Yuval Levin on The American Covenant

Even though I hope you’ve been avoiding the election news like I have (as you would the plague), admittedly, it’s hard to do. It’s like someone is blasting it outside your window at 5 AM. Or like a billboard outside your front door that you can’t help but see every time you step outside. Bummer.  

Fortunately, AEI’s wonderful Yuval Levin joins us today to talk about the remedy to the plight of election season and America’s recent malaise (not to echo Jimmy Carter…): the American constitution. Now, I know, you might be rolling your eyes and thinking “Those classical liberals are at it again, always talking about the founding…” But seriously. Remembering and embracing the spirit upon which America was founded—one of intellectual and political dynamism—is key to striking the balance between life, politics, and disagreement that has felt so off-kilter recently.

Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, as well as the founder and editor of National Affairs. He recently released the book American Covenant, which we are talking about today. Join us today for a livelier, timelier version of what you learned in your 7th-grade civics class. 

Want to explore more?

• How the Constitution Can Bring us Together, an EconTalk podcast with Yuval Levin.
• Yuval Levin on a Time to Build, an EconTalk podcast.
• Darren Staloff on the American Founding, a Great Antidote podcast.
• Christy Lynn Horpedahl, A Skeptic's Guide to the Perfect Commonwealth, at Speaking of Smith.
• Understanding Jefferson: Slavery, Race, and the Declaration of Independence, a Liberty Matters Forum at the Online Library of Liberty.

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Transcript

Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliette Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today on July 17th, 2024, we're going to be taking, we're going to be talking about something that haters criticize, especially classical liberal haters, which is uplifting the Constitution and our nation's founding. I personally don't care for the hate, so I'm excited to welcome Dr. Yuval Levin, the podcast today to explain why in maybe more intellectual terms than why are they hating on me, that the hate is unfounded and that the Constitution is still relevant to modern American life. He's a senior fellow and the director of the social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the author of several books, including his most recent, which is most relevant to today's conversation, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again, I just finished it this morning. It was fantastic. The audio book is very well narrated. Welcome to the podcast.

Yuval Levin 

Thank you very much for having me.

Juliette Sellgren 

So my first question is, what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?

Yuval Levin (1.34)

That's an interesting question. I think broadly the answer I would offer to that question is that it would help younger people and it would've helped me as a younger person to know that cynicism is very often naive that the notion that everybody's only self-interested or the idea that it's all in the service of somebody with a lot of money or a lot of power is actually not a very good way to understand politics. And that generally speaking, the real truth about politics is more complicated and strange than that. And it is that people mostly mean what they say, they're mostly trying to do what they say they're trying to do, and the resulting mess is just a function of the fact that nobody really knows enough to get it right. I think cynicism is very easy, especially for younger people, but it is very often misleading and a mistake, and I've learned over the years to become less and less cynical, oddly enough.

Juliette Sellgren 

Have there been any moments that stick out to you where you really realize this and learn this lesson?

Yuval Levin (2.50)

Yeah, I mean, I had the opportunity to work in government in a variety of ways that really taught me this as a very young person right out of college. I worked for [Newt] Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House. I worked for him at the end of his term, so I worked for him during the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1997, and I would ride into work on the metro every day and read in the paper about how Republican leaders had all these complicated plans, and they were trying to pull the strings and move things this way and that way. And then I would get to the office and nobody had a plan at all. Nobody had any idea what was going to happen that afternoon and over and over as I worked in government and I worked for a house committee, I worked for President of the United States for George W. Bush for four years as a White House staffer.

And over and over I came to see that first of all, the hardest thing to grasp about politics is that people mean well. Just about nobody…and there are a few exceptions to this. There are sometimes real sociopaths in the world, but just about nobody gets out of bed in the morning to do harm to anybody else. People actually believe they're doing the right thing for the country. They're often wrong, they're sometimes very wrong, but the reason they're doing what they're doing is more or less what they say and when it falls apart, it's because they got it wrong and not because they somehow had a plan that involves this happening and not that happening. That's made me pretty immune to conspiracies. I think there's just not nearly enough competence at the highest levels of American life for conspiracies to really work. People just nobody's got a seven step plan that you're a pawn in.

