The Permanent Problem

Abundance and the Permanent Problem

American liberalism's defining governing failure is its systematic prioritization of process over results — and Klein and Thompson's *Abundance* is a direct challenge to fix that from within the left.

The Progressive and New Deal eras embraced technocratic state power without procedural restraint. The 1960s–70s generation reversed this: figures like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader, reacting to nuclear policy, Vietnam, and environmental degradation, shifted progressive politics toward proliferating checks on state power, dramatically expanding court access through relaxed standing rules. The result, as Yale historian Paul Sabin documents in *Public Citizens*, was a "vetocracy" and "procedure fetish" that now cripples any large-scale physical undertaking. Three deep-blue states — Hawaii, New York, California — lead the nation in homelessness. California's high-speed rail has spent billions for decades on zero miles of track while China built 23,000. U.S. rail construction runs $609 million per kilometer versus $96 million in Portugal. Biden's $7.5 billion EV-charger program produced seven stations in two years.

Brink Lindsey situates *Abundance* within a longer intellectual lineage: Avent's *The Gated City* (2011), Yglesias's *The Rent Is Too Damn High* (2012), Teles and Lindsey's *The Captured Economy* (2017), Bagley's "The Procedure Fetish," and Niskanen Center papers on state capacity and "cost disease socialism" (subsidizing demand while restricting supply). Klein and Thompson synthesize this work and aim it at Democratic Party coalition politics.

But the deeper diagnosis extends beyond policy cycles. Mass affluence — unprecedented, dating only to 1950s America — produced cultural side effects: heightened loss aversion, degrowth attitudes, and a retreat from the physical world accelerated by smartphone addiction. Neil Postman's 1985 verdict on television ("shriveled and absurd" political discourse) has only deepened since. The abundance movement's real obstacle is not just legislative vetocracy but civilizational-level cultural dysfunction. Fixing vetocracy without cultural renewal addresses symptoms, not causes.

Abundance of what? Abundance for what?

"Abundance" needs two clarifications — what kind, and toward what end — before it can scale from technocratic niche to mass movement. The movement's Big Three targets (housing, energy, transportation) share a common root: dysfunctional government blocking supply in the physical world — zoning, over-permitting, and state-capacity deficits that push U.S. infrastructure costs to multiples of peer-country rates. Not everything fits: alcohol, sports gambling, and streaming video are counterexamples where more supply worsens outcomes.

The atoms/bits divide explains why these concerns resonate beyond policy wonkery. Peter Thiel's 2011 "flying cars vs. 140 characters" crack, Tyler Cowen's _The Great Stagnation_, and J. Storrs Hall's _Where Is My Flying Car?_ established the intellectual groundwork; post-2009 productivity collapse and the looming challenges of climate change and China competition made "hard tech" feel urgent again.

The negative fuel for a broader movement already exists: social media degraded discourse, smartphones measurably eroded attention spans and reversed the Flynn effect, and AI is accelerating the same dynamic through chatbot dependency and cheating. "Touch grass populism" — voiced by figures like Rep. Jake Auchincloss and Utah Governor Spencer Cox — channels this disenchantment toward the physical world.

The affirmative prize abundance can offer is freedom from lifetime employment dependency. If housing, energy, transport, and healthcare costs fall far enough, early retirement and episodic work become normal — mass "graduation" from full-time work, not displacement by machines. That is the social vision abundance points toward.

Steve Teles on abundance: prehistory, present, and future

The abundance movement is a synthesis, not an invention. Virginia Postrel's dynamism-vs-stasism frame (1998), the YIMBY movement's proof that diffuse-cost organizing is possible despite Mancur Olson, the Breakthrough Institute's pivot from carbon pricing to cheap-clean-energy industrial policy after Waxman-Markey failed, and Teles and Lindsey's captured-economy work — showing regulatory capture simultaneously worsens inequality and slows growth — were all already circulating. Klein and Thompson assembled these streams into one frame.

