What if the Constitution had the solutions all along? With Yuval Levin

Valerie Boyd: Today on Transition Lab. We’re pleased to welcome Yuval Levin. Yuval’s work is everywhere.

He’s the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Currie Chair in Public Policy. He is also the Founder and Editor of National Affairs, a Senior Editor at the New Atlantis, a Contributing En editor at National Review and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

Earlier in his career, Levin worked on Capitol Hill and in the George W. Bush White House. He’s the author of five books and has written innumerable articles across a variety of media outlets. Much of Yuval’s work discusses how America’s public institutions should create a more active citizenry but are failing at that task at hand.

Today, with grave consequences for our democracy and our political culture. We’re excited that he can join us to discuss what’s going wrong in our polarized politics and how we can fix it. Yuval, thank you so much for being here.

Yuval Levin: Thank you very much for having me.

Valerie Boyd: So, we want to talk to you today, mostly about the role of political institutions and how they impact political culture and polarization, but before we get there, I have to ask you about your path into government.

What inspired you to go to Capitol Hill and then the white house? And what did it mean to you to be in public service?

Yuval Levin: Well, you know, to begin with, it came really just from a love of politics. I, at a very young age was interested in politics and came to Washington for college. I went to American University in DC.

And during college and after, ended up working on Capitol Hill. I, started out working for a really wonderful member of Congress named Bob Franks, a Republican from New Jersey, who later left to run for governor. And at that point, I went to work for the House Budget Committee. This is at the end of the 1990s John Kasich was chairman, and then I went to work for the speaker’s office, and I ended up working for Newt Gingrich for about a year and a half, the last year and a half of his speakership.

What drew me to it really was that at that moment in the, in the 1990s, it seemed as though, Congress was at the center of the action, certainly for, a conservative like me, that was the place to be. And, Congress also turned out to be a place where a young staffer could really have a lot of visibility into how government works, how decisions are made.

It’s a tremendously young place, Capitol Hill, and you don’t get real power at that age, but you do get real access, and I learned an enormous amount about government. When Gingrich left, I went to graduate school got a PhD at the University of Chicago, but I came back to work in government again, in that case when George W.Bush was elected and worked in his administration almost for its entirety, first at the Department of Health and Human Services and then in the Bush White House.

Valerie Boyd: I can picture the 1990s on the Hill working for Newt Gingrich as a particularly exciting and inspiring time for a young conservative.

Yuval Levin: Yeah, inspiring. It was crazy is what I would say. And that certainly made it interesting. And there were moments when it was inspiring, if you wanted to learn about politics, that was a pretty good way to do it. As is working at the White House, of course. And that was exciting in its own way, uh, much more responsibility, but also much more of a window into how decisions are made, how government works.

And working for George W. Bush was really the honor of a lifetime. He’s a hero for me.

Valerie Boyd: Absolutely. I think, as we’ve discussed , I felt like I started my professional career working for the Bush administration before moving on to the next two. And I felt like it was an outstanding foundation to learn about public service leadership, working, for him and the, and the people surrounding him.

And also. Crazy is, is probably a better word than inspiring for a lot of government service. I, I like to say that it’s like dog years and therefore I’m something like 150 years old.

Yuval Levin: Yep. It sure feels that way.

Valerie Boyd: Well, let’s dive into some of your more recent work because you’ve been writing in your last three books about kind of individualism and then the loss of institutions, and in your most recent book, taking us back to the constitution and the ways that, the ways that it was built to encourage unity.

So, let me start first by asking about your vision of the role institutions play in society.

Yuval Levin: You know, the path you described through those last several books of mine is quite right. And it really began for me with government service and with working in public policy. I was, when I left government, working mostly on kind of policy wonk set of issues, healthcare, budget, welfare, a little bit of education work.

And gradually over time, doing that in the think tank world in Washington, I came to the view that the kinds of traditional public policy debates that, that work is supposed to feed and support, were not really happening enough in 21st century Washington. And the question of why that was, which pulled me back to my education and political theory, my PhD, came increasingly to be the central focus of my work, the question of what was becoming of American political culture and why, and it led me first to think about the breakdown of cultural consensus in America. The fragmentation of our public life.

