Replay: The Fractured Republic with Yuval Levin

One of conservatism's brightest policy minds, Yuval Levin, joins us to talk about his book *The Fractured Republic.*

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Transcript

Sponsor And Book Discount

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexim Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our July book of the month is The Culture of God's Word, Faithful Ministry in a Post Christian Society. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting bakerbookhouse.com backslash pages backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes to get 30% off of our book of the month from Lexing Press.

Meet Yval Levin And The Book

SPEAKER_01 0:53

We're also joined by a very special guest. Um absolutely divided. I'm the Shimmel, and you all is the author of the excellent book. But he's also a fellow at um I'm just gonna have a string of my favourites here. He's a fellow my favorite Washington DC think tank. Um the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He started um my favorite conservative policy journal. Which may be the the only conservative policy journal in the world. Um National Affairs is an absolutely terrific journal. Um you've all you've also been involved in uh the New Atlantis in my craft in um Yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_05 1:43

I was one of the founders of the New Atlantis about the.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

So you've all been very excited to have you on the show. Uh, thanks for being here. Love the book. Um yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.

Why Nostalgia Captures Politics

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Wow. I appreciate it. Um, so as I understand the Fractured Republic, um it's your therapy for the false nostalgias that grip the the both the left and the right. Um it's it's your tonic to free us from uh this nostalgia that we all have that's keeping us captive to um sort of certain models of what life was like in uh the 50s and and holding our politics captive to trying to get back to it. Have I gotten the gist of that right as a sort of overarching statement of what you're up to?

SPEAKER_05 2:48

Yeah, I think that's fair as a place to start. You know, it it's a book about the intense frustration that is overwhelming our politics now in the United States, but really around the developed world, the sense that our institutions are breaking down, that our society is divided and polarized and just doesn't work like it used to. That frustration is obviously everywhere in our political life. It's impossible to ignore, it was all over the last election. And the book is really about why we are feeling so frustrated, what the actual problems are, and why we're finding it so difficult to improve things, and then it tries to suggest some ways of uh breaking through that and improving things. It does begin by arguing that uh our politics is so frustrated in significant part not only because we face real problems, which we certainly do, but also because both of our major parties in the United States have been intensely nostalgic and backward looking for a long time. The the left always wishes it could be 1965 again, the right always wishes it could be 1981. They're actually both playing out the same basic kind of baby boomer nostalgia, just in different ways, and the power of that nostalgia over our politics is really an extraordinary thing. Uh this election has changed a lot, but it hasn't broken that. We are still in a situation where w what w what people who say make America great again seem to mean is make America like it used to be back then. And the book tries to suggest that not only is that not possible, it's also not the right way to think about America's strengths and weaknesses in the 21st century.

Solidarity Vs A Sanitised Past

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Yeah, so that's that's very helpful. I I I noticed that um your response to nostalgia isn't to debunk it, um, but to try to use it to point to what was good in the respective periods that both the left and the right are pointing to. Um it it it seems like here here's my question or or my concern. Um what you what you go on to do is is predominantly economics focused. There's there are social dimensions to it, but um the the sense of national cohesion that you identify from from the periods that we're looking backwards to, um, and the sense of sort of economic optimism and mobility, um uh those are both worthwhile. But I think my question is whether or not the the economic tonic use of E is sufficient to actually overcome our nostalgia, right? The the the the point that um the nostalgia, like the society that we look backwards to um was a society where you know to pick the cardinal sin, um there was significant racial injustice. And um and I wonder, I just wonder if uh in order to free us from the nostalgia, we actually need more debunking, need need more of a uh kind of lament or penitential period where where we would say, you know, there are there were goods, there was a sense of national cohesion, but it was the wrong kind of national cohesion. It was it was a a national cohesion built on the backs of um constituencies who were were uh severely uh oppressed from it. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_05 6:13

