17

Alternative Futures

In which it is asked whether the divergence of American classes foreshadows the end of the American project. Two models for thinking about that prospect are presented, one pessimistic and the other optimistic.

GREAT NATIONS EVENTUALLY cease to be great, inevitably. It’s not the end of the world. Britain goes on despite the loss of its onetime geopolitical preeminence. France goes on despite the loss of its onetime preeminence in the arts. The United States will go on under many alternative futures. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wisely counseled a young correspondent who feared that Britain was on its last legs in the 1700s.1 As a great power, America still has a lot of ruin left in it.

But how much ruin does the American project have left? The historical precedent is Rome. In terms of wealth, military might, and territorial reach, Rome was at its peak under the emperors. But Rome’s initial downward step, five centuries before the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire, was its loss of the republic when Caesar became the first emperor. Was that loss important? Not in material terms. But for Romans who treasured their republic, it was a tragedy that no amount of imperial splendor could redeem.

The United States faces a similar prospect: remaining as wealthy and powerful as ever, but leaving its heritage behind. The successor state need not be one ruled by emperors. We may continue to have a President and a Congress and a Supreme Court. But the United States will be just one more in history’s procession of dominant nations. Everything that makes America exceptional will have disappeared.

The American Project Versus the European Model

I have used the phrase the American project frequently. It refers to national life based on the founders’ idea that the “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, is a state that “shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”

At this point in our history, more and more people, including prominent academics, the leaders of the Democratic Party, and some large portion of the American electorate, believe that history has overtaken that original conception. Over the course of the twentieth century, western Europe developed an alternative to the American model, the advanced welfare state, that provides a great deal of personal freedom in all areas of life except the economic ones. The restrictions that the European model imposes on the economic behavior of both employers and employees are substantial, but, in return, the citizens of Europe’s welfare states have (so far) gotten economic security.

I think it is a bad trade. In chapter 15, I indirectly described why. Let me be more explicit here.

The European model assumes that human needs can be disaggregated when it comes to choices about public policy. People need food and shelter, so let us make sure that everyone has food and shelter. People may also need self-respect, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether the state provides them with food and shelter. People may also need intimate relationships with others, but that doesn’t have anything to do with policies regarding marriage and children. People may also need self-actualization, but that doesn’t have anything to do with policies that diminish the challenges of life.

More Sanguine Views

This indictment of the European model represents a minority position, at least among intellectuals, and so do my perspective on happiness and my conclusion that the American project is disintegrating.

For an evocation of the European model as the ideal, I recommend Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.2 Two companion volumes reflecting the European perspective on religion and happiness are Phil Zuckerman’s Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment and Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.3

For the case that American culture shows great continuity over the last two centuries, enduring to the present, I recommend Claude Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.4 Fischer and Michael Hout also wrote Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years, which takes many social and economic trendlines in this book further back than 1960.5

These are all thoughtful and useful analyses that I will not try to engage in a data-driven debate. With regard to advocacy of the European model: If you think that providing economic equality and security are primary functions of government, you should be a social democrat. You can easily find evidence on behalf of social democracy (given that pair of priorities) that you think is dispositive. I look at the same evidence and judge it to be peripheral, irrelevant, or wrong-headed—not because the numbers are wrong, but because of differences on first principles. With regard to Claude Fischer’s optimism about the continuity of American culture, I share much of it if we are talking about Belmont, not if we are talking about Fishtown—but that is not a distinction that Fischer set out to explore, so our positions largely pass in the night, neither directly in conflict with the other.

The tacit assumption of the advanced welfare state is correct when human beings face starvation or death by exposure. Then, food and shelter are all that count. But in an advanced society, the needs for food and shelter can be met in a variety of ways, and at that point human needs can no longer be disaggregated. The ways in which food and shelter are obtained affects whether the other human needs are met.

People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned—it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned—and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling need content, and that content is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences. People need self-actualization, but self-actualization is not a straight road, visible in advance, running from point A to point B. Self-actualization intrinsically requires an exploration of possibilities for life beyond the obvious and convenient. All of these good things in life—self-respect, intimate relationships, and self-actualization—require freedom in the only way that freedom is meaningful: freedom to act in all arenas of life coupled with responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The underlying meaning of that coupling—freedom and responsibility—is crucial. Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards. Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.

Recall from chapter 15 the four domains that I argued are the sources of deep satisfactions: family, vocation, community, and faith. In each of those domains, responsibility for the desired outcome is inseparable from the satisfaction. The deep satisfactions that go with raising children arise from having fulfilled your responsibility for just about the most important thing that human beings do. If you’re a disengaged father who doesn’t contribute much to that effort, or a wealthy mother who has turned over most of the hard part to full-time day care and then boarding schools, the satisfactions are diminished accordingly. The same is true if you’re a low-income parent who finds it easier to let the apparatus of an advanced welfare state take over. In the workplace, getting a pay raise is pleasant whether you deserve it or not, but the deep satisfactions that can come from a job promotion are inextricably bound up with the sense of having done things that merited it. If you know that you got the promotion just because you’re the boss’s nephew, or because the civil service rules specify that you must get that promotion if you have served enough time in grade, deep satisfactions are impossible.

