Ray Bradbury’s Enchanted Science Fiction

There are many books in my house. As a child, I spent a lot of time digging through piles of dusty boxes that seemed to go to the ceiling, hoping to find a new novel to spend an afternoon with. My favorites were the Bantam books with simple but memorable covers, so worn and aged that they often fell off halfway through my time with them. I loved the smell of the decaying paper and thought it was fascinating how yellow and oxidized the pages were.

Out of all the books in those boxes, I enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s the most. Bradbury is best known for writing Fahrenheit 451, a cautionary tale where a numbed and hedonistic populace allows all literature to be burned, preferring to consume mass media. But his prose is at its strongest in his short stories, relics of early modern science fiction rife with impossibility and brimming with imagination. Take, for example, The Martian Chronicles, a collection of short stories that traces the colonization of Mars and subsequent destruction of Martian civilization. Bradbury’s yarns are memorable, even though very few characters appear in multiple stories, because they succinctly explore the human condition in an evolving world.

In one instance, an unhappily married Martian named Ylla telepathically foresees the arrival of an expeditionary crew from Earth, fantasizing about one of the crew members, while her husband dismisses her as either childish or insane. But while Ylla cannot comprehend the possibility of extraterrestrial life, her husband is more jealous than curious, humanoid but as emotional as a human, and murders the crew when it lands. In another story after Mars has been colonized and disease has decimated the Martian population, colonists receive word of a nuclear war starting on Earth, which soon destroys the Australian continent. The colonists are helpless, countless millions of miles away, and must watch as flames engulf their true home. And the most famous story in this collection is “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which portrays an automated house on Earth struggling against encroaching nature to continue its cleaning and maintenance regimen, oblivious to the nuclear holocaust that burnt its owners’ shadows into the wall, in sharp contrast to Ylla’s peaceful home pages ago.

Bradbury’s storytelling power comes partly from a latent romanticism in his works, a fascination with the tension between existence in an increasingly mechanistic world of reason and the spirituality, emotionality, and curiosity intrinsic to all humans. Bradbury wrote stories that could resonate with anyone, perhaps in line with Leo Tolstoy’s definition of art as that which makes one feel. In a story from a different collection, an astronaut flung from his ship and about to burn up in the atmosphere contemplates his empty life and wishes that his death will mean something, as a child on Earth looks up at the sky and makes a wish on a falling star, the astronaut’s last moments a gift. In another, a couple in rural Mexico encounter a stream of American refugees of nuclear war, bewildered at their claim that the world is over because nothing has changed in their small town, possessing a morality and worldview simpler and purer than the corrupted society that created such devastation.

He certainly wrote compelling stories, but it is worth considering where Bradbury’s work stands in relation to the larger genre of science fiction. He actually considered himself a sort of fantasy writer, despite instances of scientific speculation in his stories, because he knew that his depiction of shapeshifting and clairvoyant Martians was fundamentally untrue. Instead, Bradbury believed that his stories were potent because they were untrue; their staying power was in their almost myth-like treatment of the human condition against an implausible but entertaining backdrop. Even his tamer works, to some degree, examine how mankind would operate within some future reality. The specifics of this reality are often vague, Bradbury having cleverly crafted the narrative to express his own imagination but leave room for the reader to have fun too.

Some believe this balance is missing in contemporary science fiction. It often attempts to make a world credible by conveying a myriad of dense explanations for, say, an imaginary technology’s existence--which may only delay the point where a reader must suspend their disbelief and detract from character development or thematic coherence. Contributions from physicists and futurologists on possible ways to make an unbelievable part of the story, like faster-than-light travel, valid may detract from what we are naturally better at expressing and understanding, weighing down a story’s plot. The original Star Trek was entertaining because, like many of Bradbury’s short stories, it was realistic in form, not content, and it knew that. The “dilithium crystals” that powered its space travel were a plot device, not a fantastically explained potential reality within our understanding of science, just as Bradbury never explained many of the physical challenges of living on Mars. These stories exist within their own realities, both for entertainment and to relay a message more interesting than it would be if it was forced to conform to our reality. Arguably, much of recent science fiction is disenchanted, lacking any sort of magical feeling in trying to square with our world.