Yeah, I mean there's a lot there. I I would say, first of all, I I certainly don't think that the the fundamental tonic is going to be economic. I don't think economics can ever be sufficient. I I don't think that any uh that any social problem that's that's as deeply felt as what we're looking at now could possibly be fundamentally economic. I think that it is fundamentally a problem of the soul. Uh a a a social problem that is a moral problem that ultimately affects individuals um i i in ways that can only be understood as a problem of the soul. And you know, the the the characteristic um the the characteristic pain people feel now is a kind of isolation um uh that's a function of the radical individualism that's characterized our society in recent decades. And that's much more than economic. It certainly has an economic dimension. But there's no question that for a lot of people the the nature of the nostalgia, and really this has to do with the vocabulary of our politics, with the way we think about political questions, it tends to express itself in economic terms. And so you you'll hear people say, in the good old days you used to be able to go downtown and get a factory job and keep it for life. Th that's certainly one thing people miss uh about post-war America or about the sort of half-remembered post-war America that we live with in our imagination. But even that, let alone when people talk about the strength of families in that period or uh religious observance or a sense that there was some kind of broader social consensus, it seems to me that a lot of that is actually a nostalgia for solidarity, a nostalgia for an America that felt like it was one thing with one purpose. Now, the obvious uh counterresponse to that nostalgia, to that deeper sense of what we're missing, is just as you say, that this was the case for some people, but it was certainly not the case for all people. Um, and it was especially not the case if you weren't white in America in the 1950s and sixties, which is that period that's that our politics misses so much. So that certainly has to be said. I think there uh there's more than that to what we wouldn't want to go back to, honestly. I mean, in a lot of ways, what we miss about that period is that it offered us a stable backdrop for liberalization. Right? It i i i what we miss about it is not just that it was itself cohesive and stable. What we miss about it is that it was cohesive enough to allow us to liberalize, whether that meant liberalizing economically toward a more market-oriented economy, which is what a lot of people on the right miss about that period, or whether it meant liberalizing socially, that is the struggle against racism and the fight to liberalize our society, diversify our society, that was made possible by the background cohesion that people miss. And the fact is that has happened, that liberalization has happened, economic and social, um, and our society is its product. And the question for us is how do we now uh build a path towards solidarity given the society we are, that is as diverse as it is, that is as liberalized as it is in its culture and in its economy. So we can learn from the fact that we missed the 1950s and sixties. I I I am not an an an implacable enemy of nostalgia. I think nostalgia has its place, and I'm a conservative. I think we should be learning from the past always. But the particular nostalgia that is so overwhelming now in our politics, which is uh a baby boomer nostalgia of a very specific sort, I think really is just overpowering, and it creates enormous problems for our politics, to the point that our entire country, our entire political culture, thinks about itself as an aging baby boomer, and i it does enormous damage to uh to our country's prospects.

Brexit Post Nationalism And Pushback

SPEAKER_04 10:04

Reading your book from the context um that I'm in in the UK, I was wondering how you'd relate some of your analysis to a broader political situation, because looking at the recent election in the US, there are a lot of uh uh things that resonate with the situation here in the UK with the recent Brexit referendum. And it seems to me that some of the broader trends that are appearing are international trends, particularly with the rise of things such as post-nationalism and concept people's concept of themselves no longer being so tied to um a particular nation and the rise a resurgent nationalism pushing back against that. And I wonder how exactly we can is it possible to retain a strong sense of the republic in an age of post-nationalism, both as ideology and for many people as fact. I mean my family is spread to many different parts of Europe. I'm going to be um probably moving to the US at some point in the future, and all of us have married outside of our um our nation, and uh nation just doesn't have the same hold on us anymore. What does the republic mean in that sort of age?

SPEAKER_05 11:25

Yeah, it's a wonderful question, and I do think a lot of these trends s surely are um at the very least Anglo American, but they're really evident in in the entire developed world. A sense that the the post war social order and political order is exhausted, the post-World War II order, which in a lot of ways is what we've been uh living out since uh since the mid-1940s. And uh uh not only exhausted, but that our our our leaders, our governing elites, um are totally unsure what needs to come next and what they ought to be doing about this. I think this has a lot to do with why our politics is so nostalgic. I would say that there's uh clearly been a reaction to that post-nationalism, um, a nationalist reaction around the developed world. We've seen that in America, we've seen it in the in the UK, um we we we see it in France, we see it in Austria and throughout Europe. I th the sense that people in fact are not satisfied with the implicit answer that a lot of our leaders have to this challenge, which is to say that we ought to embrace some a a kind of post-nationalism, or at least that we should understand what's happening to our world since the end of the Cold War as finally making possible a kind of politics at the end of history where the challenge is really about how to allocate the enormous benefits and advantages of um of the liberal order. I I I I think that i in the United States the politics of the twenty-first century has been a painful coming to terms with the fact that that's not actually what the end of the of of the post-war political order means, and it's not actually what the end of the Cold War means. Th the if i y y if you had looked in on the 2000 election in the United States between Al Gore and George W. Bush, you you easily could have thought that our two parties had really found fairly plausible left and right wing paths toward kind of governing at the end of history. Um they were both thinking really about how to live in that world where there is peace, in the United States, there were these big budget surpluses, and the question is how not to waste our opportunities. But it became evident very clearly, certainly by September eleventh of the following year, but uh in a lot of ways, uh not just in in in in terms of global stability, but the economy, the culture, nothing in fact was going that way. History did not end. And instead the challenge that we've been facing since the beginning of the twenty-first century is that the end of the post-war order and the end of the Cold War meant not that uh that that that that that nationalism was forever submerged. It meant, in fact, a re-emergence, a resurgence of a lot of these long submerged forces. Nationalism and populism, ethnic tensions, economic resentments. These actually are the challenges of the post-Cold War world. These are the challenges that have been tormenting the West in in the early 21st century. And I think a lot of our elites on the left and the right have just been unwilling to accept that, and have treated the frustration of the public in their countries as part of the problem rather than as a sign that there is an underlying problem that they ought to think about. Um and so they've treated all of the challenges we faced as challenges to the potential to now live past the end of history instead of clear signs that we do not live beyond the end of history, that we have these very real uh problems to think about. Uh it seems to me they're coming to terms with that now, gradually, they're being forced to, because the public in the United States and in the UK and other places um has been trying to tell them something they don't want to hear for 15 years, and the politics of telling the public to shut up uh ha has has reached its limits.

