My second encounter with MacIntyre was in a Notre Dame classroom: he was lecturing while I took notes. I was excited to be there, but could hardly have anticipated how large MacIntyre would loom over my next two years (and perhaps, by extension, my life). In light of his recent passing, I naturally find myself reflecting back on that heady period. I would never try to present myself as a MacIntyre scholar, nor did I know him with the intimacy of a personal friend. But I did know him, as my teacher and mentor. And what he gave me in that capacity was not trivial. 

Modern Moral Philosophy

My first class with MacIntyre was a history of moral philosophy, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and continuing on through St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. It conveyed the broad contours of his thought, but it was also quite simply a captivating experience. In the classroom, MacIntyre combined the lucidity of a trained analytic thinker with the sweeping grandeur of a great novelist or professional storyteller. This is an extraordinary feat; almost no one can do it. In MacIntyre’s narration, moral philosophy became a kind of epic adventure, the Socratic quest for the good extended across centuries. As in any philosophy class, he drew distinctions, analyzed arguments, delved into texts. But history, literature, biology, sociology, and personal anecdote were also woven seamlessly into his lectures, always delivered fluidly without notes. I was dazzled. How could I not be? By October of that year, moral philosophy consumed my thoughts in almost every spare moment.

MacIntyre had a quasi-prophetic aura, surely helped by the fact that he was brilliant and immensely erudite. But it was more than that. He had passed through a gauntlet of bruising professional and political encounters, but still somehow radiated conviction and an undiminished hunger for truth. His ideas were thick and complex, but his manner was disarmingly artless. He treated philosophy more like a vocation than a discipline or profession. And despite his reputation for cutting remarks, he could be extremely generous towards anyone who seemed to be trying, however clumsily, to do it. 

It may have been a paper assignment that supplied an official excuse for my first visit to his office. The debate that occasioned it was so exhilarating, however, that the next time I dropped the pretext. I simply worked out a position I wished to argue (over and against something he had said in class), and showed up to his regularly scheduled office hour. Over time, this became a regular occurrence, with the format basically the same each time. I knocked, and MacIntyre offered me a chair. He asked genially, “What can I do for you?” I staked out my chosen dialectical ground. We sparred. 

The exercise should be readily recognizable as a classic Socratic elenchus. And as in the Platonic dialogues, our exchanges reliably ended the same way: with me conceding defeat. But that was fine. As in a rodeo, I took it that the goal was to survive as long as possible. I would sometimes spend hours preparing for these conversations, combing through texts, taking miles-long walks with my brain on fire as I worked out the nuances of my position. My roommates thought I had gone completely off the deep end. MacIntyre, for his part, never seemed impatient with the impositions on his time. It was as though he conceded my right, as a fledgling philosopher, to put forward my positions and be duly refuted. 

Once, when I finally conceded after a particularly lengthy and rousing exchange, he did offer a rare compliment. “Miss Smith, that was quite good,” he said, smiling. “And, if you think of any further arguments you’d like to make on behalf of Leibniz, I will be in my office tomorrow between one and three.” 

Those were good times. And yet, there was a difficulty. If moral philosophy is an epic adventure, it seemed in our time to be trending towards tragedy. I knew, walking in, of course, that MacIntyre had made his name by diagnosing the incoherence of modern moral discourse. Once that had seemed exciting, but as I was drawn further into the world of moral philosophy, the implications became more troubling. Although MacIntyre did not himself teach us about his disputes with the logical positivists and postmodernists, that first course I took with him tracked the once-proud Western tradition as it broke down into an incoherent jumble of moralistic debris. We saw how Enlightenment thinkers, in shedding the robustly teleological moral framework of earlier eras, lost the context for making sense of human excellence and thriving. We considered how Kant and Mill tried to paper over the problem, and how Nietzsche, after seeing it with admirable clarity, opted for nihilism over the recovery of virtue.

It was an unhappy conundrum. MacIntyre set young minds ablaze, instilling a sincere zeal to join the quest for wisdom and the Good. But he also gave us reason to think that our odds of finding it were bleak. Morality is learned in the context of cohesive communities. How many of those do we have nowadays? His lectures were filled with references to fishing crews, small hamlets, religious orders, and other exemplars of the types of communities he thought human beings needed to thrive. After a while, one started to wonder: Must I become a fisherman or a nun to lead a good life? Clearly, modernity was fundamentally ill. Virtue was the cure. But we benighted moderns were hard-pressed even to understand what virtue meant, so what was to be done?

Pilgrims in a Modern Wasteland

In later years, I have found this to be the point where many people become disappointed in MacIntyre. They want answers, and all he could really suggest was that we keep plugging away. Do philosophy, build morally cohesive communities, cultivate the virtues, and help instill them in others. It didn’t feel like enough, coming from a man with such genius and prophetic grandeur.

In particular, all sorts of people have grown frustrated with MacIntyre’s reluctance to travel (or even bless) particular roads they considered promising. Why, for instance, wouldn’t he trouble himself more to lay out a Thomistic metaphysical grounding for his moral theories? Why wouldn’t he help articulate a more tradition-friendly version of liberalism (or, alternatively, a more unambiguous rejection of the same)? Why would he not speak more firmly in support of labor unions, the pro-life movement, any political party, or candidate? It seemed he was perpetually holding back, and admirers and critics alike still speculate regularly on the reasons. It was probably the Marxism of his youth. The Catholicism of his dotage. A stubborn Scottish streak. Prejudices inherited from the British empiricists. Seriously, the man had issues.

With me, all such critiques basically elicit a shrug. It would be hard to assess them fairly without a deeper dive into his (extensive) writings than I can manage right now, but to me, it seems like MacIntyre’s curious and sometimes-maddening qualities (the idiosyncratic mix of influences and commitments, the reluctance to “ally” with causes, camps, or schools of thought) made sense, given his rather severe view of the modern landscape and our capacity to find meaning and truth within it. He admired St. Thomas Aquinas immensely, but understood that we, hapless offspring of a benighted modern age, would have to aspire to less than his achievement. And yet, less needn’t mean nothing. It is always possible to pursue the truth and cultivate virtue from wherever one happens to be. 

Maybe MacIntyre avoided certain lines of enquiry because he didn’t like to charge headlong into questions he felt ill-equipped to answer. Perhaps he tolerated tensions in his commitments because he preferred that to a hobgoblin-like “foolish consistency.” Even when he was tweaking and needling people (questioning the existence of “rights” or throwing poxes on all political parties), there was a kind of Socratic impishness to MacIntyre’s style, consistent with the goal of trying to help people see how little they really knew. It occurs to me, too, that it’s fairly common to meet people who publicly ally themselves with Christians for dialectical or political purposes, while finding it difficult to make the trek all the way to the altar rail. MacIntyre had the opposite priorities. Good for him.

In the twenty-some years since I left Notre Dame, I have sometimes found that others are surprised if it comes up in passing that I was a student of MacIntyre’s. Apparently, I don’t fit their profile. This is honestly a little bit odd. I’m still fundamentally an Aristotelian Thomist, and an adult Catholic convert. My writing still largely revolves around questions of “virtue in context,” and the ways in which different patterns of living facilitate human thriving (or not). That’s all thoroughly MacIntyrian, so where’s the puzzle? 

Perhaps the problem is that I fail to project the profound anti-modern gloom that many associate with MacIntyre. I don’t hate free markets, or liberalism. I’m not utterly despairing about modernity. I rarely sigh for the medieval hamlet. Some MacIntyre devotees are much bleaker, which makes a certain sense given his harsh critiques of modernity. 

Truthfully though, I don’t remember him being especially doom-and-gloom. Nor did he encourage that in his students. This was especially clear in the second course I took with him, titled “Three Catholic Philosophers,” examining the work of three contemporary thinkers (Jacques Maritain, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe). We considered how they had addressed important philosophical questions, mainly by marshaling the resources available to them and working the problem. Clearly, MacIntyre admired these three modern thinkers, presented to us as worthy of emulation. There was a broader lesson there. Instead of sobbing over the decline of Christendom, why not get excited that there’s so much meaningful work out there, just waiting for a crew of baby philosophers?

Ave et Vale

In my senior year, Notre Dame opened a new building for the philosophy and theology departments, inviting one student from each major to speak at the dedication banquet. Though I didn’t mention him by name, my little speech clearly channeled MacIntyre: I spoke about Catholic universities, and their opportunity to embrace philosophy not just as a series of tricks and puzzles, but as a noble pursuit “with something more at stake.” I half hoped, half feared that he might be present. He was. But when he sought me out afterwards, and extended his hand, I knew it was all right: he was not about to take me to task for a sloppily-drawn distinction. “That was brilliant,” was all he said. He probably meant it in a British way, but I’m certain those were his exact words because even if I, too, live to 96, I will never forget that shining moment.

Soon afterwards, I graduated and went into the Peace Corps. I had just one final exchange with MacIntyre, via email, when he agreed to write in support of my graduate application, waving away my apologies for not paying the postage. (It was hard to buy American stamps in Uzbekistan.) I was overwhelmed with gratitude. But we never communicated again.

I wondered, after hearing of his death, whether that was ungrateful. But really, he just wasn’t the sort of man who craved sustained contact with a wide circle of people. Even when I was regularly in his office, there was hardly any small talk. All energy went into the elenchus. Occasionally, on a visit back to Notre Dame campus, I’d imagine myself walking unannounced into his office. “Hey, it’s great to see you, Professor! Let’s talk about Marx and cohesive moral communities.” If he did want to see old students, that might have been the preferred way. But even I wasn’t quite that audacious.

MacIntyre’s business was doing philosophy. That’s what mattered to him. He sometimes helped others to do it too, but afterwards, he simply sent his students off into the wide world to make whatever contribution they would. He had no interest in heading up a school or research program, but I don’t doubt he left his mark on far more people than have contributed to the secondary literature on his work. 

Anyway, that was me. At 20, he made me feel the tug of some high-minded philosophical calling. It’s been years since I thought much about that eager-beaver philosophy student, but on the occasion of his death, I look at my life, my faith, my writing, my classically educated children, and wonder: am I still perhaps on that mission?

Requiescat in pace, Professor MacIntyre. And thank you.

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It’s the honeymoon period, of course. Eventually there will be hard decisions to make, about China, recalcitrant German bishops, and issues not yet on the horizon. The new pope appears to be a mensch, with a talent for making more friends than enemies, but there will surely be severer tests to come. In a way, though, that makes the present moment especially revealing. A month ago, very few had heard of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost. Now people love him, simply because he is the pope. 

In the present case, this may be particularly true, for an interesting reason: far more than his predecessor, Pope Leo seems willing to be a pope. With Pope Francis, it always felt rather ambiguous. In the obvious sense, he was, of course, the pope, but he often seemed uncomfortable with the role. His iconoclastic stunts excited some people, and were frequently cast as an embrace of Franciscan simplicity, but the papacy isn’t really a dress-down kind of gig. Over the long term, it was demoralizing. Pope Leo has been stepping back into a more traditional papal persona, and Catholics are loving it. 

For the pope, symbolism matters. People want to know that they can trust him to lead the Church, and the symbols underscore that. So where Pope Francis refused to live in the Apostolic Palace, the pope’s traditional residence, Pope Leo is moving back. Pope Francis famously bristled when people tried to kiss his ring, citing “hygiene” or time constraints as excuses to avoid an old custom he obviously found distasteful. Pope Leo seems unbothered, not haughty but gracious and pastoral. Already he seems more comfortable in papal garb than either Pope Francis or the introverted and professorial Pope Benedict. He may be an American, but he plays the patrician well. The Italians are clearly buying it, anyway. 

The New World can have its patricians, too. Robert Prevost may be the first American pope, but he’s not the first man from this nation to appreciate the value of nobility. George Washington certainly knew how to be the statesman his people required. Abraham Lincoln cut an impressive figure. Perhaps, in honor of our first pope, Americans could reflect anew on this subject. We’re not constitutionally, or even Constitutionally, incapable of decorum, but our public square sometimes gives the impression that this is the Land of the Squalid and Home of the Vulgar. Is it possible to change this? Sometimes a touch of aristocracy is just what the world wants.

