The Baby Bust in the United States began in 2008, the year of the financial crisis and the year the Great Recession began. Births and the birthrate have fallen nearly every year since the 2007 peak.

It’s easy, then, to blame the recession, and most commentators do, believing that the Baby Bust is mostly an economic phenomenon. But it’s not mostly economic. It is mostly cultural. And so if we zoom in a bit, we can pinpoint a more precise date when we stopped having babies.

The second quarter of 2008 was the first quarter with a year-over-year drop in births. The four months starting in May 2008 were the first four-month stretch where the year-over-year general fertility rate fell every month.

May 2008 was before the stock market crashed. It was, however, nine months after the first iPhone launched.

To some ears, it sounds absurd that smartphones could deter people from having kids. But the iPhone was never just a device. It was a cultural revolution. And when we see a cultural phenomenon as dramatic as the last 18-years’ collapse in marriage and family formation, we should wonder what changed the culture.

Maybe the culture was upended by a device that altered how people spend all their time, how singles date, how fast first-world norms spread across the planet, and frankly, how we understand ourselves.

The evidence

While the timing of the iPhone lineup, that could just be a coincidence. What’s more, something as massive as our reduction in marriage and family formation, obviously, will have many causes.

So economist Caitlin K. Myers and data analyst Ezekiel Hooper tried a more detailed analysis. They took advantage of the fact that the iPhone didn’t launch in equal quantities everywhere at once. For about four years, only AT&T subscribers could use iPhones, and AT&T coverage is not equally distributed.

The researchers say they compared “counties with near-universal AT&T coverage to counties with little or none over 2003–2011.”

What they found: The dropoff in baby-making was far greater in the counties with more AT&T coverage. The difference was large enough and the pattern clear enough that the authors concluded that the iPhone was a major cause of the Baby Bust.

“Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44,” the researchers concluded.

“The diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women.”

This is a single study, so it’s certainly not proof. There are a million reasons to doubt the conclusion, and a million other likely culprits in the Baby Bust: The Great Recession started in 2008, and birthrates have generally been falling for hundreds of years. The study’s methodology is not watertight.

The study has, though, shown correlation: Where the iPhone became available, birth rates were lower than expected.

The mechanisms

So how exactly could this work? How could a cellphone keep a woman from getting pregnant?

The study points to a few plausible mechanisms by which smartphones could drive down baby-making, but anyone familiar with a smartphone could imagine a dozen other possibilities.

The dating apps are an obvious potential culprit.

Before smartphones, almost every couple met in person. Now, most young adults use dating apps. These apps were supposed to reduce the friction in meeting a good match, but since their widespread adoption, marriage rates have gone down, and men and women have come to trust one another less. Now the data suggest that even dating is down.

Why would apps made to facilitate dates result in fewer dates? It’s not totally clear, but one could guess.

Maybe meeting people in person, through friends or shared activities, is more conducive to helping people find a good match.

Also, the dating apps drove home the idea that one ought to flirt only with someone who has explicitly consented to being flirted with.

Further, dating apps have become the place to seek a partner, fostering the idea that it is inappropriate to ask someone out in person or to pursue a romantic relationship with the girl on the softball team.

More darkly, the smartphone put all the pornography in the world in the pocket of young men, and that had bad effects. More people watched porn, and more people searched for porn after the iPhone was launched than before.

“The iPhone made on-demand pornography always-available and private,” the authors wrote. “If the device displaces partnered sex by providing a substitute, the substitution should show up in series like these.”

More porn makes healthy dating and marriage harder.

Also, smartphones simply waste people’s time, leaving less time for socializing and dating, which leads to less dating, which in turn leads to less marriage. The time-wasting and less hanging out show up in the study as a good outcome: The largest drop in birth rates was among teenage girls. Instagram might be ruining high school, but it’s doing it in a way that at least results in fewer pregnant girls!

However, Gen Z’s and Millennials’ emaciated social life appears to extend into their 20s.

Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki puts it in the terms of ease: Smartphones make it easier to take care of necessities, and thus make it easier to just stay home.

