Home > Work > The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism QUOTES

The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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. "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

12 " 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? "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

13 " 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 "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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. "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

17 " 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. "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

18 " 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. "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

19 " 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 "

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

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

― Yuval Levin , The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism