Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Social Decay and The Pandemic - with Yuval Levin

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Yuval currently wears three hats:At the American Enterprise Institute think tank, he’s the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies.He’s the editor-in-chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, and political thought. He’s also authored numerous books. In addition to “A Time To Build”, I also highly recommend “The Fractured Republic”, and also “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left”.Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He earned his masters and PhD from the University of Chicago.

A lot of what happens when we are with other people can be divided into two separate kinds of activity. One is communication, and the other is communion. One is exchanging information, the other is being together. And those two are not the same. I think we tend to overvalue communication and undervalue communion when we think about what happens when we're with other people. And to break down the workplace, to break down the school into just individuals exchanging information, I think we'd lose a lot. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor.

The coronavirus pandemic was a public health crisis and an economic crisis, but was it also a social crisis? Will we look back at COVID-19 as being a catalyst for unifying our society, tearing it apart, or simply accelerating trends that were already in the works long before March of 2020. Yuval Levin is one of the most prolific and influential public intellectuals on the subject of the health of our society, pre and post-corona. He wrote a book about the social breakdown in the U.S. and how to turn it around. It's called A Time to Build, From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. As for the book's timing, well, it was released just six weeks before the world shut down due to the pandemic, and yet his diagnosis of societal breakdown is as relevant now as before the pandemic.

Actually, more so. It reminds me of a book that had a big influence on me from the beginning of this century, when Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam wrote the groundbreaking book Bowling Alone, the Collapse and Revival of American Society. Putnam tried the groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone, the collapse and revival of American society. Putnam tried to scream from the hilltops about how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and society using something like 25 years of social science research data. Yuval's book is the perfect bookend to Putnam. Some two decades later with the global financial crisis and a pandemic along the way.

Yuval takes a measure of the health of our society through the lens of institutions and their role in our lives. He believes that our institutions are in pretty bad shape and doesn't think we repair society without first repairing these institutions. Now, this is a big topic because when it comes to the breakdown of trust in institutions, some listeners might expect us to make this conversation entirely about President Trump. But I'll leave that to what seems like every other podcast dealing with institutional crisis. Yuval takes a longer view on the roots of the crisis, how we got here, how COVID changed things, and where we go

from here. Now, a brief moment on Yuval's impressive background. He currently wears three hats. At the American Enterprise Institute think tank, he's the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies. He's the editor-in-chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, and political thought. I highly recommend it. I'm a subscriber. He's also authored numerous books. In addition to A Time to Build, I also highly recommend Yuval's book, The Fractured Republic, and also his book, The Great Debate, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and The Birth of right and left. Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics. He earned his master's and PhD from the University of Chicago.

All this is to say that Yuval is a pretty smart guy and a very clear thinker. He's well worth a listen. Social decay in American life. Did the pandemic accelerate, arrest, or reverse the path we were on? And where do we go from here? This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast my friend Yuval Levin. Welcome to Post-Corona, Yuval. Thanks very much. Good to be with you. Does it feel like you're in Post-Corona? It's getting there, slowly, but not quite.

We're not back to normal yet. So, you know, one step at a time. You're still in a basement. I'm still in a basement. I am in my office now a couple times a week, but yes, I'm still in my basement today. Right, right. So I want to jump into a couple of times a week, but yes, I'm still in my basement today. Right, right. So I want to jump into a bunch of topics with you. You have been writing for some time, long before this pandemic, about America's social crisis.

And the pandemic has struck me as a public health crisis that was wrapped in an economic crisis, and then it seemed like a new social crisis, kind of wrapped around all of that. And I think you have been writing and arguing that the social crisis is not new. It predated the pandemic. Now, the pandemic may have been an opportunity to turn around the social crisis. The pandemic may have been a turn for the worse in kind of accelerating some of the worst trends within the social crisis. The pandemic may have been a turn for the worse in kind of accelerating some of the worst trends within the social crisis. But nonetheless, this social crisis predated the pandemic. So before we get to where we are now and where we're going, can you just describe the social crisis you were diagnosing long before the pandemic?

Yes, I think it's important to understand our situation in contemporary America in terms of a kind of social crisis because it is so broad-based and multifaceted. We can see this kind of crisis in everything from the vicious partisan polarization in our politics to rampant sorts of culture war resentments in all kinds of arenas of American culture, to even in people's personal lives, a sense of isolation, alienation, despair sometimes that sent suicide rates climbing over the past decade and a half, that's driven an epidemic of opioid abuse in some places. These are different dysfunctions that all seem to have some common roots.