Trump Sanders And The Power Of Alienation

SPEAKER_01 15:24

That wasn't a winning strategy? Who would have thought it? What's that?

SPEAKER_03 15:30

Just making jokes over here. That didn't um I I had a question on that. Um in that vein, uh post post-Trump, uh how how do you how do you see that conversation um changing in a sense? So the the the nationalism nationalism seems to be back on the menu again that the the the conversation in the national review between uh Rich Lowry and Ramesh Pan P Panan I I always can't get all the the the names right, but um and then you and and Ben Shapiro and um how how has in a sense Trump changed the analysis uh either either just among the among among the elites or or even just uh you know coming off of the analysis of your book, um how is that how has that kind of changed the portrait? How how does that shift what you what you see moving forward? Uh because it in a sense, you know, history hasn't ended and history just happened in a big way.

SPEAKER_05 16:38

So um, yeah, so I I I think that in some respects what what Trump grasped uh in twenty sixteen was that this this unwillingness of leaders in both parties even to see and acknowledge the problems that people were facing had created a huge opportunity to appeal to frustrated voters just by acknowledging their frustration, even without really offering any ways to address it. And in a s in a way, Trump's diagnoses were always more important to his appeal than his prescriptions, which even his biggest fans I think never really took very seriously. What he saw was that the kind of fracture and breakdown of consensus and fragmentation that I try to get at in the book, and that has really been a defining feature of American life now for several decades, that that fracture had created a powerful alienation in our politics that could be an enormously uh powerful political force. And that identifying with alienated voters could matter even more than offering those voters concrete answers uh to their worries. So m my book was written before Trump, in a sense. I mean it was uh i i it was finished just at the beginning of twenty sixteen. Uh and so uh i i i it offers a diagnosis of of of what I think ended up being the kinds of problems that Trump was able to to channel and to draw on. But I I certainly didn't see the potential of sheer alienation as a political force in a way that Trump clearly did understand. I think that's one thing we learned in the past year is the power of alienation. You know, we think of alienation as as I mean it's something we we tend to associate conceptually with the political left, even maybe with a c a certain strand of Marxism. But that doesn't have to be what alienation is. Uh alienation is a sense that the the social order that you're part of uh is distant and incomprehensible and fraudulent and remote. Um that it's th you're apathetic toward it, you find it b at least boring, and maybe you're hostile to it. That's that's the attitude that Trump and a lot of his early supporters uh very frequently voiced about America in twenty sixteen. And i it was an attitude that a lot of the people who follow politics had a lot of trouble sort of getting our arms around, um, because it isn't actually a very common feature of American politics. But it is now very powerful. And I think that both Trump and on the left Bernie Sanders um appealed to that in a big way, and they both did extremely well. You know, Sanders won forty-three percent of the vote in the Democratic primaries, Trump won forty-five percent of the vote in the Republican primaries, and then beat the candidate of the status quo in the general election. And one lesson we have to draw from this year is about the power of alienation. The other lesson for me from this year's uh the other the other lesson I would now add to the book if I were writing the book now, is that the the forces driving our politics now are not just alienation, that's that's a negative force, that's a dangerous force. But there's also a very, very powerful desire for solidarity in American politics. And I think you see this again around the West. And that that desire it's in Kuwait and the parties channel it in ways that are undeveloped and so can be um dark and problematic. But that desire, the underlying desire, is a good thing. People are not in fact satisfied with division and fragmentation and fracture. People are really looking for some c some language of solidarity in politics. They were d very dissatisfied this year with the language of of liberty and prosperity, which in different ways is what the left and the right tried to offer them. And instead they w th th voters went after these people who, in very undeveloped ways, but still in pretty clear ways, offered them some form of solidarity, some idea of unity, which uh you know it's they were in neither case were they forms of it that I was happy with, but the fact of the desire is something we have to be attentive to. I think on the whole that desire is a good thing.