“We can one-click order meals and nearly any product, practice yoga on YouTube, and even pray through an app,” Zaki said in a 2025 interview. “Communal activities don’t have to be done in community, so we stay home. Going out has become like working out: We feel better after doing it, but it takes energy to get started.”

Declining sociality leads to all sorts of social pathologies.

Members of Gen Z are less trusting of others than any of the previous generations, and they have become less and less trusting every year. This could be another mechanism by which smart depresses baby-making. The internet and social media seem especially crafted to reduce human connection and foster distrust.

Marriage and parenthood require high trust. Joining your life with another person, which is what both marriage and parenthood require, makes you extremely vulnerable. As a result, less trusting people will be less likely to have kids.

Also, raising children requires social support, and so it requires a tight-knit community, which is inseparable from trust.

Other studies seem to confirm these connections.

One recent study out of China found that folks who use the Internet more are less trusting of others. The causality likely goes both ways here, but if you spend time online, you can imagine how it could erode your faith in humanity. A smart phone plugs us into this alienation-machine 24 hours a day. Instead of speaking to your neighbors at the bus stop, you’re mainlining bad news and conspiracy theories.

In turn, more trusting people have more babies and get married more. For instance, as women get more educated, their birthrates fall, but they fall less in cultures with higher social trust.

The deeper cause

Smartphones are tools, and it’s easy to think that a tool cannot harm us — a tool is simply what we make of it.

But our tools often shape us, and change the nature of society. The cotton gin was just a tool, but it created a demand for cheap labor, specifically slavery, thus changing history.

The smartphone has changed not merely how we carry out our daily tasks — it has changed how we understand ourselves. Social media, in particular, seems to have driven home a harmful anthropology.

Social media algorithms are designed not to make us happy, but to make us addicted. The easy and the enraging are the most addictive. Feasting our eyes and minds and souls on the easy and enraging will make us torpid and angry. It will fuel social distrust and convince us that people are bad. That doesn’t dispose a person to marrying another person, or to creating more people.

WAKING UP TO THE BABY BUST

Social media also cultivates an overly individualistic view of the human person, at the expense of family and community.

Instagram, for instance, is made for you to cultivate your personal image or brand. It cultivates self-absorption. It teaches us that life is about improving and advancing yourself, rather than about serving and loving others, which is exactly what parenting requires.

A traveling salesman might be resting his haunches in seat 2C. Your local congressman might be reading the newspaper in row 3. Grandma might be downing her pre-flight champagne on another visit to one of her children and grandchildren scattered around the country.

All the flights they took earned them status, and status earned them upgrades.

But the frequent flyers are no longer up front. The salesman is flying coach, and Grandma’s back in steerage. The good seats are for the folks willing to pay extra.

These days, first class is no longer something earned, but something bought. Familiar faces are out. Big spenders are in.

Almost 90% of first-class seats used to be filled by upgrading frequent flyers who had bought coach seats, according to airline industry media, and now that number is down to 12%. So in that Boeing 737-800, 14 of the 16 passengers paid for it.

Airline executives are very proud of this change. Former Delta Air Lines President Glen Hauenstein bragged about it when he ran the airline, and now that he’s retired, he points to this change as one of his accomplishments.

Armed with artificial intelligence tools and improved tracking of customers’ online behavior, executives are confident they can extract the maximum number of dollars out of customers while leaving the fewest number of vacancies. The apps are now built to upsell coach customers, and they seem to be having success.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE KNICKS’ GAMES START TOO LATE

In doing this, of course, the airlines are devaluing customer loyalty. The most valuable part of the frequent flyer programs wasn’t the points that eventually added up to a free trip or two. It was always the status that got you free upgrades.

Status was almost a relationship between the passenger and the airline. That was unfitting, the executives concluded. This is a simple transaction — you give them cash, they give you a seat. None of this “treating your best passengers well” stuff. This is capitalism, after all.

Ehrlich wanted the tax code to discourage large families: the dependent exemption should apply only to the first two children, and a luxury tax should be levied on all cribs and diapers.

The federal student loan program seems to have been created in the same spirit.

