MixedLos Angeles Review of Books... occasionally smart but mostly unhelpful ... The evidence marshaled for...claims is as familiar as the problems themselves. Douthat mainly does the work of yoking everything together in one narrative, though he does not claim that the problems he addresses share a single cause or solution ... There’s something for everyone to agree with, here, as well as to disagree with ... the political and economic sections are the strongest: big, serious topics get big, serious treatment. But they have the unfortunate effect of making Douthat’s treatment of culture look silly. His reading of literature is often shockingly bland and bereft of insight ... The whole section on culture fails in this way ... It gets us no closer to understanding why many of these societal problems exist, and certainly doesn’t help us find solutions to them ... If this kind of armchair chaos-theorizing tell us anything useful, or anything we don’t already know, it’s about the author. Not wanting to be proven wrong, Douthat anticipates everything and nothing. It’s the only option for a writer who wants to predict the future without looking stupid.
