What is reform conservatism in the age of Donald Trump?

Times are tough for anyone looking to write a serious book about politics.

The daily flood of news and commentary makes it nearly impossible to craft a book-length argument that doesn't feel hopelessly stale by the time it appears. It takes time to write and edit and revise tens of thousands of thoughtful words, and more time (usually close to a year) to place those words between the elegantly designed covers of a book.

An awful lot can happen in a year.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

While reading The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, I more than once amused myself by imagining its author Yuval Levin, one of the nation's foremost conservative intellectuals and a leading figure in the so-called Reformicon movement, making plans with his publisher about the launch of the book. Timing publication for late spring 2016, they probably hoped it would get picked up by whichever presidential campaign ultimately prevailed in the Republican primaries. Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or John Kasich would contact the author about his ideas for developing a reform conservative agenda.

Those ideas would then make their way into the GOP platform, and Levin could serve as their most articulate and persuasive spokesman, explaining and promoting them in op-eds and on cable TV interviews. Finally, after the Republican ticket had prevailed in the general election, Levin might be asked to put aside his job as editor of the thoughtful center-right policy journal National Affairs and join the new administration as a senior domestic policy advisor, helping to craft the new president's inaugural address and formulate his ambitious plans for his first 100 days in office.

All of that probably seemed eminently reasonable a year ago.

It's a testament to Levin's intelligence and (lamentably rare) commitment to civil debate about our nation's public life that his book is very much worth reading and pondering, despite the fact that it doesn't so much as mention the name of Donald Trump.

The demagogue's absence from the pages of The Fractured Republic does make the book feel somewhat out of date, a little like an artifact pulled from a time capsule buried in a simpler time — you know, back when Paul Ryan actually seemed like a formidable figure in the GOP. But that distance from the anxieties of the present moment is actually a virtue, since it helps to provide us with much-needed perspective on the populist passions roiling the Republican Party and the nation.

Levin has written a book about the power of nostalgia to distort our political vision. Both the left and the right in America look back to a prior moment in 20th-century history as a golden age from which the present country has fallen. Liberals find their ideal in the postwar decades of rapid economic growth, relative equality of income and wealth, and progressive liberation from received constraints in culture, morality, and religion. Conservatives look back just as fondly at the Reagan era, which stretched to the end of Bill Clinton's second term in the White House, when drastic cuts in taxes, government regulations, and obstacles to trade unleashed entrepreneurial vitality that benefitted nearly all Americans.

While Levin concedes that there was much to admire in the 1950s and '60s, as well as in the '80s and '90s, he also insists that America has changed in ways that make it neither possible nor (for the most part) desirable to return to either era.

The mid-20th century, in Levin's telling, was a time of consolidation and conformity, when America led the way in rebuilding nations devastated by the Second World War and the government's "corporatist, cartel-based approach to regulation," first imposed during the New Deal, stifled competition and helped "large incumbent players... maintain an artificial balance between powerful producer interests and powerful labor interests." The resulting combination of "inflated wages, high taxes, constrained competition, and an ethic of national solidarity... contributed to the prosperity of many, albeit mostly white, working-class Americans."

Yet the rising abundance and prosperity of the period also helped to catalyze the patterns of cultural "liberalization and fracture" that we've come to call "The Sixties." It was in the immediate aftermath of the cultural revolution of "expressive individualism," in the second half of the 1970s, that the age of economic consolidation finally began to fray along with the nation's moral consensus.

That's when Ronald Reagan extended to the economy the post-'60s tendency toward individualism and liberalization, cutting taxes and regulations, freeing up the entrepreneurial energies that had been contained by the corporatism of the postwar era. The result was a two-decade-long economic boom that rivaled the growth following World War II, albeit without the earlier era's high levels of cultural and economic cohesion.

And that brings us to the nostalgia-suffused discontents of the present.

For much of the past decade and a half, middle-class wages and growth have stagnated, while politically, socially, culturally, and economically the country has fallen into a new pattern that Levin calls "bifurcated concentration." We see it in politics, with increasing rates of ideological polarization. We see it in society, with mediating institutions (families, churches, free associations, social and civic organizations) playing ever-smaller roles in the lives of individuals who then find themselves increasingly dependent on the state for support. We see it in culture, with the widening gulf that separates secular Americans from the deeply devout. And we see it in the economy, with the hollowing out of the middle class and sharpening of inequalities in income and wealth.