When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America’s more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives. There is no way for clever planners to avoid it. Marriage is a strong and vital institution not because the day-to-day work of raising children and being a good spouse is so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are strong and vital not because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met—family and community really do have the action—then an elaborate web of expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time. Together, that web leads to norms of good behavior that support families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities. The web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

Through November 21, 1963, the American project demonstrated that a society can provide great personal freedom while generating strong and vital human networks that helped its citizens cope.6 America on the eve of John Kennedy’s assassination, while flawed, was still headed in the right direction.

In some ways, the United States continued in the right direction, bringing us closer to the ideals that animated the nation’s creation. The leading examples are the revolutions in the status of African Americans and women. The barriers facing them in 1963 represented a continuing failure of America to make good on its ideals. In every realm of American life, those barriers had been reduced drastically by 2010.

In other ways, it has been downhill ever since. The trendlines of part 2 and chapter 14 constitute the gravamen of that charge. Family, vocation, community, and faith have all been enfeebled, in predictable ways.

The problems these changes have engendered are different in kind from the problems of poverty. The problems that children suffer because of poverty disappear when the family is no longer poor. The problems that poor communities suffer because of poverty disappear when the community is no longer poor. The first two-thirds of the twentieth century saw spectacular progress on that front. But when families become dysfunctional, or cease to form altogether, growing numbers of children suffer in ways that have little to do with lack of money. When communities are no longer bound by their members’ web of mutual obligations, the continuing human needs must be handed over to bureaucracies—the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for giving people the kind of help they need. The neighborhood becomes a sterile place to live at best and, at worst, becomes the Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zone that we have seen in some of our major cities.

These costs—enfeebling family, vocation, community, and faith—are not exacted on the people of Belmont. The things the government does to take the trouble out of things seldom intersect with the life of a successful attorney or executive. Rather, they intersect with life in Fishtown. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing a theoretical outcome, but American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t. Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, “I made a difference.”

Europe has proved that countries with enfeebled family, vocation, community, and faith can still be pleasant places to live. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Paris. When I get there, the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an oppressive system. On the contrary, there’s a lot to like about day-to-day life in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. They are great places to visit. But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible—the Europe Syndrome.

Europe’s short workweeks and frequent vacations are one symptom of the syndrome. The idea of work as a means of self-actualization has faded. The view of work as a necessary evil, interfering with the higher good of leisure, dominates. To have to go out to look for a job or to have to risk being fired from a job are seen as terrible impositions. The precipitous decline of marriage, far greater in Europe than in the United States, is another symptom. What is the point of a lifetime commitment when the state will act as surrogate spouse when it comes to paying the bills? The decline of fertility to far below replacement is another symptom. Children are seen as a burden that the state must help shoulder, and even then they’re a lot of trouble that distract from things that are more fun. The secularization of Europe is yet another symptom. Europeans have broadly come to believe that humans are a collection of activated chemicals that, after a period of time, deactivate. If that’s the case, saying that the purpose of life is to pass the time as pleasantly as possible is a reasonable position. Indeed, taking any other position is ultimately irrational.

The alternative to the Europe Syndrome is to say that your life can have transcendent meaning if it is spent doing important things—raising a family, supporting yourself, being a good friend and a good neighbor, learning what you can do well and then doing it as well as you possibly can. Providing the best possible framework for doing those things is what the American project is all about. When I say that the American project is in danger, that’s the nature of the loss I have in mind: the loss of the framework through which people can best pursue happiness.

The reasons we face the prospect of losing that heritage are many, but none are more important than the twin realities that I have tried to describe in the preceding chapters. On one side of the spectrum, a significant and growing portion of the American population is losing the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society. On the other side of the spectrum, the people who run the country are doing just fine. Their framework for pursuing happiness is relatively unaffected by the forces that are enfeebling family, community, vocation, and faith elsewhere in the society. In fact, they have become so isolated that they are often oblivious to the nature of the problems that exist elsewhere.

The forces that have led to the formation of the new lower class continue as I write. In the absence of some outside intervention, the new lower class will continue to grow. Advocacy for that outside intervention can come from many levels of society—that much is still true in America—but eventually it must gain the support of the new upper class if it is to be ratified. Too much power is held by the new upper class to expect otherwise. What are the prospects of that happening? I conclude this tangled story by offering two alternative ways of thinking about what comes next.

