A Time To Build

Yuval Levin, “A Time To Build: From Family and Community To Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream”, Basic Books, 2020, 204 pp.

Yuval Levin, a leading conservative intellectual, argues that Americans must recommit to their failing institutions.  "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".

Levin diagnoses our discontent as a consequence of Americans ceasing to take institutions seriously. American universities, for example, have three functions: teaching the great ideas of human civilization; teaching skills that will lead to remunerative employment; and teaching students how to understand the moral demands of a just society. However, according to Levin, because the faculties and administrations are sunk in a malaise of white guilt, they fail to fulfill their duty to uphold the academic standards necessary to impart great ideas and teach useful skills. Similarly, legislators have turned over their duty to shape policy to government agencies while they enact performative careers as social media celebrities. Judges are also afflicted, which Levin writes, explains, "A significant portion of the problem that has traditionally been described as judicial activism” should be understood as part of this “transformation of institutions from character-molds to partisan performance platforms.  

I found some interesting observations in this book although I believe our community institutions are failing in congruence with the hollowing out of the middle class. Also, notice that the upper-middle-class and above are having no problems with institutions and community.

My Notes:

Pg. 2:  Robert Nisbet wrote in 1975: “Periodically in Western history twilight ages make their appearance.  Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evident than those of genesis and development.  Individualism reveals itself less as achievement and enterprise than as egoism and mere performance.” 

Pg. 16:  On the Right, it is maintained that at the core of the crisis of institutions is the collapse of family and religion, suggesting that our social crisis is a breakdown of tradition and moral order.  On the Left, it is argued that contemporary capitalism elevates the interests of the wealthiest above the rest, exacerbating inequality to the point that it becomes impossible for people to feel and function like equal parts of a greater whole.

Pg. 22:  When we think about the challenges our society faces, we tend to think about the array of forces pressing on it—globalization or automation or polarization or populism or radical individualism or ethnic nationalism.  However, our country has seen periods characterized by vastly more intense kinds of pressure.  What stands out about the current time is not the strength of the pressures we are under, but the weakness of our institutions—from the family on up through the national government.  That weakness leaves us less able to hold together against the pressures we do face.  Our age embodies a populism that insists all of our institutions are rigged against the people with an identity politics that rejects institutional commitments and conformance to standards, resulting in a celebrity culture that chafes against all structure and constraint. 

Pg. 29f:  Gallup has kept track of Americans’ confidence in various institutions for decades—in most cases, from 1973 until today.  The trend is unmistakable.  From big business, banks, and the professions to the branches of the federal government, news media, organized labor, the medical system, public schools, and higher-education, confidence in our institutions has been falling and falling.  In almost every case, the decline was gradual at first, then through the 1970s and ‘80s, grew a little steeper, more so in the 1990s, and then accelerated sharply in the 21^st century.

For instance, in the early 1970s, 80 percent of Americans told Gallup they had a great deal of confidence in doctors and hospitals.  In 2018, the figure was 36 percent.  Forty years ago, 65 percent had a great deal of confidence in organized religion—this was just 38 percent in 2018; Congress went from 42 percent to 11 percent; the presidency from 52 percent to 30 percent.  Only the military has retained the people’s confidence, remaining at 74 percent.

Pg. 34ff: When we don’t think of our institutions as formative but as performative—when the presidency and Congress are just stages for political performance, when a university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling, when journalism is indistinguishable from activism—these institutions become harder to trust.  They aren’t really asking for our confidence, just for our attention.  This has led to the gradual replacement of a culture of integrity with something more like a culture of celebrity—in which achievement is measured by prominence and legitimacy by affirmation.

Pg. 45ff:  The failure of our American institutions is evident from top to bottom.  The most reasonable place to start examining this failure is with an institution everyone agrees is seriously dysfunctional: the Congress.  To add perspective to this examination, it is useful to reflect on the founder’s intentions.  The Constitution gives Congress powers but not responsibilities (the author seems to have forgotten ‘the power of the purse’).  The president is required to execute the laws, the courts are required to interpret them.  The assumption was that Congress would run as far and as hard as the Constitution allowed, so only boundaries were required.  It was not anticipated that Congress would substantially farm-out its responsibilities to an imperial presidency, an activist judiciary, and administrative agencies.   