Liberals respond to the wrenching reality of our fractured republic by pining for a return to the original era of postwar consolidation. Conservatives respond by longing for a return to its last gasp of vitality in the '80s and '90s. And what about those who thrill to Donald Trump's angry diatribes? In what might be the apotheosis of the nostalgia Levin discerns at the center of our politics, they just seem to want someone to Make America Great Again — with the meaning of "greatness" left vague enough to stand as the under-specified inverse of a wide array of economic, ethnic, and racial grievances.

There is far more to Levin's historical analysis than my thumbnail sketch can convey. On almost every page that he devotes to elaborating on it, fair-minded readers from all points on the political spectrum will find fruitful provocations. The same goes for his wonderfully cogent chapter on the future of the religious right ("Subculture Wars").

Less helpful are Levin's proposals for developing a non-nostalgic politics for our fractured age. His suggestion? Instead of fighting the multiple centrifugal tendencies of our time, Levin urges us to encourage "subsidiarity" — the concept, derived from the social encyclicals of the Catholic Church, of "putting power, authority, and significance as close to the level of the interpersonal community as reasonably possible." Instead of further empowering the federal government to solve our problems, we need to revive our ailing mediating institutions, as well as state and local governments, to address those problems instead.

Here I wonder if Levin might be guilty of a little unearned nostalgia of his own — not so much for a real or imagined past as for an idea that has transfixed the imaginations of conservatives since Edmund Burke first praised the "little platoons" of civil society for their capacity to foster virtue. The idea can also be found in Alexis de Tocqueville's classic account of how civil associations in Jacksonian America managed to restrain and temper the worst excesses of democratic government. Writing in the mid-1970s, sociologist Peter Berger and first-generation neocon Richard John Neuhaus likewise suggested that the "mediating structures" of civil society could stabilize the United States after the cultural and political tumult of the 1960s. And now here comes Yuval Levin to tell us that these same institutions can serve to renew America's social contract in an age of individualism.

It's hard to avoid the impression that for a certain kind of conservative — one who considers centralized government perhaps the greatest of all threats to human flourishing — mediating institutions are the perfect solution to just about any problem.

Such conservatives certainly aren't wrong to cherish these institutions. They're indisputably essential and do an enormous amount of good. But they are also far from sufficient.

Civil society is tricky. It's a domain of life in which people freely engage in pursuits as they wish: forming families (or not), joining and attending churches (or not), donating to charities (or not), starting small businesses (or not). Leaving aside the difficulty of devising public policies that encourage participation in such activities — beyond various kinds of tax credits, reform conservatives like Levin don't have a lot to propose — there remains the problem that not all, or even most, mediating institutions significantly advance public goods. If I join a hunting club or start attending church more regularly, there might be some minor positive externality from my behavior that, when multiplied by millions of other people joining other groups, contributes in a modest way to improving quality of life in the country. But such an amorphous good can hardly substitute for the regulation of a coal-fired power plant or covering the medical expenses of cancer patients.

I'm sure Levin would agree. He'd just be inclined to say that such public goods are more effectively and efficiently fostered by state and local governments than they are by the federal government in Washington. I have no objection to that in theory — though I would have appreciated some acknowledgement from Levin that in recent years staunchly conservative governors in Kansas and Louisiana have done to their states precisely what conservatives are always promising to do at the federal level: gutting spending on education, social services, and other public goods. Does Levin approve of the policies pursued by Sam Brownback and Bobby Jindal? Is that what he thinks a reformed conservatism focused on subsidiarity should look like?

The Fractured Republic doesn't say.

Levin does, however, tell us toward the end of his book that the federal government "now engages in more direct intervention, through spending and regulation, in the daily lives of Americans than it ever has in peacetime" — even though he knows full well that during the three decades from 1945 to 1975 the transportation, communications, energy, banking, and finance sectors of the economy were far more heavily regulated than they are now.

Levin also tells us that he considers the liberal welfare state (whether at the federal or state level) a "glaring anachronism," in part because its mandate to provide for the general welfare clashes with public opinion in "our era of dismally low trust in large institutions" — even though a significant portion of the blame for driving down those levels of trust can be traced to years of unmodulated anti-government ranting on the part of right-wing politicians and media personalities, none of whom come in for even a paragraph's worth of criticism in the book.

All of which means that, for all of its many strong points, Levin's book falls short of formulating a truly novel and constructive way to address the very real problems it so masterfully describes.