What Citizenship Requires with Yuval Levin

About this episode

The youngest generation of Americans are increasingly without the kind of formation that shapes children into adults and allows them to develop the muscles of good citizenry, as the institutions and systems that once helped their elders fall short today. This not only sets young people up for failure, but erodes social cohesion and a democratic politics. Yuval Levin joins Oren and Chris to try to define what a better path of formation and true citizenship could look like. They discuss how replacing citizenship with consumerism has impoverished not just conservatism but the country more broadly. and wrestle with the temptations both toward nostalgia for older generations and nihilism for the younger ones, Finally, they talk through what this all means in the context of politics, and what today's deeply unpopular Democratic and Republican Parties could learn about renewing formative institutions from their predecessors in the late nineteenth century.