Is our Constitution part of the problem we face, or part of the solution? In a time of polarization, anger, and confusion, some argue that its design, requiring dialogue and compromise, no longer works. What can history teach us about whether the constitutional order can help us to navigate deep differences and pursue “a more perfect union”? Noted scholar Yuval Levin’s book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, draws from our history to offer a hopeful answer to these questions for our times, and for generations to come.

This is the last conversation in our “Faith, Freedom, and Flourishing” series in partnership with the Pepperdine School of Public Policy.

Thank you to our sponsor, Howard Dahl, and our co-host, Basic Books, for their support of this event.

• What aspect of Yuval’s remarks or the conversation was most compelling to you and why?
• How does Yuval define political unity? Why does he distinguish between unity and agreement?
• How does Yuval describe civic virtue? How is it different, in his telling, from ideological purity? Do you agree? Why is it needed for a republic to function?
• What roles do institutions and institutional culture have in shaping political culture?
• How did the founders’ recognition of people as both imbued with dignity and oriented towards self-interest affect the “American Covenant”?
• What habits and practices did Yuval recommend to cultivate civic virtue? Do you find these compelling? Why or why not?

Cherie Harder: Thanks, Campbell, and welcome to all of you for joining us for today’s Online Conversation with Yuval Levin on “Is There an American Covenant?” I want to add my own thanks to our collaborators in this effort, Pete Peterson, the very able dean of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. This is actually the fourth out of a four-part series that we’ve been partnering with Pepperdine on, on “Faith, Freedom and Flourishing.”

So, many thanks to all of you who’ve joined us for all four of these programs, and we’re especially glad that you’ve joined us today. We’ve been just delighted by the response. We have well over a thousand people who’ve signed up for today’s Online Conversation, including 40 first-time guests. So a special welcome to you. And we know that we have at least 17 different countries represented in terms of today’s registration list. So a big hello from across the miles and time zones to our viewers in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Fiji, France, Guernsey, Ireland, Jamaica, Lithuania, Mozambique, New Zealand, Panama, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and the UK. So if we have missed you, be sure to drop us a note in the chat box just to let us know where you’re joining us from. It’s always fun to see people tuning in from all over the world.

And if you are one of those people joining us for the very first time or are otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we work to cultivate, curate, and promote the best of Christian thought and provide a place where leaders can wrestle together with the big questions of life and ultimately come to better know the Author of the answers. And we hope today’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today.

In these final days before the presidential election, it seems like all of us, and particularly those in battleground states, are besieged by apocalyptic, belligerent, and alarmist campaign rhetoric. We’re told that we’re losing the country, that drastic action must be taken. And it can be tempting to think that the challenges we face are entirely new and unprecedented, or that extreme times require extreme measures. But as our guest today, a renowned political theorist and political scientist, has argued, we already have a road map, even an institutional guide in place, one that, for all of its flaws, has offered a workable framework for acting together even when we think differently, for forging practical solutions across gulfs of difference, all while acknowledging both the innate dignity and the innate selfishness of its citizens, a plan that he calls the “American Covenant” in a new book by that title.

Joining us today is Yuval Levin, who is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, where his research focuses on the foundations of self-government and the preconditions of civic flourishing. He’s also the founder and current editor of National Affairs, as well as a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. He previously served as a vice president for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics under President Bush, and as a special assistant to President George W. Bush for domestic policy. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and many others. And he’s also the author of several books, including The Fractured Republic, A Time to Build, which we had the pleasure of hosting him here to discuss earlier, and his latest work, American Covenant, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss. 

So, Yuval, welcome. Great to see you.

Yuval Levin: You too. Thanks so much, Cherie. And thank you for everything that Trinity does. It’s an extraordinary public service.

Cherie Harder: I really appreciate it. And we’ve been looking forward to this conversation. And just in starting out, right now seems like kind of a bleak as well as belligerent time. And many people I think are feeling either anxious about the outcomes of the election or just demoralized by where we are. And you yourself have written several books about the fracturing of the country and what has happened. But you’ve begun this new book by asserting that it is ultimately about hope, even as you have disavowed optimism. What is it that makes you hopeful?

