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  • The Decadent Society

  • How We Became a Victim of Our Own Success
  • Written by: Ross Douthat
  • Narrated by: Ross Douthat
  • Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (27 ratings)

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The Decadent Society

Written by: Ross Douthat
Narrated by: Ross Douthat
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Publisher's Summary

From the New York Times columnist and best-selling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our wealthy, successful society has passed into an age of gridlock, stalemate, public failure, and private despair.

The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing - how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis.

Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment - by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

©2020 Ross Douthat (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio
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A thoughtful reflection on our current predicament

This book should be catnip for regular Douthat readers, as it synthesizes and extends many of the ideas he explores in his weekly NYT columns. Douthat continues to provide the smartest conservative take on where we are as a culture. Great reading for anyone interested in what the next century might look like.

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Ignore the sub heading regarding pandemic

There is zero mention of the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic related to any of the topics/suggestions the author makes throughout this book. I believe they added the sub heading “before and after the pandemic” to make the book appear to be more relevant to the times/the globes current situation to simply sell more copies.

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