‘But Your iPhone’ Conservatism Will Fail

M y children haven’t even become teenagers, and yet my wife and I have often expressed our frustration at their lack of gratitude for all the modern marvels they have. We remind them that when we were kids, you couldn’t select the programming on television; you had to wait until it was being broadcast. There was an hour of cartoons in the afternoon, and if you did a school activity, you just missed it. There was only one screen in the house. And never in the car, as they get to enjoy on long trips. We couldn’t download any film or video game on demand. On our sick days, we watched The Price Is Right, and we liked it. They live in comparative luxury.

This is both difficult for them to apprehend and probably useless to explain on our part. All these things that are marvels and novel to us are just par for the world that all their friends exist in, and the world that we gave to them. They’ve known no other. And, in important ways, they are deprived of things we had. There is almost no self-organizing neighborhood play among kids anymore. Sleepovers are rarer. We talk about those things less. Gratitude of this sort is better informed not by lectures, but by one’s own curiosity. It strikes you at odd times. For me, memorably, it was reading Auberon Waugh describe the monotonous diet that fueled French farmers in the 1970s, even at a time when Anglos romanticized French rural eating. Or reading about field medical treatment in World War I.

Our advances make life better in some ways, but our perception doesn’t experience these benefits in the objective way that spreadsheets do. Nobody in 1985 felt an acute lack or deprivation of having the applications for food delivery, driving directions, and even rudimentary large language models on cellphones. Similarly, though you can tell me that in 1985 terms, the computing power and software capability on my $1,100 phone would be worth millions, you cannot, by handing me an iPhone in 2025, make me feel the advantage, security, or power of someone in 1985 possessing a luxury asset worth millions. The comparison is academically interesting, but socially null.

Unfortunately, these days, any material complaint made by people under 40 is met with a version of “But your iPhone” conservatism. Yes, some people on Twitter radically overestimate what people were able to afford on one income in the past. Or they don’t sufficiently appreciate the diversity of some goods on offer. But putting too much emphasis on technological and other advances is a way for successful Gen Xers and Boomers to deceive themselves about the conditions they’ve handed to Millennials and Gen Z.

David French, citing one overstated tweet from Matt Walsh and his impressions of the common memes showing idyllic 1950s neighborhoods, says that “America’s glorious past is indispensable to understanding MAGA’s appeal,” weighing in with a version of the “But your iPhone” argument.

Americans live longer, enjoy higher median wages, live in larger and more luxurious homes, and enjoy more civil liberties and greater access to justice than in even the recent past. The starter homes of the 1950s — tiny places that often lacked central air and other modern utilities — would be considered poverty-level accommodations now.

Violent crime is much lower than in decades past, the divorce rate has decreased from its highs in the early 1980s, and the abortion rate (despite recent increases) is far below its early 1980s peaks. 

David French allows as a rejoinder that young social conservatives complain about the novelty of Drag Queen Story Hour. To this, he responds, Well, that’s morally better than slavery. This is a non sequitur, since none of the people he’s arguing with want to return to 1850.

But there are worse problems with this argument. Americans were living longer than their forebears and the homes were getting bigger when French was a young man. The divorce rate has decreased, but a huge portion of that decrease is due to the overall abandonment or delay of marriage. Since the 1960s, kids are much more likely to grow up in homes without both of their biological parents.

American men are less fit, less likely to be married, less likely to have children, less likely to own a home, more likely to be addicted to a drug, and more likely to be mired in a medical disability than they were in the 1950s, the 1970s, or the 1990s. As for the larger and more luxurious homes, that’s true, but Americans are more than twice as likely to live alone in them in 2025 (28 percent of all households) than they were in 1991. The median first-time homebuyer in 1991 was 28 years old (the youngest Boomers were 27 then). The average first-time home buyer is now 40. In the 1980s and 1990s, those home prices were roughly three times the median income or slightly higher. Now they average five to six times the median income. People have lost faith in the American dream, not because of some cultural pathology, but because they correctly perceive that the chance of achieving it has declined, and the cost of achieving it, in years and dollars, has risen dramatically. One study using census and Zillow data finds that since 2000, U.S. median household income is up about 92 percent nominally, but median home prices are up about 177 percent, with real (inflation‑adjusted) home prices rising far more than real incomes. Maybe we should make smaller, more affordable starter homes in 2025. They would be nicer than in 1955! But they won’t be as affordable until we’ve built hundreds of thousands more of them, and thereby lowered the nominal value of the homes owned by people like David French and me.

David finds the idealization of the 1950s contemptible, but cohorts born around 1940 had a 90 percent chance of absolute upward mobility — the American dream of working hard, playing by the rules, and doing better than your parents. The chance of doing so in America has declined to a coin flip. This is an astonishing thing to consider when you note that at this time, many households added an additional worker into the workforce, and we’ve also altered the social contract to include more and more duties and debt as part of the meritocratic ladder we bid children to climb. David French has often pointed out that the middle class shrinks partly because the ranks of the affluent are growing faster than those of the poor. But so too are the risks of downward mobility. America, like Hungary and China and every nation but North Korea, benefits from accumulated technological progress. But American society used to be defined by the vast majority of people doing better than their parents. Since that time, all the badges of middle-class life — marriage, children, a home of one’s own — have become harder to achieve. This decline is real and obvious, and unevenly distributed.

If we can’t acknowledge this — if we continue to tell our children that their lives are better because they spend money on take-out coffee, or their avocados are 20 percent larger than they were 20 years ago — we’re going to go politically extinct. We have confused the relative marvel, but largely constant force, of material progress with the attractive but disappearing way of life it once supported.