But I think it's almost the case that one symptom of that crisis is that it's very hard to put your finger on exactly what that common root is, where it's connected. And when we think about those problems, we tend to imagine that they're problems of connection. Like our society is a big open space. It's filled with individuals who are having trouble linking hands. And so we naturally talk about breaking down walls in America, building bridges, leveling playing fields. But I think one thing we've been missing is that more than just connectedness, we've been lacking structures in our social life, a way to give some kind of shape and purpose and concrete meaning to the things that we do together. And American life is not a space filled with individuals, but a space filled with those

structures with institutions. And so to me, this crisis is really all about institutions, and I think it's very important to think about it in those terms when we can. Okay, so let's talk about, because that obviously was the main focus of your most recent book, which we mentioned earlier. Let's talk about institutions. So first of all, I mean, you cite some academic definitions of institution, the term institution in your book. Just can you describe to us what you mean by an institution and provide a couple of real-life examples of institutions. Yeah. I mean, the term is so broad that it can be very hard to define. There's all kinds of academic definitions. But I would say that when I think about an institution, I think about what I call the durable forms of our common life, the shapes, the structures of what we do together. So some institutions are organizations, like a company, like a school. Obviously, these are institutions. But a lot of institutions are

maybe formed and structured by laws, by norms, but they're not corporate in that way. The family is the first and foremost institution of any society. You can think about a profession as an institution. You can think about the rule of law as an institution. What holds these together is that, first of all, they're durable, right? They last over time, and so they shape some realm of our lives together. And secondly, they are forms. They give shape, they give structure to our relationships. So an institution is not just a bunch of people, but a bunch of people ordered together to

achieve some common aim. And it gives all of them a role in relation to each other. One person is the father or the mother, one person is the child, and you have a family. One person is an employee, one person's an employer, and you have a business. And the relationships that are formed between them are the way in which an institution structures them. And so ultimately, institutions, because they are this kind of form of human action they're formative of us they shape our character they shape our expectations they ultimately shape our souls and their form of accountability yeah exactly they create obligations

they create responsibilities and expectations and so to live in a society is really to be formed by institutions and I think that relates to this in a society is really to be formed by institutions. And I think that relates to this question of the social crisis that we started with, because in a lot of ways, that crisis is a kind of absence of institutional relations and of responsibilities and obligations. That's what it means to be alienated, to have a sense like this whole society is just for other people. It's not for me. It's for them. That's the form that a lot of our social crisis has taken. And that, to me, rings of a failure of institutional formation and therefore a failure of institutions on a lot of levels. So I know in National Affairs, in your journal, you had a piece in one of the recent issues,

Bowling Alone at 20 by Alexandra Hudson. And she looks back at the Harvard professor Robert Putnam's iconic book on this topic called Bowling Alone, and is what you're identifying just a worse version of what he was diagnosing decades ago? Well, I would say that what he described 20 years ago, he understood to be a kind of individualism, a desire that people had to separate themselves from institutions and be on their own. I think in the course of these 20 years, it's become clearer that there's actually a kind of decay and failure of these institutions at the heart of it. It's not so much that people want to be on their own, but that people feel like they are on their own. And that a lot of the sense we have that our institutions

are failing us, a lot of what we process as a lack of trust really has to do with a change in what these institutions do. So when we talk about institutions in America, a lot of times we talk about trust, right? We all know we're losing trust in institutions. It's kind of a cliche by this point. And it's true. We're losing trust in all kinds of institutions. But what does it actually mean to say we trust an institution? To my mind, it means that we believe that institutions forms people who we can rely on, that it shapes them in an ethical way so that we can believe that they use the power they have reliably and responsibly. So outside of the family, which is an obvious one in that regard, what are other examples that we have historically depended on to do just what you said?

You know, we trust a political institution when it seems to form people who take public service seriously. We trust a business when it promises reliability and quality and it rewards its people when they provide that. You trust a profession if it imposes some kind of standard and set of it rewards its people when they provide that. You trust a profession if it imposes some kind of standard and set of rules on its members and they take it seriously, right? So you trust a reporter if that person seems to really follow a process that allows you to verify what they say or a scientist in the same way. A lot of this is about restraint. You trust people

when you know there are things they wouldn't do right I don't just trust an accountant because he understands the carried interest rule I trust an accountant because there are things that an accountant would never do and that means that when he signs his name to something it has meaning and the trouble we've seen a lot of institutions in American life is that people within them come to see them not as formative in that way, and so not as imposing those kinds of restraints, but as performative, as a place to stand and be seen and build a following and build your prominence. This is obvious in politics, where a lot of people who might in previous generations have been formed to be that kind

of human being that is a member of Congress, a legislator through and through, now see Congress as a stage, as a way to build a bigger social media following, to get a better time slot on cable news, to perform in the culture war. Yeah, you've used that line that members of Congress used to use the microphone as a path to power, and now they use power as a path to the microphone. Yeah, it seems like a particularly good way to get a cable news show. Right. And so it transforms from being formative to being performative. You see the same thing in the university, which increasingly becomes just a place to stand and yell. I think you see the same thing in journalism, in some of corporate America,

in some religious institutions that should be shaping souls, but instead are expressive. They're a way to show kind of what team you're on and where you stand. And institutions that basically function as platforms that way are much harder to trust. And it's especially true when they're political platforms, when they become just a way to express what side you're on. So that when the public health profession uses its authority to show that they're on the right side of racial issues, whatever you think about those issues, they become harder to trust as public health professionals. So specifically, you're talking about summer of 2020 when there were the Black Lives Matter protests in the streets of major cities, and all these public health officials were signing documents, signing letters and statements saying that people should go out and protest and it wasn't a health risk. it's for racial justice, then you can. That makes it much harder to trust that person as a public health professional, because what they're doing is basically displaying their political views

rather than being formed by their profession to give you authoritative advice. Can we talk about Congress? Because I know you've written extensively about that. We'll put in the show notes how folks can find the essay you wrote for Commentary Magazine on the breakdown in Congress, because that's a very practical case study. Because I feel like each one of these, while they have common threads, all the ones you just cited, the academy, journalism, politics, Congress, each one also has its own dynamic. Absolutely. So can you talk a little bit about how Congress broke down? Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways, Congress is one of the places where this pattern is easiest to see because Congress has gradually lost its inner life.

