As the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Yuval Levin spends a lot of time thinking about American institutions and the ways in which they are struggling. From the family to three branches of government, the outlook can seem grim amid political acrimony and historically low levels of public trust.
Levin, however, brims with hope. America could be just fine, he says, if we can let go of the idea that we need to agree on everything.
“Unity in a free society doesn’t mean thinking alike, but acting together,” Levin said in a conversation with Deseret News about “American Covenant,” his latest book. “We have to be open to an idea of unity where we don’t all end up sharing the same opinions, but we’re able to solve problems together. And a lot of our political institutions are built to make that possible.”
As is the U.S. Constitution, Levin believes.
The Constitution, he says, is a multi-pronged framework with most attention paid to its legal, policymaking, institutional and political structure. But the document also comprises a “unity” framework, which was just as important in 1787 as it is now. He notes that the Articles of Confederation were formally titled “The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.”
“Yet they had clearly failed to foster union. The fearful prospect of disunity and even war among the states was quite real to late eighteenth-century Americans,” Levin writes in “American Covenant.” The framers understood that, as James Madison once said, “We cannot ... be regarded, even at this time, as one homogeneous mass” and that the Constitution could compel disparate factions to work together.
“Through the institutions it constructed, the boundaries it set, the ambitions it held out, and the spirit of the polity it helped instantiate, the system was plainly intended to help forge common ground in American life, and not just occupy such ground,” Levin writes.
Levin, 47, comes to the topic as a conservative, “and not a bashful or halfhearted one,” but says that his views need not be partisan, even though readers might disagree with him on some points. This is part of his message, too — that Americans need to engage more with each other even when they disagree, and that doing so is part of our responsibility as citizens. Like Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, he wants Americans to “disagree better” and Levin believes that doing so may involve some changes to our political process, as well as intentional effort by individuals.
A father of two who came to the U.S. from Israel as a child, Levin became an American citizen at age 19 and in the book, he recounts a story from from his naturalization ceremony. The judge who presided over the ceremony told the new citizens that from then on, they “should think about America in first-person plural: in terms of we and our and not them and their.” At the time, Levin had hoped for something more inspirational, but he writes, “His point was profound, and it was one we all need to hear all the time.”
Levin, who is also the founder and editor of the journal National Affairs, spoke with the Deseret News earlier this month about the reasons he is hopeful about America, why he doesn’t think the next election will be as impactful as many people fear, and the simple steps that individuals can do to strengthen democracy. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: You are probably familiar with Dennis Rasmussen’s book from 2021, “Fears of a Setting Sun,” in which he talked about the disillusionment of the Founding Fathers and their fears about the future. Your book seems like an antidote to that one. Why are you so hopeful about America’s future at a time when many people aren’t?
Yuval Levin: The reason for me is very simple: We live in America. And we have a lot to work with here. I do think that we tend to overstate and over-catastrophize the degree of challenges we face. It’s actually a very American characteristic. This has been the case from the very beginning. The people who created the system thought it could never last. You can look at just about every generation of Americans and you can find a lot of people who think this is where it ends. We’re always kind of amazed that we’re still here.
I was thinking about our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which was a very unusual song to choose as our national anthem. It’s not about triumph or the beauty of America. It’s just about surviving the night. “The flag was still there” — that’s the best we can say. I think that’s part of the American character. Certainly, there are reasons for worry, and that’s true in every generation. It’s surely true in this one. We are divided in some dangerous ways. We are forgetful of the truths that have to guide how we live together. We’re not treating each other well. But, is there a place you’d rather be than America in the 21st century? Is there a time you’d rather be here than the 21st century? I really don’t think so.
We have tremendous resources for recovering from the problems we have. And so I am hopeful. I don’t think it’s guaranteed that we’ll be able to pull this off. I don’t think it’s easy or simple. But I do think that it’s achievable, and I do think we’re up to it. Part of what we need to get it done is to remember our strengths and to remember our political traditions.
DN: At an event in May that AEI held in conjunction with BYU’s Wheatley Institute, you said that the next election is just the next election, which is the opposite of what we hear from many people, on both sides of the aisle, who say that democracy is at stake if you don’t vote for my candidate. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that?
