The Year of Stasis

We live in a deeply conservative and anti-progressive era—but it’s a curious kind of conservatism. It is shared almost equally by self-proclaimed conservatives and self-proclaimed progressives. Everyone seems to be fixated on preserving the past in some way, setting up an idealized version of the way things used to be and trying to freeze everything at that point.

For all the differences between conservatives and progressives, they roughly agree on the year that seems to be the hinge point: 1970 is the Year of Stasis at which everything must be fixed in place.

The Henry Adams Curve

One way of measuring this—which suggests 1970 as the critical date—is the Henry Adams Curve, named after the American writer and historian and created by J. Storrs Hall, which graphs power consumption per capita in the United States since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

[W]e have had a very long-term trend in history going back at least to the Newcomen and Savery engines of 300 years ago, a steady trend of about 7% per year growth in usable energy available to our civilization. Let us call it the “Henry Adams Curve.” The optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries can quite readily be seen as predicated on it. To a first approximation, it can be factored into a 3% population growth rate, a 2% energy efficiency growth rate, and a 2% growth in actual energy consumed per capita.

But all of this growth stops at about 1970, after which power consumption per capita levels out and even declines slightly.

One of the factors driving the growth of power consumption was the post-World War II rollout of nuclear energy. The first nuclear power plant in the U.S. went online in 1957, and by 1973, there were nearly 200 nuclear plants across the country at various stages of permitting, construction and operation. Then it all came to a grinding halt: In 1970, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which imposed extensive new permitting requirements on any large project, and the 1971 Calvert Cliffs case applied this law to require stricter licensing of nuclear power.

The judges’ ruling declares their dedication to upholding “the commitment of the government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’” Well, mission accomplished. Whatever nuclear power projects were not already bogged down by these rulings were killed off by the anti-nuclear hysteria following the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island, which led to a “temporary” moratorium on new nuclear plant permits. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would not issue another permit until 2012, and only two new reactors have gone online since then.

Here’s another example: I was astonished to discover recently that New York City’s subway system has not been extended since 1940—that’s 85 years of stagnation. The original system expanded rapidly from 1904 into the 1920s before getting caught up in a political battle in which populist mayors refused to let the companies that ran the system increase their fares, choking off both the cash and the incentive for expansion. Then state and federal governments poured money into highways instead of extending rail lines to the suburbs. The last major attempt at expansion was proposed in—if you guessed 1970, you’re not far off—1968. It was never implemented.

Not in My Backyard

Speaking of New York City, we just passed the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s influential 1974 book “The Power Broker,” which presented a highly critical view of the efforts by city planner Robert Moses to reshape the Big Apple. Yet there are restless voices pointing out that the rejection of Moses’ often high-handed restructuring has moved us to the opposite error, in which we are reticent to change anything or to build anything big.

As Ross Barkan recently wrote in the New York Times:

Politicians today need that sort of ambition. Centralization is not inherently grotesque, and community control is sometimes an excuse to reject anything that qualifies as change. The post-Moses era in New York and beyond has been one of frustration and stagnation—public infrastructure deteriorates as the local governments overseeing it dither. Sclerotic bureaucracies like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, created in part to thwart Mr. Moses, make power diffuse, shield politicians from accountability, and bloat budgets.

Nowhere have they taken this kind of obstructive “community involvement” to a more sclerotic excess than in San Francisco, which issued only 16 new housing permits in the first half of 2024. The city had been given a target by the state government of building 82,000 new homes.

In 1970, the suburbs were the great new innovation—yet many of them have since been frozen in amber by zoning laws meant to prevent the construction of anything other than single-family housing and low-rise apartments in small downtown areas. Everywhere you go, people are trying to “preserve the character of the community,” as if change is the enemy. And now it is spreading to the countryside. My own county in Central Virginia has become a real estate hotspot, as people move here in search of cheaper housing than they can find in Richmond or Northern Virginia. So naturally, we’re looking to clamp down on all of that growth to “preserve the rural character of the county.”

The YIMBY movement—people who are willing to say “Yes, in My Backyard”—has been on the rise recently. But NIMBYism is still dominant in cities and counties across America.

You can see this mania for stasis everywhere. I noted it recently in a review of the cutthroat competition for admission to elite colleges. Stanford University, for example, more than tripled its enrollment from 1920 to 1970. Then it stopped—and so did many other top schools, causing an already selective acceptance process to become harrowing.

Or consider global warming, where the sole goal seems to be to roll back global temperatures to the exact level of 1970—not coincidentally the year of the first Earth Day. The dubious assumption is that temperature stasis is the norm and therefore we should reject any attempt to adapt to a change in the climate.

Make America Stagnant

The examples above are largely (but not exclusively) fixations of the left. Yet there are other aspects of this mania for stasis that are specific to conservatives. They lionize traditional gender roles—which were already being challenged but were still very much dominant in 1970—and an old-fashioned manufacturing-based economy. The percentage of U.S. workers in manufacturing had already begun to decline by 1970, but the absolute number would not reach its peak until a few years later.

Conservatives’ support for manufacturing is not about whether America still makes things, because we do. Rather, it’s about a desire to return to making the same things we used to make and making them the same way. Vice President J.D. Vance has railed against buying cheaper imported toasters, but perhaps the purest expression of this viewpoint is Donald Trump courting the longshoremen’s union. The president of the International Longshoremen’s Association has been threatening a nationwide dockworkers’ strike to prevent ports from automating the unloading of shipping containers. According to a New York Times report:

Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that he had met with ILA leaders and was sympathetic to their concerns. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” he wrote. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”

But the “traditional” method of shipping that Trump is trying to protect is not all that old. It dates to—you guessed it—about 1970. The modern intermodal shipping container was invented in 1956 and standardized by the International Organization for Standardization in 1968. And the unions fought it every step of the way because it deprived longshoremen of the extra work of moving and arranging non-standardized boxes and barrels.

But the most passionate conservative push to keep us in the Year of Stasis is directed toward immigration. The right has targeted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed national caps on immigration and partly by accident led to a wave of new immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. Influential conservative voices with connections to the incoming administration, like Tucker Carlson, have denounced this law because it “changed the composition” of America. Nativism has long maintained a strange hold in a nation of immigrants because politicians can always promise the previous wave of immigrants that they will keep out the next wave and freeze social change at a single point.

Stasis as a Subsidy

Economist and blogger Noah Smith has summed up this trend in the concept of stasis as a subsidy:

[A]s a society we’ve decided to award people with stasis instead of stuff. In many dysfunctional societies, the government’s guarantee of economic inclusion comes in the form of a specific physical good—usually, cheap fuel. In the United States, the in-kind subsidy we provide our people is the option to keep their world from changing…. The ‘70s were when the embrace of stasis began, but the 2010s are when it reached its apotheosis.

This is profoundly un-American. One of the most striking things Alexis de Tocqueville observed about 19th-century Americans, in contrast to Europeans, was their openness to change:

The American lives in a land of wonders; everything around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems an advance. Consequently, in his mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement…; in his eyes, something which does not exist is just something that has not been tried yet.

If we renounce this legacy, we will instead accept mediocrity and stagnation. This will neither make America great again, the supposed concern of the right, nor will it encourage social progress, the supposed concern of the left.

The central question about growth and progress is not how to do it but whether to do it. We didn’t languish into stasis in all the areas above—energy, housing, transportation, economics—because we couldn’t figure out how to grow. We did it because we chose not to.

But that means there is nobody obstructing progress but us. As the Calvert Cliffs ruling put it, we chose to limit the engines of progress. If we want to, we can turn them back on again.

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