Liberalisation And Solidarity In Tension

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Yval, can I ask on that the um the solidarity, the sense of solidarity and cohesion, you earlier described it, and you describe it in the book, as a as a kind of background for liberalization, um as providing a stabilizing force so that the liberal liberalization of the 60s and so on could could happen? I wonder if um you think that these uh sort of competing forces uh towards solidarity and towards liberalization uh are intention. Um is it possible for them to be held together, or does the sort of nationalism that uh might animate a real sense of solidarity just stand in in sort of insurmountable uh opposition to the kind of liberalization that our society has generally become comfortable with and and seems to like a lot.

SPEAKER_05 21:55

Yeah. Well, that that tension is definitely a reality. I think that. Tension is the life of the West in our time, and and you know, in some ways that tension has been the life of the West uh since since the Age of Revolution, since the end of the eighteenth century. In different ways, there's been a uh a tugging back and forth between this desire for some form of solidarity and and a desire for some form of liberalization. And you can see it in the histories of the various Western countries, a kind of back and forth. The United States has been fortunate in that it hasn't gone to the extreme in either direction, um, in a way that some that some in Europe have. And I I would say that's true in a gen that that's true more generally, by the way. The United States has always managed to have more moderate forms of Europe's problems, um, and we we've been very lucky that way. But I I do think that um that we're living in a moment now where that challenge is especially clear, where we can see the tension between liberalization, both cultural and economic, um, and solidarity. And in a funny way, the the left and right, certainly in American politics, um each kind of pick half the story to tell and describe that as the whole story, so that on the right, it wouldn't strike people as strange at all to say that the that cultural liberalization through immigration, through cultural change, through secularization, is a problem for our society, and we need to respond to it by a kind of r reversion to tradition and to and to forms of national unity. On the left, it wouldn't surprise anybody to say that economic liberalization uh is divisive and creates polarization and creates inequality, and we have to respond to it by reversion to some forms of economic solidarity. And yet neither side accepts the other half of that. Um on the right, the economic argument is totally unacceptable. The notion that there need to be limits on markets in order to preserve national cohesion. Uh on the left, similarly, the idea that our culture is changing too fast um is taken to be just a form of uh bigotry now. And so each side has grasped half the story and treats the other half as anathema, and uh ultimately uh it that's not sustainable. I mean, I think our politics uh is going to have to um arrange itself around the question of liberalization and solidarity in a different way, and it's part of why we've had such trouble coming to terms with the problems we have now, and it's part of why we're in this strange situation where we're intensely divided. There isn't there is a polarization in American life that people call partisanship, but it's happening at the same time that we have very, very weak political parties and very weak institutions in general. Um and so again it's a challenge to uh see our way forward.

Rebuilding Mediating Institutions Locally

SPEAKER_04 24:56

You talk a lot about the importance of institutions and um the mediating structures within our societies, things like families and churches and these sorts of institutions that provide alternatives to um extreme individual the extremes of individualism or centralized um statism. And I was wondering, is it possible to have strong mediating institutions in an age where increasingly our technological and infrastructure and all these other factors have prevented the um these institutions from exerting the same sort of cent the same sort of consolidating pull that they once did. So, for instance, the fact that we can easily opt out of going to one church and just drive to the next town, or um we can detach ourselves from our immediate local community and connect to people online. So many of these communities that in the past we would have had to we would have been bound to them in various ways by the inertia of distance, by um limitations in transport, by mere um affiliation and all these sorts of things. Now we have so many ways to opt out of them, to we're moving from place to place, we're no longer forming the attachments that we once did within our local communities. Most of us will marry many of us will marry outside of our local communities and the attachments that that creates are very different in character. So how could we form these strong mediating institutions in the context of a high mobility um society where there is mass communication and it's very hard to form anything that sticks. It seems very fluid.

