Yuval Levin Quotes

Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones.

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it. You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.

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

The poor are more isolated—economically, culturally, and socially—than they used to be in America.

All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.

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.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all,” Burke writes.

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.

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

we must all accept the responsibilities that come with the positions we hold, and we must ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well.

Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.

[T]heories inevitably can't be as complex as life itself.

At the core of this unity was not just a common set of ideals, but also the notion of commonality itself as an ideal.

Americans were encouraged to understand their circumstances and their obligations in terms of their citizenship in a great nation managed by large, powerful institutions that would help them through the risks and instabilities of

Just as solidarity had an underside of repression, so liberalization had an underside of chaos;

Our problems are the troubles of a fractured republic, and the solutions we pursue will need to call upon the strengths of a decentralized, diffuse, diverse, dynamic nation. The

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.

there are never simple or universal formulas for revitalizing a complex society.

the absence of easy answers is precisely a reason to empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right. This

countless Americans of all parties and no party are practical, experienced experts in putting family, faith, and community first and helping one another in hard times. A

We should look for ways to thrive that are suited to the nation we have become and are still becoming.

There are only perches within society, and we can elevate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others.

In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration. This

To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to moderate its movements, to substitute little by little an understanding of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men—such is the first duty imposed on those who would guide society in our day.

both the social and the economic consequences of our growing diffusion have hit the poorest Americans as punishments and the wealthiest as rewards.

Low-income Americans’ potential for mobility is often impaired by family breakdown, cultural dysfunction, and the polarization of norms

it is far too difficult to rise out of poverty in America, and it was so even throughout most of what we have thought of as America’s postwar economic golden age. This

mobility agenda, whether advanced by the Right or the Left, must start with growth and build to the lifting of burdens, the clearing of paths, and the revitalization of American education.

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.

the end is not combatting inequality as such, but combatting immobility, and counteracting the isolation and estrangement of some Americans from the core institutions and relationships essential to building thriving lives. Our

Focusing on the right problem does not mean we have adequate solutions, of course.

Higher costs, lower value, and growing debt make for a bad deal, and families know that, but they are short on other options for upward mobility.

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.

Our society does not have to be one big “yes” or “no” question over which we are constantly at each other’s throats. It can consist of a diversity of ends pursued by a diversity of means, united by some crucial common ideals

Under a cruel king, Burke argues, members of an oppressed minority “have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds.” But under a tyrannical democracy, the public as a whole is against them. “They seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.”17 Their

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

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

called upon personal recollections of a lost ideal, described that bygone time as possessing everything we now take ourselves to lack, and defined progress as a recovery of what that earlier age had to offer. It

an America in which each generation built something solid so that the next generation could build something better. But for many years now, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered.4 Whatever

nostalgia characterizes the thinking of so many of our most able and important scholars, journalists, commentators, and social analysts that it poses a problem for our capacity for self-diagnosis.

The objects and the flavor of our national nostalgia are not random. They draw on the memories of a particular group of Americans who have exercised an extraordinary power over the nation’s self-image.

we will only be able to think clearly about what is beginning, and about how we can make the most of it, if we can pull ourselves away from lamentations for a lost youth. The

Rising generations of Americans will soon need to look around and build their own understanding of the present, and sense of the future,

we should consider how they came to be, how and why America has changed, and what this might mean for what America is becoming.

The pervasiveness and intensity of our nostalgia make it hard to achieve the kind of analytic distance that would allow us to address these questions seriously. That

We are living in a time of change, and therefore a time that is as much a beginning as an end.

Few of us, including me, would want to return there without major reforms,

prescriptions of these writers are nonetheless fundamentally backward looking, because their standard is a particular point in time.

it was not the paradise that some now suggest, and it was made possible by a set of circumstances—historical, social, economic, political, and cultural—that are no longer with us.

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.

The American idea of progress is the tradition that we’re defending. It is made possible precisely by sustaining our deep ties to the ideals of liberty, and equality, and human dignity expressed in our founding and our institutions. The great moral advances in our history have involved the vindication of those principles—have involved America becoming more like itself.

Conservatives often begin from gratitude because we start from modest expectations of human affairs—we know that people are imperfect, and fallen, and weak; that human knowledge and power are not all they’re cracked up to be; and we’re enormously impressed by the institutions that have managed to make something great of this imperfect raw material. So we want to build on them because we don’t imagine we could do better starting from scratch. Liberals often begin from outrage because they have much higher expectations—maybe even utopian expectations—about the perfectibility of human things and the potential of human knowledge and power. They’re often willing to ignore tradition and to push aside institutions that channel generations of wisdom because they think we can do better on our own.

Burke argued that political parties were not, as many people insisted, factions each contending for its own particular advantage, but rather were bodies of men each united by a vision of the common good of the whole nation. Partisanship, he insisted, was not only unavoidable but also beneficial, as it helped to organize politics into camps defined by different priorities about what was best for the country.

