State School Upper Middle Class

A writer who goes by the name “Drunk Wisconsin” wrote a viral essay back in February around what he called the “State School Upper Middle Class.” or “runner-up elites.” Don’t let his nom de plume or other saucier essays turn you off, there’s some great insight in here. People like this are all over suburban Indianapolis (and the suburbs of most other cities).

For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight of globalization and shifting demographics. We’ve talked about how the Ivory Tower has descended into navel-gazing wokeism. We’ve talked about the sense of spiteful anger that fuels the lower classes to revolt against the elites in a populist backlash. But we haven’t talked a lot about a very large, influential, and important segment of American society: the state school upper middle class.

As the middle class disintegrates, it recombobulates in two new segments of society: a downwardly-mobile lower middle class that has more in common with “the poor” and an upper middle class, which can be viewed as either upwardly mobile or as static in their relative socio-economic position. It’s clear that the former make up a large segment of the Trump/MAGA political movement, but who are the latter group? What do their lifestyles look like? What are their political leanings? This post is intended to reflect on this new group, who I call the state school upper middle class, in an attempt to start asking questions I don’t see getting answered.

You know these people. His name is Tyler or Ryan or something, her name is Lauren or Megan, but maybe it’s spelled a little stupid. They met in college—University of Michigan, unless I’m remembering it wrong, maybe it was Minnesota….They gave the city life a good try after graduation—living in an apartment, going out all the time, living the life of a twenty-nothing. But they’re sensible people and they instinctively follow the success sequence, which means they had a weird nagging feeling pushing them to get engaged, get married, buy a house, get a dog, and have kids. That’s exactly what they did, in exactly that order. He proposed on vacation somewhere abroad—Italy or Ireland or Iceland—and their wedding was as large as it needed to be to accommodate her mother’s preferred guest list. The dog is a doodle, his name is Huxley. They now live in the suburbs of a large metropolitan area somewhere in the US. Hard to tell exactly where, the parking lots all look the same. They have two of the 2.5 children they will have, on average.

You know these people. State schools across the country are pumping them out by the thousands annually. They are the descendants of the middle class from the 1950s—not only in the sense that many of them have ancestry in the American middle class from seventy years ago, but also in the spiritual sense. There is no longer a true middle class. Instead, the middle has split into lower and upper sections that are increasingly foreign to one another. The separation is powered in large part by the fact that the UMC goes to college to obtain a four year degree, a mechanism that shaves a portion of society off and isolates them within a bubble of people from similar backgrounds, similar tastes, and similar IQ levels.

Like the middle class from the ’50s, they are content. They have a house and two cars and their lives are generally fairly stable. Their 401k is funded and their kids have a 529 account the grandparent throw some money in every Christmas. Their student loans, car payments, and mortgage are not a burden that will cause them bankruptcy. They’re prudent, so they pay off their debts and only use credit cards as intended—for cash back rewards. Unlike the lower middle class, they’re going to be fine and they feel it deep in their bones. That sense of doing okay is why they are the spiritual descendants of the old middle class, and it’s why the have-nots that happened to end up in the other category cause a disproportionate amount of concern in the pundit class.

The state school upper middle class are not rich in the traditional sense. They haven’t inherited large sums from their parents, they had to take out some student loans to pay for college, and they can’t afford to live a life outside of their means. Instead, their within-the-means lifestyle is perfectly mediocre: shopping at Trader Joe’s and buying a new Toyota. Compared to the old middle class from the last century, they’re undeniably more wealthy; their houses are bigger, their TVs are flatter, and they can afford to throw away the plastic toys their kids get from the grandparents so that the kids aren’t tempted to stop playing with those expensive wooden Lovevery toys their pseudo-crunchy millennial mother bought them. In inflation-adjusted terms, this cohort earns slightly more on a per-household level than their socio-cultural ancestors. With that money, they can afford to live a life that’s similarly slightly better in relative terms.

That sense of doing okay is an important component of analyzing this group of people because it informs their worldview. Their reality meets expectations; the life they expect to have is the life they do have. Even if the actual individuals that make up the millions of people who inhabit this zone are from immigrant backgrounds like myself, or moved up from being born in a trailer park, they are the inheritors of the American dream, the torch has been passed to them. Through hard work, good decisions, and a heavy dose of sheer luck, they managed to find themselves working an email job that pays them enough to go on vacation twice a year. As a result, they have none of the grievance their lesser halves hold. They don’t feel an intrinsic need to revolt against the powers that be. Why would they? They’ve got it good.

The writer correctly describes their socio-political outlook as “left of center, right of woke.” They are the heirs of the suburban Reagan Republicans, but today they are essentially moderately center-left. Because they live in functional communities, are doing well personally, and still basically have middle-class ideas about decorum, they are revolted by Donald Trump’s style and the general affect of today’s GOP. Trump and state GOPs are not the underlying cause, but are an accelerant of this group of people moving left.

The Great Realignment that American society has undergone has upended our old definitions, and we’ve struggled to find new labels that appropriately describe what people currently believe. As part of that split, small-C conservatism is now found more often among politically blue-leaning Americans. (See LastBlueDog for more on this line of thinking.) These people don’t want massive disruptions, they don’t want revolution. They want stability, consistency, and competence. Moreover, the ideas that the state school upper middle class exhibit in their lived experience—marriage, children, stable employment, education—that used to be associated with red-leaning voters are now likely to be found among reluctant, unenthusiastic Kamala Harris voters.

This UMC is moving to the suburbs and buying real estate with 30-year mortgages with the school district in mind. As such, many suburbs are turning purple or blue-ish like the WOW counties of suburban Milwaukee in my home state of Wisconsin. I know some of these people personally. As a matter of fact, I am them, which is why I find this group of people interesting to think about. What I see among my peers is a generally moderate disposition that, according to the current balance of the political scales, means that they prefer to vote for Democrats, regardless of any admitted excesses on the left. In my opinion, this is largely cultural. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you drive a truck and think Applebee’s is the pinnacle of cuisine, you’re Team Red. If you wear a Patagonia vest and dress sneakers to the office, you probably know what (actually good) restaurant to book a reservation at for Valentine’s dinner, and you’re probably Team Blue.

This shift has profound implications for politics. Although neither Republicans nor Democrats are governing well at present - except perhaps in places like these state school upper middle class suburbs - the Republicans have a bigger problem in that the leftward shift in educated voters leaves them without the human capital needed to govern or run institutions. Even if they decided they wanted to govern, they don’t have the horses to do it.

Also, it’s undeniable that more educated and affluent people are better able to mobilize politically to get what they want. So the concerns of this increasingly left-leaning group will have significantly more influence in society than the Republican working class, even if it is smaller.

This is why in his famous 1994 essay, Edward Luttwak believed fascism was likely to come to America because of a white collar rather than blue collar squeeze. His prediction of that squeeze was early, but with the potential for large AI disruption to white collar employment, the conditions for radical politics of many stripes in the US may end up being much greater than anyone imagines. In our day, this is manifesting in various forms of neo-socialism, which has of yet not come to these suburbs, but might if the state school upper middle class really starts getting hit hard.

Drunk Wisconsin goes on to say:

The state school upper middle class shops at Costco and is concerned about their exposure to microplastics. They drive a normal gas-powered car and try to minimize screentime for their kids. That time they spent at college was the entry point for receiving the trickle-down cultural preferences that are held in more extreme versions by coastal elites. They haven’t gone full Erewhon, but they certainly avoid Walmart. My guess is that a large part of Instagram’s ad revenues come from the woman in the state school upper middle class family clicking on algorithm-fed ads for Montessori toys, merino wool clothes, and guides on how to correctly discipline their kids without causing long-term trauma. The purchasing and consumption habits of this cohort reflect their moderate, slightly-left-of-center politics.

…

These people are the reason so many cleaning products are now “natural.” They are the reason children’s toys are now pastel-beige-colored. They are the number one source of Peloton’s monthly memberships. What I’m trying to say is that, while the state school upper middle class may not be the elites who set trends and determine morals, they are the ones who make up a large share of home purchases across the country, they are the ones to whom corporations pander, they are the ones who can break the tie in an off-season election. In short, these people are important, and I get the sense that, due to their relatively silent existence, they are being underdiscussed in the intellectual space.

The state school upper middle class is a significant portion of the top 10% of the households in our K-shaped economy that now control half of all consumer spending. Think a dual career couple in Carmel, Indiana where the husband works for Eli Lilly and the wife works for Roche.

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s an important piece.

Subscribe now

The Young Angry Women

The UK magazine New Statesman had a cover story on Britain’s rising new radical feminism. One of the authors of the paywalled piece shared some of their key points on X.

• Young women are 26 pts less favourable to capitalism than young men, and feel much more positively towards communism than capitalism.

• Women u25 dislike capitalism so much, they view it as (un)favourably as fascism.

• UK should pay slavery reparations by a 2-1 margin

• They think 43%-40% ‘it is unfair some people have more than others and we should redistribute wealth’ over ‘people deserve to keep what is theirs, even if it means others have less’

• More negative than young men about their careers, earning potential and property

• 6 in 10 (58%) say they would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed on Gaza

• 3 in 4 (74%) say the say the same about views of Donald Trump, with even more saying they wouldn’t date someone who disagreed about social justice

And this one: “Under 30 women are 3x as likely to hold a negative view of young men than the other way around.” Check out this graph.

Subscribe now

The Savannah Enlightenment

I have said that someone needs to write a Plutarch’s Lives type book about American Protestant elites, because today’s American Protestants, especially evangelicals, have no idea what one looks like.

First Things magazine supplied a chapter in that book this month, with an article in their new print edition about James Oglethorpe called “The Savannah Enlightenment.” Oglethorp was principally an Englishman, but he’s very notable in America as well as the founder of Georgia and Savannah.

Oglethorpe’s greatest legacy, however, would be far from England. On November 16, 1732, he sailed from Henry VIII’s old docks at Deptford with a group of 114 men and women of various trades and stations in life. They were beginning what history has called “the Georgia Experiment.” To Parliament, Oglethorpe had proposed a new colony to serve as a military buffer state between wealthy Carolina and Spanish Florida. To subscribers, he spoke of planting a colony on the principle of philanthropy, led by “a noble Tenderness for the Miseries of others.” Oglethorpe had led an unsuccessful penal reform effort in England, after a close friend of his, a publisher whose books had failed to sell, was thrown in debtor’s prison. It is said that, while visiting the jails, Oglethorpe saw his fellow Englishmen, “chained neck to neck and hand to hand,” being led off to servitude in the American colonies. Scholars estimate that more than half of the white immigration to the American colonies before independence—270,000 out of 500,000—occurred in the form of indentured servitude. Oglethorpe decided he would lead England to a better way. There would be no slavery in Georgia. There would be no aristocratic class either, and to prevent its arising, no amassing or sale of property: All shareholders would hold equal-sized plots of land, which they were powerless to alienate. They would bring seed plants for a whole new economy based on the warm climate: wine, ­mulberries (for silk), olives, citrus.

…

[Benjamin] Franklin’s criticisms were very nearly inevitable. His personality was at odds with Oglethorpe’s. They were the two most remarkable men then active in British North America. Franklin worshiped hard work, industry, success, virtue; Oglethorpe wished for kindness, benevolence, philanthropy, redemption. Oglethorpe was a soldier, Franklin a burgher. Franklin was cunning, practical, and conscientious; he counseled great leaders but never quite counted as one himself. Oglethorpe was idealistic, impulsive, given to the grand gesture; he attained positions of leadership again and again, and men followed him.

Franklin’s prudence might have made the Georgia Experiment a success. Franklin’s thought began with the task, and considered which means might help him achieve it; Oglethorpe started with people, and sought for them a purpose. Franklin observed the world in order to discern where a profit might be had; Oglethorpe sought a wrong to redress. Both believed in progress: Franklin pursued it by rewarding success, Oglethorpe by salvaging failure. Franklin adapted to the times; Oglethorpe clung to ideals. Franklin believed that actions could be assessed in dollars and that seeking financial gain was the wisest course most of the time. He did not personally approve of slavery, but he bought, owned, sold, and employed slaves, since doing so was legal and profitable. He could suspend moral judgments, which made his occasional moralistic interventions in American history—for independence and against slavery—all the more effective. (Pennsylvania prohibited the importation of slaves in 1780, and Franklin became the president of its Abolition Society.) Oglethorpe did not know how to yield. Nor did he know how to follow the dollar for an hour, and await a better season for his ideals.

…

Then came war. The War of Jenkins’ Ear pitted Spain against Great Britain starting in 1739. Georgia became a front, and Oglethorpe’s presence was supremely opportune. He barely visited Savannah, where the malcontents prevailed, and instead lived mostly at Fort Frederica, a now abandoned frontier fort. For three years he crisscrossed the coastline, capturing Spanish outposts and fortifying Georgian ones. His excellent relations with the Creek confederacy secured them as allies for the English. Oglethorpe twice led an army against St. Augustine, but failed to take the great stone fort there. He proved his worth, however, at the Battle of the Bloody Marsh, where the Georgians massacred nearly to a man a small Spanish detachment, inflicting ten casualties for every one they suffered.

…

Practical men are no greater than their successes; idealists, however, may leave behind treasures for future generations, however contemporaries undervalue them. Georgia would have to recover Oglethorpe’s moral wisdom about slavery later and at great cost. Oglethorpe left another legacy, written into the very landscape of Savannah: its urban plan. Simple yet surprisingly subtle, it has in this age of mass tourism and urban preservation made Savannah one of the most visited and beloved places in America. Three decades ago, the town attracted five million visitors a year; that number has tripled since. Forrest Gump rode the beauty of Georgia, and Savannah in particular, to the Oscars. John Berendt turned Savannah’s unique blend of Southern culture into Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction work that reads like a novel. The book became a publishing sensation for a quinquennium and remains the best introduction to the city. Aging Boomers flocked to the Georgia coast. But the main allure is the Oglethorpe Plan itself.

…

But the real genius of Oglethorpe emerges when you take to your feet. For every forty-four lots he made a square, so that as you walk north to south, you arrive in a square every four blocks. The effect is magical. It is as if you were in the city when suddenly your path diverges in a wood, and now you must go right or left under a canopy of trees. Live oaks fill the sky; hints of buildings glint through the boughs. The squares are a repeating element in the grid, but they function as a counter to its normal effects. In places like Oklahoma City or Omaha, grid lines lead monotonously off into the distance. In Savannah, you leave leafy Chippewa Square and walk four blocks north past houses, churches, apartments, and shops to Wright Square, where you exit the streets and enter a park. You may turn right or left or keep straight, as at any grid intersection, but you may also go diagonally, or sit under a tree, or lie on the grass. If you are driving a car, you have to take a detour around the square. The square interrupts the grid’s monotony without compromising its geometry.

…

He lived to see the American Revolution, and history records that he met with John Adams while the latter served as ambassador to Great Britain. In their meeting it is said that Oglethorpe spoke admiringly of the Revolution, suggesting that Parliament was given over to the love of money, and gave his blessing to the new nation. He died shortly afterward. Inscribed on a tablet near his burial site were words we do not find often boasted of: “He was the friend of the oppressed Negro.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

This is a very good article, but strangely underplays Oglethorp’s Anglican Christianity. Oglethorp seems to have had Christian motives for much of what he did, and was connected with John Wesley, who briefly served as rector of a church in Savannah.

Author John Byron Kuhner chose instead to talk about Oglethorp as a freemason, which to a modern ear would make him sound like he was not Christian. This would not have been the case in that era in England, however.

Best of the Web

The New Yorker: Saving a Lost Generation of Men With Chop Saws - The College of St. Joseph the Worker, which combines the trades with a liberal-arts education, is trying to restore its students’ sense of their own competence, and to revive the city of Steubenville, Ohio, along the way

Veronica Clarke/First Things: A Whole New World of Disney Adults

Ryan Burge: This is Not Simple Generational Replacement - Can Millennials or Gen Z Save the American Church? The Data Says No.

James Wood/First Things: In Defense of Cultural Christianity

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• Post-Protestant, Post-Literate - The collapse of Protestant culture is degrading American human capital — and literacy is just the beginning.

• My podcast this week was with Margarita Mooney Clayton on art, beauty, and human creativity.

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

If you liked my repost of Anthony Bradley’s post about evangelical “cubicle men,” be sure to go read part two in his series and sign up for his Substack.

Market Failure and the Mansophere

Last week’s Financial Times weekend essay was one of the best things I’ve seen in mainstream media about the rise of the manosphere. It’s about the market failure beneath the manosphere.

The clip had promised a raging misogynist. What I encountered was a boy whose insecurity and ambition were fighting over control of his face. Davey’s dad died young. What he wants now, more than anything, is to give his own children what that death has taken from him: a strong father figure at the centre of things, providing and steadying, the man of the house.

This innocent ambition had curdled into something else entirely: a search for a “tradwife” and contempt for a woman he barely knew.

What took him from one to the other is the manosphere, the sprawling online ecosystem of influencers who have built profit-making careers telling boys the world is rigged against them. The manosphere has two unifying elements: escaping the so-called matrix, a worldview that tells you your role as a man is already fixed and the system has you under its thumb; and the corruption of modern society by feminism.

…

American young men are significantly less likely to identify as conservative than their elders, with 68 per cent in one recent poll disagreeing with the idea that society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. Young people of both sexes are more liberal than ever. 

Whatever the indicator you look at in the World Values Survey — women in political leadership, abortion, homosexuality — the long-run trend across western democracies is the same: young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less conservative. This is quite the narrative violation in the manosphere debate, where the dominant framing treats the whole phenomenon as the visible tip of a deeper ideological shift.

…

I propose a different explanation. Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts, and what remains is a disarmingly simple promise: you can make something of yourself. Yes, the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency, about giving young men a navigable path through a world that grades them hard on success but offers them little guidance on how to achieve it.

In polite society, talking too openly about success is not quite the done thing. This is understandable, but it also creates a vacuum. And a crude, extractive definition will always find buyers among young men who cannot get their answer elsewhere.

…

There is a moment, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, when something ignites in many young men: an almost physical conviction that you have to make something of yourself. Earn money, get fit and, perhaps most pressingly, become “high-value” on the dating market.

I recognised it in friends, in classmates, in boys I shared a single cigarette with outside clubs. I felt it myself. It arrived alongside the first cold suspicion that nobody is going to do this for you, and that the clock, for the first time, is actually running.

…

At school, we learnt about Pythagoras’s theorem and the Treaty of Versailles, neither of which proved especially useful outside a debating society. Nobody told us how to approach a girl, how to build a network or what success actually meant.

There is a reason for that silence. Success, examined closely, is an uncomfortable subject for anyone who takes seriously how much of it is unearned. Before your first breath, your genes have already set margins for your height, your hair, your metabolism and your predisposition to anxiety.

…

Religious communities, sports coaches, teachers (politicians, at present, perhaps less so): all present and dispense wisdom about the good life. What they share, however, is a certain reluctance to name what success looks like for a young man, and to say plainly how it is achieved. The manosphere has no such reluctance.

Many young men are intensely competitive, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is simply what that drive gets aimed at.

The manosphere is not uniquely well-positioned to reach people such as Davey. It wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply. That is the market failure beneath the manosphere.

…

If this captures the appeal of the manosphere, then the way to beat it is to offer boys an alternative story about male success, about what it means to win and how to get there. Let me offer one.

The lives I find most impressive share a single feature: the person has found a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction. What they share is the understanding that individual ambition and collective benefit are not at war.

…

Rather than being primarily about ideology, the manosphere is a contest over who gets to define success for a generation of boys actively searching for an answer. Young men in a capitalist society understand perfectly well that they will pay the price if they have no answer to what success means and how to get there.

The manosphere gets at least one thing right: this demand is real and will not go away. The “red pill” it sells (don’t just accept the hand you’re dealt) contains a kernel that is not wrong. The problem is that it then uses it to sell shortcuts that don’t work and views that harm women.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can try to click over to read the whole thing. I excerpted as much as I could justify.

There’s clearly something to this. Society at large seems indifferent if not outright hostile to male success. Instead, men are delivered hectoring Man up! lectures about how they need to be less toxic or sacrifice more for other people.

As I’ve said before, in most evangelical teachings, a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert and no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold.

Even this piece hits similar themes. He author says men should find “a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction.” This is good so far as it goes. But I wonder how many people in our society would be willing to qualify women’s ambitions similarly, to say that they are only legitimate if they lead to someone else’s flourishing? I rarely hear female ambitions talked about this this way.

Related in the Dispatch: The Dispatch: The Rise of the “Gentlemanosphere”, the Anti-Manosphere - While some of these people like Richard Reeves and Arthur Brooks clearly deserve the title of gentleman, the main person featured in this piece, Prof F-Bomb Galloway, certainly does not.

Subscribe now

The Old Guard

The new issue of Harper’s has a great essay on the crisis of America’s gerontocracy called “The Old Guard.” It’s very much worth reading. Some excerpts:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.

Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.

The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.

The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.

In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy.

…

America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.

…

That question ignores the relationship between the aging of politicians and the disaffection of the young, who prefer to vote for candidates closer to themselves in age, all other things being equal. We know that the age skew of voters is among the best explanations for the elderliness of our politicians, and it has created a self-­fulfilling prophecy: the young stay home, and then have an even better reason to do so in the next election, because the old vote old politicians into office.

…

Elder power in the public realm has a private foundation: above all, old Americans are disproportionately rich. Gerontocracy overlaps with plutocracy—­or more precisely, it is one of its most consequential forms. Of course, poor old people exist, just as rich young people do. You can imagine, just barely, a society in which elder rule is not so intertwined with wealth. But that place is not America today, and the correlation of age with wealth is anything but random.

According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-­seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-­five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-­four fell by 68 percent during the same period.