A Hollow Elite

The first alternative is that the new upper class is in just as much trouble as the new lower class, albeit in different ways, and the American project is doomed. The new upper class has vast resources, both in wealth and in human capital. The modern economy is ideally suited to their strengths. They are doing an excellent job of co-opting the new intellectual talent in each generation, much as classical China co-opted the new intellectual talent in each generation through its examination system. But the new upper class is showing signs of becoming an elite that is hollow at the core.

A Collapse of Self-Confidence

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History had a public vogue in the United States.7 Toynbee identified twenty-six distinct civilizations in recorded history and propounded a grand theory that explained their trajectories of growth and decline. The academics pounced on A Study of History—Toynbee’s sweeping, moralistic approach was at odds with the academic temper of the time—and after a few years it became intellectually unfashionable. But in 2001, while working on a book about the history of human accomplishment, I decided that I should take a look at a work so rich in material. Eventually I reached the chapter titled “Schism in the Soul,” and experienced a shock of recognition.8

In that chapter, Toynbee took up the processes that lead to the disintegration of civilizations. His argument went like this: The growth phase of a civilization is led by a creative minority with a strong, self-confident sense of style, virtue, and purpose. The uncreative majority follows along. Then, at some point in every civilization’s journey, the creative minority degenerates into a dominant minority. Its members still run the show, but they are no longer confident and no longer set the example. Among other reactions are a “lapse into truancy”—a rejection of the obligations of citizenship—and “surrender to a sense of promiscuity”—vulgarization of manners, the arts, and language—that “are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of ‘proletarianization.’ ”9

The shock of recognition that I experienced in 2001 came because of the adoption by the middle class and upper-middle class of behaviors that used to be distinctly lower class. When Tipper Gore, the wife of senator and later vice president Al Gore, attacked the incontestable violence and misogyny of rock and rap lyrics, why was she so roundly scolded by so many of her social and political peers? Why were four-letter words, which formerly were seen by the upper-middle class as déclassé, appearing in glossy upscale magazines? How had “the hooker look” become a fashion trend among nice girls from the suburbs? How had tattoos, which a few decades ago had been proof positive that one was a member of the proletariat, become chic? Toynbee would have shrugged and said that this is what happens when civilizations are headed downhill—America’s creative minority has degenerated into a dominant minority, and we are witnessing the universal next step, the proletarianization of the dominant minority.

There are many reasons to bridle at that characterization. For one thing, civilizations that see a coarsening of the culture are sometimes in their heyday. Why shouldn’t America in recent decades be seen as something like Regency England? The early 1800s were a time of haphazard morals and mindless extravagance in the aristocracy, but also the era when England defeated Napoleon and English science, technology, literature, art, and industry were in a golden age. We should remember, too, that cultures sometimes do an abrupt about-face. Within a few decades of the end of the Regency, England had become Victorian.

For another thing, how is America’s new upper class vulnerable to a charge of imitating the proletariat, when, as this book has just documented, the new upper class and, more broadly, Belmont, have more or less held the line on marriage, industriousness, and honesty—even religiosity, comparatively speaking—while the proletariat has deteriorated?

All good points. But, nonetheless, the signs that America’s new upper class has suffered a collapse of self-confidence are hard to ignore. There is, for example, the collapse of confidence in codes of honorable behavior.

The Collapse of a Sturdy Elite Code

In The Philadelphia Story, Tracey (Katharine Hepburn) is unable to recall what happened between her and Mike (Jimmy Stewart) the night before, because she had been so drunk that she passed out. She is relieved to learn that Mike had carried her to her bedroom, deposited her on her bed, and departed, but worries about why he had been so gallant. “Was I so unattractive, so distant, so forbidding, or something?” she asks. That wasn’t the problem, Mike replies. “You were also a little the worse—or better—for wine, and there are rules about that.”

Mike was observing the code. Codes of behavior exist in every nook of society, and they are powerful determinants of the social order within that nook. Doctors have a code and cops have a code. Teenagers have a code. Prisoners have a code. The elite has a code. The difference between the elite’s code and the others is the breadth of its influence. The history of England in the last half of the nineteenth century can be seen as the Victorian elite’s success in propagandizing the entire English population into accepting its code of morals.10 A degenerate elite code can inspire contempt and encourage revolution among the rest of the population, with France in the mid-eighteenth century and Russia in the early twentieth as cases in point.

