Toward a Transpartisan Politics of Limits and Beauty

In October 2025, Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox, who called for calm after the murder of Charlie Kirk, wrote a scathing critique of consumerism’s impact on our national values. Cox cited historian Christopher Lasch: “Advertising manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored.” “The online attention economy,” Cox added, “especially social media, has intensified the reality Lasch described.” Concern about the negative influence of consumerism on our children, families, communities, environment, and politics may provide common ground for bringing Americans together toward new purpose and unity.

We bemoan the idea that this generation may not be as materially rich as its parents but downplay the pressures on resources caused by the proliferation of material wealth, the crime fueled by our addictions, plastic and narcotic, and the need to live more sustainably for the sake of future generations and other species.

When we ask, as seems obligatory each Presidential election, if voters are “better off” than four years ago, we mean the amount of money in our wallets rather than the joy in our lives. Candidates and pollsters aren’t interested in whether voters have happier families, stronger social bonds, purposeful work, better health or greater access to the beauties of Nature. It’s all about the money.

Today, despite generally higher incomes, Senator Bernie Sanders points out that “60 percent of our citizens are living paycheck to paycheck.” Data confirms this; few could survive more than six weeks on current savings. But it is also true that many Americans, influenced by marketing, consistently spend beyond their means. Private and public debt expand apace with expectations. House sizes have tripled since World War II while family size shrinks. Expensive electronics, almost unknown in the 1990s, have become necessities, replaced every couple of years.

We now swim in a sea of marketing messages from multiple media, a constant echo chamber of temptations to our wallets. As Cox and others, have pointed out, this ad-driven materialism has weakened our social bonds, fueled our greed, divided our communities, created an epidemic of loneliness, and cheapened our values.

Marketers probe our purchases and preferences and target messages directly to our weaknesses. Our email boxes fill with spam and fraud; social media blossoms with come-ons; our phones ring unceasingly as robots or real people tempt us with more things to purchase. Every inch of public space appears plastered with commercial appeals. Governments consider us customers rather than citizens as the language of the market invades our politics.

Today’s “engineers” manipulate minds and algorithms instead of structures. Consider the vast salaries paid to computer wizards whose calling is to persuade us to “need” things we haven’t even thought of. Is it any wonder that teenagers enter college not to learn skills of service and make a difference but to prepare for making a killing? As Cox points out, our universities must now pander to such demands, continually substituting business training for humanities and the classics, as if the question, “How then shall we live?” was no longer important.

Traditional conservatives such as German economist Wilhelm Ropke, author of A Humane Economy, defended the free market against advocates of socialism but understood that the market must be kept in its place lest it destroy the moral bonds that hold communities together. A culture of mutual distrust arises when everyone is trying to sell something.

To make sure all this marketing is working, our government measures “consumer confidence.” Will Americans strangle each other for a place at the head of the line on Black Friday? Will they buy “big ticket” items for Christmas, showering luxury cars on most-favored partners as evidence of affection? If they do, then a growing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of the goods and services we produce, will be evidence of our economic success. The bigger it gets, the better our economy is seen to be.

Both of America’s major political parties worship at the altar of GDP, each pledging to “grow the economy” faster than their rivals. But GDP is a hollow Golden Calf. It counts as positive anything with a price regardless of its impact on our wellbeing. Drug and alcohol sales add to it, and so does the price of repairing the damage they cause. On the other hand, GDP does not measure many useful “goods”—the value of unpaid housework, for example, or of exercise not purchased in a gym, of walks in the woods or the kindness of strangers.

Economist Simon Kuznets, who developed the GDP (then called the Gross National Product) in 1934, stated forcefully that such a measurement was no indicator of national well-being. Much of what currently boosts GDP includes defensive expenditures to alleviate the deleterious impacts of previous growth. While economic growth is still vital in poor nations and clearly improves welfare there, the late economist Herman Daly pointed out that in the United States it has become uneconomic—its costs now exceed benefits.

The negative externalities of GDP growth are now too obvious to ignore. “Global warming, the most serious crisis overtaking mankind,” warned conservative Rod Dreher in his 2006 book, Crunchy Cons, “is the result of our refusal to live within our means.” Alarmingly destructive, it triggers fires and floods that overwhelm governments and insurance companies alike. Despite alternative energy sources, fossil fuel consumption and output of planet-warming gases continues to rise. Entire species are threatened; America’s birds (and the insects they feed on) have seen catastrophic declines. Pollutants from agriculture and industry create “dead zones” in the oceans; plastics collect in immense marine garbage patches; microplastics fill our bodies.

The Global Footprint Network estimates that by July of each year, the human population uses more non-renewable resources and discards more waste than is sustainable. If the whole world were to consume at American levels, we would need five Earths. We can’t grow on like this.

Limits and the American ethic were always uncomfortable bedfellows. Alexis de Tocqueville, two centuries ago, commented on the fierce productive energy of Americans. And why not? The frontier then seemed limitless. Land and resources were plentiful and population pressures small. Of course, the land wasn’t empty. Native peoples were willing to share, but grew tired of greedy European settlers and their cavalier dishonoring of treaties.

