Q&A with Ross Douthat

I mean stagnation, drift, and repetition at a really high level of wealth, power, and civilizational development — a society that has done really well for itself but has run out of things to do and ends up going in circles.

You start the book by tying the beginning of our decadence to the end of our ambitions for space exploration. Why is this such an important turning point?

Well, first, it’s just a convenient coincidence. The moon landing happened in 1969, and economic stagnation, declining birth rates, and technological stagnation all started sometime between 1965 and 1975. But I don’t actually think this is a coincidence. There is something in American society about the idea of the frontier that is an incredibly strong motivator for action, creativity, and dynamism. And sometime between the moon landing and the Challenger explosion in 1986, we either realized or decided that what we thought was the new frontier was too cold and far away and empty to explore. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that realization happened at the same time we started stagnating on a lot of other fronts.

You identify four horsemen of decadence. The first is economic stagnation. Many on the Right think that the economy is booming — why do you disagree?

Stagnation doesn’t mean that growth ceases. It’s more about deceleration from the sort of growth we achieved in the fairly recent past and the fact that our growth today is more dependent on huge amounts of deficit spending. The Trump boom is a good thing, but the fact that you have to pay yourself large sums of borrowed money in order to sustain 2% growth, when 50 years ago you could have 4% or 5% growth without deficits, suggests that something substantial has changed in the economy.

The second horseman is sterility, by which you mean low birthrates. But if people are just choosing not to have kids, what’s the problem? Can’t we just bring in more immigrants to keep the economy afloat?

Well, you can’t always bring in more immigrants. That solution brings with it all kinds of political and cultural upheavals. And outside of sub-Saharan Africa, there aren’t actually going to be that many young workers eager to fill jobs in Europe and America.

Now, you can make a case that people are making these choices and that if the implication of those choices is that society ages and growth slows down, well, that’s just the price you pay. But there’s a big gap between how many kids men and women say they want and how many they actually have.

There are exceptions to this rule — namely Israel, where even secular people have birthrates way above replacement level. But this just suggests to me that there’s some sort of loss of faith or loss of belief in the future that’s driving sterility in the West. There’s something in humanity where you want to believe you’re part of a larger story. That desire is answered most fully by religion, but it can also be answered by forms of national solidarity that convince people that their works will live on after them. That’s something still palpably there in Israel, because it’s the ark of the Jewish people. It’s hard to find other places in the West where people have similar levels of confidence that the story they’re a part of is something real and worthy of sacrifice.

The third horseman is sclerosis or the stagnation and gridlock of Western politics. You identify Japan’s Shinzo Abe as perhaps the most successful leader at resisting political decadence? Why?

I’m no expert on Japanese politics, but for a long time, Japan looked like the most sclerotic and decadent of the major Western countries. They had a new prime minister basically every nine months over a period of eight to 14 years. And what Abe has been able to do is what many Western populists want to do, which is to combine a mix of cultural traditionalism and nationalism with various programs that are pro-growth, pro-dynamism, and pro-family. I don’t think Japan has escaped decadence, but I think Abe has kept up the battle longer than any other leader and has done so without behaving like a fool or a strongman.

The final horseman is repetition, which is your name for cultural decadence. It’s most clearly true when applied to movies, but some might argue that this is the area where we’re least decadent — aren’t there all these interesting and weird cultural movements happening on the internet?

Well, the cultural landscape of a country with 300 million people is so broad that it’s easier to make generalizations about Star Wars movies than to parse what exactly is happening in literary culture. Even so, it’s not that it’s impossible to write an interesting novel today, it’s more that even when there is creativity, it’s hard for it to find much purchase in the wider culture. And while there are interesting things on the internet, there’s a question of how much they are real and how much they are playacting in a virtual safe space.

When you look at older diagnoses of decadence, there’s often an idea that it’s essentially unsustainable. The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had this idea of dynastic cycles — essentially, barbarians come in from the desert, establish themselves as a ruling class, and then slowly grow so weak and effeminate that they’re unable to hold on to power. You seem to think our decadence is pretty sustainable.

Our era is unique in that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to being a world civilization, so it’s harder to find zones of chaos outside our borders that would produce whatever the 21st-century equivalent of the Mongol hordes would be. Which means change has to come from within — maybe one generation’s elite has trouble handing over power to the next generation. You can see versions of that today, such as the rise of woke progressivism as an alternative to the hyperachievement-oriented meritocracy that dominated my own youth. But you also have plenty of historical examples of civilizations, such as the Roman or the Ottoman empires, that were able to stay decadent for a long time. And I think, in particular, virtual reality is a new thing in human history, where the sorts of people who in the past would’ve been participating in cycles of decay and renewal are instead playing video games and reenacting Protestant Reformation-era debates on Twitter. And I don’t mean that as a condemnation — I literally do that as part of my job.

Could you recommend a piece of nondecadent art for our audience?

I’m not going to elaborate on this at all, but I think the least decadent movie of the last decade was Mad Max: Fury Road.