Social Decay and The Pandemic - with Yuval Levin Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

The coronavirus pandemic was a public health crisis and an economic crisis, but was it also a social crisis? Will we look back at Covid19 as being a catalyst for unifying our society, tearing it apart, or simply accelerating trends that were already in the works long before March of 2020?

Yuval Levin is one of the most prolific and influential thinkers on the subject of the health of our society - pre… and post corona. He wrote a book about the social breakdown in the U.S. and how to turn it around. It’s called ”A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus. How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream”.

As for the book’s timing? Well, it was released just six weeks before the world shut down due to the pandemic. And yet his diagnosis of societal breakdown is as relevant now as before the pandemic… actually more so.

It reminds me of a book from the beginning of this century, when Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam wrote the groundbreaking book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Society”. Putnam tried to scream from the hilltops about how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and community. Yuval’s book is the perfect bookend to Putnam, some two decades later, with a global financial crisis and a pandemic along the way.

Yuval takes a measure of the health of our society through the lens of the role of institutions in our lives. He believes that our institutions are in pretty bad shape and doesn’t think we repair society without first repairing our institutions. Yuval takes a long view on the roots of the crisis, how we got here, how covid changed things, and where we go from here.

Social decay in American life - did the pandemic accelerate, arrest, or reverse the path we were on? And where do we go from here?