And then in thinking about where that pointed, I came to the view that ultimately the only way to really change culture is to work through institutions. When you say a problem is a cultural problem, you don’t leave yourself much room to act. How am I supposed to change the culture?

Well, the answer to that very often is you’re supposed to change the culture. By the way in which you operate, where you are, in your family, in your workplace, in your school, in your church, those are institutions. And it’s very hard often for Americans to see institutions. We don’t think of our lives as mediated by them.

But they are, of course, Institutions are how we do everything we do together in groups. And it’s often very useful for us to treat them as invisible. It makes us feel more free than we are when they’re working. We don’t have to see them, but when they fail, as they have been in 21st-century America, in many cases we have to see them to treat them as invisible.

Then is to fail to diagnose the problems we have, which I think happens a lot now in the way Americans talk about our public problems. And so it seemed to me that. We have to think institutionally, which doesn’t come naturally.

And so about four years ago, I wrote a book called A Time to Build, which tries to help people see what institutions are, why they matter, how they work, how they shape us, ultimately really forming our character and our behavior, and therefore why solutions to the kinds of problems we have in our public life require a recommitment to institutions, require people to be who work within institutions, whether that’s Congress or the civil service and whether that’s your church or your school, to operate by seeing the roles that those institutions give them, recognizing what their responsibilities are and how that should shape what they do.

That’s the argument that the book makes. And I think that to see our way through the kind of cultural challenges we face now, we have to be able to think individually. We have to ask the question, given the role that I have here. What should I be doing? And that’s as true in our constitutional system as it is in every other part of American life.

And so, my work from there really pointed me in the direction of thinking about the constitution and what it would look like to revitalize its institutions.

Valerie Boyd: So, it seems natural to me that people working in an institution recognize the value of it and want to invest in its strength and success. I certainly feel that way about the institution of the presidency.

If it might feel a little more amorphous for you. For average citizens who are focused on their daily issues of importance. So, what would that look like for them?

Yuval Levin: Well, I think to see that something is wrong in contemporary American public life, which is not hard to see, I think almost everyone agrees that something is wrong.

Has to force us to ask what exactly has broken down here? And I think when we ask that question, the answer will point us toward failures of institutional responsibility. Our public life is full of people who too often don’t do what’s required of them in the institutions they’ve chosen to inhabit.

So, they run for Congress, but they don’t want to engage in cross partisan bargaining and negotiation. They instead want to be political actors, they want to be communicators. They want to be conveying the message their voters want to hear on cable news and social media. Well, there’s room for that. There are people whose work involves that, but members of Congress’s work involves negotiating toward legislative outcomes.

If you don’t see that, then what you’re failing to do is really carry out a kind of institutional responsibility. I think we can look at the presidency in some important respects in recent years and say the people occupying that institution don’t seem to know what it’s for and what it requires of them.

They do things that a president shouldn’t do or that people in positions of public authority shouldn’t be doing. And to address that, to recover from that, I think requires our seeing why institutional responsibility matters. And ultimately it matters not only so that we can get things done, and it is how we get things done together, but it also matters so that we can trust each other.

Institutions facilitate public trust. We trust people, not only when they seem to be capable of doing what they say, but also when they seem to be somehow constrained or shaped by responsibilities that are given to them by the institutions they’re part of. We trust a journalist because that person’s work is channeled through some institutional framework that lets us know that it’s been checked, that it’s been tested, that it’s been verified.

We trust an accountant because that person has an institutional role, a set of obligations that mean that when she signs a piece of paper, We can believe that what’s there is what that person believes is true. It becomes very, very hard to trust those people when they don’t seem constrained by their institutional roles.

When they’re just another person on a platform giving us their opinion. And too often that has been happening in journalism. It has been happening in the professions. It happens in our political and public life. And so, it helps to see that institutions facilitate public trust in a free society. Trust is very hard and it’s essential.