Papal Popularity

Enthusiasm for the pope is not a uniquely Old World phenomenon. Surveys suggest that Americans like him too, considerably more in fact than they like Catholicism. Only 34 percent have favorable views of Catholics generally, but the last three pontiffs have all enjoyed approval ratings among Americans that would make any president salivate. This was especially true of St. John Paul II, a true rock star with more than 90 percent net approval. But even the low-water mark is a solid 67 percent, which, tellingly, was Pope Benedict XVI’s approval rating in America immediately after his election, when the press was busily telling the public what a rock-ribbed hardliner he was. As the months of Benedict’s pontificate ticked by and the armies of ruler-wielding nuns failed to emerge, Americans softened on the German pope, and in the end, his numbers looked fairly similar to Pope Francis’. It seems Americans’ “generic pope” approval lingers between 70 and 90 percent.

Perhaps this is not, in the end, too mysterious. Popes can be popular today for the same reason that the First Lady generally enjoys much greater approbation than her president husband. Why wouldn’t she? With no real political power, First Ladies and popes largely get to be anodyne figureheads, congratulating Olympic athletes or comforting the afflicted after tragedies. Popes spend a lot of time blessing babies and talking about God’s love, which doesn’t grind many people’s gears. 

We’re talking about the pope, though. He was long despised, by Protestants especially, accused of being the Antichrist or at least the symbol of corruption, decadence, and mindless authoritarianism. Even half a century ago, many Americans still worried that Catholics (such as John F. Kennedy) were unfit to be president, given their ostensibly unshakeable loyalty to the Chair of Peter. But look! Today we like the pope! We liked him even before an American assumed the office.

And there is something extraordinary in this. The pope, more than any other living person, symbolizes religious authority, tradition, and orthodoxy. Popes are draped in symbols of authority: the crossed keys, the Fisherman’s Ring, the papal mitre. Do these seem like Americans’ sort of thing? But while “anti-papist” sentiment does still exist in this country, it seems increasingly to be an antiquated curiosity. Yes, I’ve known people who still see Catholicism as fundamentally unAmerican, viewing ring-kissing as slavish and creedal recitations as an insult to the sensibilities of free men. But these people are now an eclectic minority. Popes, to most people, are now fascinating figures, like the remaining European monarchs: living bridges to a pre-modern past that we don’t truly want to forget. That’s why a conclave remains global news (and not just in the Catholic world) as people thrill to the rich images: red robes, a blue wall, white smoke billowing. Popes are even better than European monarchs! In addition to being a head of state, the pope does have some real authority (of a spiritual and institutional kind), even if his army is unintimidating. 

The Excellence of Aristoi

The United States has no fond memories of kings, but even though our Declaration affirms that “all men are created equal,” Americans historically have not embraced equality in the same manner as the French Revolutionaries. Our Founders were mostly landed gentlemen whose political ideals left considerable room for paternalism. And even traditional aristocracy has had robust defenders, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, who famously declared that he “loved liberty but hated equality,” which for him did absolutely mean that the landed gentry of his native Virginia should be defended against the ravages of democracy. Randolph might look to modern Americans like a radical, but in his way, he was very much a lover of liberty. He had reasons for seeing liberty and aristocracy as a natural pairing, as many others have done historically. 

There are reasons to hate aristocrats, who can exemplify all the bad aspects of entitlement: laziness, snootiness, a sense that the world owes them everything. We’re never going to embrace a real caste system in America, nor should anyone want that. But there are some ways in which aristocrats can genuinely excel and serve society. For instance, they can make an excellent counterweight to tyrannical abuses of power. King John did not sign the Magna Carta because he was pressured by an angry mob, or by university students marinating in political theory. It was the barons, England’s powerful aristocrats, who laid the foundations for constitutional government. Aristocrats have some power of their own, but not absolute, which gives them both the means and the motive to prevent power from consolidating too completely in one place. 

They also tend to be natural conservatives. Their resources and leisure often enable aristocratic families to produce talented, accomplished, and high-minded men, but where university-based intellectuals tend to feel a strong pull from the left, aristocrats have a strong desire to protect the existing social order. They naturally understand themselves within the sweep of history, not in opposition to it. And this, in turn, disposes them to “protect the guardrails” of custom and culture in ways that meritocratic elites frequently do not. Reputation is worth a great deal to them, but they are generally close enough to lower-born people that they can be seen. They can be hypocrites, obviously, but at least aristocrats tend to want to preserve decorum and decency, which is more than one can say about most of America’s present elites.

Americans have always tended to prefer meritocracy or “natural aristocracy” to the more strictly hereditary forms. As Alexis de Tocqueville warned, the spirit of equality has given rise to a great deal of envy and social unrest, and sometimes the anti-elitist spirit is most at home in the gutter. But the opposite impulse still exists in American life. It can manifest in the most surprising ways, such as enthusiasm for the pope.

A New Nobility?

One cannot help but reflect that this shift may be especially welcome to Americans, given how base and vulgar our own political climate has become. Whether in the papacy or democratic politics, populism tends to be like a plate of pancakes: the first few bites are delicious, and the sugar rush is fun, but all too soon it turns into a stomachache. Truthfully, it must be awkward to be the pope in an age when even “black tie functions” generally really are not. I can feel some compassion for Pope Francis. But how much more impressive, then, that a poor kid from Chicago seems able to do it. 

It’s especially refreshing given the vulgar spirit of our times. Examples are legion but I will limit myself to one: a few months back, in the midst of DOGE’s whiplash-inducing round of Federal firings, I happened to see on X one day a meme posted by Elon Musk in which he had photoshopped his face onto an image of a boxer parading around the ring, flexing and celebrating his manly physique. This behavior isn’t in any way unique to him, obviously, and I care about bureaucratic bloat. But still, at that moment I could not help but feel a visceral disgust. Musk is the richest man in the world, with immense gifts. He could be magnanimous, inspiring, a great man. Instead, he thrills to the kinds of memes one expects from middle schoolers, as he drives a truck through the lives of thousands of Americans. Why must our most powerful and influential men be so unspeakably petty and small? 

We’re still getting to know Pope Leo XIV, but whatever else he might turn out to be, he does not seem petty, nor small. Especially moving to me is his willingness to sing at liturgically appropriate moments, in front of the world, as no recent pope has been willing to do. It’s very Augustinian, an expression of the dictum that “he who sings, prays twice.” His voice is good, but not of professional quality; Simon Cowell would eviscerate him on American Idol. But who cares? The world has plenty of performers already.

What we need is not entertainment, but morally serious men willing to exercise authority for others. Perhaps America can still produce such men. Let’s hope Robert Prevost wasn’t the only one.

The post A Touch of Aristocracy appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Family policy is certainly in vogue on the right, and presently enjoying a kind of curiosity bounce in leftist or centrist publications. Some of those pieces are tentatively favorable, while others indulge in some Handmaid Hysteria, presenting right-wing pronatalists as racists and misogynists secretly looking to enslave women and ensure Aryan dominance. It’s a little tricky sometimes to cut through the noise.

Demographic collapse is a real problem. It may really be one of the most significant variables that determines which presently existing societies will survive and thrive over the next century or two, and which will sink into obscurity. (If that’s true, there’s some good news: America is in much better shape than China. Perhaps Tyler Cowen is right.) Even so, I am of two minds about pronatalism’s present moment in the sun. Will it open fruitful new pathways or send us charging down dark alleyways? When it comes to babies, casual experimentation can be perilous. 

Welcome, Brave New World

Smarick is surely correct that the New Right has enjoyed success in “mainstreaming” pronatalism on the American right. Reading his piece, I smiled a little, enjoying a flashback to a time roughly a decade ago when I tried to publish a piece in a major right-wing publication defending the then-active Reform Conservative movement. Tea Party conservatism was still in the saddle at that point. With brusque condescension, a confident young editor advised me to spend some quality time with the Wall Street Journal to help rectify my glaring economic illiteracy. In those days, it was easy to write off pronatalism as some dopey mom fixation.

The New Right changed that. But we may now find ourselves in an unhappy situation. The same developments that made pronatalism discussable may also have undercut our ability to reach prudent conclusions. The New Right, as Smarick also acknowledges, tends to be very quick on the button when it comes to the exercise of state power. Especially in the realm of family life, this can be a bad (and perhaps egregiously bad) thing.

To err is human. To really foul things up, you need a government program. I have two major concerns about big-state pronatalism, but also a few ideas about the direction a prudent pronatalist society should go.

I want to be clear here that I absolutely believe that mainstream conservative pronatalism is driven mainly by a lively enthusiasm for babies, families, and rejuvenated communities. Somewhere in the bowels of the Internet, one could surely find pro-natalists with a bigoted, racialist agenda, but in general, the visible pronatalists are the ones who believe strongly that families and kids bring more meaning into people’s lives. Yes, they’re monsters.

There are two major issues that complicate the picture, however. The first has to do with advancing technology. The second relates to state subsidies. 

Technology has been advancing rapidly in the area of human reproduction. Things that a generation ago were still in the realm of lurid laboratory experiments are now touted by many as “rights.” Political pressure is mounting to throw substantial public money into subsidizing artificial reproduction, even as further breakthroughs loom on the horizon. No matter how one views IVF, surrogacy, genetic screening of embryos, artificial wombs, or a range of possible transhumanist innovations, it would be ludicrous not to acknowledge the moral and social gravity of these developments. No one should be indifferent to the question of where babies come from.

What do the pronatalists think of this brave new world of reproductive possibility? Really, there’s just a lot of disagreement. This is a movement that brings together many different kinds of people. Many are religious conservatives, who tend to frown on technological and transhumanist innovations as violations of natural law. (I’ll call these “natural law pronatalists.”) Others are less concerned about natural law but clearly sincere in their liberal commitments. (I’ll just call these “liberal pronatalists.”) Some are frankly odd. Their moral and political convictions are harder to parse. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the pronatalism of Elon Musk, for instance, or of Simone and Michael Collins’ “intentionally constructed, technically atheist” descendant-worshipping faith, but it’s very obviously not constrained by natural law or any other established ethical tradition. I’ll call these the “techno-pronatalists,” because they tend to be actively enthusiastic about the embrace of new reproductive technologies. 

Unsurprisingly, it is this last set of people that has recently had me paging through my copy of Matthew Connelly’s Fatal Misconception, a gripping book about the appalling atrocities committed in the twentieth century in the name of population control. I mention this book with some trepidation, recognizing that it is in some ways monstrously unfair to draw parallels with today’s pronatalist movement. Both natural law and liberal pronatalists would certainly be horrified by the human rights abuses described in this book: systematic campaigns of forced abortion, mass sterilization, and bureaucrats openly strategizing about who they consider worthy to breed. I do not for a moment believe they would sign off on such measures. And perhaps techno-pronatalists wouldn’t either. I just don’t know. But I do know this. When rapidly advancing technology combines with unrestrained social zeal and state power, things can go wrong. Sometimes very badly wrong. 

It doesn’t seem at all likely that Americans will be won over en masse to the Collins’ odd philosophical outlook, but one interesting point that emerges from Connelly’s history is the way that the architects of twentieth-century Malthusian horrors were in many ways quite diverse. They were united in their concern about “uncontrolled” human breeding, but beyond that, they had a range of goals and commitments. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that there were different “controlled breeding” camps that sprang up independently and then converged into a recognizable movement. Malthusians worried about too-rapid population growth, scarce resources, and “lifeboat scenarios.” Birth controllers like Margaret Sanger wanted to liberate women from the onerous demands of domineering husbands and relentless serial pregnancies. Eugenicists worried about the consequences for the human race if birth rates fell among the right kinds of people (educated, prosperous, white), while the wrong kind continued to breed with reckless abandon. The relative influence of each camp varied over time, depending on how they intersected with prevailing social trends. But they ended up becoming de facto allies, and together they shaped the policies of states, institutions, and transnational organizations in deep and ultimately horrifying ways. Thomas Malthus himself (a sober Christian economist who regarded even artificial birth control as unethical) would have been appalled at these applications of his theories, but once the Malthusian train had gathered momentum, it was hard to stop.

Natural law pronatalists, to their credit, have often been up-front about their opposition to IVF, surrogacy, and various transhumanist innovations. But there are many reasons to think that the techno-pronatalists have greater political influence at the moment. It’s reasonable to reflect at this juncture on what can happen when technology and social zeal fuse together in an unbounded social experiment. Natural law is the best protection against that kind of outcome. The second best is a general reluctance to use state power and resources to magnify whatever mistakes the human race is about to make.

