrong way. The result has not simply been that we have been ineffective, rather we are making things worse, being unwitting allies in the culture of nihilism.

The task before us is more difficult work than we may have realized. In part because the seeds of our challenge begin not in the voting booth but in the church pew, not among the unwashed deplorables, but among the elite—academic, commercial, and cultural. Hunter warns that our focus has been on the wrong things.

Much of the scholarship in establishment sociology is committed to denying or trivializing its [the deathwork culture's] existence by focusing attention exactly where the conflict is weakest—the attitudes and opinions of ordinary people. It ignores or avoids the areas of social life where the conflict is strongest: the culture-forming institutions of contemporary society [corporations, academy, entertainment, and media], the elites who lead them, the competing sources of moral authority that animate them, and the symbolic discourse through which much of this conflict takes place.

Christian thought leaders need to stand back at this moment of inflection as we enter the Age of Trump 2.0 and take an honest look in the mirror. We have work to do. It begins with us.

Cover image credit: Cornischong at Luxembourgish/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 1.0

Retro-Americana, techno-futurist, and neofascist are managerial aesthetics, reflective of educated, leadership classes - though very different and often opposed groups to be sure. MAGA aesthetics are non-managerial, reflecting the masses or working class right. This divide is significant, as I’ll explain after reviewing each of them.

Retro-Americana

As an aesthetic style, retro-Americana is in a sense the most conservative. There are two basic flavors of this: traditional American aesthetics and neoclassical aesthetics. These are both primarily preferences of the educated classes in conservatism, but could be thought of as the “civilian” and “professional” varieties. Traditional American aesthetics, often with a retro flair, appeals to educated conservative voters and donors, whereas neoclassical aesthetics with a fine arts sensibility is the de facto aesthetic system of movement conservative elites.

The traditional American wing would celebrate things like the classic American small town. Ironically, many of these, as in the picture below, are now very liberal enclaves.

I call this style “retro” not just because it is rooted in the past, but because there often is a self-consciously retro aspect to it, as in these types of images:

Norman Rockwell, of course, is a favorite here. The homesteading or “trad wife” aesthetic counts here.

While not in the explicitly retro category, the superb aesthetics of the LDS Church (Mormons) are an exemplar here. We can see it in this Romney family Christmas card photo from last year.

Movement conservatism - the New York and Washington think tank and magazine world - tends to eschew this aesthetics in favor of neoclassicism. I just interviewed Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society for my podcast. He was one of the people behind President Trump’s move to require classical architecture on federal buildings. He’s a great example of this. You also see it in this Eugene Kontorovich article about the use of the fasces on federal buildings and structures that explains they were included as classical, not fascist elements. Or you can think about Notre Dame architect Duncan Stoik’s churches that look like traditional churches. Here is his new chapel at Hillsdale College, for example:

It’s also seen in the way movement conservative people tend to be into opera, a niche pursuit to put it mildly. In fact, magazines like the New Criterion and City Journal publish opera reviews. These typically argue in favor of traditional productions and against regietheater (avant-garde European) ones.

One of the hallmarks of the conservative movement is its rejection of the modern. This generally applies to both retro-Americana groups. They tend to hate all forms of modern art and architecture apart from Art Deco, and are the people who tell you they want to “RETVRN.”

In this they are often curmudgeons if not outright philistines. We see this in a 2000 City Journal article in which Myron Magnet makes the case for demolishing New York’s Lincoln Center and replacing it with a new set of classical buildings. While some of the buildings aren’t great, the Metropolitan Opera House is one of the world’s great opera houses. The idea of demolishing it and replacing it with a no doubt boring and derivative classical structure that would simply look second rate in comparison with European houses is nutty.

Interestingly, the original neoconservatives appear to have been very interested in the aesthetic avant-garde in their Partisan Review magazine days. No surprise they were very intellectually dynamic as well. The total rejection of the modern by today’s conservatives is a sign of deeper underlying problems that prevent them from innovating.

Perhaps that’s the very nature of conservatism, but as we’ll see next, there can be a right wing with a more forward-looking attitude.

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Techno-Futurism

Techno-futurism is an essentially science fiction type aesthetic associated with the Silicon Valley right, and the neoreactionary movement spawned by Curtis Yarvin (himself a technologist) and others.

In some ways techno-futurism is the opposite of retro-Americana. It’s futuristic, not traditional. And most of it has no obvious tie to America or its culture.

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Knowing how to perceive and climb the right hierarchies is one of the most stringent but also most universal tests available. It requires emotional self-regulation, perceptiveness, ambition, vision, proper sequencing, and enough order in one’s activities to actually get somewhere. Whenever you see signs that a candidate has this skill, look much more closely. If anecdotes suggest cluelessness about hierarchies, give that person a significant downgrade, at least for all jobs requiring ongoing initiative and learning over time.

He doesn’t define exactly what he means by hierarchies here. There are multiple forms of hierarchy - skill, status, economic, etc. He probably means all of them.

My viral tweet on this drew a huge response, with a barbell distribution. Probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the people loved it, the rest hated it.

