The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

What has happened to American civilization?  Shared moral values used to define the uniqueness of America (e.g., virtue, a sense of community and compassion). Columnist David Brooks provides a framework for understanding the enormous shift away from these shared values that has occurred within America over the last 50 years or so:  “Way back in 1966, Philip Rieff wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic, arguing that shared moral frameworks were being discarded and replaced by therapeutic values. The highest good is not some sacred ideal, but rather, personal well-being and psychological adjustment. Then in 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism, which built on Rieff and argued that therapeutic values and consumer capitalism combined to produce narcissistic individuals—self-absorbed, fragile and desperate for recognition.  In such a culture people are naturally going to define love as the feeling they get when somebody satisfies their craving for positive and tender attention, not as something they selflessly give to another . . . The ethos of self-effacement (I’m no better than anybody else and nobody is better than I am) has been replaced by the ethos of self-display. Look at Instagram, TikTok or the occupant of the White House if you doubt me.”

Brooks concludes:  “I wonder if the general misery and disconnection all around is partly a product of the gradual buildup of the culture of the therapeutic, the narcissistic, the performative. When the culture encourages people to idolize the needs of the self—to focus on self-actualization, self-esteem, self-display—that doesn’t produce strong people but needy, touchy and insecure ones. A narcissist has trouble loving because a narcissist can’t really see another person. The only reality he perceives is the effect other people are having on him.  When I look at the self-help best sellers of our day, they are not generally about how to pour out service; they are more often about how to protect yourself from other people. The general theme is, don’t let other people get you down. As I write, a book called The Let Them Theory is the No. 1 seller on Amazon, a prime example of the genre. The core idea is that you need to release your impulse to manage and improve others and focus on YOU—your own well-being.”

Following Brooks’s reflections, I would argue that the surge of populism worldwide reflects the therapeutic values Rieff and Lasch observed in America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Let’s examine two developments:

First is the phenomenon of mass migration.  Columnist Bret Stephens takes us back:  “It’s been 10 years since Angela Merkel, as German chancellor, memorably declared “Wir schaffen das”—“We can do this”—in the face of the mass migration crisis sweeping Europe. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported, ‘For the first time, populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in the U.K., France and Germany.’ Similar parties are already in power or in government in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, to say nothing of the United States.”  Why?  Stephens traces the fragmentation of democratic societies over the last two decades.  [He uses the term liberalism in the historical sense as a philosophy centered on the rights of the individual, liberty and consent of the governed]:

• Preliberal democracy accepts the practice of regular elections but rejects most of the core values of liberalism: free speech and moral tolerance, civil liberties and the rights of the accused, the rule of law and independence of courts, the equality of women and so on. Turkey under the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan typifies this type of democracy.
• Postliberal democracy, by contrast, embraces the values of liberalism but tries to insulate itself from the will of the people. The European Union, with its vast architecture of transnational legislation, is one example of postliberalism; international courts, issuing rulings where they have no jurisdiction, are another; global environmental accords, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement are a third.
• “Standing between these two models is old-fashioned liberal democracy. Its task is to manage the tension, or temper the opposition, between competing imperatives: to accept majority will and protect individual right, to defend a nation’s sovereignty while maintaining a spirit of openness, to preserve its foundational principles while adapting to change. If the frustration of liberal democracy is that it tends to proceed in half-steps, its virtue is that it advances on more secure footing.”

Mass migration developments were one cause of this fragmentation, Stephens argues:  “Merkel never sought the approval of German voters to relax the country’s immigration laws and take in nearly a million people over the space of a year. Americans didn’t elect President Joe Biden on any promise to let in millions of migrants over the southern border. Post-Brexit Britons never thought they’d bring in an astounding 4.5 million immigrants to a country of just 69 million between 2021 and 2024—under Tory leaders, no less.”