What Congress is for is to serve as a venue for accommodation, as an arena for bargaining. And the trouble with bargaining is you can't really do it in public. Bargaining ultimately happens in a closed room where people can put on the table what they want, what they need, what they're willing to give, and a deal comes out. Now, we want our politicians to be answerable for the deals they make and the votes they take, but there's also really a need for them to be able to negotiate with each other for Congress to have an inner life. And in Congress, in part because everything is televised or streamed online now and has been for a long time, all of what we would think of as the deliberative arenas in Congress have become performative arenas. And so a committee hearing is not a place for members to work out a bill or to hear from a witness even. It's a place for members to produce YouTube clips,

right? And so they each look at the camera and say what they need to say, even if the last guy just said exactly the same thing. And they understand themselves as performing on a stage. And gradually, that means they're not working with each other. They're each working individually facing a camera. And the legislature can't really function as a legislature. And part of what happens is that the institution has therefore given up its traditional forms of power. And Congress is a very powerful institution on paper. It can make huge demands on the U.S. government. It writes the laws. Ultimately, the executive is answerable to it and the judiciary to some extent. Congress doesn't really want to do that anymore. And members delegate power, give it away in ways that I think would have really surprised James Madison and the

other framers of the Constitution, because they understand the power they have in a different way than they used to. And so Congress has become weak by choice and has turned itself into a performative platform where the way now to advance is basically to speak to the people who already agree with you. And a lot of times even to spend your time talking about how terrible Congress is, rather than being Congress, working from the inside to advance legislation. In a lesser form, you see that happening in a lot of American institutions, but it's really uniquely evident and problematic in Congress these days. One other take though is how much of that is a result of the fact that the control

of Congress has become much more competitive than it was for like over a century. I mean, beginning in the you know, the 94 election, the Gingrich revolution, the 104th Congress, every couple of Congresses control has been, has been bounced back and forth like a ping pong after going some, you know, four or five decades where one party controlled it. So suddenly it's, you know, every member of Congress thinks, well, why do I have to compromise? Why do I have to reach across party lines? Because in two years, we could be in the majority. My person will be speaker, and we can play for everything. at Princeton makes this argument that since the mid-90s, control has gone back and forth, and that makes it much harder to think beyond the next election. The trouble is that this has now been happening for a generation, right? The 1990s, so you're talking about almost 30 years,

and neither party has actually achieved all that much legislatively in that time. So it turns out that waiting for the next election isn't very effective. The incentives haven't changed much because the culture around it is polarized in a way that has given members of Congress something else to do, another way to become prominent and channel their ambition. And in the meantime, Congress has lost its place at the center of our system of government so that all of the incentives, as you say now, are fundamentally partisan rather than institutional. And the institution itself has just become a stage to work out a kind of partisan theater. So I think it's part of the same story. The question is, if members of Congress, A, want to change that, and B, want to actually deploy and use political power, they're going to have to think about how to change the institution so that it's more suitable to a time when the parties are more evenly divided and balanced. We haven't had one party control of Congress for about as long now as we did have it. That 40 years that we always talk about, it's almost 40 years since that ended. And it's time for Congress to

think about how to change itself accordingly, change the budget process, change the committee system in ways that could enable it to function now, rather than always thinking that that was the norm, and until we get back to it, we're just kind of play-acting. What about the role of political parties to impose some kind of leadership on these performative entrepreneurs who are out there just trying to get on cable news and get YouTube hits. Since the real change in the campaign finance system, I mean, obviously post Watergate, the real changes, but then with McCain-Feingold, which really took a lot of the money out of the parties. It didn't take the money out of politics.

That's what's interesting. McCain-Feingold thought they were taking money out of politics. Groups like NARAL and the NRA were for decades as strong as ever. It was just the parties got weaker. And is that part of the problem here? Well, I think that there's a – this is another way to think about this transformation from formative to performative institutions. The political parties, the two major parties, now are largely platform institutions. They're a place to stand, a place for narcissists to stand and talk about themselves and talk about the other party rather than being formative of the political arena.