That's just not how anything works. And more generally, it's made me a little bit more immune to just raw cynicism because I really do think that the people I disagree with very intensely think they're right. They think their way is better. And so to show them why that might not be. So I have to at least try to understand why they think it is and in what terms that could come to be understood as a mistake and how I would make my case to them. And I think needing to see it that way ultimately makes you more persuasive and hopefully more effective.

Juliette Sellgren (5.04)

That's a great way to come at it, especially I think in the wake of recent current events, which we don't really need to get into. I have a lot of friends, especially on the left who do this. There are plenty of people on the right, there are plenty of people all over the place that kind of fall into this cynicism, but it doesn't look good either. It doesn’t feel good, it doesn't look good. And it's just shocking to me that I don't know, I guess we'll kind of get into this more, but I'm trying to remind myself that this is probably not the first time in history, nor is it uncommon for there to be people that behave in that way or that kind move towards that in moments that are tense like these ones.

Yuval Levin (5.54)

I think it's certainly not the first time, and I do think it's a very common reaction to unexpected things happening. I think conspiricism and cynicism, they're connected to each other, not the same thing, but they're both rooted in a sense that this must be somebody's intention, that somebody must be pulling the strings here. And it can be hard to recognize that that's actually not a more sophisticated way to think about how the world works. That's a more simple-minded way to think about how the world works, because in fact, the world is very complicated, very little follows anybody's plan, especially in a free society where people don't just do what they're told and don't sit on big secrets. It just doesn't work that way. If you think about your own life, it could never work that way. And so to assume that when somebody does something that you really can't fathom why they would think that was a good idea, to assume that there's a secret planet idea.

And oftentimes you learn something that way because other people really do know things we don't and they have reasons for coming to very different views than I have, and I think there's a way to at least understand 'em a little better that way, but then also to be more persuasive to other people, to help other people see why this person's wrong and I'm right, if that's what I think all of that requires us to be realistic about how the world works. And realistic doesn't mean seeing that only money and power matter. That's how a lot of people think about realistic when it comes to politics. I don't actually think that's very realistic at all.

Juliette Sellgren (7.30)

I agree. It's funny because I think the non-simple way is exactly what you said. It's empathy. If you think that you are in a position to judge someone else, that must mean you hold yourself in pretty high regard. So if you extend the same power of judgment and perception to the person that you're looking at, then you might be able to, it's very human.

Yuval Levin (7.58)

It's also a way to be more effective in a domain where is very, very hard to do. People only really change their minds in private generally, except with very, very close friends and they change their mind when you help the see themselves in a different way so that to persuade somebody of something, you have to hold up a mirror to them in which they can recognize themselves and then help them see that there's something wrong that they might want to do differently. Those are very hard things to do, and they really do require empathy. They require believing that people are acting for reasons that make sense to them, which on the one hand is obvious, but on the other hand can be very, very hard to fathom sometimes when we're engaged in an intense disagreement with people we think are wrong.

Juliette Sellgren (8.50)

Yeah, neither steel nor straw function as an effective mirror, not from personal experience with those materials, but okay, I want to get into the Constitution, but first I want to share a little story. You mentioned Bush. So last summer I had the wonderful opportunity of joining Michael Strand's class at summer honors at AEI, and one afternoon we were talking about immigration and economics and the relationship between these two things and he puts up one slide onto the screen and it's just a screenshot of you and President Bush on a Zoom call, and he's holding up the painted picture of you because he painted you in his book. How did that happen? What sort of a situation leads you to get painted by a president?

Yuval Levin (9.35)

This is a strange country and strange things happen here. As I mentioned, I worked for President Bush for four years. I was a domestic policy staffer at the White House. I was not a senior person at the White House, but I got to know him a little bit. And in his retirement, president Bush has become something of a painter of portraits. He produced a book of portraits a few years ago of veterans of Military Veterans, combat veterans, mostly people. He had gotten to know who he painted and then he told their story with each one. [Editor’s note: The book is Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.] And then a couple of years back, I think in 2020 maybe he set out to produce a book like that of immigrants to the United States. Again, people he knew personally who had immigrated here and had some story to tell. I went to see him when I was in Dallas for a conference in 2021, and he told me that he was doing this and he said he wanted to paint me and I said, I'm an immigrant. 