I misremembered Cowen’s quote as about “status hierarchies.” A lot of people reacted against the term “status.” Although everyone, and I do mean everyone, is playing some sort of status game, it’s considered gauche to directly mention it. That’s one reason our society is so cynical today. (I should note, Cowen says that focusing too much on pure status games is actually a negative indicator. Things like mastery of craft really matter).

While status is involved in every hierarchy, if you don’t like that word, don’t use it.

Everybody is climbing some ladders. Everybody is playing some game in some league. Everybody is fishing in some pond. Everybody is part of some networks of people. Everybody is part of an ecosystem. Pick the term that makes the most sense to you.

They key is: are you picking the right ladders for what you want to achieve? Are you even conscious of this ladders you’ve chosen to climb?

Choosing the ladders to climb, choosing the game and league to play in, has an enormous impact in where you are going to end up in life. It doesn’t determine what you can achieve, but plays a huge role in it.

Here’s one example. Do you want to be a venture capitalist? A 2018 analysis by Richard Kerby found that 40% of all venture investors graduated from either Harvard or Stanford.

You don’t have to go to Harvard or Stanford to be a VC. Going to Harvard or Stanford won’t turn you into a VC. But this stat is still telling us something profound about what it takes to even gain entry to the venture investing field, much less achieving a high level position within it.

The answer to the “right” hierarchies to choose is not necessary “the most elite.” Most people don’t even want to enter an elite profession like venture capital. And most of us have values and priorities that aren’t a fit for a life of pure elite hierarchy climbing. An example of a guy who looks like he undertook elite hierarchy climbing in a traditional form is Pete Buttigieg. I don’t want to be Pete Buttigieg. Also, trying to play at a level too far above your talent is a recipe for frustration or failure. Although a superb pianist, as a young person Condoleeza Rice smartly decided against pursuing a career as a professional when she saw that there were other people who were much more naturally gifted at it than she was. And, of course, there are always tradeoffs.

You have to choose the right ladders for you. You might want to simply be your own boss and build a life close to family in the area you grew up in. In that case, you might set a goal of founding a “sweaty startup” like a home services trade business (e.g., HVAC contractor). You might then want to start learning your trade working for someone else, move up to working for the premier company in your field in town, then start your own firm, then start building your own business’s reputation. You might also start out as a volunteer for civic organizations and over time become a go to guy the community relies on.

Or think about the immigrant experience. A child of Indian immigrants noted in response to my tweet that his father had perceived that, at the time, climbing the ladder in India wouldn’t provide a lot of opportunity. And also that the conditions there would make it hard for him to climb high anyway. So he moved to the US, a much bigger pond with much more opportunity for moving up. A middle class life here was far above what he could have achieved for his family in India. Say what you will about immigration, but immigrants perceive that the USA has the best ladders in the world to climb, and consciously choose to come here to climb them.

There’s a saying, “Without awareness, there is no choice.” Most people don’t actually choose the ladders they end up climbing. They just ended up on them by default. They did not recognize the profound implications of the path they started walking down.

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My Own Path

In my tweet, I described what I view as, retrospectively, one of my biggest mistakes. Namely, I chose the wrong hierarchies to climb. The implications of those choices only became clear 20 years later.

I grew up four miles outside of a town of fewer than 100 people in Southern Indiana. My consolidated high school had 50 people in my graduating class. I got perfect grades in high school, great test scores, and was actually named one of the top 40 high school students in the state of Indiana.

I ended up making the default choices for a Midwest “farm boy” like me who got good grades.

• I went to college at Indiana University. That is, I chose the Big Ten status group of the state flagship university hierarchy.

• I moved to Chicago after graduation. That is, I chose to climb the ladder of Midwest cities, from small town to Bloomington to Chicago.

• I got a job with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), a technology focused management consulting firm. That is, I chose mid-tier corporate consulting. I rose through the ranks there to become what is now called a managing director.

These choices catapulted me to places that I never dreamed possible. I fell in love with cities and public transit. I was able to make good money and get to splurge on any restaurant I wanted to go to, subscribe to the opera, etc. I got the satisfactions of career success.

My choices arguably satisfied all my goals in life at that time. All I wanted was more money, to be “rich” in some sense. And had I actually stayed with Accenture and simply avoided getting fired, I’d probably have made enough money to be able to retire today.

But in time my goals shifted in life. That’s something few of us can relate to until age 35 or so. When we’re younger we know that we have changed in the past - oh, how we know we’ve changed and we’ve grown - but we can’t emotionally connect to the reality that we will continue changing in the future.

In my 30s and into my 40s, I shifted towards wanting to have influence in the world. This is when I discovered that my choices had been limiting in ways I didn’t perceive.

Indiana is a good school, but it’s not an elite college. Everybody loves to hate on the elite university credentialing system, but it has an enormous impact on the opportunities you’ll be presented with and the network’s you’ll be part of. Influence at the higher levels of our society is dominated by people from elite educational backgrounds.

Chicago is a wonderful city. Arguably it has the best price/performance in urbanism available today. For college graduates outside of the top 5% of talent who want to build a life, it's arguably the best place to move after college. But with some limited exceptions, it's not the big leagues. It's less connected to elite networks. It's not an ambition force multiplier. For people who aspire to reach the peaks or have major public influence, it's the wrong choice, or at least a more difficult choice. It's the top of the Midwest hierarchy, but not the national or global one.