And a lot of that has happened, as you say, because of a mistrust of insiders in American political culture. And so the sense has been there are all these people in back rooms making deals. We've got to take away their power. Well, it turns out you can't really take power out of politics. You can move it around. And what we've done is move that power around from insiders to outsiders. And outsiders are actually more likely to be rabidly partisan, to be focused on single issues, and to be focused on culture war kind of performative things. The two parties, each of them has a huge incentive to build a broad tent and look for the middle. Because, you know, the Republican Party's got to get people elected both in Mississippi and in Oregon. So that means they've got to somehow make a broad appeal. But if we make each of the members

of Congress an independent contractor, then he or she's only got to win one district. And that means they can appeal to the small number of people who are likely to show up on primary day or on election day. And that has actually had just about the opposite effect of what the reformers were looking for. The same thing happened with the introduction of primaries in the 1970s. The hope was to democratize the process by taking some power away from insiders in back rooms. And what ended up happening was you empower much more polarized, radical outsiders and make our politics much less constructive than it was before. So I think in a way, we've got to see that there's a use for insiders. You want some people to feel like

they're the ones responsible. Not everybody can say, I'm an outsider criticizing the establishment. If you're a member of Congress, if you're the president of the United States, you are the establishment. Whether you like it or not, you are. And you can't run as an anti-establishment figure to be, you know, speaker of the house. But I think our politics now discourages anyone from thinking of themselves as political insiders, and that means that it discourages responsibility. Friends of mine who are in the Senate describe those, I won't name their names, but they generally loathe their committee work, which they just find is just procedural and

ultimately pressure to be performative, except if they serve on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Yeah. And I know you've spoken and written about why that committee is unique in this context. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I've had the same experience with people who argue that in that committee, they get to know other members, they get to learn something, they get to talk to each other about public problems. And just for our listeners to understand, there's no cameras allowed.

It's the only committee. What's different about the intelligence committees in both houses is there's no C-SPAN, and there's no web streaming. And in some ways, I love C-SPAN. I think that it is valuable to have some transparency in a public institution, but there has to be a limit on it. Like every good thing, it's good up to a point. And transparency has simply gone too far in Congress so that now the only places where you can really talk to other members in private are the leadership offices at midnight before a government shutdown. And that's where all the work gets done because the work's going to get done wherever members are able to actually deal with each other.

And so I think there's really a need, especially for committees, to build out some time. So your point is the Intelligence Committee, people just, they can let their guard down and do real work across party lines. Yeah, they can let their guard down. They can say something like, oh, I didn't know that, which you can't really say on television when you're a politician. They can ask real questions. They can appreciate one another even across party lines and learn something from each other because they're not always on. They're not putting on a show for their particular cable news audience. And there have to be some spaces where members of Congress can do that on other issues too. Let's talk about the university campus as an institution. So why is that breaking down as an institution, if it is? Yeah, well I think it is. And in some ways it's related to politics. I think part

of what we're seeing in this, in what we call the culture war in this particular moment, is the breakdown of those arenas of American life that are intended to be arenas of contention and engagement, where people who are different from each other are supposed to somehow encounter each other and deal with each other. Congress is one of those. The university is one of those. That's supposed to happen in journalism. It's supposed to happen in certain ways in American civic life. And every one of those arenas, what we find is that that's getting closed down, and they're becoming performative spaces where people yell about each other rather than actually encounter each other.

And that's certainly happening in the university. You know, universities have always been politicized, really always. I mean, they've always had a kind of political role. They've also always had a sort of moral role, especially in American life, where from the beginning they've been intended to serve as places that advance a kind of moral vision of our society. But along with that, they've also been understood as places where you pursue the truth by encountering different ways of thinking. And we're seeing now on university campuses a kind of closing off of that because what you find is that administrators in universities are using the language of racial justice or political correctness or, you know, it gets a different name every year

or so, as a mode of administration, a mode of power, a way of shutting people down and keeping things under control. The problem in the university is not that all the literature professors are Marxists. That's been a problem for a long time. It is a problem, but that's not the end of the world. The problem is that administrators now operate in a politicized way, and students increasingly expect them to, and expect the university to be a platform for a certain form of political expression. It's just another place where you stand and yell about oppression. And if that's all the university is, it can be that in part, but if that's all it is, then it's no longer serving its function as the place where

we search for truth in our society. And I think it is in grave trouble. The elite universities are in serious trouble. Do you see the same thing at elite secondary schools, like elite public schools, private schools? Increasingly so. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's happening to a greater degree than it used to, especially in the kind of hyper elite spaces where, you know, parents and administrators and teachers and students sometimes feel like they constantly are on display and have to prove themselves. Social media has changed the environment there a lot so that people really are, in a way, kind of always on and being watched and everything is kept a record of.

And, you know, part of what you find, and you see this in elite journalistic institutions too, they're all becoming interchangeable stages for yelling about the same kind of political priorities. What happens at the New York Times and what happens at Brown University just isn't very different from each other anymore. They're both places where you stand and yell about oppression. And the trouble with that is not just that it's politically one-sided, but that these institutions have a purpose. We need universities, we need newspapers, we need them for different things. And they can't all just be places where the same political theater gets played out.

