Building American Dynamism

Two weeks before the start of our perpetual lockdown, The New York Times columnist and Substack writer Ross Douthat released “ The Decadent Society ,” a survey of America’s general apathy toward building a more dynamic future. While the book itself isn’t particularly surprising in its critique, the timing of its release was important: it was among the last public critiques of American stagnation before the world changed forever in March 2020. In the Before Times, Douthat noted four indicators of malaise in the Western world, some of which were magnified during the pandemic: institutional failure and loss of civic trust; economic and technological stagnation; declining birth rates and sterility; and mimetic, derivative culture. By April, many seemed hopeful that some of these trends might reverse — if anything could pull America out of its decades-long march toward decline, perhaps it was a global pandemic.

Almost two years later, it’s clear that the stagnationists were right about some aspects of American decline and very wrong on the ones most within our control. Institutional failure is the most glaring and far-gone aspect of American stagnation: look no further than the U.S.’s shoddy exit from Afghanistan and the associated $2 trillion of spend, and it’s clear that the military, the governmental institution with the highest degree of trust — before the Afghanistan withdrawal, 69 percent of Americans had a “quite a lot of confidence” in the U.S. military — has been damaged. Other institutions like public schools and the medical establishment have lost so much trust during the pandemic years that they could go the way of mainstream newspapers, plateauing into a distrustful malaise where only a fraction of the country cares about what they have to say at all. 

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