Our public life cannot work without it. If we don’t trust each other, then all the gears get stuck in American life. And that means that to rebuild that trust, we have to somehow reestablish our sense that institutions. Have some authority over the people in them that make those people trustworthy.

That’s become very hard in 21st-century America. And I think to make it easier, we do have to restore some sense of what institutions are and what they’re for.

Valerie Boyd: That makes a lot of sense that in order to rebuild trust in institutions, the institutions need to prove themselves worthy of it.

Yuval Levin: Yeah. It’s the simplest thing in the world.

How do you get trusted? You just have to be trustworthy, right? It’s easier said than done, but it has to be said first.

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, but that should be job number one. Be, be trustworthy. So let’s, let’s connect this to your writing about the constitution. In your most recent book, American Covenant, you write a lot about how the constitution prioritized unity over policy action, and that our governing institutions were designed to be slow, to force debate, and to not allow policy to be made unless it was supported by a broad and durable consensus.

So. Why, let’s go to the basics. Why did the founders strike this balance? What purpose does that serve?

Yuval Levin: So, I think there’s a real sense underlying the formation of the American constitutional system that some degree of social peace and mutual trust is essential for a free society to function and that American society might have particular trouble with this because the United States, is a vast and diverse democracy.

That was true, at least in relative terms, even in the 18th century. The United States, at the time the Constitution was adopted, was already bigger than any of the European nations. It was already clear that it was going to be a kind of continental empire, and that it was going to be very complicated to keep this society from breaking down and breaking apart.

And so from the very beginning, there are some among the framers of the constitution, James Madison, most of all, who worry about faction, who worry about division, and not just about having an effective government. They did want that. And the, and the constitution ultimately was necessary because the previous American system of government was not effective enough.

Also wanted to make sure that we had a system that facilitated trust and cohesion. And the way in which the American system does that is sometimes frustrating to us because among the things it does is it compels competing factions into negotiation with each other and into competition with each other, into dealing with each other.

It doesn’t let us. Just stick to our partisan cocoons and instead forces us to constantly deal with people we disagree with. The American system really stands out for this among the democracies of the world. In the parliamentary systems that you find in much of the democratic world, if you win a majority, however narrow that majority is, You have all the power of the government until the next election or until you lose your majority in parliament.

In the American system, if you win an election, what you win is a seat at the table. And what happens at the table is bargaining and negotiation. There are two houses of Congress that are elected in different ways. There’s the president who’s elected in a third way. They all are legitimately elected. They all have to deal with each other.

Veryrarely will you, will one party have a significant majority in both houses and have the presidency and so have the power to move assertively. And instead what often happens is you win an election and then you find yourself confronted with the other party again. And every modern president has found himself in this place, sitting in the Oval Office, with leaders of the other party from Congress thinking to himself, didn’t I just win an election?

Why am I dealing with these people? And the answer is the Constitution wants to make sure that we, that political outcomes are the product of broadly representative negotiating processes. And so, a majority has to first broaden itself before it can really be empowered. That’s further advanced by all kinds of rules and procedures that are not in the Constitution but serve a constitutional purpose.

The Senate filibuster is a great example here. That forces some cross-partisan bargaining to happen before policy action can happen. The American system stands out for this in a way that’s often frustrating for us. It is slow. It is cumbersome. It is hard to get anything done. But it’s also more likely, at the end of the day, to achieve durable resolutions of disputes, and that, resolution is achieved not by being nice to each other, not by civility alone, but by bargaining, negotiating, fighting it out.

It feels confrontational, but ultimately it’s the way we remain united. And there’s an idea of unity that underlies our system that says that in a free society that is as diverse as ours. Unity is never going to mean thinking alike, but unity does mean acting together. And we have to look for ways to act together when we don’t think alike.

The great strength of our constitution is that it offers us ways of doing it.

Valerie Boyd: Can you say that again? You have to think together to..?

Yuval Levin: You have to act together. You’re not going to think alike. And it forces the question, how can we possibly act together when we don’t think alike? The constitution is a set of answers to that question.

