A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

by Yuval Levin

A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions





Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse.




Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation.




As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Cultural, Political Science, Audiobook, Current Affairs

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 2020

About the author

American political analyst, public intellectual, academic and journalist. His areas of specialty include health care, entitlement reform, economic and domestic policy, science and technology policy, political philosophy, and bioethics.
He is the founding editor of National Affairs, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing editor of National Review and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.
Levin was vice president and Hertog Fellow of Ethics and Public Policy Center, executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics, Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President George W. Bush and contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. Prior to that he served as a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.
He holds a BA from American University and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently heard this author speaking on NPR, then followed up with a longer interview on a podcast. Intrigued, I bought his book and enjoyed it. It's not long (a little more than 200 pages). My only complaint is that it was a bit too general. I would have liked to seen more specific examples of the phenomena that author described to well: the failure of institutions.

What institutions, you ask? The family. The church. The government. Civic and civil groups. The media. Colleges and universities. The military. His work reminded me a little bit of Robert Putnam's seminal Bowling Alone in that both writers discussed the negative consequences of isolation and the concurrent loss of social capital. In Levin's case, the author discussed how the loss of the formative power of institutions has left our nation a weaker and lonelier place.

I was reading this book during the week of February 6th, 2020 when President Donald Trump was acquitted by the United States Senate on two charges, as was allowed to remain in office rather than be removed due to impeachment. As luck would have it, the President also delivered his third State of the Union address the day before the end of the Senate trial (which everyone knew would go his way). Before the State of the Union, two new representatives (a part of what's called 'the Squad') very publicly announced that they would not be attending. President Trump then refused to shake the hand of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who--at the end of Trump's remarks--ripped up a copy of his speech in front of the cameras. All of these examples are the performative virtue signalling that the author so presciently described. Rather than comport themselves to the norms of the institution in which they serve--the White House, the House of Representatives, the federal government-- everyone involved used their position to grandstand and draw attention to themselves. It was all so very undignified and petty. Embarrassing, really.

Reading this book gave me some perspective about the institutions that I have belonged to, and continue to belong to. While Americans are wildly independent people, the author argues that we are actually better off when we are formed, and tempered, and supported, by our membership in institutions. I have found this to be true for myself, certainly. I have been blessed with a wonderful family, I am a veteran of the United States Navy, and I am a person who can't seem to shake the whole Catholic thing. These three institutions have helped to turn me into the man that I am today. Other institutions--my college, for example, or the public schools where I have worked--did not, and have not, had that same effect. Perhaps that's partly my fault for not embracing the ethos of these places more intentionally. Or, maybe, there is not real ethos to comport to since, as public institutions, they cannot take strong moral stances.

This is a good book. 4/5 stars because I would have liked more examples. It has certainly given me a lot to think about. As I read, the phrase 'ordered liberty' kept coming into my mind. Seems appropriate.

[Allen Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levin is more conservative than I am, so I did not agree with all his points here, but, as I am a reasonable human being and not a chronically online echo chamber zombie, I can appreciate a ton of what he's saying, the main point being:

we've decided, as a society, that institution are no longer formative, but instead PERformative, meaning we no longer expect our institutions to MOLD and FORM us as people but instead USE institutions as platforms for us to perform on.

I'm reminded of Senator Bell from the Emperor's Club when Hundert tells him it's Hundert's job to mold his son's character. The senator replies, "What? God, no! You will not mold my son. Your job is to teach him his times tables. Who did what to whom and where. But you will not mold my boy. I will mold him."

Ok, senator. That's why your son is a douchebag.

[Gordon Larsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the past several years I've read a handful of books that have offered some really perceptive insights into what's wrong with American society right now. I especially learned a lot from Ben Sasse's "Them" and Sebastian Junger's "Tribe". Yuval Levin's "A Time to Build" is even better. Everyone should read it, even those not really interested in politics.

Levin points out that while Americans are richer than ever and while all signs point to a very successful economy, we all seem to be aware that there is something rotting within the core of America; we just can't put our finger on what is wrong. As many others have already done, Levin correctly diagnoses our social isolation, loneliness, polarization, populism, etc. These are important symptoms, but a more proximate cause is the increasing weakness of our institutions—Congress and the presidency, but also the media, business, academia, doctors and hospitals, organized religion, civic institutions, the family, and more. He points to the stark decline in trust in these institutions, starting in the 1970's until now. The only institution that bucks the trend is the military, which has increased in trust over that time period.

Levin describes the ways that well functioning institutions serve to give us purpose, to form us by giving us specific roles, to expose us to divergent views, constrain our behavior in healthy ways, and more:

"Most institutions—and not just at the familial, communal, or local level—are in effect small ponds in which individual members can be big fish. We can be known and appreciated, we can be missed when we are absent, we can take part in the sort of interpersonal politics that we all like to complain about but actually enjoy and need: office politics, club politics, school politics. Each institution provides a place where everybody knows your name, your quirks and your strengths and weaknesses . . . You can be acknowledged for the part you play in making the larger whole a success. You can be appreciated for integrity and responsibility—loved for your virtues, and not just noticed but recognized." (pg. 177)

He suggests that in many ways institutions have become warped and rather than helping form and shape us they are now platforms on which we perform.

"When we don't think of our institutions as formative but as performative—when the presidency and Congress are just stages for political performance art, when a university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling, when journalism is indistinguishable from activism—they become harder to trust. They aren't really asking for our confidence, just for our attention." (pg. 34)

Levin links the undermining of institutions to the "revolt against expertise" which causes "a growing inability to agree on what is true, or to distinguish fact from fiction."

He talks extensively about social media. He acknowledges some of the potential for good, but his criticism is eloquent and cutting. He discusses the ways "platforms intended to help people come together have often pulled us apart", the way social media robs our personal interactions of depth, and by feeding us what an algorithm thinks we want robs us of the "miracle of serendipitous learning: finding ourselves exposed to knowledge or opinion or wisdom or beauty that we did not seek out and would never have known to expect." He also points out how social media erodes the "inner life" of both individuals and institutions. In fact, he puts his finger on something that has troubled me for a long time, and which any of us on social media surely recognize in ourselves:

"By letting us carefully curate the image of ourselves available to others, social media encourages us to think of ourselves as living performatively. As we are experiencing an important milestone in our lives, or just enjoying a beautiful day with family or friends, a great many of us find ourselves thinking about how to capture this moment for Instagram or Facebook. As we undergo some mass experience of tragedy or joy or surprise, we work to convey an appealing image of ourselves experiencing it. . . The platforms of social media offer each of us the means and the incentives to act as a celebrity before our own circle of followers. As a result, we sometimes find it hard to really feel like we are living our lives unless we know others are watching us live them." (pgs. 132-133)

Also, "social media platforms have undercut our social lives. They plainly encourage the vices most dangerous to a free society. They drive us to speak without listening, to approach others confrontationally rather than graciously, to spread conspiracies and rumors, to dismiss and ignore what we would rather not hear, to make the private public, to oversimplify an complex world, to react to one another much too quickly and curtly. They eat away at our capacity for patient toleration, our decorum, our forbearance, our restraint." (pg. 135)

He has similar incisive observations about the problems in journalism, academia, religion, and other institutions that have eroded trust, cost the institutions their "inner life" and made them performative rather than formative.

