Americans Are Tired of Choice

The Atlantic

6 days ago

Among President Donald Trump's lizard-brain intuitions is that Americans are overwhelmed by choice. This exhaustion is a strangely underexplored reason for his appeal; it may even help explain why his heavy use of executive power (verging on what some experts have no problem calling authoritarianism) is often met with shrugs and blank stares.
Just to take one surprising example: Last month, Trump swept away worries about his tariff war raising the cost of an array of consumer products by suggesting that children didn't need so many toys ('I don't think a beautiful baby girl needs—that's 11 years old—needs 30 dolls')—to which a chorus on the anti-consumerist left responded, Yeah, you're probably right. Although most observers interpreted Trump's comments as a gaffe (because what president since Jimmy Carter has suggested that Americans should scrimp?), the journalist Alissa Quart wrote that Trump had 'unwittingly' put his finger on a real problem, that 'American kids are being overly defined by material goods and they and we need to buy less.' Writing in Slate, Rebecca Onion, also holding her nose, admitted that 'American parenthood is an intense encounter with the excesses of the consumer economy, where the acquisition of stuff feels like it's not in your control.'
Much of Trump's schtick—the aspiration to wear a crown (literally), the assertion that ' I alone can fix it,' the ostentatious governing through reward and punishment—can be seen as a leader offering his subjects relief from the burden of making decisions. This is not to say that Trump has developed such a supreme case for himself as daddy, but rather that his popularity reveals the readiness of Americans to turn to one. The desire to have someone else choose might have to do with just how valueless our many options have become. Think of the expansive selection of 'mid' TV shows to pick from on Netflix, or the nearly infinite number of possible sexual partners that fly by on Tinder, or the agony of selecting a candidate at the polls (among either, usually, two flawed politicians or, as in New York City's ranked-choice Democratic primary, so many candidates that consensus feels unreachable).
The notion that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question has become something of a truism for liberals. But perhaps he is, in this unintended way, pointing us to the end of 'choice idolatry.' This is the phrase that the historian Sophia Rosenfeld uses in her recent book, The Age of Choice, which sets out to explain how freedom came to be synonymous with having an endless number of possible doors to open, and how wrapped up our sense of self is with the ability 'to make one's own personally satisfying choices, with a minimum of impediments, from among a range of options.' She uses idolatry for a distinct reason, suggesting that we might be reaching a golden-calf moment: As shiny and captivating as choice has been for so long, it is revealing itself as a hollow source of identity and a distraction from what really matters.
Rosenfeld, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, calls herself a ' historian of the taken-for-granted.' (A previous book of hers traced the history of common sense.) The presumption that freedom equals choice is the kind of fixed notion she is primed to deconstruct. To think of humans as a species that revels in possibility—unlike, say, anteaters or mice, who are not exactly seeking out novelty—seems self-evident. But Rosenfeld's book demonstrates just how recent and culturally constructed this definition is, a seeping consequence of social and psychological developments over the past 300 years that gradually saturated the way people came to see themselves.
Ceasing to think of freedom as the possession of many options would be no small rupture. What might take its place? Abandoning a consumerist worldview might not be the worst thing for humanity, and for Americans in particular—it might lead to a sturdier value system, maybe one more concerned with the common good. But the resulting vacuum could just as easily be filled by Trump's idea of freedom, one based on power and sovereignty over others, and on screwing the other guy before he screws you. The cruelty of this vision almost demands a reinvigoration of choice, an effort to salvage what had made this human impulse so liberating to begin with.
For Rosenfeld, the first inklings of our choosiness could be glimpsed in Western Europe in the late 17th century. Picture a woman walking into a store that sells calicos, which were ornamental pieces of cotton from India printed with varied and colorful designs of flowers, birds, and the like. These were some of the first pieces of frippery available, sold at a price point that made them accessible to more than just the rich. No longer was the act of buying goods one of provisioning, asking for flour or butter from behind the counter. Now the products were on display, Rosenfeld writes, 'hung from hooks inside shops or on the side of entranceways in enticing folds that stretched down to the floor in a simulation of women's copious skirts.' This was not mere sustenance; it was seduction.
During the century that followed, choice exploded. Soon, sales catalogs laying out the choicest wares were read for pleasure, presenting opportunities to fantasize. A new style of eating establishment, by the 1790s exemplified in the Parisian bistro, offered expanding menus of meats and sauces and drinks in hundreds of possible variations.
The habits of mind that formed around these activities altered the way people thought about their lives. This is Rosenfeld's central contention. But shopping was soon perceived to have a moral cost; it was seen, she writes, 'as emancipatory and as selfish and indulgent.' An anxiety attached itself to choice even as the rituals of consumption were becoming ingrained—the coveting, the browsing, the haggling, the price comparison.
Shopping guides emerged to help guard against making bad choices. The Tea Purchaser's Guide; or, The Lady and Gentleman's Tea Table and Useful Companion, in the Knowledge and Choice of Teas, authored anonymously by 'A Friend to the Public,' could be considered a kind of 18th-century Wirecutter. Such compendia were created to avoid choosing according to 'fancy' or 'whim,' two vices that made their appearance in novels of the time, as did a new stock female character: the coquette. This was the woman who exercises her power to choose by browsing extensively but also withholding a decision. She teases. As Rosenfeld emphasizes throughout her history, such excesses were often projected onto women, who were accused of causing 'social and moral decay' through their frivolity and unexpected economic power.
The shopping revolution was as significant as the more obvious political revolts that occurred around the same time. The philosophers of liberalism and the authors of new constitutions may have provided a language for talking about individual freedom, but it was the consumer's habit, in Rosenfeld's framing, that eventually trickled down and transformed political systems into expressions of personal preference.
