A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

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Everybody knows that Americans have long been losing trust in institutions. But what does that actually mean? Just what is an institution? What is involved in having trust in such a thing and in losing that trust? And how is that widespread collapse of confidence related to the daunting, complex social crisis our society is living through?

In “A Time to Build,” Yuval Levin takes up these questions to better understand the frustration, division, populist anger, and alienation that have overwhelmed our public life in this century. Drawing on examples from politics, the professions, the academy, media and social media, civic and religious life, and more, he argues that a transformation of our expectations of institutions has played a key part in powering our age of acrimony and shaking the foundations of our common culture. In one realm of our lives after another, we have moved from seeing our institutions as formative to thinking of them as performative — from viewing them as molds that shape our character to viewing them as platforms that enable us to be seen.

By understanding what our institutions do for us, how they are now failing us, and how we might be failing them too, we can chart a path toward an American renewal and can see what we each might do to bring it about.