Chasing the Stork

The “birth dearth” problem can be viewed from many angles, but one helpful framework presents it as a kind of free-rider problem. Raising children is an immensely costly and laborious task. In agricultural societies, that investment paid dividends relatively quickly as children helped out on the farm or in the family business. But rarefied labor markets largely neutralized that advantage, and modern societies then proceeded to make the problem much worse by implementing expensive entitlement programs, which redistribute the earnings of today’s workers to the poor, sick, and (especially) elderly. 

Children today require a much greater investment from their parents than in days of yore, because fruitful participation in a free society requires extensive education and formation. Babies have always been needy and unproductive, but kids in their tweens and teens used to be a real asset to the family farm or business, supplying low-cost, productive labor. Today’s teens may load the dishwasher now and again, but it’s understood that their education and general development need to be a parent’s priority, and while that attitude may sometimes reflect an excessive willingness to indulge the young, it goes much deeper than that. In a liberal society with a rarefied labor market, young people need an extended period of development to prepare for adult life. Parents today pour great energy into this because we know that our kids will soon need to go out and establish themselves in an immensely complex world that even we struggle to understand. We cannot simply advise them to marry their sweethearts and do “the done thing” (farming or mining or whatever sustains the economy in our particular region), because there is no “done thing” anymore. The ability to chart a course and put down roots on a unique patch of soil is itself, in the West today, the primary proof of adulthood. That’s difficult. The reality, then, is that raising successful liberal citizens is a hugely difficult and expensive task, but after completing it, parents pass into the care of the state on the same terms as elderly adults who did not raise new, productive citizens. Parental efforts are taken for granted, which helps to explain why fewer people are willing to step up to that plate.

In fact, the paternalistic state has expanded its reach to the point where we now view the state as a kind of “primary caregiver” to nearly all people in serious need, except children. We have made public provision in various ways for the old, the poor, the chronically ill, the unemployed or unemployable, and people with various disabilities. But babies, who are perhaps the neediest of all people, are still viewed first and foremost as their parents’ responsibility. Parent-child relationships have become a weird outlier, the one significantly onerous natural human tie that we still treat as presumptively binding in both law and culture. Not surprisingly, people are often reluctant to take on that obligation, and those who do may find themselves in a strangely liminal place. I know a lot about this, having once been the mother of four children under the age of six. It can be hard for non-parents, or even parents of more “normal” families (in terms of the number and spacing of children) to grasp what it’s like to be a circus-freak spectacle everywhere one goes. Black looks from all the store clerks. A small gasp each time the elevator doors opened. People actually calling companions to come over and gawk at “this lady with a zillion babies” as we walked down the street. I wasn’t an Octomom; I simply got married and followed out the natural consequences of that choice. But a once-normal life course has now become incomprehensible to many people, a kind of counter-cultural rebellion in itself.

This is clearly a problem. But if we conceive of it as a kind of multi-faceted free-rider problem, we will see two strategies, broadly speaking, that might help to address it. We can accept it as a reality that human relationships will become increasingly mediated, as natural obligations devolve to the state. In that spirit, we can work to realign parent-child relationships with those same trends, demanding a more aggressive state role in family life. Alternatively, we could view the shift away from organic human bonds as a negative development, and look for ways to recover more organic networks of human bonds.

Strictly speaking, these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, the state could spend more on children and less on the elderly. On one level, that makes obvious sense. But there’s a reason why spending less on the elderly is so difficult. Elderly people have come to rely on the state to meet their needs. They feel entitled to care. Realistically, the options for encouraging births on a federal level will mostly involve the creation of new entitlements, which is to say, further increasing our federal commitments by showering money on families.

Even leaving aside the magnitude of America’s existing debt, and the precarity of our present financial situation, there are reasons to worry that this is a bad idea. Decades of welfare-state experimentation have demonstrated time and again that dumping money on people isn’t usually an effective way to help them thrive. Entitlements create dependency traps, discourage adaptation and initiative, and erode “safety nets” of a more organic variety. Pronatalists tend to feel that families are deserving of greater support, and that caretakers should be more fittingly honored. I warmly agree with that, but I don’t think we’re likely to achieve it through handouts and government-distributed prizes. State-sponsored programs are likelier to turn all mothers into “welfare queens” in the eyes of their fellow citizens, further diminishing appreciation for the immense self-sacrifice that parenthood involves. The last thing we should want is to see childbearing reduced to a kind of bottom-rung option for people with poor employment prospects. (At the risk of sounding paranoid, I must note that that would also be the path most likely to reignite eugenics-oriented conversations in earnest.) 

Recovering natural human bonds is a tall order. Conservatives have been pressing that cause for decades, with disappointing results. On the other hand, pronatalists are playing a long game. And there are things that can potentially be done to facilitate family formation without turning parents into wards of the state. The key is to stop thinking of families first and foremost as needy people requiring help, or even as noble people deserving of honor. We should think of them first as productive people in need of a hospitable climate congenial to their worthy aims. As it happens, conservatives have already ventured some way down this road. It was called Reform Conservatism, and I personally still think that that playbook contains some good ideas.

In principle, pronatalism could be the sort of cause that brings conservatives of different stripes together in fruitful conversation. Demographic collapse raises some very practical, policy-related concerns (a shrinking workforce, a loss of dynamism, horizons dotted with ghost towns), but it also reflects deeper moral and spiritual problems that traditionalists can speak to with eloquence. Why are people losing interest in perpetuating their family tree and their civilization? Why aren’t we willing to do hard things anymore? Most important of all, generating a productive response to the birth dearth could force conservatives to recognize the foolishness of pitting pro-business and pro-family policies against one another. Commerce and domestic life each have their own rhythm, but they also need one another and should be mutually supportive.

Can the New Right inspire that kind of conversation? It would require certain qualities that they have not reliably displayed: humility about what policy can accomplish, a willingness to talk to free-market conservatives, an agreement that long-term goals should be prioritized over short-term victories and political theater. 

The stakes are high, though, and the moment is a dynamic one. So I will live in hope.

The post Pronatalism’s Brave New World appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Naturally, I am thinking here about Daylight Savings Time. The chattering classes have again suggested that we need to get rid of it. Do we? And is that really what Americans want?

Orange Juice in the Dark

Ever since 1966 (with a brief hiatus, described in a moment), most Americans have switched their clocks twice a year, falling back to Standard Time in November and flashing ahead to Daylight Savings Time in March. Many people find this inconvenient. Over 60 percent, in fact, tell pollsters they would prefer to stick to one time or the other. To the opponents of Daylight Savings, this looks dispositive. Americans are ready to throw in the towel.

Hold on, though! This picture is more complicated than it first appears. People do find clock-switching annoying, but they might not like the alternatives either. Without clock adjustments, we have to live with either darker mornings or darker evenings across the entire year. Are people really up for that? And do we agree on which one we should choose?

We do not. Asked whether they prefer Daylight Savings Time (“summer time”) or Standard Time (“winter time”), Americans are divided, though most surveys suggest that permanent Daylight Savings is the more popular option. It turns out, the question “Do you like switching your clock?” isn’t particularly helpful. Most people don’t, but they do still care about light. Some may not have reflected too deeply on how year-round Standard or Daylight Savings Time would alter their day. Others might opt for clock-switching over the unhappy situation of being permanently stuck in their non-preferred timeframe. 

The plot thickens further. Going by the numbers, it does look as though the most favored alternative among Americans would be a permanent change to Daylight Savings Time. Instead of “falling back” in the fall, we’d just continue on summer time across the whole calendar. Some Republicans, under the leadership of Marco Rubio, have recently made an effort to do exactly this, but the funny part is that this solution has already been tried, with unpromising results. In 1973, in response to the energy crisis, Richard Nixon signed legislation placing the nation on year-round DST in what was meant to be a 2-year experiment. At first, the measure enjoyed strong support (almost 80 percent), but those numbers plummeted to around 40 percent once Old Man Winter showed his face. It turns out people really don’t like dark mornings. They especially hate sending their kids off to school in the pitch black. Gerald Ford restored the old status quo after only one year, and we’ve been switching our clocks ever since.

Taking as premises that Americans 1) don’t love the status quo, and 2) didn’t like permanent DST when they tried it, one could conclude that it’s time to try the third option: permanent Standard Time. And indeed, a number of people have made exactly that argument, presenting Standard Time as the widely preferred choice.

It’s not, though. The numbers strongly suggest that a switch to permanent Standard Time is in fact the least popular option. Presented with three alternatives (the status quo, permanent Daylight Savings Time, and permanent Standard Time), the most definitive poll I can find suggests that Americans prefer the status quo to permanent Standard Time by more than two-to-one margins. In Northern climes, where I live, it’s almost four to one. 

Don’t let anyone tell you that year-round Standard Time is the people’s choice. It’s not. It’s the experts’ choice. They’re trying to sleep-train us.

Circadian Rhythms and Other Exotic Creatures

Sleep training, for those who don’t know, is the practice of trying to habituate a child to a regular sleep schedule. It’s normally intended for babies and toddlers, and like many parenting trends, it goes in and out of style. There are benefits, most obviously that it does sometimes succeed in getting babies to sleep regularly. For exhausted parents, that may be worth almost any sacrifice. But sleep training normally involves at least some use of the “cry it out” technique, wherein babies are left wailing alone in cribs until the Sandman finally comes for them. It can also leave families chained to a rigid schedule, rubbing outings and social engagements right off the schedule for a few years until the baby stops napping. Older siblings may find themselves sacrificing a lot of library trips and zoo days.

Parents do what they have to do. I never sleep-trained my kids, but I don’t judge other parents who did. Personally, I found that the super-strict schedule drained too much joy out of family life. I gave up a lot to be at home with my kids, and I wanted at least to have some freedom for sunset walks and summer afternoons by the river. But other families have different needs, and at the end of the day, everyone needs sleep. It’s not wrong to sleep train a 6-month-old.

Sleep training adults is another matter. Adults get to set their own priorities, which may or may not be built around hyper-regular sleep patterns. Sleep hygiene is a trendy health topic nowadays, and perhaps there are some good reasons for that; a civilization drenched in coffee and blue light tends to have a lot of insomniacs. Some redress may be in order, but when the sleep nazis start trying to rearrange everyone’s lives, I want to order them to their rooms for a nap. 

Daylight Savings, we are told, is bad for our health. But why is it bad for our health? There are really two pieces to that argument. The first is built around the ostensible hazards of clock-switching. Supposedly, there are more heart attacks and car accidents at the onset of Daylight Savings in spring. This is nominally true, but the effect is quite small, such that even the Mayo Clinic suggests that it’s not worth factoring. Anyone who literally has a heart attack over a lost hour of sleep is likely in very poor shape already, but in any event we make up for it with fewer coronary events than average in the fall, when we get the extra hour of sleep. This doesn’t seem like a major concern. 

The second argument claims that it is intrinsically good for us to align our daily rhythms with the earth’s tilt, looking straight up at the sun around noontime and sitting in darkness for a while before bed. Standard Time, by ensuring that it gets dark relatively early, would push us towards healthier sleep habits (assuming, of course, that we don’t do anything ridiculous, such as watching TV before bed, or turning on electric lights in our homes). Permanent Standard Time is recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which insists that our “natural bio-rhythms” would be better served by an early-to-bed-and-rise schedule. “Issues other than patient health are driving this debate,” complains AMA Trustee Alexander Ding in his statement on the issue. And you know what? He is absolutely right. People do seem to feel remarkably free to care about things other than sleep hygiene. 

In a characteristically devastating post on this subject, Nate Silver points out that permanent Standard Time would deprive the average American of 40 full minutes of waking daylight in the warmer months. Some of us really hate that idea. I suspect, as in Nixon’s abortive experiment, that the experienced reality would be even more unpopular than the idea.

The People’s Choice

The really interesting question is not, “Do you like switching your clock?” but rather, “What is your highest priority with respect to daylight and time?” Juxtaposing survey data against many anecdotal conversations, I would suggest that people mostly fall into three broad categories.