Pg. 55:  Our presidents, like many members of Congress, now too often see themselves as outsiders yelling about the government more than insiders wielding its power.  The Trump presidency has made the problem clearer because Trump, in an unusually explicit way, approaches politics in performative, theatrical terms, almost always as an outside voice speaking at, not for, the institutions of the government.

Pg. 69f:  The professions derive their very purpose and significance from their commitment to deliberate integrity in the work of the people within them.  This is particularly true of the lawyer, the doctor, the nurse, the teacher, and the scientist.  What we call professions are distinct from other occupations precisely because they are somewhat institutionalized.  They are characterized by some combination of formal training (often through professional schools or certifications), a set of institutional structures of which the profession is the guardian (like courts, hospitals, schools, churches, or labs), specialized knowledge, some degree of self-regulation, and an important social purpose that the profession exists to serve.  

Pg. 73:  The crisis of American journalism is especially acute because journalism conveys information that is only valuable to the degree it is deemed reliable.  Confidence in the news media has plunged from 72 percent in 1976 to 32 percent in 2018.  Nontraditional and informal sources of information have sprouted up everywhere and have applied intense pressure on traditional journalism.  The pressure from the internet and social media has replaced formative responsible structure with performance.  (We’ve crossed into the world of ‘alternative facts.’)

Pg. 93:  In 2018, the five most common undergraduate majors in America, in descending order of popularity, were: business, nursing, psychology, biology (including pre-medicine), and engineering—all of which suggest a fundamentally professional orientation among these five groups of students. 

Pg. 100:  Conservatives have clearly long been a minority of American academics.  In 1969, a quarter of American professors described themselves as right of center, recent surveys have put that figure at one in ten.  By some prominent measures Republicans make up 4% of historians, 3% of sociologists, and a mere 2% of literature professors.

Pg. 102ff:  Today’s students of all political persuasions are exquisitely sensitive to avoid giving offense.  At the heart of this pressure is what has come to be called identity politics which amount to an acute emphasis on group identity and structural power relationships among different racial, ethnic, sexual, and socioeconomic camps.  They all claim to be fighting oppression.  They each have a sense that they are systematically mistreated—and that, as a result, their experience of life in America cannot be understood apart from that mistreatment and therefore that identity.  This idea that relations of oppressor and oppressed are at the heart of social and political life is a long-standing premise of the Left in the West, while the Right tends to view politics and society through the lens of a conflict between order and disorder or civilization and barbarism.  When controversy arises, discussions take place on social media with people taking sides and talking past one-another.

Pg. 149:  Only 30% of white Evangelicals in 2011 felt an official who commits an immoral act in their personal life could still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life; in October, 2016, 72% felt it made little difference.

Pg. 156f:  The kinds of interpersonal institutions that have helped many Americans to find a place and make connections have been made less necessary by a variety of changes in our economic and political order.  We have achieved marked improvements in efficiency by removing human intermediaries.  Automation and the rise of e-commerce have made it much easier to be a functional loner in America.  Meanwhile, the welfare state has grown to take on many of the tasks previously performed by family, church, and civil society.  Local civic and charitable groups, religious institutions, and fraternal organizations simply have less to do, and therefore fewer ways to attract people out of isolation and into community. 

Pg. 185:  Institutions understood as formative are inherently constraining.  They provide the people in them with boundaries and procedures, a code of behavior, standards of integrity, and formal responsibilities that help direct their ambitions and abilities to a broadly shared purpose. 

Pg. 190:  The percentage of students at selective colleges whose families are in the top quarter of income earners in America has gone from 45 percent in 1985 to more than 65 percent today.  Our meritocracy is plainly rearranging itself into a more familiar aristocratic pattern.

Pg. 198:  The recovery of a formative idea of institutions is essential to the revival of legitimate authority, without which the future of our free society is at risk.