I was born in Israel, but I came to the United States when I was eight years old and I told him, you should paint my parents. They have more of a story. I don't really have a story. People took me here and here I am. He said, no. He wanted it to be people that he knows and that it actually might be helpful to have somebody who came very young because most of the people he was painting hadn't. He took some photos and asked some questions, and a few months after that we spoke on the phone too, and he asked a little bit about my family's story. He ended up asking me to write that story myself in my own voice in the book. So of the people he painted 40 something people, a couple of us have little sections that we wrote ourselves, and I'm one of them.

He painted from the photos that he had taken and yeah, you can find the book. It's called Out of Many One and it's a beautiful book. My story is I think by far the least interesting. I mean he talks to people with really extraordinary personal stories of how they came to America, but I mean it's an amazing thing. It's just a mind boggling thing. As I say, I came here as an 8-year-old. By the time I was 28, I was working for President Bush, and this is an extraordinary country where something like that can happen, and one of the many bizarre things that have happened to me here has been that I found myself painted by President of the United States. It was a great honor.

Juliette Sellgren 

So this is maybe a dumb question and not the question you would anticipate as a follow-up, but did you have to become naturalized? Did you have to take the test and go through that entire, ah…

Yuval Levin (12.18)

Yes. I'll tell you a story about it because it actually relates a little bit to the Constitution book. As I said, I came when I was eight, I became an American citizen when I was 19. If you are over 18 when you naturalize, you do have to take the test. My younger sister, who was 15 did not have to, I took the oath. I was a college student. I was, as I say, 19 years old. I took the oath at the federal courthouse in Newark, New Jersey. I was by then a history buff, an American patriot, interested in politics, obsessed with all the things that still interest me now, and the test is relatively straightforward. 

Juliette Sellgren 

Most Americans would fail it.

Yuval Levin 

I think that's probably right. They ask questions about the branches of government and a little bit about American history…

Juliette Sellgren 

What's in the gourd.

Yuval Levin (13.17)

When we took the oath, the oath was administered to us by this federal judge in my memory, he is an ancient grizzled federal judge. I mean, I was 19, so he might've been like 40, I dunno, but he seemed like a very old man and he got up to speak after we took the oath and I thought he was going to give a speech about the founding and whatever, Abraham Lincoln, but that's not what he did at all. He said something very simple to us that it took me a while to understand. He said that from now on you have to talk about America in the first person plural, and I guarantee you that I was not the only new immigrant there who did not know what he meant. I think my English was probably better than most there. And he told us, he said, that means you have to say us and we and not them. And when you talk about America, this country is now your problem and it's your privilege.

I distinctly remember being disappointed with that speech when he gave it because it's a strange thing to say, but it has actually stuck with me ever since. And I would say it's even affected a lot of how I think about the work that I do because one of the biggest challenges we have as Americans now is exactly speaking in the first person, plural about our country and saying us, and we is a really important word in the American political tradition. It is the first word of the Constitution, WE the people of the United States. It's the first word that amazing second paragraph, the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Those documents are written in the first person plural because they are about a people taking common ownership of its fate, and that's what we have to be able to do now and it's never easy.

Juliette Sellgren (15.11)

So you've been thinking about the “we” for a long time. I don't know if you, I mean, I guess maybe because you told us this story, you would put it this way, but when I think about just what an institution is and also obviously your past work on institutions, which I think segues very perfectly into the current book, I think that institutions are, we maybe I just really like Burke, but it's we of the past, we of the present, we of the future, but it's all one and that's what gives them strength and that's why they're so important. I guess what have been some of the most, okay, there's so many things I want to ask. What drew your attention to institutions and would you count the Constitution as an institution and how does it fit into that framework? If Sso or if not?