The first category of people really hate adjusting schedules twice a year. They side with the sleep experts because they themselves do live by their circadian rhythms. They might be parents with rigorously sleep-trained babies, or adults prone to insomnia. I’ve argued with people who complain that they’re tired for weeks after the clock change. This is astonishing to me, but who can argue with subjective experience? For this group, the top priority is not switching.

The second category of people strongly prefers to have light in the morning when they’re waking up and getting started on their day. The parents have particularly strong feelings, but many adults also dislike walking across a pitch-black parking lot at 8 am. Psychologically, light tends to signal to us that a new day is underway. Dark mornings can exacerbate Seasonal Affective Disorder. 

The third category of people loves light, and especially afternoon and evening sunlight. Lovers of outdoor recreation tend to fall into this category. Some people want significant time after work for a hike or a game of outdoor tennis. They want to enjoy evening walks or a book in an outdoor hammock. They aren’t comforted by the promise that sundown in the shoulder seasons will still be after six. If you get off work at five, that leaves no time for anything. Those gorgeous spring picnics or September evening hikes will be lost to us.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. A person can value more than one. But if you value all three you’re out of luck, because this is a pick-two scenario. By switching our clocks, we can have both the evening sunlight and a reasonably-timed sunrise in winter. But if we aren’t willing to switch we must sacrifice one or the other. It’s either dark mornings, or dark evenings.

I have never seen a survey that asked people to rank-order these priorities, and it’s interesting how an issue like Daylight Savings (which is seemingly so straightforward) underscores the major challenge of figuring out what “the people” really want in a given situation. I myself place the highest value by far on evening light; the thought of losing the gorgeous September afternoons and late summer evenings is heartbreaking to me. But I also find dark mornings depressing. I don’t mind early sundown quite as much in winter, when it at least feels cozy to be inside sipping hot tea. As a working mom of five, I’m indifferent to the clock-switching; I don’t think I’ve glimpsed the elusive “circadian rhythm” in over a decade. I remain, therefore, a proud and outspoken member of Team Status Quo. Go Daylight Savings! It gives us our light at the times when we can best use and enjoy it. 

Everyone does not have to share my priorities. I can be sympathetic to other concerns. But I do encourage my compatriots at least to reflect on the benefits of the present arrangement, and the costs of alternatives. Historical precedent suggests that dark winter mornings bother people more than they initially anticipate. Meanwhile, Permanent Standard Time, for most of us, would literally mean darker lives. Is this truly what we want?

What we definitely should not do is shrug off the things that actually matter to people in deference to rarified “sleep experts.” Sleep matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Even if we take it as a premise that physical health should be the highest priority, it’s far from clear that permanent Standard Time would be the overall best option. Exercise, outdoor leisure, and the enjoyment of nature are all very good for physical and mental health. It’s only reasonable to suppose that less evening light will mean less of those things, likely replaced by more screen-based entertainment. Will that be beneficial to Americans’ health? Will it even improve their sleep in the end?

Living in Minnesota, I love the long summer evenings. Minnesota parks, beaches, and hiking trails are full of people at 8:30 pm in July. My evening sailing club simply could not meet on summer weekday evenings if dark descended an hour earlier. Who wants to give up on those good times? But the problem would be much worse in shoulder seasons, when this soccer-and-football mom would be picking kids up from their sports practices in the already-gathering gloom. My cross-country runner would regularly be finishing his meets in the dark. On every front, this just sounds to me like a really bad idea.

Take a hike, sleep experts. Then back off and let other people enjoy their evening hikes too.

The post Sleep Training the American People appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Is anyone really surprised by this trend? As the nation polarizes and culture fragments, individuals have become very good at building “safe spaces” for themselves, in which their own views, preferences, and personal choices are continually affirmed. Anyone unwilling to play by the rules of our personal fiefdom can be shown the door. Much has already been written on the political implications, but at Christmas especially, it’s worth thinking more about the personal costs of this approach. Christmas can be a joyful time, but it can also be deeply painful for people estranged from loved ones. And there is ample evidence that Americans are suffering enormously from loneliness, isolation, and a lack of human connection. I find it particularly alarming to see kids slamming the door on their parents, because it’s hard to see how a culture can sustain itself when it places immense burdens on parents without recognizing any reciprocal obligations of piety on the younger generation’s side. Of course, the problem goes beyond that one case. A healthy life involves both chosen and given relationships, and kids should learn from a young age how to navigate both.

Not everyone agrees. Coleman, in his Atlantic piece, did present family estrangement as a sad phenomenon, but some people view it as a mark of modern liberation. We didn’t choose our family, right? So why do we owe them anything? A more recent piece in the New Yorker documents a sustained effort on the part of advocacy groups to normalize family estrangement, treating it as a perfectly legitimate choice for anyone who finds their relations more burdensome than supportive. Merry Christmas, America!

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

There can be serious reasons for refusing to see a family member. Perhaps they are violently abusive, or deliberately undermine children’s moral or religious formation. Some people have addiction or dependency issues, and demand that their relatives act as enablers. In our time though, it’s far more common for people to cut ties for interpersonal reasons. This key quote from Coleman should terrify all of us:

Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy to achieve … happiness. While there’s nothing especially modern about family conflict or a desire to feel insulated from it, conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth as it is commonly done today is almost certainly new.

Ponder that for a moment. People today like to see “the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth.” And this is “almost certainly new.”

People have always disagreed with their kin about questions of importance to all concerned, such as politics and religion. It’s painful when loved ones don’t support your life choices. And sometimes people just don’t get along! That’s life, and it’s not new; nearly everyone has experienced that to one degree or another with their kith and kin. 

But when a therapist explains that it is now common to see “the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth,” that’s something far more perverse. Instead of valuing relatives as people, some want to instrumentalize them as part of a personal narrative, severing relationships as an expression of their own identity. Of course, if that’s permissible, it could presumably happen to any parent, no matter how loving or conscientious. And this is exactly what Coleman has found. Though he agrees that parents sometimes find it difficult to understand or acknowledge how they’ve hurt their kids, or burdened them with unreasonable demands, he also writes, “My recent research—and my clinical work over the past four decades—has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”

It’s a strange thing. Modern parents invest massive time, energy, and resources into their offspring, probably more than at any other time in history. But the kids, once they’ve grown, are likelier than ever before to decide that their progenitors have failed so spectacularly that they don’t deserve even the occasional phone call. 

Maybe it’s not so strange, though. On further consideration, this is broadly consistent with the modern approach to all human relationships. The data suggest that twenty-first-century Americans are increasingly likely to cut ties with people who vote differently from them, or disagree on significant moral or cultural questions. One study from a few years ago found that a remarkable 41 percent of young Democrats claimed they were unwilling even to patronize the business of someone who voted Republican in a presidential election. It’s not just about the family reunions anymore; apparently there are people (and not just a few) who claim they won’t even buy a sandwich from someone who votes differently from them. (Young women appear to be particularly intolerant in this regard, especially if they lean left.) 

I’m guessing most people don’t really follow through on that, because the required research would be exhausting. But we do tend to know the views of our nearest kin, and they bother us a lot more than the butcher’s, baker’s, or sandwich-maker’s. In fairness, even among people who earnestly want to do right by their elders, it can be genuinely difficult in these chaotic times to agree on appropriate expectations, boundaries, and roles within families. Time has eroded many of the rules and customs that used to help people navigate familial relationships. We aren’t sure what we owe each other anymore, and that uncertainty opens a lot of ground for misunderstanding, resentment, and a general fraying of relationships. Still, it’s one thing to feel some angst in the lead-up to Christmas dinner, and another entirely to refuse to come.

A Plea for Piety

So even if you’re a fantastic parent, your kids might one day reject you in a gesture of triumphant self-actualization. But you probably won’t clear that bar anyway, because there’s really no such thing nowadays as good-enough parenting. Precisely because we now view attachment, nurturing, and education as crucially important to a person’s happiness and long-term success, parents are perpetually fighting an unwinnable battle. If your kids succeed in life, they’re free to leave you in the dust, but if they don’t, that’s probably your fault.

It should be said that there are real upsides to the modern stress on attachment and close-knit familial relationships. Fathers today spend considerably more time with their children than in days of yore. Mothers, too, are more actively engaged, prioritizing homework help, outings, and read-alouds over housework. Is anyone really opposed to this? People matter more than dusty mantelpieces. But the dark side of this holistic approach to parenthood is that virtually any adult defects can now plausibly be blamed on parents. “Bad childhoods” now appear to be responsible for an enormous share of the world’s problems, and who might we blame for those?

It’s a losing game for parents. If “happy, successful adult” is the understood goal, there’s essentially no limit to the service and sacrifice that can be taken for granted, while any failure may be deemed unforgivable. The problem is compounded by the fact that Americans, in general, are an impious people, prioritizing individual growth and opportunity over respect for ancestors or deference to tradition. At best, we tend to see our ancestors as the backstage crew who commendably laid the groundwork for our own existence. But we often take the immense work and sacrifice of earlier generations for granted, while hugging ourselves for shedding their benighted, shameful prejudices. Within that paradigm, generational differences are easily viewed as progress, while personal defects are relentlessly traced back to progenitors’ mistakes.

In the midst of the Christmas flurry, with presents to wrap, cookies to bake, and a zillion school concerts and pageants to attend, it’s hard for a mother not to remember those haunting words (“expression of personal growth”) and shiver. My five sons are not yet grown, so career choices, daughters-in-law, and voting all still lie in the future. I think we’re a happy family, but who can say how the kids will remember it? Christmas at the best of times is the year’s most stringent Mom Test, when mothers are expected to deduce and meet everyone’s expectations and emotional needs (including the ones they aren’t aware of themselves). Which particular disappointment or moment of insensitivity might my kids be describing to a therapist twenty years from now? 

Filial piety isn’t everything, nor should it be. Thinking back on my time in the Islamic world, I can think of several adults I knew who made dubious life choices (entering careers they hated or marrying people they didn’t particularly like) out of deference to their parents. I’m not sorry that American culture rejects that kind of slavish obedience, especially because, in my anecdotal assessment at least, elderly people turn into petty tyrants when their every whim is appeased to that degree. Older people have their own blind spots, and it’s generally not good for anyone if adult children are hamstrung by an elderly mother’s nostalgic daydream, or an elderly father’s inflexible understanding of “how our family does things.” We expect prime-aged Americans to build functional lives for themselves, so we must allow them some room to make their own adult decisions, even at the cost of disappointing their parents. 

Outgrowing a parent’s authority doesn’t mean outgrowing the relationship, however. If you can read these words, someone surely poured immense effort into feeding, clothing, and protecting you over the course of many years. They’re humans, which means they made mistakes. But without them, you’d never have made it out of diapers.

If the relationship is fraught, here’s some good news. Familial relationships don’t have to be perfect. For children as well as for parents, your best can often be good enough. This is the magic of given relationships: because they are rooted in something more than feelings, they can endure some hard ones. In a way, Christmas is all about a particular “given” relationship, and the lifelong effort to make the most of it. Perhaps that’s one reason why family reconciliation is such a common recurring theme in Christmas television specials.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

It’s human nature to crave companionship and intimacy. But most people historically have taken for granted that they need to maintain many not-intimate relationships, for both practical and moral reasons. This is not outrageous. It’s not morally compromising. Sometimes it’s just necessary to get along with people you find difficult (or at least endure their company for a while).

My experience suggests that women tend to find this more difficult than men. Women are more willing, in general, to sever familial ties, and while I do feel some shame on behalf of my sex, I also think it has something to do with the comparatively greater energy that women pour into “kinkeeping,” or maintaining the quality of familial relationships. Men are often willing to come to the family function, make some polite small talk, and move on with their lives. Women feel more compelled to soothe feelings and mend fences, and that can be a wonderful form of service, but if a relationship doesn’t seem fixable they may be more tempted to jettison it entirely. That’s often a bad mistake. Sometimes you just have to allow a thorny relationship to be thorny. 

This is particularly true in a rapidly changing world, where people’s lives do tend to be quite different from the lives of their parents and grandparents. In an agricultural society, a boy was expected to grow into someone very much like his father, and a girl like her mother. Today we have fewer cross-generational touchpoints, and that makes relationships harder even as our expectations for them grow more stringent. But we still need love and connection. We still have phases of life where we need other people to care for us. We still find life far more meaningful when we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.

Call your mom—no matter who she voted for. Family can be difficult, but it’s not the sort of thing a person should outgrow.

