Book Review: The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat

Douthat has some interesting points to raise around stagnation, but there are some major issues I take with his conclusions.

I’ve wanted to read this book for some time. I think the application of “decadent” to the United States in the 2020s is accurate but haven’t really thought through a more structured argument for that thought and hoped that Douthat, who is someone I find interesting but mostly wrong, might provide some structure worth borrowing. Unfortunately, I think there are some significant divergences between why I think the United States is decadent and what Douthat is assessing, making the book one that was less satisfying than I’d hoped.

Douthat claims he defines decadence in a manner similar to that of Jacques Barzun, claiming the United States is decadent and thus facing “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development”.¹ He them proceeds to work through evidence of all of these items before pivoting to explanations first as to why decadence is not guaranteed to lead to eminent destruction and second as to how the country could experience rebirth/renewal.

On a very simple level I don’t think Douthat’s arguments hold up particularly well. His evidence for economic stagnation is largely that we have seen minimal growth in median income while the structure of our economy has increasingly seemed to favor large, slow-moving firms that are more interested in financial transactions than in expanding technology and creating new products. He dismisses mobile technology and the internet as being relatively minor in comparison to previous inventions.

In terms of institutional decay, I think he’s on fairly strong ground - pointing to scandals and poor responses across multiple US administrations in the past thirty years, ranging from the Iraq War to the Affordable Car Act website rollout. He claims that the United States operates as a “kludgeocracy”, “meaning a system in which every solution is basically ‘an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of the system.’”²

Lastly, Douthat points to the decline of new or innovative music, movie-making and fashion styles over the past thirty years. In his role as a film critic, he is able to clearly elucidate how repetitious popular culture has become with what many perceive as being innovations simply being repackaged versions of previous art and concepts. He extends this commentary to fashion and even to ideologies, noting that many of the arguments of contemporary politics have been going on for almost forty years now.

Overall, I find the weight of evidence Douthat provides for most of these assertions as unconvincing. At best, I think that rather than grapple with the ideological choices we have made on a policy level, Douthat makes our economic condition appear to be almost a natural condition, from which there is no escaping. However, when looking at economic stagnation, I think there’s a perfectly reasonable case to be made that in the 1970s and 1980s we embarked on a series of decisions that ensured slower, steadier growth by disempowering workers and cutting inflation. The inability of workers to demand higher wages removed incentives for productivity enhancements to spread more widely that would otherwise have existed and created a demand constraint on the economy.

Similarly, the growth of pseudo-monopolies or oligopolies is a direct result of a decision to prioritize an extremely narrow conception of ‘consumer benefit’ as the consideration in looking at antitrust activity rather than continuing the previous definition which viewed sustaining competition as being in and of itself valuable. Reversing these trends does not require some sort of massive national renewal, just the implementation of different policies.

On cultural grounds, I’m not someone with a particularly sophisticated pallet (I liked ‘The Big Bang Theory’). Douthat is a film critic so I’ll give him wide berth. The one thing I would note though is that I think the concept of popular culture in the current age is really fluid. The homogenuity of culture twenty or thirty years ago where you had fewer pathways through which media could be consumed simply doesn’t exist. While you can bemoan the disappearance of movies, a world full of TikTok, Instagram, blogs, YouTube and Github is one rife with cultural innovation and creativity. It’s just likely that it’s being created and consumed by a more segmented population, making it less evident from the outside.

As I’ve noted before, I find he’s on stronger ground in his critique of institutions (though I feel as though he handwaves away the fact that one of the two parties has actively sought to sabotage the functioning of government). However, I think there are deeper issues than the size of government and interest groups capturing regulators (which, again, one of two parties is vastly worse…), fundamentally I think the critiques of Peter Turchin, Christopher Hayes and others are accurate in describing how our nominally “meritocratic” elites are increasingly separating from the vast majority of the country.

I think the perception of elites (and I begrudgingly count myself among that group) has, through a combination of geographic and educational sorting, become one that is fundamentally disconnected from the values and lived experience of large swathes of the population. I don’t simply mean disconnected from the values of rural, conservative whites, while at the same time they have remained studiously disconnected from the values and experience of most disadvantaged populations. Instead the elite population largely lives in its own insular bubble of cultural, religious and political ideas that are utterly alien to many of their fellow countrywomen.

Fundamentally, my assumption of the US as a decadent society has to do with indulgence. Culturally, I think the constant mantra of individualism that is echoed by economic and social libertarians has created a society where the sense of community is dangerously weak. There is no easy fix here, there is no easy policy solution. Simply put we need to become more engaged and more connected as neighbors, as citizens and as people in a manner we haven’t been in some time.

Douthat’s book is probably worth reading if you want to understand the perception of a good portion of politically conservative elites may be, but as a philosophic text it is unsatisfying.

1. p.9

2. p.75