Yuval Levin: You know, I think it’s actually very important to start with that distinction between hope and optimism, because I do think that there’s a tendency to identify the two in a way that makes us forget just how much hope has to offer us. Optimism is just like pessimism. It’s a way of saying, “Something’s going to happen, and it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m going to sit here and watch it.” And maybe you think it’s going to be great. Maybe you think it’s going to be terrible. Either way, it’s the wrong way to approach the future. I think optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, and between them sits a virtue of hope.

Hope is different from both of them in that it is not passive. It invites us to act on the potential for good, and it calls on us to be deserving of good, and to be capable of it, to actually take up the work of making it happen. I think looking at America, looking at our history, looking at our people, looking at the world we live in now, we should be hopeful about it. There’s no society you’d rather be in this world. And I think in a lot of ways, there’s no time you’d rather live in than this time. It’s not without its troubles, very serious and grave troubles, but we have a lot to work with in addressing those. And I absolutely am hopeful about the future of this country, because I think we’re up to the challenge.

Now, to meet that challenge we do have to face it. We do have to see it, and we also have to grasp what’s at our disposal for dealing with it. And to me, that’s why I wanted to write a book about the Constitution. We’re living in a time that’s very divided when we feel like the Constitution contributes to that division. And I think we’re wrong about that. The Constitution can be a solution rather than the problem. And seeing that is really the purpose of the book.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about that, in that you have certainly taken the problem of fracture and disunity very seriously. You’ve written an entire book kind of analyzing its causes and its consequences. And I think you have two different chapters in here on both what unity is and what the Constitution is and how they relate. And so let me ask you about that—like, what unity is, in that so often we assume that if we don’t think alike, we really can’t work together. And you make a very different argument that unity actually involves working together, even and perhaps especially when we think differently. It’s a lowered sense of expectation, but it seems to open up new possibilities. And I wanted to ask you about that.

Yuval Levin: Yeah. I think we have a tendency to talk about unity as though it meant unanimity. And we do talk about unity a lot. Our politicians constantly talk about unity, and what they mean is, “I sure wish people would stop disagreeing with me all the time.” They mean, “If everybody agreed with me, things would be great.” And, look, I believe that. If everybody agreed with me, I think things would be great. But not everybody is going to agree with me. And I’m also surely wrong about various things, so that everybody agreeing with me maybe wouldn’t be all great. The potential that the politics of a free society offers us is to find ways to act together to address common problems without first having to reach unanimity. 

That’s, first of all, valuable because we’re not going to reach unanimity. And the notion of a society in which there aren’t disagreements, I think, is pure fiction. There are a lot of critics of our society now who say that in order to really be a functional society, we have to begin from thick agreement about all the fundamentals. Otherwise we’re not a real society. I don’t think there’s been such a society where there isn’t fundamental disagreement about crucial questions. That kind of community of people would not need politics. Politics exists to address disagreements. And [it] would not really ultimately be a society. It certainly wouldn’t be free.

And here I think the framers of the Constitution really saw to the heart of the matter. James Madison in Federalist 10 just says very plainly, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he’s at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” Period. If we are free and can think the way we want, we’re not all going to land in the same place. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be one unified society, because as a political matter, unity doesn’t mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. I think the value of seeing it in those terms is that it forces us to ask an obvious and difficult question, which is how can we act together when we don’t think alike? And our Constitution over and over is an answer to that question. How can we act together when we don’t think alike? That’s the question to which the Congress and its structure and design are an answer. That’s the question to which the various complicated mechanisms of the separation of powers and federalism stand as an answer. They’re there to allow us to act together when we don’t think alike. It’s not an easy thing to do. It requires a lot of negotiation and competition and coalition building. But that’s what our Constitution exists to drive us to do. And ultimately, that’s how it makes unity possible, even in a diverse, divided society.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. Well, you know, in order to do that effectively, it does seem like it requires a certain character on the part of civic and political actors. And I’d like to hear you talk a little bit about what that character is or needs to be, in that so often, especially now, we tend to think of, well, of political virtue almost in terms of ideological purity or even ferocity. You know, sort of tirelessly attacking other sides or discerning and rooting out the squishes in our midst. And it seems like the character of the citizenry that would be necessary to form those coalitions to negotiate and contest across difference is of a very different character. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit about what kind of character that is, as well as how it might be formed.