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Holiday Inn (1942) is the only Christmas movie explicitly built around the American calendar of holidays, and the time off from work, which is instead filled up with a kind of longing that doesn’t find its place in our ordinary activities. There’s much in the story about both modern America and the older America, with Irving Berlin’s then-famous mix of nostalgia and confidence. It’s a fun movie, and yet it’s now famous for introducing White Christmas, a rather lonesome Christmas song, which won an Oscar.

The director is Mark Sandrich, who made some of the famous Fred and Ginger musicals: Top Hat, The Gay Divorcee. His stars are America’s best popular singer, Bing Crosby, and America’s best popular dancer, Fred Astaire. They represent the two aspects of the pain caused in us by beauty, glamour and feeling. Fred Astaire is a star and therefore distant; effortlessly graceful, he floats where the rest of us move (not to say plod). Bing is all-American; his expression and control in singing are somehow also what we experience listening to him. Fred and Bing compete for the love of Marjorie Reynolds, but also for the hearts of America, in a light-hearted comedy that audiences have loved for more than 80 years.

Home and Work

On Christmas Eve, Bing and Fred find themselves in a song and dance show about winning over a woman’s heart with song or dance (Virginia Dale). The joke is that Bing thinks she’ll marry him and settle down on a farm, to live out the old American promise of property, freedom, and being one’s own man. But dancing is more exuberant, more victorious, more American. The lady runs off with Fred for a life of glamour on and off the stage.

Bing learns the hard way over the subsequent year that he’s deluded about life on the farm. He’s a songwriter, not cut out for the hard life. It’s one thing to sell himself on it, but quite another thing to experience it, so he ends up in the sanitarium. But that does give him an idea with which to ring in another new year: he wants to start the Holiday Inn, where guests come for shows evoking the national past and enjoy an all-American kind of entertainment. It’s a compromise between the life of the stage, which is unnatural (always putting on a show and never living the life one showcases), and the unglamorous life of commerce (which doesn’t have much song and dance to it). It’s also a compromise between the forward-looking American life and the need to remember the past, between the showcasing of talent and the piety toward the great past that makes America what it is.

Art always has to mix patriotism with a certain kind of daring—after all, without conflict, we seem to lose interest. Of the two men, it looks like Bing has it made. As a singer, once he sets up a business like the Holiday Inn, he’s lovable enough and a success. The story becomes his quest for love, which also turns out to mean finding out where he fits in a modern America, where women as well as men are free. All he has to do is wait for the right kind of woman to come along, whatever brings her in. What’s good for Bing is good for America—that’s what we mean, after all, by being all-American. And yet the musical numbers he delivers for the holidays invariably leave him out of the picture and he finds himself unsettlingly easily supplanted by a returning Fred, whose dancing captures the meaning of the songs and the attention of the audience. Fred is both more passionate and more of a schemer, and therefore a natural leading man.

This has to do with the only specifically cinematic moment in the story, the 4th of July number that includes a montage somewhat like a newsreel, not to say a propaganda movie. While Bing sings about freedom—mixing the old First Amendment freedoms with FDR’s new four freedoms—we see the industrial, technological marvels that power American war, especially planes and warships. This must have impressed audiences at the beginning of WWII—Holiday Inn was a very successful movie in 1942—but it now looks out of place in a romantic comedy. Meanwhile, the anxious Fred improvises a dance with firecrackers which suggests a humanity absent from patriotism—almost as though something about beauty or art escapes war, although of course it also suggests that artists are playing with fire.

Freedom and Love

Initially, Holiday Inn seems to be a story about the dangers that glamour poses to America. Hollywood and showmanship are indicted for the conniving and deception that is inevitable in art. Our temptation to beautify some among us, we may say, invariably tempts them to act as though they were free of moral restraints, and so they find they have to lie to have their way. Another way of putting it, to paraphrase a quote in the movie, is that in showbiz everyone loves everyone—there are no limits. Fred indeed plays a rather unscrupulous seducer, but it soon turns out the lady he stole from Bing has in turn stolen away with someone else. Meanwhile, Bing finds a nice girl (Marjorie Reynolds), less glamorous, more sensible, but perhaps just as talented. And they’re in love, they’ll marry, and they’ll entertain America. Freedom in that sense is happiness. But of course, there’s drama even in a romantic comedy musical, so he gets the girl, loses the girl, and has to win her over again.

But there’s something wrong, as I suggested, with Bing’s songs. They are nice enough, but he seems to want life to work according to script, as though expressing and eliciting sentiment is the same thing as life. As any good artist, he, too, is something of a plotter. He’s only sure that things are working out if he’s having his way and, having been traduced, he’s in no mood to take risks. He wants to defend himself and his fiancee from a repeat of Fred’s predatory love; having been abandoned, Fred wants a new partner, and there’s no denying that he and Marjorie dance beautifully together—they’re made for glamour, a possession of all Americans.

Perhaps, therefore, patriotism is a new defense for Bing, to replace the previous, unsatisfactory one (farm life) in an attempt to add something more solid to song and dance. Ultimately this is the law, the ground of our way of life. But as soon as Bing’s showbiz turns American history into entertainment, it in turn becomes obsolete, as America modernizes again, and Hollywood comes calling—showmanship itself becomes content for a new medium and we get to see how movies are made. Far from needing to go out to an inn, entertainment will come closer and closer to home, by the halfway house of the movie theater, where the Holiday Inn can be expertly recreated and preserved. That, too, is a kind of freedom from ordinary life, and again, freedom means beautification.

It’s of course his black maid Mamie, the voice of common sense, or perhaps of nature without the sophistication of modern life, that pushes Bing to go to Hollywood and save himself from misery by throwing himself on the mercies of the woman he loves. His scheming previously to keep her from the temptations of glamour was both inexpert and patronizing, so he lost her to Fred. The artificiality of showmanship fits Bing so well not because he’s glamorous, otherworldly, but because he’s a square and he’s on the level—he needs fair play. It is only in this concluding sequence in Hollywood that Bing figures out how to woo a woman, which is more or less the same thing as musical art, but with a smaller audience. That’s the remarkable thing about the story: it had never occurred to him how similar his work in entertainment and American life really were. 

The Arts 

A funny thing about Holiday Inn is that everything seems to happen twice. The singing of White Christmas, Bing losing his love to Fred, Bing meeting cute with Marjorie. Christmas Eve happens twice and the calendar year visual gag is repeated, too, juxtaposing the realities of work with the beautification of showmanship. Partly for that reason, it’s a film worth watching at least twice; the first time around, Bing looks innocent and cruelly put upon—the second time, not so much.

Bing is a superior artist and faces a problem all artists must now face: Is America some kind of sophisticated lie they tell to easily fool audiences, merely a song and dance? Or is it a reality they have to come to understand, including finding their place in it, which is much more at the mercy of audiences than spellbinding them? Orchestrating the national memory is no mere joke and it does suggest artists have remarkable power in America, but that it accrues slowly over time, as each generation looks to remember its formative years.

In the end then, keeping his distance from the country, from Hollywood, and from the girl turns out to be impossible for Bing. What seems like conventions of romantic comedy, or demands we as an audience make on our artists (such as giving us a happy end), turns out also to be part of the artist’s education for freedom, encouraging a certain daring and risk-taking which we all share in at least at a national scale. There’s always room for something new with us, and the surprise of Holiday Inn is that what seems most wholesome, folksy, and even naive is the proper way to explore the difficulties of modern life, including the problem of the artist in a commercial society.

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Nearly everyone was engaged by Murray’s argument. I’m glad now that I taught it, because I now have clear memories of my early impressions, and also of the way the book’s cultural significance morphed and evolved as the Republican Party reinvented itself a few years later. By that time I had quit teaching, replacing the paltry income by instead contributing to right-wing media. So I was well positioned to watch as Murray’s “bubble quiz” morphed from a fun conversation-starter into a class-war weapon. I remember vividly the days when a piece on electoral politics could draw a flurry of accusations from readers demanding to know if I had ever even met someone who drove a pick-up truck. (I have! My father used to drive me to school in a pick-up, and my husband’s truck is parked in our garage at this moment. But perhaps the actual vehicles are beside the point?) 

It was an iconic book for a tumultuous decade. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that Murray was in one sense prophetic, but in another way quite wrong. He saw the widening crack that is now a defining feature of America’s political landscape. That’s impressive. But he also misread America’s educated elites in significant ways, and accordingly made recommendations for cultural reform that now seem rather curious. Murray wanted elites to try harder to shape and maintain a common American culture that reflected their own values. He worried that they were too reticent to cast judgment on less-elite compatriots. Does that still sound right? The next crop of populists seized eagerly on Murray’s indictments of “bubbled elitists” while jettisoning all the complimentary and approving parts. Coming Apart now feels somewhat dated, but it’s worth revisiting nevertheless, as a cultural touchstone but also as a potentially helpful jumping-off point for a revised set of recommendations.

At this point, it’s hard to see a realistic path toward the common, middle-class culture that Murray hoped to recover. We certainly aren’t going to do that under the leadership of a shallow, technocratic elite. But it may not be so obvious today that we really need a common, middle-class culture. Perhaps cultural rejuvenation is still possible, under a different sort of cultural leadership. 

Remembering Belmont and Fishtown

For those who did not teach Coming Apart to several classes of undergraduates, a brief refresher may be in order. Using demographic data, Murray created two imaginary “towns” (of statistical persons), which he named “Belmont” and “Fishtown.” People with college degrees and white-collar jobs were placed in Belmont. People with no degree and a blue-collar or service job went to Fishtown. Murray then looked at statistical trends among these two imaginary towns, comparing 1960 and 2010. In Belmont, people were for the most part working steady jobs, establishing themselves as respectable citizens, and raising children in wedlock. Fishtown was rife with crime and illegitimacy, and its citizens had irregular, complex marital and employment histories. 

Murray found as well that “Belmont” and “Fishtown” were far more segregated than they used to be. In 1960, people of different backgrounds and levels of education tended to intermingle more, going to different workplaces perhaps, but living in close proximity and encountering one another in parks, churches, or community organizations. By 2010, you could guess a lot more about a person based on their address, and especially their zip code. Murray explained this through a story about “assortative mating” and meritocracy. Smart kids were going to top universities, meeting and marrying other smart kids, and then raising their families in affluent neighborhoods where everyone had fancy degrees and good jobs. Murray found that an enormous percentage of the wealthy and highly credentialed were living in a few super-elite neighborhoods (the SuperZips) where they interacted primarily with other highly credentialed, wealthy people. As Belmont and Fishtown became increasingly estranged from one another, class resentment grew, and Fishtown struggled to maintain social cohesion. 

Murray wanted elites to get further outside their comfort zones, and learn a bit more about the culture of Fishtown. But this mattered to him especially because he wanted elites to make a stronger effort to “rebuild the guardrails” of polite society, imposing the sorts of cultural standards that would help the residents of Fishtown to stabilize. In particular, he wanted them to bolster the respectability of marriage and community involvement, and stigmatize unemployment, crime, and illegitimacy. Murray was anxious for elites to “preach what they practiced,” upholding a certain social-moral structure through their behavior and influence. 

How does this book strike us today? Nearly fifteen years on, it’s obvious that Murray was right about many things. Nevertheless, paging back through it, it’s hard not to feel a bit of disappointment, not in the book so much as the right’s inability to move beyond it. Murray had predecessors, such as Christopher Lasch, but when Coming Apart hit the shelves his critique was still bold and helpfully provocative. It’s not anymore, and while I’d love to claim that years of wrestling with class concerns have given rise to a nuanced and constructive right-wing conversation, I’m not sure that’s true. It feels more like we weaponized Murray, and then got stuck on him. 

Coming Apart Gracefully

Over the last several weeks, as the left marinates in despair and recrimination, familiar figures have taken the stage to scold progressives for being snooty and out-of-touch. An oldie but a goodie, maybe? Undoubtedly many of these criticisms are fair, but it all feels so tired and trite. They took the bubble quiz, okay? They know who Jimmie Johnson is now! Last fall, Tim Walz donned red flannel and pretended to like hunting, and the right just snickered and called him a phony. I can’t disagree. But if a performative tribute to low culture isn’t what we want, perhaps we should better articulate what we do want.