Yuval Levin (16.19)

It's a great question. First of all, I agree. I think institutions part of their great strengths, and I love Edmund Burke too, is that they span time, they span generations, and in that sense, they enable us to be a we across time and to understand ourselves as part of a larger whole. I came to think about institutions in a way that for me led directly ultimately to this book about the constitution I was to begin with. When I left government in 2008, I was a policy wonk. I went to the think tank world to think about healthcare policy, to work on federal budget issues, welfare, very mundane kind of domestic policy questions. And around 2012 or so, the work I was doing started to turn back in the direction of political theory, which had been my education because I found myself working in Washington in a moment when it seemed like the kinds of public policy debates that I was trying to speak to were happening less and less and something was breaking down in our political culture that was transforming that culture into a kind of entertainment culture.

It was becoming extremely difficult to see the institutions of our government functioning in ways that those debates just assume and presume and require. And so I started to think about the sources of that problem, the sources of the degradation of American political culture first by thinking about the roots of polarization and fragmentation. I wrote a book about the sources of the left right divide, which had been my dissertation, and it was about Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In 2016, I wrote a book about the sources of the breakdown of consensus in American culture, a book called The Fractured Republic. And the challenging thing about telling that kind of story is that it's a broad cultural diagnosis. It says we've lived through a kind of transformation of culture that has made it difficult for our politics to function. And that kind of diagnosis doesn't naturally point to prescription because if you say the problem is the culture, well what am I supposed to do about that?

You can't just change the culture. It's not clear what that means. And when you ask yourself, how do I change culture? The answer always amounts to something like you have to work where you are to change the way people behave in the immediately accessible surroundings in your family, in your community, in civil society, in school, in church, at work. These are all institutions. So that to think about how to change culture is ultimately to think about how to work through institutions. And Americans are often very bad at thinking about institutions. We see through them, we don't really grasp what they are and what they do. And so in 2020, I wrote a book called A Time to Build that was about institutions and tried to really offer people a way to think about what they are, what they're for, what they do. And the argument of it is ultimately that institutions are formative of us.

That what the family and the church and the school and work really do is they shape our character, they shape our soul, they turn us into a particular kind of person. And part of what was happening in American life was that we weren't allowing those kinds of formative institutions to shape us and therefore to shape culture. To think about that and then turn back to the question that had put me on this path, which was what is happening in our political culture is to think about the institutions of our politics and therefore it is to think about the Constitution. And that is for me, how I came to think about the American Constitution, not in a lawyerly way, not simply as a legal framework, but is more than that. And among the things the Constitution is I would say is a framework of institutions. It's not exactly itself a single institution, but it describes and creates a set of institutions, the congress, the presidency, the courts.

It creates a set of arrangements that make federalism possible around it as a party system that consists of institutions, an electoral system. All of these are institutions and in that sense we have to [think] of them in formative terms. We have to think about the way they're shaped to channel human collective action and therefore to build habits and ultimately to build character and to shape souls. And to think about the Constitution that way in almost a kind of classical political philosophy way of understanding the term constitution is I think very helpful in thinking now about what's gone wrong in our system and how it might be improved. And especially in thinking about how we've become so divided. I think the constitution is near the center of the answer. We would have to offer to the question of how can we address that division, reduce that polarization and allow for more effective collective action in American life. And that's how I come at the Constitution, not simply as a legal framework, but as a political framework in the highest sense, and therefore also as a set of institutions.

Juliette Sellgren 

I really like that. It might just be that I'm a classical liberal and that…

Yuval Levin 

Yeah, me too.

Juliette Sellgren (21.48)

The way that I think about it is almost as a relationship, almost every relationship has, no, not almost all relationships have institutions. Some are more explicit than others. I would say probably the best ones, romantic, familial, even with things like school or yourself are made better when they're explicit and they're reflected upon. And so I agree entirely and honestly, it's the sort of thing that I don't know why I don't know how to explain what it incites in me other than that it started when I started actually reading these documents for myself and that I don't know, that must be part of the solution. And I don't know if you can…

Yuval Levin (22.37)