In keeping with its democratic tradition, America did not have different codes for socioeconomic classes.11 To be a decent person was to adhere to a code that applied to all, rich and poor. In effect, Mike in The Philadelphia Story was observing the code of behavior that was taught to every American child who attended school, usually through the McGuffey Readers I described in chapter 6, reinforced by the larger American civic religion that gave rise to the McGuffey Readers in the first place. Here is a passage from the Fourth Reader, 1901 edition, that a man of Mike’s generation would have read when he was in the fourth grade: “Tom Barton never forgot the lesson of that night; and he came to believe, and to act upon the belief, in after years, that true manliness is in harmony with gentleness, kindness, and self-denial.”12

By the time The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940, the McGuffey Readers weren’t being used anymore, but the code survived and it was still being communicated. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, I understood the code for males to go something like this:

To be a man means that you are brave, loyal, and true. When you are in the wrong, you own up and take your punishment. You don’t take advantage of women. As a husband, you support and protect your wife and children. You are gracious in victory and a good sport in defeat. Your word is your bond. Your handshake is as good as your word. It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When the ship goes down, you put the women and children into the lifeboats and wave good-bye with a smile.

It is hard to imagine a paragraph more crammed with clichés. My point is that they were clichés precisely because boys understood that this was the way they were supposed to behave. A code existed that was energetically propagated by the people who ran America and it was taken seriously. If you see or hear any of those clichés used today among the new upper class, it is probably sarcastically. The code of the American gentleman has collapsed, just as the parallel code of the American lady has collapsed.

In today’s new upper class—what Toynbee would surely see as a dominant minority—the code that has taken its place is a set of mushy injunctions to be nice. Call it the code of ecumenical niceness. Children are supposed to share their toys, not hit one another, take turns … to be nice. And, by and large, the children of the new upper class grow up to be nice. But they are also taught that they should respect everyone else’s way of doing things, regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, cultural practices, or national origin, which leads to the crucial flaw in ecumenical niceness. The code of the dominant minority is supposed to set the standard for the society, but ecumenical niceness has a hold only on people whom the dominant minority is willing to judge—namely, one another.

That’s what I mean by loss of self-confidence. The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.

Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture.13 The members of the new upper class are industrious to the point of obsession, but there are no derogatory labels for adults who are not industrious. The young women of the new upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births. You will probably raise a few eyebrows even if you use a derogatory label for criminals. When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.

If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret. Conspiratorial explanations are unnecessary, however. Nonjudgmentalism ceases to be baffling if you think of it as a symptom of Toynbee’s loss of self-confidence among the dominant minority. The new upper class doesn’t want to push its way of living onto the less fortunate, for who are they to say that their way of living is really better? It works for them, but who is to say that it will work for others? Who are they to say that their way of behaving is virtuous and others’ ways of behaving are not?

Toynbee entitled his discussion “schism in the soul” because the disintegration of a civilization is not a monolithic process. While part of the dominant minority begins to mimic the culture of the proletariat, remnants of it become utopians, or ascetics, or try to invoke old norms (as I am doing here). To recognize a disintegrating civilization, Toynbee says, look for a riven culture—riven as our culture is today. For every example of violence and moral obtuseness coming out of Hollywood, one can cite films, often faithful renderings of classic novels, expressing an exquisite moral sensibility. On television, the worst-of-times, best-of-times paradox can be encompassed within the same television series—wonderful moral insights in one plotline, moral obtuseness in another, sometimes occurring within the same episode. Some parents of the new upper class are responsible for producing and distributing the content that represents the worst of contemporary culture, while others are going to great lengths to protect their children from what they see as a violent and decadent culture. Sometimes those parents are one and the same people. The only common thread that I claim in all of this is an unwillingness on the part of any significant portion of the new upper class to preach what they practice.

Unseemliness

The collapse of a sturdy code (ecumenical niceness is not sturdy) also means that certain concepts lose their power to constrain behavior. One of those concepts is unseemliness.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines unseemly as “not in keeping with established standards of taste or proper form; unbecoming or indecorous in appearance; improper in speech, conduct, etc.; inappropriate for time or place.” The ultimate source, The Oxford English Dictionary, requires just three words: “Unbecoming, unfitting; indecent.”14

Some examples? Unseemliness is television producer Aaron Spelling building a house of 56,500 square feet and 123 rooms. Unseemliness is Henry McKinnell, the CEO of Pfizer, getting a $99 million golden parachute and an $82 million pension after a tenure that saw Pfizer’s share price plunge.15 They did nothing illegal. Spelling had the money to build his dream house, just as millions of others would like to do, and got zoning approval for his plans. McKinnell’s separation package was paid according to the contract he had signed with Pfizer when he became CEO. But the outcomes were inappropriate for time or place, not suited to the circumstances. They were unbecoming and unfitting. They were unseemly.

I chose two examples so extreme that only people who deny that unseemly is a valid concept can argue with me. But as soon as I move to less extreme examples, that phrase, “established standards of taste or proper form,” comes into play. Since my two examples involved money, let’s stick with that topic. The final figure in this book, 17.1, shows the trend in the total compensation received by CEOs of large corporations since 1970.

