Burn It Down: What the Polls Say Young Americans Really Want should be on the shelf of every political figure and public-sphere thinker in America. (Just, please, read it first, before putting it on the shelf.) Barris and Lisec provide precisely what the subtitle promises. They provide, too, a sharp-eyed, considered analysis of what those wants mean for the upcoming century. They ask which direction America will go, arguing that, really, we only have two (and they’re nearly right).

Why Read the Book?

I recommend you go buy and read Barris’s book if you have any serious interest in modern American politics. You may not agree with him; you may find some of his conclusions unconvincing. But he has laid his finger on a major problem and its two most likely outcomes. More, he’s put in the work to provide the data, current and historical, to ground solid, effective analysis.

This article will summarize several of Barris’s biggest points. I’ve no compunction in doing so, because Barris has laid out the book’s premise in various public statements over the past few years. I did not go into this book expecting to discover a entirely new hypothesis. I went into this book, as you should, to get that data and historical context for the barebones ideas, alongside a much more complete examination of the ideas here touched on.

For all I can summarize, a summary always loses detail and foundation, at least when the summarized is more than a blowhard (and Barris is no blowhard). So go read the book itself. Then, return to judge whether this article, as much response as review, gets the matter right.

The Thesis

Barris and Lisec present a choice between two political futures. Neither of these is a staid or steady thing. The hope for such adherence to the Moderate and the Centrist receives its coup de gras in the first chapters of the book, as the authors lay out the facts on America’s younger demographics, using statistics as backbone and anecdote as explication.

In short, they demonstrate, America’s younger half (maybe less than half new; far more than half soon enough), America’s younger half simply does not see a world which will let them prosper.

No longer do ‘up by your own bootstraps’ messages resonate. See, that works very well when the sky above is clear, when the thunderstorms are visible and intermittent, when hard work really does tend to get you a home and a family and tolerable financial security, with something for the kids when you pop your clogs. But the people getting their start nowadays (and, in some ways, I am one of them) are looking up at a sky entirely black, at something which in many places is not so much a sky as a ceiling. In such circumstances, radical solutions become attractive.

The first, the easiest, and the most likely (in Barris’s mind and my own) is what Barris calls “Ledger” politics. In this politic, people coalesce around the promise of recompense, justice turned too easily into vengeance, resentiment become ressentiment. The central hope is ‘creative destruction,’ the premise of much left-wing thought: by burning away the dead weight and the dead wood, we achieve renewal. In such a system, unity is achieved by identifying an outgroup, a ‘scapegoat’ in Girard’s terminology, and if this foe is ever exterminated or made an insufficient threat, new foe must be found. This is the path of communism, socialism, and its ilk.

The alternative, Barris’s preferred choice and the better of the two by far, is Ladder politics. Here, rather than promising to destroy everything which stands in his people’s way, the leader promises to provide the people a way to rise. In ideal, he uses overwhelming force and a willingness to defy ‘the rules’ to clear away the system, not in hopes that destroying the system will work, but as clearing the path for the people to lift up themselves once given the opportunity, once given clear promise that their work will indeed work.

A Thought on Pessimism

The calculation made by the young is not insane, though it may often be black-pilled. The remonstrance made by some at least of the optimists has some truth in it. Neither is a complete reality, but both are part of the reality we live in.

The optimist is right to say that you can make a life for yourself. It’s not impossible. You can find a good spouse; you can raise kids; you can achieve financial ‘stability,’ if we ignore the macroeconomic tottering that makes all financial stability slightly nominal. But the optimist too often proffers this technical truth in lieu of recognizing the full reality.

The reality is that while you can do this, it’s all much, much harder than it used to be. Our society is morally bankrupt, and so it is technically, politically, and economically cracked to the core. That translates to a system basically hostile to families, hostile to people forming good enough lives for themselves that they can form families. You can climb the ladder, but you have to deal with the ladder and everybody on it trying to scrape you off. The odds of success, given the same investment of hard work and talent, are much, much smaller.

The optimist too often ignores this. Yes, you can get a home and a family and a web of healthy relationships. Yes, hard work and virtue is still the path to those blessings. Across all time, though, this has been true: you can do it all right and still get nowhere. In normal times, that’s an accepted risk. In a breaking society such as ours, that failure has become closer and closer to the norm, and people know it. They can see the chances of their virtue ‘working out’ are ever lesser. So… Why try?

