Coming Unstuck: Three Books on Stagnation and How to Reclaim the American Dream

I’m going to discuss three interrelated books, each of which deals with the American Dream, although none of them focus on the term. First, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, which is generating plenty of buzz. Second, Yoni Applebaum’s Stuck, and third, Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class, which is a few years older than the other two but concerned with similar topics. All three books, in their own ways, ask similar questions: Why do things feel so stagnant in America? Why is it so hard to build new homes, roads, rail lines, and more? Where did the American dream, of picking up and moving, taking on a new job and a new life, go?

Klein and Thompson’s vision of abundance concerns the question of how to build things in America. More specifically, they focus on the fact that Democratic-run states, like California and New York, have built up so many veto points that these liberal states can’t build the very things they want, like affordable housing and public transportation. This is a pretty damning point.

As they correctly note, big cities like New York and San Francisco are not the drug-infested, crime-ridden hellholes that conservatives claim. They are much more the opposite—highly desirable places to live that have priced out all but the superrich. But far from a minor flaw, this should be seen instead as an absolutely devastating failure on the part of blue-city and blue-state governance.

Consider this example—Tyler Cowen, in The Complacent Class, cites the median rent for a two bedroom apartment in San Francisco at $5,000 a month, and his book was published in 2017! All three books dwell on the fact that middle-class life feels increasingly unaffordable and that we no longer seem to build things in America, especially new housing.

Applebaum powerfully captures this dynamic, specifically the loss of control experienced by many Americans in a less mobile America. “When people can choose where to move, they can also choose not to move. But either way, it is their choice. Today, too many Americans no longer feel as if they can make that choice for themselves. They live where they are able, not where they want; they experience their lives less as the result of their own decisions than as the consequences of vast and impersonal forces. And with that decline in agency has come a deep embitterment.” (19).

Does this mean that regulations alone are the source of these problems? Can we simply deregulate our way out of the affordability crisis? Harold Meyerson notes in a review of Abundance that market factors are also a big part of the story—for instance, many people in the building trades (carpenters, electricians, plumbers), lost their jobs during the great recession or moved into different industries, making it hard to build houses post-recession. Similarly, small, high-demand neighborhoods in Manhattan will likely not return to affordability with the creation of more skyscrapers—they will also require publicly-administered affordable housing. There is a difference between the claim that continued construction will keep Houston affordable and the claim that expanded construction will return New York to affordability.

Applebaum, concerned with the same general themes, draws our attention to the fact that Americans used to move more. Put simply, most Americans used to rent rather than own and many of them moved regularly, at much higher rates than we do now. Moving was so common that many cities had ultra-busy moving days where huge numbers of tenants would vacate their apartments on the same day. “Moving day embodied the very American expectation that change would be the constant of their lives and that it would bring expansive opportunities.” (77).

What about the worry that constant moving would undermine community ties? As Applebaum points out, the period when we moved regularly was a period of thriving civic associations. “Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Local businesses prospered. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.” (77). This relates to the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited America, particularly regarding our propensity to join and form civic organizations. On this point, Robert Putnam famously sounded the alarm bell around the turn of this century with his Bowling Alone, which demonstrated in painstaking detail how Americans were no longer joining voluntary organizations like we used to.

Now we move less, so we are in the same place longer, and yet we also join fewer groups. This feels counter-intuitive but appears to be true. And it is likely one among many factors contributing to our current political, social, and economic disfunction. Americans need to spend more time in person and less time online.

A key concern of all three books is the impact of NIMBY, the not-in-my-backyard efforts of residents in rich neighborhoods to prevent change and keep out newcomers. In Applebaum’s words, “progressive communities like Cambridge and Shepherd Park, which pride themselves on their openness and tolerance and diversity and commitment to social justice, are the worst offenders.” (22).

Why? Because “progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish. How could that happen?” (23).

It is a difficult question to answer, although all three books offer some insights. In part, people settle into an area that they like and then oppose further changes. As Applebaum points out, the urban activist Jane Jacobs moved into a Manhattan neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century, was awed by its dynamism and vibrancy, and subsequently joined up with others to prevent any further changes, a decision sure to kill off the very lifeblood of the neighborhood and erode its most likable traits.

