Booming Economy and Shattered Institutions: Is this Modern America?

Americans are living through a social crisis, according to a leading American political analyst.

Theoretically positive economic indicators including low interest rates, low unemployment and low inflation across the past decade have been juxtaposed with “vicious partisanship polarization, rampant culture war resentments, an upsurge in isolation, alienation, loneliness, a sense of despair… climbing suicide rates and an opioid abuse epidemic,” observed Yuval Levin in discussing American institutions at the Faith and Law Friday Forum May 14 in Washington, D.C.

Despite a growing economy, the social fabric of the nation is dire, Levin told the Congressional staff organization.

“Our usual measures of wealth, health, personal freedom and choice don’t explain the problem because these familiar kinds of indicators, important as they are, are largely material and individual,” assessed Levin of the current state of social science. To make sense of the data, the AEI scholar argued for a shift to examine the nation’s relationship to institutions, which he believes have the greatest overall impact upon social flourishing.

On the American right, critiques of institutional society articulated by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) or Charles Murray in Coming Apart (2012) have been discussed increasingly as a diagnosis for Donald Trump’s 2016 election as U.S. President. As Murray, Putnam and Levin write, Americans used to inhabit a more communal society that included churches, civic organizations, labor unions and other institutions that Americans not only participated in, but were shaped by. Levin describes society today as a “vast open space that’s filled with individuals who are having trouble linking hands.”

According to the AEI philosopher, institutions are the “durable form of our common life, the shapes and the structures of what we do together. Some institutions are organizations and they have a corporate form like a university, hospital, school, business, school, or civic association. Those are all institutions that are legally formalized.” However, institutions do not have to be legally written out to matter; for example, “Families are the first institutions.”

Certain traditions, professions or really any ties that bind can be thought of as institutions. They aren’t “just a bunch of people;” they are “a bunch of people who are ordered together to achieve a common goal,” and in the process of that goal the character and souls of the individual members are shaped.

But these shaping organizations which used to be the focal point of our society have been in decline for a long time. For example, “In the early 1970s 90% of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in doctors and hospitals. Last year it was 37%. Forty years ago 65% Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in organized religion, last year that number was 38%. In the 1970s 60% expressed confidence in the public schools, last year it was a third. Even in 1975 — a year after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace — 52% of Americans said they had confidence in the presidency. Last year 32% did.” This is to say nothing of long-standing abysmal Congressional approval ratings.

How did America go from a society alive with civil institutions a couple generations ago to one with an absolute dearth of social organizations? Levin traces this in part to a shift from seeing institutions as formative to being performative.

With formative institutions, the mission of the organization takes priority over the promotion of its members. When Congress or the Presidency are just stages for performative outrage, the university is a venue for virtue signaling, journalism is hard to distinguish from activism and when the Church becomes a political stage, these institutions cease to be formative and are instead performative platforms.

Levin contrasted these institutions with the military, the last highly respected organization in America, which is also the institution most explicitly interested in character formation. People trust the military because they expect that its members are not invested for personal glory, but rather out of sincere devotion to the mission of the armed forces.

Levin acknowledged, however, that many who treat institutions as performative instead of formative are reasonably responding to the incentives of their environment. A politician, for example, who hires exclusively communication staff and no policy staff actually does stand a better chance of reelection than one laser-focused upon policy and compromise. Since electoral and professional incentives seem to sway people towards self-promotion, Levin argues that ethical language must shift towards promotion of institutions that are greater than any individual.

After all, the most-respected persons are more likely to ask “given my role [in this institution], how should I behave?” and not “given my position, how can I self-promote?”