But science fiction does not necessarily have to be enchanted to be entertaining – look at the subgenre of cyberpunk, which often disenchants even the mind in tales about artificial intelligence and lifelike androids, but still tells moving and relatable stories. Cyberpunk succeeds where “hard science fiction” does not because it rests on an imagination that is unwavering in its construction and unafraid to lean into the fantastic. And it often tells more compact stories, as Bradbury did, focusing on interesting characters posed against a semi-recognizable world rather than spending pages cataloguing different planets and explaining ridiculous technologies. Here and in Bradbury’s work, the author shows rather than tells, creating stories that anyone may enjoy.

Why is Economics Trending Toward Sociology?

In the latest Quarterly Journal of Economics, the most prestigious economics journal by measured impact, there are twelve articles. Given its acceptance rate of just 3 percent, the Quarterly Journal’s articles represent the pinnacle of economics research. Surprisingly, in this recent issue, less than half are about economics. While titles like “Indebted Demand” and “Hall of Mirrors: Corporate Philanthropy and Strategic Advocacy” represent the type of research that is to be expected in a top economics journal, ones like “Concessions, Violence, and Indirect Rule: Evidence from the Congo Free State,” “Folklore,” and “Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018” seem out of place there. While any of these topics are worthwhile, why are top economists working on sociology and political science?

            After Paul Samuelson published his Foundations of Economic Analysis, economics increasingly became dominated by mathematics. Instead of tomes like Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy or The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money published by the previous generation, economists after Samuelson wrote much shorter and more data-driven texts stressing a particular ideological and mathematical framework. By doing so, they developed more and more sophisticated methods to prove their theories. From creating entirely new methods to improving upon old ones borrowed from medicine and psychology, the study of economics increasingly consisted of learning a variety of statistical methods and when to apply them to certain scenarios. Due to this focus on empirical methods rather than theory, the current generation of economists is highly capable of proving causality whenever a quasi-experimental situation arises.

            While economists heavily use statistics to quantify observable phenomena, sociologists are more skeptical of them as an accurate way to understand the world. For example, while economists are happy with stating that a policy caused a drop in reported crimes, sociologists would be much more skeptical because the statistics could be massaged by the government agency that collected them or be distorted by structural bias. This relative skepticism toward statistics created an opportunity for economists to fill the void. Instead of sociologists attempting, as one article recently put it, to “fill in the gaps and expand upon a group’s ethnographic record” by focusing on things like political complexity, leading economists are doing so, using machine learning methods to demonstrate how certain traits in stories can predict cultural norms.

            Although the study of folklore is fascinating and worthwhile, economists should consider the opportunity cost of not focusing more completely on the economy. If economists are not sufficiently studying the economy, society will be stuck with our current inadequate level of sophistication when it comes to policy. Monetary policy and taxation, among other economic matters, drastically affect the lives and well-being of entire nations.

What is the Meaning in Life?

Before we discuss the meaning of life, perhaps we should ask why grappling with its meaning even matters. Existential angst -- is it useful? In a chaotic world where iconoclasm vies with conformism, metanarrative is frequently sought after and persecuted. Globalism has added so much mobility in the market of ideas that it has replaced stable dominant teloses -- ultimate values and goals -- with anarchy. We cannot help but scurry aimlessly, hunted by the tide that is time, jumping over hurdles one after another without even a partially formulated telos. What chaos! (i.e., the Greek khaos, meaning abyss). We fear and ponder at this abyss of the unknown, ponder and yet fear more.

In Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, Susan Wolf believes she has found the exit to this cosmic treadmill, or as Nietzsche called it, “eternal return.” She entreats us to ponder the meaning in life rather than the meaning of life. Because only then, fueled by pragmatism, can we tease out the practical from the superfluous. In scrutinizing the motivations behind our actions, we grow and improve. Wolf speaks of two core conditions, subjectivity and objectivity, that are both necessary to human fulfillment. She neatly captures the complementary relationship between them when she explains: “meaning in life arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” Rejecting both “rational egoism” and consequentialism, Wolf sharpens our understanding of worth and justification while steering us away from agonizing misconceptions about value. Her “fitting fulfillment” view clarifies the role of self-interest in our actions without relying exclusively on its explanatory power. But her view doesn’t sufficiently address (although she recognizes) a major point about objective worth, and it doesn’t provide a solution to the lack of an independent arbitrator or relatively impartial judge.