Specifically, nimbyism among the wealthy is a serious and hypocritical problem. Environmental reviews, for instance, may be used to slow or stop the building of new multifamily housing in California cities. But of course the best way to serve Californian ecosystems is for large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles to build up, not out. Nimby zoning regulations, however, have the opposite effect, leading to the ever-sprawling suburbs of single-family homes, which are far worse for the environment!

In Applebaum’s words, “far from preventing sprawl…the empowerment of local communities accelerated it by making the production of new housing in dense urban areas incredibly difficult and forcing construction out to the exurban periphery.” (218).

This was strikingly apparent on a recent southern California visit, where I observed the $1-2 million price for small, suburban homes that aren’t even very close to Los Angeles or San Diego. Reflecting this trend, the median home price in the state was $900,000 in 2023. This is not only the product of nimby efforts to oppose development. But that is clearly part of the reason why we can’t build things anymore.

On this point a piece in National Affairs has the following to say, “But whether it's Gretchen Whitmer running for governor of Michigan on a platform of "Fix the Damn Roads" or Josh Shapiro trumpeting his eagerness to cut through bureaucratic hurdles to fix I-95 in Pennsylvania, Democratic officials have sensed that infrastructure dysfunction is a thorn in the side of blue-state governance.” (The piece is called “Minoritarianism is Everywhere,” by Steven M. Teles).

What is so damning is that this disfunction is basically imposed by a tiny, rich, unrepresentative minority. As Applebaum notes, “when state legislatures delegated the power to regulate land use to local governments, they were putting decision-making authority in the hands of a group of voters who are remarkably unrepresentative of the broader public (221). Specifically, very wealthy, vocal homeowners who are opposed to change near them while also being liberal on national political issues. It is a potent brew that does not help the cause of liberal and left politics.

To repeat, all three books discuss how America has become stuck. Consider now how Cowen characterizes it: “For all the revolutionary changes in information technology as of late, big parts of our lives are staying the same. These days Americans are less likely to switch jobs, less likely to move around the country, and, on a given day, less likely to go outside the house at all.” (6).

Later, echoing Klein and Thompson, he notes the loss of imagination: “what has been lost is the ability to imagine an entirely different world and physical setting altogether, and the broader opportunities for social and economic advancement that would entail.” (7). I discussed this point in an earlier blog post titled “In Defense of Dreaming.”

In addition, America is becoming more segmented into two separate classes, one higher and one lower. “There is more assortative mating of high earners and high achievers” (15). Cowen, for instance, gives the example of two investment bankers marrying each other rather than a neighbor or high school sweetheart. Maybe this makes people happier. It definitely makes high income houses even richer, since they often now have two high earners, and low income houses struggle because they, at best, pool together two low income workers. 

What are some of the impacts we can expect from these developments? In a prescient passage, Cowen lists some disruptive changes that are likely to bubble up in the coming years. For instance, “impossibly expensive apartment rentals in the most attractive cities; the legacy of inadequate mobility and residential segregation; a rebellion of many less-skilled men; a resurgence of crime…” (22).

Whereas Applebaum focuses more on housing, Cowen focuses more on jobs. We are moving less, in part, because we are changing jobs at a much lower rate than we used to. In addition, as regional variation has shrunk, there is less incentive to pack up and move. In Cowen’s example, the suburbs of Cincinnati and Denver have pretty similar jobs, so why move?

“The American economy is evolving into a tiered system of high-pay, high-productivity companies on one hand and lower pay, lower-productivity jobs on the other.” (34). Have you seen how hard it is to get a good job? This helps explain why so many people don’t change jobs—if you manage to get a good one you stick with it. And this explanation is coming from a very free market economist! 

As a consequence, the well-off may fight all the more, at least at the local level, to preserve what they have, leading into nimby politics. Cowen recognizes one implication of this inequality, which “is that the affluent and well educated in America may be especially out of touch, no matter how ostensibly progressive their politics.” (57). Indeed.

Cowen also looks at median wage stagnation/decline post great recession, lower productivity growth, less innovation, or fact that median male wage peaked between 1969-1973. Is it any surprise voters rebelled in both primaries in 2016? Or consider how the US has less class mobility than it used to and less than many similar European countries. We actually have more mobility for immigrants than much of Europe but less mobility for native born workers. Relevant to understanding our current times? Yes!