Levin has some really beautiful advice about how to rebuild and strengthen our institutions by making them more trustworthy and valuable to those who would belong to them. Most of his advice boils down to us doing our small part to "inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well." He suggests "the simplest way is for the people who inhabit our institutions—that is, all of us—to be more trustworthy. We can each work at that." (pg. 200)

"We don't have to figure out how everyone might do this; we just have to do it ourselves. You and I. We can do it in small ways—in thinking about how to use our time and energy, how to pursue our goals, how to judge success and failure, how to identify ourselves when people ask us who we are, how to measure our responsibilities. Approaching the social crisis of our time through the lens of institutions gives us all something to do by giving us each something to do." (pg. 201)

It's a marvelous book.

[Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book reminds me of why I am a conservative. Levine highlights the best of the Burkean tradition to propose a the solution to the societal fragmentation that we are experiencing today.

In many ways, this book also builds on observations made by Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone”. The institutions upon which a well-ordered society is built are fragmenting. This is in part due to the hyper-individualism of our time, which is in part due to the natural trajectory of liberalism.

What we need is not a revolution so much as institutional reform and renewal. Institutions are what form citizens to be virtuous and productive members of society. They are also the places where community is built and isolation is kept at bay.

The challenge to the reader is to think about how we engage with our societies core institutions (e.g. the family, church, schools, the profession, and politics) and to risk trusting them again in the hopes of coming back together as a culture. I don’t think this is THE answer, but I think it is definitely one of the most important.

This work draws together thinking that I have followed in the above mentioned Edmund Burke and Robert Putnam, but also contains threads of influences (whether intentional or not) of thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, Abraham Kuyper, David Brooks, and James K. A. Smith.

Absolutely loved it!

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yuval Levin digs deeper into what he explored in his book ‘The Fractured Republic.’ He speaks my institutional love language. Keen analysis on some of the cultural fracture we’re observing and how institutions are becoming more platforms rather than molds of character. Problems today, he argues, are a sign of the excesses of institutional weakness. At their best, though, institutions ought to embody a formative ethic (not a performative one)—they make people more trustworthy. Several striking insights—like how the RCC is marked by a corrosive insiderism whereas evangelicalism, he says, is marked by a corrosive outsiderism (think Falwell Jr.).

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

The election of Trump occasioned a strange new genre in conservative commentary. The US is led by a corrupt gameshow host, & buffoonish authoritarians hold sway in many other nations. The rot in US society & its capacities has become undeniable, as the government does little against or exacerbates crises of ecology, health & mental well-being, & sustainable employment, which all contribute to cultural outcomes conservatives claim to abhor. A few game conservatives like Jordan Peterson & J. D. Vance still prescribe bootstrapping for people suffering from these crisis, but it’s patently insufficient. So, conservatives must rediscover the hoary old internet cliché that ‘we live in a society tho’ & pivot from austerity politics & the joys of self-reliance to assays into social analysis & reform proposals beyond slashing higher-earner & corporate tax rates & bemoaning individual life choices.

An example of this conservative pivot to social analysis & reform is the Seattlite president of a conservative think tank convincing liberal wonk outlet Vox to produce his self-titled vanity podcast, The Arthur Brooks Show, internet audio filled w/ celebration of Brooks’s own deliberative virtue & anodyne analogies of US partisan polarization to a failing marriage. In season 1, episode 7 of the show, we finally, after all the bad background music & earnest talk, reach the inane point: healing polarization requires viewpoint diversity on US college campuses. &, I thought liberal academics had an inflated sense of universities' importance! My contempt for this as analysis or policy is capacious, yet I genuinely admire how Brooks grifted one of the most annoying & pretentious liberal media sites to produce & publish this show, which basically climaxes its first season by advocating a Koch-funded center on every campus.

Unlike Brooks podcasting marriage counseling to our two-party system, one must at least credit Yuval Levin’s Time to Build: From Family & Community to Congress & Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream w/ understanding society exceeds the mere aggregation of individuals. Instead of aggregation, Levin analyzes mediation, specifically the mediation of institutions. Institutions, in Levin’s account, are weakening & losing their formative capacities to mold individuals. These malformed individuals lack proper loyalty to the institution as anything other than a platform for self-aggrandizement, which creates a vicious cycle where poorly functioning or selfishly used institutions further weaken in the public eye, allowing greater individual capture of institutions, & so on.

Conceptually, Levin’s vicious dialectic of individuals-institutions-society is intriguing. His focus on social form in interviews & the constructive rhetoric of the book’s main title, Time to Build, drew me in, for it recalls one of last year’s best left books (a book I was lucky to read alongside works by Jodi Dean, Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin, Martine Rothblott, & Eliane Glaser), Anna Kornbluh Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, & Social Space, which is scintillating case for attention to form as necessary for reviving literary study & critical theory as we seek to build social forms adequate for life in an era of crises. However, the important distinction between Levin’s & Kornbluh’s concept of form or institution is not just avowed politics, but the sophistication of Kornbluh’s conception of form, which understands form as antagonistic & malleable, while Levin downplays institutional antagonism beyond a mere dialectic of institutional loyalty & individual selfishness, which locks him into a moralistic binary where the only change institutions might have are positive rededications or negative selfish declines.

Levin’s focus on moralism, necessarily freighted w/ the individualism he deplores, becomes a backdoor to smuggle in opposition to democracy, as his most substantive policies generally are calls for strengthening institutions by reducing democracy & transparency, especially in the context of Congress & political parties. Levin is little concerned about the institutions & forms of our politics: relatively little space is spent on the government, perhaps because conservatives have scored large victories on that front ever since the Reagan Revolution. Much more space is spent about areas supposedly hegemonic in their liberalism: the media, social media, the academy, supposedly ‘woke’ corporations, & the nuclear family breakdown. Although, I would never deny that media & the academy do face real problems of credibility & sustainability capped off by those institutions’ tepid centrism & hollow genuflections to identity politics, one cannot help shake the feeling that Levin’s calls for ‘renewal’, like Brooks’s, entail a conservative cultural revolution to dedemocratize already fairly undemocratic institutions. &, of course, the phrases ‘union’ only appears twice in the book, ‘family policy’ not at all. If conservatives are serious about reversing familial decline in the US, then, like some on the left, they need to talk unionization & redistributions—tax credits, like this book, are a poor attempt to grapple w/ the scope of what our moment of crises requires.

