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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Acts Of Edifying Rebellion

Yuval Levin on the Benedict Option
Yuval_Levin_AEI_1-Oct-2015

I’m reviewing reform conservative thinker Yuval Levin’s new book The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, so I don’t want to say too much about it on the blog just yet. It’s a terrific book and an important book, and it offers a new way to think about American politics, beyond the stale left-right ideologies.

This is not a “third way” book, but rather one that dings both Left and Right for holding on to a dead-end politics of nostalgia. The fact is, says Yuval, for a number of tectonic reasons, American society continues to grow apart, and neither party can stop it. A smart, workable politics of the future will figure out how to accommodate this reality and make it work for us all. The Fractured Republic is more or less a smart, accessible, book-length case for a politics of subsidiarity.

I particularly like the part where he praises the Benedict Option as one response cultural conservatives should consider to this fracturing. Here are a couple of excerpts:

It does not have to require some great act of social founding. It often requires merely the living out of the virtues of community and family that orthodox traditionalists believe are required of all of us. They may not need to do something new, but they might need to understand what they are already doing in a new way – as at once a shelter and a model, a refuge and an act of edifying rebellion. And they need to see that most of the time, this can suffice, especially if they are willing to welcome into their circle outsiders who come in search of what they have to offer.

More:

The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there. … Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts. In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.

In other words, you may do more good for yourself, your family, and for America by leaving the cities of Empire and relocating to a small place, if you can. The renewal may well begin at the margins.

You need to get this book.

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