America appears to have experienced a regime change from criminality to competence. But many would agree our culture is still in crisis. Drug and alcohol deaths are up, as is depression; random shootings continue, as do gender mutilations and senseless crimes.
Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy recently advocated for cultural revival by arguing that America needs a new “Sputnik moment,” a return to the 1950s and 1960s when we funded technocrats – whom Ramaswamy terms “nerds” – to help us compete scientifically with the Soviet Union. This time, however, the threat is China.
Ramaswamy contrasted the need for nerds with youth consumer culture, noting, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
He went on to argue that, though most parents value “normalcy,” that “doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.” He concluded, “We’ve awaken[ed] from slumber before & we can do it again … but only if our culture fully wakes up.”
But is this really the kind of cultural shift America needs?
One indicator that it isn’t is that technocrat culture and consumer culture, which Ramaswamy contrasts, are actually the same thing. Both fund the other and have for 75 years since our last Sputnik moment. For example, when companies like General Electric (GE) started getting money from the government in the 1950s to make materials for the Defense Department, they were also using that money to invest in inventing TV sets for Americans to buy – and the government meant for it to happen this way. The point was for GE and other corporations to be the inventing middlemen: supplying the government with arms to defend against the Soviets militarily, while supplying consumer products for a market that would beat the Soviets economically.
But technocrat and consumer culture marginalized America’s real traditional culture: populist politics. Populist politics are what Americans – mostly independent owners of small businesses or farms, or artisans turned private sector trade unionists – used to tell their politicians how our country and economy should run. Such politics mobilized via associations and the state legislatures set up by our constitution, as well as through explicit constitutional arguments about government power, such as Thomas Jefferson’s small government “principles of ‘98” to Ronald Reagan’s constitutional crusade.
These politics were almost always rooted in Christianity. For example, the “Second American Revolution” against top-down Federalist government was spurred by Baptists, Methodists and Catholics revolting against Episcopalian institutional elites in 1800. Likewise, the temperance and women’s rights movements started with Christianity, as did Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement. Christian populist culture, in turn, was the setting for truly creative minds with solid characters, such as Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers (the sons of a Christian minister), to push American innovation without government funding.
The 1950s and 1960s changed all that. Suddenly, the way to be a proper citizen was to buy things, and to listen to well-spoken technocrats from the Ivy League, Washington agencies, and Washington-funded corporations speak on how to manage society in the name of “the American way.” These managers were increasingly immigrants from around the world, since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act raised immigration levels, targeted skilled workers, and lowered the quotas for immigration in the Western Hemisphere (helping lead to the illegal immigration from Latin America we see today). As a few commonsense voices have pointed out, this essentially set up high-paid servile labor: well-paid people not tied to American society who owed their position to the U.S. government.
The outcome of all this didn’t really help Americans. From the 1960s to today, it was this new “best and brightest” group who repeatedly fueled foreign wars, outsourcing, rising inflation, the border crisis, the financial crisis, the decline of community associations, and the ensuing crises – in masculinity, in drug and alcohol abuse, in depression, in loneliness – that flowed from these. Even government-backed innovation’s great triumph, Silicon Valley, represented a “surge” between 1996 to 2004 that some conservative economists dismiss as an innovation blip against an overall decline in our “capacity and urge to make indigenous innovations” since the 1960s.
But it’s Christian populist constitutionalism that started getting these problems fixed. This happened first under Ronald Reagan, and now it’s happening under Trump. As historical scholarship shows, Reagan was propelled into office by associations of believers: Anaheim housewives and West Virginia miners pushing back against anti-Christian teaching in schools, or churches objecting to the national government removing their tax exempt status. Contemporary evidence shows the same for Trump, who was propelled to office by groups such as Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, and Christians against vaccine mandates. The language common to all these groups is Christianity, constitutionalism and popular government.
There’s no doubt we must invest in STEM to help us compete with the Chinese; if there aren’t enough high-skilled tech workers to fill certain jobs important to national security, then we may need to allow visas for a limited number of immigrants. But historically, the way America has truly triumphed is on a bed of Christian constitutional populism. Trump’s movement has already started that revival, but we need to build on it and make its value explicit to truly change our culture.
Matt Wolfson is an investigative writer whose work appears in The American Conservative, The Epoch Times, The Federalist, and many other publications.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email culture@1819news.com. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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