[Joseph Reynolds · Rating 2 out of 5]

Levin examines some of our institutions and finds them wanting.
Levin says we should restore our institutions.
Not a lot other than that. He dives into why journalism, religion, higher education, politics are failing us. Instinctively, we know all that. You already instinctively know everything in this book. He does occasionally have some aha insights. But there are no prescriptions. There are no solutions other than a woolly 'let's be better'.

The book was disappointing, and even Levin seems to know he is just curling around in a circle or constantly asking 'chicken or egg?'

He's a good writer. But can't recommend.

[Davis Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. Good message. But you can probably get the gist by reading a Levin essay on the topic as opposed to an entire book.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I was choosing a benevolent dictator, I think Yuval Levin would be my choice. Brilliant, deep and balanced. If you want to better understand where we are as a country and what we can do to change for the better, read this book. It is insightful, challenging, and yet ultimately hopeful.

tl/dr --> We need to commit to rebuilding institutions that are formative nor performative; that form us rather than giving us a platform to raise our profile and become a celebrity.

This is not a partisan message or book. Readers of all perspectives can and should read and think about the issues Levin raises.

[Julie Masson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a good read. I feel like I need to write a paper on it to really process what I learned. The idea that we've viewed institutions in our society as platforms for us rather than a way to mold and form us was so good. The question, "what does my position require in this moment?" is a good one to ask. My favorite chapters were the ones on social media (practically highlighted the entire chapter!) and the university.

[Taylor Barkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main thesis is summarized in a sentence. Maybe if I had read this book right when it came out it would have been better because the points by now are almost mainstream. Very short on solutions.

[Todd Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as Jerry Falwell Jr. was getting drunk with his wife's assistant on Yacht paid for by the beneficiaries of his Christian University's nascar sponsorship deal.

With that as the backdrop I can't really argue against Levin's the central theme. His theme is that institutions are failing to shape the individuals in those institutions (think liberty university making good god-fearing capable intellectuals and leaders). Instead, institutions are used as platforms by their leaders to pontificate in the culture war. As the leaders engage in the culture war they neglect the their institutions and often don't adhere to values the institution stand for (see Jerry Falwell Jr. instagram). As a result public trust in institutions decays and we are left with a destructive nihilism prevalent today. Levin points out this trend in institutions throughout society: Politics, media, church, academia, family, etc.

His solution is a call to action to revive institutions. He is asking all of us to be institutional insiders and make our institutions better by asking "what is my role here?" Not clear to me that this will be enough to fix a lot of society's disfunction but it can't hurt and sure we should try it.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levin writes “We all require formation, and the weak are often oppressed by the strong. But which is the primary problem? Which would need to be taken first in order to enable us to address the other?”

I need more that answers this question. Because I find Levin’s institutionally-based conservatism appealing. Until I remember that halfway down nytimes.com this morning was a story about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery who was gunned down while jogging. Need I say he was black?

How do we rebuild institutions that are built on so rotten a foundation as the subjugation of human beings? I disclaim that revolution is not my goal (but isn’t it in the DNA of this nation?) but truly - how are we to reform institutions we are locked out of?

I appreciated Levin’s pro-institution approach, how he charitably speaks of his ideological opposition.

I was taught to be conservative, and I lean that way in some respects. But the cognitive dissonance isn’t going away, and I want to know, honestly, if conservatism is only available those with privilege.

The conversation in this book is important, and I want more, and a response from the progressive side.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an effort by a conservative political thinker to steer the U.S. conservative movement towards a more positive agenda. I wanted to like this much more than I did because, though I don't consider myself politically conservative, I like the idea of a conservative movement with positive political and social aims. The book is based on an entirely valid observation but author Yuval Levin doesn't actually use it to create the positive agenda that he says he desires. In fact, he seems to fall right into the trap from which he says he wants to rescue others, which is the tendency to identify problems without articulating a plausible solution. Even more frustrating is that while Levin's premise appears to be that it is time for our politics to pivot to something more productive, he drifts into a very conventional conservative political rhetoric that blames the decline of traditional institutions on individuality.

Levin's main theory is that the social and political discord in the U.S. is caused primarily by the decay of political institutions such as the Congress and the mainstream press and social institutions such as the family and the professions. Levin believes that these institutions "form" or develop citizens and leaders and constrain their behavior in ways that produce a more harmonious society. The authority of these institutions has been diluted by individuality, transparency (mostly via social media), and (in some cases) the demands of activists. Without the authority to form and vet people, we get leaders who are poorly prepared and, in many cases, totally self-absorbed. Levin offers absolutely no ideas at all about how to strengthen "institutions" so that we start getting better leaders.

There's some truth to Levin's theory that many traditional social and political institutions have been weakened over the last several decades. It is also true that the politicians' ability to appeal directly to the public has been a major factor that has weakened institutions such as the mainstream press, political parties, and the Congress. The problem with this book is that rather than offering an incisive analysis of why those institutions are weaker, Levin simply drifts into a very standard conservative argument against individuality. For Levin, the problem with political institutions isn't the loss of local media, secretive political campaign funding, deceptive advertising, and partisan media (all of which have been nurtured by the American Right); rather, the problem is that the people who make up those institutions are too ambitious and and individualistic. They have imbibed liberal ideas of individuality and don't respect those institutions. The problem, Levin says, is that our political and social institutions lack authority over people. Oh, and computers and liberal university administrators are causing problems too.

Levin's ideas about the current state of American political institutions are based almost entirely on nostalgia rather than actual historical facts. That's a big problem. His analysis of the institutional decay of the U.S. Congress basically concludes that the problem with Congress is that there's too much transparency (such as cameras in the chambers). While it is true that the transparency has resulted in more public involvement in policymaking, perhaps the institutional failure is that there were not additional reforms that would allow for productive policymaking in a transparent system. Levin doesn't seem to know or care what gives an institution "authority." Authority is based on trust and legitimacy, not just brute power over individual members. Transparency, which Levin thinks is bad, is supposed to improve trust and legitimacy in institutions, thus enhancing their authority.

Another thing that helps institutions retain authority is their ability to reform themselves and to hold members -particularly leaders- accountable for failure. Perhaps the crisis in our institutions isn't due to the fact that liberalism taught people to be individuals and because people can see what's going on in Congress but because our institutions seem incapable of reform and accountability. Levin never gets to this. He is too focused on individualism and transparency as the enemies of a strong society.

Levin seems to be trying to build off of Robert Putnam's ideas in "Bowling Alone" in which Putnam argues that society was damaged by the decline of social clubs and organizations (such as bowling leagues) that allowed people to form bonds with each other. "Bowling Alone", however, is much more compelling because Putnam is focused on how institutions create bonds of trust and respect among equals in these groups. Levin, by contrast, is fixated on the loss of power and authority of institutional leaders to direct the behavior of people under them. It is Putnam who analyzed social trust. Levin is simply interested in power.

