Thanks to our good friend Yuval Levin for giving us such a generous post of recommendation. He even compared us to our president, at least when he’s in his “I am the truth you can believe in” mode. We spend a lot of time musing about “what is postmodern conservatism,” as if anyone gave a rat’s ass but us. And it’s even worse: We subtly disagree with each other on that boring question, as if anyone with any sense would notice. Yuval is right to suspect that were suffering from branding anxiety. Still, if you’re willing to pay close attention, “what is postmodern conservatism” is one of the most important questions of our time.

Pete has done better than the rest of us in directing attention away from himself and our issue and toward real policy issues, such as immigration. Over the last couple of years, Pete and Yuval have been pretty much on the same page on most of the major issues over the last couple of years. I can give you no better advice than to listen to both of them.

Yuval is the leading light in a searching and timely effort to reconfigure the Republican policy initiatives on the effective application of conservative principle. I’m sure you’ve all read Room to Grow. Now I’ve read criticisms of this consistently excellent study by David Brooks and Rod Dreher. But in both cases — in all reasonable cases — the conclusion is that there’s no better beginning to really attending to what ails us as a people.

David and Rod say, more or less, that growth depends on more than room. That’s because even economic growth depends on people having both work and love, both good jobs and fulfilling and responsible relational lives. Our relational pathologies won’t disappear just by getting government out of the way. Order isn’t quite as spontaneous as the libertarians say. Not only that, libertarian futurologists such as Tyler Cowen are admitting that that the techno-dynamic of the global competitive marketplace is causing the middle class to shrink. “Average is over,” Cowen says, and we’ll soon be left pretty much with a super-wealthy meritocracy based on unprecedented techno-productivity and a marginally productive many. We can already see the life of marginal productivity is often incompatible with responsible family life. And even some conservatives openly worry about the proletarianization of the middle class.

Cowen, I’m certain, exaggerates. But he might not be all wrong that the best we can do is to alleviate some of the negative aspects of a future that we can only half-believe in. I completely agree with those who say that virtually all of the remedies liberals or progressives put forward would be counter-productive. Yuval is right to have written often that the Democrats, in that sense, have become our reactionary party, while the Republicans have become the genuine progressive one, the one that aims to achieve the best version of the future we’re actually going to have as a free people.

But from a free and relational point of view, it’s hard not to be selectively nostalgic for aspects of parts of our world being taken out by the imperatives of the global competitive marketplace.

Take unions. I’m fully on board with the idea that the flourishing of industrial unions depended on American business being relatively insulated from global competition. Defending unions is reactionary and counter-productive. But unions often did, after all, allow a man doing manual labor to achieve relational dignity by earning a “family wage” with secure benefits. Jobs of that kind are getting scarce, and they’re paying less and have become more insecure.

Or entitlements. Jim Capretta explains that, for demographic reasons alone, our present entitlement regime is unsustainable. To save what we can of Social Security and Medicare, a lot of trimming and reconfiguring and so forth is going to have to happen. But it’s easy to see why most Americans don’t regard this change as some new birth of freedom. Our population is rapidly aging, and more and more people wonder how in the world their money is going to last as long as they do. The move from defined contributions to defined benefits — which will occur in Medicare and health care generally and is, of course, the change from pensions to 401(k)s — does have the merit of giving people more choice over the details of their lives. But generic average guy who can’t afford to hire experts isn’t thrilled with having his future dependent on the risky business of the stock market. (Rod Dreher remembers the day he was liberated from his intractable personal incompetence by becoming rich enough to be able to hire a financial advisor.) We can’t afford to give people pensions of any kind any more, but that doesn’t mean we have a reliable replacement for them for many or most of us. (One more point about stocks: Even with 401(k)s, the number of Americans actually owning stocks is declining, and for now the country is divided into the surging wealth of those who have them and the stagnation or worse of the economic condition of those who don’t.)

I could go on and talk about school choice, the breakdown of employer and employee loyalty, and so forth. But I will content myself with one more point: Republican and libertarian think-tankers who talk about educational reform focus on making education more efficient and productive — and so much less costly, by freeing it from the shackles of accreditation, tenure, administrative bloat, and bureaucratic political correctness. They want higher education to become all about people getting the skills and competencies required to flourish in the 21st-century competitive global marketplace. Education should be all about life-long learning. For us postmodern conservatives, life-long learning means being educated for leisurely enjoyment of books, art, and so forth on your own time. But the new meaning of life-long learning is having the flexibility to constantly retrain or pick up new skills to keep up with techno-development and employer needs. There is something good about successful people increasingly being independent contractors on the move from job to job. But it’s not all good to constantly have to live that insecurely, that displaced, as the porchers say. Even lawyers and whole law firms, we read, are soon to be replaced by machines. (One good result, maybe: The rule of lawyers might be replaced by the rule of law.)

These musings, which I have given you to prove I’m not all about me, really are only a prelude to talking about Yuval’s work. He, even more than his colleagues, is alive to the challenges posed to relational life, to all the intermediary institutions — such as the church and the family –in which most people find real personal significance by both big government and the globalized marketplace. When he means room to grow, his focus is not on the economy but on those institutions, and he defends downsizing and reconfiguring government from that personal and relational point of view. The order we find in relatively stable and unencumbered families and churches is spontaneous only in the sense that it corresponds to what we really know about who we are.