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The first Trump supporter I met was the guy who drove me to Princeton University from Newark airport in April 2016. The factory he’d worked at for 20 years had moved to Mexico, and all those promises he’d heard about getting retrained for a higher-paying job in the globalized knowledge economy hadn’t panned out.
“I’m ready to put a wrecking ball in office,” he’d told me. Donald Trump was the destroyer for him.
I’d been invited to Princeton to speak with student activists. Like many campuses, Princeton at the time had faced protests over racism of all stripes, including naming its School of Foreign Service after Woodrow Wilson, an avowed segregationist who also happened to be president of both Princeton and the United States. The student activists I spoke with had virtually nothing in common with the guy who drove me to Princeton, except maybe this: they were ready for a wrecking ball, too. This was a “tear things down” moment in their eyes.
Yuval Levin opens his book A Time to Build with precisely this observation. He writes, “Our common life has come to be overrun with demolition crews of various sorts, promising to knock down oppressive establishments, to clear the weeds and drain the swamps and end infestations … [They look] to ease our disappointments by tearing down the institutions that embody them.”
But where is the conversation about what will replace those institutions? And who is preparing to be the kind of leader who will build such things?
I love Levin’s book because both its inquiries and its proposals are aimed at just the right level: above the social group and below the national government. Of course, social groups and national policies are important -- it’s just that so much attention is already focused at those levels, and huge parts of our lives are lived in between.
It is the melting of the institutional layer -- religious communities, civic organizations, etc. -- where we ought to focus our attention, not only because it matters so much, but also because it’s at this level that we live our own lives and make a difference in the lives of others. America is the Little Leagues, the community theaters, the youth associations, the volunteer groups, the PTAs, the churches and mosques and temples. Too much trust has been lost in too many of those institutions, and many were built for a nation that feels now a little like a foreign country. (The news that the Boy Scouts may have to sell the original Norman Rockwell paintings they own as they go through bankruptcy proceedings symbolizes this as well as anything.)
What is certain is we can’t continue down the path we’re on, where the demolition crews draw all the attention, and where, as Levin notes, “those who are more naturally inclined to build are often left working without blueprints of what a more worthy alternative would look like.”
Levin is as eloquent as anyone on the reasons we ought to focus on rebuilding civic institutions: “What we are missing … is a structure of social life: a way to give shape, place and purpose to the things we do together.”
Institutions are the way we connect with one another, the way we express community identities (often religious ones) and the way we live out our national ideals.
Levin is concerned not just with the disappearance of institutions, but of how the ones that are left are being used by their leaders as platforms for their own celebrity rather than vehicles that mold character.
What kind of institutions will we need for our diverse democracy? I think Levin puts it beautifully when he says, “Our society does not need to be one big ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question over which we are constantly at each other’s throats. It can consist of a diversity of ends pursued by a diversity of means, united by some crucial common ideals.”
These are abstract goals that are instantiated through participation in institutions. As Levin writes, “We aren’t just loose individuals bumping into each other. We fill roles, we occupy places, we play parts defined by larger wholes, and that helps us understand our obligations and responsibilities, our privileges and benefits, our purposes and connections.”
To be an adult and a responsible participant in society is to say, again using Levin’s formulation, “Given my role here, how should I act?”
It is only institutions that allow us to ask and answer that question.
As the ones we are familiar with disappear, who will build the new ones we so desperately need?
