The Fractured Republic (2016, Basic Books), by Yuval Levin, presents a view of contemporary American civilization and the historical stages that most recently preceded it.  The book is much acclaimed.  John Podhoretz  pronounces it the best thing he has read in years on the American malaise, adding that the work's "great power … comes from its diagnosis of our ills, not its proposed cure."  It is also praised for its attractiveness to liberals as well as conservatives by Barton Swaim on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The overarching error now obstructing a solution to the nation's problems, according to Levin, is "nostalgia."  By this he means that liberals and conservatives labor under the misapprehension that the country should return to the policies of some bygone age.  Levin demonstrates what he assures us is a ubiquitous tendency by adducing the remarks of President Obama and a few other public figures, in which they refer to happier times when they were young.

No past period was all that perfect, Levin explains, and the transition to our present condition indicated more a series of trade-offs than a decline.  In any event, the conditions that shaped the earlier times are no longer here.  In particular, the prosperity of the 1950s (the "Age of Conformity") is attributable to the decimation inflicted upon our competitors during World War II.  Furthermore, the transition to the "Age of Frenzy" (the 1960s and '70s) was essentially a desirable process of economic and social decentralization, as we became a more individualistic and diverse people.  What Levin calls "cultural diffusion" began in the aftermath of the war.  It started with the publication of Dr. Spock's book recommending a liberalized approach to childrearing.

The present "Age of Anxiety" is a vexed time, according to Levin, in which people have lost faith in their institutions and in which they suffered the "economic cataclysm of 2007-2009."  Ignoring the redeeming aspects of the era, both political camps look backward.  The left imprudently seeks "a reversal of the profound diffusion and decentralization of the past half century and more in the economic sphere," while the right, equally foolish, desires a retrenchment in the "social sphere" (93).  Both sides are blinded by a reactionary refusal to accept that the times, they are (or have been) a-changin'.  They just demonstrate their nostalgia with respect to different aspects of policy.

Having offered the above analysis, Levin is a cornucopia of advice for conservatives.  To begin with, conservatives mistakenly see unmitigated decline in these first two decades of the new century.  Levin tells us that a "flowering of diversity," a "profusion of life-style choices," and an "explosion of opportunities for personalization and customization" are the beneficences of our time, although they are outweighed by a "decline of the public's trust in institutions and the general detachment from sources of social order" (87).  Further, "[c]onservatives will need to better come to terms … with the fact that modern American society is highly diverse, individualistic, dynamic, and deconsolidated, and that a significant degree of cultural fracturing, family breakdown, and estrangement from tradition and religion – not unrelated to our economic dynamism – is a fact of life" (103, emphasis supplied).  The proliferation of dissolute young people, growing up without functional families or education in our urban centers, unemployable, and turning to drugs and violent crime, is to be associated with economic dynamism.

What should conservatives do in response to such manifest social deterioration and carnage, as well as an enforced acquiescence in same-sex marriage and men in women's bathrooms?  Why, they are to build "cohesive, attractive moral subcultures in those mediating layers of society, rather than just struggling for control of the old institutions of a once-consolidated 'mainstream culture[.]'"  Conservatives must be content "focusing inward and close to home."  And they must talk differently.  In combatting the "scourge of statism," they "should more frequently employ a vocabulary of middling communitarianism [Levin elsewhere calls it 'subsidiarity'] rather than of radical individualism."  A vocabulary of radical individualism makes people dislike you.

Levin is apparently confident that the left will allow conservatives to take refuge in local government, civic organizations, and the family if only they turn inward and eschew "radical individualism."  And what might that be – "radical individualism"?  Levin does not define it so much as characterize its effect.  In his final chapter, he says radical individualism "causes us to see our fellow citizens as outsiders in the world we seek to create around ourselves, rather than as friends and neighbors in communities we share" (216).  This is a problem he associates particularly with conservatives.  "Radical individualism" is part of their vocabulary, not the liberals'.

Levin, educating us in the facts of life, defines the American society with which conservatives must come to terms as "individualistic."  It appears that there is a liberal "individualism" pertaining to cultural norms and an unacceptable conservative "radical individualism" pertaining to economics.  Does the liberal individualism, then, not "cause us to see our fellow citizens as outsiders" but instead encourage us to see them as "friends and neighbors"?  Is that the way liberals treat those not quite on board with gay marriage,  baby part harvesting on the Planned Parenthood model, and gender-bending bathrooms?  

The triumph of political atheism and hedonism that are the victory of the left in the "culture wars" represents no "flowering of diversity" and individualism.  These concepts are enforced by political correctness, by regimented compliance on pain of character assassination, loss of career or of business, or even of liberty if certain Democratic office holders have their way.  In Chapter 6, "Subculture War," Levin acknowledges the bullying of religious dissenters but counsels against invoking a constitutional protection like freedom of religion (or, presumably, freedom of speech).  This is too defensive, he says.  Very well – then would he have religious believers go on the offensive and tell everyone what is wrong with homosexuality?  Hardly.  Instead, Levin recommends to opponents of the new morality "offering living models of their alternatives to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age."  Let everyone see how admirable we are, and we will stave off the left's attack upon virtue and liberty.

Is it really "nostalgia" that governs the two political camps in this country?  President Obama, the leader of the Democrats, has fulfilled his stated intention to pursue the nation's "fundamental transformation."  The transformation does not relate merely to the social issues.  The consolidation of economic power in government, through Obamacare and such regulatory schemes as Dodd-Frank, is no idle dream.  The transformation is not yet complete – there may still be the opportunity to resist and to defend the constitutional republic erected in 1787 – but it is the threat of further transformation, not return to an America of thirty to seventy years ago, that engages the attention of American conservatives today.

We need not wax nostalgic for a lost golden age to venerate the creation of our representative democracy and its perpetuation over the centuries.  In his only reference to the thought of the Founders (John Jay in Federalist 2, extolling the original homogeneity of the American people as a basis for national unity), Levin denigrates that thought.  Dispensing with the past and getting with the program is much of his thesis.  But Burke tells us that we dare not forget what came before lest we, "unmindful of what is due to [our] posterity should act as if [we] were the entire masters" and "commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at [our] pleasure the whole fabric of [our] society," and lest "the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth … be broken" so that "no generation could link with the other" and "[m]en would be little better than the flies of a summer."

We trust that Mr. Levin and his admirers will not be distressed if Burke remains part of our conservatism, as yet unfractured.