The Triple Package (22 page)

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T
HUS THE
C
ONSTITUTION
cemented the American Triple Package, helping to launch the nation on its extraordinary rise to continental and then global preeminence. But as a Triple Package nation, America had Triple Package pathologies. Characteristically, the Achilles’ heel was superiority.

Lofty as its ideals may have been, Revolutionary America had all the moral failings of its time. The American superiority complex of the late eighteenth century, and for a long time afterward, did not accept the idea that all men are created equal.
A great many Americans believed in the superiority of one race over the rest; of “civilization” over “savagery”; of men over women; and of Christianity—specifically Protestant Christianity—over all other religions.

As a result, America’s Triple Package drive and ambition also contributed to some of the darkest
stains on American history: at least two centuries of race slavery and, even after the Civil War, another century of segregation, violence, and systemic discrimination; the decimation, subjugation, and relocation of Native Americans, including the forced and fatal march of several tribes halfway across the continent in the 1830s; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; and the forgotten lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans well into the twentieth century.

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B
UT FOR THOSE WHOM
America’s Triple Package benefited, it was an engine of extraordinary potency. The American Triple Package
was not the same as the Puritans’. Infused with the American desire to live in the present, it was both more materialist and more rule-breaking.

This gave the American Triple Package a distinctive character. It was as liberating as it was constraining. In some Triple Package cultures, the path prescribed for individuals is rigidly conventional and risk-averse. America’s Triple Package was different.

Americans want to make the world anew—in every generation. Long after Jefferson said the “earth belongs to the living,” Henry Ford would famously declare, “
History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present.” One generation of Americans after another has pushed into new frontiers, torn down the old, created new religions, new rights, and new kinds of commerce, forever engaging in what economists, following Schumpeter, call creative destruction. If America was the quintessential Triple Package country, it was also a country where people constantly climbed the Triple Package ladder only to kick it away—drawing on its drive and discipline to defy convention, to break uncharted ground.

More than any other country, America managed to fuse two seemingly opposite impulses: Triple Package deferred gratification and living in the present. It did this in part through the alchemy of the American Dream. The formula was simple. Work hard during the week, and you can play hard on the weekend; work hard for years, and you can have the house and cars and family you dreamt of.

Through this productive fusion, America succeeded in becoming not only the world’s hardest-working country, but, just as famously, the land of letting loose and living in the moment—of Coca-Cola, keggers, and California. An American could live the Triple Package five days a week—but declare independence on Friday afternoon. No other society in history has ever had it more both ways.

Then, in the latter part of the twentieth century, something
happened. America turned against both insecurity and impulse control. With those Triple Package elements gone, what remained was superiority and the desire to live in the present—a formula not for drive, grit, and innovation, but for instant gratification.

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M
ANY TODAY CLAIM THAT
welfare has destroyed Americans’ work ethic. “Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans,” write Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall of the Heritage Foundation, its “result has been the
disintegration of the work ethic.” In Triple Package terms, this argument in essence asserts that welfare eliminated insecurity: freed from the chastening anxiety of starvation, poor Americans live happily on their unemployment checks, watching their flat-screen TVs instead of taking a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s.

And as a matter of historical fact, the modern American welfare state did
originate with the goal of eliminating insecurity. “
There is still today a frontier that remains unconquered,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1938 radio address: “the great, the nation-wide frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear.” In his famous “
Second Bill of Rights” speech in 1944, Roosevelt declared that the Constitution had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness”; what America needed was “the
freedom from insecurity.” Not for nothing was FDR’s groundbreaking welfare program called Social Security.

But for members of the comfortable classes to blame America’s decline on the lower classes is, at best, myopic. Lamenting the disintegration of the work ethic in our inner cities when in some Baltimore, Detroit, and New York neighborhoods, the
chances of graduating high school are under 50 percent, but gang leaders can earn as much $
130,000 a year selling drugs—and die reportedly
at
the average age of twenty—is missing pretty much
everything that’s important about the big picture. So is telling Central Appalachians to stop whining and
apply at McDonald’s, when changes in the economy essentially
wiped out all the sectors that previously provided livelihoods for entire towns.

America did lose its insecurity—and hence the Triple Package—in the late twentieth century, but the real culprit was success itself. Insecurity faded because of
prosperity
, some of it undeserved, but much of it hard-earned and reflecting the best of America—the fact that we have good institutions and great incentives for innovation. All the partisan finger-pointing—It’s welfare! It’s tax cuts! It started with Reagan! No, it’s totally Obama’s fault—detracts from the undisputed most important fact: the extraordinary, inexorable
rise in American income and standards of living, both at the top and on average, over the twentieth century, culminating after 1980 in one of the
greatest wealth explosions in the history of mankind. The 1980s were so loaded and overloaded that the
entire decade came to be symbolized by Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
and Oliver Stone’s
Wall Street
. And the
1990s were astronomically even richer than the decade before.

With the dot-com boom and the growth of venture capitalism, twentysomethings barely out of college became
multimillionaires overnight. Between 1995 and 2000, the
stock market tripled, and by 2000, Silicon Valley was producing up to
sixty-four new millionaires per day.
Corporate compensation soared, but
few complained, because employment was strong and shareholder profits were soaring too. People with no special skills or insight suddenly believed they were stock-picking geniuses because everything they bought turned to gold. Across the country,
family net worth climbed; by 2007, it was over $120,000—a record high. Homes were worth twice as much as people paid for them only a few years earlier.

