A Time to Build
From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
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A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions
“A Time to Build is exactly what America needs right now.” —Wall Street Journal
Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics are polarized and bitterly divided, and culture wars rage across the country. Left and right alike have blamed our institutions and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cancelling, defunding, draining the swamp. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us.
In A Time to Build, Levin argues that today 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. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.
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National Affairs editor Levin (The Fractured Republic) examines how American society lost faith in its institutions in the 21st century and proposes steps to renew the public trust in this sober, conservatively minded inquiry. According to Levin, durability and structure are the defining characteristics of such institutions as Congress, the mainstream press, universities, corporations, the family, and the rule of law. "By giving shape to our experience of life in society," he writes, "institutions give shape to our place in the world." Individuals lose trust in an institution, he contends, when it is internally corrupted or when it becomes a platform to display individuality rather than to mold character. Levin sees the effects of such institutional degradation in "culture-war politics," declining marriage and birth rates, and white Evangelicals' loyalty to President Trump. He calls on Americans to reform institutions from within by being more trustworthy, aligning their personal and institutional identities, and working harder to understand opposing viewpoints. The modesty of Levin's proposals feels both refreshing and anticlimactic, and liberals are likely to find him too dismissive of the inequities that exist within institutions. Mainstream Republicans dismayed by the current state of their party, however, will savor this well-reasoned and hopeful study.
