Republicans Are Doubling Down on Vice
GOP vice promotion, changing times, and more in this week's digest.
Brad Wilcox and James Lynch have a great essay in Compact about how the GOP learned to love vice:
Given their self-conception of sturdy American virtues such as thrift, hard work, and sobriety, you’d think the GOP would be at the forefront in opposing Big Weed and online gambling. But too many in the party of “family values” have become partisans for the vice economy.
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There is nothing conservative about a government that signs stablecoin bills while working-class men max out credit cards on parlays. There is nothing populist about a regulatory apparatus that protects Polymarket’s revenue and lets insider trading run wild. There is nothing Christian about canonizing THC dispensaries, sportsbooks, vapes, and AI mistresses as the patron saints of liberty.
This is true, but also a reflection of the changing culture. An anti-vice attitude was a product of a Protestant Christian culture that is long gone in America. Thrift and hard work are hardly American values these days, certainly not in the way they used to be. It’s no surprise that the rapid metastasization of vice in America happened after 2014, when I noted America entered a truly post-Christian Negative World.
Political parties exist to win elections. We should expect them to go where the voters are. Appeals to “that’s not Christian” aren’t going to be heeded. Empirical facts about the damage these new engines of vice are doing aren’t likely to move people that much either, although there will probably be some rearguard actions by some Republicans. My own state of Indiana has resisted pot legalization so far, for example.
The reality is that young men, and Americans generally, do want this stuff to be legal and normalized. Demoralized men aren’t going to want to give up what seems like a form of psychic relief to them. And promoting vice goes along with the GOP’s new downscale image.
The good news is that, as we typically do, we will likely file down some of the sharper edges of the vice revolution. Laws requiring age-verification to access online porn are part of this. I’d expect more regulation of online sports betting and pot as well. But as with no-fault divorce and smart phones, this retrenchment will likely leave legalized vice firmly in place. Down the road that could change, as America does oscillate between periods of more permissive and more restrictive public morality. But a shift like that is not evident anywhere yet.
Not every conservative is ready to give up, however. Scott Yenor wrote a piece for the American Mind arguing for a national greatness agenda for regulating pornography.
And here’s some good news in the New York Times. Problem drinking is in decline (gift link). This seems related to the overall decline in alcohol consumption. This news is good, but only as long as this isn’t a result of people shifting from alcoholism to being the proverbial pothead.
Changing Times
American Reformer has been making some significant changes. Dan Strand is the new editor-in-chief, and the journal has been relaunched on Substack. I have contributed an essay looking at the perennial online question of whether we know what time it is. I argue that we have reached a shift in times from disruption to construction.
What time is it? This is one of the most important questions to answer correctly. There’s a season for everything. Too many people want a single approach that’s good for all times and all places. But having timeless principles doesn’t mean having one go-to strategy or action in every situation.
America is in a liminal space, where the old is increasingly decaying but the new has not yet been fully formed. While there is still tremendous uncertainty, now is the time to build for the future….Back in the 2010s, forces that rendered many of our political and institutional arrangements increasingly unfit for purpose were already at work.
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A period of disrupting legacy beliefs, approaches, political views, and institutions was necessary to make room for those seeking to address the pressing new realities of the 21st century.
However, disruption itself cannot be the goal. And many of the disruptors were unsuited to building new institutions to address the problems they highlighted. It is one thing to read a manosphere blog to learn the truth about attraction that your parents, pastors, or teachers never told you. It is quite another to build a society on the morals of Andrew Tate. Questioning authority has led all too many influencers to become purveyors of conspiracy theories.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Best of the Web
Going forward, my “best of the web” roundup in the Friday digest is going to be behind the paywall. This is where my specially curated selection of the best and most interesting pieces I found this week lives. This week I highlight pieces arguing that capitalism productively channels masculinity, critiquing a study claiming that men’s failure to help with housework is causing a birth rate drop, chronicling the closure of the formerly open Internet, and more.