…

It’s no mystery why the old want to retain their privileges. That they can keep them so easily is in large part because the age of gerontocracy has been an age of tax revolts on behalf of the propertied. A house isn’t just a place to live; older people also have fanatical attitudes toward the disturbance of their property. “They are not generous,” Aristotle noted, for “they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.” Beyond blocking development that would benefit those who do not yet own homes, the old evince a hostility to taxing property for the sake of social goals. Americans in their final decades go even further than the libertarian American default. Not only do they feather their nests; they also secure them against predators, even though they hurt their own young in doing so.

The primary agenda for old people has long been avoiding property taxes, even when the immunities they win are regressive in the extreme, as in the case of California’s Proposition 13….The purported rationale for property-­tax relief is that old people no longer have the salaries coming in that they would need in order to pay their share to the state. But this is mostly a smoke screen, because of just how much property wealth many older Americans control.

Property-­tax limits have further abetted the elderly’s monopolization of housing. Places with higher property taxes predictably have lower house prices, leading to younger ownership. After all, it’s easier to pay even a high tax bill than to make a giant down payment. So it follows that when property taxes are held down, and home prices rise, young people are kept away.

…

The effects on all levels of American government are tremendous. It has been estimated that various property-­tax breaks for seniors cost states the equivalent of 7 percent of their income-­tax revenue.

…

If we want to counter their power, it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much. It won’t work, either, to paper over the enormous differences between the precarity of some seniors and the situation of the mass of younger people living without the specific privileges correlated with, and often reserved for, older people. Those differences imply that seniors will sometimes be allies of progress, but not always, and opponents more often. Age-­related class advantages are in many cases far more profound than the intersection of class with gender or race. There is no way to ignore them if we want a fairer future.

…

Legally, it became possible for workers to stay longer and longer, and many do, clustering in elite professions, in contrast to manual or menial work that people leave if they can or because they must. America’s corporate leaders exemplify the situation. The average hiring age for CEOs at the top American companies—­those included in the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500—­has risen dramatically, from forty-­six to fifty-­five in the past two decades. That is the same period during which executive compensation has soared, with direct implications for the fusion of age and class inequality in America today. It is not hard to think of leaders who stay on and become hard to eject even for sound business reasons, as they control their own companies or stand symbolically for them.

…

There is no known reason to believe that corporate performance has improved as a result. Indeed, there are many reasons to think that there is a price to pay, and it is not borne only by younger workers who are unable to break into the upper ranks. The market speaks clearly about the profitability of younger leadership. According to a recent study, stock prices decline when younger CEOs die unexpectedly, while the sudden deaths of the doddering and wizened drive price spikes.

According to their official purpose, corporations should be engines of change and novelty; part of what drives profits is the creation of new and better products that consumers will buy. But corporate America is hampered in this mission by its laboring gerontocracy, and by the conversion of society into a static domain for hoarding seniors. While Monsieur Grandet eventually dies in Balzac’s novel, his successors are alive and well in America today.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s interesting that almost all of the discussions about the implication of gerontocracy, such as incredible generational inequality in favor of largely Boomer seniors, is happening in secular society but not in the church.

There’s frankly enormous injustice in wealthy, selfish seniors who continue to push for policies that benefit themselves at the expensive of younger generations and the future of the nation. This form of selfishness is basically never called out by pastors as near as I can tell, however.

Subscribe now

Foreign Influence in American Universities

Kite and Key is a great media non-profit that produces informative explainer type videos designed for social media. The recently turned five years old, and just released this really great video about the way foreign governments like China have acquired undue influence over our universities.

Best of the Web

The Federalist: Project Hail Mary Is The Masculine Christian Film You’ve Been Waiting For - See also Joseph Holmes’ review if you missed it.

The Guardian: Despite their bad reputation, parenting group chats are – for some – the village that never sleeps

NYT: Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (gift link) - Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

WSJ: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (gift link) - Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy.

New this week:

• When Bad Social Practices Drive Out Good - Why it’s getting harder to do the right thing — whether hiring legally, waiting for sex, or running for office — as bad social practices take over

• Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” - Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions - A guest repost by Dr. Anthony Bradley.

Be sure again to check out Bradley’s second installment in this series.

Cover image: Andrew Tate by James English/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0

I’ll again highlight the pending release of a new Canon Press book with people engaging with my “Negative World” idea. It’s called Welcome to Negative World: How to Read the Times You’re In, and you can now order it on Amazon.

I also want to make you aware that Real Clear Investigation is accepting applications for $20,000 grants to fund investigative reporting projects. Details await at the link.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’m presently in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m speaking at a small conference. This is part of an intense stretch of travel and speaking. I’ve got three events in three different cities the week of April 20, then hopefully a bit of a break.

I wanted to share pictures from some of the events I’ve done so far this year.

Back in January I spoke at the David Network conference. The David Network is a great group of faith-based Gen Z people from Ivy+ institutions. I was on a panel on the future of conservatism with Robert George from Princeton University, Patrick Deneen from Notre Dame, and Margarita Mooney Clayton from Princeton Seminary.

I previously had George on my podcast talking about the future of conservatives in academia, a topic he not only talks about, but has done a lot about. I’m planning to have Margarita Mooney Clayton on very soon, and Patrick Deneen is on my list.

I also spoke at an event sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. I was on the keynote panel about troubled young men called “The Lost Boys.” The other speakers were Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men, and Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of the all boys school The Heights. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated.

The video of our entire panel is also available to watch.

I have not gotten any photos from my Hephzibah House event in New York, but here’s one from a luncheon event I did at the Manhattan Institute while I was in town.

I was also in Washington, DC recently for a salon dinner hosted by American Affairs to discuss a recent article of mine. While there I was able to spend some time talking with my Senator Todd Young.

I’ve known my other Senator, Jim Banks, since he was in the House, but this was my first time meeting Sen. Young.

This isn’t even all the events I’ve done recently, just the ones I’ve managed to get pictures from so far.

Subscribe now

Visions of Biblical Womanhood

The New Yorker ran an interesting piece comparing the visions of Christian womanhood in books by Jen Hatmaker and Emma Waters. The author, Emma Green, used to be the religion reporter at the Atlantic, and so knows this beat.

Waters is part of an emerging cohort of Gen Z writers trying to reclaim female empowerment for young women who are both religious and conservative. Just as evangelical deconstruction became its own subculture, which Hatmaker helped define, these new, young, family-oriented religious conservatives seem to be forging a potent subculture of their own.

…

At the same time, feminists have never quite known what to do with women like Schlafly or Waters, or, for that matter, with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, other than calling them hypocrites for having big careers while singing the virtues of staying home. That kind of dismissal misses something important about the project that Waters is pursuing. She’s writing about women who find freedom in the constraints of motherhood and marriage, and insisting that there’s room for them to nurture both professional ambitions and a traditional home life, if not necessarily at the same time. Hatmaker felt small in her conservative world, but Waters doesn’t feel small in hers; instead, she feels relief from the relentless pressure to lean in. She doesn’t experience motherhood and marriage as a millstone she must bear on the way to career success, or as a source of ambivalence about her identity. She appears to be at peace in the conviction that she was made for both.

Jael is a sly choice of hero for Waters, because she’s so easy to cast as a girlboss. After all, it takes real determination to drive a tent peg through a man’s skull. But nobody owns Jael, and women don’t have to fit a feminist frame to be powerful. Waters is lucky enough to be a young woman in a world where she can freely choose her remix of a traditional life. The tent peg is in her hands now.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I’ve known Emma since before she married Jack. It’s exciting to see Gen Z people like her get such great press. I believe she’s also been included in NYT cover stories twice as well.

I had her on my podcast to talk about her new book.

All the Single Ladies

The NYT ran an interesting piece (gift link) about single women who are throwing themselves 40th birthday parties that are designed as if they were weddings.

For some single women, the milestone 40th birthday is more than a party. Instead of waiting for a partner to justify a celebration, women are using the moment as a declaration of empowerment and self-love, complete with wedding attire, a curated guest list of their closest friends and family and the joy and excitement of a wedding.

“People are getting married later in life,” said Sarah Adair, the founder of Social Bliss Events in Nashville, who has planned several wedding-style 40th birthdays for clients. “Women deserve to celebrate such a milestone with or without a partner.”

…

“So much of our adult lives are spent marking the traditional milestones you hear about your whole life — engagements, marriages, babies, first homes,” Ms. Bart, 43, said. “For women who aren’t partnered, there’s often no external occasion prompting this kind of celebration, so creating one yourself is a genuine declaration of self-worth.”

Alyssa Pettinato, the owner of Alinato Events in New York, helped her best friend plan a blowout wedding-style 40th birthday in March 2025. “Millennials like to party,” she said. “We like to show up and show out.”

Ms. Pettinato estimates that her friend, who is single and childless, spent nearly $50,000 on her 75-person affair at Le Jardinier in New York, which drew friends and family members from across the country.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Related:

NYT: Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever (gift link) - From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common

The Times of London wrote a piece about why women aren’t having babies. You’ll never guess who they blame.

And the Wall Street Journal wrote on the women who love the manosphere (gift link).

Subscribe now

How We Gave Up on Forgiveness

The Financial Times is the world’s best newspaper, and has the best lineup on columnists, one of whom is Jemima Kelly. Her new piece on how we gave up on forgiveness is stellar. Since the FT has a very hard paywall, I’ll quote as much of it as I can justify.

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” These words, spoken by Jesus on the cross at Calvary, according to the Gospel of St Luke, constitute the apotheosis of one of the most important virtues in Christianity.

At the time of his greatest suffering and as his mortal life was about to end, Jesus was asking God to show love and mercy towards those who had wrongfully condemned him to his imminent death. This courageous act of forgiveness, as all good Christians know, is one of Easter’s central messages. The sinless Jesus died on the cross in order to redeem all of us mortal sinners, so that we may be forgiven by God.

Indeed, forgiveness is a key theme throughout the New Testament, and thus forms an important part of what it means to be a Christian (and to be a follower of many other major religions, too). During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encouraged his followers to not only love their enemies as they would love their friends, but to pray for those who might persecute them. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, connecting divine forgiveness of us imperfect humans with our own commitment to forgive others.

And yet, in our increasingly secular, consequentialist world, in which the very notion of virtue appears to have gone out of fashion, forgiveness is no longer much spoken about, or even held up as something to aspire to. In fact, it often seems to be considered as quite the opposite: something akin to moral weakness, or even altogether immoral.

Bizarrely, this is often the case when someone has not done the wrong thing but has said or even implied the wrong thing. The problem seems to be that they have thought the wrong thing; once they’ve said the wrong thing, they’re out. If you dare to “platform” them so that they might explain themselves or apologise, and in so doing “let them off the hook”, that can mean you’re out too. Guilt by forgiveness, you might say.

And so, faced with no route to redemption, those who are deemed to have done, said or thought the wrong thing are left in moral Mantua with their fellow deplorables, and often drawn into more extreme positions with no incentive to do otherwise, their voice amplified on one side of the spectrum by their very banishment from the mainstream.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

If you didn’t see this new essay in American Reformer from Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on the Reformation in America, it’s a very important and thought provoking essay. It inspired an entire newsletter edition from Ross Douthat interacting with his thesis, as well as mentions and comments from others too. I may write more about it, and hope to have Mitchell on the podcast to discuss it, but I wanted to flag this for you now with a very high commendation.

New Yorker: The Camps Promising to Turn You - or Your Son - Into an Alpha Male.

IM 1776: The Food Guidelines They Wanted

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from Andrew Sullivan (actually about Joseph Holmes’ article) and Commonplace.

New this week:

• Things That Are Getting Better - A hopeful counterpoint to the endless online negativity: modern life is advancing in surprising and practical ways

• Love, Loss, and Land - In a cynical age, The Madison dares to portray good men, great marriages, and the healing power of place - A guest post by John Seel

Head’s up for those of you in the Bay Area. I’m going to be in San Francisco next week for some meetings, and we are hosting an American Reformer event on Monday at 8pm if you are interested in coming. Here’s the signup link.

Last week I was delighted to be at the University of Virginia to participate in a discussion about the challenges facing young men today. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated a panel with Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Alvaro de Vicente of the all-male school the Heights, and me. Here’s the recording of this great event.

The Gen Z Male Attitude

In yesterday’s look at a new Institute for Family Studies survey of young men, I noted in the findings that Gen Z men are emphasizing being financially independent but not having a full time job as a marker of adulthood.

When I took an Uber to the airport yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with my 28yo male driver.

He’s very into the hustle culture. He likes to trade crypto and forex with high leverage. Has a mentor in Mexico and is planning to go visit him soon. That guy runs a discord server for traders. My driver is hoping they can spend some time traveling the world and open some pop-up stores.

He’s not averse to MLMs or any other way to make money, preferably quickly. He want to “get ahead” of AI because getting ahead of trends is how you make money. Has been scammed himself a few times, but doesn’t seem bothered.

He said he’s been to therapy, which sounds more like mindset coaching. He’s not interested in worrying about anything, says money is “just a tool” and is confident that if he keeps working at it, success will come his way - because he knows he has the work ethic.

He’s a trade school product. Has some tattoos, a couple of them crypto related. At no point did he express interest in getting a traditional job.

You can’t read too much into one person’s story - especially when I didn’t validate how much of it was true. But this is very resonant with what I see and hear in Gen Z, particularly those who are not part of the most elite, educated spectrum. (I previously wrote about how I’m bullish on this upscale segment of Gen Z).

Gen Z men just have very different views of the world from previous generations.

Subscribe now

Working at Home and Fertility

The Financial Times had a recent piece asking, “Could working from home solve the global fertility crisis?”

With an 18-month-old babbling and wailing in the back of a car outside her daughter’s primary school, Nicole Greene laughs at how “on-brand” she is to discuss how working from home could help increase fertility rates.

The 39-year-old founder of a communications consultancy says the decision to shift her agency entirely to remote working was a major factor not just in attracting talent in a predominantly female industry, but in deciding she could have another child.

…

Drawing on data from 38 countries, academics from King’s College London, Stanford University and Princeton University concluded that working from home could play a significant role in addressing sliding fertility rates.

“Flexibility over where we work is emerging as one of the most promising and cheapest ways to help people have the families they say they want,” says Cevat Giray Aksoy, associate professor of economics at King’s and lead research economist on the report. “In richer countries women still say their ideal family size is a little above two, but actual fertility is stuck closer to 1.7 or 1.8. That gap between desired and realised family is at the core of today’s demographic problem.”

Drawing on data gathered between 2023 and early 2025, Aksoy’s study found total fertility — including realised births and stated plans for more children — among more than 11,000 surveyed adults was “systematically higher for those who work from home at least one day a week”.

For couples where both partners worked from home at least once a week, total fertility was 14 per cent higher compared to when neither did — equivalent to 0.32 children per woman. The findings hold when controlled for other factors such as education, age or marital status.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can click over to try to read the whole thing.

The Barbellization of Venture Capital

There was an interesting recent interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreesen in which he was asked about starting his firm a16z and the research that went into it. It starts around 22:00, and the video embed below should be queued up to the right spot.

The process he describes here is an important one. He studied the trends that were occurring in other industries that were related to VC, and extrapolated those to the industry he aspired to be in.

This sort of study of industry dynamics is key to understanding much of what is happening in the world economically.

I remember once listening to the former CEO of a telecom company talking about how he had hired McKinsey to advise him on the likely future of his industry. McKinsey noted that many industries were consolidating towards a “two towers” model: Walgreens and CVS, Home Depot and Lowes, etc. Telecom was likely to consolidate in the same manner into AT&T and Verizon. This man’s own firm was not going to be a long term survivor, so the management strategy was to build it into the most attractive acquisitions candidate. (In reality, cell phone service at least ended up with three major competitors, but the trend was still correct).

This is a more business than cultural or policy item I know, but I wanted to give you insights into one small way that top business leaders think about and model the world. Obviously there are insights to apply to other fields as well.

Best of the Web

The Atlantic: The Death of Millennial Feminism (gift link) - Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era

Of course, it’s one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It’s quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

Helen Roy: Marriage Is Not a Meme

South Korea’s fertility rate has been infamously low. Apparently, January was the highest level of births in seven years, with the birth rate now reaching 1.0. That’s far below replacement, but progress. He’s an article (in Korean, but my browser could translate it) with more details.

Michael Foster: You Will Own Things, and Actually Care - “The subscription economy and the rented life are not just inconveniences. They are a curriculum.”

Walter Russell Mead: The Rise of the Tech Hamiltonians - The political coalition that has formed under Trump’s banner has the potential to reshape American politics

The Liberal Patriot: No Learning Please, We’re Democrats! - This good publication from Democrats Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin (with 50,000 subscribers) is shutting down because donors no longer want to fund it. Despite reformist ferment across the left and right, few of these outfits have been able to obtain a lot of funding, particularly from traditional sources.

Rutgers published and interesting report and database on affordable housing built on religious property in the US.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from the University of Virginia. I was also a guest on the Too Mikes podcast.

New this week:

• Why America Needs to Pause Mass Immigration (paid only) - Once a source of high-agency newcomers and entrepreneurial energy, mass immigration now fuels division, scams, and economic harm

• Demoralized Men - A survey of how young men feel about themselves today.

• My podcast this week was with Emma Waters on modern Christian womanhood.

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

Leaving America

I’ve noted many times that one indicator to watch to see if America is really in trouble is expatriation. If we ever start to see a significant number of native born Americans leaving the country, that would be a warning signal not to ignore.

To date, most of what I’ve read on this suggests expatriation on only a small scale, often for what seem like (likely temporary) lifestyle reasons. For example, there’s been articles talking about the growing number of Americans that have moved to Mexico City.

But a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests the volume has been picking up, saying that Americans are leaving the US in record numbers (gift link).

In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration?

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe…The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.

In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language—not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification.

…

On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company, almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania. The former Stalinist state offers a special visa allowing U.S. citizens to live and work there, with no tax on foreign income for a year, no questions asked.

“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,” said Expatsi founder Jen Barnett, a 54-year-old Alabama native who moved to Yucatán, Mexico, in 2024.

“Now they’re ordinary people, like me,” she said as she ticked through growth numbers. In 2024 the company organized three group scouting trips for clients; this year it will be 57, she said: “Our goal is to move one million Americans.”

…

In nearly all of the European Union’s 27 member states, the number of Americans arriving to live and work is at a record and rising. The total living in Portugal has jumped more than 500% since the Covid pandemic and grew by 36% in 2024 alone, official data there showed. In the past 10 years, the number of American residents has nearly doubled in Spain and the Netherlands, and more than doubled in the Czech Republic.

Last year, more Americans moved to Germany than Germans moved to America. The same was true in Ireland, which welcomed 10,000 people from the U.S. in 2025, about double those who came in 2024.

…

Or do these émigrés personify a loss of faith in America’s future and way of life? Across dozens of interviews, U.S. expats described their motivations as a tangle of economic incentives, lifestyle preferences and disenchantment with the trajectory of America, citing violent crime, cost of living and turbulent politics. Trump’s re-election was a factor for many—although others voted for him. But the structural and societal shift runs much deeper. When Gallup asked Americans during the 2008 recession how many wanted to leave the U.S., the answer was one in 10. Last year: One in five.

…

In his rallies, Trump has mused about attracting Norwegian immigrants. But the number of Norwegians living in the U.S. has fallen over the past 10 years, and in 2024, it crossed a symbolic milestone: There are now more natural-born Americans living in Norway than Norwegian-born residents in the U.S.

Click over to read the whole thing.

We shouldn’t read too much into this. As the article notes, there isn’t necessarily good data available. Also, many of these Americans may be immigrants or their children returning to their homeland. The growth in foreign passports is part of a general trend of people looking to collect multiple passports. Americans are richer now, so more of them can afford to live the expat life. Life in a lower cost country has appealed for a while to some retirees, and we have a lot of Boomer retirees right now. There are only about 100,000 annual moves by Americans to OECD (developed) countries.

Still, we’d do well to pay attention. The online zeitgeist has a lot of narratives about the desirability of leaving the country (e.g., “passport bros”).

One country that’s had a lot of out-migration is New Zealand. This just made a round of headlines as the country’s former prime minister just moved to Australia. Moving away is a longstanding trend for this small island country, but levels seem to be climing. The Financial Times recently ran a story on this. 200,000 people have left the country in the last three years, a big chunk to Australia. With 670,000 New Zealanders living there, that’s 12% of the entire population that’s moved to Australia alone. To put that in perspective, the official total foreign born population share of the US is 16%.

The country’s weak economy and high costs are cited as factors. But Australia isn’t exactly cheap. And New Zealand has been a poster child for “YIMBY” policies, as making it easier to build homes there was supposed to have brought housing costs down. Yet the exodus has accelerated.

The FT notes that New Zealand’s population is still growing due to in-migration by foreigners from places like Fiji, India and the Philippines. Undoubtedly these population shifts are going to change the skill structure of the economy, and maybe in ways that actually structurally reduce its economic potential, depending on the mix and education/skill structure of the newcomers.

Subscribe now

Any Lifestyle You Want, As Long as It’s Not Normal

I always like to say that the media love to rep every lifestyle choice except normal. Of course, these pieces also tend to be good for clicks. New York magazine is one of the publications that has figured that out, and had a number of recent pieces that went viral online.

One was about women who regret having children. It’s profiles of a handful of women talking about how they wished they hadn’t had kids. Here’s one sample:

It’s been a year. Genuinely, if there is a hell, I’ve been living in it since I gave birth. My son has a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair. I’ve tried so hard to do the things early intervention advised us to: I read the books, play the music, dance around, and nothing works. Every day, things get worse and worse. I wake up and count down the hours until my husband comes home. At some point, I thought, I can’t keep living like this, and neither can my son.

I noticed that every one of the mothers featured here were married when they had a baby. But if you want to be a single mother by choice, New York is happy to tell you all about it and how to find support. A sample:

Kelly always loved kids. Growing up in a rural part of Texas in a conservative, Christian environment, she worked as the camp counselor during vacation Bible school and volunteered to teach classes at her church. She knew she’d be a mother one day, she just had no idea how she would get there — especially once she understood she was queer. When, at 28, she eventually married a trans man, they got as far as making embryos together, but those embryos are set to be destroyed once their divorce is finalized this spring. Now living in Houston and working for an education nonprofit, she pondered how she might pursue her goal on her own. Kelly doesn’t use much social media, but she does use Reddit. About a year ago, she stumbled on a sub-Reddit dedicated to becoming a solo mother by choice and began poring over other would-be parents’ stories.

