This is my first post on Yuval Levin’s new book "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again,” which is out June 11.
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.
Why is American politics so messed up? Some would say it's the other side's fault. But there are larger forces at work that shape all of us and mold our actions and our points of view. One of those forces is the quality of our leaders. Another force is technology, and the way it shapes and changes communication: our communication technologies shape us, the way we think and act. The story of the last century of American politics can be told through the lens of its people, or through the lens of our media, technology and communications.
A new book is about another key lens: the tectonic plates underneath all of this: "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again,” by Yuval Levin. It's about how better understanding this substrata of our politics can help us shape a better future, to act together even if, and especially when, we don't agree on many things.
This is Yuval’s fifth book. This one will be read by the most influential people in American politics. If you want to understand how we can make our system better, you can read the book. If you need some translation of the book, or want to understand it better, read my Substack series this June about the book, which kicks off this week with our interview.
Yuval's argument is that our Constitution is more than a legal document, though it is that. The Constitution is also a blueprint, a map, which lays out how our nation was intended to solve problems and resolve disagreements.
James Madison, the nation's fourth president, was one of the chief architects of our constitutional system. And our system has a psychology of sorts, Yuval's book says. This system defines unity as acting together even when we don’t agree. Madison and others designed an architecture of checks and balances and disparate power centers that are intended to pull and push us into engagement with those who are different and think different. It is that action together which creates common purpose and cohesion, a unity of "peace but not quiet," as Yuval writes.
Our political system was designed to bring us “peace but not quiet.”
"Politics is haggling, or it is force," he quotes Daniel Bell as saying. He adds: "We have forgotten that the only real alternative to a politics of bargaining and accommodation in a vast and diverse society is a politics of violent hostility."
Many Americans despair that we can repair our divisions. But Levin rejects that despair. He calls his book "hopeful" but says that does not mean he is necessarily optimistic. "Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity," he writes. "Hope is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worth of it happening."
The way we move toward this unity of "peace but not quiet" is by thinking more carefully about how our system is structured, and what kind of behavior it incentivizes: cooperation across difference as the Constitution intended, or pulling apart, demonizing the other side and fearing those who disagree, and performative outrage.
Here's a very partial transcript of my interview with Yuval:
Jon Ward: I really enjoyed the book. I think it's a little different from your previous books in some ways and you can kind of get into that in response to this first question, but I wanted to ask you about sort of the terra firma that this book came out of. You wrote this book over the last several years. Your last book came out in early 2020, and this book came out of the last few years that kind of started with the craziness of 2020, the Pandemic, and Floyd, and the Election, and January 6th. We walked around downtown, the two of us, I think not long after January 6th talking about that, trying to make sense of it. And you could have written a lot of different books out of this period of time, so why this one?
Yuval Levin: Yeah, it's interesting. I would say in a way, for me, this book is an extension of work that's been going on for a decade or so, and of several books that have been trying to think about the nature of political division in contemporary America. Beginning maybe really back in 2012 with a book about the left and the right about Edmund Burke and Thomas Payne, which seemed very far away from this moment, but I think are actually really about why and how we are divided. And after that, a few years later, a book called The Fractured Republic that tried to think about how America became fragmented, and how the very strong cohesive national culture of the 1950s and sixties turned into the very broken and fractured culture of the 21st century. And then the book you mentioned, which is called A Time to Build, which was really … a kind of turn from diagnosis to prescription, for me at least a little bit, and tried to think institutionally about the situation we were in.
This book, this new book, is a further turn in the direction of prescription. In a way [it] takes a part of that larger picture and thinks specifically about the institutions of our national government, and how they are designed to deal with the kinds of divisions that we now confront … It's exactly in this moment — when we are so divided and so inclined to think that our system is failing us — that we should actually look to renew it rather than to throw it away as a relic of the late 18th century, as so many people argue now about the Constitution. I think what's most striking when you look at the American Constitution on its own terms is that it actually was intended to address division and disunion in a diverse society. And there are a lot of ways in which the wisdom that it offers about how to do that fills a kind of gap in our understanding of the present, because it helps us to see that the problem in a divided society is not all these people who disagree with me. That's just a fact of any society.