Accenture is a great firm and I had a great experience there. But as a career platform, unlike elite McKinsey tier management consulting or investment banking, it doesn't really lead to big things outside of that world. Very few people I knew at any level of Accenture went on to achieve big success in obviously elite realms. Almost all of them are still doing some variety of corporate IT.

In retrospect, I was left completely alone growing up to make my own life choices in a vacuum in a rural environment. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t do anything. But they never told me I should do anything either. That's better than a lot of people in my hometown area, whose ambitions were actively suppressed. My choices were extremely high ambition by the standards of that community, but in that era I almost certainly could have gone to Harvard or another elite school. Nobody ever told me to think bigger, and my default choices had a major negative impact on my ability to have public impact and influence.

By contrast, I met a very famous pastor whose name you'd know. He grew up in a similar backwater to me, probably 2-3 hours from me. But in high school he had a teacher or counselor who looked at his test scores and told him he needed to go to an elite college - and even gave him a list of acceptable choices. That put him on a trajectory that led to the very apex of his profession. He’s much more influential than I am.

Obviously, this says nothing about merit, character, substance, etc. But the ladders you choose have, everything else equal, a major impact on your potential level of accomplishment.

Now, I actually was successful in having an impact. I managed to become a senior fellow in a major think tank in New York City. My three worlds of evangelicalism framework is becoming pervasive in how evangelicals understand our world. I’ve never had greater reach or been more influential than I am today. I’m happily married and very satisfied with life. I’ve been successful, and am not nursing regrets or what could have beens.

But I say my choices were a mistake because they made it more difficult to achieve, and continue to limit my progress toward, the level of reach and influence I aspire to have. It’s easy to say that, since in God’s providence we like where we ended up, all of our choices must have been good after all. That’s a cop out. If you can’t look back on your life and think of significant bad decisions that you’ve made, you are deluding yourself. And you are probably ensuring that you’ll continue making the same kinds of bad choices in the future.

Fortunately, today’s world offers opportunities to disrupt outside the existing ladders that were much less available when I was young. I’ve taken full advantage of that. And genuine innovation often happens outside of the mainstream hierarchies, because innovators don’t fit in with them. As Eric Hoffer wrote:

People who make good usually stay where they are and go on doing more and better what they know how to do well. The plunge into the new is often an escape from an untenable situation and a maneuver to mask one’s ineptness. To adopt the role of the pioneer and avant-garde is to place oneself in a situation where ineptness and awkwardness are acceptable and even unavoidable, for experience and know-how count for little in tackling the new, and we expect the wholly new to be ill-shapen and ugly.

Being outside of certain hierarchies gives me the freedom to say and do things many other people can’t do, and which I myself would not be able to do if I were embedded in those networks. Arguably, that’s the situation that’s best aligned with my personality and talents.

But let’s not kid ourselves that status and ladders don’t matter. They matter a lot. For example, when I wrote my original three worlds framework for my own newsletter, it went viral. But when I wrote a version for First Things magazine, a very high status publication within its ecosystem, it went nuclear viral and had enormous impact it would not otherwise have had. Had I thought I shouldn’t consider the venue I was publishing in, I would have forgone an incredible opportunity to make a difference in the world.

Again, my goal of having influence necessitates a certain kind of approach which has to be very conscious of things like that. Your goals may be very different. To be clear: I’m not telling everyone to try to pursue the elite institutional path. I do think most people ought to think bigger, which I will write more about in the near future. But that doesn’t necessarily mean trying to get into an Ivy League school.

The point is, you have to be consciously thinking about the choices you are making. Where you go to school, what city you live in, what profession you choose, what firms you work for. All of these put you on certain ladders that have profound downstream consequences you ought to at least think about before making a commitment.

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Why Status Seeking Can Be Ok

The minority of people who didn’t like my post tended to take the view that climbing elite hierarchies is inherently wrong or, as one person put it, “grotesque.” Some others argued that it’s anti-Christian.

When I read the Bible, I see that God ordained hierarchies and at times explicitly affirms that it’s good to try to climb them. “It is a trustworthy statement: if any man aspires to the office of overseer [bishop or elder], it is a fine work he desires to do.” (1 Tim 3:1). “Earnestly desire the greater gifts” (1 Cor 12:31)

Rightly ordered, the status hierarchy is a tool to promote character and pro-social behavior. If you aspire to be an elder, then that causes you to seek to become the kind of person Paul talks about in terms of qualifications for that role. When status accrues to honorable behavior, men have an incentive to behave honorably. Status sends signals about what we should be doing, the same way the approval of parents sends a message to children about how they should behave. Much of the teaching of the New Testament is not against the pursuit of glory, riches, honor per se, but about the true path to their achievement (e.g., storing up treasures in heaven), which often does differ from the worldly version.

Of course, we live in a society that’s far from rightly ordered. Hence we must be on our guard to ensure the pursuit of status doesn’t lead us into bad goals, selfish ambition, moral compromise, abandoning truth, pride, etc. Nothing could be more natural than to fall into these traps.