Yuval Levin: So I think that’s absolutely right. The sorts of virtues that are necessary for living well in a free society involve a lot of restraint and toleration and an ability to accommodate differences, and it’s really crucial to see that the purpose of these is not just to achieve peace and quiet. These begin not from a desire for peace, but from a recognition of human equality. The foundation that we do agree about in America, that’s stated in the Declaration of Independence, that we’re all created equal—which I think across vast and intense differences, Americans do believe that we’re all created equal, and a lot of our most divisive debates are actually about what that means and what its implications are. Very rarely do we argue about whether it’s true. If we’re all created equal, then none of us has the authority or the right to coerce anyone else. And that means that to get anywhere, to achieve something together and to act in a concerted way, we have to persuade one another, and we have to accommodate one another, and we have to find ways to work together. The reason for that is that we are all created equal.

And so the purpose of seeking a politics of bargaining and accommodation, the kind of politics of competitive coalition-building that the Constitution establishes, is to apply the reality of human equality. And that does demand virtues that are not about purity, that are not about intensity, but rather are about finding ways to work together across differences. That’s what it takes to win in American politics.

I think there’s a confusion now in 21st-century America about what it means to engage in politics. Politicians promise to fight for their voters. They should promise that. They should do that. That’s their job. But they behave as though what it means to fight for your voters is to never give an inch to anybody who disagrees. And that’s actually not what it means to fight. That’s what it means to lose in the politics of a democracy. If you’re not willing to bargain, if you’re not willing to compromise, then you’re not willing to use the only leverage you have. Because what you win when you win an election in America is you win a seat at the table, and what happens at that table is precisely bargaining and negotiation.

The American Constitution really stands out in this way. In most other democracies, in the parliamentary systems you’d find in Europe and Asia and some of Latin America, when you win an election, you win all the power of the state until you lose your majority. In the United States, you never win all the power. You win a seat at the table. And that system is meant to make sure that no one has all the power, that no group of Americans can fully dominate anybody else. But instead, there has to be some degree of engagement across differences and of bargaining. And our system is meant to do that precisely to allow us to remain more unified, not to allow narrow majorities to dominate broad, durable minorities, but to require majorities to grow before they have power. I think that’s one of the secrets of our system, and it’s why I think of it as so geared toward producing unity and cohesion.

Cherie Harder: You know, just listening to you, that may be one of the secrets of our system, but it does seem like we have a number of things kind of stacked against us right now.

Yuval Levin: It’s a well-kept secret. Yeah.

Cherie Harder: Yes. Certainly there are some institutional and structural challenges to that. One of the most obvious seems to be just the form of our communication media, which consistently rewards with attention, with likes, with eyeballs, with, you know, retweets and the like, that which is not about persuasion or restraint or accommodation or all of the habits of mind and practices that make that possible. It instead rewards the extreme, the inaccurate, the sensational, the snarky and insulting, the invective which actually destroys that. And there’s no indication that we’re going to be changing our primary communication media anytime soon. The civic virtues that you describe, are they possible in our technological age?

Yuval Levin: So I think that in asking ourselves how technology affects our culture, we have to start from the fact that technology is a tool, and we use it in the ways we choose to use it. So if we step back and see that we’re now using the internet to basically systematically demolish our capacity to live together, we have to ask ourselves, “Why are we using this amazing tool in this way?” And that suggests to me that culture precedes technology, that we choose to do this because we have arrived at a place where this is what we understand to be the purpose of our political life. This is how we define success in politics. Politicians are always going to be ambitious men and women. They want to succeed. And we get to decide what success means, because ultimately they want our vote and they want our support.

If we think success means that you’re the person most able to articulate our differences with the other party and to state as sharply and harshly as possible why they’re the worst people in the world, our politicians are going to make sure they know how to do that, and that’s what they’ll do day and night. And if instead we think that a successful politician is someone who’s able to advance what we think is important, is able to protect our rights, is able to serve our needs, is able to help address national problems in ways that we think make sense, well, our politicians might try to do that. It’s about what we reward at the ballot box. It’s about what we reward with our support and our attention.