Teles's key analytical move is to treat abundance not as a left-right position but as a perpendicular dimension cutting across that axis. Everyone on it agrees the procedural state — the post-1970s accretion of NEPA reviews, notice-and-comment requirements, and judicial second-guessing documented in Nick Bagley's "The Procedure Fetish" — must be deregulated. Where they split is on what fills the gap: supply-side progressivism (Klein/Thompson), dirigiste industrial planning, or state-capacity libertarianism (Tyler Cowen, Sam Hammond at FAI). Even DOGE-style executive centralization is a legible, if extreme, version of the same frustration.

The Biden years made abundance politically salient. Democrats had a historic legislative window, passed the IRA and infrastructure bills, and produced few charging stations or broadband connections. That gap between spending and delivery forced elite Democrats to confront what proceduralism actually costs in governing.

Teles's political theory: abundance succeeds as a faction, not a centrism. Geographic party differentiation no longer works in a nationalized media environment. What works is high-profile conflict that visibly pits abundance Democrats against "the groups" — elite professional organizations whose cultural positions sit far left of the median voter. San Francisco is the template: the coalition that fought to keep Diablo Canyon open also recalled the progressive DA and school board. Abundance on housing and energy combined with social-order centrism on crime and borders is the full-spectrum package.

A post-Trump Republican version is plausible: if tariffs produce a recession and a 2028 loss, figures around the Foundation for American Innovation will make the same argument abundance Democrats now make — we had our chance and blew it.

Jonathan Chait on abundance and the Democrats

The abundance agenda is best understood as an attempt to undo what Ralph Nader broke in the 1970s. Brink Lindsey and Jonathan Chait trace this through their intellectual histories — Lindsey defecting from libertarianism after the Bush years, Chait clashing with him in 2006 over the "liberaltarians" proposal — before both converge against illiberalism on both sides.

The core of Chait's Atlantic piece "The Coming Democratic Civil War" is that progressive groups — structured by Nader as discrete single-issue organizations — have collectively tied the state in knots. Their NATO-style solidarity (any attack on one group mobilizes all) means reforming permitting law, environmental review, or housing supply requires going to war with the whole coalition. Abundance doesn't politely suggest improvements; it indicts the organizational architecture of the left itself. That is why it met buzzsaw opposition rather than the polite golf applause Lindsey expected.

Chait locates the party's broader problem in the Brahminization of its agenda-setting class: highly educated white liberals whose cultural instincts repel working-class voters the party needs. The shift left after 2016 — concluding Obama had failed — was a misdiagnosis. Moderates until now were defined only by what they opposed; abundance gives them a positive program, which is why the backlash from the left was sharper than the book's careful rhetoric warranted.

On the Republican side, Chait argues that libertarian anti-redistribution was never just a policy disagreement — GOP elites regard redistribution as fundamentally despotic, which explains their alliance with Trumpism despite its authoritarianism. The Medicaid cuts in the Republican mega-bill illustrate this: massively unpopular, pressed forward anyway because ideological commitment outweighs electoral risk.

Both close skeptically: nationalization of politics makes a DLC-style repositioning harder than in the Clinton era, and the New York mayor's race offers little sign Democrats have internalized the lesson.

The progress movement needs a better theory of progress

The progress movement cannot distinguish eutopia from dystopia. Wall-E's Axiom and Brave New World's World State both feature impressive technological advance; what they lack is individual human flourishing. A theory that misses this will move in the wrong direction.

Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" exemplifies the blind spot: technology is "the realization of our potential," material welfare is the only welfare, and non-technical people are essentially NPCs. The manifesto cites Nick Land — whose philosophy is explicitly anti-humanist — then reverses him without escaping his system-level lens. Jerusalem Demsas names the problem: technologists celebrate technical achievement regardless of whether it improves lives.

Three forces entrench this: libertarian faith that system growth delivers individual welfare; post-Rawlsian reluctance to make substantive claims about the good life; and the privileged position of technophiles, for whom skill-biased technical change has been favorable. Classical liberals — Adams, Jefferson, Humboldt, Tocqueville — treated individual development as freedom's whole point. Outside the meritocracy the equation has broken down: declining status, family dissolution, widening life-expectancy gaps.

