American Aspiration and Its Enemies

Ideas about economic growth and abundance are ascendant in America at a time when resistance to meaningful regulatory and fiscal reform is as strong as ever. We want more roads, bridges, houses, and entrepreneurs, but we cannot muster the will to change regulations or reform government spending to get them. Why is it so hard to make big changes to get more of the good things we know we really need?

It is challenging because our biggest public problems are often not just a single law or regulation, but rather the institutionalized mindset that prevents sensible changes from occurring. Without getting bogged down in the psychological literature from Durkheim’s “collective consciousness” to various contemporary mindset theories, by “institutional mindset,” I am referring generally to how shared values in overlapping governmental, commercial, and cultural networks become formalized in rules and norms, thereby influencing how people set priorities. Anything that coheres with the rules and norms of such a mindset appears rational and normal, even necessary at times. Things that do not cohere are discarded as unworkable, impractical, or downright illogical.

Regulatory reforms that conflict with accepted health and safety rationales, which are themselves fortified by layers of legal and regulatory decisions, are very difficult to implement. Freeing up more public resources by reforming entitlements is notoriously difficult due to the obligations we owe seniors, regardless of how affluent many of them may be.  

Three institutionalized mindsets should be of interest to anyone who cares about the future of innovation, creativity, and yes, “abundance.” Wherever we find the pursuit of happiness constricted and people unwilling to take risks to improve their lives, we usually find one or more of these mindsets lurking in the background. In the first essay in this series, I highlighted how people’s appetite for adventure and creativity leads to collective benefits in a dynamic society, and in the second, I focused on six key traits we find in people who create, build, climb, and achieve. In this essay, I examine how institutional barriers, often justified in the name of health and safety, equity, and the status quo, hinder the kind of aspiration a dynamic society requires.

 Safety and Security Politics

The contrasting 1970s works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, two Harvard professors, and the ensuing debates they produced about distributive justice and social welfare, encapsulated a core tension running through American public life. Because the future is unpredictable, everyone should either be guaranteed a baseline level of economic security (Rawls) or equipped to freely handle whatever life throws at them so that their well-being is an achievement (Nozick). In general, it is safe to say that the Rawlsian view has dominated the American public policy landscape. The prioritization of safety and security in our regulatory and political culture has created a well-intentioned institutionalized mindset that aims to protect us from harm and indigence. Over time, as the definitions of welfare and safety grow and encompass more people, as they typically do, we also tend to discourage acceptable levels of risk, adventure, and experimentation.

Studies showing how the social contract in some European countries – long an ideal for American progressives – stifles risk and innovation are a warning that prioritizing security too much can lead to collective stagnation and unhappiness. Studies of U.S. welfare programs have found similar dampening effects on work and productivity, varying in degree. More importantly, as health and safety concerns expand in our regulatory webs, they have a chilling effect on innovation, experimentation, and entrepreneurship.

Institutional incentives toward safety and security are everywhere. Graduates of elite universities now disproportionately take jobs in consulting and finance, rather than entrepreneurial or other high-risk, high-reward endeavors. Extending parental concerns for physical safety to psychic and emotional safety, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have documented, has had disastrous collective consequences in schools, universities, and workplaces. 

It is difficult to quantify how much of the decadence Ross Douthat has documented or the stagnation that Peter Thiel has described and Tyler Cowen has analyzed proceeds from policy choices, and how much from changing cultural norms. It is probably a mix of both. But recognizing how we suppress dynamic behavior in the name of good intentions among the young and adventurous is a good start. Suppose we make it too costly for too many people to move, quit a job, get a permit, or do other dynamism-enhancing things that used to be easier. In that case, we risk the kind of generational stagnation that is a very real threat in the UK and elsewhere these days.

Grievance Politics

Grievance politics wax and wane in American life, but it is worth highlighting due to its pernicious effects – and because it may become a more permanent part of our politics. The turbulent and sudden unraveling of DEI and “wokeism” as institutional forces in America has elated conservatives and distressed progressives. I leave the debate about the status of DEI and wokeism to others and prefer to focus on how grievance politics – which I consider the best umbrella term for identity politics and related forms of the politics of ressentiment of which wokeism is one instance – is part of a broader opposition in America to the importance of human agency, aspiration, and achievement.

