-
A Time to Build
- From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
- Narrated by: Ford Enlow
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Categories: History, Americas
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Audible Premium Plus
$14.95 a month
Buy for $29.65
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Decadent Society
- How We Became a Victim of Our Own Success
- By: Ross Douthat
- Narrated by: Ross Douthat
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing - how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence”, a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.
-
-
Another Liberal Arts Intellectual who does not rea
- By Trebla on 03-24-20
By: Ross Douthat
-
The Fractured Republic
- Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism
- By: Yuval Levin
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans - and the politicians who represent them - are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time.
-
-
Make Subsidiary Great Again
- By J. Bickett on 01-09-17
By: Yuval Levin
-
Divided We Fall
- America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation
- By: David French
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An engaging mix of cutting edge research and fair-minded analysis, Divided We Fall is an unblinking look at the true dimensions and dangers of the widening ideological gap, and what could happen if we don't take steps toward bridging it. French reveals chilling, plausible scenarios of how the United States could fracture into regions that will not only weaken the country but destabilize the world.
-
-
The solution!
- By J. A. McCarron on 10-06-20
By: David French
-
The New Class War
- Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
- By: Michael Lind
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In both Europe and North America, populist movements have shattered existing party systems and thrown governments into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war. In this controversial and groundbreaking new analysis, Michael Lind, one of America’s leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry and reveals the real battle lines.
-
-
Monopoly is good... brought to you by Google
- By David Larson on 01-29-20
By: Michael Lind
-
Human Diversity
- The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: David Baker
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: Gender is a social construct. Race is a social construct. Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in. It is not a story to be feared. But it is a story that needs telling.
-
-
Purchase the Kindle version not the audio book
- By Wayne on 02-09-20
By: Charles Murray
-
The Age of Entitlement
- America Since the Sixties
- By: Christopher Caldwell
- Narrated by: Christopher Caldwell
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
-
-
Socio-political masterpiece!!!
- By TheJ.C.T. on 01-26-20
-
The Decadent Society
- How We Became a Victim of Our Own Success
- By: Ross Douthat
- Narrated by: Ross Douthat
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing - how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence”, a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.
-
-
Another Liberal Arts Intellectual who does not rea
- By Trebla on 03-24-20
By: Ross Douthat
-
The Fractured Republic
- Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism
- By: Yuval Levin
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans - and the politicians who represent them - are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time.
-
-
Make Subsidiary Great Again
- By J. Bickett on 01-09-17
By: Yuval Levin
-
Divided We Fall
- America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation
- By: David French
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An engaging mix of cutting edge research and fair-minded analysis, Divided We Fall is an unblinking look at the true dimensions and dangers of the widening ideological gap, and what could happen if we don't take steps toward bridging it. French reveals chilling, plausible scenarios of how the United States could fracture into regions that will not only weaken the country but destabilize the world.
-
-
The solution!
- By J. A. McCarron on 10-06-20
By: David French
-
The New Class War
- Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
- By: Michael Lind
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In both Europe and North America, populist movements have shattered existing party systems and thrown governments into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war. In this controversial and groundbreaking new analysis, Michael Lind, one of America’s leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry and reveals the real battle lines.
-
-
Monopoly is good... brought to you by Google
- By David Larson on 01-29-20
By: Michael Lind
-
Human Diversity
- The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: David Baker
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: Gender is a social construct. Race is a social construct. Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in. It is not a story to be feared. But it is a story that needs telling.
-
-
Purchase the Kindle version not the audio book
- By Wayne on 02-09-20
By: Charles Murray
-
The Age of Entitlement
- America Since the Sixties
- By: Christopher Caldwell
- Narrated by: Christopher Caldwell
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
-
-
Socio-political masterpiece!!!
- By TheJ.C.T. on 01-26-20
-
Kill Switch
- The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy
- By: Adam Jentleson
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every major decision governing our diverse, majority-female, and increasingly liberal country bears the stamp of the US Senate, yet the Senate allows an almost exclusively White, predominantly male, and radically conservative minority of the American electorate to impose its will on the rest of us. How did we get to this point? In Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues that shifting demographics alone cannot explain how Mitch McConnell harnessed the Senate and turned it into a powerful weapon of minority rule.
-
-
Informative and interesting!
- By K. Iftiger on 02-21-21
By: Adam Jentleson
-
What Were We Thinking
- A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
- By: Carlos Lozada
- Narrated by: Christian Barillas
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his presidency reveals about our nation. Many of these, he's found, are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. In What Were We Thinking, Lozada uses these books to tell the story of how we understand ourselves in the Trump era, using as his main characters the political ideas and debates at play in America today.
-
-
Useful book
- By Kindle Customer on 11-22-20
By: Carlos Lozada
-
The Smallest Minority
- Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics
- By: Kevin D. Williamson
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Listener beware: Kevin D. Williamson - the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle - comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”
-
-
Brutally honest, accurate and relevant
- By Sean on 09-19-19
-
Suicide of the West
- How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
-
-
How did I get here? What are these scars on my wrists?
- By Daniel J. Dewit on 04-27-18
By: Jonah Goldberg
-
Cynical Theories
- How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody
- By: Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay
- Narrated by: Helen Pluckrose
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only White people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed to challenge the logic of Western society? In this probing volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields.
-
-
Vast Amount of Jargon Lost Me
- By P. Jackson on 10-23-20
By: Helen Pluckrose, and others
-
The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America
- By: Oren Cass
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around - if the nation’s proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker’s interests first. Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans?
-
-
Great book. Better policy recommendations
- By BamaNYC86 on 02-08-19
By: Oren Cass
-
The Conservative Sensibility
- By: George F. Will
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 24 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist's "astonishing" and "enthralling" New York Times best seller and Notable Book about how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition (Booklist) - "easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written" (Jonah Goldberg).
