Ross Douthat dissects America’s 50-year stagnation in The Decadent Society, framing it as a paradox: prosperity—low infant mortality, women’s empowerment—fueled decline by eroding purpose after Apollo’s failure and the internet’s surveillance-driven retreat. Comparing Rome’s cultural legacy to U.S. pop-culture remakes, he warns of internal decay over China’s rise, linking "wokeness" and QAnon to secularized spiritual crises. While elites face unrest (Capitol riot, campus protests), he sees hope in vaccines and long-term adaptation, urging institutional religion’s revival as a cultural anchor amid demographic shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
So, as you know, usually here at the Daily Wire, we have security guards making sure that no one from the New York Times gets in.
We have a tase on site order out there, but we make an exception for Ross Dalthat.
He is actually, I think, one of the best and most interesting columnists in America.
He writes for the New York Times op-ed page, and he's written a book, which I just finished.
I thought it was really terrific and just fascinating, called The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victim of Our Own Success.
Ross, thank you so much for coming on.
I'm glad you made it past security.
Thanks for having me.
I'm glad that my disguise worked.
So, I want to talk about this book about the decadent society because I thought there was a lot of truth to it.
First of all, just for those who haven't read it, usually when we talk about decadence, we're thinking about Roman orgies and excess.
And in fact, I was hoping there'd be pictures of Roman orgies.
But you're actually referring to something entirely different.
Can you define decadence for us?
Sure.
I mean, I had a whole photo essay ready to go.
And then, you know, the publishing industry are such prudence that they scotched.
But yeah, so I'm using decadence basically to mean not orgies or not necessarily, but stagnation, drift, and repetition at a high level of wealth and technological development.
So basically, it's a stage that rich, advanced societies can enter into when their economies don't grow as fast, new technologies aren't invented as fast, and people sort of lose faith in the future.
They stop having kids.
They start remaking the same Star Wars movies over and over again.
And their political institutions end up sort of stuck in gridlock and dysfunction.
And I think that's a pretty good description of the U.S. and really, I would argue, the whole Western world over the last 50 years or so.
Yeah, I mean, it does sound familiar, I have to confess.
But it's interesting.
The title of the subtitle of the book is How We Become the Victim of Our Own Success.
And even as you're describing it, you're describing it as a function of wealth and prosperity.
Is that always true?
Do you think that's always the case?
Well, I think you can't have decadence without having success, right?
So a society that's never built a great empire or become a wealthy republic or done any of the things that we associate with sort of civilizational greatness can't become decadent.
You have to reach some heights in order to be decadent, right?
So Somalia at the moment is not decadent.
You have to hit.
You can't just be sort of unhappy and in political chaos.
You have to have reached something.
And then this kind of stagnation and torpor doesn't have to, but it can set in.
But what's the relationship between the success and the decadence?
In other words, is it just because you've gone as far as you can go?
Or is there a causal relationship?
Yeah, I mean, sometimes there are sort of immediate causal relationships, right?
So I start the book with the moon landing and the Apollo program and argue that, you know, basically not just America, but the whole Western world had for a long time been oriented towards exploration, discovery, and so on.
And, you know, space was rather famously supposed to be the final frontier.
It was supposed to be the next phase of discovery and exploration.
And, you know, we sort of entered into what was described as the space age.
And then it turned out that other planets were too far away.
Our technology was too limited.
There wasn't that much interest in colonizing the moon.
A lot of the confident technological predictions that inform everything from science fiction to even a lot of things that people sort of futurists wrote in the 50s and 60s didn't come to pass.
And so when you took that frontier away, there was, I think, a loss of sort of purpose and ambition that might have continued had Mars been habitable and ready for us to go.
So some of it is contingent, but then some of it is, I think, is actually just a function of being wealthy and advanced in ways, like take the birth rate, for instance, right?
So the whole developed world has a birth rate problem.
We are not, every rich society, with the interesting exception of Israel, has birth rates that are below replacement levels, sometimes way below replacement levels.
And this is something that's, you know, creating and going to create a lot of problems for our society over the next hundred years.
But that's something that happens because of wealth and achievement.
It's sort of the result of, you know, breakthroughs, escaping from an agrarian society, right?
So suddenly you don't need seven kids to work on your farm, escaping from high infant mortality rates, giving more opportunities to women, all kinds of things that are successes create a context in which it becomes possible to have that kind of birth rate collapse.
Some of this, I mean, at least the way you describe it, some of it seems almost philosophical.
You talk about Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History and the Last Man, which most people just attack because of the title.
But really, he wasn't talking about the end of history as we know it.
He was talking about the success of the liberal free trade, free market philosophy.
And you point out that once you've succeeded, once a philosophy has resolved itself, there's kind of nothing to talk about in a way.
I mean, is that, I don't know, how would you describe it?
It doesn't ring true.
Yeah, he's described, Fukuyama didn't mean that there would never be any events or wars or interesting things again.
He meant that we had entered a period, maybe a temporary period, of sort of liberal democratic capitalist triumph in which most of the plausible alternatives, you know, fascism, communism, and so on, had been defeated or collapsed.