And so I think what you find there is a profound institutional failure. Okay, so now let's talk about the pandemic. Soon after the pandemic, you wrote another essay, a different essay, in Commentary Magazine. This is early on. I'm just going to quote from it. You wrote, this pandemic, like any major public health crisis, is certain to both reveal and remake our social landscape, leaving a transformed country in its wake. It's much too soon to say just how our own culture will be changed. We're still in the midst of all of this, but by reflecting on how the peculiar pressures of this terrible pandemic might interact with the peculiar problems we were living

with before it came, we might get some sense of what to look for, what to hope for, and what to fear in the aftermath. So I put each of those questions to you. What should we be looking for? What should we be hoping for? And to end on a dark note of this particular question, what should we fear? and I do think in a lot of ways the pandemic has worsened that crisis of trust, trust in authority, trust in expertise. I think part of what we saw was that a lot of authority and expertise is easily politicized and that in any case our perception of it is thoroughly politicized and so we came to have essentially partisan debates about masks and about opening schools, questions that should be empirical questions, it should be scientific questions, were instead channeled through this crisis of trust and became entirely partisan political questions. I think that's

worrisome. It means that we have trouble actually engaging with the real world, except through the lens of partisanship. And so basically, if we're presented with reality by a leader of one party rather than another, that will determine whether we accept that reality or not. That's a big problem for a society that, after all, has to deal with reality. I think the crisis of trust was a barrier to our handling the pandemic well, and that in some ways was worsened by it. We come away from it with less trust in public health authorities and political leadership than we had to begin with. One way we might have been hopeful, and I think with reason as it turns out, is that there is a way that crisis and mobilization can help our society overcome division.

Societies do come together in times of crisis, and that also can increase trust in some ways. I actually think that when we really step back from this, when it's genuinely over, there will be a lot to be impressed with in how the United States responded to the pandemic. Not only things to worry about, to be disgusted about or alarmed by, but a lot to be impressed with. The response to the pandemic had the character of an American mobilization, which has a couple of phases. First of all, we're overwhelmed by a massive problem. Then we gradually get our arms around it so that day by day, things look like they're totally out of control. Nobody knows what they're doing. But after a while,

we're able to deploy immense resources to deal with this problem, and we deal with it. I think that's what this looked like. This looked like an American mobilization. And by the end of it, by now, we are leading the world in a lot of important ways, especially the development and deployment of the vaccines, which is an American story, an extraordinary American accomplishment. Can we just stay on that for a moment? Because we've talked a lot about that on this podcast. Regardless of what one thinks of President Trump and the Trump administration, Operation

Warp Speed, in terms of the speed of development, as you said, the production, and then also the distribution, the logistics involved with the distribution. Yeah. I mean, it's unprecedented. And it's almost like when I talk about it, people think I'm being like Pollyannish or rosy-eyed, and I just want to say, look, can we just isolate that achievement? It's absolutely extraordinary. And not only that, but the scale of it defies belief. So that at the beginning of the deployment of the vaccine, once it was ready and approved, say in January, we went through this period. It was also

mobilization. We went through this period where it seemed like we're just never going to get this. I would talk to my parents every day and they would say like, it feels like we're months away from it. We call everywhere we can. Nothing's working, nobody knows what they're doing. And they were right, except that two weeks later, they got the vaccine. And two months later, everybody had gotten the vaccine. And by now, we have way too much. And we've gone from chasing the vaccine to having it chase us and trying to get people who are refusing to take it, you know, to chase them around with needles and get them vaccinated. This has happened very, very quickly. And it's an example of what immobilization looks like,

because at the beginning, it's a mess and all over the place. But very quickly, it is an enormously impressive deployment of resources. I think that happened over and over in our response to the pandemic, even with testing where there's a lot to criticize. The United States did a lot wrong at the beginning. The CDC got it all wrong. That period lasted about six weeks. And then we were deploying huge numbers of tests very quickly. And again, within two, three months, you could get a test wherever you wanted. This is a big country. It is not easy to go from zero to 300 million that quickly. But we actually did it over and over. And I would even say, easy as it is to criticize Congress these days, and I just did it myself

five minutes ago, the response of Congress to this pandemic was also very impressive. It was, I think, easily the most impressive fiscal response of any Western government, of any democratic government, enormously effective. It kept our economy going and prevented what would have been a disaster from happening. It was done across party lines. There were five separate bipartisan bills passed. One of them was the biggest spending bill passed in the history of the U.S. Congress. And it was thought through to the extent that it

could be given the speed in which it had to be done. It was reasonably well designed. The second bill fixed some problems with the first, and the third fixed some problems with the second. And, you know, Congress worked. Under crisis, it doesn't work in normal times. All the critiques are still true. But when it came time to mobilize, our society really did mobilize. It's just that there's a certain way in which Americans mobilize. It's not civic mobilization like you find in the Asian democracies, where people are willing to just do what they're told to deal with a terrible problem. That can look much more impressive because everybody stands in line and it all works out. Americans don't do that but we do have an ability to

mobilize immense industrial and economic resources and deal with huge problems in ways that on paper just look impossible until we just do it there have been examples of national mobilizations obviously throughout history that that bring people together the Blitz in the UK, September 1940 to May 1941, bombing a number of cities in England to smithereens. I think London was bombed every day and every night for something like 11 weeks with like one day or one night's exception, 30% of the city was destroyed. And there was a sense that it brought the country together.

