Leave ‘Affluenza’ to the Left

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 02, 2025

 

Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, in part, as a result of his insistence that Americans would suffer if wealth remained concentrated in the hands of investors and productive enterprises. Shortly after Obama’s victory, his supporters pivoted to arguing that Americans were already suffering from the psychologically deleterious effect of too much prosperity.

 

In May 2013, the chair of Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality and the co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Gus Speth, rendered a diagnosis: “Here I refer to our consumerism,” he said during a commencement address, “our affluenza.”

 

“Almost universal is the tendency to try to find meaning at the Mall,” Speth lamented. “How wrongheaded to think that we can satisfy our non-material needs with more materialism — more stuff!”

 

Speth didn’t coin the term “affluenza.” It already had purchase among those who believe that America’s biggest problem is that other people are too comfortable — a condition to which the already well-off are hyper attuned.

 

In 2011, the British psychologist Oliver James posited a theory of the affliction that located the source of the outbreak in America and attributed it to unnaturally high standards of living in the United States — a condition that other societies should seek to avoid. “The more like America a society becomes, the higher its rate of emotional distress,” he wrote of the “virus” that transforms altruists into what one of the book’s reviewers described as “avaricious, anxious, jealous and competitive people.”

 

James’s work drew from the conclusions reached by other intrepid researchers in the field of anti-American studies. The 2001 book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic described the affliction as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” Before that, The Golden Ghetto: The Psychology of Affluence, by Jessie O’Neill, identified “a sense of entitlement” irresponsibility, and excuse-making among the children of “richer families.”

 

The alleged disorder evolved from a niche fixation into a pop-cultural phenomenon in late 2013, when lawyers representing a Texas teenager accused of killing four people while driving intoxicated argued that their client suffered from “affluenza.”

 

The novel criminal defense was largely rejected by the public and the press. “Not surprisingly, ‘affluenza’ does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the ‘psychiatric Bible,’” CNN reported. And yet, according to Atlanta psychologist Mary Gresham, an impulsive individual with resources can become more of a problem for the rest of us. “They have a lot more money and a lot more access to powerful cars that are fast; to drugs and alcohol, because those things cost money,” she observed. “So, the extra resources that you have to live out your impulse control problems really create a problem.”

 

With that, “affluenza” achieved epidemic status. “Despite, or perhaps even because of, a vast wealth gap in this country, the affluenza disease is spreading among all socio-economic groups,” the psychiatrist Dale Archer wrote at the time. The evidence? Viral videos of Black Friday sales in which consumers literally come to blows over access to products; children so flush with Christmas toys that they “seem almost annoyed with all the unwrapping they have to do”; narcissism and a lack of empathy among the youngest generation as measured by the sort of social science that is so often stubbornly irreplicable.

 

The left soon came to see the symptoms associated with “affluenza” everywhere there was abundance. The military suffered from the condition, if only because the Pentagon was the largest nondiscretionary line item in the federal budget. White Americans, in general, were plagued by it. Suddenly, a progressive activist class that was all but universally enraged by the “affluenza” defense as a means by which the wealthy could evade consequences for their reckless behaviors discovered a use for this fake affliction. It justified the politics of privation and necessitated their preference for redistributionist fiscal policy. The malady we all suffer from may be undiagnosable, but its cure was clear: Americans must be made poorer.

 

It’s worth recalling this embarrassing intellectual dalliance today as the tendency that once consumed the left migrates to the American right.

 

The president’s supporters are engaged in a frenetic effort to establish a rationale for Trump’s tariff regime. They have little choice but to be entrepreneurial; the guidance they’ve received from the administration on that front is contradictory, unsatisfying, or downright insulting. Bereft of anything more logical, Trump’s acolytes have leaned into the notion that Americans would benefit from having less and being able to afford less.

 

The president himself lent ill-considered credence to this argument, one so clearly politically foolish that Trump’s more strategic subordinates shied away from it. Dan, Rich, and Jim have taken the president to task for contending that deprivation — if that’s a consequence of his tariff regime — is an endurable hardship that just might be good for your soul. They correctly establish a through-line from Trump’s rhetoric to the privation endorsed by progressives. That’s why the trajectory of the “affluenza” phenomenon is instructive.

 

The left was disinclined to embrace it as an excuse for the excesses of the wealthy, but it proved useful as a political argument: When their policies fail to produce the prosperity they promise, they pivot to blaming Americans for expecting prosperity. Indeed, perhaps prosperity is the real problem. They think they can convince others that their failures are not only intentional but desirable. In electoral terms, Democrats did not fare well in the mid-2010s, a time when so many of the party’s elected officials attempted to convince the public that economic malaise was the best the country could expect. Republicans should not succumb to a similar temptation.