Levin ends the book with a chapter about elite formation that frankly didn't make any sense. The premise of it is that meritocratic institutions such as elite universities and businesses do not form the character of new elites and focus instead on materialistic things like intellect and productivity. I guess that's a fair observation but what's the alternative? What non-meritocratic institutions does Levin think are working better? He focuses his criticism of elite formation on universities and businesses but these institutions seem to be doing pretty well.

I think this book has merit in that it tries to create a secular conservative theory of the importance of social institutions. It would be good if Levin's ideas sway those conservatives who believe that institutions don't matter and that individuals should be unconstrained to make money and do whatever they want. The problem is that "A Time To Build" is so nostalgic and offers so few solutions that I think it doesn't actually add anything new to the conservative discourse in the U.S. Early in the book, Levin makes the valid point that social criticism without solutions leads to despair. That just makes this book all the more perplexing.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is light on citations or hard facts, but it does contain a wealth of insights that have already made their way into common discourse. Of course, the foundational difference between "formative" and "performative" institutions, and between "forming" and "platforming" uses of them, are at the root of the book. As a liberal Burkean, Levin of course deplores the decline of our institutions, the rise of loneliness, increased distrust, and supposed dysfunction.

I'm not sure about all of these complaints. By some measures our institutions, from the post office (not an anachronism but still one of the largest branches of government, at 500,000 people) to roads and airports, to even the much lamented Congress itself, are working more and more efficiently than ever (Congress, for example, is passing more pages of laws all the time, which is not necessarily good, but which does not show "dysfunction" either.) The decline in family and increase in loneliness are real, but are also trends that have been going on for almost 200 years, and seem as much as a result of capitalism and modernity as anything particular to 21st century American life. The decline in trust is real and recent, but it's hard to know how much of that is due to rising expectations rather than institutional failure.

Levin is fundamentally right about the need to rebuild institutions and work within them. But in that sense the book reads more like necessary moralizing from a pulpit rather than anything explicitly political. The call to moral rejuvenation, which has accompanied and attached itself to politics, even if it has little formally to do with it, is always needed, especially in a fractious modern world that continues to drive people apart, even as it continues to liberate and even improve them.

[Nate Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written book, and I don't disagree with the central thesis. I am convinced that institutions in America are indeed weak, and that renewed institution-building would be a more productive national effort than tearing things down.

However, I found some arguments to be inconsistent and Levin's overall definition of institutions to remain quite vague. His chapter on social media was interesting - I liked the premise that social media is most importantly destroying the institution of formality - but is "formality" really an institution in the same way that the Presidency or the American family are institutions? The chapter read more like a topical op-ed than a logical step in a book-long sequence of arguments.

And furthermore, across the book, Levin makes many humble political concessions to the other side to show the moderate appeal of his argument, only to, at the end of the book, conclude that while making compromises is often good, institution-building is a fundamental conservative principle that the left ought to become better at. If that's the case - and maybe it is - if this is truly a fundamental principle, why was it necessary to make so many concessions over the course of the book?

I'm being critical though. Overall, I found it enjoyable to read. One unique argument that I found refreshing was that being a "big fish in a small pond" (a family, church, or workplace) can actually be a rewarding life endeavor - fulfilling something lost from the human experience in an age that idolizes going viral and making society-wide impact. It was thought-provoking to flip a phrase that often has a negative connotation.

[Tim Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

[listened via audiobook]

I did enjoy reading this book and I think it succeeds as an anthem to rebuild and restore. His diagnosis is that our institutions (which he defines very broadly to include everything from Congress to the family unit) are essentially being overrun by platforms and personalities. This rang very true to my own experience in government, where it appeared to me that the stewards of our department were constantly leveraging the prestige of the institution to further their own ambitions and cultivate a following.

I think there is room for improvement in two areas. Although I felt Levin made quite a bit of effort to support his main arguments, he made several much more minor assertions without any similar evidence or discussion. While I am open to the idea that the U.S. Senate filibuster may encourage bipartisanship, I've heard compelling arguments to the contrary and Levin made to effort to convince me of his position. Similarly, toward the end of the book Levin makes some very sweeping statements arguing that strong institutions are always better for the downtrodden without making any effort to prove his point.

I also would have liked to see some better ideas on how we can rebuild our institutions, though perhaps, as mentioned at the beginning, the purpose of this book is less a roadmap and more a wake-up call.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is one of the best books I've read in a while that offers a logical, persuasive meta-thesis about issues plaguing American society in the 21st century. I particularly like that Levin spends more time on his proposed solution: re-commitment to societal institutions than on railing about problems. While Levin is conservative, to me he speaks about what is most valuable about the term: what is worth "conserving" or saving? In contrast to much of what I see as perversion of libertarianism and individualism (think: "but muh freedums"), Levin speaks eloquently of the power of the collective and society to set boundaries and goals for human flourishing to occur in the context of institutions: family, schools, places of worship, civic organizations, and charities. As someone who is very much an institutionalist with a high degree of obligation and loyalty, this seems very much like an "of course" solution; however, especially when Levin calls out those who use institutions performatively in service of themselves (looking at much of today's GOP). However, my one critique is that I do not think Levin gives enough to credence as to why so much institutional trust has been lost among Americans. Many (most?) institutions have long been places of exclusion - on the bases of race, sex, ethnicity, class - and many have also used institutional power to shield the sins committed within the institution (Catholic clergy abuse; USA Gymnastics). While Levin talks about the need to reform institutions within - to stick with them - I think that for all the great ideas in this book, there needs to be an acknowledgment that not only have we failed our institutions, they have sometimes failed us.

[Claire Kasinadhuni · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. This book was lowkey a game changer for me. It reminded me of a more credible and philosophical Road to Moral Character by David Brooks. Parts of this book made me cringe, especially when discussing the importance of the family structure in its normative form, but a lot of it deeply resonated and made me think more critically about my criticisms of "the system" and how we can rebuild a better country rather than lamenting its current decay. I took many pictures of pages and had many ah-ha moments, definitely something I will continue to chew on. A few lines that really got me going: "Our age combines a populism that insists all of our institutions are rigged against the people with an identity politics that rejects institutional commitments and a celebrity culture that chafes against all structure and constraint." "An attractive community, which plainly provides a venue for genuine flourishing can change minds far better than an argument."

