[Angelo Matera 02/28 10:18 AM]Rod, as someone who has worked in marketing for 25 years, and co-founded a leading marketing company, I can tell you from the inside that the nihilism Kristol described is now the official ideology of our business culture. Government has little to do with it. The ideology of Consumerism is taught in our MBA programs. It’s commerce plus relativism — the “Naked Marketplace.” And since the business of America is business (especially since 1980), Consumerism now defines mainstream American life.
While Marxism squashed human subjectivity in the name of “objectivity,” today’s business culture exploits human subjectivity to deny objective reality, to sell the experience of “choice” as the path to happiness. And as the theologian William T. Cavanaugh has said, it isn’t even about the “stuff” that we buy anymore — we don’t have time to use it all (hence TV shows like “Clean Sweep”). It’s more about shopping than about buying. It’s the logical result of Cartesianism — the mind-body split. Consumerism takes place almost solely in our minds — how else could we justify buying so much more than we could ever actually use?
The system is not run by bad people — on the contrary, they/we are the nicest people who’ve ever lived (as Flannery O’Conner said, today we feel more, but see less). Today’s business environment is a very nice, humanitarian place, staffed by what Robert Reich called “Symbolic Analysts,” experts at developing, marketing and analyzing products and services based on the soft manipulation of people’s psychic needs and desires. They operate without objective parameters for judging whether a product or an advertising message will harm the “good of the person” or the social fabric of society (other than the obvious — no racism, sexism, etc.). I know — I’m one of them.
If you want to understand consumerism, pick up the The Sims, the #1 best-selling game of all time, a computer simulation that shows consumer life at its purest.
Or consider that Anheuser-Busch is developing its own TV channel — Bud TV. It will create programming for which the underlying motivation will be to sell beer. Maybe it will have its own news channel? More and more, our creative content — movies, magazines, etc — are mere vehicles for marketing. The examples are endless.
Christians and other people of faith should be the ones to address this, but as you point out, our faith has been privatized. Aside from Alasdair McIntyre, the leading exponent of this thesis is Prof. David Schindler:
“Americans are privately very religious, but then in public we all agree to subscribe to the virtues that make us good democrats and good free marketeers, so that faith becomes essentially a fragmented, private reality. In effect, we're private theists and public atheists.”
Putting the toothpaste back in the tube will be very difficult. 