Federal subsidies have driven up the cost of college, and those subsidies are slanted in favor of having only one child — or at most two children spaced far apart.

Large families, or any families with children close in age, suffer under the current system, and last year’s changes to the federal financial aid formula made it worse for anyone with more than one child.

The 2020 law that simplified the Free Application for Federal Student Aid formula also created something of a One Child Policy.

Under the old system, you would enter your income and your assets (mostly your cash savings), and the U.S. Department of Education would calculate how much you could afford to pay for college — your “Expected Family Contribution.” Ideally, every dollar above that expected contribution would be fulfilled by financial aid, from Uncle Sam, the state, and the college.

The new system asks mostly the same question and does mostly the same calculation, but at the end of that calculation, when it determines how much you can afford for college next year, it expects you to pay that much for each child in college.

“Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, your after-tax income was just above $110,000, and so we estimate you can afford $20,000 in tuition next year. With three kids in college next year, that will come out to $60,000. Any questions?”

Why would they do this?

“Equity” is part of the answer, of course.

The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, for instance, praised the law for creating a “more equitable formula,” because it abolished the “sibling discount.”

The “sibling discount” was not an explicit discount for students with siblings. Instead, it is the result of basic math: If a family can afford $20,000 in tuition in one year and that family has three children in college, the family can afford about $6,667 per child. Each student in this family gets more financial aid because he has siblings in college.

This violates some notions of “equity,” because it means a family with more college-going children might get more aid per child than a smaller family with the same available income.

More specifically, under the old system, parents with children born closer together received more financial aid over their lifetime compared to similar parents with children spaced further apart.

For instance, a family with twins would get more aid than a family whose two children are four years apart in school.

It’s fair to consider this discrepancy. Why should these two families be treated differently if they have the same income?

For starters, their economic needs are different. Having a massive cost concentrated in four years is more of a burden than having that same cost spread over eight years. The family with twins in college really does experience greater economic hardship than the other family, so a federally run aid program is justified in aiding one family more than another.

Defenders of the new law say that big families or families with children overlapping in college can deal with that hardship by borrowing, or just saving more than other families.

But it’s a bit perverse to tell families to borrow to cover the added costs of this new formula because this very formula determines whether the student is eligible for subsidized student loans. Parents can instead take out PLUS loans, whose interest rate is currently set by the Education Department at 9.07%.

It’s also a bit odd to tell parents they should have saved for college, considering the ability-to-pay formula also counts their savings against them.

But let’s compare those two-child families head-to-head.

The Thompsons have twins, and the Spaceys have their children spaced. Imagine the two families have the same income, the same taxes, and the same savings. They both have an expected family contribution, or SAI, of $20,000, so the Thompsons pay $40,000 per year for four years while the Spaceys pay $20,000 per year for eight years.

The Spaceys’ entire needs are met each year, and so they don’t have to borrow. They pay $160,000 in total.

The Thompsons, though, are expected to pay yearly twice what they are deemed able to pay, and so they borrow half of that, at a 9.07% interest rate. If the parents took out a PLUS loan each year and paid them off over the standard 10 years, that would add up to more than $40,000 in interest — increasing the total cost of college for the twins from $160,000 to $200,000 when you count the interest.

That 25% premium for having twins is called “equity.”

The alternative, that the Thompsons should have saved more aggressively than the Spaceys, has an unstated premise: Those twins are the only children the Thompsons will have.

Look closely enough, and you will see it’s not about equity. The new law, and the folks who defend it, are unconsciously advancing a particular worldview. They just think you should have only one child, or at most two, and not too close together.

As an added bonus, the formula slightly favors those who have children later (by allowing older parents to shield more of their assets than younger parents) and two-income families over breadwinner families with the same finances. You can begin to see the pattern.

Our laws and regulations, even those that seem neutral, generally reflect an unstated worldview. The worldview expressed in our financial aid program is the one that dominates our elite class: Be parsimonious planners on family matters.

THE KNICKS’ GAMES START TOO LATE

To the extent the new formula does reflect equity, it is equity that considers only the individual, not the family. Dana Kelly, a vice president at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, put it succinctly: “Rather than looking at the family as a whole, they are looking at each student individually.”

