Is there anyone in the U.S. who doesn’t think America is in serious cultural decline? Trumpists, Never Trumpists, conservatives, progressives, the far Left, and the radical Right all define it differently, but all are unhappy, even our serene centrists.
New York Times columnist and national public TV commentator David Brooks presents himself as the center of reasonable centrism. He recently wrote that the equally centrist General Social Survey poll had reported that even before the pandemic — in the years between 1990 and 2018 — the number of Americans who placed themselves in the lowest “happiness level” had increased by an incredible 50-plus percentage points.
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After reviewing the data, Brooks concluded that the James Carville explanation for popular dissatisfaction as being rooted in “the economy, stupid” is simply wrong these days. Unhappiness today in the U.S. and worldwide is primarily cultural in nature.
Clearly, poor economic conditions, such as high inflation, unemployment, and slow growth, cause unhappiness to increase. But misery is deeper now than it was in the 1990s, and it’s more widespread. The Left, of course, still insists that economic inequality is the problem for nearly everything. It argues that U.S. Census Bureau data prove that economic inequality is extreme and growing. But even it believes that the main effect is on social groups like Blacks and LGBTQs. The problem with the Left’s theory, however, is that Census data fail to include two-thirds of the value of federal, state, and local government payments transferred to poor people to decrease inequality.
Census data do show that the income inequality gap between the 20 percent highest and lowest income quartiles has increased by more than 300 percent since 1967. But when welfare, health, education, food, and other government transfer payments are included, the per capita income of the poorest 20 percent was actually 14 percent higher than the next higher quintile’s income, and even 3.3 percent higher than the middle-income group, whose main income was from work rather than government benefits. Of course, the two highest income-category earners did much better than these, so the real rich did move further ahead.
Including government-payment income, however, explains why working poor and middle-income voters have shifted dramatically to work-requirement Republicans and why the top two income categories now vote for Democrats promoting more dependency upon their elite selves.
Resentment, guilt, and self-interest are part of the explanation, but economics itself is not the reason for the present discontent. Brooks argues that it is what he calls “the toxic culture” that has changed us all — but especially our youth. In the early 1960s, he reminds us, the typical American got married, launched careers, and started “popping out kids” quite early in life, with “half of all women married before their 20th birthday.” Today’s young Gen Zers, in contrast, live a “slow life strategy with a vengeance,” with delayed marriage, drivers’ licenses, less alcohol, sex and work, and — at least for men — less education.
Brooks further explains that today’s generation grew up with “hypercautious parenting that exaggerates the dangers in life,” which they learned from a “media culture that generates ratings and clicks by generating division and anger.” That media culture “magnifie[d] a sense of menace,” demonstrating that “other people” were “toxic.” Since other people were dangerous, everyone became vulnerable and adopted a strong aversion to risk. Brooks backs up his assertions with an Associated Press/NORC poll reporting that nearly three-quarters of Americans blame the media for today’s increasing polarization. Almost as many say they only read news headlines, which are clearly hyped to obtain the clicks.
So, what has been the result of a century of dominant progressive media culture? It has been New Deals, Great Societies, and trillion-dollar Build Back Better national government programs. This has led to widespread dependence upon government and the expert classes that set the requirements and rules for modern secular culture. This crisis hits both sexes but, as Brooks argues, has especially hit men, who no longer have any social ideal for living a satisfying life.
As psychoanalyst Erica Komisar notes, women are increasingly working and earning outside the home but wonder whether they should “fear taking on traditional nurturing roles.” And more women are living alone with noncommitted temporary partners and having fewer children. Yet, as Brooks notes, “girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be ‘school ready,’” and, by high school, two-thirds of the top 10 percent by GPA score are girls, with two-thirds at the bottom boys. More girls go to college than men, and many more are actively involved, such as in study abroad programs.
Brooks concludes that today’s current crisis is men, and the base of the problem is that many men still hold an “obsolete ideal.” That ideal long taught that “[b]eing a man means being the main breadwinner for your family.” But today, according to Brooks, “they can’t meet that ideal. Demoralization follows.” Frustration feeds resentment, a lack of commitment, divorce, and anti-social behavior. He ends, “Masculinity has gone haywire”: “A system that labels more than a fifth of all boys as developmentally disabled is not installing in them a sense of confidence and competence.”
The problem is that there seems to be no alternative ideal for socializing men. Is it back to Rousseau’s lonely male wandering alone in fields, having occasional hookups with women? That didn’t last. Real patriarchy didn’t survive industrialization. Middle-class Christianity attempted to set different and more equal roles with breadwinner and nurturer morally equal, with female formal deference but male protection unto death. But today, a more purist secular equality and shared roles are the ruling norm.
Komisar’s solution is to find a “harmonious balance” between empowered women and male testosterone. She says that it is “neither possible nor desirable to revert to a world in which women lack choices and men don’t respect women’s accomplishments,” but that “[m]en need to be men, and women shouldn’t fear taking on traditional nurturing roles, which needn’t threaten their careers.”
Even such a centrist solution obviously faces a whirlwind of woke media and intellectual opposition. Far from being simply a 20th-century phenomenon, though, it was ancient Socrates who taught that the “poets” — those image makers who create the culture — will always lead society and politics. The power of media today is based on that claimed intellectual legitimacy. Mass media and Auguste Comte’s 19th-century scientific secular positivism rose together to form today’s cultural religion led by its educational elites — “experts” in universities, arts, government, think tanks, labor, business, lobbyists and so forth — the great majority of whom lean secular left.
As the great 20th-century philosopher Eric Voegelin warned, secularization of government does not remove the human moral impulse but instead switches the job “outside the church,” to secular intellectuals “ranging from the scholar, through the publicist to the professional revolutionary who tries to gain political public status for his creed.” The 20th century was dominated by these, with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital even creating “a new [secular] Koran.”
It is an interesting quirk of modern times that — as Washington Post top foreign analyst David Ignatius revealed — Russia’s post-communist wily authoritarian autocrat Vladimir Putin publicly adopted Orthodox Christianity as his legitimating morality and claims to be its protector, especially from the irreligious United States, which (at least its elites) even rejects that God made only two sexes — “man and woman, He created them.”
As far as the U.S. goes, the three-quarters of the population in the poll who blame the media and their intellectual class allies for the present disorder are right, and until their secular religion is challenged, the toxic culture will continue to expand and ultimately play into Putin’s hands.
Donald Devine is Senior Scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during the president’s first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 10 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