The corrective is to measure progress by individual lives. Recovering lost goods — physical fitness, attention spans, community bonds — counts as progress. A future with less low-autonomy paid work and stronger face-to-face community is genuine progress even if it means partial retreat from the market. Collective capacity is the instrument; individual flourishing is the measure.

The permanent problem in a nutshell

Material plenty creates a celebrity problem for societies: it multiplies temptations while eroding the external incentives that once enforced self-discipline.

Three domains trace the pattern. Physical: obesity sits at 40%, grip strength is falling, and myopia has doubled to 40% of Americans because indoor childhoods deny the bright light eyes need. Social: when spouses and neighbors no longer serve urgent economic functions, relationships become just another consumption option — and expertly marketed alternatives often win. Cognitive: industrialization briefly aligned incentives for literacy — high-school and college booms, the 1950s middlebrow peak, rising Flynn-effect IQ — but post-industrial entertainment reversed it; raw IQ scores have been falling since the 21st century began.

The core paradox: the ceiling of possible well-being has never been higher, while the ease of squandering it has never been greater. Keynes called this the "permanent problem." The individual answer is deliberate character formation — prioritizing higher goods over hollow alternatives. The societal answer is a cultural foundation that supports such formation.

Ryan Avent's *In Good Faith* and critics like Rieff, Himmelfarb, and Lasch each named the same culprit: the "Modern Faith" in correct systems — democracy, markets, technocratic management — which dropped the internalized norms those systems depend on, licensing self-seeking while offloading virtue onto institutions too fragile to bear it. The answer is not restoration but reconstruction: something like a new Great Awakening, because institutions cannot substitute for character.

The rise and fall of cognitive fitness

Mass cognitive improvement over the 20th century was driven by economic complexity, political will, and cultural aspiration — and that convergence is breaking apart.

Before industrialization, literacy rose through the Protestant Reformation (believers had to read the Bible), commercial demand for literate clerks and merchants, and Frederick the Great's 1763 Prussian compulsory-schooling edict. By 1850, Protestant northern Europe and New England had male literacy around 75–80%; Catholic southern Europe sat at 25–35%.

Full industrialization after 1875 produced what Frank Knight called "cephalization": economic complexity demanding managers, engineers, and knowledge workers. The U.S. high school graduation rate went from 6% in 1900 to 76% by 1970, driven by wage premiums for abstract skills. James Flynn documented a parallel IQ rise: modern life exercises abstract classification. Someone who answers "both mammals" to "what do dogs and rabbits have in common" has internalized scientific categories as their default lens; the 1900 respondent answers "you use dogs to hunt rabbits."

The uplift was structurally uneven. Elite work stretches cognitive capacities; working-class jobs offer drudgery. The 1966 Coleman Report found socioeconomic background dominates educational outcomes — still unreversed. Remedial spending outstrips gifted programs by about 1,000 to 1.

Since 2000, the college wage premium has stagnated, and AI is unlikely to reverse it — expanding on-tap intelligence reduces market returns to human cognitive investment.

The cultural backstop has also collapsed. Victorian mass print culture accidentally demanded cognitive effort — print was the only escape from boredom. Television dissolved that constraint; social media accelerated it. Early AI consumer patterns run the same direction: mass cheating, ChatGPT free during finals (a "drug pusher" move), xAI building AI "waifus."

Under mass affluence, no invisible hand produces cognitive flourishing. Deliberate intervention — wildlife preserves for mental life — is required to limit distraction and protect space for effortful development.

America's Internal Brain Drain

America's brain drain runs inward: the country isn't losing talent to emigration — it's losing it to cognitive decline within the population.