And so at some level, this begins with a culture that thinks the purpose of politics now is essentially to facilitate angry yelling at one another rather than any kind of communication with one another. I think in a funny way, what we’ve forgotten how to do in American life in the 21st century is not that we’ve forgotten how to agree with each other. We’ve forgotten how to disagree with each other. We don’t know how to do that in a way that points towards some kind of constructive action. We’re very good at agreeing. People who are engaged in politics spend all their time with people they agree with, and basically just talking about people they disagree with. What we have forgotten how to do is how to talk to people we disagree with and how to engage them in a process, a combative and competitive process of working out ways for us to get some of what we want out of politics, by letting them also get some of what they want out of politics. Those skills have to be learned. They have to be practiced. But above all, they have to be valued. Because if we don’t think that’s what we need, then it’s not going to be what we get.

So, partly, that’s a reason to write a book like this, is to help people see that the purpose of politics is different from what they might imagine, and that our system is geared to achieve that purpose. And that’s why we find it frustrating now. We’re trying to use that system to achieve something it’s not meant to achieve. And which, by the way, we shouldn’t want either.

Cherie Harder: Right. Well, that does kind of beg the question, though, doesn’t it? Like, what has so malformed our political imagination? We seem to be at kind of an unusual time, in that you’ve written quite a bit about how essentially Congress, which used to be a formative institution, has largely become more performative, in that members essentially run and win in hopes of using their office as a platform for attention and self-advancement. And you actually have members of Congress basically leaving hearings early to kind of do the play-by-play for their podcast or their live transmission. No one seems to be happy with this. And yet these are the people we continually reelect. So in some ways the question kind of goes back to, why do we enable performative shirkers? Why do we support those who actually, well, are modeling and furthering that which will divide the country and hurt it rather than allow for some flourishing?

Yuval Levin: I think at some level this is a response to some broader trends in our culture, right? There is surely a broader trend towards understanding ourselves as commentators on our lives, rather than as the people living them. There are some ways in which all of us do this, and there are ways in which some Americans really understand this to be the nature of a thriving life now. And that certainly has seeped into our politics. Social media, the logic of social media, is very powerful now in American political life. To me, the reason to think that there may be a way out of it is that nobody’s satisfied with this. You don’t find a lot of Americans now who say, “Things are going great in our politics. Let’s just do more of this. Let’s have another election like this.” Everybody seems to be generally aware that something has broken down, and that means that we are badly in need of a clear and shared sense of what it is that we’re not doing.

I think a lot of Americans have a sense of what we’re doing too much of. There’s too much partisan discord. There’s too much polarization. There’s too much of this kind of performative politics. What is there not enough of? And I think that’s what we need some clarity about. That’s how we could see that we could do better than this. And so again, to my mind, that’s the reason to go back to the foundations of our political order and think, what is this for and what is it not achieving now?

You mentioned Congress, and I think that’s actually a really particularly clear way to think about what this can do for us. There’s very broad agreement that something is broken in Congress, but there’s actually, I think, a disagreement underlying that about exactly what it is that Congress isn’t doing. The natural answer to that is to say, well, they’re not passing big legislation to deal with our fiscal problems or the environment or whatever it is you take to be the important problem of the day, immigration or anything else. That’s one way to think about the problem. I think that’s not quite right. I think what Congress is failing to do, and what it’s intended to do above all, is to facilitate cross-partisan bargaining and accommodation. Now, that’s also why we’re not passing big legislation. But if you see that as the underlying problem, you point toward very different kinds of solutions.

If you think the problem is we’re not passing big bills, you want Congress to be more efficient. So maybe you want to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate. You want to centralize power more in leadership, let things move more quickly. If you think the problem is we’re not facilitating bargaining and accommodation across party lines, you actually want Congress to be less efficient. You want to force members to deal with each other more. You would love the filibuster, as I do. You would think that there needs to be decentralization so that the committees of Congress, where members with an interest in a particular subject work with each other, should be where legislation happens, rather than the office of the leadership. Rather than have a Congress run by four people, there should be 535 people who are engaging with each other and legislating.

