The Fractured Republic Quotes

“The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars—whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The poor are more isolated—economically, culturally, and socially—than they used to be in America.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“by exposing something I have seen to someone with eyes to see it differently from me, might spark some insights that would not have otherwise occurred to either of us. And”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“LIFE IN AMERICA IS ALWAYS getting better and worse at the same time. Progress comes at a cost, even if it is often worth that cost. Misery beckons relief, so that our virtues often turn up where our vices have been. Decay and decadence almost always trail behind success, while renewal chases ruin. And in a vast society like ours, all of this is always happening at once. That means there are no simple stories to tell about the state of our country, and that upbeat and downcast social analyses are often just partial descriptions of one complex whole.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The middle layers of society, where people see each other face to face, offer a middle ground between radical individualism and extreme centralization. Our political life need not consist of a recurring choice between having the federal government invade and occupy the middle layers of society or having isolated individuals break down the institutions that compose those layers. It can and should be an arena for attempting different ways of empowering those middle institutions to help our society confront its problems.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desires. This”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The Constitution rejects the populist view that the people have the knowledge required to rule, and it rejects the technocratic view that a body of experts has the knowledge required to rule. Instead, it embodies the view that no one has the requisite knowledge, and that government should therefore be designed to force different groups in society to bargain and cooperate. Restraining”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“America needs to be careful not to let aging baby boomers define its outlook. We cannot afford to farm out our vision of the future to a retiring generation. We can already see some indications of where that will lead: 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.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“There is an alternative to this perilous mix of over-centralization and hyper-individualism. It can be found in the intricate structure of our complex social topography and in the institutions and relationships that stand between the isolated individual and the national state. These begin in loving family attachments. They spread outward to interpersonal relationships in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, religious communities, fraternal bodies, civic associations, economic enterprises, activist groups, and the work of local governments. They”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“It is a vision of the free society rooted in an understanding of liberty that depends upon our institutions of moral formation and on the kind of person they produce—the citizen fit for virtuous freedom.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“our free society requires a flourishing private culture of moral formation for liberty, which”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Institutions that channel social knowledge from below and address human needs at a personal level are more likely to adapt to problems and circumstances and to find solutions. That”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“it will have to overcome a social vision that is by now deeply rooted and powerfully dominant among liberals: the idea that the only genuine liberty is individual liberty, and that the only legitimate authority is the authority of the national government. The”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“progress of the ethic of diffusion and liberalization has meant growing estrangement from precisely these prerequisites for human flourishing, especially among the least advantaged Americans.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“In our time, in particular, many people are not only estranged from some of them but are denied the chance to encounter them.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“This older idea of liberty requires not only that people be free to choose, but also that they be able to choose well.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desires.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“what is required to address the particular excesses and troubles of our age is a new rootedness that will be communal before it is national.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“We stand a chance of helping people change their behavior by enabling them to live in communities with norms that encourage better behavior—to live in a culture in which the most obvious and socially acceptable thing to do in a given circumstance is also the morally preferable choice.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Once more it is the institutions of community and civil society—standing between the individual and the state—that turn out to be most needful in our time. C”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“It would seek to build communities united not by something that would set their members apart from everyone else, but by something they believe they can offer everyone else. This”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“In our time, no less than any other, traditionalists should live out their faiths and their ways in the world, confident that their instruction and example will make that world better and that people will be drawn to the spark.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The more hopeful mode suggests that emphasizing the needs and well-being of one’s near-at-hand community first and foremost can be, for social conservatives, not an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“efforts and character of institutions like these can grow into a way of life when the people involved in them put them at the center of their cultural existence and identity and, as it were, fall into orbit around their rich moral core.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“moral anarchy has actually become something like the explicit goal of some of our most influential institutions.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“social Left is a minority, too, and it is a minority aspiring to dominate our institutions at a time when those institutions are particularly weak and diffuse.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism