Using the Constitution to Help Unify Americans with Yuval Levin | BRI Scholar Talks

0:05 For this episode of Scholar Talks, the guiding question is how can the Constitution help unify Americans? Yuval Levin is the director of the Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he holds a chair in public policy. He’s the author of several books, including A Time to Build:

0:26 From Family and Community to Congress and The Campus: How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, which we discussed on a previous episode of Scholar Talks. And his latest book is The Excellent American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could again.

0:47 I am Tony Williams, Senior Fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute, and I am pleased to bring you another episode of Scholar Talks in the Topics in American Government and Civics series. Yuval, I want to thank you very much for joining me. Thanks very much, Tony, I appreciate it. You know, I love American Covenant. And I mean, it’s so well-written.

1:08 It’s a it’s a compelling read. Such an important topic. But but I’ll tell you most importantly, while I was reading it, I had a sense of hope. I had a sense of confidence that, you know, that that will be okay, that that whatever divisions might exist in American society and politics, that we have the tools already at our disposal constitutionally,

1:31 and otherwise to, you know, to find some common ground. So it was a very, very hopeful message. Well, I’m very glad to hear that. You know, hope is, in a way, at the very center of the book. It’s, it’s not, optimistic. Exactly. I don’t simply think everything is going to be fine, but I think that we have the resources to improve our situation. And that’s what hope looks like to me, right?

1:53 Good so, why don’t we start with the problem? So what is the problem today? You know, why does why does politics, why do we seem sort of so dysfunctional and disunited, and divided today? You know, I think one way to think about the nature of the problem that we have today is that we’ve forgotten the art of coalition building.

2:16 in a sense, of course, the problem we have is that we’re divided, we’re polarized. A lot of Americans feel alienated from each other, isolated from each other. And sometimes we even blame our Constitution, our political system, for contributing to that, for for sharpening our divisions. But in fact, when you look at our Constitution, as we try to do in this book,

2:37 it turns out that bringing a divided people together is actually one of its core purposes, one of its chief aims. And when the Constitution describes its own purposes in the preamble, the first thing it says is that it exists to form a more perfect union. And at the heart of its approach to doing that is a way of of compelling, differing competing factions

3:01 in American life to deal with each other, through negotiation, through competition. All of that involves ways of building coalitions. Coalition building is really a way of turning minorities into majorities, of making majorities larger and more durable and more legitimate. That work is at the heart of what our vision of political life is all about.

3:24 And in 21st century America, we’ve gotten really bad at it. we have forgotten what it looks like to work together with people that we don’t entirely agree with about everything, where we can see path toward common action, toward agreed modes of action. We don’t have to agree about every underlying premise

3:45 and ways of doing that, or what Congress is for there, what federalism is for, or what our party system is for. And all of those institutions are now in bad shape. I think we’ve been losing the the knack for coalition building. And I would say ultimately, that an act is not about learning to agree with each other. Contemporary Americans are actually pretty good

4:06 at agreeing with people they agree with. We spend most of our time with people we agree with talking about people we disagree with. What we’ve forgotten how to do is how to disagree. And that is what the Constitution really can teach us to do. And a practical way to live with disagreement, to work through it, and ultimately to arrive at modes of common action despite disagreement.

4:28 We’ve forgotten how to do that. And that is, I think, the problem in contemporary American political life. Right. And you’ve touched upon this a little bit already. but you argue, you know, I think very interestingly that the Constitution is just much more than just a legal framework. It is that. But but it’s much more so, although you’ve touched upon it a little bit. So if you can expand upon a little bit more on

4:50 how can the Constitution actually help unify America? Yeah, the Constitution is law, as you say. That’s one of the things it is, and it’s the supreme law of the land, as it says itself, in article six. But it would be a mistake to leave the Constitution to lawyers and judges. It isn’t just law. It ultimately describes a polity.

5:10 It describes a way of living together as free people and a lot of what it offers us beyond law. You know, as a legal framework, the Constitution is a set of of boundaries and constraints, but it also offers us ways of resolving disputes that fundamentally revolve around negotiation,

5:30 competition, kind of constructive tension, all of which let us work through differences toward common action. And I think there’s a there’s an idea of unity at the center of the constitutional framework that says in a free society, unity doesn’t mean thinking alike. It means acting together, which is a framework that I think forces

5:52 us to ask how actually can we act together when we don’t think alike? And the Constitution beyond law is an answer to that question. How can we act together when we don’t think alike? We do it through negotiating. We do it through bargaining, we do it through competing, and ultimately we do it through the institutions. We do it through federalism and Congress and the presidency and the courts.

