In late June 2022, conservatives took to the streets to celebrate the greatest victory for their movement in a generation: the long-awaited reversal of Roe v. Wade. Barely two years later, that movement was itself on life-support—if not, indeed, quietly euthanized. Many activists felt they had been stabbed in the back by party operatives, but the leadership in Chicago was just doing what party leadership does: figuring out how to win elections. If opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage no longer found any place in the GOP platform, that’s because it was now clear they no longer had any in the minds of most voters. Just 35% of voters now think abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, and just 29% still oppose same-sex marriage.
Why did social conservatives lose the electorate, though? Was it because Donald Trump was a uniquely polarizing figure, driving many moderates leftward and discrediting socially conservative causes by association? Was it because elite universities force-fed Marxism and post-structuralism to our best and brightest for decades? Both factors clearly played a role, but they do not explain the breadth of the shift, which has taken place even among Trump’s own base, among those classes most scornful of the elites. (Between 2010 and 2022, support for abortion on demand suddenly surged from 38% to 56% among Americans with only a high-school education.) Nor can legal changes explain it: in the aftermath of Obergefell it was fashionable to claim that the law was a moral teacher, helping to normalize the behavior it legalized; but if so, why did support for abortion increase further after Dobbs?
In a new essay published today at American Compass, I argue that the story of the collapse of social conservatism is at least in part a technology story.
Anyone familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation or his Substack, After Babel, knows that on almost any measure of youth mental health, graphs have a hockey stick shape, with the inflection point around 2010. It turns out that graphs of young adult support for progressive causes have a similar shape. After declining for a decade, support for abortion on demand among Americans aged 18 to 34 started rising in 2006 and had more than doubled by the time of Dobbs. The share identifying as something other than heterosexual or straight rose from 4% in 2010 to 25% in 2022. After remaining more or less unchanged for decades, the share saying that divorce should be easier to obtain nearly doubled. This constellation of characteristics is not coincidental.
They are rather, I argue, in part the response to digital culture’s dissolution of six central pillars of conservatism: Limits, Tradition, Patience, Dependence, Embeddedness, and Embodiment.
The pro-life cause rests on all six pillars. Starting from the transcendent dignity of the human body, it asserts the inviolability of the tiny body taking shape in its mother’s womb. The radical dependence of the fetus does not detract from its humanity, but reminds all of us of our own dependence. To carry the child to term, and to raise it to adulthood, is the supreme act of patient suffering, and although it will impose profound limits on the mother’s ability to “live her own life” going forward, no one is meant to do that anyway; we are to discover our identity in relation to one another and accept the limits that these relationships entail. The temptation to escape this burden is so strong that we cannot rely on reason alone to resist it, but must surround the idea of abortion with every taboo that tradition can afford, trusting our ancestors that such an act should be unthinkable.
Digital technology, however, is the most powerfully corrosive acid ever conceived for the fundamental pillars of a conservative society: it invites us to transcend all limits, thumb our noses at tradition, fast-forward through time and suffering, and break free of dependence on authorities, communities, and our own bodies.
This desire for and expectation of a frictionless world has set the agenda for bio-technology and bio-ethics, making nonsense of basic social conservative commitments. Why should a woman accept the biological constraints of pregnancy if she does not have to? Why respect the tired taboos of old white men? Why patiently carry a baby to term and put it up for adoption, bearing untold physical and emotional suffering, if she can get rid of it now? Why should the unborn child’s absolute dependence on her have any moral weight, when we can create and terminate pregnancies now by any number of means? Why should she be tied down by the social role of motherhood? Why, in short, should the material reality of her own body, or that of the child within it, be determinate in any way if they clash with her desires or those of her sexual partner(s)? To a generation that has grown up inured to violent pornography, the violent dismemberment of a young body may seem like just another necessary price to pay for the regime of liberation they have come to take for granted.