I will close with two Cowen quotes on change. Referring to Trump and Sanders in 2016, the fallout from the Great Recession, the influence of the Tea Party and Occupy, burgeoning black lives matter protests, Cowen suggests that “maybe these incidents are just the beginnings of deeper fissures in American life, fissures that will in due time rip open our sense of calm and tranquility.” (180).

Finally, “the mood of the times really matters, and those moods can, if enough pressure builds up, flip fairly suddenly and set off new dynamics and unfavorable and unseemly trends.” (188).

These three books offer different insights into how we are stuck, with a focus on the cost of living crisis. None of this means that markets alone will resolve these problems. But it should be clear by now that the combination of restrictive zoning, organized and well-off nimby advocates in nice neighborhoods, and a massive shortage of housing, is not working. Blue states and blue cities are the worst culprits here and they need to engage in considerable policy changes, including the creation of affordable public housing as well as removing barriers to construction, to address the affordability crisis. For that is what it is. A crisis.

What Happened to the Left? (and surprising parallels to the late 60s-early 70s)

Introduction

I want to set out some thoughts on what happened to the left over the past decade or so. Specifically, what happened among a subset of generally younger liberals and leftists, first at universities and then spreading outward across many more institutions and cultural practices. 

There are some parallels to the radicalization concentrated among student activists in the 1960s, especially the radicalizing turn from the late 1960s-early 1970s. This is admittedly impressionistic and involves some generalizations. But more than the surprising ways in which history rhymes, I think there are genuine insights to be had comparing the similarities and hopefully learning where well-intentioned people went wrong in both cases.

So the parallels between the late 1960s and today. First, the surprising rhymes of history. Compare 1968 and 2024. Each year is preceded by about a decade of protest, each year features a Presidential election in which an unpopular President steps down, their relatively unpopular VP then runs a surprisingly close race but still loses, and earlier heroic mass protests against tremendous injustice (in the 1960s it was Jim Crow and the Vietnam War, in the 2010s it was police violence, sexism, and economic inequality), combined with admirable demands for more participatory democracy, turn to unproductive, intolerant, and at times violent, student radicalization.

Consider the parallels again. Protests in the early 2010s against police killings of unarmed black men, Occupy Wall Street protests against economic inequality, eventually congeal into unproductive and harmful collective efforts to fire professors for offensive or “harmful” statements (around 200 have been fired between 2014-2024, the same number of professors who lost their jobs to McCarthyism in the 1950s).

To be clear, attempts to cancel professors, journalists, and other public figures come from the right as well, not to mention efforts by state governments to infringe on the free speech of university students and faculty. But here I am focusing the critique internally on where the left went wrong. And there really are useful parallels to the student radicalization of the late 1960s-early 1970s beyond some of the surface similarities. Hopefully these comments and comparisons can lend some insight today.

Identity radicalization

People embrace, respond to, and radicalize based on the ideas, practices, and examples available to them.

In the 1960s-1970s, leftist student groups like SDS drew on the various radical Marxist ideas and currents available and eventually splintered into tiny, delusional factions, some forming violent groups like the Weathermen. Civil Rights groups like SNCC saw at least some participants turn to black nationalism and then calls for violent urban rebellion against the state (a truly deranged idea whose only consequence would have been the mass killing of urban blacks).

We are in a different time now. When a new set of unhelpful ideas took hold among students on the left, it had little to do with Marxism. After decades of postmodernist thought spread through the academy—a wide range of thought that tends to break down and treat all identity as a fictional, often harmful construct—it is no surprise that student radicalization would go down an identity-based rabbit hole of radicalization. Contrary to what many conservatives claim, this identity radicalization has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism or other concerns of the old left.

This leads, in short, to a youthful left obsessed with the proliferation of identities, pronouns, and adjectives, as if the ever-evolving construction of non-hetero, non-cis, increasingly fluid individual identities were the height of human liberation. 

What is so wrong with this? Nothing, in so far as any society claiming to be free should allow space for this kind of experimentation. But in so far as these ideas and practices become more prominent within academia, Hollywood, and the broader corporate world, they turn into an elite imposition on the general populace. An imposition that involves a massive disconnect from the lived reality of about 99% of people. 

This path of identity radicalization, claiming all identity is purely a construct, refusing to acknowledge the fact that we are embodied mammals, which places some limiting constraints on what we can be, is a path to permanent political life in the wilderness. 