I think one of the striking things about reading these documents and reading the thinking of the people who helped to produce them is that you really do learn that what they were doing is what we are doing. That to me is the most extraordinary thing about encountering the history of a political tradition. There's a complicated question always about how should I relate to a tradition that I'm part of? We face that constantly in our religious lives. We face it always as citizens too. And it's a very contested question, America, because what we think of our founders is kind of a controversial issue. And I think that there are, I think of it by analogy to how children think about their parents so that there's a childish way to think about your parents when you're four years old, you think your parents are perfect, they hung the moon, they can't do wrong. Whatever goes wrong, you go to mom and she fixes it. And then there's a kind of disillusion that comes and there's a juvenile way, a teenage way to think about your parents, which is

Juliette Sellgren 

The communism rebellion phase…

Yuval Levin (23.39)

Which is that they're just wrong about everything. They don't understand you, they don't, the pressures you face, they're just in your way. They don't want you to be happy. And when you're 14 or so, that's kind of how you understand the relationship. And then when you mature, maybe when you have your own kids, this has been my experience, you find yourself at some point sitting across from a three-year-old and telling her not to eat pasta with her hands and you realize, I just am my parents. That's the relationship I'm doing what they were doing and the experience of parenting is a constant experience of speaking from within your own parents' bodies as you understood them saying the kinds of weird things that my dad would say. And I realized that's why he said that that's what was going on here. And that is a mature way to relate to your parents.

I would think the same way about a tradition that you're a part of, there's a childish way. The framers are just perfect. The founders are these men in white statues and on horses and they can't do any wrong. The painting of George Washington praying in the forest, then there's a juvenile way that says some of them own slaves. They did all kinds of terrible things and that defines them. They can do no good and we were born in sin and there's nothing for us to gain from that except distance. And then there's a mature way that says what there is to understand about them is that they were doing what we are doing. They were trying to find a way to facilitate the political life of a free society that is diverse and divided and wild and energetic and out of control. And some of the ways they did that are extremely impressive and really I learned from them and some of the ways they did that are wrong and we should not repeat them.

And the way to tell the difference is to understand that they were doing what we are doing. We are in fact in a position to both be impressed by them and to reject some of what they offer us and that kind of relationship is very hard to achieve. I think that's the way for us to think about our own political tradition. And to me, when you really get to know the constitution and the thinking of the people behind it, you come to understand that they were dealing with some of the very same problems we're dealing with. And it does leave me mostly very impressed with what they were able to do.

Juliette Sellgren (26.03)

Yeah, it's funny because not only was this directly what your first piece of advice was, but I was thinking as you were talking, I re-listened to Hamilton the other day. It felt right coming into this recording and I realized that that's kind of what Hamilton did. It humanized by literally just embodying the founders in various different ways and settings and bringing it to life regardless of what you think and regardless of some of the jabs and whatever. I mean, I guess maybe in part because of that it makes it easier to face and accept and honestly have a conversation with the founders. And what's funny is I take this in part as a critique of myself and also just the tradition we come from because up until maybe a few months ago I was still like, oh, the founders were perfect. No, they weren't. I go to UVA we're told all the time about all the things Thomas Jefferson did wrong in part because we're literally walking in his oasis. And honestly now it makes me more impressed that the university actually toes the line pretty well because it's a really hard thing to do when you're walking in this monument that is also a museum that is also kind of this perfect place and yet it's not perfect because it was made by humans, but it's also awesome because it was made by humans.

Yuval Levin (27.46)

Absolutely. That's the way, and I think that's a kind of civic maturity that is very hard to achieve and it's hard for a lot of us a lot of the time so that a lot of our debates are between a childish and a juvenile way to think about our tradition and we could help ourselves out of those debates with a mature way that says, yes, there were things here that we were right to reject and would be right to reject now. And there are also things here that we should really embrace because they're just an extraordinary gift from the people who came before us.

Juliette Sellgren (28.21)

I've been thinking a lot about unity. Not only is it in part the title of your book, but also a lot of presidents and campaigners, I guess is the way to put that, use this concept of unity. I think you don't mean the same thing that they do as a way to garner new votes for them, and that's not the newest tactic, but how do we unify across honestly different groups of people that are at different levels of maturity with things like coming to terms with the American tradition and having a relationship with the constitution, but also how is the unity, I guess I'm just pelting questions at you at this point. How is the unity that Joe Biden runs under saying, we're going to be a unified America if you vote for me and only if a hundred percent of you who don't vote, vote for me and then the unity under the constitution?