Wolf succeeds in eliminating the false dichotomy between rational egoism and consequentialism. Rational egoists believe that every sound justification for our actions, or the policies we advocate, is a maximization of self-interest. Wolf rejects this school of thought, citing moral duty and “reasons of love.” She later notes situations of apparent selflessness or altruism, such as dedicating time to something we take a passionate interest in or caring for a friend. (Of course, her examples of unexplained “altruisms” can still be morphed into acts of self-interest, if the rational egoist claims such an act includes an expectation of self-benefit.) Wolf offers a conception of meaningfulness that is “neither subsumable under or reducible to either happiness or morality.” In her model, the person “loves” the activity, or is subjectively “gripped, excited, interested, engaged” by and in it. For example, if an emergency room surgeon goes to work every day feeling beat and distraught because she resents the exacting standards of her job and is tired of the crunching pressure -- even though her work is objectively valuable to society, bringing people back from the brink of traumatic death -- her life is not meaningful by Wolf’s standard because the “subjective condition” of meaningfulness, her happiness, is not met.

On the other hand, Wolf’s “objective condition” requires that an activity which a person enjoys must also engage entities independent of him or her, and that it is also recognized as objectively valuable. (For the second of these conditions she uses the term “endoxic,” based on endoxa from Aristotle: commonly accepted by everyone, or at least by the wise.) If someone is an alcoholic who rapturously downs bottles of vodka and has little time or concern for anything else, Wolf considers that a meaningless life. Although he fulfills the condition of “subjective attraction” because he loves what he’s doing, his actions lack even a paltry worth that others would recognize.

Wolf also adds a third requirement: a real connection between the subjective and objective conditions. An action cannot be meaningful, she says, if the link between self-enjoyment and objective worth is accidental. If an alcoholic, in his unstable state, happens to utter words of wisdom that deter another person from committing suicide, he only happens to accomplish this result, saving the individual’s life only passively, without active intention. If that alcoholic did not utter words of wisdom, the person would not have been deterred from committing suicide. But the simple act of uttering words of wisdom is not sufficient for deterrence.

Wolf addresses two main objections to her analysis – elitism and “metaphysics of value.” Elitism involves authority. Who has the legitimate authority to dictate to the rest of us what is valuable? Wolf is keenly aware that she, like others, operates on biases. She admits that her bourgeois or middle-class American values cannot be a certificate of genuine authority, since these are far from universal moral attitudes. But nonetheless, she affirms that we can largely overcome this difficulty if we keep our “fallibility” in mind and regard our judgments as tentative, “pool our information, our experience, and our thoughts,” and test our intellect when we are challenged to justify our judgments. If we remain self-aware and critical of our beliefs, such vigilance acts to a certain extent as a guard against prejudices and partiality. Wolf also clarifies that her endoxic approach should not be misunderstood to mean readily submitting to the judgment of the majority. She admits that adopting John Stuart Mill’s view of “a competent judge” who is “sufficiently rational, perceptive, sensitive, and knowledgeable” doesn’t resolve the issue.

Wolf rightly notes that many people would criticize her “endorsement of the idea of non-subjective value,” and that many more would be “frustrated or annoyed” by her “reluctance to make substantive judgments.” But her argument falters when she claims that a truly valuable and thus meaningful act must always engage beyond one’s self. If someone likes to drink coffee, for example, Wolf would regard that as benefiting only one’s self and thus not meaningful. Yet really, the network resulting from this taste or passion runs far and wide, all the way to the farmer whose livelihood depends on our purchases and so on, in a sort of infinite causal regression. In this case, Wolf’s view marginalizes the connectivity of global markets. From the truck driver who delivers the coffee to your doorstep to the manufacturer that made your container, from its lumber supplier to your waste collection service, a supply chain links manufacturers and consumers, buyers and sellers, together. The Ethiopian farmer might not have benefited very much from an individual purchase, since only a fraction of the ultimate price filters back to him. But the coffee drinker has contributed to the farmer’s life, however slightly. When we spend even one dollar, that dollar is used to pay for operating costs and salaries, ending up in savings and other spending. The government uses the tariff and tax we pay on coffee to provide infrastructure and public goods. So indeed, the coffee consumer is engaged with more than himself, and generally knows that he is. Isn’t that enough to fulfill Wolf’s condition of “engagement”?

Furthermore, Wolf’s view seems to inadequately reflect human psychology. Suppose that one’s happiness is not isolated, but contagious. Or that freedom from stress significantly improves one’s productivity. What then of the claim that actions which aren’t obviously consequential for others are therefore too internal, disconnected from anything else? Wolf’s analysis and arguments take little account of the complexity of our interactions.

