Beyond a Politics of Nostalgia: a Discussion with Yuval Levin on Moving the Country Forward

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE BEYOND A POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA: A DISCUSSION WITH YUVAL LEVIN ON MOVING THE COUNTRY FORWARD INTRODUCTION: MICHAEL R. STRAIN, AEI REMARKS: YUVAL LEVIN, ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER DISCUSSION: YUVAL LEVIN, ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER; MICHAEL R. STRAIN, AEI 5:30 PM – 6:45 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2016 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/beyond-a-politics-of-nostalgia-a- discussion-with-yuval-levin-on-moving-the-country-forward/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM MICHAEL STRAIN: Good evening. Good evening. Thank you. I’m Michael Strain, director of economic studies here at AEI. Thank you all for coming. Thanks to all of you who are joining us on the live stream and to all of you who will be watching the video later on. A reminder to everybody in the room that full video of the event will be available tomorrow or the next day so you can spread it around to your friends who weren’t able to make it. AEI is very happy to welcome Yuval Levin here tonight. Dr. Levin is one of conservatism’s leading public intellectuals. He’s just published an important new book, “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.” All of us at AEI are very pleased that he could join us here tonight to discuss how our politics is dripping in nostalgia, how as a society and an economy we have moved from an age of cohesion and consolidation to an age of fragmentation, and to discuss his vision of how we can move forward in a more constructive way beyond the nostalgia for the past and taking into account the realities of the present and the future. First, by way of formal introduction, Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays on domestic policy and politics. He is also the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He has been a member of the White House domestic policy staff, executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and a congressional staffer. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and first things, he holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Our program tonight is straightforward. Dr. Levin will speak from this podium about his book after which he and I will have a discussion for 20 minutes or so. We will have questions and answers from the audience following that. And afterwards, we’ll have a recession. (Laughter.) A reception, excuse not, not a recession, though we may have that too. So please join me in welcoming Yuval Levin. (Applause.) YUVAL LEVIN: Thank you very much. I can’t promise a recession, though one is likely sooner or later. I’ll speak briefly and then see what people think and open things up to questions, as Mike suggests. And I want to begin really where the book begins and walk you through a little bit of the structure, the nature of the argument and see how it strikes you. American politics, as we find it today, is drowning in frustration, in a kind of anxiety. We’re living through an uneasy time. That’s reflected in the tone of our debates. It’s reflected in the kinds of candidates that are arising and appealing to voters, in the sorts of concerns that you hear expressed and the kinds of ideas that are thrown around. Listening to our political conversations in general, you’d have to conclude that America is deeply frustrated. And that frustration, that sense of anxiety, of unease is where I’d start and where the book begins. So I want to offer just a few thoughts about the nature, the character of that anxiety, its sources, why it seems to be so powerful in 21st-century America, and then to build on those observations to offer some suggestions about how we might start to overcome that intense anxiety and help our country find its way. At first glance, our unhappiness in the 21st century might seem pretty easy to explain. Our economy, for one thing, has been sluggish since this century began and not only during the Great Recession. The country’s strongest year of economic growth so far in this century, 2004, saw a level of growth at about 3.8 percent that barely reached the average of any of the prior four decades. The century also started with the worst terrorist attack in American history, which shattered any hope for a peaceful post-Cold War World, and things haven’t gotten much more stable around the world since then. Our partisan politics has been polarized and divisive this whole time. Our cultural battles about sensitive subjects from stem cells to marriage and sexuality to religious liberty to national identity have been fought at a fever pitch, and all of that has left people on all sides of our politics feeling constantly besieged and offended. And some key indicators that cross economics and culture and politics, like family breakdown or inequality, have been pointing in persistently troubling directions for quite a while and have stood in the way of mobility and of the American dream. So the opening years of the 21st century have given Americans real reasons to worry, but there’s plainly been more to the frustration of this period than a straightforward response to challenging circumstances. Our problems are real but the way we talk about them often seems disconnected from reality so that the diagnoses that are offered up by politicians or by journalists or academics or analysts have tended only to contribute to an increasingly powerful disorientation in our public life. And when you listen carefully to what’s being said in our politics, you realize it’s disconnected in a particular way, that our way of talking about our problems now is dominated by nostalgia, by a powerful and widely shared sense that our country’s lost ground — that we’ve fallen far and fast from a peak that many Americans believe that we can still remember. I’ll give you an example that I think will strike you as very familiar, not because you’ve heard this statement in particular but because you hear things like it all the time. How often have you heard a politician in recent years say something like this, I’ll quote, “Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree. Your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed, and for many, that change has been painful,” end quote. That’s President Obama in a state of the union address a couple of years ago, but it could easily be pretty much any politician in either party now. With a little bit more of an emphasis on the cultural cohesion or the stronger families of that golden age, it might have been Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. With a more explicit emphasis on the low inequality of that time, it could be Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, and it has been frequently. With poorer grammar, less coherence, and a little bit more anger, it could even be Donald Trump calling for rolling back trade and immigration and recovering what we’ve lost. America just isn’t what it used to be. That’s the theme of contemporary politics. And it speaks to a public anxiety that often comes down to a question people ask in anguish: What has happened to our country? And, you know, it’s not a bad question. Something big and significant certainly has happened to our country. And in its less cartoonish forms, today’s nostalgia is understandable. The America that our exhausted wistful politics misses so much, the nation as it first emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War and gradually evolved from there was exceptionally unified and cohesive. It had at first an extraordinary confidence in large institutions, big government, big labor, big business that would work together to meet the nation’s needs. That confidence is just stunning when you look at it from our vantage point. America’s cultural life at mid-century was no less consolidated. It was dominated by a broad traditionalist moral consensus, religious attendance was at a peak, families were strong, birth rates were high, divorce rates were low. And in the wake of a war in which most of its competitors had burned each other’s economies to the ground, America dominated the world economy, offering economic opportunity for a while to workers of all kinds, high skill and mid-skill and low skill. But almost immediately after the war, that consolidated nation began a long process of unwinding and fragmenting. Over the decades that followed, the culture liberalized and diversified as struggled as racism and sexism coincided with a massive increase in immigration. It’s important to recognize just how much things have changed on that particular front, by the way. Because of immigration restrictions that had been enacted in the ’20s, mid- century America had an astonishingly low degree of cultural diversity until those restrictions were lifted in the late 1960s.

Load more