Yuval Levin (29.24)

So I certainly think that there is this kind of simple-minded notion of unity that our politicians like to echo. And you hear that from President Biden, it came also from President Trump. It's a very common sort of theme in our politics now. And a lot of what people mean by that is that if we didn't disagree so much, it would be a lot easier to live here. And what they really mean is if people didn't disagree with me so much, it would be a lot easier to be me. And that's true. If people didn't disagree with me so much, I would certainly enjoy our politics a lot more. But that's crazy. First of all, people should disagree. Nobody's right about everything and nobody's wrong about everything. Also, people are just going to disagree. I mean, if you've ever been in a group of people of any size ever that what happens is some amount of disagreement.

And so there's a kind of realism at the core of the American constitution, and James Madison expresses it more clearly than anybody, maybe most famously. He simply says in Federalist 10 that as long as the reason of man continues fallible and he's at liberty to exercise, that different opinions will be formed. There's no way to end disagreement and we shouldn't judge the unity of our society by whether there are no disputes. Politics exists to resolve disagreement. A society that did not disagree about anything would not need politics, but politics ultimately exists to facilitate common action, and that means we don't have to think the same way at the end of the process for it to have succeeded if we've succeeded in acting together to address a common problem. And so the idea of unity that's at the core of this book, but acting together and the question that necessarily forces us to confront is how can we possibly act together when we don't think alike?

The Constitution is in one sense, a series of answers to that question. One answer is federalism. Another answer is a functional legislature whose job it really is to negotiate through differences so that competing factions that don't think alike nonetheless come together around agreed upon negotiated courses of action. It consists of an executive that sustains a kind of stable space for that sort of politics of negotiation to happen and participates in it. It consists of a judiciary that enforces the rules that make it possible for this to happen in a fair and just way. All of that is ultimately about making politics possible in a diverse society, which really means making common action possible despite continuing disagreement. To me, that is what unity looks like. That's not a way to deal with its absence, and the Constitution does present itself as addressing the challenge of unity, and that's because the generation that it created the Constitution was keenly aware of the danger of division and of the fact of division. The first 30 or so of the Federalist Papers address the question of why a union is and why the breakup of the union would be a disaster. And ultimately a lot of the system is intended to make it possible for what is always going to be a very divided society to hang together, build a common identity and share a common life together.

Juliette Sellgren (32.58)

Common. I want to get pragmatic about this. I'm not great at being pragmatic because I really like theory and things that don't super directly apply to life necessarily, but I want to kind of have a way forward, a way people can think and act and just kind of not keep themselves in check, but to allow us to keep reflecting on this because honestly, as much as I want to do something tangible, I think going into especially this election cycle among other things, really the way we are mentally is going to be so much more important than the tangible physical stuff, which is not to say that that's not important, but my generation is so anxious and so mentally unstable and I don't love that really. I don't get it fully, but it's true. And so I think the way to stay unified in part is to take this seriously and to think about this, which obviously you've put a great deal of effort into and very well I might add, but one of the really moving examples that I'm thinking about now is the one I mentioned to you yesterday after your discussion with Adam White about your book.

Listeners, go check out my interview of Adam White. I think it's pretty great where you gave the only good explanation for and defense of the electoral college. And yes, I would like you to repeat it, but also do you think that honestly engaging with this sort of dialogue and these ideas that aren't necessarily the main narrative is that the main way and the most important way and honestly the only significant way that we can maintain unity in this way, especially in this moment where I think a lot of people are crossing their fingers hoping that we can make it past November and January because peaceful transition of power that's like a hallmark of America or it should be. I think it's hopefully it's not a was so people don't like the electoral college, we need to accept the electoral college or we won't make it.

Yuval Levin (35.36)

I think one way to think about institutions like that has to do with the core kind of challenge of accepting the character of unity. Part of what it takes to live in a society like this is to recognize, to start from the premise that the people that you disagree with aren't going away. We should stop and remind ourselves of that. How would we do this if we believed that the people we're arguing with are still going to be here tomorrow and they're still not going to be persuaded that our way is the right way? What then can we do? How can we negotiate toward an agreement that we can all think is right and just and acceptable? A lot of what our politics has to do is deal with the complicated tension between majority rule, which is the only principle of legitimacy that can facilitate a free society and the protection of minority rights and individual rights, which is essential and a core purpose of our politics.