Obviously after September 11th, there was at least in the near term after September 11th, the sense that the country was coming together. That, I mean, obviously it doesn't feel now like that has happened. And you also argue that it's not always a positive to search for those crises for a sense of unity and trust and cohesion. Yeah, I think we have to be careful about a kind of communitarianism that looks for crisis, that says we should find ways to be as unified as we were in the Second World War. Well, we don't really want that. We don't want to be in that kind of crisis all the time. And a free society is not going to be that unified all the time. So I think there is some value, some benefit to the sheer diversity and dynamism of our society even though it can sometimes feel like we're fraying at the edges.

But we have to draw a distinction between that kind of dynamism and a crisis of division and despair and isolation. And so we have to find ways to advance a sense of belonging and solidarity in normal times. And that, to me, seems like it has to be done from the bottom up and not from the top down. It's not mobilization fundamentally, but rather building an institutional framework for people in their families, in their communities, in their religious institution, in their children's schools, in their workplaces that gives people a role, gives people a place, gives people relations to each other. I think America is ultimately strongest from the bottom up and not the top down. And it's only in moments of really grave crisis that we mobilize in that more traditional top-down way.

And those just can't be what we yearn for. It would be – it's ultimately perverse to wish there was a war. Another legacy of the social opportunity or social crisis, depending on how you look at it, legacy from this pandemic, which you've written about, which I'll quote from here. You wrote, social distancing, remote work, distance learning are the watchwords of this national response for all except health professionals and a few other categories of essential workers. These are the habits that we are building, which will enable us to more effectively stand apart when this is over. Leave it at the door and knock as you leave is not an ideal motto for civic renewal.

Rather than a sense of mutual dependence, then, we might walk away from this crisis as even more capable loners. That's what you're worried about. These buzzwords, social distancing, remote work, distance learning, will leave us actually more effective at doing more alone. Yeah, and you know, in that way too, this is building on a process that began well before the pandemic. I think that there's a lot of what we consider to be kind of internet advances, you know, web-empowered new tools that are actually just ways of not dealing with people. You can order what you want at the restaurant, walk in, there's a bag with your name on it,

you walk out, you don't say a word to anybody. You put into an app where you want to go, the car shows up, it picks you up, it drops you off, and you don't even really have to exchange a word. You know, the WeWork space where you're there for however long you need it and then you leave. All of these are ways of doing what we need to do without building human connections. And a lot, a bizarre amount of what we have gotten so far out of the business revolution that's come with the internet are basically ways of being more effective loners. And there's also a way in which the pandemic naturally encouraged us to look for more ways like that, that we could do the work we do without needing to actually be in the same place. I think it forces us to see that a lot of what happens when we are with other people

can be divided into two separate kinds of activity. One is communication, and the other is communion. One is exchanging information, the other is being together. And those two are not the same. I think we tend to overvalue communication and undervalue communion when we think about what happens when we're with other people. And to break down the workplace, to break down the school into just individuals exchanging information, I think we'd lose a lot. So that I'm hopeful that people do return to work in an office together in many fields and professions. I'm hopeful that although there is a lot of promise that can be drawn out of online education,

I'm hopeful that ultimately we return to models where students and teachers are together in one place because we are already to a two-grader degree a society where people yearn to be an effective loner. And that obviously contributes to isolation and loneliness and alienation. And if we're going to build solidarity, we actually have to want to spend time with people. So the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has been hosting a series of conversations. And in one of them, they argued that they think remote work, what we've learned from the pandemic about remote work will ultimately be more transformative than the internet itself.

That it will be that much of a displacement, disruption, potentially innovating in the economy. And they argue that it's not, they don't think there's as much downside as you do, in that it means that people, because they can have more flexibility in how they work, means they actually have more time for their children, for their families, for their very local neighborhood communities. Ben Horowitz talks about how he's got colleagues who say, my gosh, I can have a career and be at home and be present when my kids come home from school. I don't have to do those crazy commutes back and forth to the Bay Area, to Silicon Valley,

and I could be home when my kid needs help with something. So I'm actually able to be more present. Is that not a—doesn't that serve what you want in terms of countering the loneliness? Yeah. Well, look, I think that's not entirely wrong, but it reminds me of the way people used to talk about what the internet would do in politics in, say, 1998, where you'd say, well, it'll just allow us to do a lot more of the good side. Politics could be more responsive. People could spend more time observing what their members of Congress do, and it'd be easier to contact them. And the assumption was, myself, as I am now, if I were simply given more of this kind of power, I would use it well. The problem is, what about people who are native to this new circumstance?

What kind of people does this form, rather than what does this allow me to do, is the question that we should ask ourselves about a cultural change on this scale. And the question is, yeah, if you now have a healthy family and community and civic or religious involvement, and you're just given more time, you're going to use it in those places. But how do you form that family? How do you meet these other people? How do you get to the place where you have that kind of life? I think a lot of that has to do with being together with other people, oftentimes not by choice. It's just the case that we're forced to be with one another, and then we find ways to love being with one another.