6:12 And I think to see that it’s not only to see how we might do better as a practical matter, but also to understand what it means to live together as a free people. They’re always going to be characterized by disagreements, so that to be reacquainted with the Constitution, which is what this book really tries to offer readers,

6:32 I think, is to be reacquainted with that vision that says unity doesn’t mean unanimity. The fact that we disagree doesn’t mean we have to be at war with each other. There are ways to live together despite these differences. Right. Great. and something I found really fascinating is, what how can federalism and a greater sense of localism

6:55 actually promote greater unity among, among Americans? Yeah. You know, federalism, I think, is often misunderstood now even by some of its defenders. There’s a tendency to think about federalism as describing a layered government where there’s there’s a higher level at the national level or lower level to local level. And we say, well, what should the power be?

7:15 And that was one of the ways that the, the convention that created the Constitution began by thinking about the, the, the state and the national. But ultimately they didn’t come to an agreement on that sort of, federalist arrangement. There was a dispute about whether the states should be governing the people directly,

7:35 in which case the national government would just be a kind of confederation like the, UN or whether the national government should govern the people directly, in which case the states would just be administrative districts like counties. And ultimately they didn’t come to an agreement on that question. They instead decided to do both at the same time. The states and the national government both govern the people directly.

7:56 They do it when it comes to different issues, to different domains of life. And so we don’t have a layered government. We have two parallel tracks of governing a national track where the national government does govern the people directly, but only regarding a few issues national security and diplomacy, economic policy, and since the post-Civil War amendments,

8:19 also the protection of core equal rights and the states govern other domains. In all other domains, the basic police powers of government belong to the States. That separation allows for genuine diversity of governance and therefore genuine diversity of ways of life in American political life. I think that we have

8:40 gradually lost, that sense that what we have are two parallel tracks of government, and instead we’ve had a kind of intermixing of governing powers, particularly in education and welfare and in health care and in all those areas, that intermixing is not been good. It’s not been good for American government. I would argue. It’s also not been good for our cohesion and our unity.

9:02 And I think that a forward looking agenda of federalism reform would involve a lot of of pulling apart these governing powers, of undoing that intermixing. And even if there are more areas now that we think should be, under the national government’s control, we have to see that

9:23 there should not be areas where both states and the national government govern at the same time, where the states are spending federal money, where the federal government is using the states as basically administrators. Our system does not work well that way. And when we do it, it makes it impossible for us to have diverse forms of government simultaneously,

9:43 which is ultimately how federalism lets us live together better. Right. and something I think was was so critical to the book is, is looking at the Constitution, the role of Congress. Right. and so why is the first branch of government, the Congress, so central to restoring unity today?

10:07 Yeah, I think this is really important to understand in this moment when it’s so easy to look at Congress as dysfunctional as sort of secondary, especially the presidency. We we live in a republic and in a republican form of government. And the framers say this over and over, particularly in Federalist Papers, in a Republican form of government, the legislative power necessarily is the predominant power.

10:29 It’s the most representative. And we have ultimately a democratic government. But it’s also the place where bargaining and negotiation can really happen as a practical matter, and a government that is framed around the need to negotiate through differences is going to put the legislature at its center. when Congress is working, negotiation is at the center

10:51 of the system, and the system works well and Congress is failing. the entire system is failing. And I think that’s a moment we’re living in now. Congress is not doing its fundamental job of bargaining toward agreed upon modes of government. very well. And as a result, a lot of power is flowed to the executive and to the judiciary.

11:12 And increasingly, members of Congress are willfully giving over their power to the other branches, choosing not to exercise the authority they have. and the result of that is much greater Division. Congress is the only venue at the national level where we can really have a politics of bargaining and negotiation. If we don’t do that, we can’t have it anywhere. We have administrative agencies that pretend to engage

11:34 in bargaining and negotiation, but that’s not really what they’re doing. And the president is not a representative job. Certainly the courts can’t do that. So I think we have to see that in order for our politics to facilitate negotiation and the resolution of differences, let us be more united. While we disagree, our government has to have a more functional Congress at its center. The first branch is first for a reason,

11:57 right? And just as a follow up, you know, it really seems like in this zero sum game of politics where any, any win for the other side is a loss for you and vice versa. That, and there’s just no idea that one would actually compromise or negotiate or engage in that kind of constructive politics. Exactly. The cultural incentives in our politics now all push against that kind of logic.

