Resurrecting Republicanism
It's not about the political party. It's about the ethic of working for the common good.
This is my third post on Yuval Levin’s new book "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again,” which was released June 11. The second post, on how unity means acting together more than thinking alike, is here. The first post, featuring an interview with Yuval, is here.
In May, I went through Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
I hadn't really heard the term "republicanism" until three years ago. And it's quite interesting. I encountered the topic while reading another book by the same exact name as Yuval Levin's recent title: American Covenant.
That book's full title was American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present, by Philip Gorski.
Gorski is a professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale University, and his book defined republicanism — in very broad terms — as a commitment to the common good, and a view that politics is about more than self-interest. (Incidentally, in the coming days I'm going to repost my interview with Gorski about this book, which was removed from the web during a switch between hosting services).
Levin's book builds on this understanding of republicanism, and he says that it's an idea that we Americans have lost sight of or forgotten about. He thinks we need to recover it for a renewal of our civic life.
Republicanism, Yuval writes, is "an idea of the human being and citizen that emphasizes our responsibility to one another and to the common good ... It values not just rights but obligations" (31).
Most of his focus on republicanism comes in Chapter 3, titled "The Constituted Republic." It is a brilliant chapter and I did not fully comprehend the depth of Levin's argument here until after I'd read the full book, underlined extensively, taken notes, interviewed him, written two posts about the book over the previous weeks, and then gone back through this chapter.
Levin's argument begins with the assertion that a democracy of free people cannot exist without people who are devoted to this republican ideal of engaged citizenship that works for the common good. Otherwise, a free nation falls into decline.
This republicanism — an ethic of seeking the good of all — is the virtue that the founders talked about, as much if not more so than a private piety.
"The American founders had meant something public and collective, rather than something private and individual," Gorski wrote.
That's not to downplay private virtue. It's to say that America was founded by leaders who thought public virtue, on top of private virtue, would be crucial for the nation's survival. (I wrote about this after my last book came out, noting that I was raised in a fundamentalist religious culture that heavily emphasized private virtue while neglecting to teach me about public virtue).
Our political design "brings into being" different types of citizens
Levin forges potentially new ground, intellectually, by insisting that we can't just create a more republican, more virtuous populace or leadership out of thin air, or through will power, or an exclusive focus on personal piety and private character. We also don't have to go looking for better citizens and pull them into a toxic political machine that chews them up and spits them out, Levin says.
Rather, if you build a better set of political incentives, those people will be summoned into our system.
"In fact, meeting the challenge of drawing reasonably virtuous people into public service was a key purpose of the Constitution," (76) Levin writes.
But he goes further. Levin argues that the actual structure of our political systems and our government can and do call forth and even "bring into being" different types of citizen, at all levels, from members of Congress to the voters who decide primary elections, who are a new form of party boss.
The shape of our government matters, he says, because it can attract and cultivate the type of people that make for better leaders: national, regional, and local. It can produce a positive feedback loop in which our government brings in and produces better citizens, who in turn produce a better politics.
"Our system can help form us to be better citizens, and our practice of citizenship can, in turn, help form our system to be more effective and unifying," (89) Levin writes.
Right now we are in a negative feedback loop, in which our politics attracts and rewards citizens who are less interested in the common good and more interested in their personal interests, or stoking conflict, or they are inflexible, dogmatic, and simply not very good at the job of solving problems by negotiating across differences and reaching accommodations.
The three "constituted publics"
Levin focuses on three ways that we can "constitute the public", ie. structure our politics to produce a more virtuous, more republican citizenry (93):
1. through our elections
2. through our systems of governance
3. by creating space for minority communities
The Electorate
"Different election systems don't just measure the same majorities and minorities in two different ways ... rather, they bring into being two different sets of majorities and minorities," (70) Levin writes.
This is largely a reference to our primary system. In some of his strongest language, Levin calls our modern primary system "a truly crazy way" to pick our politicians (258). He's in agreement here with Nick Troiano, whose book on party primaries I read and wrote about in February. (You can listen to my interview with Nick here.)
The way our primary elections are structured currently "bring into being" majorities on both sides, and politicians who represent them, who are out for blood, rather than for problem-solving.