To see what we’re failing to do, I think, can help point us toward some reforms. And one of the great Madisonian insights is that little institutional reforms, mundane kinds of changes of rules, can create culture. By changing what it takes to succeed and to win, you can change people’s expectations and habits and ultimately change the culture. So the book, in describing the problems with the culture of Congress, then proceeds to propose things like reforms of the committee system, the budget process, things that seem very mundane, very straightforward and dull, but that I think ultimately are the way to change culture. The way to change culture is to change institutions.

Cherie Harder: You know, I’d love to hear you say a little bit more about that, because one of the things I noticed in your book is that you do focus a great deal on institutional reform, and perhaps particularly when it comes to Congress. And so it’d be interesting to hear about how some of those things—as mundane, as you said, as rule changes or practice changes—can have a cultural effect. But one—I don’t know if this is an exception or just sort of an addendum— it did seem like, unlike Congress, where you really focused on institutional change to kind of change the institution, with the presidency, it seemed like you said personal character actually matters much more with the presidency than with the Congress. So would love to hear you talk about both. Why is personal character so much more important with the presidency? And how is it that institutional change is the way to go for the reformation of Congress?

Yuval Levin: Yeah, I think that the presidency— what stands out about the presidency in institutional terms in our system is that it is a unitary office. It’s contained in one person. And we’ve created all kinds of other offices and positions around the president in the executive branch. But the Constitution vests the executive power in a president of the United States. That’s it. All the power belongs to that individual. And that means that the character of that individual matters enormously. Power in Congress is distributed across 535 people. And obviously, there are all kinds of character problems we can point to in Congress as well, but they’re distributed in that way so that ultimately there is a culture that’s created by institutional rules. In the presidency, the presidency tends to take on the character of the individual elected to fill the office. And that means that more than any other office, the character of that individual matters. And we’ve seen examples, very recently, of course, including in the last few presidencies, of the way in which the character of the president just matters immensely, especially in moments of crisis, in moments that require action, which is when the presidency is most required, but also in general. In giving a kind of tenor and personality to the work of the executive branch, the character of the presidency matters enormously, and that’s something we always have to think about as voters. I think we have failed on that front in the last few years, and we really have to take it seriously.

The way in which the culture of Congress has changed, as you say, is distinct, is different. And there I think we have to think in terms of creating incentives for building the kinds of habits that build a better culture. So, for example, I think that if we were to allow the committees of the Congress to move bills to the floor—. Let’s say that the US Congress, in the way that many state legislatures do in our country, allowed a bill that got a majority of votes in a committee with at least one vote from the minority party—this is the rule in a number of state legislatures—that bill could get floor time. That would mean that members working in committee would know that the work they’re doing is going to matter. One way or another, their colleagues are going to get to vote up or down whether this should be a law. Right now in Congress, bills only reach the floor if the speaker or the majority leader want them to. And that means that most of what happens in committees, and therefore most of what happens in the course of a legislative work day for a member, just doesn’t matter. Members are not wrong to be running off the floor looking for a camera or starting a podcast, because what they do in their everyday work really doesn’t matter enough.

I think empowering the committees, rethinking the budget process in a way that lets committee work matter more, rethinking the extreme degree of transparency we’ve created in Congress, so that all committee work is televised or streamed on the internet— that’s a terrible mistake. Transparency is very important, but negotiation cannot happen in public. And there has to be some recognition that while members have to be accountable for what they end up doing, they cannot be made to do everything in front of cameras. Some recognition of the way in which these sorts of rules can change the culture of an institution really has to be part of how we think about Congress. Whereas in thinking about the presidency, I think above all, we have to make sure that we are selecting people who are worthy of the office.

Cherie Harder: You know, just to take a step back, we have done a number of Online Conversations and other programs to look at America’s founding and some of the ideas that helped undergird it, and the fact that really the human anthropology shared by so much of the founders, whether or not one believes that it was based on the Bible, it’s certainly compatible with a Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of man as both made in the image of God and therefore imbued with innate dignity, but also bent towards self-interest and even selfishness. And that is a view of man that’s encompassed within the Constitution, which you call the American Covenant. And one of the things you have talked about are the harms that have happened as a result of what you’ve called a “Wilsonian political culture clashing with a Madisonian Constitution.” Could you speak a little bit about what you mean by that, and what happens when a different human anthropology is essentially wedged into a covenant with a Madisonian, even a Judeo-Christian, understanding of who man is and how he’s wired?