[Stan Lanier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the author exhibited great explanatory power in his picture of current society. I have genuine respect for the kind of conceptual conservatism operating behind this work. Sometimes I think he sacrifices complexity, eg. liberation theologians believe in the formative nature of institutions, yet they, also, think social and political transformation are necessary to address the evils and ills of our time. In the end, I believe his solution is simply a sophisticated version of we make a better world one person at a time. Levin's intellect, his clarity in writing, and his generosity of spirit makes this a wonderful book to read. My, what a superlative intellectual conversation partner he would be. So, regardless of your political persuasion, read this book.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am persuaded by the thesis of this book that questioning authority and being suspicious toward institutions can only take us so far in achieving greater justice for all. We have to find a way to trust and make use of institutions to serve the public good. Excellent read.

[Vadim Polikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I typically don’t read books that have anything to do with contemporary politics, but this author, Yuval Levin, kept impressing me each time I heard him interviewed on my favorite (non-political) podcast. This is the second one of his books I’ve read, and the better one in my opinion. As a disclaimer, Levin is a conservative thinker, works at the conservative leaning American Enterprise Institute, is a strident critic of Donald Trump, and has written in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In hearing him speak and reading two of his books, he seems to be authentically committed to thoughtfully analyzing and attempting to solve the difficult problems of our age.

I loved this book. It proposed a model of our current political, social, and cultural environment that helps put many strange and disconcerting trends we’ve all been experiencing into a framework, a model, that gives some order to the chaos. I doubt it is a perfect model, but just like Newton’s model of planetary motion was a better model of reality than Ptolemy’s, and was ultimately replaced by Einstein’s model, it comes one step closer to explaining reality. It also implies certain steps we can take as individuals and citizens to make things better. I like this book better than his 2016 book - it is a much more creative and original work.

The book starts from the counterintuitive position that we have lost respect and trust in our institutions (a common finding among social scientists) precisely because they are no longer trust-worthy. Institutions have specific functions and as they have abandoned those functions and forms, they have lost our respect (my intuition was originally that the causation ran the other way - something about us caused us to care less about institutions that then caused them to wither).

It is important to understand what Levin means by institutions, because the book is an extended metaphor of the “molds” of institutions, their roles in society, how they have been degraded, and what can be done about it. Here is an extended set of passages that define institutions and set up the metaphor for the rest of the book:

“[Institutions are] the durable forms of our common life. They are the frameworks and structures of what we do together.

Some institutions are organizations and have something like a corporate form. A university, a hospital, a school, a legislature, a military, a company and a civic institution are all institutions…

Some institutions are durable forms of a different sort: they may be shaped by laws, norms or rules but lack a corporate structure. The family is an institution: in fact it is the first and foremost institution of every society. We can speak of the institution of marriage, or of a particular tradition or profession as an institution, or even of the rule of law…

[Institutions] share two distinct elements… That they are *durable* is essential. An institution keeps its shape over time, and so shapes the realm of life in which it operates. When it changes, it generally does so by incremental evolution of its shape and structure, not by sharp and disjunctive transformation, so that its form over time exhibits a certain continuity that is fundamental to what it is able to accomplish in the world.

Most important, each institution is a *form* of association. What’s distinct about an institution is that it is a form in the deepest sense: a structure, a shape, a contour… An institution in this sense is different from a group of people in the same way that a form is different from the matter of which it is composed - as for instance, the shape of a candle is different from the raw wax of which it is made. The institution organizes its people into a particular form moved by a purpose, characterized by a structure, defined by an ideal, and capable of certain functions.

In other words, institutions are by their nature formative. They structure our perceptions and our interactions, and as a result they structure us. They form our habits, our expectations, and ultimately our character. By giving shape to our experience of life in society, institutions give shape to our place in the world and to our understanding of its contours. They are at once constraining and enabling. They are the means by which we are socialized, and so they are crucial intermediaries between our inner lives and our social lives…

One of the most important ways that institutions accomplish this task of formation is by giving each of us a role and therefore a shape or form in the world. Healthy institutions often function as molds for the people inside them. We pour ourselves into our family, our community, our church, our work, or our school, and in doing so we begin to take the institution's shape. That shape then enables us to be more effective. It both protects us and empowers us to interact with others. We aren't just loose individuals bumping into each other. We fill roles, we occupy places, we play parts defined by larger wholes, and that helps us understand our obligations and responsibilities, our privileges and benefits, our purposes and connections. It moves us to ask how we ought to think and behave with reference to a world beyond ourselves: ‘Given my role here, how should I act’”

Robert Putnam famously identified how social capital allows us to work together (and how it has decreased since the 1950’s) in his seminal work Bowling Alone. Levin adds to Putnam’s diagnosis: its not that our time is unusual for the level of pressures and stresses we are feeling, it is instead unusual in the

“weakness of our institutions - from the family on up through the national government, with much in between. That weakness leaves us less able to hold together against the pressures we do face. It leaves all of us more uncertain about our places and less confident of the foundations of our common life. And it leaves us struggling with something like formless connectedness, a social life short on structural supports.”

I love the metaphor of a landscape of forms that help mold us, resist stresses, and populate our social and political spaces. These are the civic organizations that De Toqueville described were uniquely strong in the US.

So, what has gone wrong? Why have we lost trust in our institutions? First - Levin defines how an institution gains trust:

“Each institution works to accomplish some socially important task (say, educating the young, making laws, defending the country, serving God, helping the poor, producing some service or product, or meeting a need) by establishing a structure and process - a form - for combining people’s efforts towards accomplishing that task. In effect, then, the institution also forms people so they can carry out that task successfully, responsibly, and reliably. It fosters an ethic that defines how they go about their common work, which in turn shapes their behavior and character. That ethic often involves a way of achieving the institution's core goal effectively while guarding against some of the dangers of social life - like individual selfishness, avarice, ambition, lust, or vice. This is part of what we value about our institutions: in addition to carrying out their intended work, they form people to do so appropriately, properly, and ethically.

We trust an institution, then, because it seems to have an ethic that makes the people within more trustworthy. We trust political institutions when they take seriously their obligation to the public interest, and when they shape the people who work within them to do the same. We trust the military because it values courage, honor, and duty in carrying out the defense of the nation, and forms men and women who do too. We trust a business because it promises quality and integrity in meeting some need we have, and rewards its people when they deliver. We trust a university because it is devoted to the search for truth, and shapes those within its orbit to pursue that search through learning and teaching. We trust a journalistic institution when it holds itself up to high standards of honesty and accuracy, and so renders the work of its people reliable.