(This is not a denial that trans people exist. They do. Gender dysphoria is real. But it is a real thing that happens to people in real bodies, bodies that do not match their minds).

So here is a question from the left: What does any of this identity proliferation have to do with the leftist dream of greater economic equality, participatory democracy, and an end to empire and war? 

As for identity radicalization, it is a mundane fact that most Americans, including most gay and trans Americans, desire the bland-seeming, heteronormative(ish) life of finding a monogamous relationship with a loving partner and raising one or several children together. Even among current college students a majority report that they want to find, but have not yet found, a committed long-term relationship. The fact that younger people are having a harder time finding such relationships only underscores how much they are missed. Again, most single people in their 20s and 30s say they are looking for this fairly conventional monogamous lifestyle.

As someone on the left, I have to reiterate that there is nothing wrong with bohemian, non-conforming lifestyles and they don’t threaten me in the slightest. But they remain, as much as they did in the 1960s, an aspiration for only a tiny subset of people, even among the left. But when these ideas spread out and filter into the broader mediasphere, into academia, and eventually come to to be perceived as a key part of leftism, liberalism, and the Democratic Party, they turn people off. 

A Party, or movement, infused with claims that all identities are a construction, and mostly harmful ones at that, is a party and a movement without a future. It is destined to remain within the confines of a tiny elite of cultural radicals. And the more the perception that identity radicalization infuses the broader spheres of liberal and left thought, the more it discredits them.

At the same time, and this leads into the next section, much of the identity-focused left also obsesses over inherited identity traits like race and gender, at times seeing them as immutable and definitive of who we are. Is this a contradiction?

Groupthink (and a culture of condescending scolding)

Here we come to the paradox at the heart of identity politics on the left: on the one hand, identity as a fictitious construction, where experimentation with and discovering or creating new identities is the pinnacle of liberation. On the other hand, the treatment of ascriptive characteristics that we are born with, particularly race and gender, as immutable traits that confer unqualified privilege or oppression depending on which traits one possesses. 

It is here, with the inclination to dismiss the perspectives of anyone deemed privileged, and promote anyone deemed oppressed, that we get into the groupthink and look-down-your-nose scolding at those you disagree with that has come to characterize so many progressive spaces, especially among the young. At their most extreme, they lead to calls for people to be censored, removed from platforms, and fired.

Reviewing attempts to remove people from Twitter or Facebook, Lukianoff and Schlott note (drawing on multiple studies) that “censorship doesn’t change people’s opinions. It encourages them to speak with people they already agree with, which makes political polarization even worse,” (p. 190). Or consider the simple, most tangible version of this. Trump is removed from Twitter, then wins the next election. 

Examples of this censorious attitude among students on the left are now legion. What were once rightly derided as isolated instances have become much more common. Here is journalist Jill Filipovic discussing a case at Macalaster University where students demanded the removal of a “harmful” art exhibit that depicted some revealing images of women as part of a critique of religious fundamentalism in Iran.

“Nearly 80 students have signed a petition against the exhibition, on a campus of just over 2,000. And the petition is worth a read, because I think it tells us a lot about a troubling kind of intolerance and narcissism that seems pervasive among a particular set of self-identified young progressives. There’s an entitlement not just to an education, but to broad emotional safety and wide control over what happens on campus.” This quote is from a blog post of hers titled Fear of a Female Body.

Filipovic is cataloguing just one example but by now cases like these are quite common at America’s universities.  As she says, “I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent…Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.”

And once we divide the world into various identity groups it becomes much easier to silence some people, for they are by definition oppressors, be they male, or white, or straight, or cis, or whatever. After all, if you are by definition privileged and oppressive, you can’t really be harmed, even if you lose your job. 

This danger isn’t new to the left. Because we care about victims of oppression there is always a danger that we will celebrate and fetishize victimization, which can create a sort of victim olympics culture among the young where people compete regarding who can claim to be most oppressed. One reason this is so unappealing to most Americans is that such behavior is concentrated among the rich, educated young, especially at the Ivy leagues, places that with little exaggeration credential and connect the future ruling class while excluding the poor and middle classes.