This may seem a fatalistic message, for who can hope to turn back the clock on the digital age? And yet this cloud has a silver lining: If the road to any durable political success for social conservatives must run through tech policy, this is a road on which we are likely to meet unexpected allies. If tech policy is the new family policy, conservatives may have a chance to build a bipartisan coalition for the first time in a generation. States are now tripping over one another to get smartphones out of schools and protect kids from pornography—Texas’s bill age-gating adult websites, set to go before the Supreme Court this winter—passed 141 to 0. Indeed, with data showing low-income and minority children are disproportionately victimized by Big Tech, it should be easy for conservatives to join hands in progressives on this issue of social justice.
We can also change the digital landscape for adults, without insisting that we all go analog. Our problem today is not lack of policy options, but lack of will to pursue them. We need conservatives who understand that the “wokeness” of Silicon Valley is no coincidence: Big Tech’s profit model is inherently progressive, persuading users to adopt a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured vision of themselves as mere bundles of desire. Using policy to push back is not just intrinsically worth doing for the sake of those whom such technology exploits; it may be our only real bet for reviving social conservatism in our lifetimes.
I hope you’ll take time to read the full essay over on American Compass. Oren Cass was a sensational editor who helped me sharpen up a sprawling argument into a forceful statement that I hope will serve as a preview of the kind of work I’ll be undertaking here at EPPC in the months to come.
Newly Published
“iThink Therefore iAm”: Synopsized above. I’ll just add here a shoutout to Jared Eckert for helping me initially start brainstorming this argument a couple months ago, and to Hadar Hazony, John Ehrett, and Jon Askonas (among others) for helping me process and develop some of the key claims.
“Lost in Neverland”: How is it that Disney World revenues keep going up while birth rates keep going down? Easy: convince adults to lock themselves into a perpetual childhood, and to pay any price to live the perfect childhood vicariously through their 1.6 children.
Coming down the Pipe
“Technology and Freedom: The Faustian Bargain of Modern Life”: I’ve been invited to give the Collegium Lecture at New College Franklin next Thursday, and I’ll be presenting my chapter on technology from my forthcoming book Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. I just learned that the lecture will be live-streamed—tune in at this link.
Faithful Citizenship in a Fractured World:
Audio of my lectures at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, NC will be posted serially starting next Monday.
I’ll be teaching a slightly-expanded version of the course at St. Andrews Anglican, Mt. Pleasant (ACNA), September 13-14. Register here.
I’ll be teaching a slightly-condensed version of the course at City Church of Richmond (PCA), September 20-21. Register here.
I’ll be teaching a very-condensed version of the course at Christ the King Alexandria (ACNA), October 20.
I have articles appearing in the upcoming issues of Ad Fontes, Mere Orthodoxy, and National Affairs later this month. Subscribe to the print editions to be among the first to read them!
On the Bookshelf
D.C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (2017): Since I am a Protestant, this Substack must double as my confessional booth. So here I admit, shame-facedly, that I have never read this book; or actually, what is still worse: that I started it years ago, got sidetracked 40 pages in, and never finished it. Does that mean that I have no right to write on this topic or dare to publish my own book on freedom? Probably so. Thankfully I’ve been told by a few folks that Schindler’s work complements my own nicely—albeit at a higher level of philosophical sophistication (I being but a lowly Protestant). But it’s high time I find out for myself—so this week, I’m starting back in on this volume, and plan to follow up with the sequel Retrieving Freedom afterward.
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012): Lots of people like to blame World War I on nationalism run amok. Yoram Hazony retorts that it was not nationalism, but its polar opposite, imperialism, that drove Europe into this suicidal conflict (the idea being that nationalism seeks sovereignty over a clearly-defined ethnos, whereas imperialism seeks to establish domination over a polyglot collection of subject peoples.) Clark’s careful analysis reveals the sterility of this debate. Both sets of motives played key roles for different actors in the lead-up to the conflict, and in many cases, they are impossible to distinguish in practice. Serbia, for instance, was intensely ethno-nationalist, in terms of wanting to establish a “Greater Serbia” that would unite under one rule all ethnic and linguistic Serbs in the Balkans. But in practice, this could not be achieved without also establishing dominion over many non-Serbs in these territories, as the subsequent sad history of Yugoslavia demonstrates.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869): Tolstoy keenly observed the phenomenon of “The Inner Ring” long before Lewis wrote his famous essay on it.