And if we weren't forced, we would be loners. I mean, I think we don't just incline to use new resources to the good. We have to think about the downsides of human nature. And it seems to me that there's a greater downside to isolating all white-collar workers in their own homes and keeping them from each other. If you think about it in terms of a generation that is now graduating from college and will spend their entire careers in that way, I don't think that those people are going to be spending all their time in civic and religious life. I think

there's going to be a lot more playing video games and a lot less getting married in that kind of culture. I want to move to one other big topic, but before we do, I don't want to turn you into a political pundit, but I was surprised in this election, the degree to which at least when you look at the exit polling in the 2020 election, how little impact the pandemic seemed to have on voter preferences. Now, obviously, this will take time to see how it plays out. We didn't really know the long-term implications electorally of the global financial crisis in 2007, 2008, which you could argue played out all the way through to the election of Donald Trump a decade after the crisis. So these things take time. But so far, are you surprised by what seems like the pandemic hasn't shaken up our politics,

or you think it has? Well, I am surprised. I'm surprised in the same sense that I was somewhat surprised at the way in which everything about the pandemic was channeled through existing partisan frameworks. So that essentially, it acted to reinforce what we came into it thinking. And we understood everything through whether this was the left or the right. Are we supposed to be for masks or against them? The question wasn't, do they work? What's the downside? The question was, do I like Trump or do I like the Democrats? And so in that sense, it made it easier to approach the election in that same partisan framework and not ask, has the president done well in handling the crisis or would Joe Biden do better, but rather basically ask, am I a Democrat or a Republican, which is the one question that now

overlays everything about our politics. And rather than being sort of at the end of a sentence about politics, I believe these things and therefore I'm a Republican, We say I'm a Republican and therefore I vote this way and believe that and agree with this. And so, you know, I think in that sense, the intense partisanship that was only intensified over the last couple of years is playing out there. But I find it a little hard to believe that there won't be some more transformative effects over the medium term from what we've all just been through as a country, which I think everybody's still processing. I want to switch gears to a topic that is not directly related to the pandemic, but I have, I got to believe it sort of is part of the surround sound, which is the future of civilian R&D, research and development around technology,

innovation, science in this country. And you have written about this bill moving through the Senate and the House called, in the Senate, it's the Endless Frontier Act, which dramatically, exponentially increases funding for the National Science Foundation. You think this is a positive sign. You actually have some concerns about the bill. So before we talk about the bill and why it's significant, can we just take a step back and talk about your view on just how we think, how we as a country

think or not think big anymore about issues of innovation and big problem-solving leadership globally? Yeah, I guess I tend to think that we're stuck in a place where we take this sort of question as being a question to which the answer is either public or private, when in fact, when America has been strongest, and when it's dealt with big challenges, taken on big projects in the best way, the answer has been that it's both, that there is a role for the federal government as a provider of resources, and for the private government as a provider of resources and for the private sector as a provider of dynamism, experimentation, innovation. And I think it's very important for us to think that way in the 21st century, that there are a lot of challenges that could serve

as focal points for national projects in which a federal investment could enable a mix of public and private research to really get us somewhere. The questions like the development of more effective battery and power storage, questions about the development of the power grid, the future of cellular communication, all kinds of future IT and also biotech, where it seems to me that there is the potential for enormous steps forward if we enable genuine R&D, experimentation that doesn't have to immediately have a market outcome, and therefore can try new ideas. And I think there's just an obvious role for federal investment there. And there's a long tradition of American investment of that sort that we've sort of let slip. We do a fair amount of it in the biotech side, especially through the NIH, which I think

is a very effective public agency. And thinking that way... And when you were working in the White House, in the Bush White House, George W. Bush White House, you dealt a lot with efforts to increase funding for the NIH considerably. I did. It shapes the way I think about this, because I actually think we increased the budget of the NIH too quickly. The budget was doubled between 1998 and 2003. Ultimately, because the NIH funds academic research, I think that growth was much too quick quick and it created a situation where universities made all kinds of investments that they then were not able to

sustain and started projects and started careers that they then had trouble keeping up. So that to me, in thinking about doing this now on the IT side and other areas, we need to think about huge investments that are slower and take longer. Think in terms of 10 years and 15 years and really how to grow a field of academic and commercial and public research. But I definitely think that there is a need for a significant public investment there to compete with China and just to make the most of the opportunities we have. And so I'm glad to see Congress heading in that direction, even if the details might not be perfect in one way or another.