And the answers look like negotiating, they look like competing, they look like sustaining a kind of tension between different sets of priorities, and above all, they look like coalition building. Our system forces us to build coalitions. that let us act together even when we don’t agree about everything.

Coalition building is hard work, and we’ve gotten a lot less good at it in 21st-century America. I think a lot of the failures of our system now are functions of our just not wanting to build coalitions, and instead wanting to push through our own narrow view. The system resists that, and so we find it frustrating.

Valerie Boyd: I think I’m going to have to get t-shirts made that say act together, even when you don’t think alike, that feels like a pretty good motto for us to endorse. So, you alluded to the role of the president in some of what you just said and at the center for presidential transition, we’re focused on an effective presidency.

So, can you spell out a little bit more about what that means? The president’s role should be in building a durable consensus. Is, he or she, the negotiator or the administrator?

Yuval Levin: So I think it’s really important to ask that question. Exactly. What is the role of the president in, when we think about the goal of greater cohesion, greater unity, obviously the presidency is a complicated office.

I think the presidency was the greatest innovation of the American framers. There was really nothing like it before a genuinely Republican executive that has some of the prerogatives of a King, but some of the character of, of a bureaucrat, just had not really happened before. And the question confronting the convention was, is the president supposed to be an elevated head of state?

The, the leader of the nation, or is the president supposed to be a kind of glorified clerk whose job it is to carry out what Congress decides? And the convention that produced the constitution took those two opposite options and said, yes, the president is supposed to be both of these things. And that means that the presidency is an inherently confusing and complicated office.

But it also means that there’s a lot of room in the joints. The presidency can, in a sense, shift its weight without losing its balance. There are times when we need a president to be a national leader and a head of state. There are times when we need a president to carry out the laws that Congress passes.

And the presidency is supposed to enable the same person to do both of those things. When it comes to facilitating unity and cohesion in particular, I think it’s important to see that the president’s role is not fundamentally a representative role. No one person could represent 350 million people. The representation in a country as diverse as ours has to happen in a plural institution, and that’s what Congress is for.

The singular institution of the presidency is really there to facilitate effective governance and administration. The presidency, even though it’s an elected office, is not a representative office. It’s an administrative office. We elect presidents to keep them accountable. And when it comes to advancing the cause of unity, the president’s most important function, I think, is to facilitate stability in our system of government.

What Alexander Hamilton calls steady administration. I think we really undervalue that part of the president’s job now. We focus on Hamilton’s other priority, which was energy and the executive. That’s important too. The president has to be able to act in the world, to carry out his job in real time. The presidency, more than any other part of our system, is active, right?

You might say Congress builds legal frameworks for the future. The courts review past actions. The president lives in the present and acts now, and that is very important. But the purpose of that action is what Hamilton called steady administration and steadiness, stability is an absolutely essential function of modern government.

It’s easy to underestimate it. It’s easy to, to undersell its importance. But I think when you look at the way that the people who created the Constitution thought about it, and here really the place to look is one of the Federalist essays that people don’t normally read. It’s Federalist 62, in which James Madison makes an argument about the importance of stability and the danger of unstable laws and unstable administration.

We’re living with that reality. We live in a time now. When a lot hinges on every election, because whoever is elected president can just change direction altogether and just do the opposite of what his or her predecessor did. That’s a dangerous situation. And it means I think that we’ve invested the presidency with too much power.

There’s tremendous concern among the people who wrote the constitution that if we give, you a single office too much power, we will raise the stakes of the election to that office too high and our politics will come apart. When the stakes are that high, people are not wrong to think that everything hinges on the election.

And that makes it very, very difficult for people to accept defeat. Well, that to me is a description of 21st-century American politics. And, I think we’ve come to a place where stability has become much more difficult for presidents to facilitate, and where too often they don’t think of it as their job.

I think what you work, on the question of transition, how do we facilitate some stability between presidential administrations, is an enormously important question, and it’s one that should be on the minds of our presidents much more than it is.