SPEAKER_05 26:52

Yeah, it's a great question because this really gets to the core of the problem that um that I think was also at the heart of the of the previous question. I i in a sense the the th the solution to the tension between liberalization and cohesion, to me at least, and this is very much the argument of the book, um, can be found by redirecting ourselves more to these mediating institutions, by thinking more locally, um as a way to turn down the temperature of of huge national debates that can't really be resolved in the forms they now take, and instead to try to solve problems at a more interpersonal level, where you actually see other human beings eye to eye, where you don't have to settle problems theoretically before you can settle them practically. Um and so it becomes much more easy to actually address concrete human problems. But as you say, those communities are not just sitting there waiting for us to c to come back to them. Um they're the the ways in which modern life is different and is continuing to change are enormous problems for any kind of reversion to local community or to mediating institutions. Um and uh th that problem is especially defined in just the way you suggest, which is that we have so much choice now that in order for us to return to these mediating institutions, from the family to the community, to religious and civic institutions, um, to local government and local politics, to educational institutions that can shape our character, we would return to these if we chose to. Um the challenge is that we have to want them first. And that's a challenge because there are a lot of other things competing for our desire and for our time and for our attention. And so we really have to understand the problem we face as a problem that calls for a return to these institutions and a a reinvigoration of these institutions. There's a way that public policy can help there if more of it were channeled through um some of these civic and religious and local institutions, but that's a limited w that's a limited solution. Ultimately, the only way to really revive the mediating institutions is to want to. And that's why you have to persuade people that those institutions have something to offer, and that um community as community, not just as a platform for personal expression, which is what um which is what the things we call communities online really are at the end of the day, um, but rather as a set of institutions that shape us, that form us, um, that we need those in order to be free and in order to be happy. I I I I think people may be open to that argument because a lot of us know that we don't have what we need to be happy and to be f and to be complete. And so we're open. We're asking the question, what do we need? What are we missing? Um it seems to me that the the case for community as an answer to that question is very strong. But it has to be made and it has to be persuasive and it has to be attractive. Um it is an enormous challenge. It is uh i i th there's an inclination among people who tend to a kind of communitarianism to think that if only we take away the uh the obstacles to it, if only we remove that centralizing government that uh pulls us out, then all those institutions that we that that live in our imagination would just be there for us to walk into. But it's going to take a lot more work

Technology Mobility And Choosing Community

SPEAKER_05 30:30

than that.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

So I I'm I have a question as a I'm the I think the only one here is a sort of full-time pastor, but I'm just fascinated because obviously when I in fact I came across the book, I think the reason I picked up the book in the first place is because I'd seen a uh a sort of a an application of it to local church life, and I thought, oh, that's a really interesting concept that someone's talking about mediating institutions, and it obviously sends it to me like a Christian presentation, and then as I started reading it, I realized this isn't an explicitly Christian thing at all. This is this is this is more accessible, but obviously local churches and symbols and the most obvious way in which the clouds you give a number of examples of sexual immediately. I'm just interested to what extent you think this this there is a satisfaction system. So you can see the census the community and resolutions, maybe this is intergenerational connection, and most of the other things seems to me that theistic solutions or religious solutions in Europe and America at the moment are far more restrictive as providing that sort of mediating institutional functions than the sexual equivalence that I'm aware of. Do you think that you are making an implicitly religious case when it comes to the institutions? Or do you think actually, no, it just happens at the moment those institutions are doing that reasonably well, but there's no other reason at all why we couldn't have the same to be true of a union or a working man's club or whatever it might be?

SPEAKER_05 32:12

Yeah, you know, I I I think that because the problem is multifaceted, it it would take different kinds of institutions. Some facets of the problem really are uh social and political, in the sense that the the space between the individual and the state is just too empty, and it's very difficult for citizens to form the habits that are required just for being good citizens in a free society. But there's no question that the most fundamental problems are problems of the soul, are problems of um of moral formation and uh problems of emptiness and loneliness. And I absolutely agree that those are uh ultimately not going to be resolved without those institutions that that turn our gaze upward, um without those institutions that help us to understand that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Um and so I I I d I don't think the free society itself is possible without uh as you say, theistic institutions, without uh w without Judaism and Christianity and and uh and and ultimately I I don't think that that what we understand to be the liberal society could exist without them. And a lot of the other institutions, the secular institutions of our kind of society, frankly live off the capital uh that's that's generated by these um by by religious institutions. And that you know, that's a kind of um that's a kind of crass utilitarian way to describe what they do. Th the the reason that churches and synagogues and mosques are important is not that they make it possible for us to have a liberal society, but they do. Um and that is one important thing about them, after all. Um They they also do something more important than that for uh for for the for the for people looking for the truth. Um but uh among the enormous benefits they provide to our society is that they do help to form us to be better citizens and uh and to think of one another uh as as neighbors. Uh and so I I I agree with you. I I don't think ultimately the solution can work in a purely secular way, but that's just a function of the fact that I don't think ultimately our kind of societies can work in a purely secular way.

