In a year of depressingly predictable election trends, the rise of biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy represents something of a breakthrough. In some polls for the Republican presidential nomination, the 38-year-old Ohio native now occupies second place behind Donald Trump, overtaking the beleaguered Ron DeSantis.
“Politics is really downstream from culture.” Andrew Breitbart’s assertion, echoing the ideas of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, has become a watchword both for the Right and Left. This culture-first approach has fostered a politics built around cultural issues like abortion, gender, and race, guaranteeing ceaseless social unrest, and in some minds, the prelude to a breakup of the union.
While important, cultural issues are not the main concerns of most Americans. Instead, as Gallup surveys reveal, the more critical issues for most remain jobs, housing, and the economy. Roughly 30 percent of voters ranked economic issues as their key concern—incompetent government was the other big winner—six to ten times the number who cited climate, abortion, or race.
As our politics focus obsessively on cultural conflict, there is little discussion of how to make life better for most people. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Data from AEI’s American National Family Life Survey, which sampled over 5,000 Americans and was fielded in November and December of 2021, found 74 percent of Americans believe that things are getting worse and barely a quarter (26 percent) see things improving.
To restore our focus, we need to de-nationalize the cultural debate. This means allowing various parts of the country to, within limits, express their own preferences. The Constitution wisely assigned most issues of culture—abortion, marriage rights, education, law enforcement—to the proper domain of states and localities.
This is a vast and diverse country with no singular voice on cultural issues. The focus on culture has helped engender the increasingly dogmatic parties with radically different bases who go to different movies, eat different food, and consume different media.
The Right dominates the culturally conservative South and parts of the West while the Left inhabits the narrow band of progressive-dominated dense communities on the ocean coasts, and college towns everywhere. On some issues—defunding the police, affirmative action, exposing children to transgender literature or not informing parents about their children’s gender change—progressive dogma is unpopular with the vast majority of voters, even in California. After decades of an inexorable shift to progressive views on cultural issues, the country, perhaps reacting to the antics of gender activists, is becoming not more liberal, but more culturally conservative.
The culturally conservative face similar problems with their unpopular stance against legalized abortion—some of their own fringe even oppose birth control. They have already lost decisively on the issue in red states like Ohio and Kansas, as well as Michigan. Gallup polls indicate that 46 percent of Americans think the country’s laws toward abortion should be less strict, which marks a 16 percentage point jump from January 2022, when only 30 percent said the same. Only 15 percent of Americans now think the laws should be stricter, and 26 percent are satisfied with how the laws are now.
Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo credit: Hollywata via Flickr under CC 2.0 License
A potential face-off on Fox TV between Florida’s Ron DeSantis and California’s Gavin Newsom may not remind anyone of Lincoln versus Douglas, or even Kennedy and Nixon. Read more
For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many as two in three Americans feel is not entirely up to the job. As a result, the chorus calling for Newsom to become America’s 47th President has been growing steadily louder.
We may soon regret the radical and absolutist embrace of electric vehicles (EVs). Governments across the world are planning to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars, and to take older, gas-guzzling vehicles off the road. The Biden administration is proposing strict new pollution limits, as well as vast state subsidies, to accelerate the US’s transition to EVs. Read more
“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”
Otto Van Bismarck
America, the proverbial lucky fool, remains, despite itself, the world’s leading military power and largest economy. This has little to do with the genius of our leadership, but largely despite them. This failure is reflected in part by the fact that most Americans reject the political establishment forcing them to choose between unpopular President Joe Biden and his equally despised likely opponent, Donald Trump.
Mike Barone, arguably the most knowledgeable political commentator of the last half century, suggests we are experiencing a political “doom loop” of historic proportions. But despite this, the U.S. is so powerful, compared to its key geopolitical rivals, it could even survive four more years of Joe Biden (or God forbid, Kamala Harris) or even the vengeful incoherence of Donald Trump. Indeed despite these poor leaders, the U.S. increasingly dominates as the largest recipient of foreign investment.
Notions of inevitable American decline, of course, remain popular, particularly in Europe, where such notions have been popular since at least the early seventies. Yet it is not Europe, or even China, that threatens American preeminence, but our self-absorbed and increasingly feckless elite class, extending from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to academia, the media, the arts, public school education, and the state bureaucracy. All hold a generally disdainful view of the country, its heritage, as well as its prospects.
America’s long-term prognosis turns on three things: the self-correcting nature of the Constitution, its enormous physical endowment, and the innovative nature of its people. The political system may get bent by the depredations of the federal nomenklatura or the iconoclastic impulses of the Left, but the courts, Congress, and public opinion usually work to restrain the the worst excesses of would-be authoritarians.
Much of our providential advantage rests also on physical resources. America dominates the physical world—largest oil and gas producer, a nation blessed with natural ports, and large reserves of freshwater. It has the world’s largest expanse of arable land and a variety of climates that allow for a remarkable range of economic activities from the icy north to the semi-tropical south. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. resources base, for example providing fossil fuels to Europe, has become ever more critical.
Then there is the human edge. Despite all our well-recognized flaws in education, declining life spans, depressed teenagers, and widespread social unrest, Americans still churn out innovations at a level unmatched anywhere. America is home to all seven of the world’s top tech firms and all but five of the top 25. In terms of venture capital investment, a key factor in creating new companies, the U.S. leads easily, with over four times as much as China, and almost ten times as much as third-place Britain. No large country comes close to the U.S. in creating “super entrepreneurs.”
