that is only “dystopia-ish” will not
necessarily inspire, or even merit, the sort
of risky, history-reviving actions that
might end decadence.
Especially since the forces that
gave rise to it were somewhat beyond
our control.
Start with productivity slowdown,
stagnation’s most familiar, easiest-to-
measure form. Drawing on the work of
Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen (the
latter’s Great Stagnationin particular),
Douthat suggests a variety of constraints
that have made high productivity growth,
and the social contentedness it brings, less
sustainable than in past decades. Richer
people have fewer kids, fewer kids means
older societies (and thus more debt), the
educational gains of the 20th century
were more or less a one-time shock, and
it’s no longer possible to boost growth by
appropriating fallow land—the frontier
has been closed, and, pending space
travel, won’t be reopened any time soon.
Space travel is pending, moreover,
because innovation in the realm of atoms
has not kept pace with innovation in the
realm of bits, with inventions that were
predicted “fifty years ago... now
dismissed as fantasies,” the stuff of Star
Warsor (better yet) Star Trek. And this
technological decadence, while not
obviously inevitable, is not obviously
reversible either—in part because of
feedback loops between the afore -
mentioned constraints but also, po -
tentially, because there is an “inherent
limit on possible innovation” built into
our present order. “At some point, every
advanced-for-its-time society has ceased
advancing,” Douthat notes ominously.
“There is no reason to assume that the
modern world is inherently immune
from the torpor that claimed the
Ottomans and imperial China in the not-
so-distant past.”
Likewise, there’s little reason to
assume that the “consistent ineffectuality
in American governance”—the gridlock,
the failed presidencies, the forever
wars—can be fixed through any kind of
conventional reform. What Francis
Fukuyama calls “vetocracy,” a system in
which too many checks and balances
hamstring effective policymaking, is now
the default condition of the United Statesand, across the sea, of Europe as well.
Both have experienced sustained
stalemate—Democrats vs. Republicans
in America, centrists vs. populists in the
EU—in which no side can achieve
lasting legislative victories, stymied as
they are by interest groups and insti -
tutions that seem increasingly endemic to
the liberal order.
Overcoming such obstacles will
require a great deal of imagination and
ambition... which, according to Douthat,
are two things today’s West sorely
lacks—not just in technology and politics,
but also in culture, and in our recurring
battles over it. “Famous 1970s-era texts
such as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture
of Narcissism... seem entirely relevant”
to America today, Douthat observes, as
do ’90s-era critiques of affirmative
action, postmodernism, feminism, and
progressive myopia more generally. The
buzzwords may have changed, but the
underlying debates have not, and
concerns about their being decisively
resolved in the Left’s favor seem
exaggerated, to say the least. Instead,
writes Douthat, “today’s changes are
aftershocks” from “the genuine revolu -
tions of fifty or sixty years ago... rather
than new earthquakes”—hence the
striking “similarities between the Clarence
Thomas Supreme Court con firmation fight
in 1991 and the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh
confirmation fight, between the current
Black Lives Matter moment and the O. J.
Simpson– and Rodney King–era debates
about police brutality,... even between
the sexual scandals of Donald Trump
and the sexual scandals of Bill Clinton.”
Equally telling, and arguably more
depressing, is the state of popular culture,
which has traded the creativity and
cultural ferment of the Boomers for
endless reboots and recyclings, often of
Boomer-era IP. “Thirty years after 1985,
the year’s biggest blockbuster was a Star
Wars movie about Darth Vader’s
grandchildren... which was directed by
a filmmaker, J. J. Abrams, who was
coming off rebooting Star Trek...
which was part of a wider cinematic
landscape dominated by ‘presold’
comic-book properties developed when
the baby boomers were young,” Douthat
notes wryly. The problem is that the‘D
ECLINE is a choice,”
Charles Krauthammer
famously quipped. But
decadence is not.
Or at least that’s one possible reading
of The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat’s
sweeping, incisive tome on the stagnant
state of Western liberalism. Decadence,
Douthat writes, “refers to economic
stagnation, institutional decay, and
cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a
high level of material prosperity and
technological development.” It does not
mean excess so much as enervation,
and—crucially—it needn’t imply crisis
or collapse, at least not in the immediate,
return-of-history sort of way often
associated with the Trump era. Lest the
reader begin to feel reassured, Douthat
says the best analogue of our present
situation is imperial Rome, which, as
W. H. Auden put it, “managed to last for
four centuries without creativity,
warmth, or hope.”
Repetition as opposed to regression,
drift rather than death—that is the order of
the day, and part of the reason renewal
may prove so elusive: because a societySPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 43The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims
of Our Own Success, by Ross Douthat
(Avid Reader, 272 pp., $27)Sustainable
Stagnation?
AARON SIBARIUMMr. Sibarium is an assistant editor of The
American Interest.Books, Arts &Manners
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