But wanting to achieve positions of leadership, authority, influence, etc. is a good thing if we are the kind of person that society should want to see in those roles. To believe otherwise is to abandon the playing field and the commanding heights of society to bad people who don’t share our values. I saw someone quote Augustine that, “There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that, by the mercy of God, they who are endowed with true piety of life, if they have the skill for ruling people, should also have the power.” People who think being in the game is illegitimate aren’t in a position to be complaining about what the people who end up in charge are doing.

Sometimes you run into roadblocks, such as a requirement for moral compromise, that you cannot get around to keep rising. Sometimes you make the right choices, aim high, swing the bat hard, and just end up missing the ball. Sometimes people utilize their status by consuming it prophetically. Some people came from blue blood backgrounds and burned their bridges in that world to hold the line. That too can be a choice worthy of honor.

Making it to the top is not the mark of a good man or of being in the right. But there’s nothing wrong with good men seeking to achieve and operate well at the high levels of society and life.

And let’s be clear: sometimes the denigration of status seeking is its own form of pride, it’s own status game. The people criticizing my tweet by and large present themselves as having made morally superior choices. It’s just another way of saying, “I’m better than you.” It’s a status game in its own right. There are plenty of backwoods fundamentalists who are as insufferably arrogant as any McKinsey consultant. You don’t have to be an elite success to be full of pride.

Even worse is the hypocrisy of our society and even the church, where we talk one way and act another. When rich kids at Ivy League schools pretend to poor and then say, “Aww shucks, I guess I just worked hard and got lucky.” When people pursue status while denying that’s what they are doing. Or when churches preach about how leaders in the church should be the people who are the most humble and servants of all when their own elder board is the seven richest dudes in the congregation. No wonder our society is so cynical today. We can all see it.

Better to admit that hierarchy is ubiquitous, we are all trying to achieve goals in life using some theory of how to get there, and that it’s a good thing if men of good character and competence seek and achieve positions of commensurate power, responsibility, influence, and status.

If I’m leading people astray, then I don’t want to go viral. But I want to be the kind of person who is worthy of influence, and then obtain it. If you have a blog or other public online presence, if you are quote tweeting my post in order to critique it, then be honest: you want to have influence too. There’s no shame in that.

If you found this essay thought provoking, please like or repost my original tweet.

You can help me grow my reach by sharing this post.

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Cover image: Harvard class of 2015 graduates by Caroline Culler, CC BY-SA 4.0

Hunter writes in his book:

For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]

It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.

You see this change in ethical outlook on life in basically any book on the topic. It’s a move away from the old Calvinist outlook and behaviors and towards modern American post-bourgeois consumerism.

In his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber describes how Calvinism’s concept of calling and election - which he distinguishes from that of Lutheranism - led to furious activity to attempt to objectively demonstrate that one was among the elect.

The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis….Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, for even the elect remain beings of the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards, nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election. They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation.

He describes how this manifested itself in various ways, such as in the Puritan ethics of Richard Baxter:

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with [Benjamin] Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it.

The mention of Benjamin Franklin shows that this was one form in which these values were transmitted to American culture. Again, far from contemporary America, which puts a high premium on leisure and consumption over asceticism and production.

Weber’s book is actually short and readable, so is very much worth picking up.

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We see the same in French writer Emmanuel Todd’s provocative book The Defeat of the West, which I wrote about earlier this year. Todd sees Protestantism as the foundation of the modern West, and describes it similarly to Weber:

Let us conclude our review of the main characteristics of Protestantism. It is an ethic of work: we are not on earth to have fun, but to work and save. Here we are at the antipodes of the consumer society. Protestantism has also long been synonymous with sexual puritanism.

He sees the collapse of Protestantism as the core factor in the decline of the West, one which lies underneath many of today’s social pathologies.

The original religious matrix was slowly built between the end of the Roman Empire and the central Middle Ages, and then ultimately thickened by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. If it was the arrival at a religious zero state that made the national sentiment, the work ethic, the notion of a binding social morality, the capacity for sacrifice for the community disappear, all these things whose absence makes the West fragile in war, it becomes obvious that they will not reappear in the next five years, the time I have given the Russians to carry out their war.

He cites Ross Douthat’s assessment in condemning modern evangelicalism:

Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion teaches us that evangelicalism is a heresy, with no real connection to classical Protestantism. Calvinism and Lutheranism were strict; they demanded that man observe a moral code, economic and social for example, and it had given birth to progress. The religious revival of the 1970s, while it allowed some of its inspirers to make a lot of money, has above all carried regressive elements: a literalist reading of the Bible, a generally anti-scientific mentality and, above all, a pathological narcissism. God is no longer there to demand, but to cajole the believer and distribute bonuses, psychological or material.

I haven’t read Bad Religion, but my understanding is that Douthat may have been referring to some specific strains like the prosperity gospel here.

