Partisans For The Vice Economy

Brad Wilcox and James Lynch writes:

As marijuana use surpasses alcohol and tobacco use for the first time, Republicans have delivered another win for the vice economy. Figures ranging from Donald Trump to Rand Paul successfully pushed to delay a ban on intoxicating hemp-derived products. This is the latest in a string of pro-vice moves from the GOP, ranging from rescheduling marijuana by executive order to curtailing regulatory scrutiny on cryptocurrency and prediction markets.

Given their self-conception of sturdy American virtues such as thrift, hard work, and sobriety, you’d think the GOP would be at the forefront in opposing Big Weed and online gambling. But too many in the party of “family values” have become partisans for the vice economy.

Young men have been hit hardest by the proliferation of gambling apps, prediction markets, chatbot companions, digital tokens, and harmful substances, the proliferation of which has been helped along by the libertine wing of the Republican Party. The consequences are clear in new data from the Institute for Family Studies, based on a survey of 2,000 men aged 18-29. Forty-three percent agree that “I am inclined to think that I am a failure.” Sixty-one percent say they often feel they have little control over the things that happen to them. Almost half agree that they will never achieve the American dream.

Male loneliness is rampant. In the past thirty days, a quarter of young men report having felt lonely all or most of the time, and 26 percent felt isolated. Forty-two percent report two or fewer close friends, including 9 percent who have zero.

Young men aren’t simply lonely, sad, and pessimistic. They have noble goals of working hard, getting married, having a family, and contributing to their communities. But a substantial portion of young men feel like they’re falling short and making little progress towards their goals.

Rather than help them realize these dreams, too many Republicans are content with turning them over to the very vices that will keep them emasculated; unable to become the providers, protectors, and parents they would like to be. More than half of young men gamble, with 35 percent doing so daily or several times a week—a number which is even higher among conservative young men, 47 percent of whom gamble daily or several times a week. Likewise, 43 percent watch porn daily or several times a week. An even greater number, two thirds of young men, play video games many times a day or at least once a day.

The young men who gamble and watch pornography most regularly are more likely to consider themselves a failure than those who do so less regularly. Unsurprisingly, greater shares of young men who consume porn frequently say they are lonely, anxious, and depressed than those who watch porn once a day or less.

When it comes to gamblers, about two-thirds say that gambling creates some level of emotional distress. Much of this emotional distress is either “moderate” or “mild” according to the data. But these numbers will only rise as online prediction markets and sports betting casinos continue to proliferate.

It is unclear which comes first—the mental health problems or the gambling and porn addictions. What is evident is that these vices are not helping young men feel more confident in their ability to move towards their goals.

John Adams wrote that our Constitution was made for a “moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The American founders were not libertarian about vice. They understood that a republic whose young men cannot govern themselves will not govern anyone else for long. A political vision for American men necessitates rediscovering the fact that liberty and license are not the same thing.

There is nothing conservative about a government that signs stablecoin bills while working-class men max out credit cards on parlays. There is nothing populist about a regulatory apparatus that protects Polymarket’s revenue and lets insider trading run wild. There is nothing Christian about canonizing THC dispensaries, sportsbooks, vapes, and AI mistresses as the patron saints of liberty.

The political calculation for expanding the vice economy was always simple: Republicans must do this to win young male voters. But young men are increasingly souring on President Trump because of practical concerns about the cost of living and a collapse in institutional trust. As it turns out, permission to smoke weed and gamble will not make men feel more confident about their prospects of buying a home and one day providing for their family.

Most young men still want to get married, value financial independence, and want to become fathers, the Institute for Family Studies finds. At the same time, they also feel deeply uncertain about what manhood means today, and believe that society looks at manhood negatively.

Conservatives have always understood that men flourish as devoted husbands, fathers, workers, citizens, churchgoers, and members of their communities. But many are no longer helping young men work to achieve their desires of marriage and family by promoting the virtues that make healthy masculinity possible.

Instead, they are promoting business interests that seek to profit off male misery. This isn’t the way to make America great again.

Or anywhere else. There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, so there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy.

But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. It was in 2000, under Tony Blair, that the introduction of the R18 rating effectively legalised hardcore pornography. As with the downgrading of cannabis to a Class C drug between 2004 and 2009, and as with the mercifully failed attempt to set up supercasinos while successfully permitting gambling companies to advertise on radio and television, that was what the replacement of Clause IV wrought.

Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today, both by means of drugs, and specifically among young males by means of pornography. In Ukraine, when they tore down statues of Alexander Pushkin and renamed streets that had been named after him, they legalised pornography to help pay for the war. Even before then, some people had already been taking payment to strip on camera via the “charity project” Teronlyfans, to fund the Armed Forces.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side. The same side as the Green Party, with which Nigel Farage further concurs in wanting to legalise drugs across the board. Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023, and Richard Tice wants to legalise at least cannabis.