After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humili... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...st-and-learn-a-little-humility
conservatism reform history culture crisis interpretation subsidiarity individualism nostalgia
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 16
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He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
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he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
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Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
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This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
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Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
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These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
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Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
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The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
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In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
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for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
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“Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
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Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
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This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
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the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
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“In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
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“Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
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In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
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In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
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The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
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he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
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The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
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He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
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“we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
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It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
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So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
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He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
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a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
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He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
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Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
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“In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
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Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
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In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
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he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
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in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
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in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
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Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
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I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
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