I started writing this on Black Friday, reminded once again that shopping is America’s religion. But what I want to explore here is why, whether you were for or against him, Trump, despite his felony convictions, inveterate falsehoods and narcissism, still won the presidential election.
There seems to be countless theories—unchecked immigration, inflation, racism, misogyny, resentment of coastal elites and cancel culture, abandonment of the working class, resentment of government mandates, the war in Gaza, and so forth. Each of them, no doubt, contains a kernel of truth. But the bigger issue is one of expectations—the refusal to accept the “limits” that Front Porch Republic so clearly recognizes.
More than two decades ago, I produced a film and co-wrote a book called Affluenza, warning of the cost of America’s love affair with consumerism. Both were popular: 15 million people watched the film on PBS; nearly 200,000 bought the book. Conservatives as well as liberals responded; Affluenza was actually more popular at BYU than Berkeley.
We are now 80 years into the Age of Affluenza, the love affair with stuff that began with pent-up demand at the end of World War II. During that time Americans alone have consumed more resources than all humans put together did before 1945. Now billions of other consumers, from Dubai to Beijing have joined them. According to the Global Footprint Network it would take nearly two planets for world consumption to be sustainable, and 5 planets if everyone consumed as Americans do.
More than fifty years have passed since the authors of Limits to Growth warned that exponential economic growth was leading to a catastrophe of resource exhaustion and environmental destruction. They urged limits on our material appetites but almost nobody listened. Now their models have for the most part proven true, not to mention this consumption’s contribution to climate change, whose consequences are already more severe than anyone imagined when their book was first published.
“There are many people, including our leaders,” environmentalist David Brower wrote in 1969, “who believe that what we’ve been doing since World War II can continue indefinitely. They are considered reasonable, intelligent people, but they are stark raving mad.”
It is this refusal to accept limits that lies behind Trump’s appeal and was never challenged by Harris. When the question “are you better off than you were four years ago?” is asked, as it always is, the question always refers to the ability to consume, not to whether our family lives are better, our health is better, we are less stressed, our friendships are stronger. George Monbiot points out that these are “intrinsic” values while ours is a society that worships “extrinsic” values—money, fame, celebrity, power. As early as January of this year, Monbiot warned that our emphasis on extrinsic values would be the key to a Trump victory. He was right.
The assumption seems to be that continued economic growth will allow each generation to be materially richer than the one before, that it will continue to make products cheaper and more plentiful. But as more people around the world compete for more goods, this pattern cannot continue. Pressure on resources will make them more and more costly. An ethic of “drill, baby, drill,’ will not overturn the laws of physics. Fossil fuels are finite; where we can get them, it is more and more expensive to do so. Lowering gas prices will only add to demand for fuel, along with the sale of gas-guzzling vehicles. And it will contribute to the continued costly disruptions that come with climate change. Even electric vehicles will require huge supplies of minerals and massive polluting mines.
With these developments come a dramatic loss of biodiversity, refugees from drought and hunger, wars over resources, local corruption and brutality, and the kind of increasing migrant flows that have led to crises like those at our southern border.
If the price of eggs does go down, that too, will be temporary. Farmers’ costs continue to rise and even now, the price of cheap eggs is inhumane corporate factory farming with all the excess waste it produces. And yet, voters demand that prices continue to fall. No limits.
Consumer pressures and the demand for more and larger, faster products makes land more scarce as well. The American home size, at least triple what it was in 1945 (while family sizes are smaller), requires more and more land, and more expensive land makes it harder for poorer Americans to afford housing and harder to build more housing at reasonable cost.
Moreover, the increasing gap between rich and poor sets standards of consumption ever higher. Instead of keeping up with the Joneses, the models of affluence in our media are fabulously wealthy. Elon Musk, because he is so rich, must be knowledgeable about everything, or so we are led to believe. And the standard of affluence he sets calls for personal space travel. Instead of appreciating the local and the staggering beauty of our God-given world, as FPR suggests we do, the good life requires million-dollar jaunts into outer space. This, Musk implies, is the kind of high we should covet. It would be cheaper, and easier on the planet, to give folks free lifetime supplies of magic mushrooms.
