Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage and family and happiness. We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice, and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.
And even if this kid marches through an opioid epidemic in an environment and a community where there are very few good jobs, and even if he finds himself in a healthy relationship and wants to do the thing that I most defined as core to my American Dream – start a family and have happy, healthy children – he will confront a society and a culture and a market economy that is more hostile to people having children than maybe at any period in American history.
There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the way that I measure a healthy society, or I think the most important way to measure healthy society, is whether a nation – whether the American nation – is having enough children to replace itself.
Do people look to the future and see a place that’s worth having children? Do they have good enough jobs so that they can make the necessary sacrifices so that one of the parents can be home with that kid most of the time? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a roof over their kid’s head, put food on the table and provide that child with a good education?
By every statistic that we have, what we see is that people are answering ‘No’ to all of those questions. For the first extended period in the history of the American nation, our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us. Now I know some libertarians will say ‘Well, that choice comes from free individuals. If people are choosing not to have children, if they’re choosing to spend their money on vacations or nicer cars or nicer apartments, then we should be okay with that.’
I think there is a good libertarian sympathetic response to that. We can point out, for example, that areas of the world and areas of the country with fewer children are less dynamic. We can point out that we have a social safety net that’s entirely built on the idea that you will have more workers and more people coming into the system than retire, and to do that, you need to have children being born. But I think to make this about economics is to concede too much of a premise that we don’t want to concede.
When I think about my own life, the thing that has made my life best is the fact that I am the father of a two year-old son. When I think about the demons of my own childhood, and a way that those demons have melted away in the love and laughter of my eldest son; when I see friends of mine who’ve grown up in tough circumstances and who’ve become fathers and have become more connected to their communities, to their families, to their faith, because of the role of their own children, I say we want babies not just because they’re economically useful. We want more babies because children are good.
Libertarians aren’t heartless, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are. I think they also recognise many of the same problems that we recognise. But they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it to solve or even to try to help address some of these problems.
If people are spending too much time addicted to devices that are designed to addict them, we can’t just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something to stop it. If people are killing themselves because they’re being bullied in online chatrooms, we can’t just say parents need to exercise more responsibility. You have to accept that parents live and swim in the same cultural pond as the rest of us.
It is one thing to be a good parent who monitors your kids screen time. It is another thing to tell a kid whose entire environment, whose school friends, whose school bullies, whose teachers, whose work friends all use these technologies and use them in a way that is increasingly causing social problems and say, “we can’t do anything about that other than let our parents be better about screen time.” We live in an environment and in a culture that is shaped by our laws and public policy, and we can’t hide from that fact anymore.
The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish these things?
I serve my child, and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and it will be used to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbours without any consequence, because those people chose to take those drugs.
It is time, as Ronald Reagan once said, for choosing, and I choose my son. I choose the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life for him, and I choose a healthy American nation so necessary to defend and support that civic constitution.
This is an edited version of a speech entitled ‘Beyond Libertarianism’, delivered by JD Vance at the National Conservatism: Founding Conference in Washington DC on 16 July
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SubscribeGood piece. I think many of us have got into the habit of saying, “It’s the individual’s fault” without recognising that none of us lives in a vacuum and we are all shaped by our cultural environment. So yes, why not try to re-shape that environment for the good of society, even if it means limiting the freedom of individuals to indulge in destructive, anti-social choices activities. Perhaps it’s time that the good of society takes precedence over an individual’s freedom.
Good piece. I think many of us have got into the habit of saying, “It’s the individual’s fault” without recognising that none of us lives in a vacuum and we are all shaped by our cultural environment. So yes, why not try to re-shape that environment for the good of society, even if it means limiting the freedom of individuals to indulge in destructive, anti-social choices activities. Perhaps it’s time that the good of society takes precedence over an individual’s freedom.