America, get over it

Every so often, a well-timed political manifesto comes out near the beginning of a presidency and functions as a kind of billboard for whatever new era the administration believes it is ushering in. One thinks of Stuart Chase’s “A New Deal” (1932) for Franklin Roosevelt, or George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty” (1981) for Ronald Reagan, or Robert Reich’s “The Work of Nations” (1991) for Bill Clinton. Such books require not just the right election result, but also a big idea that could plausibly make a comfortable fit for one of the major political parties: they have to promise a significant, but not threatening, directional change, and not get too bogged down in specifics.

Yuval Levin’s “The Fractured Republic” could have been one of these books — but that would require not only that the Republican Party recapture the White House this year, but also that it produce a different nominee than Donald J. Trump. Levin aims to rescue the country from the big-government tendencies of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations; and although he doesn’t say so explicitly, there is an unmistakable strain of disapproval for George W. Bush’s presidency here too (for such grand gestures as the Iraq war, No Child Left Behind and the vastly expensive Medicare prescription drug benefit).

Levin, whose previous book was in large part about Edmund Burke, wants Americans above all, in Burke’s famous phrase, “to love the little platoon we belong to in society”. And his own little platoon is such — he is the very plugged-in editor of the journal “National Affairs” and, as “The New Republic” put it in 2013, “the conservative movement’s great intellectual hope” — that his views would be sure to get a high-level hearing in a non-Trump Republican Washington.

Levin believes that both parties, in their different ways, are caught up in the fundamental mistake of wanting to restore such features of post-Second World War America as steadily rising incomes and low economic inequality, hegemony in the global economy, growing government, broad membership in the mainstream religions and a white-bread mass culture. Such goals, which are especially appealing to politicians of the baby boom generation who were young back then, are, Levin insists, nostalgic and unachievable. We need to accept that the country is now unalterably far more decentralised, and to devise political solutions around that reality.

Conservatism comes in many varieties. Levin is not a libertarian, because he doesn’t value personal freedom above all else. He is not a neoconservative, because he shows no interest in foreign policy and strongly objects to a powerful federal government, even if it is put to conservative ends. He is not a populist, because he wants ordinary people to revere authority figures, as long as they are local and not in government. Social issues seem to be closer to his heart than economic ones. His big idea is that during the first half of the 20th century, the United States created a set of large, powerful institutions that dominated national life, and then, in the second half of the century, the national culture moved away from these institutions and towards individualism.

Levin understands this process as inherently neither liberal nor conservative — and for all his stated anti-nostalgia, the picture he offers of contemporary America is not a happy one. By embracing “a view of society as consisting only of individuals and a state,” we have “set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation” on the one hand and, on the other, a federal government that “engages in more direct intervention ... in the daily lives of Americans than it ever has in peacetime.” The only workable solution is an ethic of “subsidiarity,” which decentralises political power and elevates local “middle institutions” such as churches and neighbourhood organisations.

Towards the end of “The Fractured Republic”, Levin calls on conservatives to “enter into the details of public-policy debates, and not limit themselves to the level of abstraction”. That is not a project he engages in here. He calls his book “an essay”, and its main strength and main weakness are the same: it fits a vast range of material under the roof of one fairly short volume, but at the price of speaking primarily in general assertions unsupported by evidence.

Levin is a master of the old debater’s trick of setting up and knocking down a straw man: he almost never quotes an actual person advocating for a return to the 1950s, but he consistently presents himself as a lonely voice with the courage to envision something different. (Another debater’s trick, which follows from this one, is his tendency to label ideas he disagrees with as “anachronistic”, “no longer plausible”, “stuck in the past” and so on, rather than arguing against them on the merits.)

Levin frequently manoeuvres himself into range of specific policies — on social programmes, on economic regulation, on immigration — and then leaves us to guess what he’s actually for, as if he fears that by taking a position he would lose our attention or alienate potential converts.

With this very broad style of argument, Levin runs the risk that what he says might not ring true, and this is especially a problem in his characterisations of liberalism, which is obviously not the world he inhabits. This shows up often in specific instances where he seems unaware of exactly what liberals have been up to. He refers to Lawrence Summers — the former Treasury secretary whose candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve was sunk by the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party — as a former official “from the left”. He says the term “the establishment” was “borrowed ... from the postwar radical counterculture”, when in fact it was invented by the not-at-all-radical British journalist Henry Fairlie and popularised in the United States by the “New Yorker” writer Richard Rovere, a prominent defector from radicalism to mainstream liberalism.

Levin doesn’t mention liberal thinkers much at all, and so misses not just the nuances but the main outlines of their often ferocious debates during the period he covers. (Perhaps the most conspicuous absence is the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers, whose “Age of Fracture”, published five years ago, covers much of the same ground as “The Fractured Republic”; Levin repeatedly uses Rodgers’s title phrase in his book.)

More broadly, you would have no idea from reading Levin that the federal government has fewer employees today than it did half a century ago; that federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product is about where it was when Ronald Reagan left office; or that the United States has more than 13,000 school districts that control what is by far the developed world’s most decentralised education system. Nor would you know that the last three Democratic presidents — Carter, Clinton and Obama — all defeated intraparty rivals who were far closer to the big-government, big-labour politics that Levin says is the core conviction of the entire party.

“The Fractured Republic” is useful in helping us understand why conservative intellectuals have been so intensely opposed to Trump, even though Levin doesn’t mention him (the only active politician he seems to praise by name is Paul Ryan, who has provided a blurb for the book). Starting with its slogan — Make America Great Again! — Trump’s campaign perfectly embodies the kind of nostalgia and grandiosity that Levin defines as America’s main problem.

Trump is against free trade and other aspects of the unimpeded market; notably uncritical of the big federal social welfare programmes; not visibly religious, personally restrained or engaged in community life; and in every other particular seems to be opposed to everything Levin is for. And he’s a baby boomer, born in 1946 (the same year as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; Hillary Clinton was born in 1947), who sees his own journey through life and the nation’s decline as having run on parallel tracks. Trump’s success this year also demonstrates that even among Republican primary voters, let alone the public at large, the ideas of conservative intellectuals in Washington may have a limited resonance. If there is a Trump White House, it’s doubtful that “The Fractured Republic” will be its handbook.

–New York Times News Service

Nicholas Lemann is the Pulitzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for the “New Yorker”.