In spite of their heated disagreements, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians share a “highly individualist, liberationist ideal of liberty,” Levin writes, which leads to an “emaciated understanding of the life of our nation.” Society, in this view, is merely a collection of individuals who would be left alone, if the Right were in charge, or ministered to by the state, if the Left ran things. Yet as his argument unfolds, readers may wonder if a problem still more fundamental is an impoverished individualism, which abstracts from the thick, complex, subtle web of relationships that shape and sustain people’s lives. To demonstrate that nostalgia has become pervasive and blinding, Levin cites many instances of politicians and intellectuals invoking a lost Golden Age. Having thought deeply about where we are and what to do, he devotes the entire second half of The Fractured Republic to fleshing out an ambitious “reformicon” agenda, anchored in sound policies. On the basis of an incisive diagnosis, Levin, the founding editor of National Affairs magazine and the Hertog Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, offers astute prescriptions, far more thoughtful than the hackneyed recommendations tacked onto most books about America’s ills. The intent of this important book is to awaken us from our nostalgic slumber, in order to see our circumstances clearly. And Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us. Competing agendas incorporate other, distinctive nostalgias:ĭemocrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern. Liberals yearn for that era’s economic and political consensus, conservatives for its cultural and moral one. Left and Right each longs for an idealized mid-20th-century America. In any given era, within any given regime, prejudices distort the mind and cloud our judgment.Īccording to Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, our problem in the second decade of the 21st century is that our perceptions are distorted by nostalgia. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Abraham Lincoln’s pronouncement is not famous by virtue of stating the obvious, but for teaching an important political truth: only if we see clearly, can we then act wisely.
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