Building the American Revival

During the twilight hours of the first Trump administration, Yuval Levin published A Time to Build, arguing that many societal maladies could be traced to the transformation of key institutions from mechanisms of personal formation to platforms for personal aggrandizement. “Our challenge,” he wrote, “is less to calm the forces that are pelting our society than to reinforce the structures that hold it together.”

After a four-year hiatus, Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House has created a window of opportunity to rebuild vital institutions. This diagnosis may appear counterintuitive. Trump’s re-election could be viewed as a call to dismantle a broken regime that has disregarded the needs of average American workers, refused to secure the border, and imposed radical transgender ideology as holy writ. Polling completed before and after the 2024 election arguably bears this out.

A July 2024 Gallup poll revealed that average confidence in 17 different U.S. institutions was near historic lows. Majorities of Americans expressed at least “quite a lot” of confidence in only three institutions: small business, the military, and the police. Organized religion, higher education, big business, the media, and all branches of the federal government fell short of that mark. Relatedly, a Blueprint poll taken immediately after the election found that swing voters who broke for Trump over Harris did so because they believed the Biden-Harris administration focused on culture war issues like promoting transgender ideology at the expense of performing essential functions like taming inflation and combatting illegal immigration.

While tending to immediate problems is essential, we will miss the greater project if we interpret the recent election merely as a mandate to uproot and tear down a broken regime. Instead, the public dissatisfaction that drove the election result is ultimately directed at the fruits of institutional decay. The path to restoration lies not in bulldozing the institutions that occupy our public space but in reinvigorating and revitalizing them—and in reinstating proper boundaries on their jurisdiction.

America has long been a land of institutions. Alexis De Tocqueville observed, “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations” both “immensely large and very minute.”  This includes everything from hospitals and schools to seminaries and churches. These institutions exist between, and in conversation with, the divided and limited governments outlined in the federal and state constitutions and the seminal institution of the family—the origin of “the little platoon we belong to in society” and “the germ as it were . . . of public affections.”

The legacy of this tradition remains with us to this day. Our landscape is filled with the physical instantiations of churches and synagogues, public and private schools, community colleges and ivy-covered universities, government buildings and places of business, and family homes, to name a few. These institutions comprise an ecosystem connected by the people who inhabit them and play distinct but intertwined roles within each.

But these institutions do more than occupy physical space. As Yuval Levin recognized, they “are by their nature formative.”  Throughout our nation’s history, they served as the molds through which individuals were made fit contributors to society. Levin continues: “They structure our perceptions and our interactions, and as a result they structure us.”  When our institutions flourish, they “make us more decent and responsible—habituating us in exactly the sorts of virtues a free society requires.”

The Hyper-Individualist Challenge

However, modern residents of Western societies are increasingly unaccustomed to viewing themselves as embedded within a web of institutions. Professor Carl Trueman has observed that Western culture has adopted expressive individualism as its default operating system, recognizing each person’s autonomously determined self-definition as the preeminent public good. Trueman notes that this default system elevates the myth “that we are born free rather than the obvious fact that we are born utterly dependent and spend our lives being dependent upon others to lesser and greater degrees.”

As a result, we have become accustomed to viewing American society, in Levin’s words, as a “vast open space filled with individuals.” This emphasis upon individualized sources of meaning has led, in turn, to the rise of ideologies centered on radical self-definition: identitarian policies, gender ideology, and so-called “woke ideology,” to name just a few.

This turn toward hyper-individualism has profoundly and negatively affected institutions. Instead of embracing institutions as instruments of formation, those formerly shaped by them have converted them into performance and individual recognition tools. As a result, institutions have become platforms to advance ideological agendas inconsistent with their institutional purposes. By repurposing institutions from engines of formation into platforms for self-actualization, we have impaired their intended function and blurred “the boundaries between the internal lives of institutions and the public life of our society.”