No wonder that the reaction to years of postliberal governance has been a broad turn to its preliberal opposite: “. . . all of them have risen on the same core complaint: that postliberal governments used obscure legal mechanisms or simply ignored the law to attempt a social transformation without society’s explicit consent. In America, it’s called replacement theory. Liberals and progressives typically dismiss replacement theory as antisemitic, racist demagoguery . . . But maybe some measure of understanding ought to be extended to ordinary voters who merely wonder why they should be made to feel like unwelcome outsiders in parts of their own country or asked to pay a share of their taxes for the benefit of newcomers they never agreed to welcome in the first place or extend tolerance to those who don’t always show tolerance in return or be told to shut their mouths over some of the more shocking instances of migrant criminality.  What most of these voters are feeling isn’t racism. It’s indignation at having their normal and appropriate political concerns dismissed as racism. And as long as politicians and pundits of the traditional political establishment treat them as racists, the far right is going to continue to rise and flourish.”

Second is the lingering impact of Covid-19.  Recently, The Economist put Covid in historic perspective:  “Pandemics do not just sicken and kill. They have political and economic effects, too. After the Black Death wiped out a third of the people in Europe, fake news proliferated: rumors that the plague was caused by Jews poisoning the wells led to pogroms. Wages soared (because there were too few laborers) and rents collapsed (because so many homes were empty). Rulers tried brute force to block change, banning farm workers from leaving their lord’s land to go and work for another who paid better. But this provoked uprisings, such as the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381, an impulse that ultimately led to the end of serfdom in most of Europe.  Covid-19 was less deadly . . .  [But] it fed a global surge in inflation, a breakdown of trust in experts and an aggravation of political polarization.”

What were a few of the unintended consequences of the Covid lockdown?

• Leaders insisted they were “following the science,” meaning the advice of public-health experts. But such experts tend to focus on minimizing the harms caused by disease. They are not experts on the trade-offs between covid deaths and economic losses, children missing school or locked-down populations becoming lonely and depressed.

• Rich-country governments borrowed huge sums to pay furloughed workers or send out cheques. Direct federal spending on covid relief in America was $5trn, equivalent to a quarter of GDP in 2020. The spending binge exacerbated a global surge in inflation, which infuriated voters and eventually spurred many to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. Poor countries fared even worse. As lockdowns crushed economic activity, global poverty rose for the first time in a generation.
• Sweden never mandated masks or staying at home and kept most schools open. To protect the old, Swedes were advised not to visit nursing homes. The New York Times called Sweden a “pariah.” Yet its excess-death rate after a year of covid was one of the lowest in Europe. In America states that locked down hard fared no better on this score than those that did not.
• Public opinion was guided less by evidence than by partisanship, especially in America. Democrats were more likely to believe in lockdowns and vaccines; Republicans in neither. In Democratic states “people routinely cycled and jogged outside with masks on,” the authors observe. Schools in those states stayed closed far longer than those in Republican ones, causing students to fall behind and reducing their future earnings potential.
• The pandemic stress-tested institutions everywhere. Governments enacted “the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history,” and suppressed speech that opposed it. America’s 50 states, all confronting the same problem in different ways, should have been the “laboratories of democracy”, learning from each other. But they were not. Instead, red and blue politicians and voters retreated into cocoons of self-righteous certainty.
• In their book In Covid’s Wake, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo conclude that the world needed “a more honest politics of crisis policymaking . . . a greater willingness to acknowledge [doubt], and recognition of the reasonableness of people with varying views”. Instead, the pandemic bred partisan rancor, intolerance and bad policies, vigorously applied. Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s uniquely relaxed covid policy, put it best. Looking at how other countries were responding, he said: “The world has gone mad.”

To utilize the categories of Bret Stephens, Covid-19 has been another reason for the shift from a postliberal democracy, which insulated itself from the will of the people, to a preliberal democracy, which rejects the core values of historical liberalism.

See Bret Stephens in the New York Times (2 September 2025); David Brooks in the New York Times (29 August 2025); and The Economist (23 August 2025), pp. 67-68.