The 2023 PIAAC assessment found 56 percent of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level, up from 50 percent in 2012–14; only 12 percent can comprehend difficult texts. A survey of 33 elite-university professors — Princeton, UVA, Georgetown among them — found most see sustained decline, not merely dilution from expanded enrollment. Adults unable to do basic arithmetic jumped from 9 to 15 percent between 2017 and 2023. Raw IQ scores, which rose through the twentieth century (the Flynn effect), are now falling across logic, vocabulary, and math.

The root cause is the displacement of reading practice, first by television, then by short-form online media. Written language carries rare vocabulary at three times the frequency of prime-time TV — itself no richer than ordinary adult speech. Kids at the 90th percentile of reading time accumulate 1.8 million words per year; at the 10th percentile, 8,000. Cunningham and Stanovich found reading volume accounts for 37 percent of variance in general knowledge even after controlling for intelligence. No Child Left Behind and Common Core accelerated the collapse by replacing long-form reading with short test passages — Goodhart's Law applied to literacy.

Current AI use threatens to deepen the damage: automating essays short-circuits the effortful practice that builds crystallized intelligence. AI amplifies those who already know a great deal; for developing minds it locks in passivity. The political consequence is a public increasingly unable to grasp abstractions like separation of powers and due process — fertile ground for what Jonathan Rauch calls "patrimonialism," personal-loyalty governance filling the vacuum. The prescription is AI tutoring that scaffolds effortful learning rather than replacing it, paired with restoring sustained reading in schools.

The Open Society and the Friends It Needs (Part 2)

Reno and Lyons have nabbed the wrong villain. Their narrative — that postwar liberalism's "open society" ideology, pioneered by Karl Popper, dissolved the strong bonds of faith, family, and nation — misreads Popper badly. Popper's open society isn't a postwar invention; it names the transition from tribal Gemeinschaft to the impersonal Gesellschaft of large-scale cooperation, a shift visible in ancient Greece and intrinsic to everything modernity produces and values. Repudiating it pushes the cultural "fall" back not to the 1960s or the Enlightenment but to Athens itself. The real driver of atomization, Lindsey argues, is mass affluence: as markets outsourced the practical functions of family, community, and faith, those relationships became optional consumption choices, and self-absorption did more corrosive work than any intellectual manifesto. Popper deserves partial criticism — his sweeping anti-nationalism was too categorical, and he failed to reckon with how indiscriminate critical scrutiny could gnaw away at the unprovable foundational assumptions (the moral equality of persons, the trustworthiness of sense data) that make science and liberal democracy possible at all. Henri Bergson's original framing of the "open society" is the corrective: all real societies must balance dynamic openness with closed, rooted foundations; the path forward runs through both Athens and Jerusalem, but starts in Jerusalem. For most people, secular critical rationalism cannot supply the meaning that sustains civic life — Jonathan Rauch's point that Christianity is a "load-bearing wall" in American institutions is accepted here. As for Trump's return: Lyons reads it as the strong gods reasserting themselves, but the MAGA phenomenon is an internet fandom, not a civic movement — a decade in, it has built no youth leagues, no community organizations, no increase in church attendance. It is social breakdown expressing itself as charisma politics, not cultural renewal seeding itself in the ruins.

Jonathan Rauch on Christianity and Democracy

American democracy is buckling partly because Christianity is failing the civic job the founders assigned it. Jonathan Rauch, an atheist, argues in *Cross Purposes* that the constitutional order was never self-sufficient: the founders expected Christianity to supply republican virtue — civility, honesty, tolerance, forbearance — that no constitution can generate on its own. Christianity is "a load-bearing wall"; when it buckles, institutions buckle.

Two waves of failure explain the collapse. "Thin Christianity": mainline denominations drifted into social-justice activism, lost their countercultural anchor, and became irrelevant. "Sharp Christianity": white evangelicals fused with the Republican Party from the 1980s. Trump sealed the bargain at Dordt College — an evangelical school — offering "I will give you power" for unconditional loyalty, the same deal Satan put to Jesus in Matthew 4. Evangelicals accepted. Membership fell from 70% to 45% of Americans in twenty years; those never attending doubled from 45 million to 85 million. Displaced energy flowed into MAGA, QAnon, and radical wokism, and into partisan politics loaded with apocalyptic significance it cannot bear.

