Space Enough, and Time

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)

If there’s a book out this summer that’s worth your time and money, it’s Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.  I read it a few weeks ago and have been mulling over it ever since. In the book, Levin draws a picture of how 20th century America became 21st century America.  In doing so, he points out that the thing most political leaders in the 21st century want to do is go back in time, to realign our common life with some particular moment from decades ago.  From the introduction:

… in our time, in particular, our politics is overwhelmed by an usually intense and often debilitating frustration that is rooted in a form of that illusion [that getting back to a good place in national life is that easy], but runs deeper.  Liberals and conservatives both frequently insist not only that the path to the America of their (somewhat different) dreams is easy to see, but also that our country was once on that very path and has been thrown off course by the foolishness or wickedness of those on the other side of the aisle.  Liberals look back to the postwar golden age of midcentury America, which they believe embodied the formula for cultural liberalization amid economic security and progress until some market fanatics threw it all away.  Conservatives look fondly to the late-century book of the Reagan era, which they say rescued the country from economic malaise while recapturing some of the magic of the confident, united America of that earlier midcentury golden age, but was abandoned by misguided statists.

Each side wants desperately to recover its lost ideal, believes the bulk of the country does, too, and is endlessly frustrated by the political resistance that holds it back.  The broader public, meanwhile, finds in the resulting political debates little evidence of real engagement with contemporary problems and few attractive solutions.  In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration.

Over the next few days I’m going to write through a few of Levin’s major points.  Some of what he sees and says seems to be true for other, smaller organizations and communities, only writ large.  Even individuals can find themselves trapped, frozen in time, by a certain nostalgia.  Nostalgia has its place, of course.  But it cannot be something that keeps you from being faithful and effective in the current moment.  As Levin suggests:

To learn from nostalgia, we must let it guide us not merely toward “the way we were,” but toward just what was good about what we miss, and why.

That, I believe, is thinking in the right direction.

You can read a review of the book by James K. A. Smith here.