And if you want polyamory, they are happy tell you about the possibilities in their recent piece “Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load? For some moms, non-monogamy is a way to reclaim more than just their sex drive.”

These days, it’s no longer shocking to hear parents negotiate who will handle homework and bedtime while the other meets a crush for drinks. Even momfluencers in Utah are posting about their throuples. The most obvious perk of an open marriage is getting to hook up with other people. But the more poly parents I meet, the more I hear ENM framed as a co-parenting hack. These moms aren’t venting about being stuck at home with the kids while their husbands woo other women. They don’t seem to be stuck keeping score of who handles the grocery shopping and takes the most days off when the kids are sick. And they don’t feel guilty about taking time for themselves. For these moms, non-monogamy seems to offer more than just a way to reclaim their libido. Could it also be the secret to raising kids without completely resenting one’s husband?

Of course, like every article about polyamory, they are forced to admit that it appears to come with problems in many cases.

Best of the Web

RIP: John Perkins - Perkins was a civil rights leader who was a pioneer in the evangelical racial reconciliation movement. I didn’t learn about him until 2014 when someone suggested I attend the Christian Community Development Association conference. I heard him talk there and was blown away by it. He was a very impressive man. And while I think it’s fair to say the CCDA approach never achieved what Perkins hoped it would, I respect it a lot as an attempt at a genuinely Christian attempt to address racial disparities and divides.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: The Post-Christian Condition - More sentiment, more spectacle, more fillers, and more AI slop

Patrick Brown: Marriage Got Better—So Why Is It Disappearing? This article isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Brown treats falling marriage rates as a matter of male deficiency, such as working class men not measuring up to the expectation of women. But it fails to mention female deficiencies. A significant share of working class women are themselves not viable marriage prospects to the kinds of men they would want to marry. How many men who have themselves put together are looking to marry a “dinergoth”?

McKinsey: At 250, sustaining America’s competitive edge - An interesting, readable report about the economic future of America. Not at negative as many takes, while acknowledging that there’s much work to be done.

Vanity Fair: The Founder of Anthropic Says He Wants to Protect Humanity From AI. Just Don’t Ask How.

New Content and Media Mentions

Someone wrote a letter to the editor about my recent Washington Post op-ed. I also got a mention in Touchstone magazine.

New this week:

• The Garden, the Tower, the Temple and the City - Leadership in a change of age - a guest essay by John Seel

• My podcast this week was with T. C. Schmidt on his Josephus scholarship.

• This month’s Member (more info) only podcast is about the Christian nationalist vision for America as expressed by its proponents.

Cover image: Jacinda Ardern by WEF, CC BY 2.0

Mass at the Drive-In Theater

My debut article for the Hedgehog Review is now online in their Spring issue. It’s a review of the book Crabgrass Catholicism (buy the book) about the suburbanization of Catholics on Long Island.

Before the war, American Catholics were largely concentrated in cities. Arriving through Ellis Island in the waves of immigration that reached its climax between 1890 and 1920, they formed strongly ethnic communities, whether in traditional territorial parishes or specifically national ones—Polish, Italian, Irish. Catholicism was thus deeply intertwined with ethnicity. Koeth writes, “In an era of rapid urbanization Catholic immigrants built American city life by fusing the neighborhood with the ethnic parish which was dominated by its priests and religious sisters, centered on its church and school, and bound together by its communal worship and devotions.”

In the suburbs, that old order could no longer hold. Suburban residential patterns were organized more on socioeconomic rather than ethnic lines, against a backdrop of racial exclusion of blacks. “Postwar suburbanization helped complete the amalgamation of various ethnically inflected forms of Catholicism into one religiously identified body of American Catholicism,” Koeth explains. This meant an end to the variegated forms of Catholicism that were ethnic specific in favor of adopting the Irish style of Church. It also meant a shift from thick networks of extended family in the ethnic city neighborhoods to a nuclear-family orientation in the suburbs. According to Koeth, “The suburbs were also comprised of single-family houses in which, especially in the earliest days of suburban development, a single generation of young veterans lived with their wives and children cut off from the extended family networks that long held the ethnic parish together.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

You may recall my podcast with Chris Briem, author of the economic history of Pittsburgh Beyond Steel. I also have a column taking a look at that book over at Governing.

A Year as a Degenerate Gambler

The Atlantic gave one of its writers $10,000 to gamble on sports sites. The result was a fantastic cover story on sports betting (gift link).

Laws varied by state and century, but the practice always came with a healthy social stigma, one rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom. To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.” As a result, gambling was largely contained to certain disreputable corners of society, such as riverboats, red‑light districts, and Nevada. For a time, it was the near‑exclusive province of leg‑breaking bookies and pin-striped criminals.

…

Virtually every sports-media outlet in America, from CBS Sports to your favorite niche football podcaster, takes sponsorship money from gambling companies. ESPN now recaps the day’s games by covering which teams beat the spread; gambling talk pervades pregame studio panels. Every major TV network now seems to employ a data whiz with glasses and rolled-up sleeves who can break down the betting angles for viewers at home.

The leagues, initially so opposed to legalized sports betting, embraced it to help reverse sliding TV ratings and lure back the younger fans who were drifting away. Before long, they found themselves beholden to the industry they’d helped create. Now the NFL, the NBA, and MLB all have large equity stakes in the data companies that power the sportsbooks. They license broadcast rights directly to sportsbook-operated streaming services, and hurry to defend their partners whenever a game-fixing scandal breaks. “Gambling touches everything,” the former ESPN reporter Joon Lee recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “The betting apps are in charge now, and everyone knows it. The leagues are hostage to the forces they unleashed.”

In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion—and once you’re hooked, the list of sporting events you can gamble on is seemingly endless.

…

Now, with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket, gambling options are no longer limited to sports. Live-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election coverage. In 2026, you can gamble on how warm it will get in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the winner of the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and how much money Avatar: Fire and Ash will gross, and the date of Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life being discovered, and how many people will be deported from the United States, and the prospect of Iranian regime change, and the chances that Donald Trump declares martial law before his term ends, and whether Jesus Christ will return to Earth this year.

…

In truth, I was beginning to wonder about what Annie had said to me at church. I had always told people that I didn’t have an addictive personality, believing that to be so. Now I had to consider a different possibility: Maybe I had simply constructed a life with strong enough guardrails that I’d never had to test the premise.

What would happen to me, I wondered, if those guardrails were removed?

Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

The Great Smoking Divide

There’s an interesting article in the Harvard Gazette on how smoking divides America. Apparently smoking is a big predictor in the life expectancy gap between places.

Working with colleagues from Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Ellen Meara of the Harvard Chan School sought to shed light on the gap in mortality among Americans 25 to 64, which widened from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019. The work included close scrutiny of several potential drivers, including “deaths of despair,” the changing composition of college graduates, and globalization. The variable that best fits the evidence, the researchers say, is tobacco use: “Smoking emerges as an exceptionally powerful predictor of mortality trends.”

…

“Deaths of despair” — largely understood as mortality linked to suicide and alcohol and drug abuse — is another hypothesis that you say doesn’t answer this question. Why not?

Deaths of despair are clearly an important cause of death at ages 25 to 64, but not as important in this “place” story. Even removing “deaths of despair,” the growing mortality divide by education and place remains large. In many high-income places, like here in New England, rising drug-related death offsets dramatic declines in deaths from other causes. Although deaths of despair contribute to premature deaths, these trends are swamped by trends in mortality due to causes like cancer or cardiovascular disease, especially among people older than 50. And since the vast majority of midlife deaths occur after 50, deaths of despair do not explain the growing mortality inequality across places.

…

We are very interested in rural-urban differences. Historically, rural areas were always healthier. This is part of the tragedy. We took the healthiest parts of the country — in a country as rich as ours — and not only are they not enjoying the same gains in longevity, but they’re seeing shorter lives. Smoking is a very effective marker for where places are struggling, that’s why we’re trying to understand the underlying factors that may explain strong links between smoking and deaths in those areas. There are likely underlying factors, alone or in combination, that trigger both persistent smoking and, in other ways we do not yet understand, lead to premature deaths among these populations.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

I was delighted to see Redeemed Zoomer featured in this Washington Post piece on the rise of Christian online influencers.

The Atlantic: Americans Should Stop Using the Term “Christian Nationalism” (gift link) - Now that the perfectly progressive Christian nationalist James Talarico is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, the press is changing its tune on Christianity informing public policy.

Rob Henderson: The Class Wars Come for Fertility (gift link) - “Antinatalism increasingly looks like a luxury belief—an idea that confers status on the people who hold it while imposing costs on those further down the socioeconomic ladder. If childbearing is a status competition, the logical move for those at the top is to succeed at it while persuading others to opt out.”

If you didn’t see, the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks planned to do a themed night celebrating a famous local strip club called Magic City. The league cancelled the event, though the club stood by their desire to do it. Pro sports teams partnering with strip clubs is another good example of the cultural changes unleashed by the advent of the Negative World.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on the ReFOCUS podcast with Jim Daley, president of Focus on the Family.

I got mentions from SCOTUSblog, American Reformer, and Tim Challies.

New this week:

• My podcast was with Dean Ball on how AI skeptics are about to be left behind.

• How I’m Using AI - A piece on how I personally am using AI in my work

• How Hollywood Ruined Men for Dating - The death of the lovable loser hero and the rise of untouchable icons have men convinced rejection is inevitable — unless they’re perfect - a guest post by Joseph Holmes

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

And if you are near Charlottesville, Virginia, I have an exciting event at UVa on March 17th at 7pm called “Lost Boys: The Digital Revolution, the Retreat from Marriage, and the Decline of Men.” I’m going to be part of a great panel discussion on this topic with Richard Reeves and Alvaro de Vicente.

There’s been a lot of recent press for James Talarico, a liberal Christian who won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Texas this week. But if you’ve been a reader of mine, then you already know about Talarico as I wrote about him and his own variety of Christian nationalist vision back in 2023.

Evangelicals Missing from the Halls of Power

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Post on the lack of evangelicals in the halls of power (gift link). It’s another entry in the theme of the lack of an evangelical elite that I’ve been exploring.

Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.

This is just one of the many elite institutions in which evangelicals are absent or underrepresented. Evangelicals have excelled in politics, producing figures such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). They are also prominent in well-run and profitable businesses with relatively low cultural impact, such as food processing (Tyson Foods) and retail (Hobby Lobby). But they are all but absent from the leadership of prestigious universities, major foundations, Big Tech companies, leading financial firms and large media companies.

One response to this situation might be: Who cares?

Click over to read the whole thing.

My piece is slated to run in Sunday’s print edition as well.

In my view the lack of an evangelical elite is not primarily the result of anti-evangelical bias in institutions - though there’s some of that - but from evangelicalism’s own internal dyanmics.

Please see my longform essay on this in the First Things.

Subscribe now

Boomer Upsizing and Other Follow-Ups

I got a number of emails and replies to my article about the Boomer upsizing, that is, Boomer retirees buying large, multi-bedroom homes in prime suburban communities with top school districts.

I said one driver of this trend is Boomer parents moving to be closer to children and grandchildren. One woman wrote to say:

My parents (62) moved from DC to Winston-Salem, to live on my street and help with my kids. We moved my grandmother (81) from DC to her own home in a retirement community in Winston. My parents and grandmother now go to our church, where my sister and her family also attend. In our church, we have *multiple* examples of grandparents relocating to be close to grandchildren in a relatively low cost area, in a state experiencing a mini population boom. The downside is that our nuclear family can’t afford to move into a home the size we need - 4K sq ft- because they are filled with all-cash offer Boomers (like my parents, who own two homes). My extended family is part of the problem! What’s the solution? The boomers will age in place and not leave those big homes anytime soon.

Another woman told me:

We moved to Tennessee from the NYC area during the pandemic. When they retired, my parents took the proceeds from their home sale and bought the house next door. It’s been amazing for us. We are not the only family in the neighborhood in that situation. And every time here is a three or four bedroom. But I see my parents every single day, which wouldn’t happen if they were even five minutes away in a townhouse…

I suggested that Boomers retirees driving up housing prices in these prime suburban areas might negatively affect fertility. But she suggest the opposite, saying her parents move, “will likely give my parents a couple more grandchildren on the margin as well.”

And a retired male Boomer said:

We have met the enemy, and he is me! My wife and I wanted to retire to a walkable neighborhood in a town. The market was hot so we ended up snatching a house that, compared to the house we raised our kids in, added 1 bedroom and 400 sq. feet of space. I love it, it’s great for entertaining ... but I feel a bit guilty a family didn’t get it. We would have been happy downsizing but previously for a smaller house we were outbid by $40k.

In my piece from yesterday on the manosphere hitting the mainstream, commenter Sprouting Thomas posted this in response to my observation that the mansophere now trashes virtually every woman as too ugly to date.

Yes. I too have noticed this shift: every woman is “mid” at best. If a man online says out loud that a woman is attractive, then he’s either some sort of “simp”, or else demonstrating his own low value, that a “mid” is the best he can hope to attract. It’s exhausting just to read it…

I’m far from the most devoted observer of the manosphere, but to me this “every woman is gross and if you like them you’re a simp” mentality is a real change from the old manosphere to the new. The old one was more accepting of the way women are. “You know how you’re drawn to a good body and a pretty face? Well, women are drawn to superficial things too. Don’t waste time fighting it or moralizing about it, just operate with that knowledge in mind. Pick up some good clothes, a good haircut, good cologne. Get some exercise.”

Reasonable enough!

The new manosphere seems much more inclined to blame women for all the world’s ills. “This is the way women are, and that’s terrible. Letting them drive cars has been a disaster for the human race.”

Some of this may be due to the influence of incel culture, which Freddie deBoer wrote about today in a piece called “The Incel Veto.” As always with Freddie, it’s full of zingers. Here are some highlight pull quotes:

Simply acknowledging that I am a more-or-less heterosexual man who has had sex with a non-zero number of woman now provokes a kind of resentful reaction that I find annoying, strange, and honestly kind of anti-human.

The incel’s veto is the specific prohibition against men ever frankly discussing sex in any positive way that directly reflects the fact that they have sexual experience and thus have earned the consent of women. The incel’s veto weaponizes the natural and healthy inclination to stigmatize actual male bragging about sexual promiscuity (“I get so many girls, bro”) by spreading that stigma to any admission by any man that they have a sexual and romantic life.

The incel’s veto helps spread the ubiquitous online assumption that nobody is getting laid, anywhere, ever, and that it’s inherently pathological to treat sex and romance as not just healthy aspects of human life but as mundane and achievable.

A relative handful of alienated, internet-addled men, marinating in grievance and pseudo-Darwinian fatalism, have managed to inject into the bloodstream of our culture a bleak, hyper-strategized, market-based understanding of intimacy that treats human connection as a ruthless auction and desire as a rigged algorithm.

And in response to my article about it almost being a sin for an evangelical to be an elite, someone reminded me of the the old Keith Green song “Jesus Commands Us to Go.” Go meaning into missions. Green was a huge and extremely influential early contemporary Christian musician who died young tragically in a plane crash. He was very influential on evangelicals of my generation.

The song again basically says if that you aren’t doing some type of evangelistic mission work, you are probably being disobedient to God. The lyrics say, “Jesus commands us to go / It should be the exception if we stay / It’s no wonder we’re movin’ so slow / When His church refuse to obey.”

And Matthew Loftus wrote a related follow-up to my discussion of evangelical cultural cringe called “10 Reasons Evangelicals are Cringe.”

Subscribe now

Politicized Parenting

Psychologist Leonard Sax has a great article in Commonplace on the politicization of American parenting. It’s so good I want to just repost the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

20 years ago, I did not perceive a political dimension to parenting. Some parents were too strict, some parents were too permissive, and some parents were just right—and I saw no connection between parenting style and parental politics. Back then, I could tell you about parents who were left-of-center, ACLU-card-carrying liberals who were also strict, authoritative parents. Not anymore. Today, left-of-center parents are more likely to be permissive, and permissive parents are more likely to be left-of-center…Left-of-center parents are now uncomfortable exercising their authority as parents. Their kids are now more likely to be defiant and disrespectful. That wasn’t true 20 years ago, in my observation.

…

In response [to changes in the Boy Scouts], a cohort of men launched Trail Life USA, specifically as an all-boys alternative to Scouting America. “Our number one job is not to get kids into the program. Our number one job is to grow godly men,” said Trail Life USA CEO Mark Hancock. But Trail Life USA, which now has 1,500 locations across the United States, is an avowedly Christian and right-of-center organization. Fifty years ago, the Boy Scouts were not a political organization. Jimmy Carter, Steven Spielberg, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden were all Boy Scouts. But a left-of-center atheist Democrat would feel uncomfortable at a meeting of Trail Life USA, which proclaims that “salvation is by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ alone.” Likewise, a conservative Republican parent might be uncomfortable with the new requirement from Scouting America that anyone wishing to attain the rank of Eagle Scout must obtain a merit badge certifying that they understand the concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and intersectionality.

This is the choice which increasingly confronts American parents: secular/left-of-center or religious/conservative. The dichotomy is even more dramatic in our schools. Over the past 25 years I have visited more than 500 schools: public and private, urban, suburban, and rural, from Alaska to Florida, Hawaii to Maine. In 2001, when I first began these visits, I didn’t see much difference between schools in blue states and red states. There were good schools and bad schools, authoritative teachers and permissive teachers, and the variation did not vary by political affiliation. Not anymore. Today, I can tell you within five minutes, and with my eyes closed, the political affiliation of a school. If a teacher says, “boys and girls, please line up quietly!” then this school has a conservative, right-of-center affiliation. Guaranteed. Many urban, left-of-center school districts no longer permit teachers to use the phrase “boys and girls” because that term is not inclusive of nonbinary individuals.

…

Today, we need another scholar to write a new book documenting how Americans have become segregated by party affiliation. Researchers now find that Democrats and Republicans are choosing to live apart from each other. Harvard investigators Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos did a granular investigation of 180 million voters in cities across the United States. They found that “a large proportion of voters [now] live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment.” They emphasize that this sorting by political party is “distinct from racial and ethnic segregation.” Within the cities they studied, such as Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, Charlotte, Birmingham, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, some neighborhoods were overwhelmingly Republican, others were overwhelmingly Democratic, and only a few were anywhere close to 50-50. This sorting means that even in public schools, kids are unlikely to encounter classmates from families of different political persuasions. The school will align with the political preference of the neighborhood. If you don’t like it, you can move.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

America’s “Diane Feinstein” Problem

There was a great piece this week from the Boyd Institute on America’s “Diane Feinstein problem,” or the negative effects of how our government institutions are overly driven by a seniority system. Among other things, this repels top talent.

This [lockstep seniority] structure also exists in the military where, under the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA), officers are promoted in cohorts by year of commission. You make captain around year four to six, major around ten, and lieutenant colonel around fifteen. There is some variation at the margins: if you aren’t selected for promotion twice you’re discharged (the “up or out” rule). But what does not exist is the ability for a brilliant officer to rapidly climb the ranks. The economist Tim Kane, who has written extensively on military talent management, called DOPMA “the root of all evil” in how the armed forces handle their human capital.

Ultimately, these seniority protections survive because insiders have captured the system, especially public‑sector unions inside the bureaucracy. But what this rent-seeking accomplishes primarily is chasing away the most capable people from a job in the government and staffing many of the public sector’s most important management positions with the mediocre.

…

An exception to the seniority system is the Federal Reserve, which sits outside the GS pay scale and can set its own compensation and promotion schedules. The Fed has meritocratic hiring and advancement based on ability — and for someone working there, such work experience grants them an enormous amount of private sector employment capital (regardless of which White House administration coincides with that work experience). As a result, the Fed is able to compete with top Wall Street firms for top economists and rising analysts.

The Fed is also, in my opinion, and by way of reputation and results, the most competent institution in the federal government — a status that flows directly from its freedom to hire, fire, and pay on merit.

…

All of this would matter less if the seniority system did not also undermine congressional oversight of the executive branch. This monitoring, in theory, should be done through the committee system, since committee chairs have subpoena power, control hearing agendas, and can direct investigations. But these roles are seldom filled by members with the cognitive sharpness the work actually requires….The late Dianne Feinstein sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — the body that oversees the CIA and NSA — at the same time that multiple reports described serious cognitive decline. She did not leave her seat before passing away in 2023, and there existed no reliable mechanism for removing her.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Shaid Hamid/WaPo: America’s dating crisis is getting worse. What went wrong? (gift link) - Young people are struggling to find love. It’s time to bring back the matchmaker.

If trends continue, one-third of young adults will not get married and one-fourth won’t have kids. Some cities are worse than others. In San Francisco, half of all men remain unmarried by age 40. As sociologist Brad Wilcox told me, “We’ve never been in a cultural moment where so many young adults are headed toward a life without immediate kin.” The implications are staggering: a generation of permanent bachelors — and bachelorettes — untethered from the bonds that have given life its deepest meaning.

Institute for Family Studies: Loneliness Isn’t for Cowards; It’s for the Institution-less

Gallup: Americans’ Religious Engagement Holds at Lower Levels - 47% consider religion very important, religious "Nones" tick up to 24% and religious service attendance remains low

Chris Arnade: What Holds America Together? - The importance of Place, the American Dream, and the under-rated Midwest

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from Mere Orthodoxy and Tim Challies.

New this week:

• The Boomer Upsize - Baby boomers are ditching the downsizing myth to claim 4-bedroom homes near their kids and grandkids, sending home prices skyward.

• The Manosphere Hits the Mainstream (paid only) - From red pill blogs to Clavicular’s New York Times and GQ profiles, the manosphere has finally broken containment

• My podcast this week was with Dr. Albert Thompson on how to think about race.

