Is America Entering an Age of Unfreedom?

Weekly Column

Two recent statistics struck me as particularly alarming:

• 52% of Americans aged 18 to 29 were living with one or both parents during the pandemic,

• and, more recently, according to Bloomberg, 60% of Gen Zers and millennials reported moving back home in the past two years.

The economic explanation is straightforward: everything is expensive. But shifts of this scale have enormous political consequences, geopolitical even, as they fundamentally reshape the conditions in which people first experience two major elements of political life: authority and governance.

In fact, Anglo-American societies developed unusually strong traditions of individual freedom alongside an equally unusual family structure. The English historian Peter Laslett called this the “Western family pattern.” By examining parish registers, household listings, and population records from 16th- and 17th-century England, he showed that this pattern existed well before industrialization. Young people often left their parents years before marriage to work in another household. Marriage came relatively late, and married couples generally established their own households instead of remaining within a multigenerational family home.

A good example comes from a 16th-century English village. A farming household might include not only parents and their children, but several unrelated teenagers or young adults. They were called “servants,” who were the children of other farming families who had temporarily left their own homes to work for wages. A farmer’s 16-year-old son or daughter, for example, might leave their parents, move several villages away, and spend a few years working in another household. They each would later marry and establish households of their own. Historians such as Peter Laslett and Richard Wall refer to this period between leaving the parental household and marriage as “life-cycle service.”

This created a distinct period between childhood and marriage. By his early 20s, a young Englishman might already have spent years earning wages, living among strangers, going on adventures, changing employers, and moving between communities and villages. Independence (in the modern sense) was, therefore, experienced well before the formation of a family of one’s own.

Yet the deeper significance of life-cycle service, as historian Alan Macfarlane has argued, lay in teaching the young to prize freedom of thought and freedom of action. These values later formed the basis for liberalism as a political doctrine. Another important aspect of this is that once the extended family no longer structured most of adult life, other relationships became essential, such as the ones with the church or with various employers, which paves the way for an individualistic society that requires people to cooperate with those to whom they are neither related nor permanently bound. There are other important factors, naturally, such as rural and land reforms. Still, there is clearly something to the relationship between family structure and the political dispositions a society develops over time.

The Russian peasant household offers, for example, a revealing contrast to the English. Into the 19th century, a household could consist of an elderly father as well as several married sons, their wives, and their children, functioning as a single socio-economic unit. Marriage in that context didn’t necessarily end or start parental authority, since a man could become a husband and father while remaining subordinate to the head of the larger household.

French historian Emmanuel Todd argued that the Russian peasant family structure “habituated” generations to a particular combination: relative equality among brothers under strong vertical authority. Habituation here refers to how, long before political doctrines enter the picture, family life teaches people which forms of objects and subjects of authority are normal and which are not. Communism, in that sense, introduced a political order whose underlying structure was not entirely unfamiliar to Russians.

The Middle East presents another variation. In parts of Arabia, the family extended well beyond the household, linking several generations and branches of kin into networks that also shaped economic and political life. For instance, fathers, sons, and uncles provided one another not only with capital but also with political access. What is often called “tribalism” grew partly from these networks of “trust,” especially where formal institutions were weak, compromised, or absent.

In many ways, the lives of peasants in England and Russia, as well as traditional households in the Middle East, illustrate the same point: The family is an early school of authority. Repeated across generations, its patterns of dependence, autonomy, and obligation enter a long process of habituation, gradually forming social expectations and the cultural ground on which political doctrines can later take root. Across centuries, arrangements of family life can pass into a society’s political inheritance.

This is why the growing number of young Americans who remain in their parents’ home deserves more attention. A prolonged adolescence under family protection delays a more fundamental passage into adulthood: drawing a boundary between oneself and others, forming judgments apart from the household, bearing the consequences of one’s choices, and discovering the limits and extent of one’s own authority. For much of Anglo-American history, these were formative experiences of adult life.

Freedom, too, is partly a matter of habitus. As the social arrangements that once accustomed Americans to independence recede, the political culture they sustained will eventually follow.