Where does unseemliness begin? Even in 1970, the average CEO made about $1 million. Was that unseemly, given what good CEOs contribute to the success of their company? If that wasn’t unseemly, is it unseemly that the average compensation doubled to $2 million by 1987? That it doubled again to $4 million by 1992? That it doubled again to $8 million by 1998? That it doubled again to $16 million by 2006?

FIGURE 17.1. TOTAL COMPENSATION OF CEOS OF THE LARGEST 500 S&P CORPORATIONS

Source: Murphy, 1999, fig. 1. Forbes Annual Executive Compensation Reports.16

I am not asking whether the increases were economically rational. The technical literature hotly debates this issue, but it does not reach the question I am asking. To clarify that question, it may help if I stipulate for purposes of argument that these increases were economically rational. I will further stipulate that the dynamics producing those increases promoted economic growth and, ultimately, a better life for people all the way down the line. Now return to the question: Is there anything unseemly about the story told in Figure 17.1?

At the individual level, accepting a big compensation package is seldom unseemly. You’re the CEO; you’ve worked hard to get where you are; you think that your contribution is valuable to the company; you know that your compensation package is in line with what CEOs of comparable companies are getting. It is hard to see any ethical obligation to negotiate a smaller deal for yourself than the board of directors is willing to give you.17

But what about all those boards of directors, themselves composed of many people who are or have been CEOs themselves? They have a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders, not to the employees of the company. To what extent are they handing out these compensation packages because, like it or not, that’s what it takes to get the kind of person they need to run the company? Or to what extent have the boards of directors of corporate America—and nonprofit America, and foundation America—become cozy extended families, scratching one another’s backs, happily going along with a market that has become lucrative for all of them, taking advantage of their privileged positions—rigging the game, but within the law.18

It looks suspiciously as if there’s a lot of unseemliness going on, but I cannot prove it. People within the corporate world with whom I have discussed the issue vary in their assessment of how much the cozy-little-club phenomenon applies, though all acknowledge that it exists to some extent. Finding hard data on the how-much question is as difficult as finding hard data on the criminal aspects of corporate malfeasance that I discussed in chapter 10.

Even without hard data, I won’t get any argument from people on the Left, who are inclined to view corporate America suspiciously in the absence of any data whatsoever. But it is not really an issue that is decided by political views. Recently, I asked a successful entrepreneur, an ardent proponent of free markets, what he thought about the bonus of several hundred million dollars that a board had decided to award to the departing CEO of a large company as a thank-you gift. He looked at me sharply and said, “It’s obscene.” That is a reasonable way for people to react whether they are liberal, conservative, or libertarian—the issue is not what should be legal, but what is seemly.

I have focused on the economic manifestations of unseemliness in the private sector because they have such broad ramifications for the United States—the great majority of the new upper class are involved in the corporate, nonprofit, and foundation worlds, all of which have instances of the kind of unseemliness that I think is reflected in Figure 17.1. But if you’re looking for egregious examples of unseemliness, you can do no better than look at contemporary American government.

It’s not new. The crafting of legislation by the Congress has always been like the making of sausage. But when the federal government did not have much to sell except contracts for roads, military equipment, and government buildings, the amount of energy devoted to scrambling for government spoils was commensurate with the size of the pot. The pot has grown, with hundreds of billions of dollars of goodies now up for grabs for whoever knows the right people, can convince the right committee chairman to insert a clause in the legislation, convince the right regulatory bureaucrat to word a ruling in a certain way, or secure the right appointment to a key government panel. Perhaps unseemliness per unit of government has not increased in the last half century, but the number and size of those units has increased by orders of magnitude, and the magnitude of unseemliness has increased along with them. Washington is in a new Gilded Age of influence peddling that dwarfs anything that has come before.

Unseemliness is a symptom of the collapse of codes of behavior that depend not on laws and regulations, but upon shared understandings regarding the fitness of things, and upon an allegiance to behave in accordance with those shared understandings. Unseemliness is another symptom of hollowness at the core.

MY PROPOSITION IS that the hollow elite is as dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way. Personally and as families, its members are successful. But they have abdicated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards. The most powerful and successful members of their class increasingly trade on the perks of their privileged positions without regard to the seemliness of that behavior. The members of the new upper class are active politically, but when it comes to using their positions to help sustain the republic in day-to-day life, they are AWOL.

The Prognosis

If the case I have just made for a hollow elite is completely correct, all is lost. Think ahead to the situation in, say, 2020, assuming that the trends we have examined in this book continue. The United States is stuck with a large and growing lower class that is able to care for itself only sporadically and inconsistently. Its concentration in Fishtown puts more and more pressure on the remaining Fishtown families who are trying to hold the line.

The new upper class has continued to prosper as the dollar value of the talents they bring to the economy has continued to grow. With increased wealth, the prices that members of the new upper class are willing to pay for a home in the right kind of place have risen even more, less affluent residents who still provided some diversity within the SuperZips in 2010 have moved out, and the uniformity of very affluent, very highly educated populations within the SuperZips has increased. The proportion of the new upper class who are in the third generation of upper-class upbringing has increased, and with that increase has come increasing ignorance of the world outside their bubble.