Why Religion Shapes Citizens And Neighbours

SPEAKER_03 34:36

Um you you mentioned the issue of neighbors, and one of the things that has struck me in the last year, I I've done just a little bit of reading, um, Charles Murray and everybody read Vance this year and all that. Um the issue of neighbors and class, uh, that I up until this year has not really been a big feature of my thinking. I I but but the issue of class came up huge, I think, in thinking about the fracturing and thinking about uh and oftentimes I don't think conservative thinkers from what I've what I what I've seen in the past want to want to look at the problem of of class as a major fracturing um force. Um I'm just wondering where how that in a sense how that figures in to the uh to the narrative of fracturing in in in uh and and and kind of in a sense what's what's the solution, what's the way forward there simply because um you know you talk about conservatives not being willing to or being less willing to um deal with you know the economic solidarity solution and and that that are kind of seems anathema.

SPEAKER_05 35:56

So I'm just wondering, you know, w weigh in on there's there's there's not a clear question here at the end that but but in weigh in on class as a as a particular problem and as one that we're all more increasingly have to come to grips with um in this new fractured uh Yeah, no, I I absolutely think it's something we do have to come to terms with, and it's especially difficult for the right in the United States, where I think we've tended to and I'm on the right in the United States, but we've tended to um we've tended to imagine our country as being uniquely uh immune from class divisions. And I think that's that's always been untrue, but um it has at times been more true than it is now. Um and I I think that just as you say, the the economic class question um is an i is an indivisible part of the larger fragmentation and fracture of our society. That fracture took the form of a kind of breakdown of consensus that over time became polarization. We think of polarization in political terms as left and right becoming more and more distant from each other, and that's one form of it. Um there's also an economic polarization of rich and poor becoming different from each other. There's a there's a lifestyle cultural polarization where people um at different ends of the educational and socioeconomic spectrum in America lead very, very different lives in terms of family formation, in terms of uh of stability, in terms of community, in terms of religious observance. These things hang together. They're closely related, and I think that economic inequality um is very much a part of that. Now it's a part of that. It's not the cause of the rest of it, which I think is where some people on the left go wrong. I don't think that that economic inequality is what drives the rest of of the fragmentation and fracture, but it is one very important consequence of it. And it seems to me that what it means to see that it's a symptom and not the cause is that addressing it would require taking on the larger problem. Um and that means that in economic terms, we have to think more in terms of opportunity than of inequality uh of of incomes. That is, we have to worry about the people at the bottom. That's that's what inequality demands of us. Um and worrying about the people at the bottom is not the same as worrying about there being too big a distance between the top and the bottom. And sometimes on the left, when that's lost, I think people treat as solutions um a kind of gross redistribution that isn't really about helping people at the bottom. That's just about taking more from people at the top. I think that only makes sense if it's actually being used to help improve the opportunities available to people who start out at the economic bottom in American life, who today just don't have nearly enough of a chance to rise into the middle, let alone beyond it. Um and you know, again, we have this image of ourselves in America as as the uh as the land of opportunity, as the place where you can rise from nothing. Um but the fact is it is very, very difficult in America to rise from nothing. And that's a problem that our society has to take seriously, and that the the illusions we have about there not being class divisions in our country stand in the way of our actually helping actual people with real problems who would benefit a lot from our taking much more seriously the fact of inequality and the fact of the larger social fragmentation and divisions that stand in their way.

Class Fragmentation And Real Opportunity

SPEAKER_04 39:44

Within your book you talk about the relationship between uh developing almost subcultural conservatism and the multicultural movement, particularly engaging with um Michael Brendan Dharty. And you mention that um uh whereas multiculturalism has highlighted differences between people and indiv and distinct identities and sought very much to form political uh status on the basis of those distinctions. Um cultural conservative communities, you write, seek instead to embody ideals that their members take to be best for everyone, not just for themselves. A subcultural conservatism would seek not to highlight differences, but to embody universal human truths that could should shape the character of the large society, precisely by turning people's attention toward the inward toward the moral lives of their own communities. It could also turn them outward toward the moral lives of their neighbours and fellow citizens. It would seek to build communities united not by something that would set their members apart from everyone else, but by something that they believe they can offer everyone else. And I was wondering reading that about the relationship between conservatism's attachment to the human universal and those universal values for human nature, and also its traditional attachment to and high valuation of cultural particularity. Is there a danger that as we seek to make it more palatable, conservatism more palatable to an age of um multiculturalism where people are very much uprooted, that we d ideologise it and downplay the particularity of the attachments that it has traditionally celebrated? Um in favour of just a more generic celebration of attachment as such. Um although participating in a common life and having a place within society is a universal human good, it seems to me that these can only be realized in very particular but varied forms of specific societies. How do we square that circle, as it were, and relate those two aspects of universality and particularity?