There are two problems with the spread of this culture. First, it’s conceptually wrong. By moving toward these ascriptive identity traits and away from class, those on the left can no longer coherently analyze the injustices of neoliberal capitalism or ever hope to unite the working class majority, riven as it is (in their eyes) with immutable identity fissures. Second, it is deeply unpopular with the general public. A member of the professional class who has victim attributes can scold and lecture a white man who works at Dunkin Donuts on his “privilege.” And it leads to the use of misguided phrases like “white privilege,” which build on the fact that the median white family has more wealth than the median black family to the incorrect conclusion that every white person is a privileged oppressor. Such language rightly turns most people off. It doesn’t accurately describe social reality and it is ugly and dismissive.

As these practices and ideas filter out from the academy they come to take residence in broader sectors of American society. Museums adopt scolding language. Future psychologists and therapists are taught in graduate programs to address their patients’ privilege, (a truly horrifying thought for those who are supposed to help people with mental health challenges). Academic journals consider the supposed “impact” potential articles will have on whoever they deem oppressed, while in the commercial publishing world there are sensitivity readers combing through book manuscripts and book publishers and estates work together to retroactively change the language in old books (the language changes in Roald Dahl’s corpus are just one example among many). Meanwhile, universities compile “oppressive language” lists. Remember when the left opposed real injustices, like war and poverty? Now we compile lists of mean words.

Why? This takes us to the Speech as Violence paradigm among many university administrators, younger faculty, students, as well as HR departments in the corporate world. We now inhabit, in many progressive spaces, a world where students can demand a visiting speaker be cancelled, a lesson plan be pulled, or even a teacher or administrator be fired, because what they said subjectively offended the student or students in question. 

It’s behavior such as this that leads conservative pundits to claim that they are the ones on the side of reality while liberals and leftists wallow in their feelings. For example, Ben Shapiro’s bestselling book Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings is a conservative attempt to claim facts and evidence for the right. And when students engage in this coddled, I don’t like how it makes me feel behavior, they are playing right into Shapiro’s hands. It’s pretty rich for those on the right to claim such ground, given the growing role of election denial and vaccine skepticism within their ranks. At the same time, when those on the left turn against free speech, refuse to engage with ideas they disagree with, or insist that the our mammalian biology is purely a social construct, they are losing their claim to be the side that goes where the evidence leads. Not to mention how you appear to the public when you deny the decrepitude of an obviously ailing 82 year old President…

This leads directly into the idea, found among many on the left now, that free speech is a conservative value. This is truly a crazy inversion, since for most of American history absolute free speech protections were seen as a key position of the left. As Lukianoff and Schlott note, it used to be puritan conservatives demanding the silencing of “vulgar” comedians or “obscene” books. This still happens, of course. Just look at the number of books banned from schools in Texas and Florida. But it now has its complement on the left, where free speech is attacked as a value for the privileged and oppressive.

This is unjust. It is also self-defeating. All of this is a contributing factor to the declining trust in institutions of higher learning, medicine, and the media. It also disregards a truth known at least since John Stuart Mill articulated it so well in his essay On Liberty. 

Mill’s basic point, in favor of free speech, is that the best way to approach the truth, and avoid groupthink, is for proponents of all ideas to offer their best arguments, evidence, and framing in the public sphere. Good ideas have the best chance of triumphing over bad ones in this manner. In addition, confronting alternatives, even bad ones, leads to improvements in the right ideas. Without challenge, ideas, even good ones, become dead letters, stultifying dogma that is closed off to challenges and new, potential improvements or alternatives. The fact that many on the right now lay claim to this legacy while many on the left would dismiss Mill, a liberal democratic proto-socialist, as some sort of paean to the privileged, shows how far off track we have come.

This in turn connects us to the radicalization of the late 1960s. As you become insular (a tiny elite at the Ivy Leagues guiding cultural conversation today, shrinking sects of radical leaders in groups like SDS in the previous generation), you get groupthink, a lack of alternative perspectives, and Millian debates don’t happen.

And I make this critique as someone on the left, it is coming from in-house, so to speak, along the likes of lefties like Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, Ben Burgis’ Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns, Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke, Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoaders, as well as more center-left works like Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap and Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’’s The Coddling of the American Mind.

Many on the left would point to and condemn attempts by conservative state governments to place limits on what can be said at public universities. I agree! It’s painfully hypocritical for those on the right to critique cancel culture and then attempt to place legal limits on what speech is allowed on campus. But similarly, if we on the left are correct to oppose such limitations from the right, we should also oppose those within our ranks who demand that speech they disagree with be silenced and such speakers removed or fired.