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

Locals should also mark their calendar for March 26th, when traditional church architect Duncan Stroik - he designed Hillsdale College’s chapel - will be giving a lecture on sacred architecture at Indiana Landmarks.

Sex Positive Conservatism

The Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Evie magazine (gift link), an online women’s journal known as the “conservative Cosmopolitan.”

Founded in 2019 and named for a modern take on the Bible’s original woman, Evie has struck a cultural nerve, animating young conservatives eager to make the movement feel fashionable and drawing detractors who believe its anti-feminist messaging is regressive. (Brittany Hugoboom, the face of the brand, holds that the magazine is “feminine, not feminist.”) After Donald Trump’s re-election, conservative values have been expressed more openly in liberal-leaning cities like New York. For this cohort, dressing well, hosting social events and embracing criticism has become a way to seize ground in a shifting media landscape.

“Evie started for women who didn’t feel represented by the mainstream media, for women who love beauty, romance, aspiration,” said Hugoboom, 34. “I didn’t have another outlet to get it from at the time.”

Shortly after this article, the magazine posted an announcement of a new themed issue called “the Sex issue,” one that features highly sexualized photos and other sexually explicit material.

On Sunday night at evie's EROS party, we unveiled the cover of our next print edition in front of the press and hundreds of guests. It's the first of many themed issues, and it's the most ambitious thing we've ever produced. For years, a recurring plea has shown up in our DMs, emails, and survey responses. Young married women asking us for real, honest, detailed guidance about sex….

Many young women, especially from traditional or religious families, have come into womanhood without learning anything about sex. They saved themselves for marriage and then realized the culture that told them to wait had absolutely nothing to say about what comes after the altar. They grew up with negative associations to intimacy, but were expected to become uninhibited the moment they said "I do." We believe sex is one of the most important foundations of a thriving marriage. You cannot call something sacred and then refuse to take it seriously. We talked to doctors, experts, and women who've been married for decades. This issue is specific on purpose, because vague advice is the same as no advice. There are beautiful hand-drawn illustrations for the explicit content and tasteful photography for the implicit content.

Some of you will read this and be surprised. In truth, this is the most Evie thing we've ever done. We've always said we want to celebrate femininity and help marriages thrive by giving women real advice that actually makes their lives better. Your sex life with your husband is arguably the most important part of your marriage. You asked for guidance, and we listened.

This spawned quite a bit of debate in conservative circles. Some said it was inappropriate. Others defended it as being a positive portray of sex within marriage only - one that rejected extramarital sex.

To me, there are a few ways to look at this. One is as another example of the old quip that, “Conservatism is just liberalism with a twenty year lag.”

Another is that it’s another example of the shifts in right wing politics in the Negative World. Traditionally, conservative politics would have rejected the idea of publishing sexually explicit content, regardless of whether or not it was aimed at married people. In country that’s culturally post-Christian, and with an increasingly post-Christian right, a more sexually expressive right wing politics emerging is not necessarily surprising.

Another option is that this is a manifestation of the increasing Catholic cultural domination of conservatism, particularly among the young and politically active. The main woman behind Evie magazine is apparently Catholic. While not all Catholics would approve the Evie issue by any means, I think it’s fair to say that such a thing would be much less acceptable in the evangelical world.

Whatever the case, this sort of thing is certainly a new development in the conservative landscape.

I can’t help but compare the reactions to this to those of a pinup calendar aimed at conservative dads. This spawned major blowback. It would be interesting to track those who rejected this calendar vs. those who rejected Evie. I checked one of the bigger names quoted in the anti-calendar article, and she did not say anything about the Evie issue that I could find.

Subscribe now

Cozy Girl Life

Freddie deBoer posted some interesting observations on the “cozy girl” lifestyle, and what it says about our society.

You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible - that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. Success, as it is marketed to young people, means being a pop star on the order of a Sabrina Carpenter, a director with the cultural cachet of a Greta Gerwig, or at minimum a micro-celebrity “creator” whose daily routines are packaged for the algorithm. A contented life requires building a brand, cultivating a following, being legible to the feed. Everything else - teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! - is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others - when broadcast online, naturally - isn’t one worth living.

…

For Gen Z, this has all combined with a frankly pathological embrace of high-risk, high-variance speculation into something I find very scary; it’s a generation that seems to view all ordinary jobs as sucker deals for “NPCs,” pushing them towards more and more risky efforts to make money and escape the life of drudgery they mostly haven’t lived but have been taught to disdain. “Gen Z” is the empty, meaningless signifier that we’ve chosen for them, but it would be more apt to call them Generation Roulette Wheel. They never stop looking for a get-rich-quick hustle. Cryptocurrency manias rise and fall with the chaos of a fever dream; meme stocks explode and crater in a matter of days; sports gambling apps turn every game into a financial instrument, every friendship into a wagering pool. When your ambient culture tells you that the only meaningful victories are stratospheric and rare, it makes a certain perverse sense to chase stratospheric and rare outcomes. If stability isn’t honored, what’s left other than volatility?

…

The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The Decline of Creationism

Speaking of Ryan Burge, he had a recent interesting post looking at views on creationism. There are some limits in the survey he’s analyzing. It only deals with the development of human beings, so the view he assigns as creationist says, “Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” This doesn’t talk about creation more broadly.

Also, what Burge calls “intelligent design” I believe would more accurately be labeled “theistic evolution,” or evolution directed by God. My impression is that the people who label themselves as believers in intelligent design to do not believe evolution can account for the development of life as we know it, even with divine guidance.

With those caveats, here’s the chart:

Remarkably few people of any religious stripe believe in creationism as defined here.

Click over to read Burge’s entire post.

Best of the Web

NYT: The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing (gift link) - The political class is worried about the historic drop. But the biggest change is among the youngest women, who are the least ready to have children.

About half of all 30 year old women in America are childless. With women aged 30 without children having only about a 50% of ever having kids, that means a quarter of today’s 30 year old women will never have children - if demographic trends stay the same.

I actually agree in part with some of this birth rate decline being good. It’s good that there’s been a big decline in unwed teen mothers having kids, for example, given the big negative associations between single parenthood and a variety of negative life outcomes.

Scott Greer: The Conservative Golden Age Of… 2007? - Yet another example of conservatism being liberalism with a 20 year lag.

Block, formerly known as Square, is laying off 40% of its workforce, citing AI. Most corporate announcements of layoffs citing AI are probably just trying to portray their firm as successful adopters of emerging technology. In reality, they were probably just downsizing. That’s probably in part the case here as well, given that like many tech firms, Block’s payroll mushroomed during Covid. But AI actually is probably playing some role here as it is already ready for primetime when it comes to software development type tasks. I’ll have more to say about that in a future essay.

Harper’s: The Plot to Save America - Inside the movement to reindustrialize—and rearm—the country

Ryan Burge: The People Streaming Church Aren’t Who You Think - Education, income, and the hidden class pattern in religious attendance

Mere Fidelity: The Great Evangelical Hand-Off That Never Happened - This podcast discusses the lack of successful generational succession in evangelical institutions. In my view one of the biggest factors is that Boomer leaders never wanted to surround themselves with or invest in younger people who could ever plausibly match or upstage the boss one day - or who had their own ideas about the world. This was actually the subject of our Member Zoom this month. To learn more about my Member program for my closest supporters, see my Support page.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from the Niskanen Center, Noah Smith, Joel Kotkin, I was also pleased to see that I got a mention in one of the presbytery reports at last years general assembly of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

New this week:

• Old Orderists vs. New Orderists - Legacy vs. outsider institutions, restoration vs. reinvention: The fault line running through today’s politics.

• It’s Almost a Sin for an Evangelical to Be an Elite (paid only) - From “Radical” to “Seashells”: How evangelical rhetoric downgrades “secular” vocations to second-class—or worse

• This week’s podcast is on the Boomer paradox with Jeff Giesea.

• Why Boomers Never Produced a Next Generation of Leaders - The recording of this month’s Member Zoom discussion. Also includes thoughts on why conservatives aren’t creating art and culture.

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

In City Journal, I have a short take on how Californication caught up with Colorado. Colorado was the Texas or Tennessee of its day, but has seen a remarkable reversal in its fortunes.

Migration from California has helped change Colorado from a libertarian-inflected reddish state into a solid-blue one. And now blue Colorado is starting to turn into California.

The state’s remarkable demographic reversal provides the clearest evidence of this transformation. Recent Census numbers show Colorado losing more than 12,000 residents to other states last year, while its total population growth is anemic. The metro area of Denver, once a city with buzz as hot as Austin or Nashville, is now growing more slowly than Midwestern cities like Indianapolis and Columbus. The state’s labor force has also started shrinking—something the Denver Post notes has “never happened outside a severe recession or economic shock like the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Not so long ago, Colorado was one of America’s booming destinations. During the 1990s, its population grew by over 30 percent, adding more than 1 million residents. Between just 1990 and 1997, Colorado attracted nearly 110,000 migrants from California, about six times the number from any other state. The state also grew in the 2000s and 2010s.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I also have a longer essay in American Affairs Journal on how we should think about transportation policy in an age of disruption. This one is a bit wonkier, but I call for, among other things, devolution of responsibility of most transportation funding from the federal to the state level, as well as increasing the discount rate used when assessing the benefits of proposed highway projects in light of the uncertainty introduced by the possibility of autonomous vehicles.

Waymo, the autonomous driving spin-off of Google, is fast at work turning driverless ride-hailing from a science fiction concept into a realistic transportation option for the public. In San Francisco, it has already captured as much as 27 percent of the rideshare market. In addition to the Bay Area, Waymo offers service in parts of the Los Angeles and Phoenix areas; its driverless cars can also be hailed through Uber in Austin and Atlanta. Amid this success and momentum, the firm is now looking to expand its operations throughout the United States, with Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando next on the list.

Not to be outdone, Tesla is now promising what it calls “full self-driving” to its customers, though its vehicles still require a driver to be ready to take control; it has begun offering driverless “Robotaxi” service in Austin and San Francisco, with more cities to come. The company is nearly at the production stage for its Cybercab, a car designed explicitly for robotaxi service.

While one segment of the U.S. auto industry is focused on going all in on driverless cars, another is looking at the threat of competition from Chinese EVs. Ford CEO Jim Farley has been driving electric vehicles from China, such as the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi is a Chinese conglomerate known especially for its mobile phones. He said of the SU7, “It’s fantastic. I don’t want to give it up.” He considers these low-cost, high-quality electric vehicles from China as the real challenge to Ford, and a genuinely existential one at that. He said, “We are in a global competition with China. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”

The popular YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee was also impressed with the Xiaomi SU7. After driving it for several weeks, he said, “This feels like a preview of what Apple might have done if they’d made an Apple car.” Brownlee touted its high-quality build and materials, software, quiet ride, and more. He summed it up by saying, “Are we cooked? Not yet, clearly. This car is not available here in the US. But you can see how we could be soon. . . . There’s basically no question in my mind that if a car like this was available in the US for $42,000, that it would crush.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

A Very Protestant Catholic Critique

While reading renowned sociologist Christian Smith’s lament about why he left Notre Dame, I couldn’t help but think that complaining that Notre Dame isn’t fully living up to its Catholic intellectual ideals is such a Protestant critique. Smith converted to Catholicism in 2010, and I think it’s a testament to him that he recognizes his essay may be a reflection of his Protestant enculturation.

Much of this is on me. I have ­never done well with institutions whose performances fall far short of their ­s­tated principles. It’s probably some residue of Protestant Reformation sensibilities in me. I also have difficulty not naming things frankly what they are. That’s my Philadelphia upbringing, no doubt. I own it. But at some point the personal costs became intolerable. [emphasis added]

It’s a generalization to be sure, but it seems like being Catholic has never come with the expectation that every person or institution fully embody all of Catholic thought, teaching and practice to the same extent that this is expected in Protestantism. We see this, for example, in surveys of Catholic laity, in which their views on a range of subjects align closer to mainline Protestantism than to the teachings of the Catholic church. The culture of Notre Dame probably is relatively close to what it means to be Catholic in actual practice.

The South and the SEC as Spectacle

Christopher Sandbatch is an interesting and provocative online writer, even though sometimes it can be difficult to understand exactly what he’s trying to say. He recently put up an interesting piece about the growth of SEC colleges as prestige destinations. It hits at some points related to topics I discuss here.

Elite schools of the Northeastern corridor have begun shedding their aspirant prestigees directly onto the Southern public colleges, and these institutions built to hold the region together (and, admittedly, to shield its inhabitants from the radiative effects of the Empire’s hegemonic culture) are being reimagined as destinations for people whose own regions have long served as the country’s default importers of credentialed youth.

…

The SEC school is increasingly constructed in national discourse as a cultural “elsewhere”: a place of spectacle, excess, ritualized sociability, and stylized gender performance; a place whose public meaning is carried less by laboratories and clinics than by tailgates, stadium light, and choreographed pageantry. It becomes legible as “The South” in quotation marks, a set of signs that can be consumed at a distance. One does not have to believe that the students themselves consciously think in these terms to see the structure. A region that is still treated as backward, parochial, or morally compromised is now (again) also alluring because it is imagined as unburdened by the neurotic disciplines of the Northeastern meritocracy. The difference is that the older contempt and the newer fascination share a common mechanism: both reduce an institutional world to an aesthetic object.

…

The tension between these frames, the SEC as aesthetic object on one hand and the SEC as functional institution [producing professional and technical graduates to staff the institutions of their states] on the other, produces many of the aggravations that now surround the “coolness” narrative. Observers who approach the South as a cultural novelty often speak as though these universities were newly invented as entertainment complexes; resorts that happen to have classrooms. Observers who approach prestige as a Northeastern monopoly often speak as though any influx of Northeastern students must be an error or a fad, because they cannot imagine legitimacy moving in that direction. Both positions miss what is actually taking place. The institutions are not becoming Northeastern; the Northeast is, in a limited but real sense, becoming institutionally dependent on the South for an increasingly large share of its own middle- and upper-middle-class reproduction.

In the previous regime, Northeastern schools produced prestige while SEC/land grant schools had a functional purpose to educate skilled technical graduates largely for their own states. He argues that what’s happened with the SEC is not just a transfer of the prestige function from the Northeast, but a hybridization of prestige + functionality as a response to a collapse in credibility of our elite.

To see this clearly is to return to the original purpose of the land-grant and flagship system, and to notice what has changed around it. The older American regime could tolerate regional specialization because it assumed the stability of the national core: prestige flowed from a small set of recognized centers, and the periphery sought recognition from them. But in a period when the centers increasingly appear as engines of moral and bureaucratic dysfunction, and when the costs of the credentialing path have become grotesque, the appeal of institutions grounded in visible competence and coherent social life grows. This does not mean that the SEC school is a new Harvard, nor does it mean that it produces the same kind of national elite. It means that the old prestige grammar no longer exhausts the ways Americans are now seeking legitimacy, security, and a workable adulthood. ….The SEC flagship, once an organ of regional self-maintenance, is becoming — by recruitment strategy and by the failures of other institutional ecologies — a site where legitimacy is redistributed. The observers who continue to read this through inherited prestige frameworks will keep mistaking it for spectacle. The more accurate reading is structural: an old apparatus of competence is being asked to absorb not only its own region, but a portion of the country that it once presumed it would never need to.

…

If the SEC flagship is becoming a site where legitimacy is redistributed, it is not because it offers a more pleasing youth culture. It is because the prestige regime that once monopolized legitimacy has grown detached from visible function. Its institutions still confer status, but the connection between certification and competence has become increasingly abstract. By contrast, the Southern flagship remains legible. It is still visibly tied to the reproduction of engineers, nurses, administrators, and the professional classes required to keep a society operational.

This distinction is difficult to state within the language of credentialism, because credentialism recognizes recognition, not function. Yet function is precisely what these institutions were built to preserve. Their authority was never meant to rest on symbolic superiority, but on their ability to reproduce competence for civic ends. [bold emphasis added]

Click over to read the whole thing.

I do believe at some level people are looking for credibility and competence today, and they haven’t been finding it in our prestige institutions.

Subscribe now

Best of the Web

The Atlantic has a great major profile of Rod Dreher (gift link) in its March issue.

Joel Kotkin has a new report out asking if there is a new religious revival.

Related in Comment: Not So Secular Sweden - One of the most irreligious countries on earth is getting religion. What’s going on?

In 2025, memberships saw their largest rise in decades. Between 2005 and 2010, five to six thousand people applied for membership in the Church of Sweden annually. In the early 2020s, that number surpassed ten thousand. In 2024, fourteen thousand new members joined—the highest figure in decades. And 2025 will top even that: By November, nearly eighteen thousand had already entered the church.

Kyle Smith/WSJ: No Boyz Aloud on BookTok (gift link) - The literary world has zero interest in publishing novels for heterosexual men

I mentioned the Brad Wilcox stat that if a woman doesn’t have a child by the time she reaches age 30, she has a roughly 50% chance of being permanently childless. Here’s a chart from IFS showing how those odds change with age.

The New Yorker: Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsayer Philosopher - Nick Land

Land’s writings from the nineties have a seductive danger, envisioning a sci-fi future of synthetic drugs, black-market brain implants, gene editing, and cyborgs. At that time, a world of true digital immersion was still decades away; like William Gibson, who wrote the eighties cyberpunk classic “Neuromancer” on a typewriter, Land, in his C.C.R.U. heyday, had a green-screen Amstrad computer, and was barely connected to the internet. But now a version of Land’s midnight future has arrived. While real-world infrastructure is left to rot, A.I. build-out floats the economy, accounting, as of 2025, for almost forty per cent of U.S. G.D.P. growth. And many of the fantasies that powered the online right during the mid-twenty-tens have become official policy under the second Trump Administration. The President hired the world’s wealthiest tech mogul to dismantle the government. The Department of Homeland Security posts deportation videos on TikTok that resemble the “fashwave” fan edits once spread on meme accounts inspired by Land and Yarvin. Out-of-control A.I. is not a fiction imagined by novelists but a reality financed by venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds. And you no longer have to go to the deepest crypts of the web to find Land: in October, on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show seen by millions, Carlson and the self-described amateur theologian Conrad Flynn discussed Land’s ideas about A.I. for close to half an hour. “We are building the demons from the Book of Revelation with A.I.,” Flynn explained, summarizing Land. “That’s Nick’s Land’s position?” Carlson asked. “It’s the position of a lot of these guys,” Flynn replied.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in the American Conservative and Breakpoint. And I was a guest on Razib Khan’s podcast.

New this week:

• How We Engineer the American Transition - The playbook from America’s post-Civil War great reinvention—techno-nationalist acceleration paired with human-social formation

• Evangelical Cultural Cringe - Building the quiet confidence cultural engagement evangelicals need to critique the mainstream and create real influence

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

At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around six million in 2012 and less than one million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol.

This wider use has caused a rise in addiction and other problems. Each year, nearly 2.8 million people in the United States suffer from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which causes severe vomiting and stomach pain. More people have also ended up in hospitals with marijuana-linked paranoia and chronic psychotic disorders. Bystanders have also been hurt, including by people driving under the influence of pot.

…

The unfortunate truth is that the loosening of marijuana policies — especially the decision to legalize pot without adequately regulating it — has led to worse outcomes than many Americans expected. It is time to acknowledge reality and change course.

This was the most widely discussed NYT editorial I can remember in quite a while. Click over to read the whole thing.

Chinese Peptide Scams

As a follow-up to Tom Owen’s essay on the scam economy, I wanted to highlight this Financial Times article that sheds light on the Chinese peptide market.

In nondescript office blocks across China, salespeople are pitching injectable drugs to overseas customers, fuelling a fast-growing black market in peptides — compounds that online influencers claim can improve everything from sleep and memory to skin elasticity.

The surge has been driven partly by the runaway success of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide [Ozempic/Wegovy] and tirzepatide [Mounjaro/Zepbound], which belong to a broader class of peptide-based therapies.

…

But many of the compounds circulating online are either banned for human use by regulators — including in the US — or remain prohibitively expensive through legitimate medical channels. That has pushed demand towards online sellers, many of them based in China.

Sensing an opportunity, hundreds of Chinese traders have established operations exporting low-cost peptides to western buyers, according to interviews with multiple sellers and an FT review of online marketplaces. What has emerged is a highly secretive, unregulated shadow economy.

…

Despite the proliferation of sellers, industry insiders said the underlying supply chain was far more concentrated. Most peptides are produced by about a dozen factories clustered in Shenzhen and Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. These facilities originally manufactured active pharmaceutical ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry before pivoting towards the grey market. Multiple layers of intermediaries now sit between factories and consumers.

“We never touch the product. We don’t know who makes it,” said one seller. That opacity is deliberate, even as traders circulate videos purporting to show vials on production lines, creating the impression that buyers are dealing directly with manufacturers.

Finding sellers online is easy. They advertise openly on cross-border ecommerce platforms such as Global Sources, as well as on Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp. Tracking their physical presence is far harder. The FT visited the registered addresses of eight suppliers and found that most used false locations, with no functioning phone numbers or email contacts.

Chinese authorities have been cracking down on domestic sales of unregulated GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, arresting scores of sellers. A review of court records shows at least 40 cases of people being charged with black-market peptide sales. Penalties can include fines of up to 10 times the revenue earned. As a result, peptides popular in the US are all but unavailable to Chinese consumers.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Two things are going on here.

In one case, people are buying peptides like BPC-157 that used to be widely available in the US, including in pill form marketed as an ordinary supplement, but have since been the subject of FDA crackdowns. BPC-157 works, as I can attest from personal experience, having used the oral form when it was still available. It healed up a nagging hip injury that had been lingering for many months. Frankly, I don’t blame people for trying to get access to these kinds of peptides that are no longer available through legitimate channels in the US.

But we also see, as Owens highlighted, pirated versions of patented drugs sold by major pharmaceutical companies. These are very widely available such that anyone who wants to buy these pirated versions can easily obtain them. It’s an example of how even multi-billion dollar companies with very valuable IP and the country’s best lawyers can’t effectively protect it even domestically under today’s globalization regime in the US.

