A former George W. Bush administration official told a BYU forum assembly Tuesday that he hoped students, faculty and staff aren’t on social media.
If they are, they know it is a place where people often don’t live up to the standards of the institutions to which they belong, and the result is tearing apart the fabric of society, said Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“By making key institutions impossible to trust, we’re contributing to a profound and destructive set of social dysfunctions in America,” said Levin, who served in the White House as a special assistant to the president for Domestic Policy from 2004–07.
The answer to the political and social division and performative virtue and outrage of the polarizing culture wars is actually a question, Levin said, speaking from a podium on the floor of the Marriott Center to an estimated crowd of 4,570 assembled on the BYU campus.
The key question he shared was rooted in the classic conservative idea about personal responsibility and was a call to action: “Given my role here, how should I behave?”
“A lot of the trouble facing our institutions now might be described as a widespread failure to ask that simple question,” Levin said. “... As a president of the United States or a member of Congress or a student or a teacher, a pastor or a worker or a parent or a neighbor, what should I do here?”
He said another way to ask the question is, “What should I do here, given the responsibilities I have to other people?”
“A lot of the people we most respect today seem to ask that question before they make important judgments,” Levin said. “And a lot of the people who drive us crazy, who we think are part of the problem, seem to fail to ask that question when they really should and leave us asking, ‘How could that person in that important role have done that?’”
What went wrong?
BYU academic vice president and law professor Justin Collings said in his introduction of Levin that the university was “immensely grateful” to host him.
“Dr. Levin provides a voice of reason, wisdom, temperance, learning, judgment, civility and persuasion that serves as a tonic to the often feverish public discourse of our time,” Collings said.
Levin has a busy week in Utah. He will huddle with top Utah government officials, meet with leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speak to the Gardner Policy Institute and the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah and at the nonpartisan think tank Sutherland Institute.
Last year, he published the book “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again,” which Collings called “wise, brilliant and penetrating,” and endorsed from the podium.
But Levin, who is also the editor of the magazine National Affairs, chose a different subject matter for the forum assembly, one pulled from his previous book, “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”
He revisited a common refrain among experts who have noted that America’s fracturing and deep dysfunctions are related to growing mistrust in institutions like the federal government, big business and the academy. That loss of confidence has driven the deep dysfunction and fracturing of American norms.
The reason for the loss of trust in institutions isn’t just corruption, because that always exists and doesn’t explain the exceptional collapse of American institutions, Levin said. It is because institutions have been misused.
What institutions should be
Institutions are meant to be forms or structures that shape people to become trustworthy to build further trust in the institution. For example, when you see a Marine, you know what the institution has taught him or her to be, Levin said.
Instead, the idea of institutions has become distorted in the American mind. Instead of being formative places that mold people, they have been misused as platforms. In fact, he said, many of the new institutions of the 21st century are shaped as platforms to begin with, especially social media.
“It would be strange to trust the platform, and we don’t,” Levin said. “This change of attitude, this decline in the expectation that our institutions will be formative, is at the heart of our loss of faith in institutions, and it’s in turn, at the heart of our broader social crisis, because institutions understood as platforms rather than as molds, as stages to perform on, rather than as means to form and shape our character, are less able to offer us objects of loyalty, sources of legitimacy, means of building mutual trust.”
People are displaying themselves and building their personal brand on top of the institution “for the performative virtue and performative outrage of our vast polarized culture war,” he said.
“Too many members of Congress now run for office, less to be involved in legislative work and more to have a prominent platform in the culture war, to become more visible on cable news or on talk radio, to build a social media following and so to use their elected office mostly as a platform to complain about the government they’re supposed to be part of.”
So if institutions that once shaped behavior and character now often function as performative platforms, the way back is for people in institutions to take their institutional roles seriously and work to rebuild trust in them, Levin said.
“One way that all of us can play a part in healing our society’s wounds and divisions these days is by thinking consciously, explicitly about how to make the institutions that we are part of just a little stronger,” he said.
That personal responsibility includes trying to direct and change the institution for the better, but it also can be as simple as playing one’s own part well, he said. Answering the question about how one should behave each day may seem small, but it is constructive change that turns one into a builder.
“That, in the end, is the character of the transformation that we need,” Levin said. “The demolition crews have been allowed for too long to define the spirit of this moment in America, but where we’re going is going to be up to the builders and the rebuilders, and that’s what each of us should seek to be.”