Americans Want Everything Right Now

W ell, it happened to me. I went searching for a toy that I thought I would get my son for Christmas, and the website that sold it put the ominously unspecific “Shipping in December” tag underneath the purchase button. Of course I did what any red-blooded American dad would do and ordered more ammunition (finally back in stock!) to prepare for the supply-chain apocalypse this holiday season. You’ll have this Godzilla figurine when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

The funniest thing about the supply-chain crisis is that it is not, as it has been billed, an “everything shortage.” Quite the opposite: It is an everything deluge. COVID-era stimulus, rising wages at the bottom end, and supersized unemployment relief have restored the balance sheet of the American household. Some industries — travel and hospitality — are still down. Instead of those vacations and meals out, Americans are buying stuff for their homes, and for their home offices. They are buying stuff for their new businesses; new start-ups, which had been declining for decades, suddenly took off in the pandemic. The container ships idling outside the port of Long Beach are standing still not just because of labor shortages, container shortages, and California’s truck regulations — as crazy as those are. They are there because more ships are coming into port than ever before. And America’s just-in-time warehouses can barely handle all the incoming traffic.

Empty shelves, like inflation, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so we should expect more of those. It’s hard not to detect a little bit of judgmentalism from the columnists writing about all this. In the Washington Post, one columnist writes that “American consumers might have been spoiled” with quick delivery of all they wanted in the recent past. But we should buck up and deal with shortages, just as our forebears did with oil in the ’70s, rationing in World War II, or housing in the 1920s.

In a moralizing piece about how mean Americans are to service workers, a contributor to The Atlantic explains that “American shoppers have been trained to be nightmares.” And that “the pandemic has shown just how desperately the consumer class clings to the feeling of being served.” The thrust of the piece is that the remnants of the American middle class have no other meaningful pursuits in life and are so stressed out by economic insecurity that they throw themselves into the project of tyrannizing, tormenting, and otherwise hassling service and retail workers, in a degrading and macabre imitation of the true holders of capital.

Each in its own way, these pieces demonstrate a strange relationship Americans have to plenty and to privation. The left-wing conscience has lately turned to the idea of “abundance agenda”– where guaranteed universal incomes win the consent of the voters for massive de-carbonization of the economy. At the same time, when people do get a little extra money — as from the COVID-era stimulus — something about how Americans spend it disgusts progressives. Soon, we may see a return of small-is-beautiful sentimentalizing, and a de-carbonization agenda that is premised on moral hatred of Mammon, and on retching at the softness of modern life.

To be honest, this double-mindedness afflicts more than just progressives.  Count me among the Millennial conservatives who think Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech had a point. Initial polling — such as it was — showed Americans responded positively to the speech, which had basically called out the country for becoming soft and selfish. A speech in which the president presumed to diagnose “a moral and spiritual crisis.”

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.

This part of the speech was right, although almost in a damning way. One can sense that Carter was meeting this spiritual crisis with more secularism. Was it really confidence in the future, or was it trust in Providence that motivated our forebears? It was the latter. But secularization was well under way at the start of the 20th century, and indeed at that time it was this much less specific confidence that held America together. The people living in the 1970s had either experienced, or had parents who experienced, the nation pick itself up from the Great Depression and then win a mighty world war before becoming the global economic powerhouse. Carter named the shocks that dislodged this confidence: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., “the agony of Vietnam,” and the scandal of Watergate. And yet, Carter’s recommendations were that the American people had to join in a great struggle for freedom, and their contribution to the nation would be to not take needless car trips. It wasn’t really going to work, and instead Carter helped the United States to embark on its decades-long Middle Eastern adventure, securing the oil supplies that made the 1980s and 1990s possible.

But to everything there is a season. The COVID-19 era was one of chastisement and privation — mainly the privation of social contact and connection. Zoom was an austerity program, and I want to splurge on black-tie events again. I want to be out late in the night again. I’m ready for my roaring ’20s and the crazy 1980s. There was a few-weeks period where New York got into this mood, before the Delta variant crashed the emerging party. And I want my child to have that giant, overpriced Godzilla figure underneath a tree that is almost totally obscured by the gifts Santa brought us. Yes, I’ll overpay — we already have overpaid for it all.

Jimmy Carter said that the energy crisis was a moral crisis. I say our supply-chain crisis is a social crisis. We are buying stuff in part because we haven’t dared to meet each other IRL, to buy drinks, and rent rooms, and play loud music until your throat is sore, and your feet are throbbing in your brand-new shoes. It’s time to get out there.