Bennett sporadically turns his attention to the decadence of the media, but has no explanation for why the most stable industrial society, Japan, coexists with the most blood-curdling media. Clinton's repeal of a Ronald Reagan executive order on the family gets top blame. Tax cuts, school vouchers, and privatization of Social Security are offered as key 1999 reforms. Buchanan and Gray dismiss this cant. For them, the global free market is the central cause of disintegration.
Families are weaker in America than in any other country.
At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration . . . . Levels of inequality resemble those of Latin American countries more than those of any European society. They expose the dirty little secret of free markets. The global market, they argue, does not grow organically from society. Its imposition requires the exercise of concerted, centralized state power, in service of powerful private interests, shielded from democratic controls or social constraints.