Because of the dangers of unhindered possibility, the expansion of choice came with guardrails, rules meant to stave off anarchy and social disorder. The use of dance cards at 19th-century balls—another of Rosenfeld's charmingly idiosyncratic examples—expanded women's agency in choosing a mate. The little booklets allowed a woman to create a menu of options, but they also precluded a free-for-all—it was highly improper, for example, to dance with the same partner for more than a waltz or two.
With the introduction of the secret ballot, in the Yorkshire town of Pontrefract in 1872, choice idolatry conquered its last frontier: voting. No longer would elections be noisy, populous affairs in which candidates would treat voters to food and drink in a shared good time for all. No longer would political choice be the result of something like a public caucus, a ritual that mostly just codified already existing social alliances. The secret ballot began as an 'experiment,' as one local paper put it, in which one was to go 'alone and unbefriended to a compartment,' in the words of another, and indicate one's favored candidate. This solitary physical act soon became, Rosenfeld writes, 'what modern freedom is supposed to feel like.' The secret ballot became the most fundamental of rights in a democracy. Attention turned to the question of who should secure this right, and understandably so: Women and minority groups understood its power, even as an emblem (recall Afghan women in 2014 proudly raising their ink-stained fingers to indicate that they had taken part).
Yet even before that first ballot was shoved into a box, some saw the shift from the communal act of voting, messy as it had been, to the purely individual as carrying its own problems. Writing in 1861, John Stuart Mill, a champion of liberalism, worried about what would be let loose in the secrecy of the voting booth, where an elector might be encouraged to 'use a public function for his own interests, pleasures or caprice.' Voters would think of their choices as a way 'to please themselves,' or as an expression of their 'personal interests, or class interest, or some mean feeling in his own mind.' The whole process, Mill argued, would move voting away from a referendum on a community's values and toward an act of whimsy, like browsing from an array of calico clothes.
The 20th century only further solidified the idea of choice as the paramount freedom, which also meant shedding some of the guardrails of earlier eras. Many economists came to perceive an individual as the sum of their preferences, a choosing machine, Homo economicus, acting rationally and always maximizing the collective good through their own self-interest. The celebration of market-based individualism hit a peak when Milton Friedman's neoliberalism triumphed in the 1980s. Friedman once wrote that 'the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.'
At the same time, paradoxically, the 20th century provided much reason for skepticism about how much control humans really have over their choices. Freud revealed the subterranean sources of our desires; advertisers manipulate our taste for breakfast cereals as well as presidents. In this century, at least to a behavioral psychologist such as the late Daniel Kahneman, even the question of free will seems unsettled. This insecurity is particularly glaring in a world of proliferating algorithms that serve us more of what they predict we will want and AIs that offer to do the thinking for us.
If choice is the 'useless and exhausted idiom' that Rosenfeld suggests it might be by the end of her history, then maybe the concept is worth abandoning altogether. Doing so, she writes, would be akin to asking 'if we are done with capitalism and democracy and their special offspring, human rights'—if we are ready, that is, to throw out the dominant principle of the contemporary world.
I don't think we are. But if choice has indeed become an end unto itself, absent a set of principles for actually making choices, then something has gone awry.
Abortion rights is a telling test case. In the late 1960s, feminists began using the slogan 'My Body, My Choice' to argue for the legalization of abortion in order to make it seem to be a self-evident right: Americans would never stand in the way of freedom, and to be free was to have choices. But what is clearer now, after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is that the pro-choice argument was fragile. It gave conservatives the chance to challenge the consumerist-sounding appeal to 'choice' with the more moral-sounding appeal of 'life.' But even more damning are critiques of this framing from the left. The decision to rely on 'choice,' Rosenfeld writes, made access to abortion 'solely a civil right, a right to fulfill individual desires without government interference, not a social or economic right framed in response to essential needs or a matter of social justice.' She explains that this made abortion seem like 'something for sale exclusively to those who had the resources—financial, familial, and psychological—to select it in a reproductive marketplace.'
Is it possible to make an argument for abortion without resorting to choice idolatry? I began to hear an inkling of this possibility during the recent presidential campaign. Access to abortion was presented not as a matter of personal bodily autonomy but as a public-health concern. In one memorable speech, Michelle Obama painted a dire picture of what would happen to women if, because of abortion bans, they didn't get 'the care' they needed; to the male partners of these women, she said, 'You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.' Kamala Harris, in her one debate with Trump, also turned to images of medical distress—of 'pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room.' Rather than appealing to women's personal agency, Harris invoked other values: communal care and well-being.
What I picked up in this tonal shift was a realization among liberals, conscious or not, that just arguing for having choices was not enough. It matters how you choose and what you choose. What matters is the moral choice in question, the stakes—in this case, what we value more: the health and happiness of the mother, or the existence of her fetus.
This is a harder debate to have, and it demands making a more profound argument than one simply in favor of choice, but it is also more rewarding. In his 1946 lecture 'Existentialism Is a Humanism,' Jean-Paul Sartre compared making moral choices to 'the construction of a work of art.' The decisions you make at every juncture are what make you. This is as true of a person's life as it is of a society. 'Freedom could be reconfigured as the chance to do what one ought rather than simply what one desired,' Rosenfeld writes. Releasing ourselves from choice idolatry doesn't have to mean letting someone else—an imperial president, for instance—decide for us. It means separating good choices from bad, understanding these categories as the ones that matter, delineating them alongside our fellow citizens. This, rather than just being drunk on options, should be the sweet slog of modernity.