Stuck in an imperial system that has outlived its promise

My parents and grandparents watched the Apollo moon landing live. I was born years too late to watch it with them, but I did get to see the 2014 Mad Men episode in which the shared experience of watching the moon landing is transmuted into a pitch for a fast-food advertising campaign. Oddly enough, watching that episode helped me empathize with those generations who had seen the world-redefining lunar moment as it happened and whose awe I could participate in only secondhand. My formative experience of space flight, after all, was seeing the Challenger disaster live.

Our culture’s mastery of mining, adapting, and humanizing a moment like the moon landing is remarkable and perhaps unprecedented. But one thing this mastery does is measure the distance between the moment and the nostalgia for it. We never got beyond the moon—and the ground between here and there, then and now, can only be worked over by narrative art for so long.

Ross Douthat’s new book portrays a world that has surrendered exploration, growth, and innovation in exchange for a grim stability. It starts with the Apollo program and narrates the dead ends and disappointments that followed. The result is not a potted culture war story about declining virtue and flourishing vice leading to an imminent collapse of America. It’s something more complicated and sorrowful.