SPEAKER_05 42:00

Yeah, it you know, it's a wonderful question because in a lot of ways the the the cultural debates that we engage in now between the left and the right, uh it seems to me often confuse these distinctions between uh particularity and universality, so that uh the identity politics that's so common on the left seems in a sense to be about particularity, but in fact it seems to me that it's often about permanent distinctions that are universal among human beings, distinctions of uh uh of of uh of of race and sex and uh uh and and that those are celebrated uh in in a way that is actually in a sense universal. Those are things that are human, that that connect us all. Um whereas on the right what you find is uh a an inclination to think in terms of particularity that's always been part of conservatism and that ought to be, um, but that i i uh th that in fact involves various particular ways to advance universal goods, especially through religious communities? It's an inherently complicated problem, and I don't think that we should even quite want a solution to it. I mean, in a sense, the the the tension between these things is a very constructive tension, but it does, as you say, present um present social conservatives and religious people in free societies with some very practical challenges. Um do we actually want to approach others as potential members of our community so that in a sense we're trying to convert them or we're trying to persuade them, um, or do we want to approach them as uh people from whom we want nothing but to be left alone to live our own lives and raise our children in the ways we want to? This is a an enormous problem in my community. I'm Jewish, and we don't really go out and try to convert people. Um Judaism is certainly open to converts, but it doesn't see uh conversion as a core mission. And in a sense, in the United States, um w we've always inclined to think that what we really want from the larger society is the freedom to have our community, which is a freedom that after all Jews have very often been denied um in our history. And we value America and we value other developed countries now for the freedom they give us to be ourselves. But at the same time, it does seem to me that we also have an enormous amount to offer by example and by instruction and interaction to offer that might help those larger societies, especially in a time when the the societies we're part of are so caught up in a struggle about how to live good lives in the midst of all the temptations and all the advantages of modernity and of liberalism. I think our religious communities are actually quite good at this, um i uh and and s and and have a lot to offer in terms of lessons for how to uh contend with these tensions. And so uh w we can never let go of our particularity. I don't think we should want that, um, and I I don't think we could survive if we did. But we should understand that within that particularity, w the the strength of it, the reason our communities survive and thrive, the reasons the reason that they could have any hope of being attractive to our own children, let alone to our neighbors, is that they have something to offer that is of enormous value in modern life. Um it's not simply uh a kind of uh a set of roots that leads into uh an ancient tradition that's deep beneath the ground and doesn't have much to give us now. It has a huge amount to give us now in terms of how to form people who are capable of being virtuous people in the modern world. And so I think we shouldn't hide our light under a bushel, and we should think about what it is we have to offer the larger society. But as you say, never letting go of the particularity, the reasons why what is ours is ours. Uh, that has a lot to do with why we love what's ours, after all.

Universal Truth And Particular Traditions

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Yval, when I think about your your book and um your your project, the the emphasis on mediating institutions and um and those sorts of dimensions, um it struck me in reading it that one demographic that I think it would resonate with enormously would be uh lower class black communities, um, where even though you have you know significant breakdown of family life, um they also have really deep uh social bonds. Uh the social networks within lower class black communities are uh really incredible. The kind of social capital that gets shared uh between people in order to help each other out, there's there's a there's an astonishing sense of neighborliness that I think really your approach to things would would really resonate with. Um as you think about sort of the the demographic or the constituents that might um take what you're saying and find something to latch on to. Are there is there hope for a conservative movement sort of reaching out and and sort of breaking some of the racial uh lines that it's been predominantly captive to for the last um 30, 40 years? Um are there are there constituencies out there that you think um are overlooked among conservatives that would expand the sales pitch, as it were, to show that um being a conservative means something more than being a Reaganite on economics? Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 48:01

