The United States Constitution offers Americans “a way to address common problems across lines of difference,” said Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It gives us different mechanisms and institutions for dealing with each other when we disagree, and therefore for turning difference and disagreement into something constructive,” added Levin, a former George W. Bush administration official.

Answering questions as part of a Deseret News “Yellow Couch” interview, titled “Yuval Levin — the Constitution and coalition-building,” Levin said it is very hard to understand American character without thinking about the Constitution.

”The way in which we understand our relationships to one another, the way we think about other citizens, has a lot to do with how we understand our rights, how we understand our obligations, how we understand the institutions. And so, in a way, to think about the Constitution really is to think about America and to think about the possibilities we have for resolving problems in a very diverse and often very divided country.”

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In this Deseret News video, Lavin also speaks about unity, coalition building, hope, optimism and presidential power.

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”What I try to do is help people see how the Constitution is built to be an answer to a basic question that we have to ask ourselves, ‘How can we as Americans act together when we don’t think alike? How can we solve problems while we disagree?' I think in a lot of ways, the Constitution is an answer to that question.”

Yuval Levin calls out cynicism and encourages idealism during a BYU campus forum on Feb. 25, 2025.
Yuval Levin calls out cynicism and encourages idealism during a BYU campus forum at the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah, on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025. Photo by Olivia Taylor/BYU photo.byu.edu | Olivia Taylor/BYU
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