America's Age of Individualism
Political scientist, scholar, founding Editor of National Affairs and author Yuval Levin does not believe that nostalgia for mid-20th century America is a solution to the problems in present-day politics. Levin's fine new book, "The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism" (Basic Books, 2016), weaves political philosophy with historical analysis to rebuke the competing liberal and conservative nostalgias that polarize our political discourse. Peter Berkowitz, writing for RealClearPolitics, says that Levin "presents a deft diagnosis of our predicament and outlines a package of reforms that takes seriously American circumstances and American character." RealClearBooks spoke with Yuval Levin about his book.
Q: You state in the book that both the Right and the Left bear responsibility for the current state of political polarization and government paralysis. Please explain.
Yes, the book begins by considering the sources of the extraordinary frustration and paralysis that have overcome our politics in this century. It argues that American political life today is intensely nostalgic—that both parties suggest that America not so long ago had the recipe for success but gave it up, and that we could now simply recapture it and replay our past glory.
Republicans and Democrats do this in different ways of course. The Left wishes it was always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state could answer our every concern, the Right wishes it was always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution could be the cure for what ails us, and they have both decided to just pretend that things are as they wish they were. And so again and again they have asked voters to treat elections as choices between re-running the 60s and the 80s. That makes for political debates that are disconnected from reality—they ignore how our country has changed over the decades, and so they ignore both our strengths and our weaknesses and they don’t speak to the problems people actually confront.
Those problems are a function of how American life has been transformed. Over the past half century, we have gone from a society dominated by a few large institutions—big government, big business, big labor, all working together to manage the country—to a society with many more but smaller players and niches and grooves. In economics and in the culture, we now have vastly more options and choices, but less predictability and security. More diversity but less unity. More dynamism but less stability. Everything can be personalized, but we have less in common. We’ve been fractured and fragmented. And the real question our politics needs to confront is how to use the strengths of this fragmented and fractured but diverse and dynamic society to address its weaknesses. The failure to see that, and do that, is certainly bipartisan.
Q: Just because one looks back on earlier eras and realizes their cultural, societal and economic achievements does that mean he or she is guilty of selective nostalgia? Couldn't the country -- and the current generation of lawmakers and political leaders -- benefit from this kind of historical perspective?
Obviously learning from history, and even some nostalgia for certain peaks of achievement in our national life, is both appropriate and necessary. As the political theorist Peter Lawler put it recently, “all reputable social and political analysis deploys selective nostalgia.” The trouble is that ours is frequently selective in the wrong ways, and is so intense as to be blinding.
There is certainly a lot to miss about mid-20th-century America. It was an exceptionally cohesive, unified society that offered a lot of economic opportunity and featured extraordinary cultural stability. We should miss those things. The trouble is that we need to find ways to achieve those things in 21st century America, and our intense nostalgia keeps us from seeing that this will require different strategies than the ones that worked half a century ago precisely because of the changes our society has undergone since then.
Midcentury America offered a stable backdrop for different kinds of liberalization—be it cultural liberalization or free market economics. That liberalization has now been advancing for decades, so we don’t have that stable backdrop anymore. To advance opportunity and security and unity now would mean pursuing those goals as the fractured and diverse society we are. And that would take a different strategy—a strategy that puts decentralization, or subsidiarity, at the center of our thinking about politics. Our nostalgia keeps us from seeing that, so for all that it can teach us it does have to be overcome.
Q: Subsidiarity is at the core of your vision for revitalizing the political landscape, and the republic. Why is this organizational principle key?
Subsidiarity argues for allowing power and authority to reside as close to the level of the interpersonal community as possible. It argues for a default preference for decentralization, for the local and near-at-hand over the distant and far-off centralized power center. It’s an essential principle for public policy in 21st century America for two reasons above all, I think.
First, it’s a better way to solve problems in our time. In a vast, fragmented society, the challenges people face in different circumstances are going to look different, and it makes more sense for solutions to arise from the bottom up than from the top down: Those kinds of solutions will be better adapted to the problems people face, better adapted for trial and error, and better able to offer people choices rather than force their hands. That’s often how the modern, post-industrial economy functions—by giving people choices and options and letting their decision shape vast systems rather than the other way around.
And second, it’s a better fit for our system of government. Federalism has often been the way that Americans have dealt with the challenges posed by our diversity and fragmentation. We’ve done less of that under the influence of progressivism, which has argued that the complexity of modern life required administrative centralization and the nationalization of policy. But it is increasingly apparent that this kind of centralization is not actually effective in addressing contemporary America’s challenges—indeed that precisely because of the complexity of our postmodern life, centralization will not do. As ever, conservatives should help the country see how a recurrence to the enduring principles of our constitutional system can function as a form of modernization.
Q: You encourage a revival of the model of community, but how realistic is that when not only the republic, but society in general places such a high value on individualism and is fractured into myriad small interest groups whose members seek out only people who think or do as they do?
Radical individualism and a kind of centralization in government actually go hand in hand much of the time. They reinforce each other and make each other necessary. They are not two alternatives, they are two sides of one coin. The alternative is an emphasis on the institutions that stand between the individual and the state: the family, community, religious groups, civil society, labor and business organizations, schools, and more. To draw people back into such institutions, it’s crucial to allow those institutions to matter—rather than having government crowd them out and make them less relevant. With more of an emphasis on local, bottom-up solutions, public policy in areas like welfare, health care, education, transportation, and more can help reinforce these mediating institutions, and at the very least can avoid crowding them out quite as much. There’s no question that both our inclination to extreme individualism and our inclination to administrative centralization undermine the work of civil society and community institutions. There’s no simple solution to that. But to revitalize those institutions, we can begin by opening up the space for them to matter.
Q: Aren't you -- in popular parlance -- kicking the can down the road, by stating in the conclusion of your book that achieving the kinds of policy reforms you suggest "will be the work of the coming generation"? Why will its members succeed when the current generation hasn't -- and why will it even think that there must be the kind of fundamental change you espouse?
To say this is the work of the coming generation is to say that this is the work that must begin now but will take many years to come to fruition. It’s our work, our challenge.
It will take time to bear fruit because the kind of modernized ethic of subsidiarity that I’m proposing would not yield a radical revolution in American life but an incremental revival. And it would not involve a checklist of public programs and policy steps. It would begin, instead, with an instinct for decentralization in our public affairs, a tendency toward experimentation and bottom up problem-solving, a greater patience for variety in our approaches to social and economic problems and priorities, more room for ingenuity and tolerance for trial and error, and more freedom for communities to live out their moral ideals and so to each define freedom a little differently.
It would involve greater attentiveness to the near at hand, and so a lesser emphasis on immense national battles—lowering the stakes, and therefore the temperature, of our national politics. It would surely bring much change to the institutions of our entitlement state and welfare system over time, but by enabling salutary competition rather than replacing one set of centralizing assumptions with another. It would, in other words, work to turn our very fracture and diversity into tools for addressing some of their own worst consequences. That’s not the work of one year or one election cycle. But it’s the work we must begin.