The essential American ideal that individuals can and should make a life for themselves has been under assault for a while. It has become commonplace on both the political left and right to believe that structural forces have rendered the American ideal of individual effort a quaint relic. Believing that inequality or unfairness is mostly structural often leads to support for anti-liberal solutions. If you think that individual actors are powerless to improve their lives amidst the normal workings of democratic and commercial institutions, then you are more likely to support top-down federal power to do for people what they cannot do for themselves.

Grievance politics is by far the most acidic force in our politics and culture that discounts or dismisses altogether the role of agency in our individual lives. In its American form, it fuses conventional twentieth century social-welfare liberalism, various strains of populism, and Critical Theory from mid-twentieth century Europe, which views political power through oppressor-oppressed paradigms. Grievance politics in America is not a singular philosophical framework, but its various expressions share a view that merit, effort, and agency are meaningless for a significant part of the population whose oppression or alienation is structural. Without agency, the idea of individual liberty as an essential American principle is but an abstraction.

On the left, universities have been the primary incubator of the identity politics that spread into the media, philanthropy, corporate board rooms, K-12 education, and elsewhere. On the right, it has been less institutionalized but pervasive in nationalist critiques that blame economic stagnation, underemployment, drug use, and other maladies on structural rather than agentic sources, leading to support for expanded social safety nets among erstwhile welfare reform advocates and invasive federal power among erstwhile proponents of federalism.

Resentment, which fuels grievance politics, has been found to worsen health outcomes and reduce people’s sense of control over their lives. Grievance politics is detrimental to both sides of the supposed oppressor-oppressed dialectic: it discourages the latter from pursuing aspirational self-improvement, and it unduly penalizes the former with blunt instruments such as censorship and politicized legal action. Grievance politics reduces trust that institutions need to thrive, and plenty of evidence suggests that it has a dampening effect on the innovation and productivity that companies need to grow.

Managerial Politics

A third institutional barrier to dynamism is the managerial complex that maintains the status quo in our political economy, blocks disruptors and innovators, and favors prominent and well-connected interests over the scrappy and unconventional ones. The “one percent” is a familiar object of derision in the politics of the left, but it is the lawyers, lobbyists, corporate government-affairs professionals, regulators, professional association officials, university administrators, editors, publishers, and others in positions to shape public opinion – call them the “10 percent” – who likely do more to block opportunity in America by serving as gatekeepers and rule-makers throughout our society.

This is the well-paid-but-not-super-rich power class that negotiates and oversees the corporatism, rent-seeking, and cronyism of our highly regulated political economy, memorably characterized in books such as James Burnham's classic, The Managerial Revolution, and Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites. Corporatism, rather than socialism, poses a greater threat to a free society in its maintenance of power and position by favoring large incumbents in the economy and powerful governmental interests in politics.

In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch notes that populism in its purest sense is rooted in self-reliance, which he calls “the essence of democracy.” Historically, it has been favorable to governmental power that breaks up other powerful interests that prevent ordinary people from freely living their lives. But what happens when all those powerful interests join forces, as they arguably have done during the financial, public health, and culture-war crises of recent history? It creates the kind of acrimonious cultural divisions that we are currently experiencing, for one thing, but it also leads to concerted downward pressure on the types of disruption, creativity, and expression that a dynamic society requires.

The incentives to engage in rent-seeking are tremendous and long-standing (ancient, we might even say), and ever since Gordon Tullock’s pioneering work on the topic in the 1960s, a substantial body of evidence has shown that it dampens risk-taking and entrepreneurial endeavors by favoring large incumbents. The cooperation and coordination of various self-interests within the managerial class, although less studied, is historically evident – even recently – in the way they utilize levers of power in government, the academy, and the media to impose policies and rules on companies and individuals, controlling rather than unleashing creative behavior.

Conclusion

I have treated each of the three foregoing institutionalized mindsets in such summary fashion as to do them all an injustice. Each is worthy of, and has been, the subject of book-length treatments. However, as we continue to explore how human aspiration is both cultivated and restricted, we will continue to confront them. Therefore, it is worth establishing early markers about what they are and why they exist. The rigid doctrinarism of grievance politics, the risk reduction of security politics, and the gatekeeping of managerialism are all large, well-funded institutional realities in American public life that make the pursuit of happiness harder than it should be for too many people. As we think about and plan for a more dynamic future, we should discuss and confront them rather than let them continue to lurk in the background. 

Ryan Streeter is executive director of the Civitas Institute. He is also a senior lecturer in the School of Civic Leadership.