Land of the Free(er)

Despite everything, America is still pretty exceptional.

Here’s an occasional guilty pleasure of mine: Chatting with Europeans who think that America is an inhumane, harrowing place. It’s basically all tent cities and McMansions, right? We water our gardens with the sweat and tears of the poor. Everybody’s packing, obviously, but you still never know when you might be spontaneously gunned down in the street.

When I was 13, my family lived for six months in Edinburgh, Scotland. Fielding my public school classmates’ questions was extremely entertaining. “Are any of your family in the mob?” “Do you carry guns in school?” “How many people have you personally seen murdered?”

Who could keep count? Yes, my mom is furious if I race out the door without my piece.

America looked to them like a terrifying, chaotic place. Maybe it is in a way. But life is terrifying and chaotic by nature, and after enough of these conversations, even my teenage self began to glimpse some of the things that set America apart. My Scottish classmates had obviously gotten some absurd ideas from Westerns and mobster movies, but we really are the land of the free, or at least the free(er). That remains true, and it gives me hope, despite the squalid, unseemly politics of recent years.

I’m not sure Americans themselves understand that exceptionalism with much clarity, so let’s get into it in this November series. How are we distinctive from the rest of the developed world? How did it happen? How might it position us to survive and thrive through the challenges of the next few decades? Finally, what does faith contribute to this effort?

That’s a lot of pieces to connect, so today I’ll just give a kind of ten-thousand-foot overview. Later on this week I’ll explain why the conservatism of the past half-century did indeed conserve something, though perhaps not as much as some hoped, focusing especially on the very interesting case of the Tea Party. Next week I’ll get to the question: Is there any reason to think a renewed conservatism could do better? Especially now, as the purple tornado sweeps through Texas and New York City falls prey to the Democratic Socialists? Obviously it would be rash to make confident predictions, but I think that it could, and I’ll explain why.

That will lead us to my particular hobby horse: libertarian pronatalism. Falling birth rates are coming for the entire developed world, but we are better positioned than anyone to meet the challenge, and, as I will argue, the way forward is to absolutely not re-wire the state as a massive pronatalist redistribution machine. There might be some helpful things the state can do, but we have ample evidence already that dumping money on a particular sector or demographic undercuts its energy, adaptability, and social respectability. This is not what we want for families.

Finally, I’ll circle back explicitly to faith, and Christendom. But I hope it will be clear throughout that faith is necessarily a large piece of this puzzle. Other organizations and cultural developments can surely help, but religious communities are the only non-state actors that can do what we need at scale, and in the West, that largely means churches. All sorts of things are up in the air right now, but this much at least seems very clear. There is no plausible path back to stability and cultural health that does not rely heavily on churches. Christians, we’re going to have to do some heavy lifting here.

Today is mostly for framing the conversation, though. So let me start here.

Among modern, developed nations, the United States stands out as one that has seen the most robust efforts by far to resist the growth of the caretaker state. The Brits, admittedly, have had their moments. Great Britain, as I discussed this last summer, was the birthplace of “godless conservatism,” that classically liberal tradition that celebrates organic order, human ingenuity, and the “little platoons” that sustain a thriving free people. It’s rather ironic that my own reflections on American exceptionalism first began to germinate in Edinburgh, the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment, where many of the operative ideas were first debated. I probably walked by the statues of David Hume and Adam Smith many times with hardly any notion of who those men even were. Belated apologies, gents.

But Europeans, in general, have long since internalized the notion that it is in fact the state’s job to meet people’s needs and guarantee some minimum quality of life. And they’ve largely accepted the trade-offs: less economic vitality, a nosier and more invasive state. They picked comfort, security, and social harmony over the ruthless and inhumane American alternative. Many Americans (especially on the left) are quite indignant that we haven’t done the same, as illustrated by the recurrence of “Life of Julia” fantasies. And many still want to traipse further down that path, as we clearly see in the rise of a new group of “socialists.” They’ve got the reins now, and I fully expect those folks to do some damage in the immediate short term, but they’re cruising into some very stormy waters. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to become Europe, even as Europe begins to fall apart.

Up to a point, and at least for a period of time, a prosperous nation can choose to translate its assets into a high-conformity, low-innovation, egalitarian social order in which life is fairly comfortable for almost everyone. You’re not going to be charting the course into the future, because that kind of society doesn’t facilitate entrepreneurship or excellence. It may not go great for you if you’re part of a countercultural religious minority. And in the mainstream, you’ll probably end up with a sizable class of people who work a little, hang out a lot, take up a few hobbies, and while away the years until they die. Does that all sound so terrible, though? It’s fairly easy to cast the European model as the obviously-humane choice: fewer billionaires, fewer despair deaths. Surely those are the right priorities?

But even if you’re convinced of that, there’s a further problem. It’s the birth rates, of course. You can’t sustain cradle-to-grave care for everyone when the cradle is being overshadowed by the grave.

Europe’s caretaker state is rapidly losing the capacity to sustain itself. It’s hard to see how it can be remedied at this point; the structural defects are too severe for incremental reform, even if European citizens were open to incremental reform, which they mostly haven’t been. You need a large base of young workers to sustain a massive entitlement system. But as people get comfortable and secure, they become less and less interested in taking on the burdens of parenthood, at which point the only real option is to import a workforce from abroad. That creates a whole new set of problems, especially in a social model premised on high levels of conformity and cultural homogeneity. Been reading the news about France lately? It’s going great.

Now, it’s true that the American resistance to the growth of the state has been messy, uneven, and often polarizing. I’ll get more into this in my next essay, but it seems fundamentally true that efforts to trim the entitlement state have been fairly successful when the cuts are perceived as affecting the other party’s voters (the poor, welfare queens, etc.), and wildly unsuccessful when the Republican Party’s own voters saw their “expected benefits” under threat. We all know the core problem: Social Security and Medicare. We haven’t been able to fix them, though Heaven knows, people have tried. Despite a decades-long effort to tame it, therefore, the sprawling entitlement state is still coming for us too. Dang you, FDR and LBJ.

You could see that as grounds for despair. But I myself think those efforts have paid at least some dividends, as I will discuss in my next missive. At the very least, Americans have more understanding of the logic of limited government, which may make a real difference. We also have a far more robust network of charitable institutions and churches. And, non-coincidentally, our economy is far more robust than Europe’s, which gives us more breathing room moving forward.

We are also, even still, considerably more religious than most of the developed world. I think that’s going to work out well for us.

I’m aware that this case for American exceptionalism will sound extraordinarily dated to many ears. How very rotting-flesh Reaganite of me, to go on believing against all evidence that we’re a free, fecund, God-fearing people as our birth rates fall and our churches empty. Haven’t we learned over this past decade that America is far less exceptional than we thought? Isn’t that jig pretty much up at this point?

If it is, then we’re truly in a pickle, because it’s increasingly clear that the European alternative is no alternative at all. But I think the more “exceptional” path may be worth another shot.

I’ll pick up there on Friday with a look back at the “libertarian populist” moment, which incidentally was my own entry-point into political discourse. What did the Tea Party get right and wrong?