Yuval Levin urges rebuilding of institutions, warns performative culture erodes public trust

Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told a Hinckley Forum at the University of Utah that Americans are living through a “social crisis” driven in part by a long collapse in public confidence in core institutions and by institutions’ shift from forming character to serving as platforms for performance.

Levin said the change has degraded institutions’ ability to build mutual trust and social cohesion. “When we don't think of our institutions as formative but as performative...they become harder to trust,” he said, urging attendees to ask themselves, “Given my role here, how should I behave?”

Levin opened by framing institutions as durable social forms — families, professions, universities and other organized bodies — that give people roles, responsibilities and expectations. He said that decline in trust is visible across decades of public-opinion data and that the…