12:17 And ultimately we have to change some of those incentives by changing the electoral system. We can talk about that, but we also have to think about how Congress functions and the kinds of incentives and signals that it sends to its own members about what success looks like. I think we’ve had an excessive centralization of power in Congress, where the leaders make all the decisions and all the members do is talk,

12:39 and if all you do is talk, then you really do want a more confrontational political system because your voters want to hear you disagree with the other side. If you don’t have something else to offer them, like negotiated legislation that actually advances their interests and meets their needs, then you do end up in a purely performative kind of political culture. And that, increasingly is what Congress looks like.

13:01 Interesting. All right. So what roles, might the president and the Supreme Court play in unifying America? You know, I think it’s easy to get confused about those because we we have come to think of the president’s job as a kind of second legislature, as existing to represent the entire nation all at once and as existing to advance public policy in a particular direction.

13:23 I think that’s very much at odds with how the framers of the Constitution thought about the presidency. The president is one person, and one person cannot represent 300 million people. To really be representative, you need a plural institution like the US Congress. The president’s job is administrative and the president is elected in order to be accountable, not in order to be representative.

13:44 When we think about the role the president can play in facilitating greater cohesion and unity, I think that has more to do with providing a stable backdrop for American political life and public life. The president has the responsibility to secure both the the the defense and safety of the public and also a stable set of conditions

14:05 for American life, what Alexander Hamilton calls steady administration, which is so far from how we now think about the nature of administration, where a new president comes in, the first thing he does is undoes half of what his predecessor did, and then do all kinds of things that his successor is going to undo. That creates enormous instability. But it also, when you look at it from the point of view of cohesion, unity, it means that

14:30 the stakes of our presidential elections are unnaturally high. So much changes with a new president that it seems like everything’s at stake in a presidential election. And that raises the temperature, that raises the divisiveness. It almost makes it true when people say that everything depends on this election, it’s very important that that not be true.

14:50 And the American system is built to make that less true. Not everything depends on any one election, but the more power we hand over to the president and the more that presidents think in terms of a kind of partizan direction setting rather than securing stability, the more that they damage our potential for cohesion.

15:10 I think there’s something similar to say about the courts. In one sense, courts obviously resolve disputes. That’s what they do. But the federal courts are not meant to resolve the underlying disputes of the core of American political life. They resolve disputes about what the law is, not what the law should be. And our real disputes are political disputes are, of course, about what

15:31 the law should be. Those are resolved in Congress. Those are resolved by competition between Congress and the president. They’re not resolved by the courts. The role the courts have in advancing the cause of unity and cohesion is ultimately to secure the system, to make sure that the various constitutional actors are playing the roles assigned to them in our Constitution, and that nobody is doing an end run around the system.

15:54 Not presidents, not Congress, but also not majorities. Right? The courts enforce our basic rights to rights in the Bill of rights and elsewhere. In such a way that they they constrain majority power and they constrain the other actors in the system. It’s only when the courts see that as their role that they can facilitate greater unity and cohesion.

16:15 I think the federal courts have actually gotten better at that in, in the last, generation or so and especially in the last ten years. But it’s important that we see the role that way and not think of them as just another way to advance our policy objectives. There are other places in the system to do that, but that’s not what the courts are for. Right? So you mentioned,

16:36 lowering the temperature during elections. We’re obviously right in the middle of a campaign. It’s it’s become a very interesting campaign, a very contested election. and minute by minute, you hear it’s the most important one in history is, as you just said, but but ironically, as you point out in the book, you know, how can stronger parties and,

16:58 and these contested elections actually be sources of unity? Yeah. You know, I start out saying that coalition building is the skill we’ve forgotten. And political parties exist above all to facilitate coalition building. because of the nature of our system and especially the nature of presidential selection, we’ve almost always had two parties.

17:19 that’s largely because you don’t want more than two candidates in the Electoral College. That tends to send things to the Congress, and the House is not where the president should be chosen. If we can help it. So we’ve generally had two parties, and that means that each of them has to be a very broad and messy coalition. And that actually is good for producing the kinds of politicians

17:40 who are going to be good at coalition building in the in the institutions of the constitutional system, too, in Congress and elsewhere. So, broadly speaking, the parties as institutions actually reduce partisanship, ironically enough, because a political party has to get people elected in the Deep South and in the northwest. And so as an institution, it needs to be broadly appealing.

18:01 It needs to give people room to make broad coalition appeals, and that does tend to lower the temperature of our politics. Part of the reason that things have gotten more Partizan and and polarized in the last 25 years is that the parties have gotten weaker, not stronger, and they are now very weak as institutions because they’ve turned over a lot of their power to primary electorates.