In 1904, Katharine Lee Bates, added a new verse to her anthem, “America the Beautiful” (“a prayer, not a boast”—singer Brandi Carlile). ”America, America, God mend thine every flaw,” Bates wrote. “Confirm thy soul in self-control…” She was responding to the Spanish American War, a conflict she viewed as imperialistic. But she had a double meaning. Bates mourned the materialism of the Gilded Age, when giant department stores took root and mail order catalogs like those of Montgomery Ward, the Amazon of its day, found their way into American homes, a novelty as compelling then as online shopping is today.

Christopher Lasch, whose devotees span the political spectrum, made the need for limits the centerpiece of his 1991 magnum opus, The True and Only Heaven. He warned that consumerism, propelled by advertising, was eviscerating families and communities. Lasch shared conservative concerns about a pattern of permissiveness that weakened moral commitments, but attributed it to values promoted by television programming and advertising, not the free-love philosophies of the counterculture.

Democrats find Lasch’s economic egalitarianism appealing, while Republicans respond to his fears over the decline of traditional morality. Neither would be comfortable with his fully integrated outlook. There is little in contemporary politics that Lasch would have found more upsetting than the mindless chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” that seem to burst spontaneously from GOP rallies, with the exception perhaps of the massive tax cuts for the wealthy enshrined in the Big Beautiful Bill. But Lasch would have cautioned the Left against its faith in professional expertise and rejection of tradition.

The debate over growth and its limits rests most firmly on the values that underlie different viewpoints. “Extrinsic” values focus on external aims, including fame (now redefined as celebrity), fortune, physical appearance, power, influence, and popularity. “Intrinsic” values come from internal motivations such as service, altruism, patience, forgiveness, honesty, courage, and love. Studies by psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan convincingly maintain that “intrinsic” values enhance our happiness, while extrinsic values are more likely to leave us perpetually dissatisfied.

Yet extrinsic values often overwhelm intrinsic ones, as consumer culture teaches that the good life is the goods life. Studies show that no matter how much income Americans make, most feel they would be satisfied if they just had more. When extrinsic values prevail, there is never enough to satisfy.

Consuming less does not have to be a sacrifice. Abraham Maslow, in his hierarchy of needs, held that beyond the basic requirements of food, shelter, and safety, most of our needs were non-material, including belonging, esteem, self-actualization, knowledge, and beauty. Though we often choose to find love or esteem through expensive cars or clothing, we might better obtain them by being good and generous people.

Sadly, the United States had slipped from 11^th to 24^th in happiness surveys by 2025, perhaps driven by our emphasis on extrinsic values. Despite a tripling of our per-capita economic output, fewer Americans now describe themselves as “very happy” than did so 50 years ago.

Clearly, if we are to make a case for limits on consumer expectations, we must offer an alternative appealing enough to compensate for the perceived sacrifice that any reduction in buying power is likely to conjure.

A particularly fortuitous route to cooperation might come from a renewed attention to public work beautifying our communities and landscapes and reintroducing nature into our lives. A public work experiment in Philadelphia to replace garbage-strewn vacant lots and graffiti-ridden abandoned homes with parks and gardens reduced violent crime and mental illness by 30 percent, encouraged trust among neighbors and returned some $70 in reduced costs for every dollar spent. What’s not to like, no matter where you sit on the political fence?

New Deal public work brought Americans together as the CCC restored damaged landscapes to beauty and health, Federal Arts projects brightened public buildings, music and theater projects brought hope and joy to far-flung towns, and many new national parks were added to our legacy of protected beauty.

A new beautification campaign, aimed at restoring our abused environment, protecting the “natural capital” of our forests, lakes and streams, and adding natural luster to the grim cities where too many Americans live, offers the kind of public work and civic participation advocacy that might help smooth our rocky path toward depolarization. There is room for both the expert and the amateur in designing the more people-friendly, aesthetically pleasing communities of our future.

A rigorous bipartisan campaign to make America beautiful again might offer us the vision of living in surroundings with novelty of design and access to nature, encouraging the awe and wonder inspired by God’s good earth. And that might even provide enough joy and meaning to reduce our growing addiction to both things and drugs.

Yet, whatever pleasing alternative we might offer, the need to understand and accept limits cannot be ignored. In 1991, Christopher Lasch wrote that, “Neither [Left nor Right] addresses the overriding issue of limits.“ (my italics) “The fact remains” he added, that, “the earth’s finite resources will not support an indefinite expansion of industrial civilization.”

It takes courageous citizens to encourage sacrifice for the sake our communities, our children and theirs. Our Founding Fathers pledged their fortunes as well as their lives and honor. Can we, honoring them 250 years later, pledge less?

This essay is adapted from a longer one for the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council 250th collection on Courageous Citizenship.

Image Credit: Louisa Davis Minot, “Niagara Falls” (1818)