Whether the 2024 election was contested on “vibes,” specific issues, or outrage at institutional failures, it was not contested on institutional renewal. And yet, the question of institutional renewal was sub rosa to the entire conversation.

High inflation, for instance, was top of mind for many voters in 2024. But dissatisfaction with rising prices is just the latest iteration of long-standing unease with economic policy that many voters believe leaves them behind. This comes after more than a decade and a half of institutional failings that have disrupted Americans’ financial lives and warped our economic system, from the 2008 financial crisis to the COVID hysteria—crises that were enabled and exacerbated by institutional failings within the financial, healthcare, and regulatory spaces.

Similarly, the embrace of radical gender ideology by the Biden-Harris Administration and elite institutions more generally has been facilitated by breakdowns in the professional medical community as groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (“WPATH”) have suppressed evidence that diverges from their preferred outcomes. Similarly, public schools have stepped out of their lanes and undermined parental rights by facilitating—frequently without parental notification or consent—the social transition of minors.

The same holds for several other issues. Unchecked unlawful immigration is a symptom of institutional breakdown as Congress, having largely abdicated its lawmaking role, has allowed immigration policy to be dictated by the administrative state. Increasingly, abortion rates echo declines in the institution of marriage, as nearly 90 percent of all abortions are obtained by unmarried women. Even businesses' recent embrace of “woke” policies can be attributed to institutional blurring, as businesses have sought to assume a public policy-making role more appropriately discharged by elected and accountable lawmakers.

The Return of the Institutions

Of course, the fact that institutional decay underlies our current troubles does not mean that institutional renewal will become an explicit policy goal. However, new institutions are likely to arise.

In The Fourth Turning is Here, author, historian, and economist Neil Howe identifies this same turn toward individualism within the arc of historical generational patterns. Howe observes that within each saeculum—Latin for the period of a long human life—four “turnings” occur during which society moves from periods of consolidation and institutional strength to atomization and institutional decay, only to be reinvigorated by crises that restart the cycle anew. This new beginning is driven by a “society-wide impulse to re-create a strong community.”  Howe’s grand thesis, while debatable, bids us to consider that the renewal of institutions is possible and that human nature, in its sheer relational dimensions, demands it.

Howe’s thesis seems to find support in American history. In The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Garrett document how the Gilded Age of the late 1800s—a time of renewal following the Civil War crisis—witnessed an explosion in the number of new institutions founded to address the challenges of the day.

A similar pattern will likely emerge in the coming years. While its shape is not pre-determined, some of its outlines are visible. Businesses are withdrawing support for Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) commitments and focusing instead on core business objectives, as seen, for instance, in outflows from ESG funds to declines in ESG-related job postings. The incoming Trump administration appears committed to combating administrative overreach, as evidenced by the announced creation of the Department of Government Efficiency or “DOGE,” a commitment bolstered by recent Supreme Court cases like Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that pulled back judicial deference to agency decision-making. But such steps are the tip of the institutional reform iceberg.

Questions remain, however, about the future of such culture-shaping institutions as education, religion, and the family. These essential institutions are precedent to and will determine the ultimate health of our business and political institutions, and they are each under severe strain in their unique ways. While taming the administrative state will certainly help on these fronts, it will require something far more—a revival of the heart—to bring these institutions back to health. What and who will recruit the sentiments of American citizens to the sacrifice, love, and devotion that are the foundations of any institutional renewal that will change the American landscape? That vital work will have to be ventured by those willing to shape a new common good grounded in the enduring truths of American civilization.

Human persons were not meant to occupy the vast cultural plane unsheltered and alone. We are social creatures meant to inhabit a community filled with institutions. In the words of Levin, “while calling out the demolition crews may be an understandable response to the frustrations of our time, it is very far from enough.”  If the 2024 election teaches us anything, it must be that the time for institutional renewal has come.

Ryan Bangert serves as senior vice president for strategic initiatives and special counsel to the president at Alliance Defending Freedom.