Intro. [Recording date: May 16, 2024.]
Russ Roberts: Today is May 16th, 2024, and my guest is political thinker and author Yuval Levin. He is the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He’s the founder and editor of National Affairs, senior editor at the New Atlantis, contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.
This is Yuval’s fourth appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in March of 2020, discussing his book, A Time to Build. Our topic for today is his newest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation–and Could Again. Yuval, welcome back to EconTalk.
Yuval Levin: Thanks so much for having me, Russ.
1:24
Russ Roberts: What are you trying to achieve with this book? It’s a very ambitious book at a very, I’d say sophisticated level of thinking about the role of the Constitution in the founding of the United States, and then the role it could play today. What are you trying to achieve?
Yuval Levin: Well, this book is a reintroduction to the Constitution for Americans who know it. And, a lot of Americans, if you follow the news, we feel like we hear about the Constitution all the time. But, I think it’s worth stepping back in a moment like this, which is a moment of division and tension in American political life, and looking again at that charter of our government. Because, I think it actually has an enormous amount to offer us for understanding how a divided society can hold together in a challenging time.
And so, the book on the one hand is an attempt to help people just understand the Constitution better. On the other hand, it’s also really an effort to help people understand the idea of national unity in a diverse society better. The first chapter of the book is called “What Is the Constitution?” The last chapter is called “What Is Unity?” And, the book is really an effort to answer each of those questions by way of the other.
Russ Roberts: Now, I think we should talk–let’s start with talking about unity. And of course, we’ve recently talked about the Constitution with A.J. Jacobs and his Year of Living Constitutionally. I know you heard that episode.
Yuval Levin: Yeah. A wonderful book and a wonderful conversation.
Russ Roberts: I appreciate that. We’ll put a link up to it; but this is in some sense in conversation with that episode, but in a very different way.
Let’s talk about unity. I’m living in a country right now, Israel, that is in wartime. There’s not that much unity here. You’ve got a few things: We’d like to get the hostages back and we’d like to end Hamas’ role in governing Gaza. But there’s a lot of disunity. And, usually you’d think, wow, wartime, everybody pulls together. Certainly in America right now there’s not much unity. So, what does that mean in practical and in, more importantly I think, just cultural terms for the country?
Yuval Levin: I think it’s very important to ask that question, because we do live with a shorthand misunderstanding of unity that I think plays a big part in how we think about this moment in the United States but in a of the democratic world. There’s a sense–a kind of common sense view that what unity means is that we all agree, that we’re of one view.
And, that kind of unity is not generally possible in a free society. And, that’s not just because modern societies are very diverse in the way we use that word now. That they’re culturally diverse or people come from different understandings or religions or the rest of it. That’s part of it certainly. But, there’s also just the simple fact that free people are free to form their own opinions; and they’re going to form different opinions. And, one of the striking things about the generation of Americans that wrote the Constitution, of American leaders, is how intensely aware they were of this.
And so, James Madison in Federalist 10–maybe his most famous writing about the Constitution–in the effort to get it ratified, says this amazing sentence just bluntly. He says:
As long as the reason of man continues fallible and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
And, I think any of us who have lived in a community with human beings know that’s true. Even if we’re working on something together, if we’re part of one institution that has a clear purpose, you get 10 people together and what they’re going to do is disagree about important things.
And so, the challenge is: how can we be a unified society given that reality, given that we’re going to be free? There’s not a person here who is going to tell us all what to do.
And so, that means that we have to understand unity in a distinct way, which I think is deeply implicit in the American constitutional system.
And that is to say that unity does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And, it is not only possible but necessary to act together when we don’t think alike.
And the question that raises–the simple question of how can we possibly act together when we don’t think alike–is the question that the American Constitution means to answer. And, I think it’s really the question that any organized regime tries to answer. Given the fact of disagreement and the need for common action, how can we act together when we don’t think alike?
A society with a solid structure of institutions has a clearly articulated way to tell itself how we go about this process. And, a lot of what is most mysterious now to Americans and what is most frustrating to Americans about the Constitution is a function of the fact that it’s answer to that question. That it’s intended to help us act together even when we don’t think alike.