Nevertheless, there’s some truth here we’d be wise to pay attention to. Evangelicalism’s culture is not even contiguous with that of mainline Protestantism, much less classical Protestantism. It is very populist and dominated by charismatic pitchman type pastors. It tends to emphasize a therapeutic gospel over a strict ethic. In fact, any type of moral or behavioral code followed too seriously is likely to draw a caution for being legalistic. It’s very aligned with American consumer culture, and American culture generally. And of course it is anti-intellectual, something well-documented in such work as Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

So even if Douthat and Todd go overboard, there’s something there that represents a break with historic Protestantism.

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To the extent that modern American, and evangelical, culture represents a Protestant culture of the past, it is that of Quakerism (similar to the Anabaptists) rather than Calvinism, a point made by the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell in his book Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. Baltzell notes that the different strands of Protestantism each had a different ethos:

Accordingly, the Lutheran attitude toward the world was one of resigned participation; the Anabaptist, one of withdrawal, and the Calvinist, one of activist conquest. The logic of Lutheranism bred a race of pious bourgeoisie; of Anabaptism, a band of suffering martyrs, and of Calvinism, an elite of heroes. Whereas Lutheranism eventually became culture-bound (state churches in Germany and Scandinavia and ethnic denominations in the United States), both the Anabaptist and Calvinists remained transcultural and international: the Anabaptist spirit sought the fringes and frontiers of cultural authority; the Calvinists fought to Christianize the centers of civilization.

Calvinism had been the Protestantism that most shaped the American experience, although as Baltzell noted, “Although America as a whole has been Puritan and Calvinist throughout most of its history, it has now moved—especially since the 1960s—far closer to the ideas of Quakerism.”

If you want to see how far it has moved, read historian David Hackett Fischer’s wonderful book Albion’s Seed, which looks at the origins of American regional culture in four different groups of British settlers in America. The Puritans will certainly seem alien and off putting. The only group Fischer profiles that is remotely relatable to the modern American is the Quakers.

Baltzell noted that the ideas of election and calling in Calvinism are more than simply salvation and career, but rather included the idea that people were called to positions of authority and leadership. This produced a hierarchical society in Puritan Massachusetts, but one imbued with an extraordinary culture of leadership. Virtually all of the key figures in the Revolutionary era were either from Massachusetts or Virginia, for example.

It also put a high value on education, leading to an incredible record in the production of top educational and intellectual institutions, and scientific and literary accomplishment.

As Matthew Yglesias noted just this week:

Today, the American state with the highest share of college graduates is Massachusetts. If you go back to the 1650s, Massachusetts was the only American colony that had a college. The leaders of the colony founded Harvard because “after God had carried us safely to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the city government; one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” Almost all of the early colonists were Protestant, but the southern states were home to lots of Anglicans, who were mostly comfortable relying on the home country to educate ministers. Quakers and Calvinists, on the other hand, were more motivated to found schools early.

Those eight early northeastern colleges include two of the top three on the current US News rankings, seven of the top fifteen, and eight of the top 40. And the northeast remains the best-educated part of the country today. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth as primarily places to train Congregationalist ministers, but some very specific religious ideas have had wide-ranging social and economic consequences over the course of centuries.

Massachusetts still retains some of the old Puritan habits and values, even as it has become one of the least religious states.

The Quakers were also interested in education, but mostly primary and secondary education rather than higher education. Their institutions were also private and sectarian, rather than public institutions. Massachusetts created the nation’s first public schools, whereas Pennsylvania lagged in creating public schools and in passing compulsory school attendance laws. Quakers were also more focused purely on moneymaking in contrast with the Puritans, who were successful in business but had other pursuits as well.

Contemporary evangelicalism is similar. It also tends to be skeptical of mainstream and public institutions, has developed its own sectarian schools and such. Evangelicals have been very successful in business, but mostly in prosaic industries like fast food (Chik-Fil-A) and retail (Hobby Lobby) rather than strategically important or culturally influential industries.

It’s important to note that I am talking primarily about culture here, not theology. Modern evangelicals might argue that they are theologically in continuity with the past even if their culture has changed.

It is the case that culture is a product of specific people, places, and times. It is not and never could be static. As Benjamin Mabry recently noted in these pages, just because other people have different folkways doesn’t mean they are any less authentically Christian.

Undoubtedly, Christianity in modern America will reflect modern American values and folkways in important respects. It would be similar for Christianity in China, Africa, etc.

However, when you consider that at least some of the cultural characteristics of Protestantism, and especially the Calvinism that so shaped America, were theologically inspired, then if today’s evangelicalism produces different and even opposed cultural traits, does it really understand theology in the same way?

Imagine people on an island who find a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution washed up on the shore. They decide to use those to set up their own government modeled on our constitution and laws. Would such a thing really end up being genuine American government? No. Because so much of what America is about is not in a written document. It is written in ourselves.

All is not well for American Christianity to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but given the manifest and widely publicized problems within evangelicalism, I would submit that at least as much time should go into introspection and internal reform.

This, I think, should be a time to consider our ways. Where might we be out to sea and completely wrong on important topics? We all, myself included have to be willing to consider that we might have gotten important things wrong,

The fact that today’s evangelicalism is so different from yesterday’s Protestantism should be at least an indicator that it’s off base in some key ways.

If you found this essay interesting, please go like or repost my tweet about it.