Subscribe now

Reindustrializing America

With all the talk and debate about reindustrialization in America, it’s worth looking at companies that are successfully doing high tech manufacturing domestically. One such company is glass maker Corning, which makes fiber optic cables. The Wall Street Journal just had an interesting profile (gift link) of that business, that makes a number of key points.

Corning stock is hovering around its all-time high, boosted by a recently announced $6 billion deal with Meta to supply fiber-optic cable for the company’s rapidly growing array of AI data centers. Corning said it is in talks with others for more such deals. It’s also working on what could be its next big act—fiber that goes inside servers, instead of just connecting them to each other.

…

About half of Corning’s manufacturing remains in the U.S., a feat, given how many others have offshored high-tech manufacturing. In a North Carolina factory, it pulls glass strands as thin as a human hair, yet upward of 30 miles long. They’re so transparent, if you filled an ocean with them, you could see straight to the bottom.

…

What made Corning’s fiber reinvention possible is that the company outsources almost nothing, says Mazzali. It even designs the machines used to manufacture its optical fiber and cable.

Weeks says this is part of the “Corning Way.” That self-containment also applies to the workforce, says the CEO. When the company shifts direction, it reassigns engineers rather than laying them off, so they accumulate expertise over decades, across different projects. “The things our engineers do, you can’t learn them from a textbook,” says Weeks.

After the onset of the pandemic, Corning endured six consecutive quarters of shrinking revenue, its lengthiest drop since the 2001 telecom crash. Instead of laying off workers and shrinking factories, the company gave employees the option to take some of their compensation in stock.

“We were probably carrying 4,000 to 5,000 more employees than our revenue could support,” says Weeks. Corning currently employs about 56,000 people worldwide.

Now that demand for fiber is booming, the company needs all of those workers and capacity—and more.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Vertical integration, and generally doing things in house rather than relying on suppliers, has been a key feature of Elon Musk’s manufacturing ventures like Tesla and SpaceX. They can move faster because they don’t have a larger and fragmented supply chain.

Also, Corning was able to preserve its experienced labor force, something many other companies, which often cut workers loose the minute there’s a downturn, have been unable to do.

Thought I didn’t quote this part of the piece, Corning also stuck with the fiber manufacturing business even when it wasn’t financially attractive. Now they are reaping huge rewards for it.

All of these practices are difficult for companies in America to implement, because there is so much pressure from the financial markets to do otherwise.

In a related topic, the Financial Times also covered China’s genius plan to win the AI race. China’s focus is on identifying its top domestic talent to route through the best talent development programs at its best schools. This is not America’s strategy, which is heavily focused on foreign talent. In fact, we are so focused on it that, as the FT piece implies, that our universities are actually educating some of China’s top talent for the benefit of the Chinese economy.

Subscribe now

Best of the Web

Brad Wilcox: Get Married Young - One very interesting stat in this piece is that a woman who is childless at age 30 has about a 50% chance of being permanently childless.

The New Yorker: The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Mansion in Los Angeles - A sick article about how our surrogacy system actually functions. Some guy from China had a couple of dozen kids via surrogacy and allegedly abused and neglected them.

Scott Greer: The Right’s Culture Problem - It’s not the best sign for the Trump admin to shut down DC’s preeminent cultural institution

Stiven Peter: Prolegomena to a Future Protestant Elite - Peter is a New Yorker who attended the elite Stuyvesant High School before going on to the University of Chicago.

Christian Smith/First Things: Why I’m Done with Notre Dame - A renowned sociologist of religions packs is bags in frustration. This bit caught my eye:

Why can’t the fast-and-high-quality-but-­expensive option work [to become a globally preeminent research university]? In the current environment, no amount of money can generate enough believing Catholic scholars who are also top-shelf researchers and excellent teachers. It would take massive investments across many decades to produce anything like a pipeline of such scholars. What is available today? Scholars who can advance Notre Dame’s research agenda, yes, but many of them are neutral-to-hostile toward Catholicism.

Evangelicals like to envy Catholic intellectuals, but Smith says that there aren’t enough truly top notch Catholic scholars to fill even one top global research university.

Comment: The Dark Side of Servant Leadership

Next City: Three Years In, America’s First New Black-Led Bank in 20 Years Is Picking Up Steam - This piece has some very interesting observations about locally institutions.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned in the Telegraph (UK), and also in the Stand Firm podcast.

I was a guest this week on Jon Harris’ podcast discussing my evangelical elite article.

New this week:

• Evangelism Is Not Enough - Winsome apologetics can win souls, but it can’t run cities or drive successful outcomes in other high-stakes domains

• The Scam Economy - Guest author Tom Owens on why a populist-tort lawyer alliance is needed to start pushing back

• My podcast this week is with economist Chris Briem on America’s greatest Rust Belt collapse.

Cover image by Elsa Olofsson/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0

I was a guest this week on First Things magazine’s The Editor’s Desk podcast, discussing my essay on the lack of an evangelical elite with R. R. Reno.

First Things is also starting a new newsletter on the Protestant Mind. Be sure to check it out.

Ross Douthat wrote a piece for the New York Times (gift link) talking about vice that engaged with my own WSJ piece on the subject. It’s a great column. I was struck by this section.

And it’s here that the stronger forms of religiously minded post-liberalism make their case. Whether in their Catholic integralist or Protestant “Christian nationalist” forms, they argue that American liberalism was able to restrain vice only because of its religious inheritance, the secularizing aspects of the liberal order have destroyed that inheritance, and so only an explicitly Christian politics that repudiates liberalism can restore the moral order.

I’ve written elsewhere, at some length, about the problems with this vision. Among other things, it lacks a persuasive account of why integralism lost to liberalism in the first place, a compelling theory of how to get the diverse and divided American public to vote for a politics of faith and virtue and an adequate engagement with why post-liberal experiments in the 20th century defaulted so often to authoritarianisms that corrupted Christianity rather than restoring it.

But the alternative vision can also feel inadequate. If you think the liberal order needs some version of what we once enjoyed with American Protestantism, some kind of “softly institutionalized” moral and religious vision that prevents us from devolving into addiction and despair, but you don’t think that politics can do much more than gently create preconditions for that vision, then aren’t you still stuck inside the Yglesian framework, hand-waving vaguely at the social problems that are eating your order from within?

This is the problem. The old unofficial institutionalization of a generic Protestantism was a product of an America that no longer exists. It wasn’t created by the government in the first place, and can’t be recreated by political means. The fundamental social reality when it comes to vice is that Americans at present want it to be legal and socially approved of.

So what can we do? It’s not obvious but here are a few tracks.

• We can work to mitigate the worst negatives, such as by tightly controlling marijuana distribution and its public use, or making it more difficult for minors to access porn.

• People can begin incubating new, outside of the Overton Window cultural and moral movements. This is how social liberalization was achieved.

• Various subcultures and organizations, such as churches, can firmly reject vice as a condition of membership.

• The American leadership class can re-adopt a vision that they abandoned long ago of our people as our country’s greatest asset. Elevating our people, developing our human capital, is critical to America functioning well and to our economic competitiveness. To the extent we are working on this, we will be working on vice, even if only indirectly.

Subscribe now

David Brooks and Nihilism

David Brooks is leaving the New York Times to become full time at the Atlantic, where here’s long been a contributor, authoring a number of major pieces there.

His farewell column for the Times (gift link) hits one of his big themes, namely the loss of a shared moral order in America.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

He calls on “true humanism” as an “antidote to nihilism.” Though he doesn’t reference James Davison Hunter in the piece, he seems to be channeling some of the themes from that sociologist’s latest book Democracy and Solidarity.

Unfortunately, Brooks again falls prey to the same nihilism he decries. He views America in Manichean terms, seeing it as a venue for an epic struggle between Good and Evil:

Sometimes it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn, bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other.

He sees himself as on the side of Good of course. The not limited to them, the side of Evil is, of course, people who support Donald Trump. He writes:

Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. Selfishness, egoism and the lust for power drive human affairs. Altruism, generosity, honor, integrity and hospitality are mirages. Ideals are shams that the selfish use to mask their greed. Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places. In 2024, 77 million American voters looked at Trump and saw nothing morally disqualifying about the man.

I can certainly understand why people might denounce Donald Trump personally, or even various people in his inner circles. But demonizing 77 million people is exactly what Brooks himself says he is against.

One of Hunter’s points is that almost all of us have fallen prey to nihilism at some level. It’s not just a matter of left or right, extremes or center. The problem is much deeper than just one faction or another. I don’t think I’m immune from it myself, and have to constantly be on guard against seeing the world in these terms.

I think David Brooks has a potentially important role to play in our society as the moral conscience of our elite. He could make a good mainline pastor, and in fact I think it would be good if he went to seminary and got ordained in the PCUSA.

But he can only do that effectively if he’s able to open his heart to the big share of the country that falls into the populist-Trumpist camp. Not that he has to endorse them. But he has to recognize that they are his fellow-citizens and aren’t going anywhere. And that maybe they have some perspectives and legitimate grievances that deserve to be taken seriously, if not accepted wholesale.

As Brooks himself observed immediately after that passage above, “It’s tempting to say that Trump corrupted America. But the shredding of values from the top was preceded by a decades-long collapse of values from within.”

I’d encourage him to emulate his mentor Tim Keller here, who never talked about other people in this way. Even when recognizing there were very conservative evangelical groups he couldn’t partner with, Keller’s approach was to say that we should divide with grace and tears, not acrimony.

Having said that, Brooks fingering of the lack of a shared moral order - what I’ve referred to as our informal, softly institutionalized generic Protestantism, and later generic Judeo-Christianity - is absolutely correct. I also think we need to see something like a modern version of the capital-P Progressive Movement that Brooks cites approvingly. (That was, among other things, focused on elevating our people, as I discussed above).

He also rightly notes the dynamic, protean nature of America, and the need to restore American dynamism:

The most astute of those observers have always noted that beneath the crass, striving materialism of American life, there is a propulsive spiritual wind, driving Americans to move, innovate, self-improve, venture boldly into the future. This is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s energy infusing the musical “Hamilton”: “I’m just like my country. / I’m young, scrappy and hungry.” This is John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.” If America could once again restore its secure emotional, material and spiritual base, maybe we could recover a smidgen of our earlier audacity.

This is something I very much agree with. Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

Doomers in Love

The Point is arguably America’s best little magazine. The new issue has a great essay by Mana Afsari on the challenges and dysfunctions of dating for young people today.

I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”

…

I sympathize with the desire to distance oneself from the romantic and physical humiliations of hookup culture, which are variously—and sloppily—attributed to heterosexuality, to men as a whole, to women as a whole, to patriarchy or to the moral degeneracy of the age. The moment I learned that it wasn’t romantic suicide to reject the sexual bidding war that is the dating market, I opted out. I began to “date to marry,” not because I wanted to be married in my early twenties (I didn’t), but because I felt I had to draw a hard line against the pervasive heterosexual standard of situationships, where no one was at the wheel. Despite being raised an atheist, I, like many in my age group in recent years, took up some hard-line rules from Christian sexual ethics, which, compared to the high-strung dating discourse, seemed to offer a less baroque, if sometimes still too crude, filter for what I really wanted from love.

…

But there is a reason that these seemingly arbitrary standards hold such appeal. The new technologies, we’re told, give us more freedom and choice, and they do. Yet they also undermine the moral and practical heuristics we need to know how to make a good choice. In the absence of norms or models, however imperfect, we turn each relationship into an elaborate contract dispute. Without a clear path or end goal we inspect little red flags along the road as signals for whether to end things, searching for decisive forks in a missing trail. Amid the collapse of authority on sex and gender, and in this radical freedom, we are all forced to become existentialists in dating, in blue-bubbled messages, on our endless social media feeds and in strained conversations: What do you want? Where are we going? What are we?

Click over to read the whole thing.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

St. Louis’ PBS station hosted an interesting hour long conversation with a demographer talking about the birth dearth and its implications for the region. This is one of the best and accessible introductions to demographics I’ve seen. While it might be too wonky for some, this is a must-listen for local leaders in most American cities.

This discussion is a great complement to Ryan Burge’s recent piece about how long it will be before church denominations lose half their members.

Burge noted that the decline of the American church has been at such a slow bleed that dealing with it has been manageable. But soon there will be a steep decline as Baby Boomers pass on.

Ness Sándovol makes a similar case about cities. Demographic reality is going to be catching up with the St. Louis’ of this world sooner rather than later. He thinks the region only has about five years to change its trajectory.

While St. Louis is probably an advanced case, much of the country is going to be dealing with similar issues. Leaders have not really taken stock of the implications for their communities.

Best of the Web

WSJ: A Solution for Crowded Cemeteries: Turn Loved Ones Into Gardening Soil (gift link) - This an article talking about the trend of - I’m not joking - composting dead people’s bodies. It’s another example of how burial practices show a fundamentally post-Christian society. It notes that cremation is already used for 60% of deaths, and is projected to hit 82% by 2045. Traditionally, Christianity rejected cremation as a denial of the resurrection of the body. French writer Emmanuel Todd used the rise of cremation as one of his indicators of our arrival at a religious “zero state.”

WaPo: Christianity at the Super Bowl defies a trend (gift link)

Pirate Wires: Meet the Secret Society Where Young Tech Debates the Future of the West - The Hamilton Society, which interestingly appears to be a Catholic organization, or at least Catholic-centric.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention at First Things and American Reformer.

New this week:

• I have an essay on vice in the Wall Street Journal (gift link)

• American Transition - The old American order is gone. A new one hasn’t arrived. What the transition looks like—and why it still holds promise.

• The Plight of the Protestant Scholar - Guest writer John Ahern on why theological distinctives help the whole church and the whole academy

• This month’s podcast for Members only is my thoughts on the very non-controversial subject of Israel. My Member program is the community of my closest supporters. You can learn more on my Support page.

Cover image: A man smoking pot in Las Vegas by Vapor Vanity/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

He thinks many people are complacent about decline, thinking things will continue on with a slow bleed indefinitely. But highlighting Hemmingway’s line about going bankrupt two ways, gradually, then suddenly, he thinks in coming years there will be a very steep decline in many of these denoms.

He writes:

I cannot emphasize this point enough — we are in a lull right now. While most major denominations have been experiencing decline for a while, their ship has remained seaworthy. Yeah, some water will lap over the sides every once in a while, but there are still enough buckets and enough laborers to toss it back into the ocean.

That won’t be the case in a very short time horizon, and I don’t think many people realize just how quickly the buckets and the workers are going to disappear.

He’s got a number of great charts, but here’s one of the share of various denominations that are Baby Boomers:

One thing that surprised me about his data is that there often isn’t a huge gap between the mainline and evangelical denominations. Both the PCUSA (mainline) and PCA (evangelical) Presbyterian denoms are 47% Boomer.

He also provides the population pyramids of these denominations.

One of Burge’s conclusions that is sure to be talked about is that the future of the Southern Baptist Convention is not at bright as many might think.

This is why I’m much more optimistic about the future of the Church of Christ than I am about the Southern Baptists. Look how skinny the SBC distribution is at the bottom of the plot. When that huge bulge begins to age into their eighties, the membership of the Convention will begin to decline incredibly rapidly. There are just not nearly enough young people to offset those losses.

It’s a must read piece. Click over to read the whole thing.

Burge was recently a guest on Ross Douthat’s podcast (gift). It’s an interesting discussion so be sure to check it out.

Looksmaxxing

One of the Internet trends among younger men in recent years is called “looksmaxxing,” which is basically about, well, trying to maximize your looks. There are a number of varieties of this, including “softmaxxing”, which involves things like getting in shape, and “hardmaxxing”, which can involve drugs or surgeries.

A 20 year old looksmaxxing influencer who goes by the name Clavicular has exploded in the last year.

His hardmaxxing protocol is intense to say the least.

Starting testosterone at 14. Current steroid stack: anavar, test

Starting HGH at 16, and is still taking it after his last meal.

Starting Masterone at 17, unclear if still uses.

Weightlifting, but no cardio.

Bonesmashing.

Supplements: meldonium (neuroprotection), glutathion, NAC, melatonin (300-500mg megadose), hCG (250 units, twice per week, for fertility), pregabalin (anxiety), alprazilam, minoxidil, dutasteride, melanotan II (tanning, sexual function), retatrudide (appetite suppression), BPC-157 (cardioprotection, recovery), carotenoid blend (undertone, antioxidant), ketamine, isotretinoin (collagen production), noopept, alpha gbc, cerebralin, mexidol, semax (nasal), and adderall

It’s wild that teenage boys are now supplementing testosterone and growth hormone.

The X user Meta_trav noted that there’s a perverse logic to this, arguing that looksmaxxing is coming for us all.

Looksmaxxing is coming for us all. The game theory is clear. We've hit a nash equilibrium with male looks. The same competitive escalation women have navigated, the race that started with shaved armpits and arrived at botox, is now targeting men.

Instagram, TikTok, and dating apps are funneling everything into this reality.

…

In my city you can't be out of shape or unstylish. Zero results. That same escalation is coming for faces. Golden era bodybuilders created the fitness paradigm where being unfit makes you a loser. Looksmaxxers are doing the exact same thing for facial aesthetics.

If you haven't adapted to the fitness paradigm yet, you're getting steamrolled. The distribution keeps skewing toward fewer males capturing female desire. Late 30s? You might generationally dodge this. Under 35? The game is cooked.

Welcome to the global male-male contest.

Obviously there’s some “engagement farming” at work here, but the core point has some validity. In a difficult dating market that’s producing lots of “incels,” with partnering now mediated heavily by swipe apps in which looks are the dominant factor, being good looking is incredibly important to dating success for a lot of young people today.

Subscribe now

Giving Early

In response to Justin Powell’s article and podcast about parents giving money to their children as young adults, a reader emailed me to say:

When Covid hit, my parents let me move back in with them without any shame, gave me a car to use, and took care of me like a spoiled teenager (no cooking!) so that I had time to work two jobs (one remote, one in person). That one year of no rent and two jobs got me financially ready for marriage and one year after I moved out, I was married. For my wife, after college she spent a few years working abroad in a very expensive city in Asia, but as a Christian she was able to rent a spare room in a local Christian’s apartment for way below what all her colleagues paid for expat housing. When we met we each had a car and around 100k in the bank, which meant we could marry right away, have a kid right away, my wife could be a stay-at-home-mom, and we could even save for retirement. If we had each had to live on our own and rent studios after college like most people and if I didn’t have the family support needed for my second job, we would have been in a completely different position.

A young person fresh out of a good college can often get a high-paying job, but it will be in an expensive area with crazy rent. So if your family can cover that housing cost, or let you stay in their basement, or connect you with Christians who can house you, that will make a huge difference in accelerating the jump from single to married.

It’s worth noting that in some cities like New York, a significant number of young people are getting financial assistance to pay rent from their parents. Children who don’t get that are often put at a disadvantage.

Best of the Web

Sahil Bloom: 22 Pieces of Career Advice They Don’t Teach You in School - This is a pretty good list, though I might quibble with or nuance a few.

NYT: Her Gilded Marriage Imploded. Now, She’s Ready to Tell All. (gift link) - Another female divorce memoir. But in this one the husband is the one who wanted out of the marriage, and didn’t want any custodial time with his children. That was his response to her busting him having an affair. You can also read the original NYT essay she wrote that led to the memoir (gift link).

Mere Orthodoxy: Why and How to Give Up Your Smartphone - There’s plenty to be wary of when it comes to smart phones, especially for young people, but this piece is a good example of how evangelicals are becoming enamored of Catholic anti-technology thought. (The author teaches at a Catholic school and is presumably Catholic, while MereO is an evangelical journal).

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from American Reformer, and Mere Orthodoxy.

New this week:

• Ownership vs. Elite - The tradeoff evangelicals face: Prioritize owned institutions for cultural survival, or invest in elite pathways for broader societal impact?

• Jewish Sovereignty - In an age of institutional decay and transactional politics, could a Jewish sovereign wealth fund offer a path to autonomy and security?

• My podcast this week was with Justin Powell discussing his article on why parents should give money to their children now, not when they die.

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

The Lure of Rome

Emma Freire at World has an interesting article about why so many evangelicals in America’s power centers are converting to Catholicism.

Smith moved to Washington for a job in the conservative movement. That same month she was invited to a big party at the home of a Catholic friend. “It was really fun and sweet,” she said. But Smith noticed that, as a Protestant, she was in the minority. That was her first taste of the city’s vibrant Catholic social scene. Several years later, she enrolled in law school at the Catholic University of America. She continued attending Church of the Advent but also went to Mass. “I would just duck into daily Mass because I loved it,” she said.

When young Protestants move to Washington, it’s usually not long before they start meeting smart, influential conservatives who believe Rome is the one true church. Like many of her peers, Smith began to ask herself: Should I swim the Tiber?

Roman Catholics exiting their church are disproportionately driving declining rates of Christianity in America. And far more Catholics convert to Protestant denominations than vice versa. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at places like Washington and some influential university campuses. A small but vocal group of Protestants is converting to Catholicism—and in even smaller numbers to Eastern Orthodoxy. They tend to be ambitious, highly educated, and well connected. Catholics now provide much of the conservative movement’s intellectual horsepower—and they are picking up Protestant converts along the way.

…

Adam Nicholson, a member of Church of the Resurrection, listened attentively. He had answered the question “Should I convert to Rome?” in the negative several years before. Nicholson was raised Baptist and began attending an Anglican church in college. When he moved to Washington in the mid-2000s, he found himself immersed in a Catholic community.

“I dated several Catholic girls, was always going to Catholic parties, lived in a house with a bunch of Roman Catholic guys,” he said.

Nicholson eventually enrolled in the Catholic Church’s membership classes, called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but later dropped out. He realized the classes were for people who had definitely decided to convert, and he still had fundamental questions.