And that that kind of period was likely to be characterized by, you know, a certain peace and prosperity, but also a certain kind of boredom and anomy and, you know, a sort of a sort of waiting, right?
A waiting for the next challenge, the next conflict, the next chapter in the human drama.
And I think, you know, one of the points I make in the book is that Fukuyama was writing in 1989, 1990, before the internet.
And so the internet is the one big new technology, the big new change that sort of entered into our decadent society.
But what the internet has done so far, it remains to be seen what will happen down the road, but it's become sort of a mechanism for people to retreat into virtual reality, right?
Into, you know, to sort of replace sex with pornography, replace real life friendships with virtual, with sort of Facebook curation.
And also, in some places, it's a means of surveillance and social control, especially in the People's Republic of China, but just, you know, to some extent here in the Western world as well.
So it's the exception to decadence, right?
It's the new thing.
But in certain ways, it's pushed us deeper into decadence, away from sort of reality and away from freedom and into virtual entertainment and social control.
It's funny.
One of the things that I reflected on on the book that I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, you quote a couple of times people talking about Rome and how it lasted.
The Roman Empire lasted for, what was it, 400 years, but really after the Augustan period, it didn't produce anything of note.
It didn't produce any great artists after a while.
It's not the later period of Rome, which was pretty steady for a long time, is not the period we turn to for its great cultural productions.
But I was thinking the one thing Rome did first with the Greeks, with Greek culture, and then with Christian culture, is it spread itself into the people who they called the barbarians.
I mean, it actually did serve as a vehicle for the spread of Greek and Christian culture throughout the world.
And that's, I mean, America does sort of serve that purpose, doesn't it?
We invite people in.
We turn people into Americans.
We still, even the people who hate us become us in some ways.
And maybe this, maybe it's a phase of culture that it needs this great big empire to sort of spread the word to everybody else that we have a civil.
Is it possible we have a civilizing influence that we're not really taking account of?
I mean, I think there's, I mean, one, you know, obviously all of these analogies are a little bit strange, right?
Like there are lots of ways in which America is not at all like Rome, and those are important to emphasize.
But yeah, I think you can tell a story where, you know, Europe is to ancient Greece as we are to ancient Rome.
And so we are sort of, you know, Europe is the birth of Western culture and so on.
And the United States is sort of the world empire that then turns that culture into a globalized force.
But then, you know, as with Rome, there is a certain point where mediocrity and dysfunction set in.
So, you know, what's happening in the Augustan age with Virgil is this sort of incredibly creative reworking of Greek culture.
And then what's happening in the third century AD is not, you know, is not nearly so impressive.
And I don't know exactly where we are on that continuum, but, you know, we're sort of waiting for either our version of the Christian transformation of Rome or our version of the barbarian invasions, which is not an ideal thing to hope for.
But you are basically the point of that analogy is to just say you can have a society that's incredibly dynamic and powerful, and it can remain powerful long after it ceases to be dynamic.
And I think that's the, that's more than like China invading and putting us to the torch.
I think that's the 21st century danger for America, that the 20th century was our great vital century, and the 21st century is, you know, again, endless remakes of pop culture that was created for the baby boomers long ago.
Elites And Decadence00:08:09
Nothing against the baby boomers.
I mean, they're all not.
You know, some of my best friends are baby boomers.
Last week we had Helen Andrews on.
She tore me to pieces with her coverage.
You covered that there.
We did the bone.
I mean, you mentioned one of the points you make that I really hadn't thought of was the idea that after 9-11, we almost seized on the Islamist threat or Islam's hatred of us or radical Islam's hatred of us as almost a hopeful thing that would reignite the great kind of Cold War conflict of values.
You have a great poem in there that I had read many, many years ago, but totally forgotten about waiting for the barbarians to come almost as if they would provide a solution.
You know, there is this sense that after the Cold War ended, that it's kind of our job was done and now it was party time.
And maybe that's we're kind of in this eddy of that experience where we just can't get out and move on to something new.
I can't help but feel that some of this is spiritual.
I mean, you're a Catholic.
You wrote another book that I really enjoyed, Bad Religion, which I thought was a really terrific book.
There's always this constant refrain in Western cultures: you know, we need to get back to religion.
We need to get back to Christianity.
First, do you think that that's true?
Do you think that there's an answer there?
And secondly, do you think it's possible?
So, I mean, I am a Christian, so obviously I'm biased in favor of getting back to Christianity.
And I do think that sort of, you know, independent of my own theological convictions, I think religious impulses don't go away.
They get sort of transmuted and changed and sort of absorbed often into politics in ways that I think are worse for culture and society than having robust and serious religious traditions.
So to that extent, you know, I think you can see a lot of what's happening on the American left right now, right?
Sort of the rise of what we call wokeness, like the language of that is itself a language of religion, right?
It's a language of sort of confession, confess your privilege, scrutinize, you know, scrutinize your, you know, your role in systemic oppression.
All of these things are, they're sort of Protestantism without Protestant metaphysics in certain ways, plus maybe a dose of Catholic confession and Jewish guilt mixed into.
But all of it has religious elements.
