Yuval Levin’s new book — available for presale on Amazon; released tomorrow — argues that we are living through a social crisis. He wrote in a New York Times essay based on the book:
We can see that [social crisis] in everything from vicious partisan polarization to rampant culture-war resentments to the isolation, alienation and despair that have sent suicide rates climbing and driven an epidemic of opioid abuse. These dysfunctions appear to have common roots, but one symptom of the crisis is that we can’t quite seem to get a handle on just where those roots lie.
Levin, my colleague at AEI, focuses on the important role of institutions. He writes that public trust in institutions is commonly undermined by abuses of power. That isn’t our era’s unique problem. Instead:
What stands out about our era in particular is a distinct kind of institutional dereliction — a failure even to attempt to form trustworthy people, and a tendency to think of institutions not as molds of character and behavior but as platforms for performance and prominence.
In one arena after another, we find people who should be insiders formed by institutions acting like outsiders performing on institutions. Many members of Congress now use their positions not to advance legislation but to express and act out the frustrations of their core constituencies. Rather than work through the institution, they use it as a stage to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.
Levin argues that this pattern is evident in the Oval Office, professional world — he calls out journalists on Twitter for “leveraging the hard-earned reputations of the institutions they work for to build their personal brands” — universities, and professional sports.
His book is a call to action. From his NYT essay:
All of us have roles to play in some institutions we care about, be they familial or communal, educational or professional, civic, political, cultural or economic. Rebuilding trust in those institutions will require the people within them — that is, each of us — to be more trustworthy. And that must mean in part letting the distinct integrities and purposes of these institutions shape us, rather than just using them as stages from which to be seen and heard.
I’m excited to read it.