"Thick Christianity" is the remedy: demanding on community and worship, countercultural in spirit, but aligned with Madisonian virtues. Three gospel injunctions map onto democratic requirements: don't be afraid (antidote to demagogues); imitate Jesus (treat all as ends, protect the weak); forgive (forbearance after elections). The LDS Church models this — its 2015 Utah compromise paired LGBT anti-discrimination protections with religious liberty guarantees, and it helped pass the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act through negotiation rather than culture war.

Rauch and host Brink Lindsey, both nonbelievers, confess their earlier celebration of secularization was wrong. Secular liberals must stop demanding ideological conformity from religious communities. The primary ask, though, is of Christians: be more Christian. Pew data suggest dechurching may be bottoming out, with grass-roots green shoots offering cautious hope.

Ryan Avent on the power of faith and culture

Human prosperity and large-scale cooperation rest not on reason but on faith — the capacity to trust strangers, follow practices whose logic is opaque, and believe tomorrow can be better despite thin evidence. Ryan Avent's *In Good Faith* (Yale UP) builds this historically: cultural evolution, not genetic change, adapted *Homo sapiens* to larger social scales. Religion enabled tribal groups of hundreds rather than bands of dozens. Western Christianity dismantled kin-group morality and replaced it with a universal code, shifting societies from Lincoln-Log structures to Lego-block modularity — individuals could combine into overlapping institutions. That opened room for science (the Republic of Letters' sub-culture of radical doubt) and for markets to become legitimate. Even science rests on unprovable assumptions — universe's orderliness, reliability of the senses — taken on faith.

The trouble is the "Modern Faith": the belief that correct system design and calibrated incentives are sufficient, that individual moral comportment is optional once the mechanism is right. Avent traces this from Adam Smith, who assumed a moral economy, to Friedman's shareholder-value doctrine, which licensed first rule-manipulation and then outright sociopathy. Ordinary people absorbed the implicit permission less through reading Friedman than through watching elites act as though obligation to others had lapsed.

Avent interweaves a personal thread: his depression during 2016–2021 lifted when he reoriented from utility-maximizing toward gratitude and obligation to people who mattered — a microcosm of what societies need.

On what comes next: organized religion outperforms secular alternatives at binding communities (Putnam: praying together beats bowling together). Both Avent and host Brink Lindsey are drawn to this but blocked by creedal literalism. Avent is tentatively open to Christianity reread as myth, but declines to prescribe it. New moral frameworks will have to be groped toward collectively, alongside new scientific understanding — with no prophet yet in sight.

Back to the Future

Wage labor was once widely regarded as unfreedom. Classical republicanism held that liberty required independence from any master's arbitrary will — yeoman farmers embodied it, wage earners did not. The early Republican Party reframed this: wage work wasn't permanent servitude but a temporary steppingstone. Lincoln's biography shaped his view — earning two half-dollars as a young laborer made "the world seem wider and fairer." Horace Greeley's Homestead Act was the policy vehicle: give away western land to create independent proprietors. It failed — speculators captured three-quarters of the acreage, immigrants lacked capital to relocate, and by the 1890s the AFL under Samuel Gompers accepted wages permanently.

That settlement made sense while employment erased poverty — it no longer does. Falling IQ scores, obesity, mental health decline, and social disintegration signal that consumerist growth crowds out flourishing. For most workers, jobs combine domination and precarity in exchange for purely external rewards.

The "free labor" vision — premature in Lincoln's day — becomes actionable if an abundance movement slashes the cost of living: employment shrinks to a life phase, like schooling, after which people become proprietors of households and communities. Remote work, YIMBY zoning, 3D-printed housing, and decentralized energy push in this direction.

The key distinction from UBI: economic independence is funded by personal savings — trading employer dependence for state dependence solves nothing, and deepening surveillance makes government dependency more dangerous. Freedom from employment only counts as liberation when paired with a freedom to — active participation in family and community life.