Finally, a few comments on what might in philosophical language be called her “preemptions.” Overall, Wolf’s acknowledgement of her elitist framing regrettably does little to absolve it of this criticism. Since she has decided to retain her values, and implicitly disbelieves in the wholly objective person, she fails to set up any concrete safeguards against prejudice. Since people are often unaware of their fallacies, just reminding them to mind their fallacies isn't sufficient.

In summary, readers of this useful book are ultimately left disappointed. As with many such works, readers will see pearls of wisdom in it, and may feel a fuzzy warmness in their hearts. But Wolf’s account is inadequate in answering the question she aims to solve: the meaning in life, a question that provokes some of our dearest existential crises. Her meta-awareness of her potential bias, and her optimism about the benefit of pondering, are nonetheless laudable. But the main bulk of the argument, regrettably, is overly simplistic.

Babble On: Language and the Ivory Tower

I didn’t think stone could scream until I saw an image of Laocoön and His Sons, a sculpture depicting a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid. Troy’s priest of Neptune had implored his countrymen to refuse the Greek gift of a wooden horse, believing it was full of armed men. The Trojans dismissed Laocoön’s warning and hauled the horse within their walls.

As Laocoön attempted to sacrifice a bull to Neptune for the city’s protection, twin serpents, eyes suffused with blood and fire, emerged from Neptune’s chaotic sea and coiled around the throats of him and his sons. From Laocoön’s lungs came a “bellowing like some wounded bull struggling to shrug loose from his neck an axe that’s struck awry.” His own throat uttering the very cry of the animal he sought to slaughter, Laocoön becomes the sacrifice for a god less concerned with truth than with power, for a kingdom less concerned with prudence than with greed.

            On the postmodern campus, words are often Trojan horses that drain discourse of its lifeblood. Today, students at most colleges seem to learn to obfuscate, equivocate, and manipulate language more than to communicate. Language, once considered the most inspired means of pursuing mutual improvement between human beings, becomes a means of deception and compulsion. Educational conversation once bound students together toward the pursuit of truth. Now, with the dissolution of belief in absolute truth, verbal expression by the deconstructionists on our campuses has increasingly aimed at conquest, at seizing and maintaining ideological control. Here questions warp into “questionings,” interactions into interrogations, articulations into accusations, and sentences into sentencings.

            We are virtually willed into compliance under the grand narrative that no grand narratives are true, and the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. No longer believing our breath is carried on the wind of divine consciousness, we feel only the Nietzschean breath of empty space. With the entire horizon wiped away, we drown in our own air. Our tongues reduced to mere muscle, we learn not the art of argument but the homogeneous, droning, artless regurgitation of accusations that brand us with a perpetually redefined sense of “virtue.” Together, yet utterly alone, we recite these empty prayers to the reigning cultural authorities, sacrificing intellectual dissidents on the altars of our own egos. Logos -- the reasoning word -- is dying, and we are killing it.

            Our destruction of objective definition grows from the underlying belief that no one can adequately convey a reality to another through speech, that no one can truly reach another’s mind or heart. This amounts to a disbelief in the very definition of education, and if education is lost, what knowledge are we to acquire? That we are all “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation,” as David Foster Wallace says in his address to a graduating class of Kenyon College on the value of a liberal arts education. A bit of Hebrew wisdom once warned that from such a pursuit of knowledge, rooted in pride and power, stems every ripe horror of the human experience. Do we not taste some of that horror? Do we not feel exiled from each other? Are we not out of breath?

            The attempted elevation of our souls to infinite capacities for new definition and creation has proved to be dehumanizing, not deifying. The endless deconstruction of language generates disbelief in the ability of conversation and debate to sharpen a fellow human being. We have lost too much of our faith in mutual improvement and refinement, in good will and therefore friendship, in our capacity to gain strength through challenge. The extreme erosion of language illustrates a dying love for the human spirit. Losing this reverence strips us of our very humanity by blinding us to the humanity of others.

In our attempts to attain and advertise the heights of our own perceived virtue, we increasingly reduce our interactions to mere force. When persuasion is erased, only compulsion remains. Denying the existence of common ground, we stand in utter isolation. Our elimination of absolutes has wrenched away from us any true aspiration, while shrinking our sense of moral obligation to each other. Without a standard of meaning outside our own teetering mental constructions, we rob our pasts of redemption, our presents of hope, and our futures of achievement. With such a dismal interpretation of the nature of man, conversation regresses into a barbaric cacophony baying for sacrificial blood. 

