NYT columnist addresses global decadence and the “American renaissance”

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat spoke at Notre Dame on Friday, September 6 as part of the Center for Social Concerns’ MVP Fridays lecture series. His talk, entitled “Is There Hope For America’s Future?” revisited the topic of his 2021 book The Decadent Society but came to a slightly more optimistic conclusion: While global decadence is deepening, the case for an American renaissance has grown stronger since The Decadent Society’s publication.

Douthat analyzed the paradox of American “disquiet, discontent, and pessimism amidst material abundance.” He claimed that these issues are a result of “decadence,” which he defined as “a spirit of civilizational stall, drift, and repetition.” The signs, he argued, are abundant: Technological advance seems limited to the consumer electronics sector, American politics have settled into a fifty-fifty stalemate, new movies seem to be endless remakes or expansions of existing intellectual property, and America’s birth rate is declining. Moreover, the Pax Americana that defined the post-World War II–era has broken down, with hot wars in the Middle East and Europe.

Nevertheless, Douthat argued, there are at least two reasons for hope. First, while the U.S. has declining birth rates, American fertility rates still surpass our major adversaries like China and Russia, as well as many of our allies in Europe or Asia. Secondly, the American system of liberal democracy has yet to meet a serious competitor. While many other nations have Americanized their regimes, the “Islamic theocracy of Iran,” Russia’s “pseudo-democratic authoritarianism,” and China’s “mix of meritocracy, fascism, and Marxist Leninism,” have all failed to catch on elsewhere.

Moreover, Douthat maintains, those abroad are betting on America: “Middle class people in China are making their way to Latin America in order to traverse the Darien Gap and cross all of Mexico in the hopes of crossing the U.S. border. That reality does not seem like a vote of confidence in the Chinese century. We’re not living in a world where Americans are making their way to Manila in the Philippines and trying to take a boat … to the Chinese mainland.”

One of the trends that has made Douthat more optimistic about America’s future is the slowed expansion of the so-called “nones,” or people with no religious affiliation. “The last 20 years in American life have really been the age of the ‘nones,’” Douthat remarked. “But in the last five years, that trend has seemed to reach some kind of equilibrium. At least for now, the decline of institutional religion in the United States is no longer happening, and it’s left America with a much more resilient religious population than you see in Western Europe, East Asia, or other developed countries.”

Despite his optimism, Douthat expressed concerns for the future of the world at large. In particular, Douthat warned the audience about the “21st century bottleneck,” a situation in which prosperity and social degradation, among other factors, leave some societies and ways of life behind. “Both individuals and social groups are going to lose themselves in the lotus-eating temptations of prosperity: drugs, bread and circuses, gambling, and virtual reality,” Douthat said. “Individuals are not going to get married, form families, or build the kind of lives that most people have taken for granted as aspirational for most of our history.”

Despite this bleak outlook, Douthat ended the evening by emphasizing that America is particularly well-positioned to survive the looming bottleneck: “America just has a lot of big pockets of vitality. It has, as I said, more religion and religious energy than almost any other wealthy society. It has more entrepreneurial spirit. The American suburbs are, for all their social and spiritual challenges, still an unrivaled technology for giving people under modern conditions space to be ambitious, to build businesses, and to build families, without feeling hemmed in or claustrophobic and stuck.”

In fact, Douthat argued that the bottleneck might be a net boon for America. Citing the example of South Korea, which has a birth rate of 0.7, Douthat pointed out that the stagnation abroad may fuel domestic innovation as entrepreneurial and energetic foreigners seek better long-term opportunities than those provided by their home nation’s shrinking population.

Douthat’s talk was generally well-received. Father Bill Dailey, C.S.C., professor of law, supported Douthat’s thesis, saying to the Rover, “I do agree with him that the demographic challenge facing America’s would-be rivals is stark, and that so far we seem by a combination of immigration and a slightly better birth rate to avoid the doomsday scenarios many nations face.”

Fr. Dailey continued, “It wasn’t a theological or even political account of hope so much as one rooted in the possibility and indeed likelihood that we’ll be spared some pretty costly consequences of aging populations and declining labor pools.”

First-year law student John Burke expressed cautious optimism in response to the talk, saying, “I didn’t know that several of the metrics of doom had stabilized over the last five years. I would like to know whether they need to start trending upwards in order to be more optimistic about the future.”

Douthat has published books ranging from Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream to The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. His newest work, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, will be released early next year.

The next MVP Fridays talk, entitled “What can immigrant stories teach us?” will be given by Javier Zamora, a Salvadoran poet and activist, on September 20 in Geddes Hall.

Will Grannis is an off-campus senior majoring in Honors Mathematics and theology and pursuing a minor in constitutional studies. Outside of writing for the Rover, he spends his time attending Tocqueville Fellows colloquia, lifeguarding, working for the dCEC, tutoring math, grading homeworks, finding a job for next year, studying stochastic calculus, going to classes, planning his wedding to his wonderful fiancée, and not getting enough sleep. If you have any suggestions for how he can fit twenty-eight hours of work into a single day, he can be reached at wgrannis@nd.edu.

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