American Nightmare

The American dream is dead, people tell pollsters: “A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.”

And “nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys.”

Interestingly, though inflation has abated from its recent highs in 2022, people’s sense that it’s affecting their bottom line has not eased: “The share saying rising prices were causing them major financial strains, at 28% of all respondents, was identical to a Journal-NORC poll in March 2023, when inflation was at 5%, higher than the 2.7% of today. The share saying inflation caused them minor strains, at 32%, was also unchanged.”

Sometimes, people’s self-assessments of what they can and cannot do are delusional: the Journal quotes a 40-year-old married father of one (combined household income: $350,000) who says their four-bedroom townhome is too small for them to be able to grow their family. It’s possible, not to overly extrapolate, that Americans are increasingly pessimistic, with unreasonable expectations: For example, mortgage rates might not return to the historically low levels seen in 2020 and 2021, so some people may be anchored by that, believing those rates to be possible again. But tariffs and labor market uncertainty, rising rents and insurance prices, lingering financial hits from the era of horrible inflation, and reduced savings rates over time also have created really tough headwinds for so many people.

Regardless, the belief that upward mobility is no longer within reach has already created more favorable conditions for the growth of socialism and populism, so the reality of it in some ways matters less than the perception.

“Manhattan Project” for babies: “The group behind Project 2025 wants a ‘Manhattan Project’ for more babies,” reads a Washington Post headline from yesterday, referencing the Heritage Foundation (forevermore known as “the group behind Project 2025,” apparently, because that’s the maximally sensationalist framing).

“The conservative group behind the Project 2025 governing playbook for President Donald Trump’s second term is set to propose sweeping revisions to U.S. economic policy meant to encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children,” reports the Post. “It hopes to steer funding for child care away from programs like Head Start and toward individual families—specifically to encourage parents to stay home and rear children. And the group wants Trump to issue executive orders requiring all proposed policies and regulations to ‘measure their positive or negative impacts on marriage and family’—then overhaul or end programs that score poorly.”

All of this is The Washington Post‘s attempt to report on the executive summary of a forthcoming paper from the conservative think tank on “restor[ing] the American family.” We don’t have much detail on what specifically is being proposed, and there are some planks to which libertarians will surely object (the think tank’s opposition to “extraordinary technical solutions,” including egg freezing, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and genetic screening,  as well as “custom lab-created babies on demand”). But mostly, Heritage identifies a clear problem—historically low birth and marriage rates—and offers a list of possible solutions, like changes to the tax code and the way welfare is structured, that could alleviate burdens on families. No need for all that handwringing.

Scenes from New York: Apologies for the Roundup disruption; I moved from Queens (the best borough) back to Brooklyn (ughhhhh) and have been attempting to get a household up and running while slightly too pregnant to function.

• Mayoral race watch:

Zohran loves the idea of being able to run on “Trump likes him,” insofar as it relieves him of the burden of defending insane ideas (and convincing gullible New Yorkers that he’s abandoned some of them). https://t.co/pOdpeAFh0u

— Rafael A. Mangual (@Rafa_Mangual) September 3, 2025

• I think this Politico feature is supposed to be a hit piece, but it makes me like Curtis Sliwa—and his absurd Sliwonics—even more.
• “Florida will end all state vaccine mandates, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday,” reports Axios. “The state already leads the southeast in non-medical vaccine exemptions among kindergartners, and the rollback could mean fewer school children are inoculated against deadly viruses like measles and polio. Ladapo, a well-known vaccine critic, announced his plans to end the practice via an administrative rule at a news conference in Hillsborough County, comparing vaccine mandates to ‘slavery.’” Some mandates are written into state law, though, and must be changed by legislators, not just the Department of Health.
• Inside China’s most recent military parade showcasing new weapons technology.
• Europe bans gel nail polish, which makes me feel very Luanne Platter.

Luanne the libertarian? pic.twitter.com/AXZ4p5utIT

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) May 20, 2021

• “The ‘epidemic of loneliness’ can be understood as being caused by standards increasing faster than the actual capabilities of our search technologies. The following is a common observation about the problems associated with dating apps: These apps give people, and especially women, the illusion that they have far more options than they actually have,” theorizes Vlad Tarko at EconLib. “These days, dating apps can feel like an avalanche of options and overtures, much of which is garbage, but people also receive a fair number of legitimate messages. All this can create the impression of an abundance of potential partners. This perceived, but partially illusory, abundance causes many partner seekers to raise their standards to unrealistic levels. This leads to a failure to actually find someone in a reasonable period of time, and to a disillusion with the existing search technologies themselves. When standards outpace search, the lost trust in the existing search technologies understandably leads to a sense of despair and the belief that loneliness is inescapable.” (I disagree with his believe that traditional community is overrated, but think his diagnosis of the search/standards problem is pretty good.)
• This fills me with rage:

It is galling and shocking the number of people on the left who are so cavalier about violence against some religious people.
The assassination plot on Alito, etc, led to MSM anchors saying “quit whining that your rulings had consequences.”
The trans murders at a Tennessee… https://t.co/O50z2Ya1Jl

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) September 3, 2025

• lol

There are pre-Sumerian religions less dead than “defund the police” https://t.co/xuHcB8ODVW

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) September 3, 2025

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