On Civic Renewal and Practical Solutions

Why we need both institutional idealism and pragmatic action in addressing America's challenges

Still not feeling great - unfortunately this cold appears to be one that lingers - but wanted to put up a post.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day who noted there was a schizophrenic character to some of my thought. On the one hand, I post about the lost virtues of the old WASP establishment or how well the government where I live has performed. On the other, I talk about ways to exit the system or potentially disrupt it.

I thought this was fair because there is something of a duality here.

Part of it comes back to a challenge Michael Anton put in his infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay in response to conservatives who say that the answer to America’s problems is something like civic renewal (or national renewal or any of the other various formulations we’ve heard before).

“Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

I read about the kind of American society David Brooks describes in his columns, or the well functioning constitutional governance Yuval Levin writes about, or the kind of America James Davison Hunter writes about in the last chapter of his latest book Democracy and Solidarity, and I say to myself: who wouldn’t want that?

The question I have is: how do we get there? This, candidly, is where the purveyors of those solutions have work to do. There often isn’t a realistic map on how to get there.

As I’ve pointed out many times, we are becoming a lower trust society. That’s alarming. But how do we reverse course and start restoring general trust? That’s a much harder question.

I think part of the divergent nature of my work comes from this. It’s very important to think about what we could actually do practically to move from where we are here to someplace else.

Where things are good, institutions are functioning well, etc., I want to tout that. But where things don’t look so good, I want to talk about practical ways to move forward. In some cases, that might be looking at exiting dysfunctional places or institutions, or figuring out how to work around problems, at the individual level. Since for most of us, that’s the one lever we can pull.

Rational behaviors at the individual level can sometimes play out negatively at the institutional or societal one, but what’s the alternative? Simply naively disadvantage yourself and your family while other people game the system for themselves?

There aren’t always easy answers about what to do. But I want to be exploring ideas, and trying to develop real world actions that can be taken.

Just as a preview of coming attractions, one of the things I’ve been working on for a few months is research on an article looking at how to solve the evangelical leadership class problem. It’s widely known that evangelicals punch below their weight in the leadership domains of society. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court, for example. I want to look at this problem again - and try to think about practical actions to actually move toward changing things. It will probably not get everything right. But hopefully it at least gets the ball rolling for new ideas and approaches.

The key is that when things are not as we would like them to be, we can’t just sit back and say that things should be different, or criticize all the people who are actually trying to engage on the problem, we have to propose our own constructive actions to the extent we can. (Sometimes, we just don’t know what to do).

But where things are going well, let’s by all means say that and look to invest in sustaining that success.

Ok, this probably isn’t my greatest piece ever. Hopefully I am feeling back to normal soon.