We lose trust in an institution, therefore, when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role, serving as a forge of integrity for the people within it. One way this might happen is when an institution plainly fails to protect us, or even actively betrays our confidence, in the performance of its work - as when a bank cheats its customers or a member of the clergy abuses a child. In such situations, the institution is revealed to have been corrupted into serving those within it at the expense of its core purpose. Rather than shaping the people inside it, it comes to be deformed by them for their own ends. This is a betrayal by insiders - a mode of institutional corruption we might call “insiderism” - and it is perhaps the most obvious factor driving the loss of faith in institutions…

Alongside plenty of familiar insiderism, we have also seen in this century another less familiar form of institutional deformation. We might call it “outsiderism,” and it involves institutions that fail to form men and women of integrity because they fail even to see such formation as their purpose. Rather than contain and shape individuals, these institutions seem to exist to display individuals - to give them prominence and gain them notice without stamping them with a particular character, a distinct set of obligations or responsibilities, on an ethic that comes with constraints. Such institutions are unworthy of our trust not so much because they fail to earn it as because they appear not to seek or desire it at all.

In fact, because this kind of institutional deformation is so prevalent, our very understanding of what institutions are for has been changing subtly but fundamentally. We have moved, roughly speaking, from thinking of institutions as molds that shape people’s characters and habits towards seeing them as platforms that allow people to be themselves and to display themselves before a wider world. This subte, gradual change in expectations has dramatically magnified our loss of trust in institutions.”

So this leads to an better understanding of why it feels like we are in a constant cultural war everywhere and no matter where I look (news, friends, neighbors, family, work) people want to engage in political or culture war discussions:

“As different institutions come to be seen (by both the people in them and the larger public) as platforms for displaying individuals, they also come to lose their distinctions from one another and so tend to become homogenized into increasingly interchangeable stages for the same sorts of cultural-political performances. Their distinctive integrities, each shaped by a unique professional code, organizational history, or communal ethos, meld together and leave the complex institutional topology of our society more flat and barren. In this way, a culture at war with itself comes to be at war everywhere, so that, for instance the worst facets of college-campus culture (where performative outrage sometimes overtakes academic investigation) are now apparent throughout our political, media, and business cultures too. It isn’t quite that the culture of one institution has invaded the others as that the boundaries and distinctions have broken down and everyone, inside and outside, is participating in the same obnoxious quarrel.”

This diagnosis makes a lot of sense to me.

All the quotes above come from the first third of the book, and the remainder is about examples tracing where institutions have been corrupted (like the university, politics, the professions, and the family), who has done the corrupting (the Internet with its free access to information previously only available to specialists, social media, our own desires for freedom from the restraints institutions provide), and what to do about it (rejoin institutions, build them back up, devote ourselves (without cynicism) to an institution (especially a service based one)).

Along the way, there are some really interesting insights that I think are worth repeating:

On Universities:
“[there are] roughly three understandings of the purpose of the university as an institution all of which have been part of the American University from its earliest days and are powerful forces on campus now. The first suggests that the university exists above all to give people the skills our economy requires. This is by far the most commonly expressed expectation of higher education, especially outside the academy. The second suggests that the university exists to give students a consciousness of the moral demands of a just society. We tend to imagine this facet of American higher education is relatively new, maybe a creation of the student protest movements of the 1960’s, but in fact this was an original purpose of the university in America. The third suggests that the point of the university is to expose a rising generation to the deepest and best of the wisdom of our civilization, and so to enable a search for the truth wherever it leads, without regard for economic or sociopolitical utility. This has always been a minority pursuit on campuses, but it has also been a core purpose of the academy since Plato first applied that name to his school in Athens in the fourth century BC.

These three visions amount to three intermingled cultures within the modern university: a culture of professional development, a culture of moral activism, and a culture of liberal education.”

He goes on to say that all is well when these three are in balance, but the culture of moral activism has become too strong and the culture of professional development has just tried to ignore the other two, leading to issues in campus culture.

He puts a lot of blame on the degrading of institutions on social media, which I thought was also dissected in an interesting way, bringing in the lens of “formality”. I don’t know whether it is just a happy coincidence or these are indeed related that institutions give us “forms” and “formality”:

“Although we often cannot tell if the world of social media is public or private, indeed precisely because we cannot tell, we can certainly call what happens in that world *informal*. We might even think of social media as a massive informality machine, robbing our interactions of structure and of boundaries. This is why moving more of our social activities onto the platforms of social media tends to bring the most dramatic and fundamental changes to those of our social interactions that would otherwise be most formal - like the presentation of professional work product, the intricate dance of dating and courtship, or the pronouncements of public policy. It is also why social media is uniquely corrosive of institutions, which are after all precisely social forms.

Continued in comments...

[Joseph L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Watch a detailed review along with my favorite ideas and takeaways at:
https://youtu.be/QzAJqBsqdc4

[James Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally understand his opinion on the need to build greater engagement in our institutions.

[William Bies · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let us conclude our review of the progress of conservative thought in America with a contemporary author, selected almost at random: Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build: From Family and Community, to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to our Institutions can Revive the American Dream (2018). How has the movement fared since Russell Kirk gave it its original impetus back in the 1950’s? By now, conservative-leaning think tanks have been established to offer shelter to would-be intellectuals on the right, who must have been quite a rarity in academia in the days of Adlai Stevenson (and still are, for that matter). Indeed, Levin himself holds a post at the American Enterprise Institute, which does at least attempt a semblance of intellectual engagement with the issues of our day from a conservative point of view.

Unfortunately, the execution falls lamentably short of the aim, however well intentioned; our task is to investigate why. For Levin’s work turns out to be utterly unoriginal, non-theoretical and unscholarly. Levin’s single main idea: society’s institutions are in bad shape; the conservative view that we are shaped by them and by loyalty to their mission means that we should recommit. In opposition to this view, the author adverts to the specters of American individualism and the celebrity culture. Brief view of contents: in Part I, Levin discusses what he calls the crisis of dissolution and reflects on the meaning of what an institution may be and how personal involvement could transform them. Part II gets more specific and address Congress, the presidency and the two-party system, then the professions (law, medicine, journalism etc.) and, in separate chapters, the university and social media. Part III contains his recommendations for a ‘path to renewal’. Re. colleges, Levin makes a provocative point: despite what one might be inclined to suppose prima facie, the politically correct crowd is in fact moralistic, not relativist or nihilist (needless to say, a moralism untempered by mercy, yet more puritanical mutatis mutandis than the Puritans ever dared!).

Any prescriptions for what to do about the crisis in American public life? 1) Restore commitment to institutions; 2) relax the meritocracy, once a leveling movement but now restrictive (cf. Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy which deviates so far from the colorblind spirit au courant in the Civil Rights era). But don’t we do this already, just differ on what values to promote: the elite schools like to favor what they see as disadvantaged minorities, but don’t care very much about other inequalities, such as that of socioeconomic background; i.e., they discriminate against the white rural poor in favor of the urban poor (who tend to be predominately black or Hispanic).

