The Fractured Republic – Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism
Purchase →Yuval Levin describes America’s current political mood as one of nostalgic yearning for a perceived golden era in the recent past: “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern. And Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
Levin argues that, unfortunately, neither the nostalgia of the left nor the nostalgia of the right accurately diagnoses the problems we are facing. Instead of returning to either of the remembered pasts, we should adopt a “modernized ethic of subsidiarity” and “empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right.”
Post-World War II America was, in Levin’s telling, a unique era combining cohesion and dynamism to an exceptional degree. At a time when most of our competitor countries had been decimated by World War II, major American institutions – government, corporations, religious organizations, mass media, and strong political parties – produced an all-purpose economy that provided employment for people of all educational and skill levels and a coherent cultural and political base for a unified nation. But since then “our cultural, economic, political, and social life . . . has been a trajectory of increasing individualism, diversity, dynamism, and liberalization. And it has come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, stability, authority, and social order. The America that emerged from World War II and the Great Depression was exceptionally unified and cohesive, and possessed of an unusual confidence in large institutions. But almost immediately after the war, it began a long process of unwinding and fragmenting.”
Levin points to four key structural transformations that shaped the modern economy and contributed to the unwinding and fragmenting:
1. Globalization, which rewards increasing market specialization, so that the United States, as the world’s wealthiest nation, has increasingly specialized in higher-skill work, while countries with lower costs of living and labor have specialized in lower-skill work.
2. The automation and computerization of work, which contributes to our increasingly specialized economy and leaves fewer opportunities for workers with middling or unspecialized skills.
3. Immigration, which, despite its overall advantages to the country, tends to attract high-skilled individuals from more advanced nations looking to benefit from the exceptional opportunities at the higher reaches of the American economy and lower-skilled individuals from poor nations looking for greater opportunity through low-wage work that pays more than they could earn at home. People with middle-level skills who are in the middle class in their own countries are less likely to undergo the rigors of emigrating to the United States for what would often be a lateral move. Immigration is certainly a benefit to those in the upper reaches of the US economy, since it tends to make the goods and services they purchase cheaper, thereby making them effectively wealthier. The effects are more mixed for lower-skilled people who are already here, since immigration of lower-skilled workers tends to undermine the opportunities of those already here. The overall effect contributes to bifurcating society between the highly-skilled and the lower-skilled.
4. As our economy grew less consolidated and more fractured over the second half of the last century, worker bargaining power was replaced by consumer bargaining power. The economy has replaced large government and corporate institutions with smaller, more nimble competitors that are better at meeting individual consumer needs, but worse at protecting workers as a class. The greater consumer orientation of the US economy, and the greater consumerism of the public at large, are functions of the diffusion of American life, which Levin believes is irreversible.
Along with these changes in the economy, our cultural and political lives became more individualistic, diverse, liberal, and dynamic, bringing many benefits but also contributing to the loss of social cohesion. Accompanying these changes was a growing loss of confidence in national institutions of all sorts, including governments, corporations, religious institutions, the family, and the press.
Levin counts among the consequences of these trends a greater inequality and “a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as a crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity.”
Levin’s point is that we cannot hope to return to that earlier era – in fact, we probably wouldn’t want to return to it if we were remembering it accurately. We are not at the end of the age of diffusion. So the policy responses – of the left and the right – that succeeded in that earlier time will not work in our current individualistic, decentralized, dynamic, networked America.
Levin concludes: “There is an alternative to this perilous mix of over-centralization and hyper-individualism. It can be found in the intricate structure of our complex social topography and in the institutions and relationships that stand between the isolated individual and the national state. These begin in loving family attachments. They spread outward to interpersonal relationships in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, religious communities, fraternal bodies, civic associations, economic enterprises, activist groups, and the work of local governments. They reach further outward toward broader social, political, and professional affiliations, state institutions, and regional affinities. And they conclude in a national identity that among its foremost attributes is dedicated to the principle of the equality of the entire human race.
“A modernized ethic of subsidiarity would therefore not yield a radical revolution in American life but an incremental revival. And it would not involve a checklist of public programs and policy steps. It would begin, instead, with an instinct for decentralization in our public affairs, a tendency toward experimentation and bottom-up problem solving, a greater patience for variety in our approaches to social and economic problems and priorities, more room for ingenuity and tolerance for trial and error, and more freedom for communities to live out their moral ideals, and so to each define freedom a little differently. It would involve greater attentiveness to the near at hand, and so a lesser emphasis on immense national battles—lowering the stakes, and therefore the temperature, of our national politics.
“This book therefore ultimately argues that the frustration that defines our time should lead us not to seek an impossible return to a half-remembered golden age, but instead to work toward a modernized politics of subsidiarity—that is, of putting power, authority, and significance as close to the level of the interpersonal community as reasonably possible. That is what the modernization we now so badly need would look like.”