This individualistic, less-familial worldview results in a financial aid system that drives up the price of college, and then tilts financial aid away from larger families.

Tim Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Cruz was heard asking for forgiveness repeatedly while Ramos and a group of others allegedly insulted him and physically attacked him,” one local outlet reported, citing court documents.

Cruz was found, bloodied and unconscious, a mile away in a parked car, and he soon died.

After Cruz was killed, but before Ramos was arrested for the murder, Ramos was due in court for a totally separate assault in Virginia (his fourth assault charge). Ramos missed that court date on June 15 because he was arrested that morning “carrying 17 bags of cocaine at a 7-Eleven,” according to a news report. He was, according to police, high on cocaine at the time.

The next month, July 2022, the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force found and arrested Ramos for the deadly assault on Cruz.

Ramos was charged in August 2022 but released pending trial, and his attorney said he would reside out of D.C. (In fact, he was residing in the Fairfax County jail.) In October, a D.C. judge reversed his release and issued a bench warrant, ordering Ramos detained pending the homicide trial.

Then in December 2023, pending trial, Ramos was again released, this time to home confinement (in D.C.) with GPS monitoring. These terms were loosened in September 2025.

In early 2026, Ramos appeared in court and rejected a plea deal from prosecutors. That’s when Ramos went missing. His GPS monitor died, and he failed to show up to a May 4 hearing. “Mr. Ramos just completely vanished,” the judge said and issued a bench warrant for Ramos’s arrest.

The U.S. Marshals were sent out to find Ramos.

On May 26, they found him in a park in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant. Ramos gave them a fake name. Neighbors began heckling the police for the arrest, and one neighbor apparently came into the park carrying a bat, provoking an officer to draw his weapon. Video of the incident went viral.

Online liberals railed against the arrest, calling it fascism.

By May 28, local politicians learned that this was not some open-container or immigration arrest, but a bench warrant from a D.C. judge being executed by the Marshals, and that Ramos was a fugitive serial offender wanted for homicide.

Nevertheless, one woman who wants to be mayor of D.C. kept up the liberal hysteria.

Just this week, long after it was public that Ramos was arrested by Marshals because he was a fugitive murder suspect, socialist Democrat Janeese Lewis George used Ramos’ arrest as an argument against stricter law enforcement.

Here’s the relevant back-and-forth between the outlet NOTUS and JLG:

NOTUS: A big issue over the last year has been these teen takeovers in places like Navy Yard and the back-and-forth debate over teen curfew zones. Why have you opposed the use of those zones?

Janeese: “We saw a video a couple days ago where [federal agents] were harassing people in Mount Pleasant. Those were adults, but those could have very easily been young people, and I have to weigh the harm and the benefits.”

In sum: A man was charged with beating a man to death, has been arrested on four other assaults and drug charges, and he also skipped out on his trial and went missing — and Janeese Lewis George thinks it’s a shame he was “harassed.”

Quite the mayor she would be.

It’s too bad the games go so late.

The Knicks’ 11-0 run in Game 1 was entirely after 11 p.m. Eastern time. The wild final 77 seconds of Game 2 happened after 11:15 pm.

That’s late!

New York City public schools are in session. The kids watching these games will have to get up early the morning after the games. Also, the next two games will be played in New York City, in the Eastern Time Zone.

If the Spurs’ home games in San Antonio can start at 7:30 p.m local time (8:30 Eastern), the games in New York can surely start at 7:30 p.m. local time. Heck, the games should start at 7 p.m. local time, or even 6:30. Some Californians missing the first quarter because they are at work is far better than some East Coasters missing the fourth quarter because they are asleep.

BASKETBALL AND BASEBALL AFTER BEDTIME

Yes, New York is The City That Never Sleeps. But about 40% of the city is asleep by 11 p.m. on average, according to fitness tracker data.

Most important, though, is the cost to kids. Starting the games late means few little kids will stay up to the end, which means fewer little kids will become lifelong fans. It also means the fans of other teams, and the loosely attached Knicks fans, will find it hard to stay up for the end.

