At its 250th birthday, can America chart a positive path forward?
There’s a common attitude, now prevalent on the right but also long common on the left, that suggests a cabal — perhaps tech billionaires, immigrants, or global elites — has taken away our birthright and we need to return to a gauzy past that never really existed. Much of this is based on trite nostalgia and a misunderstanding of the past. In a world made rich by capitalism and liberalism (of the classical variety, per our founders), too many Americans are ignoring the tremendous progress of the last half-century and retreating to old and discredited ideas.
Anyone who spends time online can see the preponderance of memes that reflect this phenomenon. On the conservative side, traditionalists and nationalists often post AI-generated photos of a handsome couple, with some smiling children, standing in front of a tidy church. Or showing the family sitting around the dining room table having a traditional dinner. I’ve seen memes showing young adults having a house party, or couples dressed up and heading to the opera, or young men chatting in a bar. They often include these words: “Look what they took from us.”
These posts don’t only come from random social-media influencers, but from prominent politicians and official White House accounts, especially from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Some of this AI slop looks eerily similar to the kind of New Soviet Man or communist party propaganda from the early part of the 20th century. The featured families invariably are white, leading critics to suspect that one main complaint centers on the nation’s demographic changes. And who is this “they”? This trend has sparked a humorous “look what they took from us” counter-meme trend, featuring useless items that have disappeared, such as eight-track tapes.
The other trend isn’t much better. Progressives like to post photos of big, fancy houses from the past and suggest that any minimum-wage worker could own one back in the day. “Back in the 1950s, a minimum-wage worker could buy a house. Today, that same buying power would require $43 an hour. The math isn’t broken — the system is,” posted one writer. In fairness, I have no idea if that influencer was on the political left or the right given how the two trends have merged. But to the left, the “they” usually means Baby Boomers, who supposedly had it easy — and are now hoarding the nation’s wealth and opposing various redistributionist schemes.
Actually, the math doesn’t add up. The median home price in 1960 was $12,000, but the minimum wage was $1 an hour, or around $2,080 a year. Homes from that era were typically very small and lacked most of the conveniences we take for granted today. I’m not saying the housing market isn’t at some level broken — but minimum-wage workers weren’t buying sprawling suburban houses while Mom stayed at home, as meme-posters suggest. Anecdotally, my dad was a public-school teacher — and my mom worked, too — when they bought a small suburban house in 1964. Mom still talks about the difficulties they had paying the mortgage on that $18,000 house.
Left-wing economic fantasies are perhaps easier to debunk than right-wing ones, given that they center on measurable data v. intangibles such as a lost sense of community. The missing stuff the above-mentioned conservatives fret about — work get-togethers, church activities, neighborhood block parties — really aren’t missing, or at least could more easily be restored than affordable housing markets. My wife and I go to or host house parties all the time. There’s no secret formula. If you want to have a house party, call some friends and have one. If you’re missing neighborhood connections, then go say hi to your neighbors. We’ve only lived in our house for two years, yet we know several neighbors. If you think church attendance is lacking, then get up on Sunday morning and attend one, then talk to people during the social hour. These social connections do in fact take effort, but I suspect the online complainers mostly are too lazy to exert some.
That’s not to dismiss the serious points both sides make. In 2000, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” was a best-seller — a book that drew widespread attention because it tapped into something that most of us have felt in our bones. Per its Amazon summary, “Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures — whether they be PTA, church, or political parties — have disintegrated.”
I’ve lived in a number of neighborhoods in several states and I, too, have noticed that changing behavior. In our early years, neighbors would routinely come over after we moved in to welcome us. In one neighborhood in Ohio, neighbors really did bring apple pie and cookies. I raised my kids on a dead-end street outside Los Angeles, and we knew everybody. My kids were in and out of other kids’ houses. We knew the parents, so it was OK. My neighbor across the street constantly had impromptu pool parties or confabs around his garage ping-pong table. Some of it is the luck of the draw, but I know few people who now experience such delights. I also think everyone’s addiction to social media might explain why so few of us have time left over to spend drinking beer at the bar with our buddies.
Although progressives don’t do math very well, they tap into a point we often make in our Free Cities Center articles: Housing prices have exploded well beyond the rate of inflation. Median home prices in California haven’t just soared since the 1950s, but since the 1990s. That modest LA-area single-family home that I bought for $217,000 would cost $433,000 based solely on inflation, but is valued, according to Zillow, at $1 million. The measurable decline in homeownership rates is at least partially responsible for the immeasurable decline in neighborhood connectedness.
There are no quick-fix solutions. People can become more connected as they choose, but how do we create a culture that encourages that healthy behavior? That sounds like work for sociologists, theologians, and psychologists. Regarding the high cost of living, I argue for policies that would, say, deregulate land-use restrictions to make it easier to build more housing and for free-trade policies that lower the cost of living. But public policy is largely out of our personal control, especially now that both parties advance solutions that seem designed to make matters worse. The worse things get, the more likely it is for politicians to engage in magical thinking (Free healthcare! Rent control! Subsidies!).
But despite the obvious problems Americans face today, many elements of our society and economy are much better than they’ve ever been. As a teenager, I read Otto Bettmann’s short book, “The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!” It reminded readers that in the days before automobiles, city streets were piled high with horse poop, child labor in dirty factories was common, and diseases that have since disappeared claimed millions of lives. Even comparing modern life to my days as a kid in the 1960s, most standards have improved dramatically.
Crime is a good one to consider. Americans were rightly appalled by a noticeable hike in violent and property crimes after the pandemic, but those levels have largely dropped back down. Even during the worst recent spikes — and even considering the problem of underreporting of property crimes — the rates are around the lowest levels Americans have experienced in decades. Despite our healthcare system’s highly reported problems, that system provides a level of care unmatched in history or throughout the world. The advancements in medical devices and life-saving medications are astounding. Sure, there are reasons to criticize medicine, but I don’t know anyone who would give up medications that reduce their blood pressure or keep diabetes at bay. The environment is vastly improved and few Americans work in dangerous industries. Americans live lives of unparalleled affluence.
We hear much about inequality. But, worldwide, extreme poverty has fallen from 84% 200 years ago to 9% today, according to Human Progress. Since the 1990s, extreme poverty rates have fallen by more than half. In the United States, Americans have become more prosperous since the 1990s, although rising prices and stagnant wages have muted that good news. Life expectancy fell slightly during the pandemic, but in America we’ve reached a record life expectancy that’s pushing 80 years old.
In this series for The Libertist, we have no interest in sugar-coating the data — or suggesting that long-term positive trends negate any legitimate problems that conservatives and progressives complain about. The nation’s semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, is the perfect time for an honest assessment of our nation’s progress — and its continuing challenges. The United States remains the world’s greatest political experiment. To keep it going requires optimism and hard-headedness, not negativity and nostalgia.
Next installment: Sal Rodriguez will look at the state of the political right, and ask whether the classical liberal vision of the founders has really been supplanted by a nationalistic vision. And then we’ll move on the left, and ponder what it means that half of Gen-Z considers itself socialist.
Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center.