The problem is that we've lost our knack for building coalitions across lines of difference, and I think the Constitution can really remind us how to do that and force us to do that in ways that we should value. And so this is a defense of the Constitution, but it's also an exploration of the meaning of unity in a diverse society. The first chapter of the book is called What is the Constitution? The last chapter is called What is Unity? And I think these are both harder questions than they seem, and the book is really an effort to answer each of them by way of the other. So for me it was a natural next step from where I've been.
Jon Ward: I want to start with your focus on the idea coming from James Madison that institutional structure shapes political culture. You write, late in the book, last few pages, you write that by structuring incentives, channeling power and forming habits, we can influence the spirit of our politics. I would just note, Michael Wear’s book that I did in January, was actually called The Spirit of Our Politics, and was very much focused on the leadership, or the quality of our leadership. And there is some tension between focusing on the people we elect versus the systems that we elect them through. You're very much focused on the latter, he's focused on the former. I think both are very important, but it's interesting you also note that institutions and culture shape each other, but institutions are much more readily changeable, which I think is your argument for starting with institutional change, correct?
Yuval Levin: Yes, absolutely. I think these things are very much connected to each other and, in fact, I would argue that the kind of people we draw into politics are actually a function in a lot of ways of the ways that incentives are set up in our institutions. The people who are going to want to be leaders in any society are ambitious smart men and women and they want to succeed. And the question is, ‘What is the definition of success?’ That is a question that is answered by society's institutions, by what they value, by how they're shaped, by what it means to make your way up them and through them. And so I think that when we ask ourselves, ‘How do we get better people into the system?’, the answer can't just be forming better people. Obviously that's always something we should be working on, but how do we get them to find this kind of work attractive?
We can think about it from the other end too. Why are circus performers finding Congress appealing right now? That's a problem with how Congress is structured. Those kind of people, Matt Gaetz or AOC, they should find Congress much too boring for them, but they don't. And the fact that they don't points in the direction of a need for institutional changes. So I do think these things unavoidably work in a cycle. The part of that cycle that we are worst at thinking about — that we need to be better at — is the institutional part because we tend not to think about it.
It's also as you quote there, the part that is easiest to change. You can change the rules of the House of Representatives. You just need 218 people to want to do it. That's much easier than changing the entire culture of 21st century America. And so if you can have an influence on that culture by changing the institution, then it makes sense to work on changing the institution. And I think when I say we, I even mean people in my line of work in Washington really need to be reminded of that constantly, because it's easy to overlook the shape of institutions, and it's easy to take for granted how they're shaped now. And we need to see that a lot of this is up to us and that it really matters. These little rules make a big difference.
Jon Ward: One of your biggest points is that Congress … is too weak. The presidency is too strong, the courts are too expansive.
Yuval Levin: Yes. I mean I think the core problem is really Congress. And yeah, Congress is too weak in the sense that it declines to do its job and everybody else is responding to the deformation that creates.
Jon Ward: And I counted seven specific reform ideas for Congress. One, empower committees. We've talked about that on this podcast before. Two, reform primaries, which we'll get to. Three, discourage show showboating for social media likes and media attention. Four, create more space for negotiation by moving some conversations out as the public spotlight. Five, am I right in seeing one of these recommendations as getting rid of the appropriations committee?
Yuval Levin: Yeah, that's right, and that's an argument I've made before. I've even made it in congressional committee hearings and it meets with mixed response. But yes, I think the distinction that Congress draws between appropriation and authorization, which isn't required by the Constitution or anywhere else — and Congress did without it for more than 50 years in the 19th century — I think it's time to rethink that. Doing that would give members much more work to do in committees and make that work matter more.
Jon Ward: Six, rethink the budget process. I believe that means for you going to two year budgets.
Yuval Levin: In part. I think that in general it means Congress thinking about how the budget process could serve its contemporary purposes. That process was created in the middle of the 1970s in a very different moment for Congress. A budget process that was a little less consolidated and more broken up into the work of the committees would serve them well.
Jon Ward: And increase the size of the house from 435 currently to about 585.
Yuval Levin: That's right. And then grow from there every census the way the House did until 1920.
Jon Ward: I just want to go back to the media attention, the show boating. How structurally could you do that, I guess apart from the things we've already talked about?
Yuval Levin: Yeah, it's obviously a huge challenge. As we said at the beginning, Congress is going to attract ambitious people. The question is what kind of ambition is it going to appeal to? I think the way Congress works now does tend to appeal to a showboating ambition. Congress is a very prominent platform on which to perform and it should instead feel a little bit more like a legislature that is a venue for negotiating substantive policy differences.
