American institutions are facing a crisis. Not just of trust, but of purpose, Yuval Levin told BYU students during a campus forum on Feb. 25.
He argued that institutions, once designed to shape individuals into responsible and trustworthy figures, have instead become platforms for self-promotion, deepening societal divisions and eroding public confidence.
“It’s the sense we increasingly have that something very important has broken down in our culture, and our politics, and our common life and that this breakdown has undermined trust, cooperation and our ability to live in peace with other Americans and act together to take on common problems,” Levin said.
Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed to decades of Gallup polling which show that trust and confidence in major institutions have been plummeting fairly consistently.
While corruption and incompetence play a role, he said the deeper issue is a shift in how institutions function. Instead of forming individuals who uphold ethical and professional standards, they have become vehicles for personal gain.
“A Catholic priest doesn’t reveal what he hears in confession, a scientist only says what he can verify, a parent puts his children first. We have certain expectations of people in certain institutional roles, and we hold them accountable by those standards,” Levin said.
But when institutions fail to shape trustworthy individuals, the public loses faith in them, Levin said.
“We lose trust in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of shaping the people within it to be trustworthy,” Levin said.
He argued that institutions should serve as “molds” that form individuals, not as “stages to perform on.” When they become platforms for self-promotion, they fail to provide the structure and legitimacy that build public confidence.
“Institutions understood as platforms rather than molds — as stages to perform on, rather than as means to form and shape our character — are less able to offer us objects of loyalty, sources of legitimacy and means of building mutual trust,” Levin said.
Restoring trust, he argued, requires individuals to take responsibility for the roles they hold within institutions. He encouraged students to ask themselves a simple but powerful question:
"Given my role here, how should I behave?” Levin asked.
“A lot of the people we most respect today seem to ask that kind of question before they make important judgments. And a lot of the people who drive us crazy, who we think are part of the problem, seem to fail to ask that kind of question when they really should,” Levin said.
Even small efforts to uphold institutional values, Levin said, can create meaningful change.
“Thinking and speaking just a little differently about how we live together can make a bigger difference than you might imagine. Small steps like those are what make great changes possible. They are constructive, and so they build upon each other and turn us all into builders,” Levin said.
Levin closed with a challenge to students, urging them to take an active role in strengthening the institutions they are part of.
“The demolition crews have been allowed for too long to define the spirit of this era in America. But where we’re headed will be up to the builders and rebuilders. And that is what we each should seek to be,” Levin said.