Valerie Boyd: That’s exactly what you had me thinking about too, is how a cooperative peaceful transfer of power sharing information across administrations and thinking about the long-term success of major issues, how that is the role of a presidential transition.

It provides stability that the country desperately needs. And I think those of us who’ve, who’ve been in government and we work to build up a program for four years and the next team is, it’s their sort of mandate , to take it down , and push in a different direction. It does make you think about the, the structure of how we’re approaching, the major issues facing the country in the world.

Yuval Levin: You know, to me, it points in a couple of directions. It suggests, first of all, that we have to want Congress to be at the center of policymaking in American life. Because Congress, because it often has to build cross partisan legislative vehicles, can build much more durable public policy. When a piece of legislation has some meaningful support from both parties, it’s just less likely to be undone.

By a change, in majority when policy is instead created by the president alone, if the next president is of the opposite party, it’s much easier for that next president to just undo it. And presidents now come in and spend the first few months of their administration. Undoing what their predecessor did.

And then they turned to doing all kinds of things that their successor is going to undo. That’s not how American government should work. And I think part of the reason it works that way now has to do with our excessive emphasis on the presidency and insufficient emphasis on what Congress does, and frankly, a lot of that is Congress’s own fault and results from a kind of unwillingness to take responsibility for making policy in the legislature rather than in the executive.

Valerie Boyd: You talked a little bit about that, at the beginning of this conversation, joking about how young people in Congress may not have a lot of responsibility, but they have a lot of access and I think we meet a lot of young people in Congress who have a lot of responsibility to there. So, there’s that one angle of the issue.

You also talked about how some new members of Congress. See a role in communicating slightly more than in legislating. And I certainly don’t mean to make that a blanket statement, but, you know, this leads to an interesting conversation about some of the news of the day. The recent Supreme court decision kind of…overturning Chevron deference.

It makes me want to ask you about whether we can be optimistic that Congress can take on the responsibility of legislating so specifically on such challenging issues facing the nation which in recent years, federal agencies have kind of felt, a responsibility to try to create regulatory, solutions for.

So how do you see the role of Congress should we be optimistic that Congress can take on more of that responsibility in light of the Chevron decision?

Yuval Levin: You know, I think the decision itself isn’t going to drive that. And the way that I think about what the decision in to, to overturn Chevron deference means is that it’s, it’s an attempt by the court to make everyone in the system do their own job and not somebody else’s job. So, Chevron deference basically meant that the courts deferred to executive agency interpretations of what the law means.

Not just to their assessments of their areas of technical specialization. But to their sense of what the law, the statute actually means. And I do think that that was a kind of double dereliction. It was on the one hand, a dereliction of the court’s authority, which is to determine what the law means. And secondly, it allowed for a dereliction by Congress because legislation could make very, very broad kinds of assignments of power to executive agencies.

And then leave it to the agencies to figure out what to do with that. I think there is a need for both more specific legislation and a willingness by courts to interpret the law so that agencies do their own work. Now their work matters a lot too. They have expertise, technical, substantive expertise that no one else in government is going to have.

And courts are going to continue to defer to that expertise. It was very clear, I think, in that decision that the Supreme Court is still going to defer to the EPA about how to understand environmental science. They’re not going to take that on themselves, but what is the meaning of the Clean Air Act is really a question for the courts.

And if the courts find the law so vague that they cannot interpret it without the help of those technical experts. Then Congress has not done its job well enough. Now, the trouble is no one can make Congress do its job. No one can make Congress do anything. In fact, Congress in the constitution, unlike every other constitutional actor, doesn’t actually have duties.

Congress has only powers and it’s entirely up to Congress, whether it’s going to legislate or not. So, I think the pressure created by Chevron, where courts will be more inclined to say the law is vague and doesn’t give you the power you’re at, you’re trying to exercise, to say that to executive agencies will create some pressure on Congress to legislate more specifically. But I think there needs to be much more pressure that begins from Congress itself, ideally from voters, although that’s a lot to expect, but from members. I think part of what we’ve seen is that one of the important expectations that the framers of the constitutions had.

