It is a conservative’s nature to believe that society has gone off the rails. I believe that we have gone off the rails by having lost sight of the importance of children and grandchildren. I predict that many people today between the ages of 25 and 40 will find themselves becoming lonely and depressed by age 60 as they see the past as having little meaning and the future as having little purpose.

Note that being an aunt or an uncle can have some of the same satisfaction as being a grandparent. But with fewer siblings these days, becoming an aunt or uncle will be rare.

I believe that grandparents are the happiest people. This is based on introspection and observation. Show me a grandparent who does not love their grandchild.

Although I know happy grandparents who are divorced, grandparenting is more satisfying if you managed to stay married. At worst, a divorce may alienate you from your children. At best, it pretty much forces your children to divide up their visits, so that you get half the time with your grandchildren that you would if you had stayed married.

Nobody in their twenties makes decisions based on a desire to end up as grandparents. That is too far to look ahead. Instead, young people respond to immediate cultural influences.

Consider a repressive culture vs. a liberated culture, or R vs. L.

In an R culture, sex outside of heterosexual marriage is frowned upon and difficult to obtain; abortion and birth control are frowned upon and difficult to obtain; and divorces are frowned upon and difficult to obtain. In an L culture, none of these apply.

We are in an L culture, and even if we wanted an R culture there is no squeezing that toothpaste back into the tube. But in an R culture more people are likely to become grandparents.

As an aside, perhaps an L culture is somewhat self-limiting. Imagine that there is a polygenic score that measures likely deviation from straight heterosexual preferences. A score close to 0 means you are very straight. A score close to 10 means you are very non-straight. In an R culture, people with high scores are pressured to conform, so they try to get by in traditional marriages and have children. In an L culture, only people with low scores are likely to have traditional marriages and children. It seems to me that this would lead to a gene pool that tends to reduce the proportion of children who are born with a propensity to deviate from straight heterosexuality.

As another aside, perhaps some other people also want to take themselves out the gene pool.

The official Black Lives Matter organization, which has received vast sums in corporate funding, has listed the abolition of the family among its demands. Left-wing publications like the slickly produced anarchist Commune magazine have explicitly advocated for it. Last year Verso Books, the influential leftist publishing house, released Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, which made the case for family abolition amid glowing reviews in Vice, the Nation, the Outline, and elsewhere. The Open Society Foundation and Ford Foundation-funded publication Open Democracy recently published an opinion piece by Lewis headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis Shows It’s Time to Abolish the Family,” while the Nation ran with “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”

I believe that grandparents are the most socially forward-looking people. They want the best for their grandchildren. For the most part, I think that this means that grandparents will vote wisely. But when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, I suspect that most grandparents think, “Those entitlements mean that I won’t be a burden on my grandchildren, so it’s good for them,” even though in the aggregate this is not the case.

People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote? Raising children means being in the same household with them. So perhaps single mothers should vote, but absent fathers should not?

Geoff Shullenberger writes,

Taken as a whole, [Christopher] Lasch’s body of writing offers an account of the limitations of the American political panorama of his era. Conservatism, he suggests, tends to provide de facto ideological cover for the economic developments that have eroded the social values it claims to promote. Liberalism, for its part, has overseen the rise of a state bureaucratic apparatus that promises to compensate for the effects of this erosion. However, in the process, it further weakens the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities, and enables the substitution of democracy with technocratic elite rule. While the New Left of the 1960s rebelled against the expansion of corporate and bureaucratic power, the end result of its revolt was not a reassertion of the local and the communal, but the infusion of those structures with a new therapeutic sensibility.

Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the economic, social, and cultural tendencies Lasch deplored. While small businesses have collapsed in record numbers and average families have found themselves destitute, the major tech companies and retail conglomerates like Amazon have reaped massive profits and the stock market has soared; in response, the political class has delivered aid packages that blatantly favor the interests of the latter. As Alex Gutentag recently argued, “the pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history.” Lasch’s work suggests that the roots of this crisis extend far back into the last century, during which both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons, became increasingly indifferent to the degradation of average people’s lives and livelihoods. He offers us no easy alternatives, but his writings reveal the scale of the problems anyone attempting to look beyond the failings of liberalism must confront.

Over the past 250 years we have gone from nation of yeoman farmers to a nation of industrial workers to a nation of white-collar workers in technology, government, and the non-profit sector. With each transformation, the sense of being able to determine our own fate declines, and the sense of dependence on those with concentrations of wealth and power increases.

Kevin Vallier writes,

Strikingly, the U.S. is the only established democracy to see a major decline in social trust. In other nations the trend was in the opposite direction. From 1998 to 2014, social trust increased in Sweden from 56.5% to 67%, in Australia from 40% to 54%, and in Germany from 32% to 42%. Meanwhile, the U.S. is becoming more like Brazil, where trust is around 5%. What makes America unique?

. . .Growing up under polarized political institutions may lead young people to generalize from partisan distrust to social distrust. Americans are sorting themselves into social silos, seldom interacting with unlike-minded others, leading to less moderation and more radicalization. This may be due in part to social media, though recent research on the effect of social media has reached mixed conclusions on this question. But the effect is clear: In 2017, around 70% of Democrats said that Donald Trump voters couldn’t be trusted, and around 70% of Republicans said the same of Hillary Clinton voters.

I am skeptical of the quantitative, survey-based approach to this issue. Centrist political parties and establishment politicians have taken a big hit in many countries, not just in the U.S. It seems to me that we live in a Martin Gurri world, not a world in which America is the exception.

I am not sure that political dislike carries over into social distrust so much. If the best surgeon you can find supports the other party, how many people would pick a different surgeon?

Ş. Pelin Akyol and Naci H. Mocan write,

We leverage a Turkish education reform which went into effect in 1997. For political reasons, the reform was implemented very quickly and rather unexpectedly, and it increased the mandatory years of education from 5 to 8 years.

. . .In many societies around the world, the practice of consanguineous marriage is part of the fabric of culture. Nevertheless, our results reveal that the propensity to approve this practice and the propensity to be actually in a consanguineous marriage are malleable and that these tendencies are influenced by women’s educational attainment.

Malcolm Kyeyune writes,

for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that this class of people (which, again, nobody denies the existence of) might begin acting as a class.

Peter Turchin coined the phrase “elite over-production” to describe the volatile situation in which there are too many people with elite class markers relative to high-status positions in society. We “solve” this problem in the United States by putting these surplus elites into college administration and other meaningless non-profit positions. Otherwise, even more of them would end up as baristas, where they would at least be contributing positively to society.

One very uncharitable way to describe the result is that these surplus elites have some unfulfilled desires for power and status. They take these out on the rest of us in fits of woke rage.

Kyeyune puts the uncharitable interpretation this way:

The point of this “totalitarianism” is not to force everyone to think correct thoughts at the risk of getting fired; it is to get them fired. Full stop. Like the medieval guilds of old Europe, surplus managers are threatened by the existence of a mass of people willing to do any job within their ambit that cannot be comfortably accommodated without inviting the pauperization of their entire profession.

I recommend the whole essay.