It’s fitting that Packwood’s licentious and unfaithful behavior should hang over his reputation, because it was an abuse of power — he used his position as a powerful senator to prey on more than a dozen women.

But his corrupt dealings with lobbyists — and his own career as a lobbyist — deserve some attention, too.

Packwood’s own diary entries, which became famous during his ethics hearings, condemn him. He begged lobbyists to hire the wife he was divorcing, so as to spare him the cost of alimony. He also offered legislative favors to lobbyists/donors on multiple occasions. And after he resigned from office, while facing expulsion, he became a Washington lobbyist.

The Oregonian in 1993 reported on the job offers to Georgie Packwood:

“On June 12, 1990, Bob Packwood filed for divorce. The next day, Ronald Crawford, a registered lobbyist, wrote a letter to Georgie Packwood offering her a job.

“The day after that, Lester Pollack, a Wall Street investment tycoon, wrote another letter to Georgie Packwood offering her another job.

“In addition to Crawford and Pollack, job offers came from Steven Saunders and Tim Lee. All were friends of the senator.

“Saunders is a registered foreign agent who represents the embassy of Japan, several Japanese manufacturing firms and the Taiwan Textile Federation. In 1990, the year he offered Georgie Packwood a job, the Japanese government paid him $25,000 to lobby Congress.

“Bob Packwood sided with Japan that year when many members of Congress were arguing for trade sanctions against the country.

“The senator also supported the Taiwanese textile group as a leading opponent of a 1990 bill, eventually enacted, that set quotas and import fees on textiles.”

Politico in 2024 recounted some other details of Packwood-K Street coziness from his time in the Senate:

“In one instance documented in the diary … he pledged to a lobbyist working for Shell Oil that he’d pass a special oil tax bill to thank him for raising campaign cash. ‘Ron, I still hate the oil companies,’ he told the gentleman, ‘but I’ll do you a favor.’”

POPE LEO SAYS ‘SCOURGE’ OF CATHOLIC CHURCH SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDALS CALLS FOR ‘REAL PATHS TO HEALING’

And of course, after resigning from the Senate in disgrace, Packwood became a registered lobbyist for corporate interests and labor unions. The Politico piece was titled “Bob Packwood’s Redemption Story.” That wry headline is fitting because so much of the news media seems to love nothing more than a Republican-turned-lobbyist. See the story of Bob Dole, or all the lobbyists who backed Joe Biden in 2020. It’s like they make up for the sin of being a Republican by becoming a mercenary.

More important, though, were Packwood’s dealings with lobbyists while he was a senator. These were corrupt abuses of power that deserve to live in infamy.

If you read liberal reporters and commentators, the biggest unmet need in the United States is formal childcare.

If you listen to Democratic politicians, you might believe that affordable daycare is one of the top issues out there, and that “universal childcare” is in high demand.

But if you study the polls and read the academic research on this, you will find that formal childcare is not in extremely high demand (outside of the circles of media and political elites, that is).

Most parents do not want the model Democrats and the major media take for granted — two full-time jobs combined with institutional childcare.

What’s more, study after study undermines the feminist claim that mothers are kept out of the workforce by a lack of childcare.

Yes, most parents rely on paid childcare at some point. Yes, single mothers and their children benefit from predictable, affordable childcare.

But despite what Kamala Harris and the New York Times might lead you to believe, we are not a nation pocked with “childcare deserts” with most parents desperately crying for more daycare centers.

Betty Friedan Democrats

Feminist author Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, painting a dark picture of depressed, unfulfilled suburban housewives. Domestic life, feminists of the era argued, was a gilded cage.

The Baby Boomers atop the Democratic Party are stuck in the 1960s and still peddle Friedan’s line. Specifically, they seem to believe that every stay-at-home mom and every mother working part-time is trapped — that every woman in America wants to be working 40 hours per week.

“I think about how many women of my generation just got knocked off the track and never got back on,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a 2020 Democratic presidential debate. “How many of my daughter’s generation get knocked off the track and don’t get back on, how many mamas and daddies today are getting knocked off the track and never get back on.”

A parent who leaves the workforce to spend full-time with his or her child is “offtrack,” in Warren’s view.