Cover image credit: ToBeDaniel/Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0

Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds and convictions recognize that the entire political ecosystem—not only its leadership and its governing institutions, but also its leading ideas and ideals—is failing.

With this quote, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter telegraphs his fundamentally gloomy view of the future of the American experiment - a pessimism broadly shared by many Americans of various political stripes.

His new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis is an explanation of how we got here, and what it means for our current cultural and political conditions. It is a return to the focus of his early 90s work on cultural conflict in Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War.

This is an important book. It’s not a light read, but for those who aren’t afraid to take on a more intellectual work, I highly recommend it.

Like many such works, Hunter’s book tells the history of America seen through a particular lens. In this case, it’s what he calls the “hybrid Enlightenment,” or the shared cultural underpinnings that enabled social and political solidarity in the US.

The hybrid Enlightenment is a combination of multiple elements, principally the English and Scottish strands of the Enlightenment and a millenarian Christianity of both the austere Calvinistic variety and a sort of populist folk one.

This hybrid Enlightenment was flawed, with various incomplete or contradictory elements that needed to be “worked through” (his adaptation of a Freudian term), such as racial injustice. But this working through, along with the evolution of society, caused the hybrid Enlightenment to slowly dissolve over time to the point where it no long provides a basis for solidarity, of which he says:

Solidarity is not just about the will to come together to do the work of democratic politics. It is about the cultural preconditions and the normative sources that make that coming together possible in the first place…Solidarity in this more capacious sense defines a framework of cohesion within which legitimate political debate, discourse, and action take place…The power of solidarity is found in the unspoken, often vague or fuzzy resonances of shared identity, shared affections, shared challenges, and a shared destiny.

After tracing his history, Hunter then provides a deeply depressing overview of our current cultural and political climate, one that raises fully legitimate questions about the future of American democracy due to the loss of the pre-conditions of solidarity. He writes:

The contention of this book is that we are at a moment when the answer to the fundamental question about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be assumed—though not because we are polarized, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us.

And later:

That does not mean that democracy in America is dead. It is not. But it is far from healthy, and prospects for its vitality are not at all bright. In all likelihood, it will endure in form, but its substance will continue to be hollowed out. In its wake, the legitimation crisis will continue to harden: confidence in the range of governing institutions will continue to weaken, cynicism toward the leadership class will deepen, and the alienation of ordinary citizens from their nation will worsen. What is there to impede or reverse this course?

Two things stood out to me while reading this book. The first is that he hits essentially every critical element of American history, including many that are frequently neglected. I made a list of items in my head to look for in the book, and by the end he’d hit all of them. This includes things ranging from early 20th century anarchist bombings to managerialism to McCarthyism as a type of ethnic self-assertion by the Ellis Island generation.

The second is the overall fairness of the book. Hunter works hard to be even handed to both liberals and conservatives. I’m sure both will have many issues with his takes. The right might say that he devotes way too much ink to race. The left might say that he legitimizes the illegitimate. But while no one will agree with everything, I thought on the whole he worked hard to be balanced. For example, he gives a lengthy writeup of the Claremont Institute. While my guess is that any Claremont people reading it would disagree with parts of what he said, they would recognize it as a basically fair writeup (in contrast to the typical hit job piece).

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Critiquing of Modern America

I want to briefly highlight the ways in which Hunter validates the conservative critiques of modern America. This is not the main thrust of his book. However, Hunter is both an academic and known for his association with Tim Keller. My more conservative and sometimes Keller-skeptical reader base is thus probably suspicious of Hunter as some kind of a liberal. So I want to highlight these factors to encourage you to read the book with an open mind.

In fact, Hunter makes more profound and effective critiques of modern America than many of the right wing critics of “clown world” do.

For example, Hunter views modern American society as dehumanizing:

Needless to say, in the contemporary environment, the sense of the lack of respect or esteem or welcome by so many has been politicized. While politicization may have some merit, it mainly distracts attention away from the broader conditions of the modern and late modern world that form a backdrop of institutional realities that in their nature challenge the moral worth of everyone living under these conditions. This backdrop is overwhelmingly—possibly essentially, even if not comprehensively—dehumanizing. And its reality is tangible, experienced by most people in the course of everyday life. That backdrop is so well established at this point and now so pervasive and commonplace that it is hardly noticed. It is constituted by several interwoven elements, most of which are well known. [emphasis added]

One such factor the bureaucratization (think: managerialism) of essentially every part of our lives.

He also recognizes the negative impact that large scale post-1965 immigration has had on social solidarity.

In this way, pluralism intensified considerably, and with it, waves of people for whom the hybrid-Enlightenment and the American mythos were, at the least, unfamiliar, strange, or perhaps incomprehensible. In turn, the assimilationist ethos that had been prevalent for generations became much more difficult to sustain. The demographic influx of non-European immigrants was parallel to and reinforced the decline of the mainline Protestant churches and the weakening of the WASP establishment and the regnant system of elite privilege, power, and class reproduction.

The immigrant and the private equity partner see America the same way: as a venue for extracting personal gain. This is quite different from the native born citizen, to whom America is also home. America as home means, among other things, a willingness to, on occasion, sacrifice one’s personal self-interest for the public good.

