Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, ethnic divisions, and political polarization increasingly draw us apart. Our governing establishments often seem paralyzed. And our politics offers didn’t rise to these issues.

No wonder, then, that Us citizens – as well as the politicians who represent them – are overwhelmingly nostalgic for an improved time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth hundred years, when unions were about The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism strong, large public programs guaranteed to solve pressing social problems, and the actions for racial integration and intimate equality were improving. The Right appears back again to the Reagan Period, when deregulation and lower fees spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism appeared resurgent, and America was assured and optimistic. Each side thinks time for its golden age group could resolve America’s problems.

In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Us citizens. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century-as the large, consolidated organizations that once dominated our economy, politics, and lifestyle have fragmented and become smaller, more different, and customized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization attended at the expense of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and cultural order. It has remaining us with more choices in every realm of existence but less protection, stability, and national unity.

Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. As well as the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered from the strengths of our decentralized, different, dynamic nation.

Levin argues that demands a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society – families and communities, colleges and churches, charities and associations, local governments and marketplaces. Through them, we can achieve not really a single way to the issues of our age, but multiple and customized answers fitted to the challenging range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.