I want to conclude by saying that none of this should be taken as a claim that Democrats, or the left side of the political spectrum more broadly, should move to the center. As we’ve seen in many countries in Europe, center-left parties that choose to become the milquetoast defenders of the status-quo, obsessed with liberalizing identity and shepherding capital, are fast disappearing. They are pursuing a strategy that is unjust (marrying themselves to an unjust status quo) and politically self-defeating (nobody wants to vote for such a party).

Those of us on the democratic left should reiterate a belief in robust free speech, participatory democracy, workplace democracy, and our opposition to empire and war. We of course oppose racism and sexism but this doesn’t mean that the current prominent ways of addressing these issues on the left are healthy. Finally, we should embrace a politics that is fiery, anti-corporate, and embraces and advocates for the vast working class majority, not cast aspersions on them.

Review of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025), by Ross Douthat

I don’t usually write about religion here. But I think there are several good reasons for engaging with Ross Douthat’s new book on religious faith. First, because I share Douthat’s assessment that religious practice and belief are of great sociological importance, their decline in recent decades has had at least mixed results, and the fact that there seems to be something of a cultural shift in which people are groping for more meaning than is offered by an ethos of secular liberalism on the left or individualistic capitalism on the right.

In addition, as a self-critical leftist, I am trying to better understand the world, and understand where both liberals and lefties may have gone wrong in recent years. More broadly, I firmly believe that the left needs to be more open and welcoming of religious belief in its many forms. Just as it is not healthy for American politics to be divided into white and non-white political tribes, it will profit no one for America to be divided between a religious right and an atheist left.

And finally because Douthat, as a public intellectual, embodies many of the virtues I aspire to: he is humble, open-minded, respectful of alternatives and the inevitably incomplete nature of our individual (or tribal) assessments of the world, and he is interested in big ideas. The fact that he is a conservative Catholic, while I am neither of those, only makes engaging with this book more valuable.

In his book Believe, Douthat, a New York Times columnist, makes a case for general religious belief. He notes that Americans are in a different place culturally than, say, 20 years ago, which saw the publication of aggressive “new atheist” tracts from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. The percent of Americans who are religious has continued to decline (though there is some evidence that it has leveled off this past year) and there is now maybe more yearning for, and even nostalgia for, a more believing time.

Moreover, concerns about an empty, secular individualism becoming the dominant public culture are neither new nor confined to the right. In the 1980s, for instance, political theorists debated between communitarian and liberal perspectives. The communitarians, some of whom were more leftist than the liberals, argued that a shallow secular liberal culture was too hollow to sustain itself. Furthermore, there is pretty clear evidence that things have not gotten uniformly better as America has become less religious. While we have thankfully become more culturally open and pluralist on issues like gay marriage, we have also become more lonely, divided, angry, and dysfunctional. Of course there are many contributing factors to that (Think that neoliberal capitalism is a key contributor? Welcome to the left!). But it is plausible that the decline of religious practice is one of them.

In Douthat’s words, “relative to twenty years ago there is more discussion of the obvious sociological importance of institutional religion, its crucial shaping role in human culture, and its foundational place in the development of the modern democratic order. And there is more fear that a post-Christian or post-religious future might yield not liberal optimism and leaping scientific progress but tribalism, superstition, and despair.” (2-3). As Derek Thompson in The Atlantic notes, religion exiting the public sphere may leave a massive, unfilled void in its place, rather than a more enlightened alternative. For those interested, Thompson has a nice interview with Douthat on his Plain English podcast at The Ringer.

On the scholarly side, a detailed study of the sociological role played by religion in American life can be found in Robert Putnam’s American Grace. And various figures and writers on the left, like United Automobile Workers President Shawn Fain, Reverend William Barber, public intellectual Cornel West, and political theorist William Connolly (the latter not conventionally religious but a political theorist who is very critical of secularism) have discussed the centrality of their religious faith and/or problems with a wholly secular worldview. I mention these people just to reiterate that there is nothing strange or problematic about being on the left and being interested in religion.

Okay, on to Douthat’s arguments for why everyone should choose some form of religion. He begins by saying that he doesn’t want to make a case that you should shush your doubts and just jump into religious practice and then belief will follow (the fake-it-til-you-make-it approach), nor does he insist that if we engage in the most abstruse rational argumentation that this will prove religion’s veracity.

