Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("We have spent the beginning of this century drenched in nostalgia. And while we might sometimes be nostalgic because we find today's circumstances frustrating, the opposite is also frequently the case, especially in our politics: we are frustrated because we are so nostalgic. And the particular form that our nostalgia has taken renders us incompetent, or at least badly confused." Id. at 15. From the book jacket: "Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how mercer has changed over the past half century--as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity." "Both our strengths and our weaknesses are consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strength of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation." Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society--families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets, Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival." This short book, an essay really, is well worth the read.).
Jacob Golomb & Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche, Godfather or Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2002) (From David Ohana, "Nietzsche and the Fascist Dimension: The Case of Ernst Junger": "Half a century after the vanquishing of European fascism, as we gained an increasing clear insight into the causes of fascism's rise and success, we can identify that nihilism is hidden at the core of fascism--in its essence, its nature, its genes. The roots of the fascist mentality lie in its utopian view of the 'community of experience' and the quest for the new man. As a cultural phenomenon, fascism accords pride of place to action rather than it thinking, to experience rather than awareness, to style rather than to content. Its political acts are performed for the sake of the action itself, divorced from the social context. Fascism is not interested in social change, but in a perpetual mobile that creates the illusion of change on the road to some utopian destination." Id. at 263, 268.).