In Coming Apart, the suggestion that elites should venture beyond their “bubbles” felt fairly benign, precisely because the book itself was remarkably free of class anger. Murray obviously admired both the educated classes’ talent and prudent life habits; indeed, his main concern was to make Fishtown more like Belmont! But in the intervening years, elites have done a great deal of preaching, shaming, and shunning, and this has gone rather badly. It certainly hasn’t moved us back towards a stable, decent middle-class culture. This should not really surprise us, because people standing on soap boxes tend to preach the things they believe. The inhabitants of Murray’s SuperZips never believed the principles he wanted them to advance.

The mistake is understandable in context. It’s perfectly true that the wealthy and privileged were in general the vanguard of the sexual revolution, gleefully tearing up established social norms that once bolstered order and discipline. (Sexual morals are the most obvious example, though the analysis could extend to etiquette, work habits, financial responsibility, and so forth.) Once they had experienced the chaos of the sixties, the divorce revolution, latchkey kids, and other delightful late-twentieth-century cultural innovations, the educated and affluent largely tacked back towards a “neo-traditional” lifestyle involving stable marriages, a strong work ethic, sound financial habits, and plenty of fiber (at least dietary, if not moral). Meanwhile, among the less-prosperous, employment rates stayed low, crime and illegitimacy high. Conservative cultural critics looked at this picture and asked: weren’t we right then, with our prescient warnings about libertinism and moral relativism? Now that you’ve found your way back to sanity, why not share your good fortune by helping to rebuild the old social norms? People need them.

It made sense within the neoconservative paradigm. Neocons were ever enthusiastic about bourgeois, middle-class uprightness, ideally bolstered by a staid religiosity. And this certainly looked like the ideal solution for Fishtown. The poor clearly pay a heavier price for weak discipline and imprudent life choices, not having a network of wealthy, connected people to bail them out of jail, co-sign loans, or call in favors if they need a new job. Life is harsher for the poor. A strong case can be made that the least elites can do is maintain a cohesive social world that instills good habits from childhood, instead of waiting for people to mess up and then dropping them into a maze of social workers, penitentiaries, and custody hearings. 

Here’s the problem. America’s technocratic elites never really returned to tradition. They came back to a moderately-traditional lifestyle, but remain, in their commitments the most progressive, impious, and irreligious people in America. They are less likely than anyone else to go to church, pray regularly, or make major decisions drawing on wisdom from ancient faiths. As the most vocal champions of gender ideology, they obviously haven’t re-embraced traditional sexual morals. They view American history with a jaundiced eye, and express sympathy with casual lawbreakers. The elites of the early twenty-first century did reinvent a lot of wheels, but they did it primarily for practical reasons. It’s good to stay married because divorce is painful, impoverishing, and very bad for kids. Discipline and a strong work ethic facilitate life success. Good credit is key for establishing yourself.

Even the neocons may have built their platform on a thinnish metaphysical foundation. But the SuperZip dwellers were much worse. They bolster their commonsense traditionalism with all manner of practical supports: marriage counselors, gyms, financial planners, wellness and accountability programs, excellent schools, and of course, an ongoing stream of material incentives to make the discipline feel worth it. Neo-traditionalism isn’t cheap! Meanwhile though, material comforts can never quite quell the desire for meaning, so elites have gone searching for causes, which give them a satisfying sense of doing things that matter. They invest in social justice crusades, environmentalism, and politics. They stand up for racial and sexual minorities, panic over climate change, and try to stop the rise of fascism. They build guardrails against toxic masculinity. 

It turns out, Murray’s clarion call was answered, in an unexpected way. In the years after Coming Apart, educated elites did start preaching more, trying harder to transmit their views and lifestyle choices to others. The result was what we often refer to as “wokism.” They were never going to preach a commonsense moral traditionalism, because they don’t believe in it. Even if we persuaded elites to make the plight of Fishtown into their cause, it’s hard to imagine life improving, because the strategies elites use to preserve discipline and productivity among themselves simply don’t work well for the less-prosperous. They’re too dependent on “support staff” and an endless string of incentives. It’s not feasible to supply that to everyone. (Even elites are arguably struggling with “overproduction issues.”) But ordinary people shouldn’t need high luxury or endless accolades to get jobs and stay married. People have done those things for centuries under conditions that even “poor” Americans would consider desperate. Ordinary people need church pews, not wellness programs. They won’t find too many of those in the SuperZips.

That Old-Time Religion

As the right basks in its recent ballot-box triumphs, I think it’s worth keeping in mind how rapidly electoral politics can shift. The right emphatically does not have a dominant lock on America’s political future. This shoe is likely to change feet in the foreseeable future, and it would be depressing indeed if the ultimate legacy of Coming Apart were a world in which the microphone is perpetually passed back and forth: first we fling epithets at the “bubbled elites,” then at the “deplorable rubes,” and on and on it goes. 

I don’t hate technocratic elites. I think, like Murray circa 2012, that we need them. I’ve lived in societies where one expects to get food poisoning roughly every week or two, and where trains hardly make a pretense of running on schedules. I’d rather be here. I’m grateful for the people who grade our roads and keep our store shelves stocked, and I don’t much care what they eat or watch on TV. I don’t much care if they’re richer than me. 

As cultural and moral exemplars though, our elites have failed pretty badly. The people who can help revitalize Fishtown are the ones still standing on firmer and more hallowed metaphysical ground. I’m thinking now about the sources of order and meaning that are older than wokism, richer than “mindfulness,” and more enduring than any accountability program. The great theistic faiths have weathered centuries and provided sustenance for people much, much poorer than almost anyone living in the United States today. Traditionalists, this is your hour. It’s time for some new preachers. 

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Fusionism Foundering

That’s not at all the picture one gets from recent right-wing discourse. The ”New Right” seems to see markets as a threat to families more than a source of support, while commentators at the Wall Street Journal look at sensible pronatal measures, such as child tax credits, and see nothing but lost revenue. This is distressing. The global fertility collapse is a real problem, not a fringe obsession of the manosphere. Failing to see this, when some nations have birth rates below one child per woman, is simply obtuse. A wealthy country like the United States can bolster its workforce a bit through immigration, but while naturalized citizens make many valuable contributions, a society that can’t raise its own citizens has a dim future. In a very real sense, families and businesses are the primary engines of prosperity, each ideally reinforcing the other. 

I don’t wish to be too hard on the libertarians, though. Pronatalists haven’t been especially friendly to free markets of late, or even to freedom more generally. Their messaging can sound uncomfortably statist, and sometimes even tilts into reactionary, chauvinist rhetoric that clearly won’t attract many Americans to the cause of liberty. It doesn’t have to be that way. In theory, most traditionalists do recognize, in keeping with principles of subsidiarity, that the family is a natural institution that should be left as free as possible from state interference, both for reasons of subsidiarity and for reasons of justice. That should be an entry point for appreciating the importance of liberty, but in practice, traditionalists often resent creative destruction and worry about the ease with which liberty bleeds into libertinism. In our own time, right-wing populists have largely given up on the old Reaganite message about moral responsibility, which is basically the glue that holds freedom and family together. 

That uncomfortably demanding plank has been replaced by a blistering critique of the American elites who have ostensibly ransacked the American family by failing to “preach what they practice.” This, in turn, gives rise to a demand for a new social compromise that can restore the “great American middle.” There’s no way to make freedom a central plank of that platform. You need a nanny state (or a patriarch state?) to broker that kind of New New Deal, and indeed, many on the new right have called for exactly that. It would be unfair, therefore, to attribute the decay of fusionism to “free market fundamentalism.” Traditionalists have certainly done their part to sabotage it. 

A Society of Welfare Queens

Haven’t America’s family values frayed rather badly, though? Isn’t there a real need for family policies that try pro-actively to bolster a traditional family structure? My flyby reference to the abandonment of moral responsibility is perhaps a bit tendentious, because there are far more sympathetic ways to make the case for a pro-active family policy. If the traditional family is decaying, tracing the sources of that decay and addressing them might be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We can’t necessarily entrust that sort of job to laissez-faire libertarians who were always inclined towards indifference when it comes to the ordering of American domestic life.

One of the New Right’s most popular lines of argument, enthusiastically promoted by Tucker Carlson (among others), claims that family life was destroyed by the combination of two malign forces: feminism, and the collapse of American manufacturing which deprived men in the heartland of decent jobs. The solution, similarly, is twofold: a return to traditional gender norms, and a re-embrace of industrial policy, which would ostensibly revitalize the family by enabling men to be reliable breadwinners. The logic is easy enough to grasp, but hard to credit after an extended period in which the labor market has been red-hot especially in the trades, and in manly jobs such as roofing and policing. Diehard proponents of this approach sometimes try to salvage the argument by feebly protesting that coastal elites don’t adequately respect tradesmen. That’s probably true, but if we’ve reached the point where manly men in the heartland can’t work or support their families without applause from urbane Manhattanites, industrial policy won’t save us.

Stronger lines of argument do exist. It could be that families need more help nowadays for reasons that are rooted in the very structure of our society. Raising kids is far more expensive than it used to be, and not just because they have zillions of toys. In a liberal society with a rarified labor force, kids need extensive education and formation to have a strong chance at a successful life. They aren’t profitable from young ages, as kids used to be in agricultural societies, and as women have assumed a robust role in the workforce, mothers have paid an increasingly heavy opportunity cost by leaning out to care for children. Even after the kids grow up and start earning, those earnings will be taxed and redistributed, enabling the childless to reap the rewards of parental labors in their old age. It’s a badly-devised system that is now so firmly entrenched that neither party has the political will to change it. Accordingly, it may seem that more redistribution is the only realistic fix. This is presumably the sort of thinking that recently led Ross Douthat to declare that family policy will need to become “a centerpiece of the modern welfare state” if it is to have a meaningful impact. 

It would be hard to overstate how much I hate this idea. I understand the argument for it, but the idea that families should come to be seen as presumptive wards of the state is so deeply distasteful that I could almost be persuaded to give the industrial policy another look as an alternative. Recent history strongly suggests that flooding any population with subsidies changes motivations, sensibilities, and behavior in far-reaching ways, tamping down independence and creating a paralyzing foundation of entitlement. People within defined state protectorates learn to petition the government for solutions to their problems, instead of adapting to changing circumstances. Subsidies inevitably create a forest of moral hazards. 

Haven’t we learned this lesson by now, after struggling for decades to find better solutions to poverty traps, elderly infirmity, and disabilities? Even when there are very strong reasons for showering a particular group of people with taxpayer largesse, the negative externalities are always significant. In particular, it seems to me that sub-groups that rely heavily on government subsidy tend to be marginalized in terms of their cultural influence and respect. It’s hard to measure this with precision, both because cultural respect is not easily quantifiable and because there is no clear baseline for how various groups should “naturally” be viewed. An extended conversation would have to consider the situation, not only of low-income Americans, but also of indigenous people, seniors, military veterans, and others. But I think, in the final analysis, the evidence strongly suggests a negative correlation between government subsidy and cultural capital. Is it really necessary to inflict that handicap on parents? 

Where family policy is “a centerpiece of the welfare state,” raising a family is likely to be seen as a fallback option for people with few marketable skills. Wealthy elites might go on raising a small number of silver-spoon babies, with help from nannies and other support staff, but high fertility is likely to be strongly associated with dependency, lack of ambition, and unemployment. It’s a painful line of reflection for those of us who have argued for years that maternity should be more respected. Must we all become welfare queens?

In fairness, Douthat did not definitely endorse the family-policy-as-welfare-centerpiece option. Rather, he suggested that Americans might face a binary choice: either we can flood families with state benefits or we can wait on “some new cultural-technological-religious dispensation” to reverse cratering birth rates. I would gladly get behind the second option. But perhaps it is possible to facilitate such a transition with more than our thoughts and prayers. In fact, conservatives have been down this road before, though the last such effort was effectively tabled in 2016, with the rise of the populist right. Maybe it’s time to pull that old agenda out of mothballs. 