Nicholson met several times with a priest recommended by a friend who said he was good at providing answers. Before the meetings, Nicholson researched Catholic doctrine about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and came prepared with some challenging questions. He was unimpressed with the priest’s lack of answers. “He didn’t blow up in anger, but he basically acted like it was crazy that I could be raising any of those things,” Nicholson said.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

35 Theses on the WASPs

Tanner Greer, whom I just had on the podcast, is out with his list of 35 theses on the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class. I would say I’m broadly aligned with Greer’s takes, though might have some different emphases and some additions. Maybe I’ll engage with these in more depth at some point, but for now I can simple commend them to you as good reading.

7. The “fusion” of the new class was not only ideological, economic, and political, but biological. The marriage of the different wings of the Eastern Establishment was literally consummated on hundreds of Northeastern bridal beds.

8. The cultural, political, and economic sway of the Civil War generation had unusual longevity. The young officers, politicos, and financiers who gave their youth to Union victory would dominate the American scene through the first decade of the 20th-century. Their children and grandchildren would exert similar influence through the 1930s (and more limited but still significant influence several decades past that).

9. The origins of this class imprinted it with certain ideological priorities: above all else, an ironclad commitment to the integration and greatness of the American nation.

10. This class was also committed to technological acceleration. The Second Industrial Revolution was the primary source of the Eastern Establishment’s wealth. Their greatest accomplishment may have been the creation of the legal, financial, and administrative systems that made this revolution possible.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

James Wood: Beyond the Manosphere

NYT: Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men — and Hypercompetent Women (gift link) - Shouldn’t be surprising to anyone

Chris Arnade: Walking, Wittgenstein, and God

WSJ: The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture (gift link) - For most of the 20th century, pop culture was the glue that held the U.S. together. But what will it mean now that everything has splintered?

Ryan Burge: Money and Leadership in the Presbyterian Church in America - This is an interesting one in that it allows you to calculate how much congregational giving you should be taking in based on your church size.

WSJ: Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List for Company Recruiters - As white-collar hiring slows down and corporate DEI goals vanish, where you went to college matters again

New Content and Media Mentions

I got links this week from American Reformer, Titus Techera, Terry Mattingly, Mere Orthodoxy, the Washington Examiner and from Conor Friedersdorf.

Here’s a video of me giving a talk about my evangelical elite article at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Battle Ground, Washington.

New this week:

• Dying to Give - Why parents should financially bless their children now, not after the funeral - this is a very popular piece that’s getting a lot of readership and already has one major republication request

• My podcast this week is with Tanner Greer on his essay about the making of America’s techno-nationalist elite.

Cover image: Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC by eVanNicole/Wikiemedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

There’s an interesting article by Josh Konstantinos on what he calls “Sterile Polygamy.”

You may not have noticed, but we’ve invented a new mating system. It has the sexual inequality of polygamy with fertility closer to a celibate religious order. The harem without the children. The monastery without the prayers.

No one announced this revolution. There was no manifesto, no movement, no moment when the old order ended and the new one began. The Pill arrived. Women entered the workforce. Divorce was destigmatized. Dating apps were launched. Each change seemed incremental and was framed as expanding freedom, which it did. But the cumulative effect was far from positive. We still use the old words — marriage, dating, relationship — the way Russians kept calling their country the Soviet Union for months after it had ceased to exist.

…

If you’re older than 45, you likely live in a world where people still got married. The figures above may feel like dispatches from another planet. They’re not. They’re dispatches from the other half of your own country. Among women born in 1980, 71% of college graduates were married by 45. Among those without degrees, it was only 52%. Marriage has become a luxury good. And all groups are converging toward the same destination: below replacement fertility.

…

Births happen within durable, socially enforced pair-bonds, not serial relationships with zero exit costs. Marriage and all that it entails — shared finances, legal ties, social expectations — makes the enormous investment of raising children viable. Serial dating has no lock-in. Either party can exit at any time. Without that commitment structure, neither side has an incentive to make the sacrifices that children require. When you can get sex without marriage, and marriage without urgency, you delay.

Consider the following. Of the 0.86 child decline in American fertility since 1970, delayed marriage may account for 47%. Never marrying may account for 29%. And married couples having fewer children? Just 24%. The collapse isn’t about family size preferences. It’s about families not forming in the first place. This finding isn’t unique to the US. Across many developed nations, the same pattern holds.

In Japan, the total fertility rate fell from 2.1 to 1.2 — but marital fertility has remained stable at approximately 2.1. South Korea tells the same story: marriage age rose six years in three decades, the never-married rate at 40 jumped from near-zero to 18%, and TFR collapsed to 0.72 — the lowest ever recorded. Germany, with a TFR of less than 1.4, matches the pattern too. Married couples still have children. The problem is that fewer people are getting married, and those who do are marrying late.

…

Technology alone didn’t create this situation. It just removed the last constraint on a system that had been eroding for decades. Women’s economic independence removed the material need for marriage — a woman with a career doesn’t need a husband for survival. The collapse of institutional enforcement removed the cultural pressure. Church attendance fell, divorce was destigmatized, cohabitation became routine and premarital sex universal. Dating apps were the final blow: a technology that made the new equilibrium visible.

If you designed a system to maximize sexual access for high-status men while maintaining the pretense of monogamy, you couldn’t do better than the one we’ve built by accident.

Traditional polygamy at least maintained fertility. A chief with five wives sired twenty children. Solomon had 700 wives. The Ottoman sultans populated entire empires. Childbearing was the point.

We’ve invented something different: effective polygamy without children. High-status men cycle through partners, but nobody reproduces. Why? Because reproduction requires the lock-in that marriage provides. Serial dating offers men all the benefits of access with none of the costs of commitment. And women, waiting for commitment from men who have no incentive to provide it, delay childbearing until it’s too late.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Related: Why have birth rates cratered in majority Catholic countries?

Subscribe now

Why Millennials Love Prenups

The New Yorker has an interesting article on why Millennials love prenups.

Today’s younger generations tend to favor easy exits. Earlier this year, the Times reported that Gen Z is skittish about opening bar tabs. “If we want to move somewhere else, it’s a lot harder to close out and then leave,” one reveller said. If divorce is the ultimate settling up, then it’s fortunate for this cohort that planning to part has never been simpler. The past few years have seen the rise of new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an A.I. chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer. In 2024, Libby Leffler, Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook (now Meta), publicly launched an online prenup company called First. There, users could at one point take a quiz with multiple-choice questions, including “When you think of the future, it looks like . . . ?” One possible answer: “Shared goals, different playlists.”

Best of the Web

NYT: Can you optimize love? (gift link) - A group of tech executives, app developers and Silicon Valley philosophers is seeking to streamline the messy matters of the heart.

WaPo: Heritage paper on families calls for ‘marriage bootcamp,’ more babies (gift link)

WSJ: Surrogacy Is a Multibillion-Dollar Business—but Surrogates Can Be Left With Big Debts (gift link) - Booming fertility industry, a new target of private-equity and other investors, is largely unregulated, leaving the women giving birth with few financial or legal protections

New Articles

New this week:

• Overproduced Elites and the Luxury Welfare State (paid only) - How America’s professional-managerial class turned status anxiety into a political project—and why “normal” politics isn’t coming back. A guest post by Dr. Benjamin Mabry.

• What’s Wrong with the Multiverse - Infinite worlds promise total freedom. But what if they’re quietly teaching us that nothing matters? A guest post by Joseph Holmes.

• My podcast was with Lyman Stone on whether the United States will end up as the last man standing demographically.

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

Its author, the journalist Norah Vincent, has been anointed as something as a godmother to the manosphere. In her book “Self-Made Man” (2006), she recounted an 18-month social experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and infiltrated male-only spaces. As “Ned,” she dated, applied for jobs, did a stint in a monastery. She joined a bowling league and lurked at dank strip clubs. Vincent assumed her project would reveal that men moved through life with a kind of ease that women could scarcely imagine. She was brutally disabused. The men she met were lonely and unhappy. Their pain became her own. When she tried to date as a man, the cruelty of women left her shaken and humiliated.

…

All this came later. The project began as a lark. One evening, a drag-king friend dared Vincent to go out dressed as a man. She put on a flannel shirt, baseball cap, mustache and goatee. As they strolled the neighborhood, no one paid her any attention. As a woman, Vincent wrote, she was used to being stared at and scrutinized on those same streets, but this time the men looked away.

“It was astounding,” she wrote. “The difference, the respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposedly not staring.” The more she thought about this gesture, the more important it seemed. “There was something more than respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler, less direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect,” she wrote, “to leave each man to his tiny sphere of influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

One thing this illustrates is that women don’t understand men’s experience of the world, and of course vice versa. This is part of the men are from Mars, women are from Venus dynamic.

And The Point magazine had an interesting essay on the masculine mystique. It’s about “romantasy” films and kink, so be aware before reading it.

The Changing Nature of Work and Child-Rearing

Amil Niazi has has an interesting book excerpt in The Cut. She talks about the impact of the white collar work from home movement on children, who now spent a lot of time watching their parents work and focus on work.

The thing about working from home is that the kids see me work. They’ve become accustomed to Mom shushing them during a Zoom call or podcast recording or waving them off as I sit at my desk for hours at a time.

Like all parents do, I chastise myself sometimes for how it must hurt their feelings or make them feel less important, but then I remind myself how much of my time they have otherwise. Not that it’s ever enough. The appetite of a child for their mother is bottomless. They don’t often complain out loud, or not to me anyway, but that doesn’t change how I see myself.

It’s hard to balance the desire to keep existing creatively and existing for them, even when it’s beautiful and encompassing and full of love and reward.

…

Neither of my parents ever brought their work home in the way that both Matt and I are forced to do. They didn’t have email or cell phones or Slack; once they left work and came home, that was it, there was no carryover — the thought alone makes me feel wildly jealous. Their jobs were a kind of mystery, something we only ever encountered if there was an awkward work picnic. On the one hand, their distractions weren’t career-oriented; if or when they ignored us, it had nothing to do with work. On the other, my only interaction with the concept of work or ambition came through the TV and what Murphy Brown was up to. Everything about being an adult was a fantasy.

Now, some people did bring home boxes of files to work on in the pre-Internet era, but I think it’s fair to say that for most kids, their parents jobs were not something they witnesses on a regular basis. For some people that’s still true. But for many others - such as my son - it isn’t.

I do think it’s worth reflecting on, and paying attention to how this will affect those kids view of work and their parents.

Subscribe now

There Is No Gen-Z Religious Revival

Quantitative scholar of religion Ryan Burge has been pushing back against the idea that there’s been a big return to religion among young people. He wrote a piece for the Deseret News about this.

As the share of adults with no religious affiliation climbed from just 6% in 1991 to nearly 30% in 2020, it would certainly make headlines if that march toward secularism suddenly stopped — and even more so if the ones leading a return to church were teens and 20-somethings.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, many of his followers described him as a martyr for conservative Christianity and claimed that his death would spark millions to embrace his evangelical beliefs and lifestyle. That possibility received significant coverage from outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

However, as someone who looks at data on American religion nearly every day, I can say without equivocation that there’s no clear or compelling evidence that younger Americans are more religious than their parents or grandparents. In reality, many casual observers are overinterpreting some short-term shifts in survey data.

…

Could millennials and Gen Z find God in the years ahead? Possibly — but it would require a transformation unlike anything seen in modern times. Roughly 10 million millennials would have to reaffiliate with religion, followed by another 18 million Gen Zers. There’s no sign of that happening in any dataset.

To make this more concrete, consider a simple numerical exercise. About 25% of Americans report attending a house of worship on a typical weekend. If that rose by even three points — a small but noticeable increase — that would mean 10 to 12 million more people in church today than just six months ago.

That’s hard to imagine given that there are only about 350,000 houses of worship nationwide. Evenly distributed, those 12 million new attendees would add roughly 35 people to every congregation. And since the median church in America averages just 65 attendees, each one would have to grow by nearly 50% just to move the national number by three points.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Zero-Sum World, Zero-Sum Politics

John Burn-Murdoch has another great column in the Financial Times on the rise of zero-sum politics.

The deviation from a uniform story of populist rightwing insurgence may reassure some readers. However, upon closer inspection these apparently disparate shifts are all part of a coherent and perhaps even more troubling trend: the emergence and solidification of a politics that is anti-system, anti-growth and fundamentally premised on the idea that we live in a zero-sum world.

…

When economic growth is weak, upward mobility becomes limited, meaning gains really are more likely to come at another’s expense. This describes the past two decades almost perfectly. Per capita economic growth across the west has averaged less than 1 per cent a year since the financial crisis, down from more than double that in the previous three decades and triple before that. The conveyor belt of generation-on-generation economic progress has slowed to a crawl and everyone is looking accusingly at the person a few steps ahead or the one joining the line half way along.

…

And the importance of upward mobility to the formation of zero-sum beliefs solves another apparent puzzle: why socialist and New York mayor-elect Mamdani had particular success with high-earning young professionals. In the 1980s, almost three-quarters of thirtysomething New Yorkers earning the equivalent of $100,000 in today’s money owned their own home. Today that figure is less than half. New York’s six-figure socialists are not play-acting; by the most salient marker of socio-economic success we have (home ownership) they are empirically a downwardly mobile group, turning to radical anti-market measures out of desperation.

…

The housing crisis is just one of many reasons that it should come as no surprise to see young people holding the strongest zero-sum attitudes. Recent years have seen steadily increasing economic transfers from young to old as pensions in many countries have become more generous while taxes and other deductions from the young have mounted alongside climbing housing costs. Rent often passes directly from young adults to their parents’ generation.

Click over to read the whole thing (if you can get past the paywall).

A key to understand this is that many things today do have zero-sum characteristics. When Ivy League schools fail to expand enrollment slots, admission to Harvard is a zero-sum game. With not that many new apartments being built in New York, living there is a zero-sum game. Part of the idea of the “overproduction of elites” is that there are too many people chasing too few slots.

Subscribe now

Article Follow-Ups

I wanted to share a few reactions to recent pieces of mine. First, on my First Things evangelical elite essay, Albert Thompson posted an interesting insight.

Many evangelicals understand ownership, but they do not understand governance. Evangelical business success is concentrated in sectors like retail, restaurants, and distribution—niche fiefs, where the power of ownership is absolute. This is effective for building a company with a relatively predictable business model, but it is a poor preparation for the commanding heights of society. Institutional power in places like high finance, the Supreme Court, or elite universities requires a different social capital: the ability to marshal a consensus among the governed and to navigate complex, high-trust systems that you do not personally own. When evangelicals bring a fief mindset to politics or public institutions, they may win a few elections, but often fail to create durable institutions that flourish and survive in a messy and fallen world. Instead, they become lords of gated enclaves and public square paupers. [emphasis added]

This reminds me of a Law & Liberty essay I’ve referenced before that talks about the difference between “car dealers” and “New Dealers.” Evangelicals are car dealers (sometimes literally) whereas elites are New Dealers.

Now, I’ve spoken favorably of ownership before and the need for evangelicals to acquire more of it. So I’m not anti-ownership. But I’m also not a believer in one-size-fits-all model. The majority of evangelicals probably should continue focusing on things like ownership. But to reach elite levels, a small subset of people need to be comfortable operating in a different register as well.

The young evangelical man I’ve mentioned before who decided to go to Yale rather than Oklahoma wrote to share these thoughts:

From my perspective as someone who is considering trying to become one of those evangelical elites and in a very good place to do so here at Yale, I wanted to expand on a two issues that I think disincentivize people like me (young male evangelical from Oklahoma) from ending up where I am.

1. Lack of examples. Young people like me have absolutely zero framework to work off of for what it actually looks like to be an evangelical in an elite space. What would it mean to be on the Supreme Court as an evangelical? There’s no obvious path forward. As such, any evangelical that hopes to become an elite will be largely paving new paths, consciously entering into a space with little mentorship or precedent to follow behind.

Compare this with the type of people that were venerated in my church in Oklahoma. Men who did well for themselves, owned local contracting or HVAC businesses, and had time enough to disciple other men and care for their families. Just based on exposure, this is the type of men most young evangelicals will grow up to be. In this way, the evangelical deficit becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. This is doubly true for young women, who rarely have examples of women leading successful careers, much less elite ones.

The only person I knew who went to an Ivy transferred out after a semester due to mental health struggles. Not exactly an inspiring precedent for me to follow after. (Interestingly, the one person who did explicitly encourage me to try to attend an Ivy was my uncle, who is Catholic.)

2. Mistrust of institutions. Going to a good college like Yale is the surest way to make it into the elite. It’s also a really good deal for most people who aren’t extravagantly wealthy, contrary to popular belief.

These are facts many evangelicals would like to ignore. Most would rather write the Ivy League off as ‘too-woke’ and send their kid to State U rather than acknowledge that, even if there is bad, it often is outweighed by benefits unavailable at other institutions. (I also just don’t think that the wokeness is that big of a deal given my first semester experience here, but it’s likely too early to make a judgment.) Evangelicals are shooting themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of these opportunities. The vast majority of Supreme Court Justices went to an Ivy League undergrad, almost all went to an Ivy League law school. If we want evangelical Supreme Court Justices, parents are going to have to toughen up and send their kids to good schools.

(Another critique of Ivy Leagues is that they’re not good places to find a spouse, which…largely does seem to be the case, for better or for worse. But again, this is a self fulfilling cycle: I know a quite a few young Christians up here who wouldn’t complain if there were more eligible matches that enrolled.)

Charles Pick also left an interesting comment on my essay on the partisan coding of Christianity.

I strongly suspect that this phenomenon of Christianity becoming more about symbols than conformity to doctrine is comorbid with post-literacy. In the time before printing and the competitive pressures of Protestantism, Catholicism was a somewhat different religion on the ground than what it was in text. Printing as a coded, highly efficient medium, made it easier for the people to supervise what their leaders were doing and to compare that conduct to ideals ideals and doctrine. As the middle stops loses its capacity to decode print, it also loses its appetite for doctrine.

Pete Hegseth’s image, crafted first as an officer and then at Fox News, plays well to the semiliterate or illiterate Republican base in the same way that a similar version from another time would play well to recently converted Goths or Saxons. You could easily see him as a gregarious marcher lord on one of the many pagan frontiers, not too different from the people he’s charged with fighting. Politics also during that time was bound up with personal symbolism, personal visitation, and performance of ritual in public more than it was about the communication of complex ideas. The code is the symbol, the look, the tone, and what’s said. Only a rapidly shrinking minority can easily decode text.

Best of the Web

Scimitar Capital: Self-Reflections of a Striver - “A striver is a member of the educated professional class who organizes life around upward mobility in wealth and social status.”

WSJ: Love Is an Online Battlefield (gift link) - Red-pilled men and anti-Trump women have turned dating into a nightmare

NYT: With Rights and Resources Uncertain, They’re Seeking Sterilization (gift link) - More young, child-free women are pursuing the permanent form of contraception

WSJ: A Russian Billionaire Fights Global Infertility —With 100 of His Own Children (gift link) - Telegram founder Pavel Durov will cover IVF costs for women who want to use his donated sperm, and has promised his offspring a share of his fortune - Looks like we have a full blow billionaire fertility fetish these days.

Cremieux: Fertility Goes Up When Men Win - Successful fertility policy might need to raise male incomes specifically

William Galston/WSJ: America’s 25 Years of Decline (gift link) - Misgovernment has been the watchword for the first quarter of the 21st century

Emma Collins: Against Doom - A scathing review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. Kingsnorth has a lot of fans - even fanboys - but this review and the responses to it shows that there’s a contingent of Kingsnorth skeptics as well.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Ross Douthat in the New York Times, First Things, National Review, Real Clear Politics, Tim Challies, and American Reformer. I was also mentioned in this Paul Vanderklay video.

New this week:

• Evangelicals Need a Thicker Skin (paid only) - Taking offense to quickly at perceived slights hands control to your critics

• Beyond the Culture of Nihilism (guest post by John Seel) - America’s culture wars mask a deeper crisis: a shared nihilism defined by destruction and the will to power.

• My exclusive podcast for Members this month was about the problem of right-wing movements keeping out the kooks. (Learn more about my Member community).

• My regular podcast is a return visit from Daniel Hess on why the left went child-free.

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

What Not to Do

Shortly after Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered by their disturbed son in a domestic tragedy, President Trump posted this:

This is undignified to say the least. Never do something like this. This kind of boorish behavior is deeply alienating to normal people, and also a factor in why educated people have been shifting leftward. They are rightly repulsed by such low class behavior.

People might say you should never “punch right,” but there’s nothing right wing about this kind of behavior. We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard of behavior than this.

Contours of Antisemitism

The Manhattan Institute did an interesting survey of Republican views, looking at what they call “Current Republicans,” “Core Republicans” and “New Entrant Republicans.” There were some interesting findings on antisemitism in the Republican world:

Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated, and significantly more likely to be New Entrant Republicans. They are also more racially diverse. Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.

I’m reminded of Ross Douthat’s quip that if you don’t like the religious right, wait until you meet the post-religious right.

There was also wide variation by race in revisionist views of the Holocaust:

Holocaust denial or minimization: Nearly four in ten in the Current GOP (37%) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50). Among men over 50, 41% agree, compared with 18% of women over 50. Racial divides are particularly striking:

• 77% of Hispanic GOP voters

• 30% of white GOP voters

• 66% of black GOP voters

There are also some crazy-high percentages of beliefs in conspiracy theories:

• “One in three in the Current GOP (33%) believe that childhood vaccines cause autism.”

• “Four in ten in the Current GOP (41%) believe that the 9/11 attacks were likely orchestrated or permitted by U.S. government actors.”

• “A similarly sized chunk of the Current GOP (36%) believes that the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked by NASA.”

Obviously there are huge problems on the left as well, including a much larger and more institutionally accepted antisemitism, so let’s be sure to not give them a pass.

Subscribe now

Whither the Boomer?

