My Amazon Review of Adam Yuval's "The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism"

You Can’t Go Home Again

National Affairs editor and conservative policy wonk Adam Yuval has written a very important and very dense book as to how we arrived at our current political mess and how we may get out of it. He argues rightly that both the baby boomer Right and the baby boomer Left are nostalgic for the 1950s and early 1960s. As more than a few wags have put it liberals want to work in the 1950s while conservatives want to live there. In the words of Thomas Wolfe, “you can’t go home again.”  Simply put the 1950s represented a unique period of economic and social consolidation that was rendered obsolete by the full weight of globalization, technology, immigration and the social revolution of the 1960s. Thus no matter how the politicians may yearn we are not going back to the social mores of the 1950s  and similarly the cozy big labor/big business model of that era has long been buried.

To Levin our politics today evolve around the radical individualism brought about by the rights revolution of the 60s and 70s joined by a highly centralized national government that has crowded out the space for intermediating institutions. Levin elevates the principle of subsidiarity which entails that policy ought to be implemented closest to the local level as possible. By this he means family, religious institutions, civic organizations (including by the way labor unions) and local government. Where Levin is dead right he notes that radical individualism has brought with it rights without obligations and those obligations are largely to the local institutions mentioned. How we modify the rights mentality to accommodate is vision of subsidiarity is a big question mark. Further the forces of globalization and technology that are still well in train work to destroy the local institutions he wants to strengthen.

I also wish he would have discussed the implications of Jonathan Haidt’s “Righteous Mind….” on healing our fractured republic. Haidt’s thesis is that conservatives and liberals differ because they have different moral matrices. While liberals and conservatives are informed by care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating; however conservative morality is also informed by loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Thus if our republic is to be made whole the conservatives are going to have to give up on a host of obligations or the liberals are going to have to buy in to the idea that some of their individualism is going to have to give way for the good of society. We can hope, but it is going to be tough slog.

For the full amazon URL See: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2324X7Q28YY58/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv 

My Amazon Review of Jonathan Haidt's, "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion"

As I write this there are 422 reviews posted on Amazon. Why another? It is because Jonathan Haidt has written a very important book. Using insights from psychology and evolutionary biology offers us some very clear-eyed thinking into the process of making moral judgements. For me Haidt clarified the way I actually think in a very organized manner and he explains, at least to me, why I have so many political differences with my liberal friends.

Haidt builds on the works of David Hume and Emile Durkheim among others along with the works of modern evolutionary biologists to argue that moral judgments are built on intuition and emotion as opposed to reason. In fact the smarter the person the better the person is in making after the fact rationalizations of their hard-wired emotional judgement according Haidt we all have our inner lawyer or press agent.

According to Haidt we have six primary moral matrices: care/harm, liberty/oppression,fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal,authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Libertarians largely make moral judgement on the basis of liberty/oppression and liberals uses the first three with special emphasis on care/harm. On the other hand classical conservatives and social conservatives utilize all six. To them institutions really matter. Haidt analogizes this type of thinking to taste buds. Do we have only one in our mouth, three or perhaps six.

He also notes that liberals and conservatives are both for "fairness." However liberals view fairness as equality of result while conservatives view fairness as reward for effort or as the the Bible suggests the right to enjoy the fruits of your labor. That is why smart liberals who promote increasing the minimum wage argue that rewards the work efforts of hard working people at the bottom of the wage scale rather than arguing they should be paid more because wage differentials are too wide.

On a personal note Haidt recounts his own evolution from being a card carrying secular liberal to being somewhat of a conservative. Note he will not fess up to being a Republican. His journey is similar to what I encountered in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s.

Finally I thought so much of this book that I bought copies for my three children as holiday presents!

The Amazon URL is: http://www.amazon.com/review/R4LEVLU8NA3N4?ref_=pe_620760_65501210