I think on the whole, this is a very good idea. And the statement, it sends. I mean, you know, Douglas Brinkley has this book that came out a couple years ago called American Moonshot, in which he talks about when Kennedy's advisors were considering whether or not they should go big, you know, with the American moonshot goal, part of what motivated them was the statement it made. It wasn't just the outcome it would achieve, but just that a bold statement about where we want to go is something Americans can rally behind. It's something the world wants to fall behind. They want to lead behind an America that's thinking big, thinking

10, 20, 30, 40 years into the future. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. There is some tension between a general desire to improve R&D and that kind of specific goal where you can say, we're going to the moon in 10 years. And the question is, do we have some specific goals like that, or are we saying we need more resources to be directed to overall research in a few key areas? Those aren't the same exactly, but I think that there's an enormous role, as you say, both in sending a message about what's possible and in actually enabling it to happen for this kind of public-private partnership. Okay, before we wrap, Yuval, on the topic of institutions, are there any institutions that you are hopeful about? We know there's plenty we are unhopeful about. Like, there are things,

I mean, in reading this essay, National Affairs, by Hudson, you know, I was struck, she points out, like, that Putnam never really focuses both in Bowling Alone and also in his more recent book, Upswing, he doesn't focus on some institutions that are encouraging, youth sports, summer camps. These are institutions that are flourishing in America. Now, I get there are challenges with all of them in terms of their accessibility to a wide swath of the country. But they are creating these communal boundaries and accountability systems for a lot of young people.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that if you look at the country from the bottom up, there's a lot to be hopeful about because people are trying all kinds of things. You see that in youth sports, as you say. You see it in a variety of educational experiments now, you know, classical education, different forms of combining homeschooling with traditional private schools and even public schools. There's a lot going on in that space, even as we're arguing about education. And in a sense, education policy is much more controversial now than it was 20 years ago. There's a lot of experimentation and innovation happening there. I'm pretty hopeful about the U.S. military, which, again, has its problems,

but is still functioning as a tremendously effective and positive formative institutions for vast swaths of our country. And still very popular. I mean, they receive the highest favorability. Yeah, there's a lot of trust in it. Yeah, so why? How's the military hung out? How's the military hung in there while all these other institutions are crashing in the public's perception? I think the military has always openly taken its formative purpose seriously. It doesn't just say

we're good at defeating our enemies. It does say that, but it also says we take men and women and we turn them into soldiers and marines and airmen and sailors, and that's a better kind of human being. And they mean it, and it's true. And I think that means that we can trust that institution because it clearly takes its formative ethical purpose very seriously. It's interesting. In Israel, which I know you and I have talked about separately, while there's so much political division in Israel, and by watching the news over here, the news coverage of Israel,

you'd think it's a country at odds with itself. In fact, it's like one of the most, if not the most, unified, trusting societies in the world. And I think not,

I mean, the military plays a big role. There's a number of other elements, communal, you know, unbelievable number of youths participate in scouting movements in Israel before they get to the army, but the army plays that role 18 to 21, and then through, you know, miluim, the Hebrew word for reserves, through annual reserves for many people until they're into their 40s, the military creates this institution that almost everyone, not everyone, but almost everyone in society touches in some way. And when you combine that with the high regard for the

military, that's very powerful. Yeah. I mean, it's an enormously egalitarian institution and a genuinely meritocratic institution. And yeah, it enables a kind of mixing in society. It allows people to get to know each other in a different context than they would in commercial life or in political life. And it's tremendously important for solidarity. All right. Last point before I let you go. You quote Robert Nisbet quite a bit, both in your talks and in your book. And that's like going back to the early 50s, where basically in every generation since then,

or every decade it seems, that we're always worried about the state of our institutions. So on the one hand, you're breaking glass and saying, everyone wake up, we have an institutional breakdown now. On the other hand, you acknowledge, this is not the first time we've worried about institutions. So just before we wrap, why is this time different? Yeah, you know, Nisbet wrote about institutional failure in 1953, which we now think of as the

golden age for American institutions. So I think this is always a question conservatives have to think about, because, you know, we'll cite Tocqueville in the 1830s saying everything's going to hell. He didn't mean that was going to happen in 170 1830s saying everything's going to hell. He didn't mean that was going to happen in 170 years. He meant it was going to hell. And we now don't think it did in that time. So I would say the key to that is that social life is generational. Every generation needs to be formed from scratch.

We all begin not where our parents left off, but where they started. We all begin needing education, needing formation, needing an exposure to the highest things so that we can be capable of being free people. And that means that in different ways, we really do always confront the challenge that this generation may fail to hold up its end of the bargain with the past and the future and may fail as a link in that chain. So it's true that we actually do face forms of this crisis almost in every generation. The fact that you can find people worrying about this in the past doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about it now. It means we need to learn from them about how to act on that worry and make something of it that's constructive. And I think we do need to do that.

All right, Yuval Levin, thank you for an illuminating conversation. Hopefully we'll have you back at some point when we're really post-post-post-corona. Until then, stay safe. Enjoy the rest of the summer. Thank you very much. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Yuval Levin's work, you can find it at the website for the American Enterprise Institute. That's AEI.org. And again, please subscribe to his quarterly journal, National Affairs.

That's at NationalAffairs, one word, dot com. And if you want to purchase any of Yuval's book, including his most recent, the one we talked about on today's episode, A Time to Build, you can go to barnesandnoble.com or any of your favorite independent bookstores or that other e-commerce site. I think it's called Amazon. Post Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.