Liberals in the new upper class continue to support adoption of the European model, as they have for decades. Conservatives in the new upper class still contribute to conservative candidates, but they are no more willing to preach what they practice than are those on the Left. Those in the new upper class who don’t care about politics don’t mind the drift toward the European model, because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience—much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.

The new laws and regulations steadily accrete, and America’s governing regime is soon indistinguishable from that of an advanced European welfare state. The American project is dead.

A Civic Great Awakening

The alternative future has a chance to the extent that the following four predictions are borne out. First, we in America will be watching what happens in Europe, and it will not be pretty. Second, science will undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state. Third, it will become increasingly obvious that there is a simple, affordable way to replace the entire apparatus of the welfare state. Fourth, the persistence of Americans’ allegiance to the American project will turn out to be far greater than my argument so far has acknowledged.

Watching the European Model Implode

The simplest way in which the advanced welfare state will lose attractiveness is the looming bankruptcy of the European welfare states.

The financial bankruptcy is not anything that even the cleverest planner can avoid. As publicly financed benefits grow, so do the populations who find that they need them. The more people who need benefits, the more government bureaucracy is required. The more people who rely on support from the government and the larger the government, the fewer the people in the private sector who pay for the benefits and for the apparatus of the state.19 The larger the number of people who depend on government either for benefits or for their jobs, the larger the constituency for voting for ever-larger government.

These are arithmetical realities that have become manifest in every advanced Western country. They have brought some European welfare states within sight of bankruptcy as I write. Fertility rates that are far below replacement throughout western Europe ensure that the productive native-born population will fall still more in the years to come.

There is no permanent way out of the self-destructive dynamics of the welfare state, but Europe has a tempting palliative—encouraging large-scale immigration of younger populations who work in the private sector and pay taxes that make up the revenue deficit. It won’t work forever—sooner or later, the immigrants, too, will succumb to the incentives that the welfare state sets up. But the more immediate problem is that most of the new workers come from cultures that are radically different from those of western Europe. In some cases, those cultures despise the values that led to the welfare state. The United States will have a chance to watch these events unfold before our own situation becomes as critical, and the sight will be a powerful incentive to avoid going down the same road.

Watching the Intellectual Foundations of the Welfare State Implode

The founders believed that certain aspects of human nature were immutable and that they tightly constrain what is politically and culturally possible. Madison’s observation in The Federalist, no. 51, that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” is famous, but the preceding two sentences get more directly to the point: “It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”20

The advocates of the welfare state in both Europe and the United States reject this view, substituting instead the belief that human nature can be changed. The purest expression of optimism about the plasticity of human beings comes from Marxism, which held that, given the right social setting, humans could become selfless and collectivist, making it possible for Marx’s goal—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs—to become a reality in a communist society.21 The social democrats of the twentieth century who created the modern welfare state did not have the same aggressive agenda that the Soviet Union adopted, but the long-term workability of their creation depended equally on the premise that human beings are plastic. The first operational implication of this premise was that the welfare state could be designed in ways that would lead people not to take advantage of the incentives that the welfare state sets up—for example, generous unemployment benefits would not importantly affect how hard people tried to keep old jobs or how hard they looked for new ones. The second operational implication of this premise was that properly designed government interventions could correct problems of human behavior.

As the welfare state evolved over the twentieth century, two more specific beliefs about the nature of Homo sapiens were woven into its fabric. The first of these was the belief that people are equal not just in the way that the American Declaration of Independence meant—equal in the eyes of God and before the law—but equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics. To some extent, this belief applies to individuals—the idea that all children should aspire to get a college degree reflects a kind of optimistic view that all children are naturally smart enough for college if only they get the right kind of instruction. But the strict interpretation of the equality premise applies to groups of people. In a fair society, it is believed, different groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites, heterosexuals and homosexuals, the children of poor people and the children of rich people—will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life: the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs, the same proportions who become English professors and theoretical physicists, the same proportions who become stand-up comedians and point guards. When that doesn’t happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, the premise that significant group differences cannot exist has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation reaching into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase “politically correct” eventually comes back to this premise.

The second of the beliefs about Homo sapiens that became an intellectual underpinning of the welfare state is that, at bottom, human beings are not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten—they got it because they were born into the right social stratum. Or if they did well despite being born poor and disadvantaged, it was because the luck of the draw gave them personal qualities that enabled them to succeed. People who do badly do not deserve it either. They were born into the wrong social stratum, or were handicapped by personal weaknesses that were not their fault. Thus it is morally appropriate to require the economically successful to hand over most of what they have earned to the state, and it is inappropriate to say of anyone who drifts in and out of work that he is lazy or irresponsible.