“Speransky flattered Prince Andrei with that subtle flattery, combined with self-assurance, which consists in silently acknowledging one’s interlocutor and oneself as the only people capable of understanding all the stupidity of all the rest, and the intelligence and profundity of one’s own thoughts. In the course of their long conversation on Wednesday evening, Speransky said more than once, ‘Among us everything that lies outside the general level of inveterate habit is considered…’ or, with a smile: ‘But we want the wolves well-fed and the sheep safe…’ or: ‘They cannot understand it…’ And all that with an expression which said: ‘We, you and I, understand what they are and who we are.’”
Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023): Still chipping away and savoring every word. I suspected from page 1 that Barba-Kay and I shared an intense common passion for Hannah Arendt, and that was soon borne out by the footnotes. But here is an astounding passage he quotes from Arendt I’d somehow never noticed before:
“Positive laws in constitutional government are designed to erect boundaries and establish channels of communication between men whose community is continually endangered by the new men born into it … the boundaries are for the political existence of man what memory is for his historical existence: they guarantee the pre-existence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which transcends the individual life span of each generation … To abolish the fences of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man’s liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men, as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom.” (Origins of Totalitarianism, 598-600)
Recommended Reads
“Why I Changed My Mind About Volunteering” (Vox): Really interesting, although a bit unfocused and meandering, piece about changing attitudes toward philanthropy, particularly on the Left. Basically, the author observes the perverse unintended consequences of young progressives’ focus on systemic injustices and the need for collective action—most imbibed the idea that there was no point volunteering for your local soup kitchen to combat poverty, which meant that most were cut off from the soul-shaping (and community-forming) experience of actually doing charity rather than just giving to charity. Lots of food for thought here.
“Are People Really Lonely and Miserable?” (Ryan Burge): If they’re younger, then quite possibly yes. “Think about this: about a third of Americans in their seventies say that they never feel lonely. It’s only 10% of those in their late teens and early twenties. Also, younger people are a whole lot more likely to say that they ‘usually’ feel lonely. It was 5% of the older part of the sample and about 15% of the youngest adults surveyed. Young people feel lonelier. There’s no other conclusion that you can arrive at based on this data.”
“Is Germany’s Far Right About to Go Mainstream?” (Spectator): Lisa Haseldine covers the meteoric rise of the AfD (Alternativ fur Deutschland) party in Germany, which has interesting parallels with the populist Right here in the US. In both cases, very legitimate grievances, very ugly subtexts, and very uncertain policy implications make it very hard to know how to respond.
“Another Trump Middle Finger to Pro-Lifers” (Patrick Brown): My EPPC colleague weighs the significance of Trump’s latest pro-choice signals, and wonders aloud whether we might be approaching (or passing?) the point where conservatives might be better off with a Trump loss this year and a “clean slate” in 2028.
Get Involved
If you like this Substack, please spread the word with others. I’m just starting out, and steering clear of social media for now, and so would love to grow my subscribers through word of mouth! For now, this Substack will be totally free, but if you like the work I’m doing, please consider donating to it here by supporting EPPC and mentioning my name in the Comments.
If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.
> We need conservatives who understand that the “wokeness” of Silicon Valley is no coincidence: Big Tech’s profit model is inherently progressive, persuading users to adopt a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured vision of themselves as mere bundles of desire.
Big Tech cares for the money and power. Both of these work better with "a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured vision of themselves as mere bundles of desire".
But that's not the end of it: the technology (the medium itself) also pushes for "a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured vision of themselves as mere bundles of desire", regardless of the intentions of those selling and controlling the tech.
Even if Big Tech was conversative, all for embodied experience, etc, smartphones and social media would still promote a "a disembedded, disembodied, de-natured" vision of people as "mere bundles of desire", even in spite of explicit content circulating through them.
"The medium is the message", meaning if you stare at a screen for hours on end every day, you'll get disembedded, disembodied, and de-natured - even if all you do on that screen is to read C.S. Lewis, traditional moral advice, and elegies to traditional ways of life.