Barzun used “decadent” to refer to a world that was “falling off,” full of earthly delights but restless, stagnant, lacking a sense of adventure—en route to Hyper-Commodified Casino Capitalism. Douthat told me that by his definition, Vegas is actually less decadent than much of the United States. “It’s a place where people are always building new things like the Sphere, right? That does not happen in the rest of America.” But “compared to the dynamism of Hoover Dam, Manhattan Project–era America, it still has to be understood as decadent.”