Certainly insufficient to bring out the societal change he wants to accomplish. Consider his weak concluding paragraphs:

I’m asking you to consider the problems we face in the context of institutions, and to talk about them and act toward them in that context. To act through institutions a bit more, not just atop or against or around them. And, in acting through them, to strengthen and reform them: not just to trust our institutions but to make them more trustworthy. Thinking and speaking just a little differently about how we live together can make a bigger difference than you might imagine. It can help us to see what we’ve been missing, to do what we’ve been neglecting, to say what we have only assumed or taken for granted. Small steps like those are what make great changes possible. They are constructive, and so they build upon each other and turn us all into builders. That, in the end, is the character of the transformation we need. The demolition crews have for too long been allowed to define the spirit of this era in America. But where we’re headed will be up to the builders and rebuilders. And that is what we each should seek to be. [p. 204]

Confines himself mostly to anodyne observations, hems and haws: this and again, on the other hand, maybe this, with of course a conservative slant. At best, Levin can diagnose some of the more apparent downstream causes of the present disarray in public life, but evidently lacks the theoretical depth to get to the reasons at the root, much less to be in a position to suggest any principles that might inform the constructive action he calls for.

What does Levin miss, then? He may well be right that distrust in our civic institutions is part of the problem, but simply presumes the institutions of our society to deserve our trust as they currently stand, subject perhaps to some cosmetic reforms. In view, for instance, of widespread police brutality and the constantly recurring willingness of the police to employ lethal force unnecessarily against unarmed and often innocent men (for which they scarcely if ever face any disciplinary consequences), lack of confidence would seem to be eminently justified, and neither is this just a small concern fixable by means of a minor tweak, as Levin implies. The deeper shortcoming Levin fails to notice lies in the way we educate the young. True, professionalization and campus activist culture do constitute aberrations from a genuine educative mission, as Levin identifies, but the real problem lies in the content of what we teach. For under the monopoly of a left-liberal establishment, the classroom is increasingly being seen primarily as a vehicle for propaganda and actual instruction in the subject matter at hand as secondary. What is perhaps even more serious is the demise of the ideal of an education in the liberal arts itself which for two centuries has been distinctive of college-level education in America and which, arguably, traditionally has underpinned a sense of public-spiritedness among the elite.

Is Levin right about his target on which to saddle the blame, viz., excessive individualism and celebrity culture? These charges have probably been true of American life ever since Tocqueville first published his observations on democracy in America in the nineteenth century. Yet until recently, in living memory (say as late as the Clinton and Bush administrations), our national institutions continued to function pretty much as the founders must have intended, despite mounting partisanship. For instance, Congress was able to pass legislation reflecting a consensus and the results of the hotly contested presidential election in 2000 were accepted by the losing side, in the face of their questionable legitimacy, without leading to an insurrection and irremediable civil strife. So surely either something unprecedented must have supervened in the past few years or Levin owes us an explanation of why our individualistic streak could have crossed the threshold to being out of control only just recently. Does he acquit himself convincingly? Not at all. For the specific difference in the recent decade or two is not individualism per se, but a fatal combination of identity politics on the left with indifference to social injustice on the right. Indeed, if anything, we are witnessing a decline of individualism and a rise of group affiliation. It is common now, for instance, for the New York Times to point out a person’s race so that one can know what gross stereotypes to apply (as if his race alone tells one everything one needs to know), something that would have contravened journalistic convention in past generations.

The proton pseudos [Πρῶτον ψεῦδος] of the American right of the past ten years: it has adopted a frank ends-justifies-the-means attitude and thereby poisoned the well-springs of democracy. Evangelicals vainly imagine it suffices to cry Cyrus! in order to justify any amount of mendacity. But they forget that God never asked the Israelites themselves to condone, much less energetically to forward Cyrus’ moral transgressions and ruthless power plays. They would do well to learn from Catholic social teaching the distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil, for they are certainly guilty of the former (or where exactly does the Bible permit the endorsement and promotion of outright, known falsehood merely for the sake of political expediency?).

The Republican position seems to be that, as long as one declare oneself to be anti-abortion, one should get a free pass on any other kind of social injustice, such as to deprive the poor or other misfortunates of affordable health care by doing everything possible and politically feasible to wreck rather than improve upon Obamacare. Wouldn’t Jesus, rather, say that one should strive to be as right as possible with respect to every form of social justice, without exception? In the absence of reform of societal conditions that favor the availability of abortion on demand, it is hard to see how merely to declare it illegal in some states will help that much; the liberals will be sure to redouble their efforts to have it arbitrarily legalized everywhere again and the right’s control of the Supreme Court merely makes one avenue for doing so more difficult, probably for decades, but the overall tide of history seems to be on the side of ever-advancing antinomianism and left-liberals are likely to reestablish their dominance in the long run. The end-state towards which Republicans aim is a far cry from a genuine culture of life, in which every unborn child who is conceived will be welcomed into the world, but a punishing regime where just as many women will want to procure abortions as now do, but will be prevented from doing so by a sufficiently imposing state apparatus; they intend no reform of the conditions of society that would address the root causes of the demand for abortion.

Granted, it may be sweet to own it to the liberals by giving them a taste of their own medicine – nobody on the left recognizes the irony that what they so dislike about the Roberts court happens to be just the same judicial activism they foisted upon everyone under the Warren court. How hypocritical it is at this juncture to decry the Supreme Court’s loss of legitimacy when it was precisely the unprincipled Roe v. Wade decision in 1972 that irrevocably undermined it! Meanwhile moneyed interests in the oil industry are having a field day at the cost of literally destroying the planet for everyone else, and Republicans in their pay couldn’t care less. The contemporary landscape on the right is characterized by conspiratorial delusions and cynical pushing of the Big Lie of electoral fraud, or a willing descent into darkness.

Flush with a string of ostensible victories on the Supreme Court wrought by his policy of cynical Machtpolitik, it would behoove the conservative of today to ask himself Jesus’ question: for what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? [Mark 8:36]

Take a salutory glance at what conservatives are not doing: remember the civilizing missions of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in England, Saint Columban in Ireland and Saint Bruno in Germany and how these created the conditions for the flourishing of medieval civilization. Recall the recovery of classical literature under the leadership of Alcuin and his palace school in Aachen, leading to the Carolingian renaissance and later to the revival of learning during the twelfth century. As we previously discussed in our review of Edmund Burke (see here), these medieval developments were instrumental to the rise of the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as to that of the classical-liberal customs that define the West at its best and which everyone on the modern political spectrum within the bounds of rationality, left-leaning or right-leaning, still benefits from and takes for granted. Have then our contemporary so-called conservatives lost sight of the culture-forming virtue of right reason? Or, supposing they still adhere to such tenets, why are they powerless to offer a convincing alternative to the secular left-liberal steamroller which wants to obliterate our classical and scriptural heritage? The decidedly thin gruel on offer in the present work by Yuval Levin is not going to attract anyone on the opposing side of the spectrum. Only strong principles eloquently defended have the capacity to do so, and as we have seen there is nothing in Levin that goes beyond long-since mooted triteness. One cannot recommit to an institution unless there remain something of its original charism which, in the present context, would call for masterful political theorizing to restore principles acceptable to everyone – just what apparently exceeds Levin’s ability. For an example, if admittedly non-ideal, of an attempt in the direction we have in mind, see our preceding review of John Millbank and Adrian Pabst’s Politics of Virtue, here.