Well, uh obviously I certainly hope so, and I and I do think so. I I I think it would require um it would require an approach that doesn't insist on this being conservatism. Um I I I I I think that just as you say, uh th there there's an enormous amount in common between this way of thinking about how to solve problems and what you find on the ground in places that actually confront serious social problems. Um and, you know, th there's a way in which uh people are never satisfied with brokenness. They're always looking for a way to heal what's broken. And so th w when we think about what our society needs, we have to adopt a kind of sociology of success and ask ourselves where are there examples of people who are able to rise up from impossible circumstances, of communities that have found some way to uh to revive themselves uh uh after dealing with the kinds of uh of terrible circumstances that more and more uh American communities find themselves facing. And uh we have to be open to examples of success that are small examples, that are modest examples that we might learn from. And as you say, I do think there's a lot of that to be found in the black community in America. It's one of the reasons why I was uh I I had such a problem with the way that Donald Trump spoke about the black community in the course of the election, which was all about uh carnage and and destruction and people being shot in the streets. That's not only not true, i it it it blinds you to a lot of what's really going on on the ground in communities um th that have faced some of the worst social circumstances in our country. And uh uh so so I think that we who think about mediating institutions have a lot to learn from those communities, and I think that we also have a lot in common with people in those communities who are trying to solve problems. Th I i I I don't think it makes sense to try to approach the work of finding common ground by saying you too can be a conservative. Um and we also can't deny that there are a lot of people on the right who want to treat the race question as a thing of the past. Um not not out of malevolence, but out of a genuine belief that it isn't something we need to worry about anymore, which just isn't true. Um and so uh th that does stand in the way of a lot of outreach and a lot of finding common ground. You know, finding common ground just means putting aside some of uh some of what you're trying to achieve for the sake of achieving something together. And I think in this arena i that would mean not exactly going out and looking for conservatives. It would mean going out and looking for i instances, examples of people searching for the same thing we're searching for. And if we find it together, then it'll be a lot easier to then also think about its implications for politics. But we have to start on the ground level.

Race Common Ground And A Post Trump Future

SPEAKER_01 51:03

I think that's uh a terrific answer. Uh you've all you've been very generous with your time. We're very grateful. One final question for you. Um prognosticate a little bit for us. Um you mentioned sort of how Donald Trump spoke about uh race and how problematic that was. Um is there is there hope for your sort of vision within a Trumpian administration? Um or what you know, is the conservative movement up to um overcoming its own internal fractures and divisions and um addressing seriously some of the problems that you've named in in the way that I think you're addressing them?

SPEAKER_05 51:43

Well, it's very hard to know. You know, after this year, uh when when you're asked to prognosticate, the only answer to give is I have no idea. Um clearly anything is possible. But um since you're asking me, um look, I I I I think it's I think it's hard to say what i is and isn't possible in in the Trump years, which are only beginning. There has certainly been a real effort over the last ten years or so um to build something around this kind of vision. Um a a a a sort of circle of younger conservatives who aren't just in the business of of repeating the ends of Ronald Reagan's sentences, but who want to think about um uh w w what the principles that inform those to begin with uh would have to say to contemporary problems have been trying to think about what w w what what that kind of conservatism might have to offer uh America in this moment. That work is being done, has been done uh over the past few years, and I think we'll have a lot to offer the future. The question is um uh how can it speak to the sorts of problems that are clearly uh at the at the core, at the front of our politics now. I I think that there are a lot of ways in which Donald Trump has uh has written a check to his voters that only this kind of conservatism could actually help him cash. Um he's in a sense made some implicit promises that he's not really in a position to keep, and that in order to keep he will have to think about um a d a different approach to public policy, an approach that does decentralize some, that does try to think about solving problems from the bottom up, that tries to think in terms of experimentation and not centralization. I I'm not I I don't think that's Trump's own instinct but um the the ideas are there, um a lot of the people are there. There are some politicians in the Republican Party in our country who do want to think this way again, they also tend to be younger. Um and so I I think a lot of the resources are there. Whether they're called upon in the next few years, I'm not sure. It's certainly the case that uh the work before us is difficult and challenging. But I think ultimately this is what solutions are likely to look like, whether that's in the next few years or in the longer term is harder to say.

SPEAKER_01 54:11

Well, uh Yval, if I have anything to do with it, um that will be what the solution will be. Uh I'm so grateful for your time uh and for the conversation.

Final Recommendations And Listener Requests

SPEAKER_01 54:22

Um for those who are listening at home, uh the book is The Fractured Republic. Go buy it and read it. There's more in there that we didn't talk to uh talk about. Um it's just a treasure tree. Uh it's an incredibly subtle book, and it's it's absolutely worth reading. So The Fractured Republic, get it and read it and contemplate on it. Um Thanks very much for being on the show, you've all hopefully sometime when you've got another book out, we'll do it again.

SPEAKER_05 54:49

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

Uh and for those who are listening at home, uh, this has been another episode of Mirror Fidelity. We're so grateful for your time and for your attention. If you like the show, uh rate and review this on iTunes, you know the routine that all helps. Tell a friend. And until next time, uh be well and be good.