6:33
Russ Roberts: But, a lot of politics–I was going to say in America today, but of course it’s true through most of history at any democracy. It’s certainly true here in Israel. There’s a fear that the political process is a zero-sum game. That, if the other side wins, we lose, and we lose in a particularly devastating way.
I’ll stick with the United States. I think there’s a view in the United States that if the Left wins, the United States will no longer be the United States; and if the Right wins, the Left’s view is the United States will no longer be the United States. It’ll be some disgrace, some failure of what should be its mission.
And, I often describe that as: there’s no longer shared narrative. I don’t know if that’s a useful way to think about it. But, when a country is divided and each side sees the other side as effectively treasonous, it’s very hard, one, to get anything done, which is part of what your book writes about; but it also means there’s a cultural failure, it seems to me, and a political failure that go together as you write about in the book. Do you think we’ve reached that point in the United States, and is your book in some sense an antidote to that disease?
Yuval Levin: I do think that in a sense we’ve reached that point. I think that reaching that point–I think it’s possible to recover from that kind of condition, because our political tradition does give us a lot to work with on this front.
So, I would say that the sense that people have that the stakes are absolute is a function of a misunderstanding of how democracy works.
And, it’s a misunderstanding that’s rooted in the way that some democracies fail. And, the extraordinary thing about the American Constitution is how aware it is of that danger.
So, democracy is rooted in the sense that majority rule is essential to political legitimacy. I think that is absolutely true. And, the Framers of the Constitution in the United States began from that premise.
There is a democracy at the bottom of everything. Everybody is ultimately accountable to a voting public.
And yet, there is another fact about democracy: which is that majority rule can be very oppressive. And that it creates a fear in minorities. Because, if everything is up to the majority and if whatever the majority does is deemed legitimate, then if you’re not in the majority, you’re in big trouble. And, an election is a moment when a society decides who is in the majority and who is in the minority. And, that means that if everything is up for grabs at every election, then the stakes are extremely high and therefore it really is a fight to the death.
The American Constitution intentionally creates a set of restraints on majorities even as it empowers majorities.
Now, it has to be said, this is actually what we find frustrating about the Constitution. And, a lot of the critics of the Constitution are essentially majoritarians. And they say, ‘Look, a majority of the public voted for this party and yet they can’t get anything done because they have to negotiate with these other institutions and with the other party in the institution.’
And, it’s true. Everybody who wins an election for President or for Congress sooner or later in the United States finds themselves saying, ‘Look, didn’t I win the election? Why am I still dealing with these people?’
The reason you’re still dealing with these people is that the Constitution is keenly aware that majorities have to be restrained before they are empowered, or at the very least, that in order to be genuinely legitimate, they have to be broad and durable majorities and not narrow and fading or ephemeral majorities.
So, the system creates a bicameral legislature where the two houses are elected in two different ways. It creates these branches of government that are constantly in each other’s way. It creates an executive that’s elected in a very peculiar way and has to constantly account for himself to the Congress.
All of these things are there to make sure that it’s not simply the case that if you’re in the minority, then you’re screwed. That’s not how American life should work.
And, in a way, the competing, interacting majorities that the system creates is a way to make sure that everybody is in the minority sometimes–or at least can imagine themselves being in the minority–and therefore has to worry about how minorities are protected from majority power.
And so, how to balance majority power and minority rights is a challenge that every democracy has to face.
I think the American Constitution is actually distinctly good at doing that, but that’s also why it’s so frustrating to narrow majorities, which are the only kind we’ve had in 21st-century America.
11:35
Russ Roberts: But, this fear that everything’s up for grabs–that fundamental issues surrounding the nature of the country are at stake–seems to me comes from two forces. One force is the degradation of the Constitution. The inability of the Constitution in 2024 to restrain–I’m not sure it’s majorities, but just the power of whoever is in office.
The second is, of course, the role of social media to enrage and frighten people about what might be at stake. Of course, sometimes they’re right–those frightened voices or those enraging voices.
But, those two things seem to me to be part, if not the large part, of why we’ve reached this moment in America. Do you agree with that?
Yuval Levin: I do. And, I think that’s part of why it’s important to become reacquainted with the fundamentals in a moment like this in our society.
Because, we have had a degradation of the constitutional system, an actual deformation of it in light of an alternative constitutional vision that’s very frustrated with how the American system works. And, we also have a culture that is, I would say, objectively mistaken about the stakes.