I think one important way to do that would be to facilitate more congressional committee work that is not televised and that is not on the internet and that is not even public. And the committees could do that by creating a new kind of form, a new kind of genre of committee work that is not a traditional hearing. The hearing is now an internet and TV production and that's not going to change, but to create something more like business sessions, working sessions, whatever they want to call it in which members actually negotiate over legislative text.
I think the real model here is actually the intelligence committees, which are the most functional committees of both houses of Congress. And of course their work is not public at all. I'm not suggesting there should be no public committee hearings, but I think that every committee should have some business sessions that are not public and the reason is very simple.
It's not only evident in the logic of the Constitution, it's evident in the experience of writing the Constitution. The constitutional convention was not public. The windows were sealed in the summer in Philadelphia, and the reason was that if they had to negotiate in public, it would not have worked. You can't negotiate in public, you can't give and take in public. You can be accountable for the product of that work in public and you should be, but the actual process of negotiating should happen in some private space and the ironic thing about today's Congress is that it does.
There's only really one place where there aren't cameras and that's in the leadership offices at midnight before a government shutdown and all the real work gets done in that place. It's not a coincidence, so there should be more such places for more members to do more real work.
Jon Ward: That's a good argument. I think most people don't realize that. They don't realize that most of this legislation kind of comes—I mean they realize that it comes down to the 11th hour, but they don't think about it in the terms you just expressed, which is, ‘Hey, it's already not public — this process — so why not make it more jurisdictional and representative really.
On the presidency, I thought it was interesting you noted that personal character is more important than in almost any other part of government. Briefly, why is that?
Yuval Levin: Yeah, the presidency is a unitary office. It really comes down to one person. The character of the Congress, you might say, is an average of the character of its members. That's a lot of people, and problems can be washed away in that average if the institution is structured properly. The presidency can't get away from the character of the individual occupies it at any given time. Every presidency looks and feels like the personality of the president, and that means that the character of the president really matters a lot to an unusual degree. It's a dangerous thing that such an important office depends so much on the character of one person. It means we have to choose carefully when we choose presidents. We obviously haven't always done that in recent years and I think we see what it looks like when we fail.
Jon Ward: Probably my favorite recommendation in the entire book is to get rid of the State of the Union address. Bravo.
Yuval Levin: Yeah. There's another thing where, in a sense, reporting on the state of the union is required by the Constitution. But the idea that it should be this big speech is really a modern innovation, and it's not a great idea. I think now, when the problem we have is that the president is too large and Congress is too small, we should just be willing to rethink this and go back to writing a letter like Thomas Jefferson.
Jon Ward: What can the average person do?
Yuval Levin: When we think about what an average person can do about these problems, the place to begin is to recognize that we do live in a democracy and that's a system that is built to give you what you want, and so you should really think about what you want. I don't think we do that enough. I think we allow ourselves to approach politics with a sense of what we want that is built up by a kind of political culture that values really essentially division and discord and entertainment. And instead, we should think about what we want by beginning from what we need. Our government for the American system is actually uniquely well built to help us think about what we want, because unlike most democracies, the question we're asked at election time is not, ‘Which party do you support?’
The question we're asked is, ‘Who should have this job?’, whether that job is senator, governor, representative. And that means we should think a little bit about that job, and about what kind of person would be best at it, and which of the people in front of us looks like that kind of person. I think we have to do a better job of that, and in part that means getting to know the Constitution better. I mean, part of the reason to write a book like this — I have no illusion that the average American is going to read this book — but is to inject into the culture a better sense of what it is that our system is meant to achieve and therefore, of the kinds of questions that inform its shape and structure. I think we have to be more aware of those questions. We also, I think, do need to approach this divided moment in our country in general with a sense that what unity looks like is negotiated settlements: essentially acting together when we don't think alike.
I think that's part of what's needed in a lot of our institutions, a sense that we don't all have to have one official opinion here and we can't move forward until we get there. We have to have a process of talking through what we want to do when it comes to the action we have to take as a group and knowing that it's not going to be perfect, but that it can be good or it can be bad. And that's up to us.
"Peace, but not quiet." That's what our constitutional system was designed to bring us, argues Yuval Levin in his new book AMERICAN COVENANT