The GOP convention was a celebration of excess and extrinsic values, with a little Hulk Hogan toxic masculinity and promises to save our dogs and cats from being eaten by black immigrants, thrown in. The main promise was to fix it all on day one, and show those benighted localists who advocate limits that they will never limit proud Americans who are always deserving of more and more.
Our excess is fueled by the Amazon model—you can have what you want yesterday at the push of a button. No need for patience. You deserve it. Buy now, pay later (or not at all; let your descendants do the paying). This would be easier to accept if it were in fact making us happier. But it is not; each year, the United States slips further down on the World Happiness Report Card. It’s very difficult to think of this kind of celebration of excess as “conservative,” if conservative means to conserve. That’s what I thought conservative meant when I was growing up. But that kind of conservatism is just so yesterday.
The Democratic Convention was different in at least recognizing environmental issues and calling for national unity and compassion. But still, there seems to be no Democratic recognition of limits either. Harris and Walz had as much faith in perpetual economic growth as Trump and Vance. Barack Obama once questioned extrinsic values. But that too is so yesterday. Even Bernie Sanders only calls for a more equal division of the pie, never really asking if the pie might be getting too big to cook.
What do we value as Americans? This is the question the protagonist of my new film, From Sea to Shining Sea, asked. Katharine Lee Bates wrote the popular anthem “America the Beautiful,” a song we only sing the first verse of and that practically nobody understands. Bates, a poet and social reformer, wrote the song in response to the issues of her day—inequality, lack of participation for females, mistreatment of immigrants, and, in its last iteration, the rise of American imperialism in the Spanish-American War.
Watching miners lust for gold in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and appalled by the worship of wealth in the “Gilded Age,” Bates wrote: “America, America, may God thy gold refine…” Intrinsic values, not extrinsic. After the Spanish-American War, she wrote: “America, America, God mend thine every flaw. Confirm thy soul in self-control…” Here, “self-control” means more than a challenge to imperialism. It’s about the limits that FPR advocates, living within our means in ways that leave a future for our descendants.
Ray Charles tried to make “America the Beautiful” our national anthem. It’s worth another try, if only to get Americans to think once again about the values the song upholds. Until our extrinsic values change, the virus of Affluenza will continue to weaken our body politic.
Image credit: Lefevre James Cranstone, “The Ohio River near Wheeling, West Virginia” (1859-1860) via Wikimedia Commons
A cancer is the only organism which is dedicated to unlimited growth. And a cancer will destroy it’s host, in time. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later.
We had a good run.
I kind of think that every organism is dedicated to unlimited growth, but availability of resources, predation, diseases, etc keeps the growth in check. The deer in my neighborhood seem to be running out of resources (we lack cougars and wolf packs), and were busy eating my poisonous rhubarb leaves and probably barfing in a neighbor’s yard. I expect that followers of the American Way will be barfing in each other’s yards at some point; many already are, it seems.
Affluenza. Wow, now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a long, long time. Talk about a blast from the past.’
Let’s assume you’re at least somewhat right, and that “we” need to consume much, much less. And let’s assume that we’re still a democracy, so you can’t just declare by fiat that people have to do so. And Jimmy Carter style pleadings clearly won’t work. So what sort of policies should be pushed?
You’d want to absolutely eliminate inflation. The “target” can’t be “low” inflation, it has to be zero. Or even deflation. Inflation encourages spending and discourages spending, and you need the opposite.
You need to pare back government “retirement” programs. Incentivize people to save, rather than spend.
You’d want to stop emphasizing “efficiency” in things like appliances, vehicles, etc., and emphasize durability. Next year’s models can always be made more “efficient”, so people should always keep buying new stuff if that’s your goal. Instead we need to actively promote production of objects that will last decades, whether it’s a refrigerator, washing machine, car, etc. Massively incentivize the research and development and manufacture of such items.
This will require huge incentives to manufacture domestically, and punishing tariffs on imported goods, so we could control the quality, and make sure the items are consistent with our goals, rather than just making money for foreign countries.
You’d want to massively promote marriage, especially relatively early, and having kids, through tax and other incentives. Parents don’t spend recklessly like singles do, they spend on their kids, and think longer term.
You’d want to limit immigration, because you can’t afford to have increased sharp competition for jobs that would threaten the overall social cohesion needed to implement these goals.
I assume you’d be on board with all of this, right?