Levin endorses three specific reforms to elections (261-262):
ranked choice voting (in primaries but not in the general elections)
fusion voting (I interviewed Lee Drutman about this last year)
some sort of "peer review" by party officials during primary elections (Elaine Kamarck wrote about this in 2017)
Notably, Levin does not endorse open primaries such as the system used in Alaska, where anyone can run in the primary and the top five finishers advance to the general election in the fall. He is concerned that such a system would undermine political parties. Lee Drutman, I believe, shares that concern.
I share their conviction that strong parties are necessary. But I am unpersuaded so far that open primaries is necessarily a death blow to strong parties. In fact, I believe it could reduce the radicalism inside both of them, allowing more moderate representatives inside both parties to advance to general elections. That would strengthen the parties by broadening their appeal, and could reduce demand for other alternatives. Or it could lead to the dissolution of a party that is unable to moderate, replacing it with another one that can. Either way, both those outcomes seem like desirable outcomes.
Organized Bodies of Citizens
Transforming the "mass or crowd" into an "organized community" was another "key purpose of the framers of the Constitution," (71) Levin writes.
This is why the the Constitution has so many checks on power, like the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, independent courts.
Even representative democracy is a check on the power of the people. "The mediating laying of representation can transform a mob into a public" (71).
Our Constitutional design has a "fundamental premise ... that majorities should rule but minorities should be protected" (85).
This premise lies at the heart of the way we are supposed to be formed by our political system and our institutions. "The institutions of the American regime ... give form and structure to public opinion ... subjecting our republic to the will of the constituted public but not to the whim of the impulsive crowd" (71).
It is the fundamental premise of majority rule with protection of minorities that then brings us to this key quote about how our imagination — social and individual — should be shaped by the design and intent of our system and its institutions:
"Majorities must answer to principles that stand above majority rule. Even within the bounds of those principles, majorities still need to persuade, which means they still need to advance their aims and interests within the framework of a broader common good and to help others see how the majority's aims could meet their own needs too.
Sustaining that framework means sometimes valuing the processes by which our system acts above the outcomes we desire. This requires a kind of commitment to the Constitution and veneration of the law that do not come naturally but can be achieved by the experience of living under a system of government we respect. As Charles Kesler said, 'This means that the people must not only rule through he law, but be ruled by the law: they must come to love the law, and in particular the fundamental law, the Constitution, more than they love their own sovereign authority'" (86).
This can't just be taught, Kesler says. It must be lived. For many of us, this means "taking part in any process of common action, from serving on a church committee to speaking at a city council meeting to lobbying a legislator" (84). Doing these things helps us understand how our system works and what it takes to effect change, and creates a sense of solidarity with those who we might have thought we had nothing in common with.
Levin believes that an entire generation of Americans has come into public life and been given a deformed understanding of politics and citizenry. "When arenas of substantive civic contention in our politics become replaced by arenas of performative partisan playacting, a generation of Americans who have known no other kind of politics come to mistake political expression for civic action, and to lose some of the core habits of republican citizenship" (85).
At the national level, Levin's critique is most squarely focused on Congress, and he proposes numerous reforms to that branch of government (158-159):
empower committees
reform primaries
discourage showboating for likes and media attention
create more space for negotiation by reducing some transparency
get rid of appropriations committee
rethink budget process
increase size of House from 435 to 585 or so
We discussed all these in our interview.
Minority Communities
Finally, Levin writes that our U.S. constitutional system not only means to protect minority communities, but also to give them space to create the private virtue that should, theoretically, feed into public virtue.
"The free society requires more of its citizens than its politics alone can teach them ... Our politics requires a kind of person it does not produce by itself" (89).
"Much of the work of producing republican citizens is the work of the family, religion, and civil society," he writes. "Our Constitution protects the pre-conditions for that work — securing the private sphere so that society might benefit from the human beings produced there."
Levin's main corrective here is that, again, it should lead us to think of rights as communal just as much as they are individual. It's not about me, me, me. It's about us, us, us. And the "us" is all Americans.
"We generally think of rights as inhering in individuals ... but ... many of the most significant rights explicitly protected by the Constitution are communal rights, best understood as protecting minority communities and their formative institutions from the power of majorities or protecting the capacity of citizens to participate in public life," Levin writes.
"All the rights enumerated in the First Amendment are in this category."
"Individuals, families and communities are enabled by these rights to live according to their ideals and raise their children as they believe best. This is a more sophisticated idea of freedom than the kinds of shallow and individualistic political theories often used to defend it."