The Costs of Consumerism

During the twentieth century, consumerism became increasingly popular in America. Modern jobs and new products lifted many people out of hardship and some out of poverty. This progress encouraged Fukuyama to assume that democratic politics and capitalist economics fit together fairly comfortably and mainly automatically. However, while most people admired economic success, some saw it as generating social costs that made good citizenship hard to conceive and difficult to practice. Here was the clash of republican aims and consumerist realities that Habits of the Heart noticed, a matter of economic trends that frustrate at least some political expectations. For our story, the civic shortfall emphasized in Habits of the Heart has important consequences that are worth considering now. Yet the subject is vast and the literature that explores it is endless. Moreover, many of the predicaments that flow from consumerism are familiar, in which case to describe them here is to risk repeating what readers know from elsewhere. Still, to see something of how many aspects of American life are now linked to modern ways of getting and spending, and to gain a sense of civic direction and urgency, let us use this chapter to review some of consumerism's costs. Insofar as these endanger individual and collective well-being, we will in Chapters 8 and 9 consider how, via Citizenship III, to avoid or minimize such dangers, or others like them.