So, it’s actually just not true that the next election is the most important in our lifetimes. That’s not true. And, it hasn’t been true in 21st-century America.
The ironic thing about this period is that the sense people have of the stakes of our elections has increased and increased, even though we’ve lived in a period of very close elections. So that, all the winners in the 21st century have been very restrained and constrained by the fact that their majorities have been very narrow.
So, I’ll put it this way. I think the next election is important. It does put two differing visions and approaches to American life on the table.
But, whoever wins is going to win narrowly.
And that means that whoever wins is going to have a hard time doing anything. And, they’re going to find it very frustrating that they can’t do very much.
But, what it means that they can’t do very much is that actually, in reality, the stakes of our elections are not absolute. The stakes of our elections are not nearly as high as we imagine.
But we live in a moment of very, very narrow majorities that are persuaded that everything is at stake. I think that is a very broken political culture. Certainly, social media has a lot to do with that. I think in general the fragmentation of American culture has a lot to do with that.
But, we also have to face the fact that some of the reason for that has to do with the kind of frustration with our constitutional system that is unfounded–that is a result of our not understanding the purpose of that system and the structure of that system. And that’s one reason to write a book like this in this moment.
14:31
Russ Roberts: But, it seems like there’s a paradox: as you write in the book, and many people would agree, that the checks and balances of the Constitution restrain action. And, one complaint, typically from the Progressive side, is that: ‘You can’t get anything done in America. If only we were like China where we could just–.’ It’s a horrible thought in my mind. But, that complaint is: we don’t get anything done.
My complaint–seems inconsistent with that claim–is that too much gets done. That, too little is restrained. And maybe the way to resolve that paradox–I’ll let you have a crack at it in a sec–but it seems to be[me?] the way to resolve that paradox is that certain fundamental institutional aspects of the Constitution are impossible–almost impossible–to change.
That, there’s a Legislative Branch, that there’s a Judicial Branch, an Executive Branch–so all the action takes place in very narrow areas. How much is spent, tax rates, a few key issues.
But, the more adventurous things–and there are very few restraints on those, on what can be done there, except through majorities in the given institutions. But, the more bolder things that people would like to do are just not possible. But, not actually because of the Constitution, but also because maybe just it’s that narrow majority.
Yuval Levin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this does create a very peculiar kind of irony.
So, I would say that there has been a critique of the American system–at least since the middle of the 19th century, in some ways before that–that says this system is not up to the challenge of modern life. It doesn’t let government get enough done. That’s what the Progressives said in the immediate wake of the Civil War. It’s the argument that Woodrow Wilson makes.
And it’s an argument that actually resulted in some real changes to the Constitutional System in–saw a few Constitutional Amendments, for the income tax, and how the Senate is elected. But, more than that to the emergence of the Administrative State, which is a way to get more done through executive power. And which I think in a lot of ways is hostile or at least foreign to the logic of the American Constitutional System.
And yet, at the same time, we are alarmed at the divisions that are now present in American political life.
I think that the question of whether we’re getting enough done depends upon our answer to a prior question, which is: What are we trying to get done?
And, the American Constitution is actually distinct from[?] most of the democracies in the world in the answer that it offers to that question. It’s not like the European Parliamentary Systems, which are a model for the Progressives. Those systems really do prioritize policy action. So, if you win an election, you basically have all the power in the system until the next election or until you lose your majority in parliament. There are very few constraints on what a ruling majority can do in the British system or in Israel or in most of the parliamentary systems.
In the United States, that’s never been the case. And what the Constitution is trying to produce is actually something more like a cohesive political culture. Its purpose is to facilitate greater unity in a divided society by broadening majorities before empowering them.
And, I think that it’s true that the system now is not getting done what it’s supposed to get done. But I think what it’s supposed to get done is not what a lot of Progressives think it’s supposed to get done.
So, everybody agrees, for example, that Congress is failing in the United States now. It’s in a very bad shape. But, what is it failing to do? There’s some people who say it’s failing to pass major legislation. I think it’s failing to facilitate cross-partisan bargaining. That’s its job. And, we’re so divided in our politics now because there’s just not a lot of cross-partisan negotiation and bargaining. That can only happen in Congress. It’s not happening there.
