There is a passage in Democracy in America that has appeared in many of my essays." In the United States,” Tocqueville reports, “there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals." Tocqueville contrasts his vision of the American yeoman with the stereotypical “inhabitant of some European nations,” who “sees himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the place he inhabits… enjoying what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement.”

To write of Christmas after December 25th is neither a sin nor a crime, but there is something untoward in my tardiness. We meet the overdue Christmas missive with the same misgiving we reserve for the rooftop that twinkles through February. Even small children know—however much they may deny it—that the Christmas season cheers because it only lasts a season. The magical must be momentary. Thus we treat Christmas lights that last too long and Christmas tales that come too late with the same ill humor we greet a joke repeated one time too often. We do not smile on those who try to prolong a mood past its moment. This essay risks pushing the holiday past its healthful limits. My excuse is only that it began as a series of tweets published on Christmas itself. My tweets auto-delete: if their message is to be preserved, they must be published here after Christmas Day. The thesis I preserve is simple: the Christmas season is a sort of measuring stick. What is good in bourgeois civilization is concentrated in this season of beauty and merriment. Against this bar all creeds, all claimed paths to excellence, all cults of eudaimonia, may be measured. Against this bar most are found wanting.

A few years back Ross Douthat published an interesting book titled The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success. The thesis of Douthat's book is simple: American society is stagnant. Our blockbusters and our books are remakes from the '80s; our political coalitions and political programs all date back to the 1970s; even the technological progress we have seen over the last three decades pales in comparison to the revolutions that occurred in the decades before. We may celebrate "change agents" but we no longer have any. America is stuck in what Douthat cleverly labels an "eternal recursion to 1975." My essay "On Life in the Shadow of the Boomers" was written in response to The Decadent Society. It was mostly focused on the cultural angle of Douthat's thesis. Douthat's claims of technology are downstream the arguments of the Thielites. I assessed their arguments in the essay "Has Technological Progress Stalled?" Between these two pieces you see my general take on Douthat's thesis: his assessment of American cultural and political stasis is broadly correct, but he overstates how unusual stasis is in American history. Political and cultural transformation occurs via a sort of punctuated equilibrium (see also my essay "Culture Wars are Long Wars") and we just happen to be living at the tail end of an equilibrium phase. On the other hand, Douthat understates the true scope of technological stagnation. Nothing the internet has delivered remotely compares with the transformation of human civilization that occurred during the second industrial revolution. In 1975 technological change was the most important facet of American life. It is no longer. Were Wang Huning to read Douthat's book, I suspect he might agree with me.