What is the future of the American republic, and is it salvageable? This is the central question of a recent Catholic University of America Institute on Human Ecology (IHE) webinar entitled “Can the Republic be Rebuilt?”
The webinar was hosted by Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times. Its participants included Yuval Levin, Director, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-in-chief of National Affairs, as well as Christopher Caldwell, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
Both Caldwell and Levin have written books on the problems facing American society, Levin’s entitled A Time to Build and Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Both tell the story of American decline in different ways. Both agree, however, that the greatest challenge facing America today is our lack of good institutions, political and otherwise.
Describing Levin’s book, Douthat said he “focuses on the failures of American institutions, but also argues that they can be rebuilt, and in particular stresses that we’re living through a failure to believe in institutions as institutions. Whether it’s your college, the United States congress, your church or even your large successful daily newspaper… people increasingly see their institutions as platforms on which to build a public persona…. [but] Successful institutions need to be not only a platform but a shaping force, committed to institutional ends and to educating and integrating the next generation for service.”
Levin thinks that 2020 showed a “collapse of trust in expertise driven by a collapse… of self-restraint among experts.” Especially as those purporting to be experts in a variety of fields have been more willing to interject their own political biases into their political and social recommendations.
An expert, or anyone who stewards the authority of a class like lawyers, doctors, accountants or journalists must pass through or inhabit some kind of institution to earn their credibility. We expect and need some kind of moral formation before we trust those at the levers of power in our country, according to Levin. As the internet has made information ubiquitous, many Americans are questioning the wisdom of experts in part because their monopoly on knowledge is broken but also because they just don’t seem trustworthy.
“We trust an accountant not just because he understands the carried interest rule but because there are things an accountant wouldn’t do. There are things a lawyer wouldn’t do, there are or ought to be things that a journalist wouldn’t say,” Levin said. “Why do we trust a journalist? Because there’s a process that their work is subject to that imposes some constraints on what they would claim to know.”
Later on he added that “the core of the populist moment that we live in gives us a sense that the people with power in our society are not constrained by any obligation to that society, so that a recovery would have to involve the recovery of institutional responsibility.”
Caldwell also saw America’s institutions as in trouble, but that their problems have more to do with being hijacked than losing power. His central argument is that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent similar laws fundamentally changed our understanding of the roles of law and institutional power.
Post-1960s, the nation was burdened by constant litigation, legal and otherwise, over what violated the words or spirit of the Civil Rights Act and laws like it. Yet, even in the face of cultural evils like racism there still wasn’t an explicit expectation that a “top-down” force like the federal government would be responsible for fixing things.
As Caldwell argued though, even without legal threats, businesses and other institutions changed massively to avoid being conspicuously out-of-touch with social progress.
“The civil rights litigation made companies and other private individuals more and more and more vulnerable to being destroyed literally by litigation, and that had consequences for the corporate sociology of the country,” Caldwell insisted.
As a result of this fear institutions like universities and corporate boardrooms have been forced to get in line with the movement or potentially suffer. An institution like a church, business or university no longer has any purpose unless it’s working towards social justice, and so everything must be redefined along those lines.
Levin, however, argued that while the idealism of eradicating racism coming out of the expert class may be misplaced, it’s still genuine.
“I just can’t help thinking these people are just begging to be converted to Christianity… there is plainly a desire for justice and for some idea that will guide our society towards a deeper understanding of the good…. but what they’re being offered isn’t going to achieve that and so it seems this actually is an opening for something like renewal,” Levin argued.
Comment by Loren J Golden on March 22, 2021 at 1:00 pm
“An institution like a church…no longer has any purpose unless it’s working towards social justice, and so everything must be redefined along those lines.”
“I just can’t help thinking these people (i.e., Progressives) are just begging to be converted to Christianity…there is plainly a desire for justice and for some idea that will guide our society towards a deeper understanding of the good…but what they’re being offered isn’t going to achieve that and so it seems this actually is an opening for something like renewal.”
“Converted to Christianity” to what end? The primary business of the Church is to proclaim Jesus Christ and Him crucified (I Cor. 2.2), to the end that He might have a people for His own possession, redeemed from all lawlessness, purified for Himself, and who are zealous for good works (Tit. 2.14). Christ is the end of the Church, not any good works that He may command. It does not serve His purposes for Progressives to be “converted to Christianity,” only to have them subvert Christ, so as to use Him as a mascot to champion their “social justice” causes, rather than to seek to know Him fully and to be conformed to His ways. This, after all, is why Mainline Protestantism is dying.
Christ “came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk. 19.10), not to end through political activism the social injustices perpetrated by Rome.
Comment by Philip on March 22, 2021 at 4:08 pm
So many false assumptions to unpack here and so little time.
“Levin thinks that 2020 showed a “collapse of trust in expertise driven by a collapse… of self-restraint among experts.” Especially as those purporting to be experts in a variety of fields have been more willing to interject their own political biases into their political and social recommendations.”
The underlying assumption being that institutions of the past were not guilty of injecting politics or ideology into their work. Really? If you were studying American history in the Deep South prior to 1968, chances are you were being indoctrinated with Lost Cause propaganda. If you listened to many of the popular national preachers of the 1950s like Norman Vincent Pearle you were probably getting more self-help advise than scripture. You think the media was less bias? Ever hear of William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Pulitzer (yeah, we actually named an award for excellence in journalism after one of the fathers of yellow journalism)? Hospitals and mental health facilities in earlier periods endorsed eugenics and sterilization, particularly of minorities and people with mental disorders. He’s not proving that institutions were objectively less biased or more trust-worthy in earlier periods, he’s just expressing how HE might have trusted institutions from an earlier period more because they didn’t seem to be intruding on his biases as much. Ask non-white citizens who grew up prior to 1964 whether they trusted national institutions more back then. I guarantee you’ll get a very different answer. Of that would require getting beyond the white male perspective.
“The central argument of Caldwell’s book is that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent similar laws we have fundamentally come to understand the role of law and institutional power differently. After the 1960s, the nation was burdened by constant litigation, legal and otherwise, over what violated the words or spirit of the Civil Rights Act and laws like it. In the face of cultural evils like racism there was never an expectation that a “top-down” force like the federal government would be responsible for fixing things.”
Really? You think there was no top-down force prior to 1964 to combat cultural evils? abolitionism, women’s rights, child labor, 8-hour workdays, prohibition, etc. The first federal laws against recreational drug use are over a century old. All top-down efforts to have the federal government institute what cultural change from above and all prior to 1964. Further more in all the cases I just outlined the cultural changes were brought about by a federal government influenced or in some cases perhaps compelled by institutions (abolitionist societies, temperance groups, unions and labor organizations, churches, social welfare advocates, etc.) mostly run by highly educated and trained professionals such as the kinds of lawyers, doctors, ministers, and even businessmen who Caldwell suggests should stay out of politics and social movements, but of course never actually have. How many lawyers are in the Congress at any given time? Institutions and the people who ran them prior to 1964 were no less partisan or civically-engaged than any of us and never saw neutrality on issues of justice as a virtue.
Comment by David on March 23, 2021 at 8:59 am
In 1875, a Federal civil rights act was passed that prohibited racial discrimination in schools, restaurants, stores, hotels, and other places of public accommodation. Unfortunately, this was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883. This gave rise to the Jim Crow culture that persisted up to 1964. Of course, there were areas that never went along with the 1875 law.
Comment by Joan Sibbald on March 27, 2021 at 12:26 pm
“Social justice,” “inclusion,” and “diversity” are euphemisms hiding evil’s goal: hedonism.