Americans don’t really talk about decadence.
To the extent that the term has figured in conversation over the last few decades here, decadence has been invoked not to describe life in the US, but in Western Europe. It’s the “great” states on the continent — Germany, France, and the UK — that American pundits periodically describe as decaying, phasing into civilizational twilight, their greatness drifting toward a nostalgic memory or residual formation. Giagnoses for that slide into decadence differ depending on the politics of the speaker. Those on the right stress the corrosive effect of experiments with multicultural pluralism — naïve programs that eroded the workable consensus of unipolar tradition. Americans of this stripe might find their ideological mascot in the great reactionary novelist Michel Houellebecq. Fiscal conservatives might blame the unions, whose power spawned a culture of entitlement. Leftists in their turn emphasize the role of neoliberalism in counseling divestiture from social safety nets — a fraying of mutual care that left a vacuum filled by the false solution of nativist populism. Their artistic avatars might be the films of Ken Loach or the novels of Édouard Louis. Whatever their politics, though, arguments of European decadence abound.
But it wasn’t until the last decade or so — and really the last half decade — that mainstream cases have been made about a commensurate American decadence. Often these critiques have come from the American right. For the last five years Ross Douthat has articulated an especially salient version of one such position. He sees America as mired in a state of malaise and repetition masked by superficial progress. Douthat traces the roots of this “sustainable decadence” back to the 1970s, when grand national ambitions (e.g., the Apollo mission) receded. But it’s in the 1990s, he argues, that we accelerated into full decadence. And he’s definitely right that a change set us on a new, fast course.
Douthat is not alone in subscribing to this diagnosis — even if he is the only one to see decadence as that course’s essential effect. Patrick Deneen, Adrien Vermeule, and the editors of online journals like Compact also argue that that period — let’s say from the first Bush through Obama — marked a radical, pernicious shift in American history. Collectively, these critics have adapted 21st century ideas originally posited by Christopher Lasch who insisted, for instance, that the various vices of the our century were predetermined by the spiritual and cultural vacuum of the 90s — by the era’s lack of normative moral vision, its laissez faire relativism. For these writers, the rise of Trumpism, Brexit, Putinism, and Orbanism all trace back to this cultural and spiritual vacuum. What’s more, for some of these critics more than others, these Euro-American trends aren’t even necessarily deleterious. Indeed, they are a purifying fever, a vaccine of sorts.
These right-wing critiques don’t deviate substantially from those of certain left wing pontificators who have, especially since Trump’s first victory in 2016, become equally contemptuous of a decadence-cocktail blend of liberalism, cosmopolitanism, globalism, and secularism. They hector that neoliberal globalism was the progenitor of American decadence. Clintonian deregulation, they argue, carried through to Obama, hollowed out the Democratic Party, and led directly to the financial crisis, and maybe even to the rise of Trump-style populist nationalism. The left-of-center, they say, fell asleep at the switch sometime during the Clinton-Blair regnum, and left a political vacuum among the working classes that was eventually filled by Trump. Sometimes, oddly, this leftism flickers into pro-religiosity. For example, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has argued that secular relativism’s soullessness created an appetite eventually satiated by nativism, nationalism, and authoritarianism.
Whether one depicts it as a passive slackening or an induced indifference, this complacency is undeniably real. It is a culture (or, perhaps, tone) justifiably associated with the triumphal end-of-history attitude articulated in the post-Cold War writings of Francis Fukuyama. Writing at the dawn of the 1990s, he prophesied that the fall of the Soviet Union would usher in a period of tranquility, and, commensurately, the gradual, inevitable spread of free markets and liberalism. For a while, it kind of happened, too. Call it the End of History, the Pax Americana, or something else, the high point of this era plummeted to conclusion on 9/11, when the fantastical promise of American style liberal capitalism was revealed as, well, a fantasy.
But at this late hour, I’d like to make the case for decadence. I believe it can offer, in place of an ideological program, a helpful and healthy tonic for public culture. I don’t argue with the aforementioned frameworks’ characterizations of decadence. Rather, I posit that, all together, decadence of the 90s is an ideal, and one uniquely healing for our collective ailment.
I’ll begin with the emptiness and conservatism of the 90s, which, combined, I call negative conservatism.