Which was that members of Congress would always be ambitious on behalf of their institutions, has turned out not to be quite right in 21st century America. The psychology is still right. Members of Congress are very ambitious men and women, but their ambition now is not channeled through the institution of the Congress.

They use Congress as a platform to stand on and become prominent individuals. And so, their ambition is to become a more prominent public figure in the cultural circus of contemporary American politics, their ambition is not to be the person identified with having pushed through the piece of legislation that their voters care about.

A lot of the reason for that is that Congress has changed institutionally in ways that don’t allow a lot of members to really be legislators. The power has flowed away from committees to leaders so that there are now four people in Congress with a lot of power, the party leaders in both houses. And then there are, you know, 531 people with very little power.

Um, And who can’t really devote themselves to legislative work in the hope that it will make them matter because it doesn’t really work that way. That, that needs to change. The work of the committees needs to matter more. The work that members do in building coalitions to advance legislation needs to matter more.

And I think reforms of Congress in that direction are vitally important. If Congress is going to use the opportunity created by this Chevron case and others to reassert its own authority. For that to happen, members would need to want that authority. And I think the big problem in our system now is that a lot of members don’t want it.

They’re perfectly comfortable letting the president make hard decisions and having themselves act more like pundits and commentators. That just can’t be how they understand their own ambition. And changing that will require some institutional changes. And of course, for that to happen, members have to want it.

They, they’re the only ones who can reform the institution. So, a lot of the work that I do and that my colleagues at the American Enterprise do on this front is about member and staff education, about helping them see how some changes in the way that Congress works could improve their ability to serve their constituents, to advance their ambition, could improve even their quality of life.

I think what we need for our system to work better in the coming years is is above all reforms of how Congress itself functions.

Valerie Boyd: And I can hear you giving advice to members of Congress and their staffs and in the comments you just made. And I just want to underscore, I think you’re also giving advice to a candidate’s team getting ready to assume the presidency and thinking about how they want to enact policy.

Because of course, they’re thinking about. What executive actions can they take in the first hundred days? What needs to happen by legislative consensus? And in some cases they may in previous cycles have been thinking about what needs to happen through regulatory action, which is very slow, but also considered more durable than executive action at times.

So, I do think your advice is applicable to a team thinking, well, perhaps we should be focused on building a legislative consensus on it. That’s very hard to do, but I think your point is that it is most durable and unifying for everyone.

Yuval Levin: Absolutely. I think if, if you’re advising a president. You should think about what are the great presidents of the past remembered for.

Some of the things they’re remembered for are things that only the president can do. They were leaders in wartime or they helped advance a new vision of America’s role in the world. A lot of what they’re remembered for are actually ways in which they were central to what was ultimately a legislative process.

We think about Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Or the Civil Rights Acts that passed during his presidency. Well, all of that was done by legislation. All of that was a matter of passing laws that have endured and are still with us. Even recent presidents who certainly engaged in a lot of independent executive action, much of which I think is, frankly, very constitutionally dubious, We’re still talking about Obamacare when we talk about Barack Obama, more than we are about his executive actions.

If you want to be remembered, if you want what you do to last, it is much more likely to do so if you are willing to do the work of building legislative coalitions. And if you only act on your own. You’re much more likely to take actions that are just going to be undone by the next president, because anything you can do on your own, your successor can undo.

Um, I do think it’s very important for presidents to recognize that. And if they really want to advance change they care about, they need to think about how to bring Congress along, hard as that is. It’s ultimately how our system is meant to work. And it’s almost the only way to advance durable change.

Valerie Boyd: You had me thinking about the Obamacare example too, mostly because, when President Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention recently, he joked about how no one calls it Obamacare anymore. Now that, there’s more consensus on how it’s working. I don’t know if that’s a sore point for some people in our audience.