When the Atlantic a few years back suggested that some mothers leaving the workforce this decade might be doing so voluntarily, Washington Post columnist Elaine Olen groaned. “Give. Me. A. Break.” It was just a “a lousy old myth about moms” to suggest that “many of these women are better off for cutting their (paid) work hours and downscaling their professional aspirations in favor of tending to family responsibilities.”

The unstated assumption is that all women, including all mothers, want to be working full-time jobs, and that the unavailability of decent affordable childcare has trapped mothers at home with their children.

This assumption is undermined by the bulk of the academic research on the question.

Specifically, married mothers in America are not kept out of the workforce by the lack of daycare. Increasing the supply of daycare does not induce them into the labor force. The studies demonstrating this are many.

“Maternal Labor Supply and the Introduction of Kindergartens into American Public Schools” was a study by economist Elizabeth Cascio published in the Journal of Human Resources in 2009. Because different states rolled out universal Kindergarten at different times, she was able to study whether moms went back to work if Kindergarten was available to them. Her conclusion: “I estimate that four of ten single mothers with no younger children entered the work force with public school enrollment of a five-year-old child. No significant labor supply responses are detected among other mothers with eligible children.”

In other words, married moms are not induced back to work when no-cost 8-to-3 childcare is available.

More recent studies by the same economist had similar findings: High-quality, affordable taxpayer-backed pre-school seemed to really help poor families, but the only real effect on wealthy families just saving them money. In that paper, she cites another study finding “no statistically significant positive impacts of a child’s eligibility for state-funded preschool on his or her mother’s chances of working.”

A massive study published in the American Economic Journal in 2024, headed by Princeton economist Henrik Kleven found “the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.”

“What about women who do not work?” Kleven and co-authors asked. “Are they facing constraints that prevent them from increasing labor supply?”

The answer was no: “Only a small fraction of surveyed women say that they feel constrained by the supply of institutional care. What is more, the fraction is no larger in districts with low levels of child care provision than it is in districts with high levels.”

The economists explained this in the most economist way possible: “If child care constraints are not preventing mothers from improving their career trajectories, then what is? Evidence … points to the potentially important role of preferences and norms regarding maternal care: An overwhelming majority of women (70-80%) report that they do not work, because they have a preference for taking care of their children.”

Again: Mothers are out of the workforce because mothers want to be out of the workforce so that they can be home with their children.

These findings are reflected in public polling.

Most parents do not want to work full time, according to a recent poll by the New America Foundation.

Meanwhile, 49% of parents say they want themselves or their spouse to be the primary childcare provider. At every age, more parents say they would rather look after their child than put their child in formal childcare. Only 30% of moms say they want to work full time, the New America study finds.

Only three percent of voters say that childcare costs are imposing a burden on their household.

What’s going on, then?

Childcare is a small issue for voters, it doesn’t have a huge effect on the economy, and most parents don’t want two 40-hour-per-week jobs and formal daycare. So one wonders: Why are Democrats and the media so insistent on this model?

The first source of this disconnect is the professional feminist liberal bubble in which the elite media lives. The Americans most likely to prefer two full-time jobs and institutional childcare and to find it impossibly expensive might be New York Times reporters and editors.

They are in a household with two college degrees and maybe two masters between them. Work for them is not merely a source of money but also a source of meaning. They are left of center politically and disproportionately female. They grew up around the like-minded and now live and work among the like-minded in New York or Washington. They frankly don’t know any stay-at-home moms.

BIG LABOR’S CHILD CARE RACKET

The bigger culprit is probably special-interest politics. Democrats want to subsidize childcare in part because that means subsidizing their political allies.

Pay close attention when Democrats talk about childcare. They always talk about supporting “the care economy.” They want more people working in childcare, higher pay for those workers, and government subsidies bolstering that pay.

Universal childcare will bolster the public-sector unions, which are big supporters of Democrats. It will not help parents.

She concluded: “The second group all got on a boat and went to America.”

This European founding myth for the United States of America concisely captures our nature as self-starters and mavericks. It points towards the spirit of individualism.