18:23 So they’re not really in the business of selecting candidates anymore. They’re not really in the business of directing resources to campaigns. Money flows through different channels. Now, the parties have much less of a role than they used to as institutions, if in a sense become brands and they’re wielded by individual political actors

18:43 rather than operating as coalition builders, that has been very bad for our system, and I do think that both parties need to rethink the logic of the primary system. Now, in a funny way, the Democrats are being forced into that now because they’re going to have to choose a candidate in a way other than the primaries. But maybe there’s ultimately a lesson in that for both parties to think about. How do we get candidates who are likely to win general elections?

19:06 That is no longer the question that that the candidate selection process seems to be asking. Instead, we’re asking how do we get candidates who are most satisfying to the most Partizan people in our coalition, the 10% or so who vote in primaries? I think that is the wrong question for our constitutional system. And the parties have to think about how to strengthen themselves as institutions

19:28 and in that way, how to contribute to a more cohesive national political culture, too. Right. So it really seems like we’re appealing to the base, and to the passions of, of our bases, rather than rather than the general electorate, rather than, appealing to all Americans as someone who might be a good public, official.

19:49 Yeah. I mean, I think our, our, our electoral politics now begin every election cycle by asking the question, what do the most devoted voters in each party want? Or who might say, what do the craziest people in America want, right? The 10% of people who vote in primaries, and I’m one of them, really care about politics a lot, but they are not like the rest

20:10 of the electorate. And the party’s job is to win general elections. So by starting every cycle, by asking themselves, what do the people who are going to vote anyway want? they’re making a mistake. They’re hurting themselves and you can see it. Neither party has been successful really, in the last quarter century or so. We’ve had two minority parties at the same time now for almost 30 years

20:31 since the mid 1990s, and neither of them can seem to get out of this. They both sink, winning just barely 50% plus one voter is the only way to get anywhere. But they’re mistaken about that. If you build a broader coalition, you can win a broader victory. But you do have to disappoint your primary voters some and doing that, which means you have to think about how to choose candidates in a way

20:53 that looks beyond only that very narrow electorate. Yeah. One more follow up. It just seems like, each party is about two years to just kind of ram their, their agenda down everyone’s throat before they’re voted out. And then the other side does the same thing. We’ve had no durable majority party, which is very unusual in American history that hasn’t normally how this works. And every time a party wins narrowly, they persuade themselves.

21:17 And now we’re in a new political era and it’s going to belong to us. And then two years later, they lose everything, and they somehow don’t see that this is not working, that they have to think about how to change their own processes to get back to a place where we can have a durable majority for a generation at a time, as American politics generally has. they can, you know, I think the first party to see its

21:38 way out of this rut is going to do very well indeed. and be the next majority party in American life. But at this point, neither of them seems open to seeing it. Right. Well, final question, ending on a on a very helpful note, I think. so you argue and I think you’ve alluded to that already. Unity is not unanimity.

21:58 It’s not the absence of disagreement isn’t even necessarily tranquility or calm. So what does greater unity, in your view in American politics and society. What would that actually look like? Yeah, unanimity is certainly impossible. in a free society, we are not always going to agree. If you’ve ever gotten a group of people of any size

22:20 together, then you know that what they do is disagree. that’s fine. That’s freedom. The question is, how can we understand ourselves as one society as we work out differences about what we ought to be doing together? We don’t do everything together, but politics is about what shall we do? And it is about working through disagreements about that question.

22:42 And so I think if we can see that unity doesn’t mean thinking alike, unity means acting together. Then we see that a more unified politics looks like a politics that addresses itself to tractable problems. That is the problems where I can give you some and you can give me some, and we can both in the at the end of the day, I think we’ve gotten something significant.

23:03 and to do it in a way that involves negotiation and coalition building, that’s what a unified politics looks like. It’s not a politics where we stop disagreeing with each other. It’s a politics where we start disagreeing constructively. But rather than talking about each other, we’re talking to each other, and we’re working through the institutions to facilitate various modes of negotiated policy outcomes.

23:26 That’s not impossible. That’s what the life of a democracy looks like. There are many, examples that we can point to in American life. We don’t do it enough now, and we’ve got to rediscover the mode of political action that looks like that. To me. That’s the reason to become reacquainted with the American Constitution. And that kind of re acquaintance is ultimately the purpose of this book.

23:48 All right. Great. So, more Aristotle and more Madison, more Lincoln and and less social media. How about that? So you can, get back to having a beer with each other and talk about politics. So. Sounds great. Well, Yuval thank you very much for, thank you for joining us and discussing this important topic.

24:08 Congratulations on your brilliant new book, highly recommended American Covenant. Many thanks. Right. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of Scholar Talks. Please check out the other interviews in our Topics in American Government and Civics series on our channel.