So, I think it’s helpful to take this conversation a little bit back to our listeners and to citizens and talk about the advice that each of us might play in supporting our institutions and, fixing what may be dysfunctional institutions or dysfunctional civic habits. That’s a big question and a big problem, but I know it’s something that you’ve put a lot of thought into.

Yuval Levin: You know, for me, this is really the reason to think about institutions because when you ask those big questions, how can we change our political culture? Well, in those terms, I don’t think anybody has an answer. You can’t change the culture directly. That can’t be item one on the to do list. But how do we get there, ultimately, I think is a function of changing habits.

And changing habits is a function of changing practices. And that means that it has to begin within institutions. There are ways that we as voters can exercise some pressures on what political actors do. It is important that we should want a better politics because we get the politics we want at the end of the day.

And a lot of the reason why we live in the middle of a political circus now is that a lot of us actually want that and enjoy that. And, or at least we reward the people who provide it to us. But more important than that. is that in the institutions that we are part of in our lives, in our workplace, in our families, in our communities, in our religious institutions, we ask ourselves the question, given the role that I have here, what should I be doing?

That we make decisions with some awareness of institutional obligations. That can help us become more trustworthy. It can help the institutions that we’re part of become more trustworthy. It can help get more of us in the habit of thinking about trust and thinking about institutional responsibility.

And those kinds of habits spread through our civic life. They can reach our politics. They can reach our culture. If we ask, what can I do? It’s very easy to despair and say, well, I can’t do anything. I’m one person in a country of 330 million people. But there are many institutions in your life where you’re not just one person.

You’re an important person. You’re someone who makes decisions or you’re someone people look to, or you’re someone people take seriously. And in those places, you’re the one. You, yourself can absolutely make a difference in building trust. And those are how we should start. For some people, those institutions can be political and look like they have a direct influence on our public life.

But for all of us, they do have that influence because directly or indirectly, we set an example of what it means to be responsible in American public life. And, at least for a start, that’s not a substitute for policy reform, it’s not a substitute for civic and political action, but it is a prerequisite for it, because those things aren’t going to matter unless we can build greater trust in our society.

Valerie Boyd: It’s like another good t-shirt slogan that you get the politics that you want, and that if people are looking for entertainment or kind of a sport where I’m interested in whether my team wins or not, then you get more of that division. But if you’re looking for services to be provided, well, or problems to be solved, you may be looking for more of a consensus.

So, it is a hard question to, to how to turn that around. That question might lend itself to a short discussion about the party system. I don’t know that we have a lot of time to pick apart everything about it.

But could we talk briefly? I think you’ve mentioned about the mismatch between the party systems and how they pick candidates based on qualifications that don’t match the offices they might go on to hold.

And I think that’s a really interesting thing to touch on here.

Yuval Levin: Yeah. Look, I think that broadly speaking, the parties in a working democracy are there to facilitate the work of the system of government, especially through candidate selection, by populating the system with people who are well-equipped. To do the jobs that voters elect them to.

The American party system evolved around the shape of the American constitutional system. And we’ve ended up with two parties that are broad coalitions. And that means that working within the party gives people experience in coalition building. That then becomes very important for working in Congress or in a state legislature or in the presidency or a governor’s office.

But in the last half century and more, the parties have, in a sense, rented out their most important work, the work of candidate selection, to the primary system. And I think that has had an unintended consequence of creating a gigantic mismatch between the kind of people who populate our political system and the kind of people that system requires.

Choosing candidates through primaries basically means that we begin every election cycle by asking the people in America who are least interested in a politics of accommodation and bargaining what they want. Those are the 8 or 10 percent of each party that actually votes in primaries. They’re the most ideological voters.

They’re the people who most want a kind of ideological purity that doesn’t lend itself to bargaining and accommodation. They’re the people most inclined to punish rather than reward. A politician who tries to build a broad coalition. rather than an ideologically pure coalition. And they’re the voters who choose who the candidates are for every office now in the American political system.

