Let’s Not Grant the Postliberal Critique of Market Liberalism: Discontents with liberal modernity are perennial and a spiritual awakening won’t cure them (Jonathan Rauch, Dec 21, 2025, The UnPopulist)
Nineteen-seventy was a banner year for American cultural criticism. Blockbusters like Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock heralded a decade of introspection. Another bestseller, now largely forgotten, was by the American sociologist Philip Slater: The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. (You can read the 1970 edition here.)
Why, Slater asked, is America so prosperous, yet so unhappy? “Scarcity is now shown to be an unnecessary condition,” he wrote. Americans enjoyed an unprecedented bounty of choice—a bounty not only of consumer goods but also of lifestyles. Yet prices were high, services were deteriorating, the environment was suffering. Worse, “there is an uneasy, anesthetized feeling about this kind of life,” Slater wrote. “We … feel bored with the orderly chrome and porcelain vacuum of our lives, from which so much of life has been removed.” The blame, he charged, lay with an “old culture” which “has been unable to keep any of the promises that have sustained it” and “is less and less able to hide its fundamental antipathy to human life and human satisfaction.”
Revised in 1975 to reflect the end of the Vietnam war, Slater’s book made its way, by and by, into the hands of a certain teenager living in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. At 16, I thought the book was brilliant. I wasn’t alone. The Pursuit of Loneliness fed into a stream of national self-doubt that culminated in President Carter’s “malaise” speech of 1979. The country, said Carter, faced a
crisis of confidence … that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
In 1979, his diagnosis seemed right to me and a lot of other Americans.
And then … Reagan. Morning in America.