The first half of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is an attempt to explain the contemporary American landscape by revisiting the major trends of the twentieth century.  It’s a tall order that, from my perspective, he handles well and without much repetition.  This, of course, helps flesh out his assertion that both of America’s major political parties are trapped in an unhealthy nostalgia trap.

Levin calls (roughly) the first half of the twentieth century in America an “age of conformity.”  This includes, of course, both world wars and the depression in between.

In very broad terms, the first half of the twentieth century (and the final decades of the nineteenth) can be seen as an age of growing consolidation and cohesion in American life.  As our economy industrialized, the government grew more centralized, the culture became for aggregated through mass media, and national identity and unity were frequently valued above personal identity, individuality, and diversity. … become more like everyone else.

Levin does a great job of teasing out the connective tissue in these different areas, particularly in how the common cause of war and economic collapse put many (though not all) Americans on some kind of “same page.”  When the second World War was over, though, all bets were off.  Which led to what Levin labels an “age of frenzy.”

The second half of the twentieth century and the opening years  of the twenty-first have instead been marked by growing deconsolidation and decentralization. The culture has become increasingly variegated, the economy has diversified and become more deregulated, and individualism and personal identity have triumphed over conformity and national unity.  In these years, a great many of the more powerful forces in American life have been pushing every American not to become more like everyone else, but to be more fully himself or herself.

Levin points to the psycho-social impetus that came about through books on child-rearing and Americanized approaches to self-awareness and self-fulfillment.  The concepts of consolidation and centralization are key to understanding Levin’s argument on multiple levels.  The two concepts work hand-in-hand even as they work against one another, and interesting symbiosis.

All of this leads to what Levin calls an “age of anxiety.”  Part of this anxiety comes from a what Levin calls a “hollowing out” of America in a number of areas, which results in concentrations “on the fringe” instead of “in the middle.”  In this age, centralization works differently, too.

Growing concentration and diminishing centralization are therefore not opposite forces, but increasingly complementary patterns in our times—both embodied in the bifurcation of American life.  This peculiar combination is closely related to the tendency toward a greater centralization of power in the federal government to accompany greater individualism in the culture and economy.  Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the  mediating institutions—family, community, church, unions, and others—fade and falter.  Again, we find concentration at the ends and a growing vacuum in the middle.

Such bifurcated concentration also involves a kind of constriction of movement or change—a sense in which everyone is always in the process of becoming more like what they already are.  This phenomenon presents itself as more constrained mobility in our economy, as a growing rigidity in our politics, and as a narrowing of the radius of trust in the larger society.

The idea of a society made up solely of individuals and the state (or nation) is key in understanding his approach to potential solutions for our country.

(image from timemanagementninja.com)