Early in its history America did not seek to impose itself on other countries. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams suggested in 1821, America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” But over the last century, America’s leaders have felt compelled to confront “monsters,” sometimes necessarily, as in World War Two, but also stupidly, as with the First World War, Vietnam, and the most recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
America still confronts genuine threats, but we sometimes fail to recognize that our biggest rivals are plagued with fundamental weaknesses far more profound than our own. Over the past century America has seemed, and has been widely portrayed, as overmatched by competitors like Germany, Russia, Japan, and now China. Yet in each case, the U.S. turned out to be far stronger and resilient. To paraphrase Mark Twain, news of America’s demise is often declared far too prematurely.
Europe has often been seen by many American intellectuals, both right and left, as superior and to the U.S. Yet today Europe’s pretense of world leadership is something of a sideshow, even as leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz seek influence in “a multipolar” global order. The dirty secret is that Europe is getting weaker; Germany, its dominant economic power, has awful demographics and, largely due to energy policies, is experiencing a self-inflicted industrial collapse. France appears to be on the verge of anarchic collapse. Nor can Europe count on emerging industries. The continent is home to only one of the world’s 25 most valued tech firms, and boasts a barely functional space program. After trailing the European Union’s economy as recently as 2008, the U.S. economy is now almost one-third larger.
Similarly, Russia, a specter for generations, has turned out to be a far weaker than expected, both during the old Soviet Union and the current neo-Tsarist Putin regime. Russia’s weakness has been particularly evident in the botched invasion of Ukraine, its shrinking population intensified by the current mass out-migration of talented people from that troubled country. Russia, with a GDP smaller than South Korea’s and barely a tenth of China’s, is today more an irritant than a global rival, outside its nuclear arsenal.
Finally, there’s Japan, the great bogeyman of the late twentieth century, now retreating on the global stage. Not only has its economic growth slowed, but it has been relegated to the backbenches of the digital age. Indeed the country now boasts not one of the top 25 tech firms by market value. Its future prospects are clouded by a demographic implosion that will see rapid aging and a shrinking labor force, something also eclipsing the prospects of Japan’s close followers, South Korea and Taiwan.
Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Win-Chi Poon via Wikimedia under CC 2.5 License.
As the Supreme Court moves towards its expected affirmative action ruling, a backlash among supporters of racial quotas is already brewing. One magazine, The Nation, suggests that the lawyer pleading the case for Asian American students is serving the cause of “white supremacy”, while top college presidents, interviewed on PBS, predict that any move to curb race quotas would constitute a “disaster.” Some schools are going a step further by exploring how to get around the potential new law — just as corporations, always keen to please the chattering classes, do the same thing.
Affirmative action is not a winning issue for progressives. Indeed, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, as well as roughly half of African Americans, say that colleges should not factor race and ethnicity into the admissions process. Asian Americans are even more hostile to the idea: one recent national poll found that four in 10 of the group saw affirmative action as “racist” and more than half welcomed a Supreme Court ruling outlawing it.
The fundamental flaw with affirmative action is that it directly contradicts what the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal defined as “the American creed” — a notion, too often ignored, embracing equal opportunity for all its citizens. But where the early goals of the Civil Rights movement backed this ideal, the new affirmative action regime embraces race-based discrimination as an unadulterated good.
This approach has led to a rise in discriminatory policies against Asian Americans, now the country’s fastest-growing minority. Nowhere is this more evident than via the “Asian penalty” that comes into effect when applying for college: according to research from Princeton University, students who identify as Asian must score 140 points higher on the SAT than white Americans and 450 points higher than black Americans to have the same chance of admission to private colleges.
Like Jewish people before them, Asian Americans have benefited from the end of racial discrimination and the consequent rise of meritocracy. They have the highest per-capita income, lowest per-capita crime rates and highest rates of college education in the US. But instead of praising this group for transcending racism, affirmative action advocates prefer to attack them. They are now, it appears, the beneficiaries of “white privilege”, and dismissed as “white-adjacent”.
If the court rules in favour of Asian American students, don’t expect the Biden administration to embrace the decision. Racialism, along with climate change catastrophism, defines the current White House. The real focus, however, should not be on improving the lives of one racial group ahead of another but instead on helping those most in need. Ethnic minorities now constitute over 40% of the US working class and will soon be the majority by 2032. Their economic needs should be prioritised by creating better jobs, improving skills training and reducing crime. That will accomplish far more than helping the slim number of the more well-off minorities getting into the corporate suite or the great halls of Harvard.
This piece first appeared at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Maxjuh via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.
In an age of darkness, glimpses of light are rare — but all the brighter for it. As the censorious progressivism embraced by Joe Biden and much of his Democratic party grows into an increasingly pervasive quasi-religion, ordinary people are finding ways to push back. Read more
The global housing crisis across the high-income world, particularly in the Anglosphere, represents perhaps the single biggest challenge to the future of the middle class. From the United Kingdom to Australia, an entire generation is facing a future that will preclude even those with decent incomes from ever owning a house or acquiring assets.
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Fred Murphy, used under CC 2.0 License