Majority rule and minority rights are inherently intention and the constitutional system we have wants to secure both. And so it is always intention with itself. It is on the one hand democratic and everything is ultimately accountable to a voting public, but it's also liberal and it does want to keep some things out of the reach of majorities and to protect certain things even from the power of elected majority power. And among the ways it does this is by creating some distance between public will and public power. One way to do that very simply is the system of representation. Decisions are made by the people's representatives, not by the people directly, but the people directly. We just wouldn't be capable of reaching accommodations with each other. And Madison says also in Federalist 10 that if every Athenian were a Socrates, the Athenian assembly would still be a mom and that's not going to work.

A system of representation gives us a little distance. The same logic is at work in how we think about selecting a president in our system, the republican executive, the American president is a strange kind of institution. It has some characteristics of a monarch. The President is an elevated figure ahead of state, someone with a lot of power who can speak for our society and the world, but also has some of the characteristics of a bureaucrat. The American president sees to it that the laws are faithfully executed. He doesn't make the laws. His job is to care. The system by which we select the President recognizes the complexity of that office and tries its best to put a little distance between the voting public and this individual with enormous power to avoid the challenge of demagogues, which has always been one of the great challenges confronting any democracy.

I think one thing to understand about this system is that essentially every democracy in the world has a way of separating the public from the selection of the chief executive. So one obvious example is that parliamentary systems, which a lot of people who complain about the American constitution up as a counter example in those systems, the selection of a chief executive is actually less direct than in ours. The British, for example, just had an election where they got themselves a new prime minister. The prior election was four years earlier, and in the course of those four years, they had three different prime ministers between elections. So how are those people chosen? They were chosen by a majority of the majority party in parliament. That's a very small group of people who are by definition politically, very alike and not representative of the entire society in the voting public, in the selection of the chief executive.

And the effect of that is a system much less democratic than the electoral college. The electoral college exists to solve the same problem, but in a way better suited to our system. It consists now of basically 50 popular votes, the results of which are then weighted by population. I think that's one sensible way to do what it has to do. It has some very important advantages for us. It is broadly representative, but it's not a direct election. It also forces the regional character of our country to be represented in our presidential elections. People have to care about where voters are and it forces our elections to happen near the ideological middle of the country because you can't just win by concentrating your attention on the places where your voters are concentrated. A Republican can get all the votes that he wants in the deep south and a Democrat in California, and it doesn't matter if they didn't win.

Michigan and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Pennsylvania are closely divided. That means you have to appeal to people who might go either way, which is healthy for politics, a sophisticated way to address the kind of challenge we face in choosing a president. It's important to recognize that the American presidency is not a representative institution. It's an administrative job. The president is elected in order to be accountable, but there's no way that one person could be representative of 300 million people to be representative. We need a plural institution, a legislature where people who represent different interests, different factions, different parts of American life negotiate with each other. The president can't do that. He's one person, and so choosing the president is about being able to select someone who's capable of that very difficult job while protecting our society from the dangers of the demagogue. And I think on the whole electoral college is a pretty good way to do it.

Juliette Sellgren (41.27)

Yeah, my cat is purring in my lap. I don't know if you can hear that. I've heard you speak a lot about how the primary system that we have kind of gets in the way of that. And I'm also thinking the 17th Amendment probably gets in the way of, not that in the presidential sphere, but in the congressional sphere as well. Because what it really does, what really the Congress was an electoral college in the house or not in the house, in Congress of the House and the Senate because it was balancing land and people from different regions with people, the people, the voice of the people was what the House was. So I feel like our entire country is founded on these tensions, right? In a way, it's supposed to last and it's very Ian, but it's dependent on dynamism and discomfort and kind of moving through that together through dialogue.