In the past, the children and grandchildren of immigrants could assimilate to America as home. But today, as Hunter describes so well, there’s nothing for them to assimilate to. Our society also explicitly frowns on assimilation. The result is persistent identity groups for whom life in America is a zero-sum competition for personal and group advancement.

Hunter, while noting and rejecting right wing authoritarianism, also validates that the American left is also authoritarian and even eliminationist (at least rhetorically). He writes:

In the competition for invective, Trump walked away with the biscuit, yet this hostility was not altogether unique to Trump or the new Republican Party. In fact, polling in 2019 found that Democrats were somewhat more likely than Republicans to admit thinking “on occasion” that “we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” Democrats were also more likely than Republicans to agree that violence would be justified if the other party won the 2020 election. Similarly, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to describe their opponents as “un-American” (by eight points), “un-Christian” (by thirteen points), “dangerous” (by twenty-two points), and “evil” (by nine points).

He shows how accusations that Trump is a “fascist” are designed to give the green light to his opponents throwing out the rulebook and trying to stop him by any means necessary, fair or foul. He says, “If you are fighting a fascist, you are defending humanity itself, and you should go at it with no holds barred. The charge of fascism was intended to shake up the old consensus order in which conservatives were tolerated as the loyal opposition.”

He even talks about Fauci’s Covid lies:

In several notorious cases, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top public health officials told outright lies about scientific findings in an effort to promote what they saw as the most effective collective response to the pandemic.

In short, liberals by no means escape unscathed in Hunter’s account. Again, his critiques of them and of the current state of America are often more incisive than those coming from the right.

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Rejecting the Cultural Politics of Hate

If the hybrid Enlightenment is effectively no more, then what has replaced it? Nietzschean nihilism:

There is indeed a void generated by the unraveling of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment, but it is a void now filled with a very different cultural logic, a cultural logic that owes more to Friedrich Nietzsche than to Thomas Jefferson. Filling that void, at least much of it, in our public culture are the cultural logics of nihilism.

Nihilism in its passive variety is result of the dehumanizating conditions of modern American life noted above:

Passive nihilism is the net effect of large, institutional dynamics intrinsic to the modern world—its technology, its bureaucracy, its markets, its pluralism, its entertainment—unfolding in the public sphere.

In a more active form, nihilism manifests itself in ressentiment, a Nietzschean concept that was a major theme in Hunter’s 2010 book To Change the World. Hunter defines it as “a narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power.” Much deeper than simple resentment, he points out that it is a psychology as well, and “a cultural logic that is encoded within institutional life.” Ressentiment is not a result of some particular, discrete harm that one has suffered, but rather a general sense of inferiority or woundedness. This may be rooted in a genuine injustice, but one which has overflowed the bounds of simply being wronged.

The result is a cultural politics of hate. This new cultural politics, which spans many if not most groups, is the replacement for the old common culture of America:

Yet there is another story unfolding here as well, a story playing out simultaneously within the deep structures of American political culture. One could describe it as an emerging “common” culture, the form of which is manifest within and across every faction and division in American public life. Its shared cultural logic is defined by a moral authority rooted in rage, anger, and often hatred. Its mythoi or collective self-understandings revolve around narratives of injury and woundedness. Its ethical dispositions are defined by the desire for revenge through a predilection to negate. Its anthropology effectively reduces fellow citizens to enemies whose very presence represents an existential threat. And its teloi are power oriented toward domination. [emphasis added]

It results in part from the loss of the shared understandings of the old hybrid Enlightenment:

Absent any shared notion of reason, revelation, human nature, republicanism, or “revolution” as the grounds to establish claims or to resolve disputed claims—absent any more or less fixed cosmology within which the world could be ordered—authority becomes rooted in subjectivity. This is not news. It is one of the hallmarks of modernity. In the late modern age, however, this culminates politically in a subjective and intersubjective rage that, in turn, becomes the source from which any claims to grievance are made legitimate, from which any claims to redress are justified and made compelling, and from which solidarity within identity groups is formed.

The results are our perverse politics of hate:

Outrage against a grievance caused by others, then, becomes the source of authentic identity and authentic action. In this strange calculus, the more rage the better. In turn, rage, hatred, and the desire for revenge that emanate from injury become the source of meaning and purpose for those who see themselves as victims. Injury, then, is definitional. Identity—formed negationally—depends upon an active and hostile enemy to exist at all….Identity groups become so deeply attached to their own impotence, exclusion, and subordination because they provide the premises upon which the group’s existence depends. [emphasis added]

How do we escape this? It’s easier to get into a culture war than to get out of one. Once a culture war starts, a sort of Prisoner’s Dilemma logic takes over. The possibility that the conflict could existential at the level of the way of life is all too real, as Hunter acknowledges:

Tragically, all actors involved understand the situation in existential terms. The other side is the enemy of all that is or could be right and good about America. And it is to be treated accordingly. For the other side to win is to be stigmatized, excluded, dominated, and oppressed. For those involved, it feels like a life-and-death conflict. They may be right—if not literally, then culturally. [emphasis added]

Thus there is a perverse logic to the culture war that’s hard to escape.