Therefore, read Yuval Levin as an object lesson in the abject failure of conservative thought in America if it seem worth the expenditure of time to diagnose the causes behind it. One star, not subtracting any stars for want of originality (the rating scale does not go below zero). If Russell Kirk was already nothing but an Edmund Burke epigone, Levin could be styled a Kirk epigone – an epigone’s epigone, an index of how far we’ve fallen. Levin and his ilk patently have neither the wherewithal nor the intention to contribute to the real game, to which Pope John Paul II summons us: a renewed evangelization and founding of a civilization of love to supplant the reigning culture of death, so beloved by all the Democrats making the news in recent weeks. Why? Look once again at the title of his book: to revive the American dream, most emphatically not to proclaim the gospel or to give glory to God. For, like Protestant evangelicals under the Trump administration, he has put America first in his heart in place of the Lord God (vide Trump’s idolatrous state of the union address in 2019, which aroused nary an objection from his allegedly religiously observant supporters). Would that our conservative mandarins heed Jesus’ words in the parable:

And indeed, which of you here, intending to build a tower, would not first sit down and work out the cost to see if he had enough to complete it? Otherwise, if he laid the foundation and then found himself unable to finish the work, anyone who saw it would start making fun of him and saying, ‘Here is someone who started to build and was unable to finish’. Or again, what king marching to war against another king would not first sit down and consider whether with ten thousand men he could stand up to the other who was advancing against him with twenty thousand? If not, then while the other king was still a long way off, he would send envoys to sue for peace. So in the same way, none of you can be my disciple without giving up all that he owns. [Luke 14:28-33]

So back to the drawing board if there be any intellectually serious thinkers of a conservative persuasion left in our country. We are still awaiting Alasdair MacIntyre’s twenty-first-century avatar of Saint Benedict. What are we to look for? The imagination, like Jesus to speak the truth fearlessly while welcoming instead of driving away the alienated multitude of those (especially among the younger generation) who, in the wake of a century of secular left-liberal pedagogy, suffer from the eclipse of any coherent vision of human flourishing that would be congruent with scriptural revelation.

[Paul Sand · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see that back in 2020, I put this Yuval Levin book on my "things to read" list. After four years, I finally got around to getting a copy, via UNH Interlibrary Loan from Brandeis.

Note the publication date: January 21, 2020. So written pre-COVID. Pre-2020 election. Pre-January 6. Levin's book is about decaying American institutions, and it's difficult to believe that things haven't gotten worse.

My procrastination in reading the book may reflect my previous reports on Yuval Levin books. Snips: "Gosh, I wish I'd liked this book better" (The Fractured Republic) and "Yuval's prose is … not sparkly" (The Great Debate). Sad to report this book continues in that vein.

But let's dig out the good: as a self-identified conservative with minimal libertarian instincts, Levin makes the case that a healthy country requires healthy institutions, and all indications are that American ones are becoming ineffective and mistrusted. Those institutions should be transforming their members into subsuming their quirky individualism into reliable defenders of timeless values and virtue.

He runs through some examples of decay: government, in all its levels and branches; professionals (journalists, doctors, lawyers, …); higher education, naturally; social media, also naturally; family, religion, and our local community organizations.

His recipe for mending is in re-recognizing the values of institutions, returning to their traditional values, even if this means sanding off the individualistic tendencies of the people involved. If he recommended any specific tactics for implementing this rebirth, I missed them.

Levin does not entertain the possibility that what we're seeing isn't irrevocable decay and decline into dreary dystopia, but instead a dynamic evolution, shucking off the old, and bumbling and scraping the pieces into something new and different institutions, perhaps better in some ways. We have a long history of pessimism and doomcrying, it's part of our cultural DNA. And so far we have managed to muddle through.

One example of Levin's prose that furrowed my brow came early on, page 16:

Flourishing happens in the joints of society—and this is where the deepest sort of trouble shows itself.

Joints? So society is like a skeleton, and flourishing happens in the parts that … bend?

Or is in "joints" in the sense of "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine"?

I'm stupid, I guess.

[Hanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good start. Not entirely convincing everywhere but generally highlights an important issue and makes a good point.

[Curtis Bentley · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5.00

This book came highly recommended to me. I appreciated what I view as the two essential insights, which are (i) that although we are living in a populist, anti-institutional moment, the reaction is actually against institutions that have become weakened and deformed rather than against institutions that are oppressively strong; and (ii) that we have twisted our institutions from tools of formation of character into stages for personal performance.

However, despite the strength of these two insights, I felt the book suffered from one essential ambiguity and was overly repetitive. The ambiguity is, perhaps unavoidable: I felt as though I never understood exactly what the author's conception of an institution was. As the book went on, I settled on the idea of an institution as something that provided rules and structure. But when someone talks over and over again of the importance of building our institutions -- but offers no clear conception of what an institution is -- the reader is left wondering what, exactly, it is that we should do. The repetition could result from the ambiguity, in the sense that the author thought simply to strengthen his point through an excess of examples, lacking a clear conception of the course of action he was recommending.

Despite these two issues, recommended.

[Horace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a Yuval Levin fan so that's the first reason I read this one. But I frequently see it mentioned in various op-eds, so thought I should see for myself.

Levin, who is Jewish, aptly describes the problems of our American culture. He believes our problems are relational or community problems. We are too formed by our individualism. He notes the breakdown in the family, the moral disorder, the emphasis on materialism, economic inequality, and our lack of connections.

His prescription: *healthy* institutions. Institutions that are formative, not just performative, i.e. not gripped by the culture war or celebrity culture. As an example, Congressmen who are focused only on promoting their personal brand and unconcerned about the health of Congress, serving their constituents, or the good of the country.

But this is not just a book about political institutions. He sees the same problems in religious, educational, and business institutions, etc. These institutions have great power to form others for good, if healthy. Levin believes institutional revival/renewal is needed and not just going back to some golden age. Personal formation is needed, but it happens best through healthy institutions. And so, now's "A time to build".

If interested in reading more, a few helpful reviews:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outloo...

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-ti...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/0...

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thoughtful book and well worth your consideration. As institutions have largely ceased to become molding institutions and rather have become platforms to be exploited by individuals who desire celebrity and acclaim, we have consequently lost trust in those institutions the standard for the principles they once held. This is far beyond the political book, and it touches on just about all areas of society. He may not be right about everything, but I think his overall approach.