Americans Are Not Flourishing

flour·ish

/ˈfləriSH/

(of a person, animal, or other living organism) grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment.

The first sentence of Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change (2023) is:

No sensible reader of the news could look at America and think it is flourishing.

Deneen dives down deeply into the cold, murky waters of what has gone wrong in our culture and political economy.  Most Americans are not flourishing.  Elites in power are flourishing.  My clients are flourishing, but most people (the bottom 80%), are not.  They languish among scattered economic wreckage in a wasteland of impecunious sadness and “deaths of despair”.  This is where humanity finds itself in 2024.  What the hell happened?  In the next 7 weeks, we’ll learn what happened.  Deneen is our tour guide, like Virgil in Dante’s journey through hell.

The book’s 8-page Introduction lays out his itinerary.  Deneen’s starting point is the failure of liberalism in both its right and left forms.  It has generated a particularly virulent and bitter form of an ancient divide between “the few” and “the many”.  This has deeply harmed the prospects of flourishing for most Americans.  The elite’s unhealthy obsession with “progress” and their woke worshipping of a utopian future, have dreadfully harmed millions of souls.

Deneen’s shows us that the true is not new and the new (wokeness) is not true.  Ancient wisdom (Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, Aquinas, Machiavelli, even de Tocqueville) can light the way out of this darkness.  The ancients thought and wrote deeply about “the few vs. the many” problem.  Deneen’s work is profoundly rooted in time.  Ordinary people (the bottom 80%) need stability, order, continuity, and dignity in order to flourish – which should be grounded in a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. 

Why should you care about the bottom 80%?  I’ve got mine Jack, sucks to be you!  Well, apart from being a decent human being who cares about other people, this situation could become violent and destabilizing.  Enough resentment and anger bubbling throughout the masses can crush the entire political economy, destroying your wealth and well-being.  So, from both altruistic and self-interested standpoints, you should care. 

We’re going to tour the devastation; however, I strongly believe that it does not have a central/government solution.  As Doc Hammer wrote on 3/13/24 – “when we create government power to force people to live as we see fit…the inevitable result is that people will fight over that power, and then fight over the implementation of that power.  The government goes to war against its own people.  The only answer is to simply not have that power on the table in the first place.”

F. A. Hayek made the same point in Road to Serfdom (1944).  Socialist state power is insidious and evil because it is a power that wasn’t there in the first place.  Government should stay the hell out of our wallets, our minds, and our personal lives.