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Yuval Levin - 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
Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse.
Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. 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 and militate against alienation.
As Levin argues, now 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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Copyright 2020 by Yuval Levin Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai Cover images - photo 1

Copyright 2020 by Yuval Levin

Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

Cover images Bioraven/shutterstock.com; Milan M/shutterstock.com

Cover copyright 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Basic Books

Hachette Book Group

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First Edition: January 2020

Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levin, Yuval, author.

Title: A time to build: from family and community to Congress and the campus, how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream / Yuval Levin.

Description: New York : Basic Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019033089 | ISBN 9781541699274 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541699281 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United StatesSocial conditions21st century. | Associations, institutions, etc.United States. | Consensus (Social sciences)History21st century. | American Dream.

Classification: LCC HN59.2 .L494 2020 | DDC 306.0973--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033089

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-9927-4 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-9928-1 (ebook)

E3-20191202-JV-NF-ORI

The Fractured Republic:
Renewing Americas Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

The Great Debate:
Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Imagining the Future:
Science and American Democracy

For Cecelia, with love

T WO DECADES AGO, AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, MANY Americans had a sense that we were living at the dawn of a new agea bright and forward-looking era marked by stable economic progress and crowned by technological breakthroughs that might both liberate and unify us. Our country had real problems, of course, and the day that was dawning would bring challenges of its own, but it seemed that something exciting was afoot.

By now, it has become unavoidably evident that our country has experienced the beginning of this new millennium less as a dawn than as a twilight age. This century has certainly seen its share of novel technologies and of political, cultural, and social innovations. But all of these have seemed somehow to strain us more than they enable us. In politics, economics, world affairs, culture, media, and many other arenas, we have tried to extend into a new era some of the arrangements devised to serve us well in the second half of the twentieth century, and have been left with the sense that they are overstretchedand therefore increasingly rigid and brittle. But we dont yet know what might replace them.

The term twilight age has a particular meaning given by Robert Nisbet, one of the foremost American sociologists of the twentieth century. Writing in 1975, Nisbet offered this haunting description:

Periodically in Western history twilight ages make their appearance. Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evident than those of genesis and development. Something like a vacuum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people. Human loyalties, uprooted from accustomed soil, can be seen tumbling across the landscape with no scheme of larger purpose to fix them. Individualism reveals itself less as achievement and enterprise than as egoism and mere performance. Retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective is commonplace. There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and of corruption of culture. The sense of estrangement from community is strong.

It is hard to read these words without taking them as a prescient sketch of our own time.

Some of this has been a matter of perception, to be sure, and part of what confounds us is that we know our sullen mood is not entirely justified. Generally speaking, this era has not been a time of cataclysm or disaster but of exhaustion and frustration. It has not been devoid of prosperity or opportunity, or of good news on many fronts; in fact, it feels peculiar in part because good news seems not to translate into confidence or hopefulness. What has really defined this twilight age has been a widespread failure to understand what is missing or what has gone wronga collapse of some of the preconditions for flourishing that we cannot quite explain to ourselves.

We are not only restless amid plenty, as Americans have always been. We are also awfully daunted by what on the surface seem like readily surmountable obstacles to our thriving together. This is in part because we underestimate our strengths. But it is also because we underestimate and misconstrue some of the problems we face. We lack the grammar and vocabulary to talk about what is breaking down, and so cannot even begin to do something about it. We look for diagnoses in the realms made visible to us by our assorted sciences of society, but the troubles we find there are not sufficient to justify our despondent mood. Something has gone wrong somewhere else, in some invisible realm, and we have been straining to perceive and describe what it might be.

This book is one such attempt to perceive and describe. It seeks some underlying causes of our unease and frustrationof the isolation that afflicts too many Americans, of the dysfunction that torments our politics, of the polarization that excessively sharpens both estrangement from some and affiliation with others, and of the resulting culture war that seems increasingly to be dividing us into two armed camps angrily confronting each other in every corner and crevice of American life. My goal is not to comprehensively explain all of these predicaments, needless to say. Nor is it even to outline the historical trajectory of our cultural evolution toward division and polarizationwhich others have done well in recent years, and which I have attempted in my own past writings too. Rather, the aim of this book is to highlight one particularly important cause that these distempers have in commonone that we tend to overlook.

That cause is hiding in plain sight. Everybody knows that Americans have long been losing faith in institutions. That is a truism, if not a clich. But what does it actually mean? Just what is an institution? What is involved in having faith in such a thing, and in losing that faith? And what is at stake? This book offers an inquiry into these questions, how they have played out in American life lately, and their implications for our future.

To describe this book as an inquiry is to say that it is moved by a set of questions more than by a set of answers. It is not a manifesto or a policy platform. It is more like a search for clues. And it is rooted in concern much more than in confidence.

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