By “conservative,” I do not refer to any specific policy priorities (having to do with tax, war, race, etc). I use the term in its more abstract sense to mean that 90s-style decadence does (or did, at any rate) posit a normative — that is, nonrelative — notion of the good, the valuable, the cool. The term that best encapsulated this notion of value was “sophistication.” It was a public church, and, as counterintuitive as it might seem, a common good. Not everyone had it, and certainly some cranks opposed it on principle. But in a way that would be hard to imagine in a period characterized by hyper-fragmentation and populism, it did command shockingly wide assent. It was evident in mainstream culture, in the popularity of network sitcoms like Frasier or movies like American Beauty. While the lyrical aestheticism and ennui of those earlier texts aren’t entirely gone (this year’s Best Picture, Anora, mines a similar vein, as did Power of the Dog, Tar, etc.), they are inarguably no longer our lingua franca, cinematically and televisually speaking. Likewise, there are still in 2025 popular “literary” novels or prestige TV shows that explicitly pine for a bygone era of mainstream sophisticated holism. I’m thinking here of Sally Rooney’s fiction, whose sales are nonetheless dwarfed by young adult fiction, or the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That, whose ongoing reviews from across the ideological spectrum would seem to suggest…the absence of an audience. Or think too, in music, of the widespread audience for albums like Radiohead’s Kid A or Bjork’s Vespertime (both from the last year of the 90s: 2001) — records whose most impressive attribute from this vantage point is that works so aloof and unwelcoming found such mass public audience.
In 1997, the literary theorist Joseph Litvak published a book titled Strange Gourmets about how sophistication was under assault in the 90s. But in retrospect, what’s most telling is that his book had an audience which cared about sophistication (as an imperiled virtue). It’s hard to imagine such a book getting published today, if only because partisans of the left and the right both would consider defenses of sophistication elitist and therefore, well, cringe.
What I call sophistication is similar to what the novelist Bret Easton Ellis has termed Empire — an era, yes, but also a vibe, dominated by old-school prestige, carefully maintained public personas, and a belief in the virtue (the inevitability, really) of aesthetic and intellectual discrimination, a framework in which collective taste-making was uncontested: in other words, and in the best way, a monoculture. Its protagonists ran from Camile Paglia and Susan Sontag to Dave Letterman and Christopher Hitchens, from Noam Chomsky and Bill Hicks to Frank Gehry and Chuck Close.
As political theorists and psychoanalysts agree, the human mind might well be hard wired to believe in something, to valorize or heroize some decisive and positively-articulated system of value. Examples of such arguments abound: Rousseau on “civil religion”; Hegel on the “ethical state”; Ernst Renan on the spiritual idea of the nation. I’m most partial to Leo Strauss’s conception of the thirst for “noble lies”— an idea developed after him by fellow Chicago School baddie Allan Bloom. If these thinkers are right, then the advantage of sophistication as a placeholder for such a noble lie is that it is at once concrete, coherent, and commanding enough to satisfy that need and still so self-defeatingly ambiguous as to keep that system of belief from metastasizing into a hard cultural authoritarianism.
This is what I mean when I say that, compared to conservative value-systems, sophistication is notably empty. It provides a system of belief whose great and good secret is that it doesn’t even believe in itself. It therefore has encoded within its conceptual DNA a kind of auto-immunity — an antidote to its own power.
Writers like David Foster Wallace famously viewed this system of sophistication as cynical and ironic. Indeed, though he’s not recognizably a figure of left or right, Wallace, too, might be counted among the figures who were critical of Empire and decadence from within the paradigm of Empire and decadence. Put off by the explicit curmudgeonliness of figures like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan (anti-decadent forerunners of Douthat, Deneen, and Vermeule), Wallace’s proselytizing for sincerity as a new gospel of positive belief was actually not too different from them. DFW preached a non-relativistic core of value around which to orient life, relationships, and art. But in retrospect, sophistication was less cynical than it was ironic or glib — terms that I think might also be owed a reputational glow up. Sophistication — at once conservative and empty, glib and ironic — provides a placeholder for belief.
The absurdism of the modernist era was captured in one line within a single work — Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I must go on.” The negative conservatism of the Empire, of decadence, by contrast was captured forty years later in a dialectic between two exclamations of cinematic negative faith. First, Fox Mulder in The X Files: “I want to believe” (1993), then, five years later, The Big Lebowski nihilists: “we believe in nothing” (1998). I want to believe: the need for nobility. We believe in nothing: the lie of that nobility. This was a workable paradox. And we’ve lost it.
But what exactly have we lost post-Empire? Critics like Douthat might say we are poised to burn off a flabby cultural (even, perhaps, civilizational) ennui. I’d put it differently. In losing decadence, we lose grace, ease, and gentility. Maybe even taste.
