Yuval Levin, who was an aide to Newt Gingrich and to George W. Bush, has a new book out, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. The book is both a diagnosis and a prescription, Ira Stoll writes in his review.
In the diagnosis department, the book insightfully faults both conservatives and liberals for excessive nostalgia for the supposed golden age of the late 1950s or early 1960s. He traces this to the dominance of the Baby Boom generation: “our political, cultural, and economic conversations today overflow with the language of decay and corrosion, as if our body politic is itself an aging boomer looking back upon his glory days.” He concludes that we “cannot go back to midcentury America” but instead should ask, “how can we make the most of the opportunities afforded by the dynamism and the freedom set loose by America’s postwar diffusion while mitigating its costs and burdens, especially for the most vulnerable among us?”
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