As a Christian, I know that my work towards fruitfulness is never fruitless (Gen. 1:28; Matt. 6:19-20; Rom. 8:28). As a Christian with eyes on history, I know that men have managed, if with oft-great suffering and sometimes with worldly tragedy, to live through times as bad as these and worse. The Thirty Years’ War featured many estates worse than mine, as did the scouring of Judea in AD 70 and so many other parts of history. Men still lived functional lives in the midst of that, if rarely and painfully, by God’s grace. As a Christian with eyes on God, finally, I know that my ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are in His hands: “Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matt. 6:34).

All this does not excuse blindness or avoidance. We live in a society broken by our own sin, and that wreaks terrible havoc. The pessimist really does have good grounds for his pessimism. Simply thumping him on the back and kicking him in the rear is worse than useless. Indeed, it’s outright treacherous.

When Job was born down beneath sudden calamity, his friends came and mourned with him, wordless for seven days and seven nights (Job 2:13), a kindness oft forgotten in the rest of the book. Then, with a united message, Job’s three friends set to knifing him. In nine discourses, three to a man, they explain to Job that all this is his own fault. They refuse to ever offer a substantial answer or to identify specific ways in which Job can amend. Therefore Job says, “Miserable comforters are you all” (16:2). They are, in plain terms, traitors against their friend, and they must beg reconciliation with him in the end (42:7).

We are a people disenfranchised, in a sense far deeper than the vote, and disinherited, by waste and by theft. We perpetrate treachery against the downtrodden of our own people if we seek to paper over their problems with good advice that does not recognize its new circumstance. ‘Go work hard’ is good advice. But we need to actually consider what the young’uns face. What part is their own sin? Confront it; such is the path of love (Rom. 13:8-10). What part is the sin of others? Confront that too, fervently (2 Cor. 10:5; Ps. 149). Do not make the imperfection of the disinherited a grounds to ignore the squandering of their heritage before they can touch it, while they watch.

A Problem

Barris and Lisec correctly identify the grave danger that Ladder politics will go too far: “The same quality that makes a Ladder leader appealing can curdle” (pg. 191). As they continue, “Its promise is coherence. Its danger is overconcentration” (192). There, while I would understand the ideal and therefore the problem differently, they are essentially correct. The use of power to create opportunity can become a ‘bracing totalitarianism,’ a state which places demand above drug, in contrast to the current western trend, which cozies demand within drug.

(Certain aspects of the current Chinese regime remind me of this.)

The danger which the book misses, however, is in the Ladder vision itself, as laid out by the book, and within the Para-Father. The problem is that their ‘Para-Father’ is sinful in his design, and sin is death to a society.

The fundamental premise of leadership which he expresses is sound. If one man in modern western politics lives out Ladder thought (so far), it’s Rupert Lowe, over in Britain, and I have immense respect for him. The problem with Barris’s vision is that he expands it farther than it ought to expand, hands that father-figure more power than is righteous for him to wield.

In part, I must caveat, Barris’s statements are realpolitik assessments, aimed at understanding what such a figure would be, if he emerged in America, rather than what he ought to be. However, I do believe Barris regards these recommendations as, if not ideal, at least good and in some cases excellent. Regardless, it behooves us to maintain moral perspective.

The central problem of his ‘Para-Father’ is a tacit acceptance of statism. The state is viewed not as a tool of strictly limited authority but as an instrument to be turned to any end which man deems good. The Ladder vision therefore sees little wrong in expanding the state to engulf the church and education (pg. 215). (Nevermind that state religion has historically always been the quickest to corrupt (Roman Catholicism; Anglicanism; German Lutheranism; etc), and state education has never failed to become a method of totalitarianism, being at its core a method of destroying the family.) Similarly, it sees little wrong in restrained expansionism, sphere-of-power empire, despite the moral problems of stealing another people’s patrimony by force of arms, by right of strength, or the historical question of exactly how beneficial empire is in the long run to the heartland of that empire.