But I've been hanging out around some new illiberal, postliberal, whatever you want to call them, right? Folks who like to quote Alistair McIntyre and they say that quote, when a tradition is Ian, it's already dead. And I'm kind of wondering what you think about that because I don't know, is that true? Is it a problem? I would say in a way, our constitution kind of sets us up to be actually, and I don't really ever know how to respond to them because it's more of a concept that somehow I feel without being able to put it to words,

Yuval Levin (43.18)

I think that the notion that a tradition like this is impossible in practice because it thinks of itself in explicitly tradition terms. The kind of McIntyre critique of the Burkean tradition strikes me as just a little too abstract to be useful. It says in effect that our country's impossible in theory, and I wonder what it makes of the fact that our country is clearly quite possible in practice. I think we have much more to work with than our political and social theories would suggest, and that an approach that begins its critique from a theory like that runs the risk of getting wrong, the very purpose of theory in politics. Now, this is a dispute between a kind of Ian and thinking about theory. Burke's view is that theory exists to describe a practice that it has to arise from the fact of practice, and that it is generally speaking, not simply.

Prescriptive people do follow their political theories. Some they see them as principles to guide their practice, but society is not created by a theory that is then put into practice. And that means that if you have a theory of your society, there's not adequate to its practice, you need a better theory of your society. Political life is very individualistic, it's very cold, it's very mechanistic. American political life isn't actually like that, and the theories we have of liberalism in our kind of society also are extremely individualistic. They're all about personal rights, and the idea is that this system exists to protect those rights, and without them we aren't free. But the fact is that none of our rights are really that radically individualistic. Think, for example, about our First Amendment rights. These are kind of the worry about the Constitution. I think the rights in enshrined in the First Amendment are not actually best understood as individual rights.

They certainly adhere in the individual, but they are rights to participate in communal life. Free speech is not the right to talk to yourself. The freedom of the press is only coherent in reference to the ability to communicate ideas to other people. Nobody practices their religion alone. The freedom of assembly is obviously not an individual. These are all ways of participating in communal life and especially of participating in the lives of formative communities that shape human beings like religious communities and political communities, their ways of speaking to each other and through speech of shaping one another to understand them that way is already, I think, to step well beyond the kind of shallow caricature of the liberal society that we get from some contemporary critics of liberalism. There's much more to it than the theory says, and if all there was to American life was John Locke, I'd have a lot of problems with it too.

But that's just not true. That's not all there is. And I do think we have to ask ourselves how we have the kind of deep religious and moral traditions we do if the caricature were true, the serious religious and morally minded Postliberal should ask himself, where did I come from? How did I come to be in this society? And I think the answer to that becomes a kind of answer to the critique he offers of the liberal society liberalism like him, and therefore it isn't simply shallow liberalism. It gives us a way to live free together in ways that connect us with the deepest moral and religious traditions of the West. Our society does that. That's what it's all about. And so to criticize it as impossible in theory just doesn't strike me as a way to really come to terms with either its weaknesses or its strengths,

Juliette Sellgren 

And notably it is he, because I don't think I've ever met a female.

Yuval Levin 

Well, they must be out there, but yeah, that seems to be right.

Juliette Sellgren (47.52)

Yeah, you're probably right about that. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and to share all your knowledge and your wisdom. Thank you. Listeners, go check out American Covenant. It's great, very relevant, although I've met people that don't like the word relevant. It's timely and timeless. I have one last question for you. What is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Yuval Levin (48.21)

That's interesting. There are a lot of things I could point to, and I think in part they would connect to the first question you asked me. I do think I used to have a more normal kind of cynicism about politics has changed a little bit over time, but there are also some specific things. I used to believe I was, for example, an adamant champion of the death penalty in murder cases, and I'm now an opponent of the death penalty in all cases. And I think I've come to that view by thinking together with various particularly Catholic friends about what's involved in that. I used to be much more skeptical of certain kinds of political reforms too, and that's very much connected to the argument of the book. I've come to think that the nature of the contemporary party system requires experimentation with different kinds of reforms of our electoral system more open to seeing whether and how, for example, rank choice voting might work than I was 10 years ago. I think seeing the scale of the problem has left me thinking that we need to experiment with solutions, even if in theory a priori, they seem like they might not be great at ideas.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.