In some ways, perceptions of how flush Americans were in those boom years outran the reality. In fact,
the top 1 percent of U.S. earners reaped the lion’s share of the new wealth. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the
vast majority of Americans (all the way down to the eightieth percentile) enjoyed substantial income growth as well, and widely available credit increased ordinary Americans’ spending power beyond their actual income—sometimes well beyond it. At the same time, it’s easy to forget that today’s focus on inequality and skepticism about whether Wall Street riches are good for Main Street were not prevalent in America in the decades before 2008.
As economist Robert Shiller observes, “In the boom years of the 1990s, overt resentment by the general public of their own country’s corporations was at a historic low. Businessmen were lionized.”

Meanwhile,
globalization seemed to herald even more money for Americans; it was practically synonymous with the spread of Starbucks, Disney, Coca-Cola, Nike, and the Gap. On top of all this, everyone seemed to revere America. With the collapse of Communism, governments from countries all over the world were suddenly begging U.S. “advisers” (some of whom were still
law students at Georgetown) to help them implement U.S.-style constitutions and foreign-investment laws. Francis Fukuyama wrote
The End of History
, positing that Western liberal democracy—with America as Exhibit A—represented the “
end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.” In the nineties, more than thirty-five countries, including Tanzania and Swaziland,
started U.S.-style stock exchanges. The world, it seemed, wanted to be American. The United States was the sole superpower left standing—a “
hyperpower,” dominant economically, militarily, and culturally, master of a suddenly unipolar universe.

All this swelled Americans’ superiority complex, but had the opposite effect on their insecurity. For the first time, the United States
had no serious rival or enemy. America had nothing more to prove to the world; on the contrary, the world was scrambling to catch up to America.

Meanwhile, there were other forces—more personal, more psychological—attacking insecurity in America as well.

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“
I
CANNOT THINK
of a single psychological problem—from anxiety and depression, to underachievement at school or at work . . . to spouse battering or child molestation . . . —that is not traceable to the problem of low self-esteem,” wrote psychotherapist, Ayn Rand disciple, and father of the American self-esteem movement Nathaniel Branden. It’s an extraordinary fact about Branden’s extraordinary claim that it will strike many American readers as not implausible—as at least arguable. Such has been the astonishing triumph of self-esteem thinking in the United States.

Branden’s 1969
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
became
a bestseller. By the 1980s, educators had seized on his ideas, broadening them still further. Not only were all
psychological
problems caused by a lack of self-esteem; “
virtually every
social
problem can be traced to people’s lack of self-love,” said the reformers. “[
M]any, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society.”

Schools all over the United States made it their mission to instill self-esteem in their charges. Parents embraced the same goal. “In the 1990s,” writes psychologist Carol Dweck, “parents and teachers . . . decided that
self-esteem was the most important thing in the world—that if a child had self-esteem, everything else would follow.”

Psychologists had talked about self-esteem before. William James
saw its importance in an interesting discussion in 1890. But for James,
accomplishment remained central to self-esteem. In the new movement, the causality was reversed: self-esteem was declared necessary to accomplishment. That means self-esteem has to
precede
achievement. Kids have to be given self-esteem before they’ve achieved anything.

In other words, the self-esteem movement
severed self-esteem from esteem-worthy conduct. If self-esteem is the cure for doing poorly and acting badly, then people must be taught to
feel good about themselves—to like themselves, to accept themselves—no matter what they have or haven’t done.

The self-esteem movement made Americans feel
much more satisfied with themselves, but it didn’t cure their psychological, academic, or social problems. In fact, its claims have proved jarringly false.
*
But it did go a long way toward destroying the Triple Package in everyone who embraced it—and their children.

The self-esteem movement promotes the exact opposite of Triple Package insecurity. No one should feel that they’re not good enough or that they have to “prove themselves” by doing better; self-acceptance
is the first rule of a successful life. This has become the message of an explosion of self-help books, of wildly popular self-improvement “seminars,” and of much psychotherapy as well (a “
primary task of psychotherapy is to help strengthen self-esteem,” wrote Branden in 1969). Above all, children must never feel they failed at something or even came in second. Hence the proverbial trophies-for-everyone, the parents who ask teachers not to use red pens because it’s “upsetting to kids when they see
so much red on the page,” the ubiquitous “Great job!” and “You’re amazing!”

At the same time,
the self-esteem movement erodes impulse control. “
People with incredibly positive views of themselves,” researchers have found, are more willing to “do stupid or destructive things” and more likely to satisfy their own desires even when the “costs are borne by others.” Children brought up in self-esteem-centered schools and families are
not taught to endure hardship or to persevere in the face of failure. They’re sheltered from disappointment and rejection by devoted, exhausted parents who
monitor their every move, desperate to make their kids feel “special.” They’re encouraged to believe that they have a right to have and do everything they want when they want it—and tend to be frustrated when they can’t.

The erosion of impulse control in America extends far beyond child rearing. It has affected every domain of life. The 1960s—the ultimate
anti-inhibition, live-in-the-moment decade—probably played a role. But more important, once again, was rising affluence. Comfortable people have no pressing, life-threatening reason to exercise discipline and restraint. It’s hard to live like you’re in the Depression when you grow up in the suburbs with two SUVs. The result—when vanishing impulse control combines with diminishing insecurity and excess disposable income—is a society increasingly defined by instant gratification.

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W
E’RE
HARDLY THE FIRST
to call attention to immediate gratification as a corrosive force in America today, but the facts remain bracing.