And, you know, so too do things on the right.
I mean, if you don't see the religious element in something like QAnon, you're not looking hard enough.
So I think religion doesn't go away.
But if you want a society where religion plays a role that's both sort of that's stabilizing on the one hand and dynamic and creative on the other hand, you want it to be a religious tradition that is connected to institutions, connected to ancient debates about deep truths and connected to truth itself.
And I think the faltering of institutional Christianity in the Western world, its own decadence, right?
Like I'm a Catholic.
The Catholic Church looks decadent right now.
This big, sprawling church ridden by scandal, divided between liberals and conservatives.
That's a problem, not just for the church itself, but for the society that it is supposed to influence and shape and convert.
You know, it seems to me, it's very hard for me, at least, to escape the idea that there is some kind of spiritual crisis going on.
Before the rise of Donald Trump, people were killing themselves in such numbers that our life expectancy was going down or dying deaths of despair in such numbers that their life expectancy was going down and nobody knew it.
The elites didn't know.
The elites didn't know it was happening, which is shocking when such little things set the elites off into a crisis.
But at the same time, you talk a lot about one of my favorite books, From Dawn to Decadence, by in the audiobook, you call him Jacques Barzun.
I've always called him Jacques Barzin.
I'm not sure which of us knew Jesus is written.
But however he pronounces it, one of the truly insightful, brilliant guys in Dawn to Decadence, which he wrote in his 90s, is his masterpiece.
One of the points that really struck me in reading that book is he talks about the fact that while for many of us, a crisis in meaning, a decadent moment is a terrible, destructive, I don't know, a cause of despair, that for some people, especially elites, decadence can be kind of a blast.
Do you think that that's happening now?
I don't know.
I would have felt more confident saying that five years ago.
I mean, my perception of American society five years ago was that, you know, it's that our elites were pretty comfortable and that there was this sort of social crisis percolating in the heartland, you know, embodied in the opioid epidemic most dramatically, but sort of embodied in the decline of family, the decline of church going.
Meanwhile, the elites were sort of prosperous and self-satisfied and comfortable with their position.
When I look at, I mean, some of this may be the effect of the pandemic, which has driven everybody a little bit crazy.
But when I look at elites, and I don't just mean liberal elites, I include, you know, what I would think of as like evangelical and Republican elites, some of the people who've gotten into conspiracy theories in the Trump era, I see a lot of, you know, despair and uncertainty there too.
And I think that's new.
I think, again, five or 10 years ago, I would have said our elites were in better shape.
But I don't think you get things like, you know, what you've seen on college campuses, you know, what you saw in the storming of the Capitol, which was not like, you know, poor, was not poor people, right?
It was like sort of upper middle class Republicans.
I don't think you get that if the elite is just in good shape.
So I think the feeling that you're describing, this sense of sort of, you know, uncertainty about the future, this loss of a sense of meaning and belief, I think it extends into the elite, both conservative as well as liberal right now.
When you look to the horizon, aside from an invigorating barbarian sacking of Washington, D.C., as opposed to some kind of rise of crisis, what do you see as a possible solution?
Is there a possible end to decadence?
I mean, at the end of From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzoon adds, that was good.
I was half Barzoon and half Barzin.
I like it.
Jacques Barzoon says, you know, looks forward to the coming renaissance.
He basically has a kind of hopeful final sentence in which he says, you know, after these periods of collapse and dark ages, there can come a renaissance.
I always hate to ask conservatives if they have any hope, but do you see any hope that there is an end to this part of the cycle in the offing?
And what do you think it would be?
I mean, I think if you, it's not, maybe it's an odd thing for a religious conservative to say, but I think, you know, on the evidence of the last year or so, you would say that actually sort of hard science and scientific innovation might be in better shape than we feared.
Like our ability to produce a vaccine for the coronavirus and such, multiple vaccines in such a rapid amount of time, that's not decadent, right?
And there really are a bunch of innovations on the horizon now in energy and self-driving cars and medicine and so on that we may not get because of sort of societal and political impediments, but are sort of there and visible that might be sort of a kick, if you will, against decadence.
Innovations Against Decadence00:01:22
So that, I mean, that to me seems like the most immediately hopeful thing.
In the long term, I would also say that like, you know, things that can't continue forever don't continue forever, right?
So if you take something like population decline and the birth rate, right, part of that reflects just sort of this failure to figure out how men and women should relate to one another and form families after the sexual revolution, after the internet, after secularization, after everything else.
But people will figure that out.
People do figure that out.
People do get married and have kids.
And at a certain point, the people who figure that out will create models, hopefully, for the healthier, more flourishing society that their kids and grandkids grow up in.
So on a 10-year time horizon, I'd say technology makes me a little more optimistic.
On a 50 to 75-year horizon, I'd say sort of the selection effects of the people who do form families creating these models for the future makes me at least somewhat hopeful.
That's really interesting.
Ross Dalthat, the author of The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victim of Our Own Success.
It's really good.
His column, I don't want to drive you to the New York Times, but his column in the Times is absolutely a bright light.
Ross, it's really nice to meet you and talk to you.