During the next ten or twenty years, I believe that all of these intellectual foundations of the modern welfare state will be discredited by a tidal change in our scientific understanding of human behavior that is already under way. The effects of that tidal change will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book titled Consilience.22 As the twenty-first century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology—specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.

What are they finding so far? Nothing surprising. That’s the point. For example, science is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that males and females respond differently to babies for reasons that have nothing to do with the way they were raised.23 It is not a finding that should surprise anyone, but it is fundamentally at odds with a belief that, in a nonsexist world, men and women will find caring for infants equally rewarding. And so it is with many topics that bear on policy issues. We are still at the beginning of a steep learning curve.

But we do know already that the collapse of these moral pillars of the welfare state must eventually have profound effects on policy. An illustration may serve to make the point. For many years, I have been among those who argue (as I have in this book) that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe. But while those of us who take this position have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, no one has been able to prove that alternatives could not work as well. And so the social planners keep coming up with the next new ingenious program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.

I am predicting that over the next few decades advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, leading to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and to hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-in male is not the married biological father. These same reasons explain why society’s attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don’t work and will never work.

There is no reason to be frightened of such knowledge. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. Social democrats may be able to design some outside interventions that do some good. But they will have to stop claiming that the traditional family is just one of many equally valid alternatives. They will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth.

The same concrete effects of the new knowledge will make us rethink every domain in which the central government has imposed its judgment about how people ought to live their lives. Here are some more examples of things I think the neuroscientists and geneticists will prove over the next few decades:

All of these questions will be answered long before the end of the twenty-first century, and the direction the answers are taking will be evident within the lifetimes of most of us. I have entitled this section “Watching the Intellectual Foundations of the Welfare State Implode” to reflect my confidence that the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated. The institutions surrounding marriage, vocation, community, and faith will be found to be the critical resources through which human beings lead satisfying lives. It will be found that those institutions deteriorate in the advanced welfare states for reasons that are intrinsic to the nature of the welfare state. It will be found that those institutions are richest and most robust in states that allow people to work out their lives on their own and in company with the people around them.

The Increasing Obviousness of an Alternative

It has been muttered by some conservatives since the 1960s: “If we’d just divide up all the money we’re spending on poor people and give them the cash, they wouldn’t be poor.” For most of that period, doing that wasn’t really feasible. Now it is.

You may find the calculations and the arguments in In Our Hands, a book published in 2006, proposing that the government provide a basic income for all Americans ages 21 and older, to be financed by cashing out all income transfer programs. I wrote then that the projected costs of the current system and my plan for a basic income would cross in 2011, as indeed they did.24 But the situation in 2011 or over the next few years is not relevant. Rather: At some point over the next decade or two, the finances of the welfare state must become ridiculous to everyone.

To some of us, it was already ridiculous when I wrote In Our Hands. The United States is one of the richest countries on earth. Most Americans—the precise percentage will vary depending on one’s definition of “enough”—make enough money for themselves and their families that the entire welfare state could be dismantled tomorrow and they would do just fine. And yet in 2002, as I was writing In Our Hands, the federal government alone spent about $1.5 trillion in transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, and all forms of corporate welfare. The states spent another few hundred billion dollars in transfer payments. And yet we still had millions of people in need.

That’s what I mean by ridiculous. How, in a country where most people don’t need a penny of income transfers to begin with, can we spend $1.5 trillion on income transfers and still have material want? Stand back from the day-to-day debates about how we can tweak Social Security here and tweak Medicare there and contemplate how crazy the current system is. Only a government could spend so much money so inefficiently.

Readers of different political persuasions can come up with reasons why the situation in 2002 wasn’t as crazy as it looked to me. But sooner or later, at some budgetary figure, the amount of money we are spending to achieve easily achievable goals will eventually persuade everyone that using armies of bureaucrats to take trillions of dollars, spend a lot of it on themselves, give back a lot of it to people who don’t need it, and dole out what remains with all sorts of regulations and favoritism is not reasonable or necessary. Wealthy nations can accomplish the core goal of the advanced welfare state—the economic wherewithal for people to provide for their basic needs—without the apparatus of the welfare state. Sooner or later, that truth has to make radical change possible. A question remains—how can support be provided in a way that leaves people responsible for the consequences of their actions?—but that question has an answer, as I try to persuade my readers in In Our Hands.

The Resilience of American Ideals

Finally, thankfully, the United States has a history of confounding pessimists. Whenever the American project has suffered a wounding blow or taken a wrong turn that looked as if it might be fatal, things have eventually worked out, more or less. Can it happen again?