The American Reformer symposium on Boomers had a couple of interesting pieces, including one from R. R. Reno on Boomers and their consequences. He writes:

These sorry phenomena were midwifed and encouraged under the leadership of Baby Boomers. This generation—my generation—has rightly earned the disdain of younger Americans. We hired the DEI commissars. It was under our leadership that higher education became a progressive madras. We were in charge when NAFTA was passed, and China was brought into the WTO. We ran the NGOs that funded Black Lives Matter. My generation launched failed wars in the Middle East. We were the top-level Goldman Sachs partners who profited handsomely from the China trade. We designed the 2008 bailouts. We wrote the screenplays that celebrated perversion. It was Baby Boomer elites who quietly conspired to suspend enforcement of immigration laws. In sum, we are the architects of today’s unhappy world.

Younger readers are likely to have a keen sense of the consequences of this mismanagement of our nation’s affairs. But they may not grasp the extraordinary degree to which power was concentrated in the hands of Baby Boomers, especially peak Boomers, the members of my generation who came into adulthood in the 1960s.

C. R. Wiley also offered some observations:

Boomers are not empty cisterns; if I’ve given that impression, I apologize. There are two things they have—one is tangible, but the other is something less concrete, but more valuable.

The first thing is the institutions Boomers have built. In some cases, they received them from their elders and then refashioned them as they pursued their own goals. But more often they founded new institutions and built them (in many instances) to impressive size. It took work and sacrifice and creativity—often on a grand scale—to accomplish these things. The institutions they’ve built are valuable, and we shouldn’t devalue them.

But even more valuable is the hard-won wisdom that comes from building those things. Much of that wisdom can carry over to what is called for today. The day-in and day-out savvy and dogged dedication that built those institutions is what the rising generation needs.

To repeat, both Reno and Wiley are Boomers themselves.

The American Mind also had an interesting recent piece on “Total Boomer Luxury Communism.” (It’s a play on the title of a leftist book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism).

Wang’s comparison understates how much more the American government redistributes wealth compared to China. America is three times as wealthy, per person, as China. So the U.S. spends at least six times as much per person on social programs as China—and most of that goes to seniors.

There’s six times as much wealth redistribution happening in America as in China. That’s the “communism,” but only for the “Boomers.” The “luxury” part comes in how the government distributes these benefits.

Perversely, retired millionaires have become the greatest recipients of government aid. Max Social Security benefits in the U.S. are 3-4 times what seniors can ever hope to achieve in other developed nations, such as Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. These are allocated by lifetime income, so the greatest Social Security benefits go to wealthy individuals, who need them the least

…

Today, most Americans have no idea how their tax dollars are spent. For example, 91% do not know that Social Security benefits can reach over $60,000 per person. They have no idea that a senior household can collect nearly $117,000 a year just from Social Security. And if you tell people that Medicare programs cover golf balls, greens fees, social clubs, ski trips, and horseback riding, they stare in disbelief.

Click over to read the whole thing.

On the flip side of the issue, Scott Alexander has a new piece called “Against Against Boomers.”

Zooming out, it seems sort of like Boomers have delivered the greatest period of peace and prosperity in history: global, American, take your pick. The window of Boomer dominance, c. 1980 - 2010, saw the fall of Communism, steadily rising incomes, steadily growing life expectancy, and no foreign wars bigger than Iraq (total American death toll: 4,500).

The Boomers could reasonably blame their Greatest Generation fathers for sending them to die in Vietnam. Those Greatest Generation fathers could reasonably blame their fathers for plunging the country into a Great Depression. In comparison, we’re mad about - what, exactly? Higher housing prices? Hardly seems World-War-level bad.

Best of the Web

NYT: How to Find a Date in a Country With Over 30 Million Extra Men (gift link)

Due to the one child policy and a preference among Chinese families for boys, there are 30 million more men than woman in China. This short film profiles some of the younger, lower status, “incel” men there who are unable to get a date.

The focus is on men working with a dating coach. His tips - e.g., “compliance tests” - are taken almost directly from the Western manosphere/pickup artist community. He has his students doing what’s called “cold approach” on the street, with no success. The dating coach apparently advised them to do this with what’s called a “direct” approach (“Can I add you on WeChat?”), which is bad advice for those situations. No wonder it doesn’t work - and probably creeps the women out to boot.

My advice in these situations would be to first practice striking up friendly conversations without any romantic intent. Banter with the cashier. Talk with the older man sitting on a bench. Etc. Learn out to engage socially with people of all types.

NYT: Fighting for Femininity, Not Feminism (gift link) - A group of young conservatives feel that the pressures they face as 20-something women have been made worse by the liberal feminism that defined their youth

Samuel Abrams and Joel Kotkin: Equal but Separate: How the Gender Divide Is Rewiring America

WSJ: The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate - Videogame executive Xu Bo, said to have more than 100 children, and other elites build mega-families, testing citizenship laws and drawing on nannies, IVF and legal firms set up to help them

NYT: They Answered an Ad for Surrogates, and Found Themselves in a Nightmare (gift link) - Eve was one of dozens of Thai women who traveled 4,000 miles — only to be trapped by the dark side of the global fertility industry. - Surrogacy is the real Handmaid’s Tale.

Megan McArdle: The Brother I Lost - What a deathbed confession and a long-disappeared sibling taught me about a woman’s right to choose.

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• The Problem with the Evangelical Elite - There is no evangelical elite. Why that matters and what to do about it.

• Comments on the Evangelical Elite Problem - The Best of Your Thoughts

• Confronting the Unspeakable Truth - Jacob Savage’s viral essay exposes how DEI has quietly shut doors on a generation of young white men—while too many refuse to say it out loud

• My podcast this week was with Bobby Fijan on why families are fleeing cities. He’s a real estate developer trying to do something about it.

Greer has a superb new essay in American Affairs that I cannot commend highly enough. It’s called “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite.” Nominally a review of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book on a technological republic, Greer provides instead a historical overview of the original techno-nationalist elite who built modern America.

These elites are, of course, the WASPs that I’ve written about, though he uses the common term “Eastern Establishment.” His essay covers some of the same territory as WASP scholar E. Digby Baltzell, economic historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and others. It’s long, but provides a history of America that will help you understand how we got to now - and the problems facing us if we want to get where we want to go Here are some excerpts:

The scene was prepared by the British, whose inventors harnessed steam power during the First Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the inventions that make modern life possible emerged between 1860 and 1930. These years saw the invention and diffusion of steam turbines, internal combustion engines, electric motors, alternators, transformers and rectifiers, incandescent light, electromagnetic waves, recorded sound, aluminum smelting, dephosphorized steel and steel alloys, reinforced concrete, nitroglycerin, synthesized ammonia, radio transmission, plastics, and gas turbines. The architecture of our industrial civilization was assembled within one lifespan.

Americans did this assembling. The science that underpinned these technologies was international, but these technologies were refined, commercialized, and scaled in the United States. The Second Industrial Revolution unfolded as American industrialists built the corporate and financial machinery needed for industrial-scale production. Out of this crucible came not only new machines but new forms of management, bureaucracy, and social organization that, over the course of a century, would be imitated, adapted, and imposed across nearly every society on Earth. The United States was the birthplace of the technological republic.

….

The goal of The Technological Republic is to inspire American technologists to become American techno-nationalists. Regrettably, Karp and Zamiska offer no roadmap for accomplishing this. The two men invoke the technologists of genera­tions past as archetypes the modern engineering elite might aspire to, but they do not investigate the religious, social, political, or economic milieu that created these technologists. This is unfortunate: Karp and Zamiska’s sermonizing is not sufficient to make patriots out of a generation of engineers who have never been trained to think of themselves as stewards of a state. Elevating Silicon Valley’s engineering elite into a governing class would require much more: institutions, alliances, and traditions that root the wealth and expertise of our technologists in service to the nation.

The United States has had such a class in the past. They were the architects of the Second Industrial Revolution: engineers, industrialists, and entrepreneurs who believed that a technological revolution was needed to propel America toward greatness. They were, in this sense, America’s first governing class of techno-nationalists. In the mid-twentieth century, Americans would label their descendants the “Eastern Establishment.” This class did not materialize out of thin air. Examining their origins, and the reasons for their seventy-year dominance of American business and government, provides a useful corrective to Karp and Zamiska’s fragmented thinking and hazy wishcasting.

The techno-nationalist sees technology and nationhood as two intertwined goods. As technology advances, so does national power. Only a powerful state can unite a populous nation around a common identity and protect it from both external enemies and centrifugal forces. Such a nation then functions as a vast open market that allows emerging industries to benefit fully from economies of scale. These industries create wealth; wealth invested expands industrial capacity; booming industrial development stimulates the invention and adoption of new technologies, beginning the cycle anew.

…

The Hamiltonian program for “one great American system” of growing integration, advancing industry, and rising power was not realized in Hamilton’s lifetime. While the U.S. Constitution laid the groundwork for a technological republic, it was not enough to bring one into being. What the new republic required was a national elite resolutely committed to their nation’s technological ascent. But it would take decades before a class with such techno-nationalist inclinations came to helm the American state and economy.

…

The wealthiest elite groups of the antebellum era thus resembled Karp’s picture of the contemporary tech elite: they were suspicious of executive power, distrustful of American nationalism, insulated from the American public, and focused their investments in whatever field promised the highest returns, regardless of the political consequences for doing so. Many were localists; some were Atlanticists. Almost none were nationalists. Their favored politicians, men like Franklin Pierce, William Marcy, Howell Cobb, and James Henry Hammond, dismantled America’s system of centralized finance, slashed its tariffs, vetoed internal improvements, shoved industrial policy down to the states, and maligned the rising class of industrialists.

America’s most powerful regional elites simply had no material stake in a technological republic, and they lacked the nation-spanning institutions or social networks needed to lead one. The handful of antebellum statesmen who, with Daniel Webster, urged Americans to become “one people, one in interest, one in character, and one in political feeling,” were rewarded with a lifetime of political disappointments. All of this would change with the Civil War.

The conflict elevated two social groups that had hitherto played second fiddle on the American stage: the disparate Northern regional elites, newly united beneath the Republican banner, and the rising class of industrialists and their financiers. The first seized the commanding heights of the Union’s politics; the second built the commanding heights of its economy. War bound them together in a common techno-nationalist project. The personal ties, institutions, and ideology that saved the Union would continue long after the guns went silent at Appomattox.

…

The Republicans of the 36th Congress moved quickly to exploit the absence of Southern obstruction. They advanced a legislative program which has since been called “the blueprint for modern America.” The package included vast land grants to transcontinental railroads, high tariffs to stimulate domestic manufacturing, and a host of measures designed to spur national development. As the Civil War stretched on, demand for iron, rail lines, machine tools, telegraph wires, steam engines, and armaments surged. The combination of new protective tariffs and the threat of Confederate commerce raiding ensured that domestic producers met this demand. For enterprising industrialists, this was an extraordinary opportunity to amass wealth on a scale that antebellum America had never offered.

War also birthed a new kind of American financier. At the outset of hostilities, Washington lacked both the taxation machinery to fund its armies and the appetite to inflate away the nation’s currency. Instead, it turned to a rising class of bankers who marketed bonds in Philadelphia, Boston, and, above all, New York. These financiers, in turn, closely advised the federal government on how to design a national banking system capable of supplying the Union with a universal currency and a uniform system of credit. Young upstart J. P. Morgan began his ascent serving as one of these financial intermediaries. He was not alone in this. Out of the ten largest banks in New York City in 1870, five did not exist before the war.

…

The sheer volume of physical material that could now be produced, transported, and processed by these new technologies had no precedent in human history. Existing corporate forms could not manage the torrent. The railroads, which had to coordinate hundreds of trains moving across multiple states and time zones on a finite number of lines, were the first to confront the problem head-on. Their solution was to invent the modern corporation: vast, vertically integrated bureaucracies with multi-level, managerial hierarchies. These structures shifted deci­sion-making power away from the decentralized marketplace and into the hands of salaried technicians and middle managers, creating a template that would define American business—and American power—for the next century.

…

The politicians of the new establishment did their part to create a macroeconomic environment equally conducive to techno-nationalist development. Their chosen political vehicle was, naturally, the victorious party of Lincoln. The GOP regularly endorsed a Hamiltonian vision of America’s future. Because, as James Garfield put it, “the civil society of our country is honeycombed through with disintegrating forces,” the United States was in desperate need of a strong centripetal force, which is exactly how most Republicans saw industry. Benjamin Harrison articulated a common belief when he argued that the new industrial economy was “working mightily . . . to efface all lingering estrangements between our people.”

…

The Republican Party of this era was a political alliance between the Protestant clergy and the petit bourgeois of small-town New England and New York; the prosperous farmers of the Midwest, many of whom were Union veterans; and the new Eastern Establishment. The policy suite enacted by the GOP benefited each of these groups. Protective tariffs not only favored the large industrialists, but also smaller manufacturers across the North. Industries like wool were given special carve-outs in order to keep their producers in the Republican column. Tariff revenues, in turn, were used to fund generous pensions to Union veterans. These commitments often extended beyond government policy into acts of private patronage, such as when, during a federal budget shortfall, J. P. Morgan personally lent $2.5 million to the Army payroll to ensure that the payment of veteran pensions would continue, or when George Westinghouse underwrote the national gathering of five thousand chapter leaders of the Grand Army of the Republic in his hometown.

The magnates of the Gilded Age grasped a lesson their twenty-first-century successors have largely forgotten. Technological development is only possible when a governing coalition commits to it; potential coalition members must be courted and convinced.

The Eastern Establishment understood its project in generational terms. They knew that the integration of the American nation and the growth of American power would not be accomplished in their lifetime. They wanted their children to inherit their select position in American society—and to be worthy of that inheritance.

…

This historical review offers uncomfortable lessons for those who dream, as Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska do, of a twenty-first century techno-nationalist elite. The Technological Republic’s call for a “union of the state and the software industry” is, at bottom, a call for a new governing class. Any governing class requires three things: a political coalition to which it owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence; an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests; and finally, a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large. Absent the first two, a leadership class lacks the power to lead; absent the latter two, it lacks the ability to act as a class. The Eastern Establishment’s seventy-year dominance rested on its possession of all three.

Click over to read the whole thing.

You can read own telling of part of this history in my American Affairs essay on rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s sociology of elites.

Greer was also a guest on my podcast earlier this year:

Subscribe now

Why Elite Colleges Matter

There are people who like to claim that where you go to college doesn’t matter, or even pooh-pooh the idea of college at all. There’s research that people who attend non-elite colleges make as much money as those who go to elite ones, controlling for other factors.

But elite colleges and institutions offer network building opportunities you can’t get anywhere else. The Financial Times had a brief profile of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.

The article tells:

At 38, Driscoll became the youngest US army secretary ever. Born into a military family, he grew up in western North Carolina and retains a slight drawl. His father served in Vietnam and his grandfather was an army decoder during the second world war. Deployed to Iraq in 2009, he left the army as a first lieutenant. He then enrolled in Yale Law School, where he met Vance.

As Driscoll tells it, Vance, then the head of the Yale Veterans Association, took the small group out for pizza and told them that they would feel like they didn’t belong, but that they could push through and settle into life at the elite university. These days, the two “text each other routinely, just like two buddies would”, says the former defence official.

How did he get such a high position so young? He met JD Vance at Yale Law School.

Driscoll is surely very smart, talented, and ambitious. He could have probably done well anywhere. But opportunities to meet future Vice Presidents and people of that stature are just thicker on the ground at schools like Yale

Property Tax Followup

A young, Millennial religious conservative sent me an email in response to my NYT op-ed on why property tax abolition is a bad idea. He says:

Thank you for your piece on property taxes. I am in a similar boat to your reader from South Carolina. The anti-property tax movement may drive me permanently anti-Republican. It is especially salient for me here in Oklahoma, where three hard-right legislators have begun an initiative petition to abolish property taxes on homestead properties here. There is just a complete disconnect between civic responsibility and privileges like property ownership; between public goods and the taxes that fund them. Oklahoma already has low property taxes (roughly 1.15% of market value, capped by the Constitution) and strong safeguards against rising property values (no more than 3% of property value per year for homesteads). Further, property taxes are limited to only supporting county government entities, primarily schools and libraries. I am pulling my hair out.

If you missed my piece, click over to check it out (gift link).

Subscribe now

The Middle Class Squeeze in Vegas

As you know, I’m no fan of gambling. But this piece on the funk in which Las Vegas finds itself is interesting. Apparently the Vegas casino industry is also trying to shed middle class customers in favor of the more affluent gambler. You won’t be surprised to hear that private equity is playing a role.

It might seem wise to make room for smaller bankrolls in the city—the soul of Las Vegas is contingent on budget travelers—but those appeals are invariably ignored. Like so many other pleasures of modern life, Las Vegas is increasingly becoming a city financed by private equity. Harrah’s Entertainment, the gambling company that owned the casino where I met the Mehaffeys, was sold to a pair of equity sponsors in 2008 for $27.8 billion. One of those firms was Apollo Global Management, a New York–based real-estate holdings group that in 2022 made a play for the iconic Venetian hotel. That pattern has continued across the Strip. Blackstone, the commercial real-estate giant, entered sale-leaseback agreements for the Bellagio in 2019 and picked up the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay in the years afterward. Blackstone would later sell some of those investments to Vici Properties, a real-estate investment fund founded in 2017, which owns a total of 54 casinos. The mom-and-pops have been bought off, the copper wiring is stripped, and as so often is the case with Wall Street, that tends to be the plan all along.

“The casinos on the Strip are no longer being driven by personalities at leadership. They’re being driven by corporate politics. So they have a different attitude about how you treat your consumers,” said Andrew Woods, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Why wouldn’t the resort industry find a way to maximize shareholder value by nickel-and-diming their consumers? Especially when, until very recently, those consumers haven’t pushed back.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Scott Yenor: Porn Is Poisoning Our Culture

NYT: How Manosphere Star Andrew Tate, Accused of Rape and Trafficking, Was Freed (gift link)

John Burn-Murdoch/Financial Times: The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - Locked out of home ownership, young adults are turning to risky financial behaviour

NYT: The Conservative Overhaul of the University of Texas Is Underway (gift link) - The school has been brought to heel by conservative critics of higher education. It is part of a broader transformation at the state’s universities.

Stephen Eide: Bureaucratizing Faith - On the growth of the faith-based NGO complex

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in the Politico playbook.

New this week:

• Scott Galloway Is the Safest Edgelord in America - The manosphere’s sharpest advice wrapped in center-left bubble wrap—and it’s making him richer than almost anyone else in the space.

Some readers tell me that Galloway does talk often about how he would never get into UCLA today. I’d be interested to know if he specifically talks about the discriminatory implications of DEI for men, and especially white men. That’s the real, politically incorrect issue. It’s become very difficult for white boys with exceptional records to get into the University of California, while other people who need remedial math are admitted to these prestigious campuses instead. I’m also told he has a more business oriented book called The Algebra of Wealth.

Galloway puts out so much content it’s impossible to keep up with, so I had to go from just what was in Notes on Being a Man.

NYT Follow-Up

A reader emailed me in response to my Times piece with this anecdote about property taxes and Republican suburbanites:

I’ve meant to Reply on some other topics, but this one really struck me because my hometown, Hanahan, SC (a growing bedroom community that is a “red dot” in a sea of blue around cosmopolitan Charleston, SC) voted overwhelmingly in 2020 in favor of a multimillion dollar bond referendum to fund expansions and improvements to our parks and rec. The centerpiece, The Hawks Nest, is a gorgeous multi-acre complex where my kids play rec sports, my family picnics, and my local F3 group holds free workouts.

And while I don’t think an anti-property tax push would drive me from the GOP at this point (the current Left is just too far gone for me to responsibly consider it), with a wife and three kids I’m well-past my college Libertarian phase too. It’s not that I need any less money of course, but as long as it’s transparently earmarked and spent for causes that directly benefit my community - good schools my kids attend, green spaces we can relax and play in, well-equipped and staffed police/fire/etc. to keep us safe - I’m willing to pay a premium, including in property taxes.

And in my recent piece here on inequality, one commenter share this story:

I came across two old ticket stubs while going through things at the house. The first stub was from the 2006 Ohio State-Michigan game, 19 years ago today. That was a 1 vs. 2 game. Face value was $59 in section 26A. In 2024, that same ticket was $347.

The second stub was a 1997 ticket for the Cleveland Indians-New York Yankees game in Cleveland. I went with my grandma to that game and sat in the upper deck in right field. The face value of that ticket of the two prior American League champions: $6. That section is now a party plaza for large groups.

You want to see price inflation, old ticket stubs will show it.

French Center-Right Local Leaders Are Pro-Investment

Bloomberg CityLab had an interesting article talking about how center-right controlled local governments are big promoters of investments in public goods, services, and amenities.

The author, David Zipper, is a good guy but is definitely a lefty. He unfortunately frames the piece as about cars, but it’s actually about, as I said, public investment in quality of place. Try to look beyond the polemical gloss.

The Riviera, or Côte d’Azur, is tucked into the southeastern corner of France, running along the Mediterranean Sea to the Italian border. The area has long been a magnet for visitors: Over 5 million people visited Nice alone in 2024, more than five times the population of the entire region.

In 2024 Politico dubbed the Riviera “France’s Florida,” noting the conservative politics of its many affluent retirees as well as the legacy of resettled pieds-noir (“black feet”) who fled Algeria after that country’s independence in 1962. The Riviera’s electorate landed eight points to the right of the national vote in the 2022 presidential election. (Paris was 27 points to the left.) Conservatives dominate senior positions, leading the regional department as well as major cities including Nice, Cannes and Antibes.

Despite the region’s political complexion, local leaders in the Riviera have happily limited urban driving while encouraging people to bike, walk and ride transit. Nice opened a tram network in 2007 and booted cars from Avenue Jean Médecin, a major shopping thoroughfare. Visiting the city, I strolled along the Promenade du Paillon, a ring of parks featuring fountains, gardens, and a playground in the shape of an octopus, which was constructed a dozen years ago atop the site of an old bus station and parking facility.

