“A moving call to recommit to the great project of our common life.” (Wall Street Journal)
Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics are polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campuses, social media, and sometimes in the streets and public squares. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities.
Left and right alike have responded with anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cancelling, defunding, draining the swamp. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation.
In A Time to Build, now updated with a new epilogue, Levin argu