But our most common founding myth — specifically the story of the folks who all got on a boat to flee Europe — carries a different lesson. The Thanksgiving story is not a tale of individualism, but of community. We celebrate the Pilgrims by breaking bread together at a large table, and we tell tales of how families working together overcame adversity and tamed this land.

As much as Little House on the Prairie paints a picture of the rugged frontiersman blazing his own path, Norman Rockwell paintings show an America made up of tight-knit small towns and little platoons.

If you can hold these two competing visions together, you can understand America as she turns 250 years old. American culture is one of individualism embedded in an extraordinary network of civil society.

When Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831 to study our 55-year-old democracy, he found the most important thing was not the makeup of our government or the details of our laws, but the sprawling organic web of our voluntary institutions.

“There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America,” Tocqueville wrote.

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” he remarked with astonishment. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”

In cases where the French would rely on the government, and where the British would rely on the wealthy lord, we Americans relied on ourselves. This was not a solitary self-reliance, but a communal one. If there was a problem, Americans wouldn’t ask for permission; we would band together and solve it.

Today’s ideological divides make it easy to miss this fundamental truth about America.

Progressives rail against our overly individualistic culture, name capitalism as the root of all evil, and jump unthinkingly to the conclusion that government is the answer.

They divide life into the private sphere and the public sphere — and by “public” they mean government-run. If an individual or a family cannot handle something on its own, the state must be the solution.

Conservatives make the same mistake from the opposite angle. They understand the evils of socialism, and they value liberty. As a result, they deride “collectivism” and hold up the individual as the antidote.

But the enemy of the overbearing state is not the individual. It is the little platoon.

When we become too atomized, the proper prescription is not more government, it is more civil society.

And we have become too atomized. America’s strength is the strength of its communities: Our religious congregations, our neighborhoods, our Little Leagues, our bowling leagues. For 60 years, American civil society has been shriveling, as famously documented by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone.

Without this scaffolding of intermediate institutions, American democracy doesn’t work as well. We become more isolated as individuals, and in response, we expect more from the central government.

If you wonder why socialism is so popular among Generation Z, blame our declining communitarianism.

It really is not good for man to be alone. It really does take a village to raise a child. When Americans don’t find that village in society, we are more likely to turn to Washington, D.C.

It turns out hyper-individualism and over-centralization are not opposite errors, but are two sides of the same coin.

At the same time that young people become more socialist, a lot of America — left and right — is becoming excessively individualistic. The pandemic made isolation more normal. Tech makes it easier to fulfill our needs without human interaction. Today’s liberal feminism rejects marriage and parenthood. Some parts of the Right, meanwhile, dig deeper into a leave-me-alone sort of conservatism.

AMERICA 250: AMERICA HAS BEEN BLESSED WITH GREAT LEADERS

Individualism needs community, and community needs individualism. Unchecked individualism leads us to Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature. All-enveloping community leads us to stagnation and repression. America’s strength has been blending these two forces.

Ours is the greatest country in the history of the world because we are pioneers and rugged individualists who rely on one another and lift up one another.

Back in the Woke Era (2014 to 2024), fare evasion was nearly a cause celebre. The history of this period needs to be recalled regularly lest tomorrow’s liberals claim it never happened — pretending it’s some right-wing fever dream.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, in early 2018, said he wouldn’t prosecute turnstile jumpers, and cops noted this included those with more than 50 offenses.

When subsequently some cops got into scuffles with unruly turnstile-hoppers, hundreds of New Yorkers protested the enforcement of subway fares by hopping the turnstiles en masse. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) praised the gate-hoppers as civil rights heroes.

“Arresting people who can’t afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “New Yorkers know that, they’re not having it, and they’re standing up for each other.”

Squadmate Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) promoted “decriminalizing fare evasion” nationwide as part of her “People’s Justice Guarantee.”

And in the nation’s capital, the Democratic city council in 2019 overrode the Democratic mayor’s veto to pass a bill that, in effect, made Metro fares optional. The American Civil Liberties Union praised the council: “With today’s vote, the Council sent a clear message that it is committed to progressive criminal justice reform that dismantles the systemic racial and economic injustice that has only harmed our communities.”