Indeed, Burke argues that change, understood in this way as “a principle of growth,” is not only permissible but essential, and essential precisely to the task of preserving the existing order.49 “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” he writes.50 Such a principle of growth or means of change is intended to be a permanent feature of the regime, not just a path to an ultimate and correct arrangement that would not change further.

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle,” Burke writes.

Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.

The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory—and that this was a good thing.

What is remarkable in Burke’s first performance,” wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, “is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself.”4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life.

The government of human beings, he argued, is a matter not of applying cold rules and principles, but of tending to warm sentiments and attachments to produce the strongest and best unified community possible.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy,” Burke wrote in the Reflections, “which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.”58

Many Americans, including especially those in the most vulnerable economic situations, were becoming systematically detached (or dis-integrated) from those institutions,

the detachment from core institutions sent people searching for new kinds of connections and new sources of meaning and order better attuned to an individualist age.

We are uneasy. And unease leads men and women to seek change, to innovate, to build on the best that they have and to uproot the worst.

Our keen sense of our own unease does not mean that we are stuck, therefore. It means that we are already moving. But where, and how?

The concerns of vulnerable workers and the poor, and their particular susceptibility to the ill effects of the diffusing forces operating in our society and economy, therefore need to be front and center in our economic thinking. This

For twenty-first-century solutions to work, they must empower families and provide them with options.21

It is not a coincidence that we repeatedly find education and access to work at the core of the mobility dilemma in America.

But that ideal, put forward in the Declaration of Independence and pursued ever since in a variety of ways by Americans of all races, religions, and political persuasions, is most accessible when we allow the mediating layers of our culture and society to flourish. It is not a vision of radical individualism or of consolidated statism. 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. It is an ideal rooted in natural rights but put into practice by free men and women who are not merely natural but also social achievements. American citizenship is not simply the application of that shared ideal, of course.

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

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 older idea of liberty requires not only that people be free to choose, but also that they be able to choose well.

In our time, in particular, many people are not only estranged from some of them but are denied the chance to encounter them.

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.

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

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

our free society requires a flourishing private culture of moral formation for liberty, which

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.

A culture of more ordered individualism was more valuable to people building from a foundation of stability than to those working to rise from entrenched disadvantage, or to overcome the burdens of broken homes and communities.

Over and over, the effects of America’s diffusion, and then of its efforts to adjust to that diffusion, seemed to reach the wealthy and advantaged as rewards, but hit the poor and disadvantaged as punishments.

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? In

Declines in social capital tend to be self-intensifying: as people come to have less in common with their fellow citizens, they find it more difficult to cooperate and identify with one another, which brings a further weakening of remaining social bonds.

So while some Americans continued to experience a significant recovery of social order and norms in the 1990s, others saw their estrangement from America’s core institutions intensify. Attachment

the process of replacing attachments to large, established institutions with attachments to smaller, more flexible, but less established networks—as a “narrowing of the radius of trust” and a “miniaturization of community.

the dissolution of our core institutions and the country’s increasing diversity drove people from large institutions to small ones, and from large communities to micro-networks, in search of homogeneity, commonality, and trust.22 That

This second, late twentieth-century wave hit a deconsolidating nation that was in no position to press new immigrants to adopt a cohesive American identity. The

Ironically, the individualism of late-century America, by weakening that instinct to digest and integrate new immigrants into a self-confident whole, created more coherent subgroups, and therefore less assimilation into a culture of individualism. The

human beings will always rush in to establish new cultural patterns and arrangements when existing ones decline and fade.

Americans at the top are living far more stable lives, and are much more firmly attached to our core social institutions, than Americans at the bottom today, and that these differences are growing.

the data actually suggest something else—not a collapse of religious traditionalism, but a change in attitudes among people who were not particularly traditionalist to begin with but have grown more comfortable saying so.10

there has been less social pressure on loosely committed or uncommitted Americans even to pay lip service to traditional views or communities and a greater sense of freedom to express more lax views, or no views at all, on key moral questions. The

greater deference that religious conservatives might once have been given to shape publicly accepted moral ideals could easily have left them with the impression that they spoke for a far greater portion of the country than they ever truly represented.

And what those honest atheists grapple with is what every sinner grapples with, what all of us grapple with, burdened consciences that point to judgment. Our calling is to bear witness.

found themselves locked into conflict with social liberals who present themselves as rejecting all moral judgmentalism, but who in fact, unavoidably, end up trying to judge society by a new standard instead. E

problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.

the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive.

Now, some particularly radical liberals who would aggressively suppress religious and moral traditionalism in the public square are making the same mistake.

there has been on the Left something of a mirror-image of the Right’s exaggerated view of its own dominance in decades past:

The arrogant minority of liberals clamoring to consolidate its victories and crush dissent in our cultural battles is plainly exaggerating its power and ignoring the very trends—the diffusion and fracture of our older moral consensus—that have made its recent successes possible. It

Over time, as liberalization and deconsolidation became the dominant ethic of American life, the consensus broke down and cultural liberalism came to be at least implicitly the ideology of the American elite.

first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public.