Nobel economist Robert Fogel argued the affirmative in a book titled The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism (2000). His thesis drew upon a curious feature of American history. Since colonial days, America has periodically been swept by religious movements known as “Great Awakenings.” Before Fogel, historians agreed that there were three of them, each characterized by powerful preachers, revivalism, and evangelical enthusiasm. The first began in the mid-1720s and reached its apex in the late 1730s. The second began around 1800 and lasted until 1840. The beginning of the Third Great Awakening is dated variously from the 1860s to 1890 and continued into the early 1900s.

Each of the first three Great Awakenings had a political aftermath, Fogel argued, “a phase in which the new ethics precipitates powerful political programs and movements.”25 The First Great Awakening set the stage for the American Revolution. The Second Great Awakening was instrumental in the spread of the temperance movement, compulsory elementary education, abolitionism, and the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. The Third Great Awakening laid the ethical basis for the reforms of the New Deal and, later, the civil rights movement.

Fogel then made a case that the United States experienced a Fourth Great Awakening beginning around 1960 and continuing through the time that Fogel was writing his book in the late 1990s. Even as the mainline denominations began to lose membership in the 1960s, the growth of “enthusiastic religion”—people who believed in the doctrines of born-again Christianity—increased. Adding in members of mainline churches and the Roman Catholic Church who share the beliefs of the evangelical Christian churches, Fogel put the adherents of enthusiastic religion at about 60 million people at the end of the 1980s, representing a third of the electorate.26 Fogel saw the early political phase of the Fourth Great Awakening in the right-to-life movement, the tax revolts of the 1970s, and the criticism of the media in the 1980s.

The eventual result will not be a straight-line extrapolation of the agenda of the Christian Coalition or any other specifically religious influence, in Fogel’s view, but the emergence of a “postmodern egalitarian agenda,” as the new century sees “two mighty camps of egalitarians … arrayed against each other”—the political disciples of the Third Great Awakening and those of the Fourth Great Awakening. The new egalitarian agenda cannot be based on the social and economic goals of the welfare state (the product of the Third Great Awakening), Fogel argued, because in large part those goals have been achieved. Poverty no longer has the resonance it had in the first half of the twentieth century. He continued:

Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, it is necessary to address such postmodern concerns as the struggle for self-realization, the desire to find a deeper meaning in life than the endless accumulation of consumer durables and the pursuit of pleasure.… Unlike the reform agenda of the Third Great Awakening, that of the Fourth emphasizes the spiritual needs of life in a country where even the poor are materially rich by the standards prevailing a century ago and where many of those who are materially rich are spiritually deprived.27

Fogel characterized the political agenda of the Fourth Great Awakening as an attempt to reinstate the principle of equality of opportunity versus the continuing attempt of the disciples of the Third Great Awakening to extend the principle of equality of condition.

What struck me forcibly is Fogel’s confidence that the postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the exclusive property of political conservatives, just as the agenda of the Third Great Awakening was not the exclusive property of political liberals. In both cases, the power of the movement transcended partisan politics. I see the same transcendence with regard to many of the issues raised in this book. My evidence is anecdotal. I have friends of various political persuasions who are part of the new upper class. When we discuss issues such as the increasing isolation of our children from the rest of America, I hear from all sides that this has already been worrying them. When I talk about these issues with students in elite colleges who are the offspring of families affluent for two or three generations, the charge that they are disconnected from the rest of America is something they are willing to take seriously.

On the other side of the class divide, my family has lived for more than twenty years in a blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland where all the problems of Fishtown have been visibly increasing. Politically, our neighbors span the range. But there remains a core of civic virtue and involvement that could make headway against those problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold.

It is my impression—I do not claim any more systematic evidence—that people across the political spectrum are ready to respond quickly and positively as soon as the issues raised in this book are acknowledged. A large part of the problem consists of nothing more complicated than our unwillingness to say out loud what we believe. A great many people, especially in the new upper class, just need to start preaching what they practice.

And so I am hoping for a civic Great Awakening among the new upper class. It starts with a question that I hope they will take to heart: How much do you value what has made America exceptional, and what are you willing to do to preserve it?

As I have remarked throughout the book, American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness and neighborliness discussed in earlier chapters, but also American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it, our striking lack of class envy, and the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. Finally, there is the most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, and it has been wonderful. But nothing in the water has made us that way. We have been the product of the cultural capital bequeathed to us by the system the founders laid down: a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with one another. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we have loved about Americans will go away.

In addition to preaching what they practice, America’s new upper class must take a close look at the way they are living their lives, ask whether those lives are impoverished in some of the ways that Fogel describes, and then think about ways to change. I am not suggesting that people in the new upper class should sacrifice their self-interest. I just want to accelerate a rediscovery of what that self-interest is. Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us. A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding—and more fun—to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.

What it comes down to is that America’s new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different. The drift away from those qualities can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation or victories on specific Supreme Court cases, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it has been: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.