So, that Progressive observer of Congress and I agree that Congress is failing. We don’t agree about what it’s failing to do. And, it’s actually very important that we first come to some sense of what we’re arguing about. Because, if what it’s failing to do is to pass major legislation, then we need to remove some of the constraints on action in Congress–to get rid of the filibuster, to make it easier for majorities to move. If what it’s failing to do is facilitate bargaining and accommodation and deal-making, then we actually need more of those kind of constraints. And then, I would say the filibuster is the best thing about the contemporary Congress–which I really believe it is. It’s the only reason there’s any deal-making.
So, the question of what our system is trying to do is really where there is disagreement between Progressive constitutionalists and Conservative constitutionalists.
And, I think surfacing that question is very important because we often take it for granted and think we’re arguing about the same thing or even that we’re agreeing: There’s this little community of congressional reformers who all think Congress is failing. But we actually disagree very profoundly about what we’re trying to achieve.
And so, to see the purpose of the system in this way can help us understand what has gone wrong and right in the American system. And, I think a lot of the reason why we’re at each other’s throats now has to do with the fact that the Progressive vision of the Constitution has advanced, has succeeded, rather than with the fact that there’s this dispute between the Progressive and the Conservative vision.
19:59
Russ Roberts: The other thing that I think is true is that there are fewer and fewer moderates in either party. Which, we don’t have to talk about why that is. That’s interesting in and of itself. But, isn’t that also a barrier to the kind of negotiation and bargaining and other ways that Congress can make progress in passing legislation? It must be just harder because of the extreme views on each side.
Yuval Levin: I think that’s true, but it’s worth thinking about what we mean by ‘moderate.’
So, I think what we’re lacking in our system now are temperamentally moderate politicians–people who are in politics in order to negotiate and who understand their job as negotiating on behalf of their constituents with representatives of people in America who think very differently from their constituents.
A lot of American politicians have lost that sense that that’s their job; and they think their job is to express the frustrations of their constituents and essentially stop there. And, that means that the institutions in our system that are meant to facilitate bargaining and accommodation are not functioning in that way.
And again, Congress is really the central example here. Members think about Congress as a television studio. As a place to perform the frustrations of their voters. And, that means that what we have in a divided politics is not a lot of people arguing with each other all the time. What you have are two camps of people, each of which only talks to itself about the other rather than talking to the other. And, that makes the kind of politics that our system requires very, very difficult because that kind of politics requires constant, ongoing negotiations. It’s not just that you put two visions before the public; they vote for one, and that one then rules. There’s a need for constant, ongoing bargaining.
And, our system right now not only doesn’t reward that work, it punishes it. It treats a politician who wants to make a deal with the other side as though that person is weak, as though that person is betraying principle. And that means that all the incentives that politicians confront make it very difficult for them to really do the work that our system requires of them. It’s a big part of why that system is dysfunctional.
I do think one way to understand that is to say there aren’t enough moderates, but it’s really–I would say: there aren’t enough people who think their job as politicians is to deal with people they disagree with.
Russ Roberts: But isn’t this a problem that extends way beyond the political sphere? Isn’t it a problem in our friendships, in our social gatherings, in our colleges, and maybe in our marriages? You know, I just happened to notice a poll that shows that young men are increasingly seeing themselves on the Right, and young women are seeing themselves increasingly on the Left. And, if you don’t like to engage intellectually with people who you don’t agree with in conversation and discourse, that’s going to be a problem.
Yuval Levin: Definitely true. And I think we’ve seen this in American society in the 21st century in a very powerful way. We’ve come to understand ourselves as divided in part because we’ve come to think that the only way to get anything done is to defeat the other side and make them go away. And, a politics that assumes the other side even could go away–let alone that it should–is going to be dysfunctional.
I think–again, this is why it’s important for us to recognize that what unity looks like is not everybody agreeing. This kind of simple-minded idea that ‘If only people stopped disagreeing with me then everything would be great’–sure, I believe that. If everybody agreed with me, I think the world would be a lot better. But, you have to begin from the fact that that’s not going to happen and then work your way toward a functional society. And that means that–a functional society means looking for ways to act together even when we continue to disagree.
I think we’ve stopped looking for those; because, again, we’re looking for some way to make all these damn people go away. And that sure does extend beyond politics, no question about it. [More to come, 24:21]