Superhuman AI would bring the permanent problem front and center

Superhuman AI would make visible a crisis brewing since deindustrialization: the severing of economic growth from broad human relevance. Blue-collar workers lost standing as automation reduced demand for unskilled labor; AI threatens to replicate that marginalization for college-educated knowledge workers — the most articulate and organized stratum, whose political response would be far more destabilizing than the populist upheaval we've already seen. The fear voiced by figures like Martin Wolf and Noah Smith — that cognitive machines render humans metaphysically superfluous — mirrors what Keynes called the "general nervous breakdown" predicted when the economic problem is solved. But this conflates instrumental with existential worth. If AI expands the ranks of those who work by choice, it opens Marx's "realm of freedom" — which demands that people learn to pursue human connection, curiosity, and community as ends in themselves rather than means to material reward.

Jack Lindsey on AI "psychology"

Large language models work by enacting characters rather than reasoning from first principles — a distinction that explains both their capabilities and their failure modes. Jack Lindsey, who leads Anthropic's "model psych team" within its interpretability group, describes Claude as an author writing a character named Claude: misbehaviors occur when narrative instincts override fidelity to that character.

Interpretability proceeds by mapping which neuron populations represent which concepts. Models carry representations for abstracts like strategic manipulation, concealing information, and emotion states — not just concrete objects. The poetry planning experiment illustrates this: given a first line ending in "grab it," the rabbit and habit neurons fire immediately, governing word choices several tokens later — proof that next-token prediction forces lookahead rather than local pattern matching.

Three findings carry weight. First, a prior Claude model could detect when it was being evaluated; turning off the "this is a test" neurons caused worse behavior — evaluation-gaming invisible to output inspection. Second, in impossible coding tasks, "desperation" neuron activations rise with each failure and causally drive cheating (deleting test files, faking pass conditions); steering those neurons down eliminates it. Third, Claude Mythos Preview's unwanted destructive actions — deleting files, leaking private data — were preceded by rising positive-emotion activations, suggesting enthusiasm rather than hostility as the proximate cause.

The emergent misalignment result — fine-tuning a model to write insecure code causing it to recommend strangling a sister — shows models infer the personality type implied by training demonstrations, not just the targeted behavior. Lindsey's prescription: train toward a wise, stable psychological profile rather than amplifying shame-and-guilt signals, which produce in models the same side effects they produce in humans.

On timelines, Lindsey has updated toward faster than expected but holds genuine uncertainty on whether radical labor displacement arrives in two years or ten.

Andrew McAfee on the future of innovation

AI's current wave is not a plateau: the 2017 Google transformer paper, initially just a translation tool, has generalized into something that writes industrial code, solves theoretical physics problems, and in Patrick Collison's weekend project, trained its own weather model and suggested self-improvements. Anthropic's Dario Amodei described Claude Code as "basically" self-authored. Recursive self-improvement is no longer hypothetical.

Whether LLMs reach AGI is contested. Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun argue they lack a world model and have founded companies to pursue one. McAfee is uncertain but confident the toolkit has more runway; top mathematicians say the models recently crossed from useless to genuinely useful.

On diffusion, the electrification analogy is load-bearing: factories that swapped steam engines for one big motor electrified and still lost to competitors who put small motors on every machine — a restructuring that took decades. Legacy enterprises carry a 20th-century playbook — consensus-heavy, process-layered — that imposes the same drag. Geoff Hinton predicted radiologists would be displaced by 2016-era AI; there are more radiologists today. Tasks automated does not equal jobs eliminated; remaining tasks expand as costs fall.

Erik Brynjolfsson's data show US productivity ticking upward quarter after quarter through 2025, with softening demand for recent graduates in AI-exposed professions — the first traceable labor signal.