A few miles to the west lies Cagnes-sur-Mer, another Riviera city led by a center-right mayor, which recently revamped its coastal promenade to establish a protected space for pedestrians and cyclists. In Cannes, center-right mayor David Lisnard has overseen an array of urbanist-friendly projects, including pedestrianizing Rue Hoche, a teeming shopping street, and revamping seaside Boulevard de la Croisette with new dedicated lanes for buses and bicycles.

In a 2018 interview, Lisnard said that economic development motivated his reforms, noting that “the quality of public spaces is [a] criterion for regional competitiveness and helps stimulate private investment.” Hermans, who has been a transportation planner for the city of Nice as well as the Riviera region, said such thinking was common among local leaders — and justified, since visitors could easily spend their money elsewhere. “If you want to attract tourists, you need an attractive city,” she said. “Nobody’s going to sit and have a coffee in a parking lot.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

Scamnation

The Atlantic has a great article on how students at elite universities are scamming the disability accommodation system (gift link)

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.

Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

This is another example of our society’s shift from a high trust, pro-civic culture to a low-trust, scam-oriented one.

As with money, bad practices drive out good here. Anyone who doesn’t take advantage of disability accommodations is putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. This produces a big incentive for everyone without a strong internal moral code to wrangle the same exceptions for themselves.

As with other things, we should expect this to percolate out from the elite to everyone else.

It’s another example of the implication of the collapse of the old Christian moral framework that I frequently discuss in my work. Note that this started to hockey stick up at about the dawn of the Negative World.

Share Your Feelings With the Group

The New York Times had an interesting story (gift link) about a group of women who’ve had a semi-structured friendship/therapy group for over 40 years.

The members of this impossible-to-get-into club have logged a combined 330 years of marriage. Among them, they count 15 children, 27 grandchildren (with one on the way), assorted professions and innumerable tears shed, hands held and assurances given that none of life’s difficulties will be faced alone.

In Long Island community centers and therapists’ offices, they have met on approximately 880 occasions and talked, in the strictest confidence, for some 80,000 minutes about pacifiers and timeouts; about feeling overwhelmed by careers and feeling undervalued without them. They have discussed empty nests, dying parents, tensions with adult siblings, marital conflicts, parenting grown children — oh, the worry never stops — retirement, aging, illness and even the death of one of their own.

This is “Group,” a generically named, remarkably devoted circle of friends.

Group is six women, all in their 70s and each married for a half-century. They have been gathering on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month (minus July and August) for 44 years. Over 90 minutes, they share with each other — and a paid facilitator — their worries, struggles and triumphs. It is not, clinically speaking, group therapy. But it is also not a social gathering.

“We are not swapping recipes,” said Miriam Caslow, 74. “This is hard work.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the structured nature of these meetings, but it works for them. This is the kind of community that is so lacking for many in today’s world.

It my experience it’s not uncommon for Boomers to have friends that they have connected regularly with for over a decade. For example, a couple that has a standing dinner night with another couple every Sunday night or something.

Younger generations don’t seem as likely to have things like this that are durable for the long term.

Best of the Web

Justin Lee, an editor at First Things magazine, has a new collection of Christian themed horror stories out called A Prisoner’s Cinema. I haven’t read it yet but I believe he’s trying to write something that is primarily good fiction, yet explores Christian themes (rather than being merely Christian fiction). Check it out.

American Institute for Boys and Men: Why society offers less sympathy when men fall behind - Frankly, I think some level of this is inevitable. It’s just one of the many “double standards” that arise from our human nature as two separate, asymmetric sexes.

NYT: The Case for Ending a Long, Mostly Good Marriage (gift link)- It’s every bit as insane as you’d expect from the title. They are technically still married, with her husband keeping her on his health insurance and providing here with financial support - while she is having sex with other men. He’s a literal cuck.

Pew: 12th grade girls are less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday

Christianity Today: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Evangelical Vatican’ - A very interesting article about Colorado Springs. You’ll notice that the hubs of evangelicalism tend to be peripheral cities, far from the citadels of culture: Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Lynchburg, Virginia Beach.

Jeff Giesea: Is Donald Trump the first Zoomer president?

New Content and Media Mentions

This week I received mentions from American Reformer, Charles Haywood, and Rod Dreher, in addition to the Fox News hit I listed above.

New this week:

• The Most Important Invitation I’ll Send This Year - My Christmas appeal for you to join my Member community.

• Me in the NYT: Abolishing Property Taxes is a Bad Idea - My new piece in the New York Times on the growing calls by some in the Republican party to abolish property taxes.

• Who Is Worse? Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes - Some observations from an anonymous guest contributor

• My podcast this week was with Tim and Lydia McGrew on how the gospels pass the historical test.

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

Scott Galloway is an NYU professor and bigtime podcaster I’ve mentioned before. His thoughts are heterodox and often stated boldly, but he’s also a Never Trump man of the center-left whose views are within the Overton Window.

He’s long talked about the problems facing you men today, and has a new book out on the topic called Notes on Being a Man. Jessica Winter at the New Yorker takes umbrage at this, critiquing not just Galloway but even the anodyne Richard Reeves.

In recent years, Galloway has also become a leading evangelist for a notion that rapidly solidified into conventional wisdom: America’s young men are in crisis. “Seldom in recent memory has there been a cohort that’s fallen farther, faster,” he writes in his new book, “Notes on Being a Man.” To make his case, Galloway pulls from a heavily circulated set of statistics. At colleges and universities nationwide, female students outnumber males by about three to two. Among young adults, men are more likely than women to live with their parents; by their mid-thirties, more than fifteen per cent of men still live with their folks, compared to less than nine per cent of women. Men die by suicide at about three and a half times the rate that women do. Men’s real wages are lower for the tenth and fiftieth percentiles of earners than they were in 1979. Currently, the unemployment rate among young men with bachelor’s degrees between the ages of twenty-three and thirty is close to double that of their female peers.

…

What some Democrats would prefer, it seems, is a centrist manosphere of their own. (One imagines a podcast studio attached to a well-appointed gym where a bunch of white guys are discussing “Abundance” over beta-alanine smoothies and doing pistol squats to the theme song from “Pod Save America.”) In “Notes on Being a Man,” Galloway—who has expressed bullishness on the Presidential prospects of both Newsom and Emanuel—declares that discontented members of Gen Z and the boys and teens of Gen Alpha need an “aspirational vision of masculinity,” a vision opposed to the misogynist messaging that’s epitomized by influencers such as Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. Part self-help memoir and part Dudes Rock polemic, the book presents a capital-letter credo: “Men Protect, Provide, and Procreate.” Masculinity can be expressed simply by “getting up at f**king six in the morning and going to work and doing sh**ty work such that you can protect your family economically,” Galloway once said. And the evolved man also insures that he does not slack off “domestically, emotionally, or logistically,” leaving his partner to ask, in Galloway’s signature demotic, “O.K., boss, what the f**k are you bringing to the table?”

…

The ambassadors of the centrist manosphere praise women’s advancement and the feminist cause while insisting that men’s economic and vocational anxieties are more naturally potent. This ambivalence reveals the weakness of their side. The right-wing manosphere knows that masculinity is a series of dominance signals beamed from behind iridescent Oakleys and the wheel of the most enormous pickup truck you’ve ever seen; it is a smirking multimillionaire who “DESTROYS” a young woman at a college-hosted debate; it is—must it be said?—an AR-15, openly carried. Manliness in the Trump era, Susan Faludi has written, “is defined by display value,” which exhibits itself in a “pantomime of aggrieved aggression.” Upon this stage, men’s biggest problem is feminism, and the solutions are straightforward: restrict reproductive rights, propagandize about traditional gender roles, etc.

The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all.

What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.

…

The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Women like Winters find it intolerable that men might care about their own problems instead of hers (and those of other women).

One big difference between the manosphere and feminist left is that the feminists have access to elite media platforms in which to express their resentments towards the opposite sex.

Subscribe now

The Problems of Capitalism

Peter Thiel is a libertarian leaning investor, but he’s been telling people for years not to discount the complaints of Millennial socialists. There are some famous emails to Mark Zuckerberg to this effect floating around out there.

Thiel was recently interviewed by the Free Press about this topic. It’s paywalled, but here are some excerpts.

If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time.

The rupture of the generational compact isn’t limited to student debt, either. I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics—like a libertarian or a Marxist would—and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate.

It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.

…

Younger generations are told that if they do the same things as the boomers did, things will work out well for them. But society has changed very drastically, and it doesn’t work in quite the same way. Housing is way more expensive. It’s much harder to get a house in a place like New York or Silicon Valley, or anywhere the economy is actually doing well and there are a lot of decent jobs. People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t.

Boomers are strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids. It’s always hard to know how much bad faith there is or how bad the actors are. I think it’s odd that people thought it was odd that I was complaining about student debt in 2010, when even then the growth in student debt was an exponential process. The national student debt was $300 billion in 2000, and it’s now more than $2 trillion. At some point, that breaks.

…

Free Press: A lot of people are drawing comparisons between President Donald Trump and Mamdani. Both led vibes-based campaigns, were joined by unlikely allies, and promoted policies centered on grievance. They are both hyper charismatic. What do these similarities say about what most resonates with voters in our digital age?

I stress the negative. It’s how fake the other people are. It’s just, the average—I’m not sure who to pick on—Jeb Bush or whatever, where everything is just precisely choreographed in this extremely fake way, and you can’t say anything charismatic. There is some kind of authenticity to Trump and Mamdani. I’m not sure that they’re perfectly coherent, nor perfectly authentic. But this is what the establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats really don’t like about Trump and Mamdani, is that they can’t even call them inauthentic, because both are somehow more authentic than what the parties have. If you’re someone like Paul Ryan and you think Trump is fake, what does it say about you? What does it say about your lack of charisma, your lack of ability to speak to people?

…

There are some dimensions in which the millennials are better off than the boomers. There’s some ways our society has changed for the better. But the gap between the expectations the boomer parents had for their kids and what those kids actually were able to do is just extraordinary. I don’t think there’s ever been a generation where the gap has been as extreme as for the millennials. [emphasis added]

Click over to read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

The Clergy-Laity Divide in Mainline Churches

Ryan Burge, an academic and until recently the pastor of a mainline church (American Baptist) put together and interesting post about how much more liberal mainline clergy are than their parishioners.

Here’s an incredible chart of the share of clergy vs. laity identifying as Republican.

He also breaks it down by gender.

There’s a lot of good material in there so read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Cremieux: Are All the Good Men Married? - Why do married men earn so much? Is it because the good men get married, or does marriage make men good?

Pew: 12th grade girls are less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday

The Atlantic: The End of Naked Locker Rooms (gift link)

NYT: Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts (gift link) - “In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” a priest said about the surge of young men drawn to the demanding practice of Christianity

WSJ: More Middle-Income Americans Are Trying to Make a New Life Overseas - Financial advisers say they have seen a surge in interest in residency abroad among clients looking to cut costs or change lifestyle

I’ve long said a key indicator to look for to show that there are real problems in America is if large numbers of native born citizens start expatriating. I’ve never seen anything to indicate this is happening. However, recently there have been articles like this talking about more Americans moving abroad. I would consider this a yellow light on the dashboard saying that we should monitor this measure closely in case it starts to become material.

Subscribe now

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned in this World magazine podcast and in a recent episode of Breaking Points.

New this week:

• The Rich, the Poor, and the Ultra-Rich - The haves, the have nots, and the have yachts

• Between Empathy and Agency - Conservatives need to validate young people’s struggles—and then challenge them to act anyway

• My podcast this week is with Williams College professor Darel Paul on how society forgot about fertility.

Holiday Long Form Content

Chapin Lenthall-Cleary: Men are more tolerant of the other side than women are of their own

Claire Smith: A History of Complementarianism - This is a good read. It essentially validates what I’ve contended about complementrianism, such as:

• It’s a product of a reaction against second wave feminism.

• It adopted some of the second wave feminist critique and thus is in some ways infused with second wave feminism. For example, they asserted that there was an “upsurge” of domestic violence but failed to mention something that was unquestionably upsurging, namely female initiated divorce without Biblical cause.

NYT: She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges (gift link) - MaryBeth Lewis’s desire to be a new mom again, at 65 years old, led to a custody battle like no other.

Celine Nguyen: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

Crimieux: The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians - Why are Japanese elites so likely to be Christian when Japan is a 99% non-Christian country?

It’s probably surprising to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Ministers of Japan before the newly-elected Sanae Takaichi have been Christian. Out of those 35 Prime Ministers since 1945, Shigeru Yoshida and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tetsu Katayama, Ichirō Hatoyama, Masayoshi Ōhira, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yukio Hatoyama were various flavors of Protestant. How this happens in a country that’s less than 1% Christian and in which there’s significant anti-Christian discrimination is perplexing, but I think it makes sense given how today’s Japanese Christians came to be.

Here are a couple of presentations from me at the Believe in Your City conference in Grand Rapids. This was some of the content that I turned into my essay on entrepreneurship and the spirit of adventure.

My presentation:

And here is my post-presentation discussion with John Tuttle, the president of Acrisure

I find Smith’s obsolensce framework very powerful. His analysis is also complementary to my three worlds framework. An excerpt from my review:

Smith offers a useful new lens: obsolescence. Religion is now obsolete—that is, “most people feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest.” This doesn’t mean that religion is hated or that no one is religious, merely that the world has moved on…As Smith writes, obsolescence doesn’t mean extinction. “Some people still can and do use obsolete items because they are familiar, less expensive, viewed with affection, or as a matter of principle.” Traditional television is becoming obsolete because people have moved to ­on-demand digital streaming and social media. Many people still watch TV, but as a medium it is in decline, with viewers skewing older. Print newspapers are even more obsolete. At age fifty-five, I still take the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times in print. But younger generations have moved on.

In the short term, nothing stops you from using an obsolete product or practice. But it is no longer relevant to most other people’s lives, and eventually, social ­changes will make sustaining obsolete practices difficult. Horse and buggy transportation is obsolete: The Amish continue to use it, but doing so requires them to maintain a lifestyle that is detached from mainstream American life. Print newspapers may be even less sustainable. When they are no longer produced, people like me won’t be able to buy them at all.

…

The most impressive thing about Smith’s book is how many social trends and events he adduces—both inside and outside the church—in support of his thesis. By my count, he discusses forty-one different historical developments, ranging from the increasing number of women in the workforce to the rise of televangelism to global neoliberal capitalism to postmodernism. Most of these developments will be familiar to readers already, but together the effect is overwhelming.

…

The implications of Smith’s book are challenging for conservative American Christians whose strategies for the future have ­t­ended to involve doubling down on the very elements—the “fossilized forms”—of traditional religion that are now obsolete: rootedness, stability, family-centeredness, thick community, institutions, and historic practices and distinctives. This is the paradigm of Rod Dreher’s ­Benedict Option and, to some extent, of my own work.

But if Smith is right, this strategy will probably only ghettoize the Church by making it even less relevant to mainstream society. It is the “build an ark” approach, which is designed to help the Church survive cultural change but which at some level involves giving up on or disengaging from society.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I highly recommend reading Smith’s book. You may also be interested in the podcast I did with him about it.

Subscribe now

Make America Procreate Again

The Economist magazine took notice of the conservative pro-natalist push. Their take was everything you’d expect and focused on the Natal Con conference.

The vice-president, J.D. Vance, is at the nexus of the tech-trad alliance. As a vocal convert to Roman Catholicism whose political career was supercharged by Thiel, his former boss, Vance has been thrilled to help make pro-natalism an explicitly MAGA issue. He has criticised prominent Democrats who don’t have biological children for being “childless cat ladies” (Taylor Swift then pointedly used the phrase in her endorsement of Kamala Harris last year); and he made a point of saying in his first public address as vice-president that “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Trump, in turn, has declared himself the “fertilisation president” and recently unveiled a plan to offer discounted fertility drugs through TrumpRx, the administration’s direct-to-consumer website, due to launch next year.

There was a sense among many at NatalCon that, with Trump and Vance in power, the moment to jump-start American baby-making had come at last. But those gathered outside the museum on the opening night of the conference had a different impression: that pro-natalism was part of a broader and more insidious project to create a whiter America. A group of protesters, their faces mostly covered, gathered in the museum’s courtyard. “Nazis off our campus!” they screamed through a megaphone as conference attendees streamed in. One sign read “Eugenicists” with the word “Natalists” crossed through.

Adkinson didn’t mind being heckled. “I’ve been called a Nazi at least 500 times in my life,” he told me with a shrug. He didn’t see what all the fuss over pro-natalism was about. “The message is simple: go have babies. And the left is going nuts!”

…

Many governments have tried to bribe people to have more babies. South Korea—which has a TFR of 0.72, the lowest on Earth—has spent $270bn over the past 20 years on pro-na talist policies: subsidising taxis for pregnant women, providing free IVF and, in some towns, giving new mothers free housing. This year it began granting couples a cash payment of close to 30m won ($20,000) over eight years for each child they have. Viktor Orban’s government spends 6% of Hungary’s GDP on pro-natalist policies—including a lifelong exemption from income tax for mothers of two children or more.

These policies have had little effect. South Korea’s low birth rate has barely budged; Hungary’s is 1.56, lower than its neighbours Romania and Bulgaria, which have spent far less on promoting births. “Look, having a child is more like joining the military than going out to dinner,” Catherine Pakaluk, a speaker at NatalCon, told me. “That’s why cash incentives don’t work.” Pakaluk is a professor of political economy at the Catholic University of America, where her research touches on the economics of family and demography. “Women now have all of these wonderful options. Which is to be celebrated. But that renders childbearing a choice.”

…

Lyman Stone, a demographer and the head of the Pro-Natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think-tank, knew the optics of the conference were unpromising. When we met up at NatalCon, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that made him stand out from the crowd. “We’re getting together and all talking to each other about babies, which is kind of a weird thing to do, especially for a group that’s like, I don’t know, 70%, 80% men,” he chuckled.

He understood why women would balk at hanging out with pro-natalists. “A lot of people associate worries about low fertility with the end of women’s rights”—with a regressive vision of the future, or even the dystopia created by Margaret Atwood in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, in which women are seen simply as baby-making machines. “That obviously turns a lot of women off to the whole conversation.”

…

I had wondered whether pro-natalism was more attractive to people in the tech industry, than to, say, other educated groups in America, because they are some of the few people who feel they can comfortably afford to have massive families. But it was clear that, even for a couple as affluent as the Collinses, some sacrifice was necessary to raise their brood. Rather than living in an urban tech hub, for instance, they had moved to rural Pennsylvania, where it was cheaper to buy a house large enough for a host of kids.

As Malcolm and I spoke, I noticed that the Collins children were wearing the same black polo shirt as their father. “Mostly we just have one outfit for the kids that can change with age,” he explained. I noted that that seemed like a pragmatic way to raise children. “We’re breeding at scale,” he responded matter-of-factly, “so we need to find ways to be frugal.”

…

Still, some issues between them are tricky to reconcile, including IVF. The technology accounts for only 2% of American births, because it is expensive and often not covered by insurance. But some religious conservatives oppose it, as the process produces excess embryos—“unborn children”, in their eyes—that are often destroyed. The Heritage Foundation supported last year’s decision by the Alabama Supreme Court which ruled that frozen embryos have the same rights as living children; the decree has created confusion over appropriate storage methods and the legal liabilities those seeking IVF treatment might face.

Many of the religious conservatives at NatalCon took a more pragmatic approach to IVF, however, acknowledging that it attracts broad public support. As Peachy Keenan, one of America’s most famous trad wives, said in her NatalCon speech, “My best friend used IVF to build her family. I have IVF nieces.” In spite of her “serious moral qualms about the byproducts of the process”, she did not think it was something to block: “Neither I nor J.D. Vance nor the pope is going to outlaw IVF. That toothpaste is out of the fallopian tube.” Kevin Dolan—the conference’s organiser and a Mormon father of six, with a seventh on the way—concurred. “Religious conservatives know they’re in the wilderness. They know they won’t get to decide if people use IVF or other fertility technologies,” he told me.

Click over to read the whole thing. I was able to access it by creating a free account.

Subscribe now

Against “Toxic Masculinity”

The internet personality Cartoons Hate Her has a new piece in GQ arguing that it’s time to retire the term “toxic masculinity.”

If you were alive in 2017—or better yet, like me, in your twenties and living in San Francisco—you probably heard a lot about “toxic masculinity.” I did, all the time, and it bugged me a little. Not because I felt personally attacked by the term (I am a woman, after all), but because nobody seemed entirely sure what the alternative was. How does one replace toxic masculinity without abandoning the concept of masculinity itself? To make matters worse, there was seemingly no way for men to escape the label. In a sort of nonsensical “if the witch drowns, she wasn’t actually a witch” train of logic, the only way to avoid the label was to “do the work” and own up to being toxic. The worst sin you could commit was to deny your toxic masculinity—which was apparently a symptom of toxic masculinity.

Most reasonable people agreed that it was bad to be boorish, arrogant, overly confrontational, and aggressive. Most people agreed it was bad to objectify or disrespect women. But if those things were toxic, what would a non-toxic masculinity look like? Assuming a man “did the work,” did his future involve endless groveling and the disavowal of his masculinity entirely, or was he able to remain masculine in some way that wasn’t a problem? And how would we square this with the long history of heterosexual women sexually desiring masculine men, whatever that meant? (I distinctly recall some women denying that women were attracted to masculine traits, but as one of the many studies I conducted for my Substack on relationships and culture later suggested, women desire dominance in men more than men desire submission in women!)

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Pirate Wires: It’s Never Been More Fashionable to Ditch Your Suboptimal Loved One - New data analysis of reddit’s relationship advice reveals the depravity of modern dating

Institute for Family Studies: High-Earning Women Are More Likely to Marry

Titus Techera: The age of the techno-lords (includes a mention of me).

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in First Things magazine as well, and also from Rod Dreher, and Rod Dreher again.

New this week:

• The Evaporation of the Sacred (by John Seel) - We traded worship for branding, mystery for metrics, and now the soul is colonized by code

• My podcast this week is with this newsletter’s resident film critic Joseph Holmes on his film Jim vs. the Future.

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