15. Martha Bayless, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 36.
16. Susan J. Wolfson, “ ‘This Is My Lightning’ or, Sparks in the Air,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 55, no. 4 (Autumn 2015), p. 751.
17. B. F. Schonland, “Wilkins Lecture: Benjamin Franklin: Natural Philosopher,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 235, no. 1203 (Series A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, June 12, 1956), pp. 433-44: “Before he had heard about it Franklin was acclaimed in Europe as the modern Prometheus. The discovery was later described by Joseph Priestley, himself no mean judge of scientific experiment, as ‘the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.’ The effect on the public mind was awe-inspiring and can be compared to that produced in our own time by the explosion of the atom bomb.”
18. Chieko Tsuneoka, “A New Godzilla Faces a More Nationalistic Japan,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2016. http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-godzilla-faces-a-more-nationalistic-japan-1472834845
19. William M. Tsutsui, “Review: Shin Godzilla,” ArkansasOnline, October 7, 2016. http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/oct/07/shin-godzilla-20161007/?f=entertainment
20. Tsuneoka, “A New Godzilla Faces a More Nationalistic Japan.”
21. William Peter Blatty, “The Exorcist Script—Dialogue Transcript,” 1973. http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/e/exorcist-script-transcript-blatty-friedkin.html
22. William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist (New York: HarperCollins, 2011 [1971]), p. 345.
23. As Thomas Hibbs has noted, “Rather than straight horror, The Exorcist should be grouped with a number of classic Seventies dramas, films such as Deliverance, Taxi Driver, and Chinatown that disclose the chaos and evil lurking just beneath the surface of civilization. Both the book and the film are intimately connected to the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s; the film within the film that brings Chris MacNeil to Georgetown features a campus antiwar protest.” Thomas Hibbs, “The Exorcist at 40,” National Review online, October 31, 2013. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362662/exorcist-40-thomas-hibbs
24. Helen Childress, “Reality Bites Script—Dialogue Transcript,” 1994. http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/r/reality-bites-script-transcript-stiller.html
25. Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999. http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/AmericanBeauty_final.html
26. “Point Break: Quotes,” IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102685/quotes
27. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 2006 [1939]), p. 33.
28. “Mr. Robot (2015-): Quotes,” IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/quotes
29. Ibid.
30. “Fight Club (1999): Quotes,” IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes
31. Tom Schulman, “Dead Poets Society: Final Script,” 1989. http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/dead_poets_final.html
32. Kevin J. H. Dettmar, “Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities,” Atlantic, February 19, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/-em-dead-poets-society-em-is-a-terrible-defense-of-the-humanities/283853/
33. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, p. 12.
34. Ibid.
35. Carlyle fawned over Muhammad because, in Berlin’s words, the prophet was “an elemental force, that he lives an intense life, that he has a great many followers with him; that something elemental occurred, a tremendous phenomenon, that there was a great and moving episode in the life of mankind, which Muhammad represents. The importance of Muhammad is his character and not his beliefs. The question of whether what Muhammad believed was true or false would have appeared to Carlyle perfectly irrelevant.” Ibid., p. 13.
36. Allan Bloom notes in The Closing of the American Mind how so many of his left-leaning peers admire terrorists because of their commitment to radical self-assertion. Indeed, explain to a typical college student who wears a Che Guevara T-shirt that he is lionizing a cold-blooded murderer and he will roll his eyes. Guevara’s appeal stems from his commitment to his cause. One finds echoes of this thinking in countless apologias to terrorists around the world: “At least they believe something!” Or, as Walter puts it in The Big Lebowski: “Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism. At least it’s an ethos.”
37. Compare the well-known Latin maxim Fiat justitia ruat caelum, or “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”
38. See Jonah Goldberg, “Life and Death on Basic Cable,” National Review 65, no. 15, August 19, 2013. https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/354946/life-and-death-basic-cable
39. Paul MacInnes, “Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan: The Man Who Turned Walter White from Mr. Chips into Scarface,” Guardian, May 18, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/may/19/vince-gilligan-breaking-bad
40. See Jonah Goldberg, “Empty Integrity,” National Review 66, no. 21, November 17, 2014. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/392395/empty-integrity-jonah-goldberg
41. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Chapter XIV,” Biographia Literaria. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html
42. See, for example, They Live or “A Most Unusual Camera” from The Twilight Zone.
12: THE FAMILY’S LOSING WAR AGAINST BARBARISM
1. Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The March into Socialism,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings of the Sixty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association 40, no. 2 (May 1950), p. 450. (This was the last thing Schumpeter worked on during his lifetime. He died with it all but completed; it was finished by his wife.)
2. Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin, 2007, Kindle edition), p. 169.
3. Ibid.
4. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson, “The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, March 5, 2012, pp. 657-69. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260845/
5. Eric D. Gould et al., “The Mystery of Monogamy,” American Economic Review 98, no. 1 (March 2008), pp. 333-34.
6. Robin Fox, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 49.
7. Susan Dominus, “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?,” New York Times Magazine, May 11, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/magazine/is-an-open-marriage-a-happier-marriage.html?mcubz=1&_r=0
8. Kathleen Doheny, “The Truth About Open Marriage,” WebMD. http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/features/the-truth-about-open-marriage#1
9. W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce,” National Affairs, Fall 2009. http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce. I am deeply indebted to Wilcox’s scholarship for much of my discussion of divorce.
10. Ibid., citing Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
11. Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce.”
12. Wade F. Horn, “Wedding Bell Blues: Marriage and Welfare Reform,” Brookings Institution, June 1, 2001. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marriage-and-welfare-reform/
13. See “Table 15. Births and Birth Rates for Unmarried Women, by Age and Race and Hispanic Origin of Mother: United States, 2015,” in National Vital Statistics Reports 66, no. 1 (January 5, 2017). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_01.pdf. See also George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States,” B
rookings Policy Brief Series, Brookings Institution, August 1, 1996. https://www.brookings.edu/research/an-analysis-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in-the-united-states/
14. Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce.”
15. Due credit to Ben Shapiro for this pithy formulation.
16. W. Bradford Wilcox et al., “Mobility and Money in U.S. States: The Marriage Effect,” Social Mobility Papers, Brookings Institution, December 7, 2015. https://www.brookings.edu/research/mobility-and-money-in-u-s-states-the-marriage-effect/ (quoting Sara McLanahan and Isabel Sawhill, “Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited: Introducing the Issue,” The Future of Children 25, no. 2 [special issue: “Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited” [Fall 2015], p. 4).
17. Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce.”
18. Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), pp. 5-6.
19. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, Kindle edition), p. 165.
20. Nicholas Zill, “The Paradox of Adoption,” Institute for Family Studies, October 7, 2015. https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-paradox-of-adoption/
21. Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 165.
22. Suzanne Woolley, “This Is How Much Your Kids Are Worth,” Bloomberg Business, August 28, 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-08-28/this-is-the-best-long-term-care-insurance
23. Isabel V. Sawhill, “Beyond Marriage,” New York Times, September 13, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/opinion/sunday/beyond-marriage.html?_r=0
24. W. Bradford Wilcox et al., “Strong Families, Prosperous States: Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?,” American Enterprise Institute, October 19, 2015. http://www.aei.org/publication/strong-families-prosperous-states/
25. Jim Tankersley, “Why States with More Marriages Are Richer States,” Washington Post, October 20, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/20/why-states-with-more-marriages-are-richer-states/?utm_term=.9d08e445e746
26. Bryan Caplan, “What Is the Male Marriage Premium?,” Library of Economics and Liberty, February 28, 2012. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/what_is_the_mar.html
27. See Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Finally, Economists Acknowledge That They’re Biased,” Forbes, March 18, 2013. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/03/18/finally-economists-acknowledge-that-theyre-biased/#6543da0f1f57
For males, the premium is 44 percent for marriage and only 34 percent for college. See Bryan Caplan, “The College Premium vs. the Marriage Premium: A Case of Double Standards,” Library of Economics and Liberty, January 23, 2012. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/the_college_pre.html
28. See Gobry, “Finally, Economists Acknowledge That They’re Biased.”
29. Ron Haskins, “Three Simple Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to Join the Middle Class,” Brookings Institution, March 13, 2013. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/
30. Annie Kim, “Why Is Marriage Thriving Among (and Only Among) the Affluent?,” Washington Monthly, March/April/May 2016. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/maraprmay-2016/why-is-marriage-thriving-among-and-only-among-the-affluent/
31. Ibid.
32. Kim Parker and Renee Stepler, “As U.S. Marriage Rate Hovers at 50%, Education Gap in Marital Status Widens,” Pew Research Center, September 14, 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marriage-rate-hovers-at-50-education-gap-in-marital-status-widens/?utm_content=buffer2c241&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
33. Jason DeParle, “Two Classes in America, Divided by I Do,” New York Times, July 14, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html
34. See Milton Kurland, “Romantic Love and Economic Considerations: A Cultural Comparison,” Journal of Educational Sociology 27, no. 2 (October 1953), pp. 72-79; Charles Lindholm, “Romantic Love and Anthropology,” Etnofoor 19, no. 1 (2006), pp. 5-21; Robert Levine et al., “Love and Marriage in Eleven Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 26, no. 5 (September 1995).
