Institutions in Retreat
The world is still grappling with Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine last week. It shook many people to the core, well beyond those directly affected.
What kind of world is it where a hostile country can simply attack one’s neighbor? The United Nations – and American enforcement of the world order – exists to keep us from such a world.
We are living in an era of institutional retrenchment and retreat. Countries are just as likely to be preoccupied with internal issues and political division as to be projecting their values abroad. This describes America but it also describes a number of other western democracies that have struggled with everything from shifting demographics to migrant crises to climate change.
Of course, our own problems are real. Whether it’s the media (16-21%) or Congress (12%) or tech companies (29%) or our public schools (32%), institutional trust is down to record lows. 65% of Republicans – about 35% of the overall population - don’t believe that Biden’s 2020 electoral victory was legitimate. Our population is more polarized than ever and political stress is at Civil War levels. Our democracy is hanging on by a thread. The most trusted institutions in America right now – and the only ones above 51% - are small businesses (70%) and the military (69%).
This week on the podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, a political thinker and the director of Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a thinktank in D.C. that is generally thought of as conservative. Yuval defines his brand of conservatism as strengthening and modernizing institutions. For example, Yuval is for innovations like ranked choice voting, enlarging Congress and even experimenting with multi-member districts in order to make democracy more functional. He dislikes Trump because he sees Trump as corrosive to institutions.
I appreciate Yuval’s approach – it’s true that our institutions badly need modernization, sometimes reinvention.
He recently wrote an article noting that Americans are not dating, getting married, moving or taking risks as much as in the past. He describes it as “a disordered passivity – a failure to launch, which leaves too many Americans on the sidelines of life, unwilling or unable to jump in . . . excessive risk aversion now often deforms parenting, education, work, leadership, and fellowship in our society. It is intertwined with a more general tendency toward inhibition and constriction—with Americans walking on eggshells around each other in many of our major institutions, and with codes of speech and conduct becoming increasingly prevalent . . . [telling] us how not to behave without showing us how to thrive.”
Yuval believes that big tech is part of this phenomenon. “We have been using our technologies to accentuate all of these tendencies. Social media have turned large swaths of our personal lives into platforms for pseudo-celebrity performance, where we display ourselves and observe others without really connecting. And they have elevated expression over action in ways that have mangled our civic and political cultures.”
To the extent that Yuval is focused on one particular institution, it’s one that is central to all of us – the family. “Both blue-collar and white-collar work have become less friendly to family formation in some respects in recent decades . . . Many younger Americans now think it was much easier than it really was for their parents to live on one income or have that additional child . . . The waning desire for family formation is both a cause and an effect of the waning of support for families in our economy and politics.”
I greatly enjoyed speaking to Yuval – he’s a very deep thinker in terms of both what our problems are and how they can be addressed. In an era of institutional decay it seems to me that we have two real choices: rebuild and improve them or start new ones.