YL: Politics is very important. I care about it a lot. But I think whether things are better or worse for the average person four years from now is probably not going to be a function of this election.
DN: But how do you persuade a person who is genuinely anxious that ‘democracy hangs on this election’ — which has almost become a cliche — that they need not worry about that?
YL: Well, I think our institutions are durable; they have endured through very difficult times. We’ve lived through very hard periods, not just the Civil War, but we’ve seen times of much more intense political violence than we face now, we’ve seen times of much greater threats to the basic preconditions of American life. Think about the 1930s, the late 1960s. This is a time like that. We do have big problems. We are divided in dangerous ways, and we have seen political violence, and there’s reason to imagine we would again. The question is not whether we will face these challenges, but whether we will survive them. And I think there’s every reason to think that we will because we do have strong institutions. We do have a fundamental stability here so that most people’s lives are not about politics. For the most part, people’s happiness is not a function of who wins an election, who loses an election.
Those of us who are most invested in politics just imagine that everything rides on it in a way that is not well supported by the history of our country. It’s important that we take the framework of democracy seriously. It’s a problem when we treat it as unimportant, or when political leaders trash it and attack it. But are we on the verge of losing everything? I simply think we’re not.
DN: I have to ask: Did you steal the phrase “Disagree better” from Spencer Cox, or did he steal it from you?
YL: (Laughs.) I don’t know, we probably both stole it from somebody else. It just makes a lot of sense. The notion that the problem we have is not that we’ve forgotten how to agree, but we don’t know how to disagree is something I’ve been writing about for a number of years. Where that particular phrase came from, I don’t know. I’m happy to give him the credit for it.
DN: Still, this idea that it’s not that we disagree too much, but we disagree too little, is counterintuitive to most people.
YL: Even the Americans who are most engaged in politics, mostly we spend our time with people we agree with, talking about people we disagree with. We spend very little time actually engaged in disagreement with those people. It’s very easy now to live in a bubble, to constantly have yourself inundated with affirmations of the things you already think, and to constantly be bombarded by people who think the people on the other side are idiots. That’s easier than actually having to deal with them and say, ‘This is what I think and this is what you think. Here’s a problem we need to solve, and maybe we can go part of the way here and part of the way there.’ That’s much less satisfying and more complicated political engagement. We do it less and less. The venues where we might do that — where we might really hear other people to begin with, and also deal with them — places like Congress, or a university campus or just the op-ed page of a newspaper — all those places are getting degraded, and there’s less and less disagreement permitted in all of those places. The skill we’re forgetting is more like disagreeing than agreeing.
DN: What has changed since the publication of your book “A Time to Build” in 2020? We’re only four years out, but have things improved or gotten worse with our institutions and how they are regarded since then?
YL: There’s much more of a recognition now that some core institutions are broken, that the party system has run aground, that there are deep problems in Congress. Obviously there were people who understood that in 2020, but I think the experience of Covid and the experience of the Trump and Biden era has made it clearer to people that there is a problem to think through in those terms. … I think we’re approaching a period of political reform, which could go well or could go poorly, but the sense that the status quo is not working is very, very palpable and powerful.
DN: Are there any prescriptions you have for the system, and for each of us as individuals?
YL: For all of us as individuals, to my mind, this really is about trying to remember the role that we have as citizens. Remembering the obligations we have to one another. Treating public problems as our problems. Thinking, how can my neighbors and I do something about this, rather than hanging around with our arms folded waiting for somebody to show up and then we can complain about what they do.
The strength of Americans has always been to see a problem and think of it as belonging to us. I think we need to work on that. We’ve lost that knack some, and that’s something each of us can do where we are. But I also think there is an argument for political reform, for changing the system in such a way that it incentivizes the politics of coalition building and bargaining, rather than a politics of confrontational theatrics. That means changing some of the rules of our election system.
The move to primaries, I argue at length in the book, has been a big problem, a mistake ultimately. ... . A system that tries to populate our political institutions in ways that are more likely to build broad coalitions could help us deal with some of the challenges we have.