The consequences of America’s moral drift
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
www.washingtonpost.com /opinions/2025/10/26/america-moral-crisis-attention-economy/
The consequences of America’s moral drift
Spencer Cox, Ian Marcus Corbin 7-9 minutes 10/26/2025
Spencer Cox is governor of Utah. Ian Marcus Corbin directs the Public Culture Project at Harvard and serves as a senior fellow at the think tank Capita.
In July 1926, President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech near the Liberty Bell to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At the heart of his oration was a striking claim: The Declaration is a “great spiritual document,” composed of principles such as equality, liberty, popular sovereignty and the rights of man, hashed out in church meeting halls over generations, whose origins lay in “the unseen world” of American religiosity. Unless anchored by these deep “things of the spirit,” he warned, “all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”
Twenty-first century America is starving for the spiritual depth and moral direction that Coolidge identified. Too many Americans, especially the young, feel adrift. This is visible in high rates of loneliness , depression, anxiety, suicide and drug overdoses. It is further manifested in the rising tide of mistrust and the poison of political hatred, descending to violence. The young man who is accused of killing Charlie Kirk in Utah last month spent much of his life in the addictive cocoon of online gaming and message boards.
The problem feels fundamental; many people, including many leaders, seem unclear about who Americans are as a people, who they want to become, and what kind of world they want to help build. This drift amounts to a civilizational crisis of agency, interwoven with an epidemic of addiction. Addressing this crisis will require the nation — as it approaches its first quarter millennium — to reimagine the bounds of public life.
In a 2023 Harvard study , 58 percent of young adults reported lacking meaning and purpose in their lives. Without a moral or spiritual orientation, shared values and projects that can give shape to a life, and knit a community together, start to seem inaccessible, relics of a bygone past. Such conditions lead to toxic politics and a turn to harmful substances and behaviors that grant a small hit of dopamine, or some thin imitation of belonging, but render us only more powerless and lonely.
Too much of American economic life is designed to amplify and profit from these addiction spirals. As the historian Christopher Lasch put it in the 1970s:
“In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life.”
It’s one thing to buy well-made shoes because they protect your feet and look attractive. It’s another to buy yet one more pair of shoes because advertisers have convinced you that your present life is shabby, but this next purchase will finally make you happy.
The online attention economy, especially social media, has intensified the reality Lasch described. Practically every aspect, down to the shade of red that alerts you to a new comment or like, has been calibrated not to make you wiser or happier but to get you hooked. Other examples of the addiction economy include the destructive rise of buy-now-pay-later financing, mobile sports betting , online pornography and vaping.
Shrinking the addiction economy will require Americans to upend decades of conventional political and economic wisdom. For some time now, we have imagined that robust moral judgments should be relegated to the private sphere, places such as churches, homes and private schools. Government, work, public schools and universities, in this vision, should not only remain neutral on large questions of the good life, but should generally avoid those questions, for fear of starting conversations where perfect agreement is impossible. Instead, as employees, consumers, voters and leaders, they should focus on maximizing opportunities and resources to employ in whatever way suits them. Under this paradigm, a chief executive is not obligated to ask whether his or her business is making life better or worse for customers, employees or community, but only to offer products that people will purchase.
This approach is unable to sustain the well-being of the republic. An amoral public sphere ends up shaping even those private parts of the world where meaning is supposed to take shape. For that reason, public life also needs to become a place where people can reason together about the physical and spiritual health of society. Fundamental questions should be debated in the halls of government, in companies and schools — not just inside churches and homes.
Utah is exploring ways to bring moral reasoning into the work of government. We recently passed some of the country’s most powerful regulations to prevent social media companies from stealing children’s attention and agency. Utah has also launched lawsuits against TikTok and Snap Inc. to curb their use of addictive features — endless scrolling, push notifications and AI chatbots — designed to hook teens, often facilitating sexual exploitation and drug trafficking. A new year-long paid internship for gap-year students has benefited students and nonprofits throughout the state. The University of Utah now provides college credit for military service, religious missions and humanitarian work, recognizing the value that such service brings to the life and education of students and neighborhoods.
Education has the potential to be one of the most central forums for this revival. This could mean following the lead of countries such as France by requiring students to grapple with philosophy coursework during high school. It could also mean a renewed focus on the search for meaning in higher education. Too often, universities have presented education as glorified job training and allowed campus culture to be shaped by stultifying orthodoxies, rather than intellectual vitality and openness.
But there are promising signs. A pilot program at Utah State University places questions of meaning, purpose and civic responsibility at the heart of general education. All enrolled students will engage with the works of Plato, John Stuart Mill, Lao Tzu and Alexis de Tocqueville, fostering civil discourse and critical thinking. A new initiative called the Catherine Project has led thousands of people through readings of great books, online, for free. At Harvard, the Public Culture Project serves the public interest by hosting conversations with leaders from across society on matters of moral and spiritual import.
The nation will need more ideas than the ones above. Our democracy will not last another 250 years if it is populated by communities lacking direction and animated by addiction. As Coolidge proclaimed, we cannot rely on material prosperity alone. We must recover the “things of the spirit” — meaning, purpose and reverence for the good — if America is to endure.
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Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and author of this piece, was an admirer of Charlie Kirk , and said this to Trump in a letter
Cox added that he believes that only Trump can unite the citizenry of the U.S. and prevent the country from being torn apart.
Anyone who thinks that only Trump can unite America has no business lecturing anyone on morality.
Can’t disagree with this, trump is a polarizing figure and it doesn’t help that he constantly trolls the left and they fall for it.
Shapiro is the best bet IMHO to be able to pull it off, or maybe Rubio if he separates himself from trump early enough but there may be too many TDS suffering fools who believe any connection is to much.
Look what progressives did to someone as milquetoast as Romney. They won't ever accept a President as legitimate who they don't control.
The fact is, with his power over the Republican party which is basically being held hostage by the MAGA Trump sycophants, even after he leaves office, any Republican President will have to kneel before the Mango Mussolini. He will rule the party like Ayatollah Khamenei rules Iran, through the strength of his power over a religious fanatical group, just in this case they're Trump fanatics willing to vote whichever way he tells them to which has many Republican legislators by the balls.
To get elected in many red States you now have to praise Trump no matter what he does and the Trump sycophants in your district will vote for you. But dare to have a backbone and say anything negative about Trump and you're sunk, not unlike many secularists running for office in Iran and not getting pre-approved from the Ayatollah. Trump is attempting, and half-way succeeding, in making himself 'Supreme Leader' of America which is just so sad and disgusting to think about. Over half of this nation's legislators, right now, have zero ability to stand up to Trump. Whatever Trump wants, he gets. In fact, he doesn't even ask anymore, he just does it and basically says "So sue me" if anyone has a problem with it.
How sad is that. Over half of our nation's legislators have simply handed over their oversight power to basically a fanatical religious leader and his sycophant followers that are just Christian versions of the Islamic extremists in Iran that have enabled the Ayatollah to stay in power the last 36 years.
So the man is delusional. That seems to be becoming increasingly more common these days.
Impossible to argue with what he wrote.