Consider as a case study one of the subjects with which the anti-decadencers are most consistently obsessed: the decline of the US — and more broadly Western — birth rate. The obsession with this decline rages amongst a broad, curious coalition: the Laschians (like Douthat), the techno-futurists (like Elon Musk), and the religious millennial thinkers (from Elizabeth Breuning to Rachel Cohen and Anastasia Berg). So it’s not a MAGA concern exactly. (Writers like Breuning, Cohen, and Berg are explicitly leftist in orientation.) Writers in this big tent typically interpret the falling American birthrate as evidence of a pernicious boredom, a lack of interest in the future.Though “decadence” may not be a term used outright in these discourses (save Douthat’s contributions), it unquestionably underlies all these analyses. And, as I say, all these critics agree that a synthesis of liberalism, deregulatory capitalism, cosmopolitanism, globalism, and secularism that became hegemonic during the Pax Americana played a decisive role in slackening the American will, spirit, or civilization — perhaps even blunting its Dawkinsean will to reproduce. That blend, they feel, neutered America.
Those counseling a birth boom (sometimes euphemized as “pro-family policy”) — whether from the right (Douthat), left (Breuning, Cohen, Berg), or…somewhere else (Musk) — all overlap with the thought of the twentieth century German polymath Oswald Spengler. In his monumental two-volume tome Decline of the West (1918 and 1922), Spengler depicted the West as an organism bent on suicide, and therefore in dire need of rejuvenation. Influenced by Nietzsche and in rhythm with Freud’s notion of the death drive, Spengler insisted on the imperative to act and change, to reverse and grow. Generation! In this way, Spengler anticipates all the critiques of decadence — implicit or explicit — to which we are currently being forced to listen. To be sure, few if any of today’s critics of decadence cite Spengler directly. This may either be because they’re unfamiliar with him, or because of his eventual embrace by the NSDP (for those who, uh, care about such things).
Spengler’s thought informs nearly all critiques of decadence and Empire — I offer the birthrate panic as one of the clearest examples of his influence. I’m not arguing that the birth-panicers are wrong merely by association. When it comes to birthrates it is undeniable that dire social consequences would be incurred by a demographic cliff: shortages of young caretakers for the old, exhaustion of Social Security, and in turn a widening intergenerational antagonism. So, these critics can be right on the merits but wrong about proposed solutions. Or, to invoke yet another Lebowski-ism: “you’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.” In decadence, there is a sumptuous familiarity, a hypnotic repetition. This, too, is a kind of old conservatism of the Burkean or Dickensian sort — one whose unchanging order relieves the burdens of choice and change, of the sweaty fatigue of revolutions large and small. Negatively conservative, then, decadence was, above all, fun, easy, and abiding. It was thrillingly boring.
Indeed, as mentioned, certain aspects of American culture in 2025 announce an extant desire — inchoate surely, incoherent maybe — for the revival I’m advocating. The present, in other words, knows it wants the old decadence.
Why else would 90s nostalgia be such big business now. Analyses of its origins and drivers are in no short supply, even if they tend to offer different diagnoses of its draw depending on the generation of the nostalgizer. For Millennials, 90s yearning is symptomatic of desire to go back in time to hazy memories of childhood or (for elder Millennials) early adolescence. The predecessor for this fantasy structure might be the obsession with the 1970s by Gen Xers who were born in the late-60s or early 70s and who came into early adulthood in the 90s. Think, for instance, of 1994’s Dazed and Confused or That 70s Show. For Zoomers, the era represents a period just beyond the power of memory, an idealized zone — much like the 50s for older Gen Xers in the 1980s. In a recent piece for The Guardian Esther Adley argues that the Bridget Jones resurgence speaks to a Zoomer hope for a “simpler time” before the relentless TikTok treadmill, or ghosting, or deepfakes, or…whatever.
Some believe that the 90s were uniquely nostalgia-inducing. That is to say, the decade invites inordinate fascination, more so than other decades. They were, afterall, the era before the mass spread of terrorism, school shooting, political hyperpolarization, and crushing student debt. Or, as Anne Helen Peterson notes in Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (2020), there was: no Financial Crisis, no Covid, and no reflexive shudder at the sight of red baseball caps. No PizzaGate, no Q Anon, no revenge porn.
And so here we are. Today’s TikTok influencers scrape the 90s for aesthetic signifiers though the culture that generated and made sense of those markers has been disowned and destroyed. Is it possible that this nostalgia is itself an expression of distaste for the 2020s? Is some cross-section of contemporary America sick of the decadence-cides, of religion or faith, on the one hand, and polarizing ideologies on the other?
I’m not under the impression that we can bring back Pax Americana style decadence in full; (the) Empire will not strike back, exactly — and that is for the best. If the intervening quarter century has led us into fragmentation, radicalism, and discontent, it has also made some necessary social and political advances. But that decade can help reorient us. It can offer a check on the perpetual febrility. Might we, some day, learn to chill?