Opinion | How We’ve Lost Our Moorings as a Society

At every level of responsibility, Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible.

Alienation has become a plague: Many Americans no longer believe in America. That’s largely because, I argue here, they no longer have the freedom to take responsibility in their daily choices. Persistent failures feed the frustration and seed a culture of distrust. Instead of focusing on how to make things work, Americans obsess about what might g

A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these t

Americans didn’t abandon our belief in individual responsibility. It was taken away from us by a post 1960s legal framework that, with the best of intentions, made people squirm through the eye of a legal needle before taking responsibility.

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o