The parties have to see that that’s not only bad for our government, it’s bad for them. It creates a situation in which the parties end up with much less broadly appealing candidates than they might. And we’ve now had a 50-50 politics for 30 years in which we don’t have a majority party. In which both parties are intensely unpopular and they each find themselves constantly stuck with unpopular candidates and struggling for 50 percent plus one of the vote.

Neither of our parties has managed to build a broad, durable governing coalition since the 1990s. It’s a very long time now. And they should see that in order to do that, they may need to rethink how they choose candidates. And prioritize broad appeal, which is ultimately their job, rather than prioritizing narrow but intense politics and ideological purity.

And look, I think the parties have the power to do this. They can change the mode of candidate selection. I mean, we’re seeing that in this presidential election. One of the parties decided our candidate is going to lose. Let’s just pick somebody else. Even though they’ve already been through the primaries, the parties can do that.

It is legitimate. It is appropriate. And it might even be a good idea.

Valerie Boyd: It’s fascinating, this question of, Is the party system leading to candidates who represent the qualifications of a good president? I think you’ve helped us see how they can kind of learn from their mistakes and make different choices.

Um, I do want to ask you about, this year’s presidential candidates and what they can do in service to goals of depolarization and unity. What would you like to see the candidates and the eventual winner do in that regard?

Yuval Levin: Well, I think it’s ultimately important for someone running for president to talk about what they’re going to do in terms of building coalitions, rather than to speak as though if they win, they can just do whatever they want.

And so that the choice between the two candidates is an absolute choice between these two individuals and the opposite directions they want to pursue in various policy arenas. It’s just not true. The president can’t really do whatever he or she wants. That’s not true. And a president who was a little more upfront with the public about what it would take to achieve real policy change and would also then be in a position to build broad coalitions upon winning that is the way some of our presidents have spoken in the past about education reform in the 2000s, about welfare reform in the 1990s, about economic reforms in the 1980s. The idea there was not elect me and I will pursue to the hilt the 100 percent of the agenda that I’ve always had.

The idea was, I will build a coalition to advance a change that will be good for the country. That puts pressure on the other party when you win too. And I think it would be helpful for contemporary presidential candidates to see that, to think that way. It would also increase their own appeal and broaden the potential they might have for building broad coalitions.

It certainly doesn’t seem like the candidates this year are about to do that, but I think that they’d be well served by trying.

Valerie Boyd: That’s a good segue into the closing question that we’ve been asking all of our guests this season, which is what gives you hope for, in your case, rebuilding institutions and American unity in this election year and beyond?

Yuval Levin: I do have hope and I have hope because a lot of people are aware of the problem. I would say that there are not a lot of Americans now who think everything’s going great in American public life. And of course, in a sense, that’s bad news, but it also means that there’s an openness to reforms. And I think every successful reform movement of the next ten years or so is going to have a simple, unofficial motto.

It’s going to say, it doesn’t have to be this bad. That’s not a utopian motto, that’s not a promise to change everything about our world, but it is true. That where almost any policy issue you look at, and certainly in the case of our political culture and the state of our institutions, it actually doesn’t have to be this bad.

We can do better than this, even as diverse and divided as we are, we can. And to my mind, that’s a reason to believe that we really might, that by offering the public what they want. concrete ways of making incremental improvements in how our core governing institutions work, we actually stand a chance of building coalitions for that to happen.

I do think that we are at the brink of an era of reform in American public life. It seems to me that a lot of people are dissatisfied enough now that we’re to accept plausible ways forward. I’m not sure I see those being offered yet, but I think the opportunity that a politician would have by offering them is so great that somebody will see it and will offer it, and therefore I do have some hope for at least some improvement in how our public life works.

Valerie Boyd: Yuval Levin, thank you so much for joining us today. I was looking forward to this conversation and you’ve proven exactly why it is so valuable to talk to you about your work over the last many years, looking at the challenges facing our country. As you just said, it doesn’t have to be this bad.

And I smiled when you said we may be at the brink of reform. I feel a lot of energy around individuals wanting a system that works well for them, no matter who they’re rooting for. So, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Yuval Levin: Thank you. I really appreciate that.