Reform Conservatism 2.0

Suppose we viewed families, for policy purposes, more on a level with businesses. Like a successful business, a family is a productive enterprise making a vital social contribution to society at large. Like businesses, families are likelier to flourish if we respect the principle of subsidiarity and allow them wide latitude to order their own affairs. The state should be wary of both aggressive oversight and the sort of “help” that distorts incentives and deters healthy innovation. But it can still take steps to encourage a thriving economy, by creating a climate in which it is easier for entrepreneurs to acquire needed capital and make decisions in support of their worthy goals. A “business-friendly climate” is understood to imply low taxation and a relative lack of onerous regulations. A “family-friendly climate” could be similar. Give families significant tax relief, and try to clear the way so that it is easy for both markets and private or local institutions to meet their needs. This sort of approach was explored in the Tea Party era under the name “Reform Conservatism.” At that time many populists rejected child tax credits as excessively generous to families; today right-wing populists seem eager to commandeer the entire US economy in the interests of making it more “family-friendly.” Anyone interested in meeting in the middle?

It’s hard to give hard numbers, for the simple reason that our nation is already so indebted. However, as a long-haul strategy, legislation along the lines of Mitt Romney’s proposed Family Security Act would be worth considering. This more than doubles the existing child tax credit, gives benefits for every child (regardless of family size), avoids marriage and work penalties, and leaves the state neutral with respect to caretaking decisions. (That is, families receive the same benefit regardless of whether they rely on paid childcare, leave a parent at home, or ask grandparents or others to help care for children.) Further discussion of the issue can be found in the 2015 Room to Grow series, put out by the American Enterprise Institute in 2015, and still remarkably insightful and thought-provoking.

The logic of the middle-ground solution presumes that, like the business-friendly climate, the family-friendly climate is likely to build on itself by naturally drawing the cooperation of businesses and ground-level organizations. In most cases, child tax credits probably won’t make a dispositive difference in people’s calculations about how many children to have. But if parents have more money, markets will move to meet their needs, supplying family-oriented products and entertainment. Over time this could move the birth-rate needle. When urban neighborhoods are full of fine-dining restaurants, bars, salons, and other adult-oriented entertainment, prime-age adults may not be eager to trade their single (or DINK) lifestyle for sandboxes and sippy cups in the suburbs. But family life can be fun too, and if some of those adult establishments are replaced by ice cream parlors or laser tag adventure parks, that may shape people’s sensibilities in subtle but important ways. It’s dreadfully lonely to be the only person in your social circle with young children, but if many people have kids, social life tends to adapt to accommodate them. 

If the goal is to foster a more family-friendly climate, it may make sense to draw a sharper separation between fully refundable and non-refundable child tax credits. Pronatalists today tend to push for the former, partly out of an admirable desire to help poor families, but also (I suspect) because many actively want to blur the distinction between relieving tax burdens and directly subsidizing family life. A freedom-friendly family policy would move in the opposite direction, treating family policy and poverty relief as more distinct initiatives. This is not to deny that poverty relief raises particularly strong moral concerns in households with children. But alleviating bare needs and facilitating a thriving family culture may turn out to be somewhat distinct goals. Falling birth rates are not primarily a feature of poor nations, but of wealthy and developed nations. A successful family policy should be responsive to that reality, recognizing that Americans today forego childbearing less because they worry their prospective children might starve, and more because they struggle to see a path to a style of family life that seems both respectable and appealing. 

A prudent family policy should think about the options open to parents, and try to clear the way to developments that would increase them. Churches are and remain a vital source of community for families, so religious freedom is an essential component of a family-friendly culture. Policy planners should also be especially interested in forms of deregulation that can open employment and housing options for families. Building regulations can be pared down in ways that will increase the supply of affordable housing. Telework and gig work are often great options for parents and caretakers, so labor laws should be careful not to foreclose those opportunities. Many of these measures can be taken without invasive state action, simply by considering (and sometimes prioritizing) the needs of families in different areas of policymaking. 

School choice is another family-friendly initiative that has already built tremendous momentum in many areas, but that needs to be further expanded (especially in blue states). The federal government needn’t wait on the states: it could help parents nationwide by permitting them to deduct school tuition payments from their taxable income. Where public school systems are failing, networks of private schools can supply essential support for families. Even if poor families can’t benefit immediately, this represents the right sort of organic movement, which could over the long run expand its reach to help more people.

Insulting “childless cat ladies” is cheap and easy, but that kind of rhetoric is ultimately counterproductive. If we really want more babies, the disaffected young men and childless cat ladies will need to be persuaded to marry one another. Do we seem to be advancing towards that goal? How can we possibly get there without persuading young people that marriage and parenthood are worthy life goals?

A freedom-oriented family policy stands a much better chance of generating a family culture that is appealing, honorable, and sustainable. Think about it, conservatives. Maybe it’s time to give the old Reformocon agenda another chance.

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We talk about current events and what they mean in the context of history. This is uncomfortable because I don’t know exactly what they mean, which is the kind of reality that can be gracefully massaged in conversation with a talk radio host but not with your own kids. I’m frequently tempted to change the subject. (Dessert, anyone?) But I’ve come to understand that there are good reasons why military history is fascinating to boys. It raises crucial questions about virtue, self-sacrifice, civic duty, and manhood. I’d like to think that a nuanced exploration of the subject may make them less susceptible to empty, jingoistic rhetoric—while deepening their understanding of honor in ways that apply to more than war. At the same time, these conversations remind me that I am truly proud to be an American. In the Peace Corps, I remember sparring amicably with Uzbek friends about Soviet military history, and realizing how hard it would be to get perspective on the (harrowing) losses they suffered in the brutal conflict between Hitler and Stalin. On patriotic holidays, I’m grateful to be able to talk to my sons about George Washington, not Georgy Zhukov.

This point was vividly underscored when we recently read The Mask of Command, by the late John Keegan, as family read-aloud. Keegan is a British military historian whose earlier classic, The Face of Battle, explored the experience of the common soldier through the lens of three famous battles (Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme). The sequel considers the psychology and vocation of military commanders through profiles of four defining figures: Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Adolf Hitler. All of them are interesting, but I submit that the final two essays, on Grant and Hitler, teach certain lessons far better than a thousand warnings against “toxic masculinity” or “Christian nationalism.” 

A Place in History

Why does Keegan, a Brit, choose Grant for the hero of his book? The selection is not shocking, but neither is it an obvious choice. He was a victorious general and a US president, and his face appears on the $50 bill. But he’s not someone we regularly commemorate in story or song. Nobody I know has ever named a son “Ulysses,” and we tend to remember Grant’s defects as much as his strengths. People tend to know him as a high-functioning alcoholic who, from a military-historical perspective, won his war mainly by taking proper advantage of the Union’s enormous advantages. The Southern generals (especially Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee) are remembered for their military brilliance, while Grant is frequently cast as just the man who managed to be competent where feckless predecessors had failed. 

Keegan doesn’t agree with this assessment. Lee had a gift for Napoleonic strategizing, but in Keegan’s view, Grant was the one who truly grasped the nature of modern warfare. It’s not surprising that epic storytelling has focused more on the tragic romance of the South’s defeated Napoleons, but Grant’s “unheroic leadership” (Keegan’s term), prosaic and practical as it was, had its own peculiar excellence. He had an extraordinary ability to distill the strategically and morally essential features of a situation, and to focus unwaveringly on what needed to be done. And he didn’t much care whether anyone composed anthems about it.

Hitler’s selection as villain is utterly unsurprising; he is surely the most universally reviled human being on the planet today. That (dis)honor is merited. He started the world’s deadliest war, and orchestrated genocidal war crimes on an unprecedented scale. Hitler was a bad person. Given the obviousness of that starting point, though, the portrait Keegan paints of him is arresting and in some ways startling. The reader may actually be moved to a bit of sympathy for the alienated young striver who, in the First World War, managed at last to break into the social class where he had always felt he belonged, only to see his new friends promptly slaughtered at Flanders. Everyone knows what Hitler hated, but Keegan fills out the picture by telling us what he loved, which is ultimately more revealing. Both Hitler and Grant were patriots, and both thrived on meaningful activity and a sense of purpose. Grant found those things in the world. Hitler found them in his own megalomaniacal vision of what the world ought to be. 

That difference would not have been obvious, however, in Hitler’s early life, when he might have seemed more prepared than Grant to embrace commitment and self-sacrifice. It would in some ways be comforting to see the young Hitler as a budding sadomasochist or psychopath, on his way to becoming a Caligula or a Saddam Hussein. Even in his awful maturity, however, he doesn’t seem to have reveled in rape or torture. His motives are disturbingly comprehensible, and even familiar: at the start of the First World War, he threw himself into a cause with full patriotic fervor and conviction, believing (not unreasonably at the time) that Germany was the world’s elite military power, destined to stand astride Europe. As a Meldegänger (messenger), Hitler regularly placed himself in mortal peril to deliver crucial information that, among other things, prevented advancing German troops from being obliterated by friendly fire. His superiors were unstinting in their praise. The young Grant, by contrast, attended West Point but graduated in the lower-middle end of his class. He served with some distinction in the Mexican-American war, but a bad conscience over that war (which he saw as unjust), and severe homesickness (especially for his wife) sent him into a spiral of heavy drinking, and he ended up resigning his commission and returning to the Midwest. The outbreak of the Civil War found him scratching out a bare living as a store clerk to keep his children fed. It’s not entirely surprising that George McClellan refused to renew his commission at the start of the war.

There’s a curious symmetry to the two men’s biographies: the young Hitler fighting on the losing side of a war he supported passionately, while the young Grant fought on the winning side of a war he regarded as wrong. Both then moved into some years of obscurity, when no one would have guessed at their ultimate place in history. Grant, however, spent those years trying to live decently as a husband, father, and upstanding citizen. Hitler spent them developing his delusions of grandeur, mastering the art of propaganda, and considering how to channel his rage and resentment into a rematch of the war Germany had lost. He muscled his way into the annals of history. Grant allowed a world-historical role to find him. 

A Clarity of Purpose

Grant was neither charismatic nor charming. He detested pomp, speechmaking, and all forms of ostentation. He lived simply while on campaign, mostly preferring minimal furniture and simple fare. (But he did apparently have a taste for oysters. As a fellow oyster-lover, I enjoyed that eclectic detail.) Everything about Grant’s unassuming minimalism spoke to an individual who was self-directed, comfortable in his skin, and so aware of the extent of his abilities that there was no need to embellish. He also knew his own mind, and was able to hold that clarity even in the midst of tremendous tumult. America’s bloodiest conflict was, in his view, a detestable necessity, but unlike the previous war, it was in fact necessary and just.

So he won it. He did it because he could, and because he understood why it needed to be done. That ruthless efficiency and clarity of purpose permeated everything Grant did as a general, from his communications to his officers (always concise, clear, and delivering exactly the needed details) to his strategic decisions. He was a master of logistics. He had a spectacular memory for terrain and troop movements, and a shrewd ability to read both his own subordinates and enemy commanders. He seemed impervious to the psychological games that Robert E. Lee played so successfully with his predecessors. He understood, too, that he commanded a democratic army. Draconian efforts to deter desertion were impractical for Grant, so it was necessary to factor his soldiers’ moods and wishes into his strategic calculations. 

In the midst of such an ugly and emotional conflict, this extraordinary focus enabled him to win the trust and admiration of both his subordinates and his enemies. His compass was not clouded by the fog of war. Then, at Appomattox and beyond, Grant’s magnanimity made it clear that he had never been motivated by a hunger for domination or a thirst for revenge. Not for nothing did he name his favorite horse “Cincinnatus.”

Against that backdrop, the grotesque dimensions of Hitler’s demagoguery are particularly glaring. Though he was masterful at inspiring devotion in the distant masses, the people in his immediate orbit were constantly managing him, struggling to keep him on task and scrambling to adapt to his mercurial moods. He had fractious relationships with his generals. Quite often he would ignore their advice and then blame them when his orders went awry in predictable ways. Lower-ranking underlings were less likely to be fired, but their jobs were not enviable. Keegan tells of late nights at his headquarters in Rastenberg and Vinnitsa (far from the battlefields where his soldiers were killing and dying) where he forced his subordinates to sit awake at all hours, eating excessive quantities of cake and laboring to feign interest while he held forth with sophomoric opinions on everything under the sun. A number of young women were stationed at headquarters, ostensibly as secretaries but mainly because he enjoyed being flattered and fawned over. His war councils frequently degenerated into tangential rambles; although he was obsessed with victory, Hitler found it increasingly difficult as the war went on to focus on significant practical details. At the same time, he was unwilling to recognize his limits and delegate authority to men of greater ability. 