Rather, he is going to use evidence and arguments that appeal to the everyday reason and commonsense that we all possess and use to make sense of our world. As he says, he wants to not merely invoke the spiritual but “to think rationally about it” and to hopefully show that religion “offers wisdom and protection that in today’s spiritual landscape are in dangerously short supply.” (10). His argument “is that the basic justifications for a religious worldview are readily accessible to a reasonable human being.” (111).

The first topic he tackles is physics. Douthat’s main point, which rings true, is that the basic history and structure of the universe seems to suggest some kind of creator. The elegance of the mathematical equations that describe the movements of the cosmos at least raise the question why the universe is not merely a void of random chaos. But the second, and to me more powerful point, is that the big bang surely feels like an act of creation. If the universe was created by some sort of deity or higher power, is this not what it would look like? This deity snaps their fingers and the universe explodes into existence? At a precise point in time that we can measure, no less.

This takes us to ideas that go back to the Ancient Greeks, that to explain the beginning of the universe requires some sort of prime mover, or first cause, to get everything else going. I generally call myself agnostic. But if there is an argument for deism, the belief that there is some higher entity who created existence, this is it. This doesn’t take you all the way to accepting any particular religious faith of course. It will, however, get many, myself included, to concede that some form of deism might be the best explanation for how the universe came to be.

The second, and fascinating point of argument, concerns consciousness, the mind, and neuroscience. In Douthat’s interpretation, when we consult the latest findings of neuroscience, not to mention reflections from the best philosophers, we still don’t understand consciousness. Self-awareness, what it is, how it comes to be, continues to be something of a black box.

For all the advances in neuroscience, consciousness remains a miraculous mystery. Consider its existence throughout the animal kingdom: consciousness in a crow, a jaguar, an orca, is a truly stunning feat, let alone in human beings. Now consider our computer age: generative AI like ChatGPT has no more consciousness than a pocket-watch, in part because we have no idea how consciousness works or how it is created. Here again I generally  agree with Douthat—we have no idea how consciousness operates and simple material explanations don’t seem adequate. (On this topic I am looking forward to reading David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods). 

If you are committed to the idea that consciousness is not mere delusion, not just something produced and determined by chemicals in the brain, if you believe humans and other animals have something like free will, you are stuck in a weird place. It is not at all clear that we can account for these things through a purely material explanation—we may need something like the old mind/body dualism to make sense of them. And if there is something in us, a mind perhaps, that doesn’t reduce to mere brain matter, what are the implications? I’ll leave this question hanging.

In political terms could this make room for strange bedfellows on this issue? Humble people on the left and right, religious and non-religious, who don’t want us to merge with AI, who see humans as embodied mammals, who don’t want a techno-futurist singularity to emerge, and who see natural life, of humans and animals, as sacred? Perhaps such people might agree on various regulations and strong norms regarding big tech, AI, etc., though the stumbling blocks are substantial and that is a topic for another time…

The next chapter concerns miracles and evidence of the supernatural in the world today. The common disenchantment story says that as modern science came to explain more of the world, human life became “disenchanted” and we stopped seeing supernatural hands and actors behind every event. A medieval world full of spirts came to be replaced by a modern world full of mechanistic laws. This argument, which has plenty of truth to it, is explored brilliantly in Charles Taylor’s lengthy A Secular Age.

However. As Douthat observes, “when intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously, actual human beings kept on having the experiences.” (69). Here I am much more skeptical—not that such experiences happen, for they clearly do, but that we can draw any clear metaphysical conclusions from them. Crazy coincidences, UFO sightings, a broken record player that mysteriously turns on during a wedding. These things do happen. Douthat strenuously argues that such experiences have not gone away in our more scientific and disenchanted age. This is an interesting point, no doubt, though we might still dismiss many of them as confirmation bias or things conjured up by “the power of the human mind to generate what it wants to hear or see” (84), (Douthat’s words). I frankly think this, combined with simple mistakes of interpretation, can account for most of these uncanny experiences, though it is fascinating that some of these experiences come unbidden. The same goes for the sheer strangeness of near death experiences. I guess, for me, there is no clear takeaway. Things happen that defy explanation, yes. But what to make of them? Much less certain.