-
-
Conservativism explained and in practice
- By kevinf on 06-13-19
By: George F. Will
-
Why We're Polarized
- By: Ezra Klein
- Narrated by: Ezra Klein
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics.
-
-
Good as an intro, skip if you’re a wonk
- By Tony on 01-29-20
By: Ezra Klein
-
Alienated America
- Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse
- By: Timothy P. Carney
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Respected conservative journalist and commentator Timothy P. Carney continues the conversation begun with Hillbilly Elegy and the classic Bowling Alone in this hard-hitting analysis that identifies the true factor behind the decline of the American dream: It is not purely the result of economics as the left claims, but the collapse of the institutions that made us successful, including marriage, church, and civic life.
-
-
Worth it...
- By Richard Angulo on 04-06-19
-
Great Society
- A New History
- By: Amity Shlaes
- Narrated by: Terence Aselford
- Length: 17 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period.
-
-
How have we forgotten how bad these ideas were?
- By Robert S. Allen on 02-09-20
By: Amity Shlaes
-
Return of the Strong Gods
- Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West
- By: R.R. Reno
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After the staggering slaughter of back-to-back world wars, the West embraced the ideal of the "open society". The promise: By liberating ourselves from the old attachments to nation, clan, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we could build a prosperous world without borders, freed from dogmas and managed by experts. But the populism and nationalism that are upending politics in America and Europe are a sign that after three generations, the postwar consensus is breaking down.
-
-
Mandatory reading for disenchanted souls
- By Joshua K. Jones on 06-27-20
By: R.R. Reno
-
How Innovation Works
- And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
- By: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: Matt Ridley
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.
-
-
Bad scholarship and bias that overwhelms his facts
- By RickyF on 07-01-20
By: Matt Ridley
Publisher's Summary
A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions
Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse.
Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation.
As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.
Critic Reviews
"A Time to Build is exactly what America needs right now. A moving call to recommit to the great project of our common life. And from Yuval Levin, one of the most thoughtful and pertinent of our public intellectuals, who writes like a dream if dreams were always clear. What an encouraging book this is, and what an important one." (Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)
"There is a great deal of ruin in our society. Yuval Levin does not shrink from taking the full measure of our woes. But his counsel is not despair. This perceptive and important book sets an agenda for renewing the institutions we need in order to live and flourish together as Americans." (R.R. Reno, editor of First Thing)
"Yuval Levin stands athwart the wrecking ball of anger that is smashing a democracy in desperate need of rebuilding and repair. A Time to Build sets forth an ambitious blueprint for how Americans can work together to strengthen broken institutions we cannot live without." (Bruce Reed, chief of staff to former Vice President Joe Biden)
More from the same
Narrator
What listeners say about A Time to Build
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Joey Caster
- 11-26-20
So many good points but weak solutions
The author had so many good points and views on very relevant subjects but was missing any solid solutions to the problems. I learned a lot from this book, it just left me wanting a strong Idea for a solution to the problems but left me wanting more.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Q Garcia
- 09-16-20
Rebuild America
I was introduced to this author thru C-SPAN 's in-depth program. In the age of "me too" and the "cancel culture" this is as timely as it gets. The institutions of family, business, religion, and many others are not lifting anyone up anymore , but bring everyone down. By bowing to everyone, no one is served. Institutions no longer work for the good of all, just the individual. Speaking only works if others are listening.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- James Greer
- 08-20-20
Erratic
I've read Mr. Levin's work for years, and enjoyed it. He writes well, is accessible to the average reader and seems evenhanded in his approach. Yet, this audio presentation left me often shaking my head.
There is much to like, much that provoked thought, and introspection. Points of agreement are plentiful. He seems transfixed on one particular notion, which left me dissatisfied - that institutioms form and shape us, and give us deeper meaning. We are citizens of overlapping social constructs that help us, often involuntarily, to understand our roles and responsibilities.
Sure thing. Mr. Levin never really addresses one of life's issues in what is wrong with institutions in general. He does not examine, more than in passing, what the incentives are for people to behave in ways they do. Reform is impossible until incentives are.examined. All the altruistic hopes are misplaced if the driving force toward something overcomes the noble aspiration.
This was a fine book, well read in the Audinle version. It didn't provoke me to an epiphany I can embrace.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Robert N. Driscoll
- 03-03-20
Fantastic Book
One of the best books I've read discussing current acrimony and dissatisfaction and offering a framework of analyzing and addressing the problems. Mediating institutions!! Shades of Tim Carney's and Jonah Goldberg's recent books, but more focused on institutions.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- B. McAllister
- 02-27-20
Thought-provoking, constructive, and objective
Mr Levin takes a different approach at looking to describe drivers and reasons for the extreme polarization, and absence of constructive dialogue that we increasingly see in the US. I thought I had a decent framework for looking at how institutions fit in a community, but apparently I had some gaps. While I'm in the process of my second pass through the book, and therefore can't say that I completely agree with everything Mr Levin presents, the initial pass suggested it is a compelling argument, worth the time and energy of diving deeper into his points.
I do like how he surveys the landscapes, identifies macro forces at work, but then distills these down to the individual level. Near the conclusion, he extends an invitation to the reader to try a few things. Having an impact, in his model, is accessible to the individual, immediately, and as the awareness and understanding grows through taking those few steps he recommends, I anticipate the momentum compels an increasing share of the community to drive great changes within institutions towards restoring their formative power and relevance.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Anonymous User
- 05-16-20
Interesting book but lacks evidence for claims
The book has an interesting thesis and is well written. However claims are only backed up with anecdotes.