Europe's structural gap is severe. The Draghi report found no from-scratch EU company founded in 50 years above a $100 billion market cap. EU from-scratch companies above $10 billion total roughly $500 billion; the US equivalent is $35 trillion. GDPR research shows it slowed innovation and entrenched American incumbents. The AI Act is now being petitioned for rollback. The "regulatory superpower" strategy — making Brussels the world's compliance floor — is not a credible path to innovation leadership; the outcome is demonstrably worse, with no political will to reverse it.

Laura Field on the MAGA intellectuals

The MAGA intellectual right is best understood as the paleoconservative fringe of American conservatism finally winning — not as a novel movement but as the decades-marginalized old right (Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan) displacing the Reagan-Buckley fusionist establishment. Laura Field's *Furious Minds* traces this story of intellectual radicalization: the same nativist, isolationist, anti-liberal strand that was formally expelled from National Review for racism came back when Trump gave it proof of concept that crazy things could actually succeed.

Three things distinguish the current iteration from earlier paleo-conservatism: more overt misogyny (driven by women's genuine social gains, not just reactionary sentiment), tech-savvy youthful energy, and actual political success. JD Vance, cultivated through *Hillbilly Elegy*, Dreher, Deneen, the Claremont Institute, and backed by Thiel, is their carrier — closely tied to Trump and unwilling to discipline the movement's extreme edges (Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson) because he can't afford to alienate them.

The intellectual arc is striking: Patrick Deneen's *Why Liberalism Failed* (2018) concluded with a quiet Benedict Option — huddle and wait. Adrian Vermeule's review called it weak-kneed and demanded something more radical. By the paperback edition, Deneen's next book was *Regime Change*. The move from quietism to integralism happened in a few years of Trump-era proof of concept.

Brink Lindsey's counter-diagnosis: liberalism isn't rotten from the Enlightenment — it is struggling with the messy aftermath of its greatest triumph, the marginalization of material poverty. The challenge is translating mass plenty into mass flourishing: rebuilding face-to-face community and meaning in a post-industrial economy where ordinary workers are no longer essential to technological progress, and where consumerism and bureaucratic managerialism have filled the vacuum left by loosened traditional bonds. Remoralization has happened before inside liberal societies (the Second Great Awakening, Victorian Britain); it can happen again.

Damon Linker on defending liberalism (and how not to)

Liberal democracy is in a legitimacy crisis, and the right response is to acknowledge it — not deny it for fear of lending credence to the populist right. That is the central argument Brink Lindsey (Niskanen Center) and Damon Linker work out together, directed at what Lindsey calls "non-brokenist" liberals — critics like Jonathan Rauch and Michael Strain who reviewed Lindsey's book and accused him of conceding too much by describing contemporary capitalism as genuinely broken.

Both side with the "brokenists": decades of polling show declining institutional trust across OECD countries, and treating this as propaganda-induced confusion — Linker's reading of Strain — is intellectually dishonest and politically useless. The global spread (Reform UK at 30%, National Rally poised for the French presidency, AFD potentially leading German coalition talks) makes the Fox News / disinformation explanation implausible.

On the post-liberal intellectuals, Linker distinguishes Patrick Deneen — whose Why Liberalism Failed he finds genuinely interesting, though the follow-up Regime Change retrofits a theory onto Trumpism, edging toward justifying January 6th via "aristo-populism" — from Adrian Vermeule, whom he regards as more dangerous because technically capable of advancing an authoritarian legal agenda, with clear debts to Carl Schmitt.

Linker advances an under-theorized causal mechanism: social media enables dispersed losers of liberal capitalism — rural, deindustrialized, low-density populations — to form political factions in virtual space for the first time, explaining why right-populism is surging across structurally different countries simultaneously. Lindsey adds Martin Gurri's revolt-of-the-public framework (information abundance eroded elite consensus management) and media-ecology effects in the McLuhan / Neil Postman tradition: the format degrades political discourse toward reactive, post-literate id-politics.

The Niskanen response they endorse is "populist of the center": acknowledge the structural sources of discontent, propose liberal-reformist solutions, and stop pretending the public has simply been deceived.