In my life, as with Douthat himself, the miraculous tends to assume more prosaic forms: falling in love, becoming a father, developing lifelong friendships, growing up in a loving home with two amazing parents. Of course, from my own gut perspective, these are far more rich and meaningful than an encounter with the uncanny. Perhaps I am mistaken.

The book then makes the case for joining a religious practice/tradition, not just experimenting alone. This is because, as Douthat argues, it is harder to commit to something solo, and because the major faith traditions of the world are likely to have endured because they each, in their own way, connect to some features of the divine. Any is better than none, he suggests. A lot more could be said here but I don’t want the review to get too unwieldy. Let me just say that if more Americans participated in religious institutions, as well as all sorts of other civic organizations, from bowling leagues to yoga groups, our political culture would likely be in a healthier state.

How about possible criticisms? There are at least three that stand out to me, one cosmological, one scientific, and one moral. First the cosmological: the arguments Douthat points to, many of which I think have merit, seem to argue at most for deism, not to the much more specific theological claims of the real religions of the world, many of which advocate a very active, personal, theistic God. This is a big leap and one that he tackles. His argument, in short, is that all the major faith traditions are likely to get at some truths about the divine and so it makes sense to follow one’s gut and go where one is drawn. Anywhere is better than nowhere, to reiterate his claim. So I suppose he would suggest I look into practices within the major faiths that are most aligned with my own leanings about the nature of the universe. Perhaps versions of Buddhism, a unitarian Church, maybe the immanent Christian explorations of Tolstoy, though the latter don’t fit as well with collective engagements.

The second point concerns the scientific method. To simplify, the modern scientific method works, more or less. It gives us life-saving medicines, planes that fly, and deep insights into the nature of the cosmos. Any religious turn that saw a widespread abandonment of this would be a massive loss, for the insights into reality that have been uncovered in modernity are truly stunning. Douthat largely concedes this point, indeed his argument centers around the claim that modern scientific knowledge suggests a world ordered by a divine hand.

The third point is the moral one, namely the problem of pain and suffering. This is a standard stumbling block for many people of good will and a classic issue for religious believers to wrestle with.

As for the problem of pain, not to be hyperbolic, but how can there be an all-powerful, loving God and the Holocaust? This isn’t just a moral intuition, a gut-feeling. This question is probably the most damning challenge to theism imaginable—far more so than the misplaced claims of the new Atheists that religion is the source of most evil in the world. As an atheist friend of mine correctly pointed out in grad school, nationalism as an orienting force has probably killed more people than all the world’s religions combined. Which is to say, the reason to be skeptical of religion isn’t because of the claims of Harris or Hitchens. (Ben Burgis points out, in a thoughtful book on Hitchens, that Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is filled with pretty bad arguments against religion).

And Douthat rightly criticizes the lazy atheist argument that religion is the cause of most wars, or more broadly, most evils in human history. As he says, “there is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history, as compared to the entirely worldly and secular aims of conquest or resource control that drive most warfare between countries and peoples.” (161). Agreed.

As for the problem of pain, Douthat recognizes it as a key debate and challenge that believers, especially Christians, have been wrestling with as long as we have had these religions. It doesn’t have easy answers. Rather, he tries to show that it doesn’t defeat all claims to belief. 

He also ends with an admirable and honest discussion of how he came to his own faith. I don’t have the historical knowledge to assess discussions on the veracity of the gospels, though I shared his experience of being blown away by the Gospels when I read them in their entirety for the first time. For some time in college I was more or less a Tolstoyan pacifist Christian, and maybe still am. I certainly have never lost my interest in Christian writers on the left.

Let me conclude on some strong points—I agree with Douthat that a fully materialist account does not seem able to explain the entirety of the world, especially consciousness and free will (both of which I believe exist among animals, most obviously humans, but also among mammals and birds), and that the very existence of the universe and its seeming laws suggests the hand of a prime mover. Thinking big picture, what does that tell you? I’m not sure. 

For more on this topic, see the following:

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos. A philosopher, he rejects both materialism and theism, arguing for a third way of viewing the universe and its purpose.

David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. This is a long, dense book that delves into the most complex questions and problems of consciousness. Perfect if you want a philosophical deep dive.

Meghan O’Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine. A thoughtful book on related topics, discussing the connections between religion, AI, human consciousness, animal life, and more. I reviewed it in an earlier blog post.

David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods. Next on my reading list. Hart is a thoughtful theologian discussing in detail the materialist worldview.