The result was predictable.

New York’s MTA lost more than $1 billion due to this policy, as fare evasion more than doubled and maybe tripled, up to about $700 million in 2022 alone. Stabbings and other violent crimes spiked in 2021 and 2022, because while some fare evaders are just poor folk or sneaky kids, some significant portion is a criminal up to no good. Letting criminals waltz into the subway isn’t great for subway safety. “Virtually every criminal is a fare evader,” MTA chairwoman Janno Lieber said.

In the district, the story was similar, and the cost of fare evasion at least doubled over the Woke decade, from about $20 million to $40 million or $50 million.

But peak woke has passed, and some cities are reversing.

The district’s Metro spent tens of millions to install harder-to-hop turnstiles, and the newish Metro chief, Randy Clarke, has gotten very tough. In Spring 2026, Metro began cracking down on the freeloaders on the bus, where historically one-third of the passengers have skipped the fare. In the last week of May, Metro said, the agency issued 740 fare-evasion tickets and made 46 arrests.

Wherever authorities are taking steps to actually require fares from all riders (as in San Francisco as well), crime and disorder have fallen markedly.

It turns out that preventing theft is a good idea, and celebrating theft is a bad idea!

But the tech bros building the artificial intelligence products aren’t the root of the problem. They are, for the most part, just capitalizing on the fundamental error of our time, which is our deeply flawed anthropology.

We don’t know what a person is anymore.

Technology can steer us into error and make our bad anthropology worse, but only after we’ve already tossed out the good map.

As Leo put it in Magnficas Humanitas, “The key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it.”

Listen closely to the folks in Silicon Valley hyping AI as a replacement for human labor. You can detect their unstated view of humans: They see us as computers.

And if we are mere computers, we are poor specimens. Compared to their large language models, which can “recall” anything ever written, we are ignorant and bad at math.

We are, of course, not computers. But again, we need to avoid blaming this error entirely on Silicon Valley. The tech industry has, to some extent, just inherited an older mistake. Modern man has, over the past few decades — without noting the shift — come to think of the human person as essentially an intellect. Our flesh and bones are seen as accidental baggage, even a curse.

Elites holding to this view of the person adopt (but don’t usually say aloud) the opinion that intelligence equals virtue. Far worse is the unstated premise that productivity equals value.     

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed,” Pope Leo warns, “it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.”

Rapid technological growth creates “a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce,” Leo writes.

Today’s elites, in and out of the tech world, really do seem to believe that a person is only as good as his measurable contributions to the world. This is almost tautological to the secular materialist mind.

I have had elite students tell me they couldn’t imagine starting a family because they owed it to the world not just to graduate from their Ivy League college, but also to go to law or business school and then gain material success. When I suggested that loving one’s spouse and raising a child might itself be worthwhile, they dismissed that as impossibly sentimental.

Again, here we can detect an unstated anthropology: The achievement-oriented, heavily-educated American or European sees herself primarily as an individual. Her interactions with others are not relations but transactions — fully consensual, limited, contingent.

Modern man sees himself as a free-floating, atomized bundle of rights. The Christian view upheld by Pope Leo is different: Man is fundamentally a relational creature, an embodied creature, a familial creature. Our bodies, our families, our relationships are not accidents or adornments on our true selves. They, as much as our intellects, make us who we are. What’s more, we exist in a place — a physical place. Who and what are physically around us shape our individual identity, even if we didn’t choose those things.

Our relationships with other people aren’t merely means to getting what we want. Relationships are good in themselves. This is lost on the modern mind, and so our policymakers try to make policies that make us less dependent on one another — as if dependence is a weakness. More profoundly, perhaps, our Big Tech masters of the universe make tools aimed at liberating us from interpersonal relationships.

Here, the threat from AI is obvious:

“The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking,” Leo writes. “Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE MYTH OF GREEN CHINA

Robert Nisbet last century defined the alienated individual as the person who “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.”

AI is merely a tool. But it’s a tool with which we can’t be trusted unless and until we fix our mistaken understanding of who we are.