            I fear that when at last we realize that our tyrannous butchery of dictionaries has caused our own kingdoms to crumble, we will look at the bleeding ink on our hands and wonder who will wipe it off us. We will not have the language to construct an answer. We will babble on. Only the rocks will be left to cry out.

“Antigone” was recently a student at Hamilton College.

Recommended Reading

One way to spend discretionary reading time – which you have, during vacations – is with our specialties. Or we can just seek entertainment. But I like to read slightly outside of my usual focus. Knowing what our intellectual neighbors have written is a healthy corrective to preoccupation with our intellectual families. May I suggest that students, in the social sciences and history especially, consider the following books?

The Righteous Mind  by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is brilliant and often fun. Although fairly long, it could have gone even deeper and still held readers’ interest. Its subtitle, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, has a non-academic tone but makes a measurable claim. Does the author succeed in showing us “why”? Largely, yes. In conversational yet careful prose, he makes a seemingly major addition to our understanding of the Red-Blue divide. Haidt—an active defender of intellectual diversity who has since co-founded worthy projects called Heterodox Academy and OpenMind Platform—made his widespread reputation in political psychology with this 2012 book, which draws partly upon his own research on the differing “moral foundations” people have.

Haidt says our political convictions are rooted in emotion far more than reason, but that emotion results from natural evolution and is ultimately functional, not dysfunctional. And that we can, realistically, commit ourselves somewhat more to reason than we normally do. The convictions associated with the Left and the Right are based to a great extent on differing moral foundations in our minds. Liberals, i.e. “progressives,” focus very largely on Care or preventing Harm (in the term’s basic humanitarian meaning) and on maintaining or establishing Fairness or Equality. Libertarians, Haidt shows, are quite another breed than Conservatives because they have their own moral foundation, obviously Liberty, that greatly overshadows all other foundations despite some concern among them for Fairness/Equality. Conservatives have by far the broadest range of seriously felt moral foundations. To concerns about harm and fairness, they add strong attachments to Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity (which need not be religious in the usual sense). Far from dismissing these distinctive features of conservative public morality, Haidt is quite respectful of them from his own slightly left-of-center perspective.

Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon could, perhaps, be read with special profit in conjunction with The Righteous Mind. Published a full generation ago in 1991, it shows, from what might be called a compassionate-conservative perspective, that the concept of absolute or nearly absolute rights can be a cold and sickly thing. Glendon argues effectively, with a good range of examples, that its long-growing dominance tends to impoverish our communication with others, including empathy for their inconvenient concerns—thus, too, inhibiting and flattening deliberation in government about the public good.

Sadly, the excessive “rights talk” and the closely-associated aggrandizement of legalism—relying on the law for everything—have resulted, she says, in a “law-saturated society.” They have become simplistic, selfish substitutes for moral reasoning in our public life. Truer words were never spoken, and they’re even truer today.

The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (2017) can be read as a counterpart to an even more recent book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency. The latter’s author, Stephen Knott, a professor of national security affairs, tries to show that the office has sunk into demagoguery during our republic’s odyssey and how it might be healthily renewed. The problem, he preaches, is “not … the ‘imperial presidency’ but the populist presidency.” Historian Jeremi Suri is troubled by popular pressures on the presidency too, and he can’t stand Donald Trump either. But The Impossible Presidency follows in the non-philosophical tradition of political scientist Richard Neustadt, who argued plausibly in 1960 that the presidency is a fundamentally “weak” office—strong only, or sometimes strong, when a president assiduously exercises the complicated skills needed to make it so.

Suri differs most significantly from Neustadt in stressing not the limits our system puts on our chief executive, and the virtually limitless modern demands on the office, but what he considers our presidents’ runaway agendas and their unproductive compulsion to deal with crises as extensively as they do. The Impossible Presidency can, among other things, help explain to people who vehemently oppose Trump why they needn’t have been so fearful of him—and, to his staunch supporters, why they shouldn’t have expected so much.

The ten presidents whom Suri discusses, concisely but not superficially in this notably well-written book, are given chapter titles with varying degrees of creativity. One of the better ones is Poet at War, for Lincoln. The book also analyzes the National Healer (Franklin Roosevelt), the Frustrated Frontiersmen (Kennedy and Johnson), the Leading Actor (Reagan), and the Magicians of Possibility (Clinton and Obama).