35. See Courtland Milloy, “Why Is Baseball Striking Out in the Black Community?,” Washington Post, October 30, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/why-is-baseball-striking-out-in-the-black-community/2012/10/30/57fa1aca-22c7-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_story.html?utm_term=.955c36217479. See also Mark Armour and Daniel R. Levitt, “Baseball Demographics, 1947-2016,” Society for American Baseball Research. http://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/baseball-demographics-1947-2012
36. See Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” Atlantic, April 1993. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/
37. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd edition (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008 [1942]), p. 157.
13: THE TRUMPIAN ERA
1. Deirdre N. McCloskey, “Creative Destruction vs. the New Industrial State: Review of McCraw and Galbraith,” Reason (October 2007). Accessed via http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/galbraith.php
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “4—State of the Union Message to Congress—January 11, 1944,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518
3. Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Volume II: Muckraking/Revolution/Seeing America at Last (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931), p. 799. The line was later cleaned up and memorialized as “I’ve seen the future, and it works.”
4. In Liberal Fascism, I chronicle the infatuation the American progressive intellectuals had for governments that were willing to “experiment” with new and exciting alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism. For instance, Rexford Guy Tugwell, an influential member of FDR’s Brain Trust, said of Italian Fascism, “It’s the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” “We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages,” proclaimed the New Republic’s editor George Soule, an enthusiastic supporter of the FDR administration. Stuart Chase, the man who helped popularize the term “a New Deal,” marveled how the Soviets weren’t guided by a “hungry group of stockholders” but were “informed by battalions of statistics” and party bosses who had “no further incentive than the burning zeal to create a new heaven and new earth which flames in the great of every good Communist.” As for the people being force-marched into this new order? What of them? “The mass of peasants,” Tugwell wrote of the Russian people, are not “to be blamed for having dimly seen that the necessities for racial advance required a drastic change, and for bringing it about—with ruthlessness if need be.” Chase ended his book A New Deal asking, “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?” Since my book remains anathema for some, for those interested in learning more, I recommend Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America by John Patrick Diggins, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, and the seminal 1962 essay “American Travelers to the Soviet Union 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology” by Lewis S. Feuer in the American Quarterly.
5. See, for example, William Easterly’s The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2013) and his The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Also I highly recommend this discussion on R
ussell Robert’s indispensable podcast “Econtalk”: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/05/easterly_on_ben.html
6. William Easterly, “Benevolent Autocrats,” National Bureau of Economic Research (working paper), August 2011. https://williameasterly.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/benevolent-autocrats-easterly-2nd-draft.pdf
7. “Singapore Has Highest Death Penalty Rate,” Associated Press, January 14, 2004. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3958717/ns/world_news/t/singapore-has-highest-death-penalty-rate/#.WcFTprKGNhE
8. Thomas L. Friedman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times, September 8, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
9. Thomas L. Friedman, “The Power of Green,” New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html
10. Donald J. Trump, “58—Inaugural Address—January 20, 2017,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=120000
11. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016), pp. 7-8.
12. Ibid., p. 9.
13. Ibid., p. 7.
14. Jacob Poushter, “40% of Millennials OK with Limiting Speech Offensive to Minorities,” Pew Research Center, November 20, 2015. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/
15. “The William F. Buckley Program at Yale: Almost Half (49%) of U.S. College Students ‘Intimidated’ by Professors When Sharing Differing Beliefs: Survey,” McLaughlin & Associates. http://mclaughlinonline.com/2015/10/26/the-william-f-buckley-jr-program-at-yale-almost-half-49-of-u-s-college-students-intimidated-by-professors-when-sharing-differing-beliefs-survey/
16. See Michael Munger, “On the Origins and Goals of Public Choice,” Independent Institute, June 29, 2017. http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=9115