Review by Choice Review
Americans are currently fed up with both political parties, according to The Fractured Republic, by Levin (National Affairs), because the Left and the Right fail to grasp the fundamental problem Americans face--the fragmentation of society and the "atomization" of individuals. The Left diagnoses such ills from the perspective of the 1960s, the Right from President Reagan's 1980s, eras of much greater national coherence. The Left seeks to empower government and administrative expertise, the Right to weaken both, and both policies exacerbate the "fracturing" of the republic rather than putting it back together. Levin, a prominent member of the "reform conservatism" movement of the past five years, instead defends the principle of subsidiarity and the strengthening of the mediating institutions of civil society--religion, voluntary associations, the family--that work within and curb the excesses of this radically pluralist age. This embrace of pluralism is not new; it is an old liberal orientation from Tocqueville, Madison, and others. The Fractured Republic straddles theory, history, and public policy and succeeds most in its revealing history of the present. However, it remains frustratingly vague about successful models for the future. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Jeffrey Church, University of Houston
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
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 Clinton and 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 us 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-World War II 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 decentralized, 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 toward 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 decentralizes political power and elevates local "middle institutions" like churches and neighborhood organizations. Toward 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 maneuvers himself into range of specific policies - on social programs, 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 characterizations 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 popularized 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 decentralized 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-la-bor 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 Donald 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 our main problem. Trump is against free trade and other aspects of the unimpeded market; notably uncritical of the big federal social welfare programs; 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. NICHOLAS LEMANN is the Pulitzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Levin (The Great Debate), founder and editor of National Affairs, examines America's "subculture wars" in this disappointing book-length essay. He posits that the country's economic and cultural fracturing, as seen in the rise of a two-class society and the polarization of politics, haunts all good-faith efforts at reform. Levin's cautious analysis covers political ground that's already been walked many times. His equivocal strategies for conservatives-such as presenting themselves as "an attractive minority in a nation of minorities"-have self-evidently limited political appeal. Levin critiques "expressive individualism" and multiculturalism, but in such muted ways that it's hard to understand why he disapproves of them. Sober, abstract, and professorial, Levin's book is nuanced and measured to the point of being bloodless. His high-minded reflections on first principles, fragmented institutions, and centralized power may impress establishment conservatives, especially those for whom Donald Trump and the Republican Party insurgency are a troubling surprise. But the rapid realignment of political sentiments amid election-year tumult makes Levin's musings seem detached from current affairs. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Levin (Hertog Fellow, Ethics & Public Policy Ctr.; The Great Debate) aims to cut through the nostalgia surrounding the history of both the progressive and conservative movements in order to get to an accurate diagnosis of the current political climate in the United States. He uses the first half of the book as a period-by-period examination of recent political and social history. He highlights key elements that are generally overlooked or misunderstood and scrutinizes how misleading nostalgia of each age has led to the particular bifurcation the country experiences today. The second part is prescriptive, focusing on what both the Left and the Right should be doing culturally, economically, and politically to ensure a stable society. Considering the unsettled state of both parties during, and presumably after, this 2016 election season, a book addressing the schisms in the country and its political branches is much needed. Levin's approach is fair, illuminating, and evenhanded. His inclination is naturally toward the conservative point of view, but his criticisms of Republicans and the Right are justified and necessary. Verdict Highly recommended for those on both sides of the political divide. Levin's solutions might be too idealistic to be practical, but they're well worth considering.-Laurel Tacoma, Strayer Univ. Lib., Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A voice of both reason and establishment conservatism offers a prescription for renewed political discourse and bipartisan action. You won't hear many liberals saying that conservative voices make for healthy political balance, or vice versa. Levin (The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, 2013, etc.), founder of the journal National Affairs and a distinguished student of Edmund Burke, understands that a middle lies between left and right. The right tends to complaints of moral apocalypse and jeremiad: as the author notes, if you had told a conservative 60 years ago that out-of-wedlock birth would increase tenfold to the present, "he probably would have painted a nightmarish spectacle that would bear little resemblance to our relatively thriving society." Conversely, the left tends to alarmist talk about economic matters, especially inequality, "in ways that suggest that the sky could fall on our society any minute." Can there be middle ground? Yes, writes Levin, in ways that accommodate some of the best things about both traditions while decentralizing power to "create a constructive tension that can help us to make the most of democratic capitalism." The operative word is "constructive," and this in the place of what Levin criticizes as the tendency of both political wings to fall into golden-age nostalgia that does not admit of much action, the left for the 1960s and the right for the '80s. Some of the author's proposals are too lightly sketched to test, but they are interesting all the same. One example is his call to privatize certain public services but at the same time allow other public services to compete in the open marketallowing, for instance, post offices to double as banks, a note that Bernie Sanders has been sounding of late. Against "fracture and deconsolidation," Levin even suggests that "Right" and "Left" designations may not be useful. Refreshingly optimistic; in our diversity lies great strength, Levin writes, a strength that can be tapped once all the rancor is put aside. Highly recommended for readers of whatever political stripe. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