Finally, I recommend a tome published in 2013 by political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time is commendable, first of all, for its theme: the New Deal plus World War II plus the early Cold War – periods that Katznelson plausibly insists should be viewed as a single era, defined by a series of radically new, disorienting challenges and thus by fear.

Katznelson is thought-provokingly critical of the New Deal enactments and America’s rise to superpower status. But he views them as a success story, and indeed a democratic success story, while stressing their moral complications and compromises – including, prominently, certain New Deal compromises with racism. Although it’s heavy reading, Fear Itself is very intelligent, excellently researched by a truly independent mind, and a good investment of time.

David Frisk is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of  If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement (ISI Books, 2012). A longer version of this piece was published at the Law & Liberty website last year.

Why Socialism Doesn’t “Suck”

Campus conservatives often spout the phrase “socialism sucks.” But it’s almost never explained. If you are lucky, you will hear these pundits mention economic efficiency or freedom, but they hardly examine the root causes of why younger people increasingly support socialism. Organizations that peddle such trite slogans as “socialism sucks” usually slap those words on a t-shirt and sell it for $30 to bright-eyed conservatives looking to challenge the predominantly liberal discourse on their college campuses. It’s not much better outside of the campus bubble. While those on the religious right point to a God-shaped hole in the hearts of younger generations, mainstream Republicans obsess over Cuba and Venezuela rather than look at the countries actually idealized by American socialists (such as Norway and France) or analyze why the young are enamored with socialism.

Simply put, younger people are trending socialist because America is and likely will be worse for them than it has been for their parents. Suicide, drug overdoses, and housing prices are all rising while life expectancy, mental health, and real wages are declining. These issues disproportionately affect the generations that must over-leverage themselves in order to have the same material quality of life as the previous generation. Never mind that people in this new generation will have fewer friends, suffer heightened racial tensions, and feel the looming threat of climate change hovering over them. Frankly, socialism may provide a better solution than the nebulous, often unrewarding principles of market equilibrium and classical growth that the free- market conservatives espouse. Instead of merely hoping that housing prices will return to equilibrium without zoning laws, the socialist wants to create green, mixed-use neighborhoods with ample public transportation.

If you saw someone overdosed, homeless, and alone beside a perfectly clean corporate office, who would you empathize with? It is impossible to walk around a modern city without witnessing obscene human degradation. As the socialist sees it, this scene is an implicit threat to the working class: if you do not have your entry-level job that requires three years of experience manipulating pointless spreadsheets and meticulously constructing PowerPoints, that could be you. The socialists reject economic efficiency in their pursuit of equality. They do not care that their envisioned system doesn’t reach market equilibrium, because they see the market equilibrium as unequal and therefore unjust. The younger generations strive to enact the economic policies that they see in almost every European country, and why should they not? With innovation on the decline and social strife rising, our political system must adapt to an economic paradigm of low growth. We can either attempt to reboot our economy or accept our stagnant future and support those who are left behind.

After acknowledging that the youth are indeed likely to be worse off than their parents, we can see why they may be drawn to socialism rather than capitalism. They also harbor substantial resentment toward the older generations that valued short-term growth and enjoyment, leaving us with an untenable economic ponzi scheme and an environment on the brink of collapse. These emotions are channeled into ideas like heavily taxing the rich and agendas like the Green New Deal. Regardless of whether you think those ideas will better society or not, their motivation stems from real problems that the opposing side too often ignores in favor of abstract principles. When the system is not working for you, you want it to change -- and corporate capitalism is not working for the younger generations, now that the economic pie is not growing. Although a utopian solution is impossible, any step that alleviates the increasingly harsh aspects of modern life will seem like a step in the right direction.

To move beyond the “socialism sucks” paradigm, conservatives need to adopt a message of principled action rather than pure principles. Instead of adhering to the dogma of Ronald Reagan, worshiping free-market principles and posing a now-amorphous communism as our enemy, we need to embrace actionable ideas. We must resist the urge to bask in America’s former glory and seeming security, and focus instead on the future. If we want American manufacturing to come back, we must create a tariff system, provide subsidies, and encourage research and development rather than focus on lowering taxes for firms that are already using sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies. If we want our cities to be clean and free of crime, we need to enforce the law, but also address the underlying problems that cause social decay. The power of the state, which is not diminishing anytime soon, should be used to move toward and maintain a society that is more moral, more beautiful, and better acknowledges human dignity, rather than a structure that seems to have failed when Gross Domestic Product increases by only 2 instead of 3 percent.