Grant, in short, inspired respect in friends, enemies, his soldiers, and the broader public. Hitler used cake and fear to manufacture the social acceptance he continued to crave. 

A Noble Fight

One hesitates to reduce two such complicated men to a simplistic aphorism, and yet one immediately springs to mind. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Grant lived that truth, won his war, became the 18th US president, and died at 68, surrounded by loving children and grandchildren. Hitler failed utterly to achieve any of his life’s objectives. He lost his war, incurred the hatred of the entire world, and died alone by his own hand. (Oddly, he had a vegetarian spaghetti lunch served immediately before going off to shoot himself in the head.)

That failure was not merely moral. Hitler failed by every metric that mattered to him personally. How do angry and alienated neo-Nazis manage to overlook this point? His strategic military choices were erratic at best. His personal life was pathetic. He presented himself as the savior of Germany, but ended up subjecting her to even worse humiliations than the ones that had scarred his own youth. To his beloved homeland, he delivered yet another lost generation. 

Near the end of his life, Keegan believes, he realized the awful extent of this failure. Over just a few months, he deteriorated to an astonishing degree, reaching the point where he could hardly walk across the yard without stopping to rest. In the daytime he was distracted and puffy-eyed; insomnia plagued his nights.

For Hitler’s supreme command had been—and may have appeared to him as he passed it in retrospect—no more than a charade of false heroics. It had been based, as he himself has trumpeted in his days of power, on the concept of lonely suffering, on his internalizing of his soldiers’ risks and hardships in the fastness of Rastenburg and Vinnitsa, on the equation of their physical ordeal with his psychological resistance, on the substitution of ”nerve” for courage, ultimately on the ritual of suicide as the equivalent of death in the face of the enemy.

No earthly punishment could be adequate for crimes as monstrous as Hitler’s, but it’s terrible nevertheless to imagine such a grim moment of truth. Who could possibly want to be Hitler? 

Grant, for his part, has the rare distinction of being a successful military leader who was inadequately appreciated by later countrymen. It seems unlikely he would have minded. He knew what he did, and he was the sort of man who always valued his wife’s good opinion more than any journalist’s or historian’s. For our sake, however, it is worth looking back and remembering, particularly because there is something distinctively American about Ulysses S. Grant. Even in midst of war, he distinguished himself as a republican leader, and a lover of ordered liberty. He drew his strength from his natural connections to family, friends, and the Midwestern soil, and from a nuanced appreciation of what was best in the American political tradition. Autocracy was completely foreign to his nature, and that made him a better man, and a better military leader.

For boys especially, the lessons are crucial. It’s not wrong to love one’s country, but that love needs to be tempered by other loves, and by a recognition of moral constraints on what can be done in pursuit of national greatness. It’s not “toxic” to aspire to manliness, but great men are guided by a prudent appraisal of what a given moment requires. All boys, perhaps, are on some level spoiling for a noble fight. But noble fights are earned, not demanded, and certainly not chosen on one’s own preferred terms. 

This is not a uniquely American truth, but Americans have been more successful than some at living it. If a British historian can see that, then surely we can too.

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The fortunate ten-digited person is Lucy MacLean, heroine of Jonathan Nolan’s new television series, set in the universe of the popular video game, Fallout. Lucy (played by Ella Purnell) is one of three major characters whose paths intersect and crisscross through this zany, whimsical, blood-and-destruction-soaked story. For those unfamiliar, the game (and show) takes place in an anarchic, post-nuclear-apocalypse world where various powers fight and scrabble for control. In the crumbling remains of L.A. and Las Vegas, we encounter a range of colorful figures: zombie-like “ghouls” who somehow survived the blast as super-strong-and-long-lived mutants, sheltered “vault-dwellers” who managed to retreat to self-sufficient underground communities, and the “knights” of the quasi-medieval “Brotherhood of Steel,” sauntering around in Ironman-like super-suits with their “squires” trailing slavishly behind. 

Don’t get too attached to those pristine hands. Lucy’s manual integrity won’t survive the first season, and she’ll see things much worse than severed fingers. There’s no shortage of death and disfigurement in Fallout, but it’s all in good fun and serves as a wonderful distraction from the gloom of the real news. My husband and I tore through the show in a week, leaving me musing on a perplexing question: What makes this apocalyptic world so appealing?

It’s the End of the World as We Know It …

For some, the answer might seem obvious. Violence is thrilling! Historically, this time-honored truth has produced such crowd-pleasing entertainments as jousting, gladiatorial contests, and public executions. The makers of modern entertainment have shown time and again that they are happy to cater to this taste. 

I myself, though, do not have a particular appetite for visual violence. I can tolerate a fair amount in service of a great plot, but it’s not something I seek out. For me, this is the test: Does the violence help tell a good story, or does the story feel like a delivery device for giving graphic-violence addicts their fix? I loved Justified and The Wire, but I abandoned Game of Thrones after a few seasons, weary of all the gratuitous sex and gore. (I did cave to peer pressure and watch the final season.) 

Nor do adapted video games often make my must-watch list. I have distinct memories of an evening many years ago when a romantic interest planned a date and opened the evening with, “We’re going to watch a great movie, truly the best I’ve ever seen, based on a video game.” I’ve forgotten the title, but as lasers and alien corpses proliferated, I stopped looking for a plot and spent the time musing on the possibility that, just perhaps, this wasn’t a love for the ages.

Fallout has a plot. The three main characters complement one another well, and it clearly wasn’t a mistake to cast Walter Goggins as Cooper Howard, the fiendishly fascinating character whose back story supplies the basic narrative of the Fallout world. The story is well-paced, not too predictable, and full of dark humor that keeps it from becoming excessively grim. 

The real pleasure of Fallout’s world, though, can be found in the creative, often twisted but not too bracing, venue it offers for reflecting on what endures through cataclysmic change. What survives beyond the end of the world? What things do we want to see survive? For all its wacky and weird elements, this universe basically testifies to the fundamental stability of human nature. Dropped into a broken world, the characters quest after goods whose value modern viewers will readily understand: family, home, ordered liberty. In short, they want what we want. This makes it easy to root for them, and even though their world is broken in some dramatic ways, it is also blissfully free of certain forms of brokenness that often feel, in our time, like serious obstacles to attaining those goods. (More on this below.) It’s harsh soil for civilization, but fertile ground for imaginative heroism. 

The show’s creators lean into that sense of epic adventure by filling Fallout with arresting visuals that readily evoke those deeper yearnings for fundamental goods. It’s a bit on-the-nose sometimes, but I found that I didn’t really mind. By juxtaposing obvious and recognizable symbols against a hyperbolically horrifying backdrop, the show brings the reality of human need into sharp focus. 

In the first episode, for instance, Lucy shows up to her (arranged) wedding in a white wedding dress with a classic bouquet of red roses. Things go awry, and she ends up running around performing heroic feats with a dagger protruding from her body and a bloodstain spreading across the dress. It’s not subtle, but it’s effective. We understand that nothing can stay good and pure for long in this so-very-fallen world, and that the good of family is especially fragile and elusive. Lucy’s ruined wedding won’t be the last abortive attempt at establishing or maintaining lasting human ties.

Peace and security are, if anything, even more scarce. The Fallout world is saturated with sharp visuals representing those coveted goods. Flags, representing various competing powers, seem to pop up all over the place. Familiar features of our own world (billboards, famous public monuments, houses with wrap-around porches) can regularly be discerned amidst the ruins, like ghosts from a half-remembered past. When people do manage to create a semi-functional community, the first thing they do is plant corn. Particularly for the vault-dwellers (trying to support fifty or more people in underground silos), this is not really credible. Corn is not at all space-efficient; hydroponic labs would be far more effective at keeping people fed. But this is beside the point. Corn is beautiful and literally upright. Its stalks stand in tall, neat rows, like sentries of civilization. Corn is ordered liberty in a form that you can taste. Of course, people start planting it whenever they have a fleeting opportunity to put down roots.

Against the backdrop of ruined cities and radiation-soaked wastelands, it’s clear that these goods are fragile and fleeting. But that only underscores their desirability, which resonates with modern anxieties in a very affecting way. Though I would not describe Fallout as philosophically deep, it does very successfully evoke certain desires that all human beings share, which can transcend the political and cultural particularities of a given moment, and even (perhaps) survive a nuclear bomb.

… And I Feel Fine

The show has a few irritating political notes. One ludicrous subplot effectively blames the apocalypse on corporate greed (because capitalists find it immensely profitable to kill most of their potential customers), while another points an accusing finger at overzealous anti-communists. These are minor features, and relatively easy to ignore. Far more noticeable are the many retrofuturist elements that simultaneously evoke nostalgia, and a can-do American spirit. 

Those elements are freely drawn from different eras, but especially ones that Americans remember with fondness. Although this is supposed to be the twenty-third century, ’50s clothing is somehow back in fashion, and the technology is reminiscent of the ’80s and ’90s. The soundtrack plays old-timey songs from the ’40s and ’50s, while Goggins’ character is essentially a cowboy. (He once starred in Hollywood Westerns, and now brings that ethos to life as a bounty hunter on the irradiated plains.) The throwbacks are weirdly comforting, and add another poignant note to the running theme of things that endure. But they also underscore the viewer’s sense of questing after something, with real confidence that success may be within reach—grim circumstances notwithstanding.

As mentioned, the violence is ubiquitous, and Fallout also has a twisted creativity that keeps viewers’ eyeballs locked on the screen. But in keeping with the “dark but in a fun way” promise, it backs away from truly heartbreaking moments. Bodies factor in all sorts of grotesque ways, as fingers are severed, heads roll, and corpses are carved up for human jerky. And yet, sexual violence is conspicuously absent. The creators playfully explain this by implying that radiation-doused humans have greatly diminished libido. In one scene, the innocent, vault-raised Lucy suggests to her new surface-dwelling friend Maximus (Aaron Moten) that it might be fun to have sex. He shamefacedly admits that alarming things have happened to him in the scenario she proposes. (He doesn’t know that sexual arousal is normal.) Fallout offers the kind of safe space where there are no rape gangs, just ghouls that will make a necklace out of your metacarpals. This is Halloween stuff.

Race is not a theme. The characters of Fallout are ethnically diverse, but nobody comments on this or makes anything of it. Children are also treated gently. Morbid medical experiments abound, with one episode featuring a woman giving birth to a school of piranha (which then eat her). It’s twisted, and yet on reflection, still demonstrates that there are lines that the show doesn’t cross. There’s an odd kind of relief in the fact that the psychotic experimenter never gets his hands on an actual baby. 

At times the show is genuinely hilarious, repeatedly tweaking viewers with comic juxtapositions. The leader of the grotesque-medical-experiment lab is fastidious about maintaining orderly sign-ups for the community foosball table. A human head is packed in a suitcase next to an adorable container of deviled eggs. These details keep rolling along throughout the show, staving off excessive seriousness. At the same time, they also force the viewers to keep calibrating and re-calibrating their internal moral compass, constantly re-evaluating what really matters. It makes the show feel purposeful without being excessively painful, like an imaginative moral romp. It’s engaging, without making viewers work too hard on a Friday night. Most viewers will probably watch Fallout in an escapist way, but it still has the potential to open doors to deeper reflection on what human beings truly need to thrive.

Questing for Meaning

Fans of the Fallout video game assure me that the show captures the world extremely well. I probably won’t find 150 hours to play it anytime soon, but I begin to understand the appeal. It resonates emotionally without going overboard, and it gives players a chance to quest after precious things in a setting that feels fresh and free of some of the hyper-emotional cultural issues of our own age. 

America has always understood itself as a land of opportunity. In obvious ways, the opportunities of the Fallout world are far more limited. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which these hyper-American characters can devote themselves to worthwhile pursuits with a candor and zeal that may feel out of reach for us, the viewers. Our social, cultural, and political climate has grown so tense that it’s often unclear how we can secure these most basic and fundamental goods, or even whether we’re allowed to try. Maybe we’re too “privileged” already. Maybe we don’t deserve those nice things.

Lucy MacLean doesn’t have that problem. Neither does Cooper Howard. They can just identify the important things and go get them, or die trying. I like having ten fingers, but maybe there are things that matter even more.

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