Hunter does not provide a roadmap here. In fact, he provides little in the way of specific advice or tactics. Instead, he concludes his pessimistic book with a chapter on what a renewed healthy politics would have to incorporate.

But I would submit, and Hunter said similarly in our podcast, that we must reject the cultural politics of hate and recognize the humanity of the other side.

I will address conservatives here. Hunter’s book clearly says that liberals embrace this politics of hate and negation. They do intend to destroy the way of life of conservatives.

But the question is not about them but about us.

Too often conservatives are simply a mirror image of the left. I’m distressed to read statements online like, “It’s impossible to live in the same country with these people.” This is, candidly, eliminationist rhetoric that sees the people rather than the ideas, movements, and system as the problem.

This is one thing that the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin got right in his earlier writings. He would talk about wanting a “velvet glove revolution” (that is, not repressive or vengeful against the citizenry). He’d say that, “We like the people. It’s the government we don’t like.” Government here representing the form of government, which he wanted to replace with a type of outré patchwork quilt of city-states run by sovereign, publicly traded corporations. His ideas of “formalism” and “neocameralism” attest to this focus on the system of government, broadly understood, as the problem rather than the people. His ideas for a replacement are, of course, insane. But he largely avoided the politics of hate.

The problem for us is that there really are people, unfortunately more than a handful of them, on the left who mean us ill. We’ve seen all too many social media mob attacks to this effect. So what do you do?

The first thing is to recognize the basic humanity of your opponent. Hunter says, “The question of the moral worth of the human person, as I have posed it, is the fundamental question for any society that imagines itself to be—or aspires to become—genuinely humane.” And, “It is critical that we rediscover human beings underneath the abstractions of our inflammatory symbolic politics.”

Here a Calvinistic conception of human depravity is helpful in seeing the wrong in your enemy without denying their humanity. Calvinistic Christianity believes that it is impossible for any man to overcome his depravity in the absence of supernatural action in the form of grace. Hence if we see someone in thrall to what we believe are bad ideas, motives, and actions, it may well be that they cannot but be otherwise. It seems to me that the injunction to pray for your enemy is in part rooted in this reality. The prayer might be that they would receive grace such that the conflict could as a result become less existential, and thus open the possibility of resolution.

Boethius made this same point in his Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius, a former high court official in the Roman Empire, fell out of favor and was unjustly imprisoned until a painful execution. He wrote this great work from prison awaiting death. He writes:

There is no place whatever for hatred in the mind of the wise. Only an utter idiot would hate good men, and it is irrational to hate the wicked; for if vice is a species of mental illness comparable to illness in the body, since we regard those who are physically ill as wholly undeserving of hatred and deserving rather pity, then men with minds oppressed by wickedness, a condition more dreadful than any sickness, should all the more be pitied rather than hounded.

This doesn’t mean we should passively accept defeat or stand down from political conflict. Nor does it mean that we shouldn’t do things like move to an area populated with more like minded people, which is a completely rational choice in today’s environment. It does means not dehumanizing your enemy, and recognizing that you actually will be living in the same country with them.

The second thing to do is to make sure to establish a positive identity not a negative one. You should know what you are for, not just what you are against (although there are plenty of things to be against today). Too much of the cultural politics of hate is organized around the enemy, as Hunter noted above.

I previously devoted a newsletter to this very topic.

Aaron Renn

Newsletter #84: Why You Need a Positive Vision

Welcome back to my monthly newsletter. This is always free, but you can get access to additional exclusive content, podcast and interview transcripts, and commenting privileges by becoming a paid sub…

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2 years ago · 39 likes · 24 comments · Aaron M. Renn

The last point is to recognize that today’s conflict may not be as existential as we think. So much focus is put on the upcoming election. But regardless of the outcome, it does not necessarily mean the end for the loser.

Hunter gave a great example of this, I believe in his podcast with Russell Moore. You would think that if anything would settle something, it would have been the Civil War. But while the Civil War did end slavery, it did not lead to blacks being included into American society or even being given basic civil rights for another 75 or so years after the end of Reconstruction. The South reconstructed a system of Jim Crow to replace slavery that endured generationally.

Similarly, Roe vs. Wade did not settle the abortion debate. Nor did its overturning. Nor will any laws of any type passed today.

Simply acquiring the levers of power, even nearly ultimate power as with complete military victory or a Supreme Court ruling declaring something a constitutional right, is not necessarily decisive.

When Hunter’s 1991 book Culture Wars came out, the reaction of his sociology colleagues was “What culture war? This is a mopping up operation.” They thought their victory was a foregone conclusion. They were badly mistaken.

So while the election may be important, it probably isn’t the last election ever - or whatever various things people think about it - regardless of who wins. And the future will contain surprises we can’t even guess at today.

Reject the dehumanization of the other. Have a positive identity. And avoid assuming every event has apocalyptic significance.

These are all ways to stay sane and avoid being corrupted while fighting vigorously for what you believe to be right and to preserve your way of life.

Click to buy Democracy and Solidarity.

In case you missed here, here is my podcast about the book with James Davison Hunter.