Barris is quite right to identify leadership with fatherhood. Fatherhood is leadership (Deut. 6). But the king- the civil governor- is not a father, and we cannot make the analogy of paternity stretch farther than the truth. That was the foundation found for the Divine Right of Kings, repudiated by our forefathers both as tyranny and as producing tyranny. The king’s duty is not to raise the citizenry as children; they are not children, and to do so infantilizes, in direct conflict with the premise of Ladder politics. No, the king must lead as a king, fulfilling his kingly duty to the citizens- to guard against the sword by bringing the sword against those who abuse it (Gen. 9:5-6). He is a father, in a sense, but he is a father to grown children.

The paternalistic doctrine finds strength in Barris’s work from that fatal plea of ‘necessity.’ Whether Pitt the Younger or Spencer Roane, many have recognized the abject danger which is an appeal to expediency, that “Necessity is the plea of tyrants.” If a rule may be broken in an emergency, it is soon discovered that emergencies are very common indeed (see: modern Canada and modern politics in general). Need can justify a course of action only after we know that the course is permissible in God’s eyes, else all is permissible. Necessity as a standard makes law relative to man’s perception of the circumstances. Ultimately, “… whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10).

Barris’s recommendation, while far from pervaded by this appeal to necessity, is tainted by it. While the fear of being a ‘noble loser’ is potent and we ought to do good even when we cannot get perfection (Is. 64:6; Mic. 6:8), we must never justify an action by appealing to its necessity. A course is wrong or right before it is practical or impractical (though a stupid choice, being foolish, is immoral). While we must accept the certainty of imperfect results, and while we must work with the near-certainty of imperfect goals (1 John 1:10), we ought not to introduce sin into our vision from the first. We must adhere to God’s law, not to our own wisdom (Prov. 3:5).

In the end, we must recognize that even Barris’s more optimistic vision is broken at a fundamental level. The sum of my problem I will leave, for now, to a quote from a man perhaps himself not orthodox but who was in this instance thoroughly right, Ben Franklin, who himself quotes the infallible Author: 

“I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without [H]is notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without [H]is aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without [H]is concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall be become a reproach and a bye-word down to future age.”

A Different Vision

God’s word, robustly and thoroughly presented by Godly, courageous, forthright leaders, provides a vision of true health and righteousness, of true societal renewal. Such a renewal, however, requires a far more revolutionary base: the regenerating and sanctifying work of Christ in the individual. No matter how closely man cleaves to the law in himself (Is. 64:6), in the end his best efforts are self-destructive (Matt. 12:45). The only way for the vision of true renewal to take meaningful, lasting hold upon a people is for actual, real salvation to be the overwhelming force in their character, not necessarily uniform but prevailing beyond doubt (Is. 26:12; John 14:15; 1 John 5:3).

It can be done- imperfectly and very, very partially, as in post-Reformation England and America; or nearing to perfection as it shall be in the days to come when, “They shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:34).

When we speak to our current benighted culture, we must declare, first, “Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2), and being crucified, also Christ resurrected and ascended (Acts 1; Rom. 6:4-5; Rev. 21-22). Then, because of the relationship which He establishes with us by saving us, because of His love and the love for Him He stirs in us, we can turn to a people who know that their structure and their long savior, the state, is broken. We can offer true justice, both the justice of human civil government according to Genesis 9:5-6 (Ps. 149) and the complete justice which comes after death, justice which abhors vengeance because vengeance is the Lord’s (Deut. 32:35), and the Lord has all the vengeance which is His.

We can offer, moreover, the pattern which gives politics and all of life meaning, purpose, and assured, if oft hidden, fruitfulness. The law of God is “perfect… sure… right… pure… true and righteous altogether,” “more to be desired… than gold, even much fine gold,” and “in keeping them there is great reward” (Ps. 19:7-9,10,11). He is not only the Judge but the Creator (Gen. 1:1), and so God provides us with the guidance to fulfil His commandment to “be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28, 9:1,7), that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9). In other words, God our Father opens the path and provides the guidance to walk it which leads to the fullness of blessing (2 Tim. 3:16-17; is. 65;17-25; Deut. 31:20; Rom. 8:28).

He gives us the pattern, and we ought to declare that vision of hope to all men. Rather than the radical destruction of the Ledger or the oft-false hope of the Ladder, we can turn towards the true renewal He gives, a turn far more radical and far harder (but, if God wills it, unstoppable) than any politician on earth can innovate.

God bless.