Yuval Levin: Yeah, this is a very large question, I think a very important question for understanding the character of our system. I do think that there is implicit in the American system an idea of the human person that begins from the fact that we are fallen and inclined toward various kinds of sin and vice, but proceeds to the fact that we are also created in a divine image and therefore capable of extraordinary heights. We need to be formed to be able to reach those heights, and we are formed by the institutions of our society, by family and by religion, by education, and also by politics. And the Constitution strives to be a part of that network of interlocking institutions. And it ultimately pushes in the direction of a kind of republicanism that assumes a citizen capable of exercising a tremendous amount of freedom. That citizen is a social achievement, not a natural phenomenon. Americans don’t grow on trees. They have to be made by the institutions of a free society, and our political institutions are a part of that.

And I think that the assumptions that are implicit in the structure of our system, that we’ve started to talk about already, the assumption that ultimately we can achieve unity as a society by forcing differing factions in our society to engage with one another, to deal with one another, and that there’s a kind of constructive tension at the heart of the political life of a free society, that idea has always been contested and controversial. There’s always been an alternative vision that just says “what unity means is following the same leader.” Or “what unity means is all pointing in the same direction.” I call this Wilsonian because in some ways the most articulate champion of this view was Woodrow Wilson, a progressive political scientist and then politician who was, of course, the president of the United States. But even before he was that, he was a voice for a critique of the Madisonian system that begins from the premise that acting together when we don’t think alike isn’t really quite possible, and that ultimately the different parts of our society all have to point in the same direction.

It’s not a crazy view, but I think it’s not correct. And it also points toward a politics that tends to emphasize administrative efficiency over a kind of building of social cohesion, so that it’s very impatient with the chaos of the American system, the chaos of federalism with all kinds of different interests going their own way, the chaos of Congress with all these voices and coalitions pulling and pushing all the time. Wilson wanted a much more orderly American system, organized around a singular vision and especially a vision advanced by the president. And so, in his view, our system should be directed by presidential rhetoric and presidential vision. Congress should be directed by the work of its party leaders, and national priorities should override local and state priorities.

That vision has been very attractive to a lot of Americans over the course of the 150 years or so since it was first articulated, and it’s still very attractive to a lot of Americans. And I should say it’s not a crazy vision. But it is a vision that underestimates the danger of disunity, the danger of social breakdown, the danger of social tension. And so I think a lot of contemporary critics of the Constitution, progressive critics of it, accuse it of being too simple, of being a kind of 18th-century relic that’s not up to the task of modern democratic life. And I think they’re exactly wrong about that. The Constitution is actually more sophisticated than they are about the greatest challenge that faces every modern democracy, which is exactly the challenge of cohesion amid diversity, of holding together despite intense differences. For that purpose, the chaos and tension of our Constitution is a solution and not a problem.

And I think what happens when we lean in a Wilsonian direction is we end up with a system that is more divisive, that puts all the power in the presidency so that presidential elections seem like they settle all the questions and so they become much more important than they’re supposed to be and therefore much more divisive, and a system that ultimately places a kind of emphasis on ideological purity that the American Constitution thinks is dangerous and to be avoided. And I think when you put Wilson and Madison against each other, Madison seems the one who understands 21st-century problems much more profoundly.

Cherie Harder: You know, in just a moment, we’re going to turn to questions from our viewers. But before that, I need to ask, whatever happens in the upcoming election, it’s going to be difficult. Just all of the lack of a shared reality, the growth of conspiracy, the apocalyptic rhetoric, the growing distrust, the growing nihilism. Many people have doubted whether solidarity can be renewed. And so I want to kind of return to the very beginning where you said this was a book about hope, and you talked about hope as action one takes, not just a positive frame of mind, but virtuous action that actually better fits us to a positive outcome. And so I wanted to ask you about that. What hopeful actions need to be taken to reknit a sense of solidarity and shared community in a fractured republic?

Yuval Levin: You know, I think that that kind of hopeful action has to start from the conviction that we are one nation. And we are. It’s very easy to overemphasize our differences and our divisions now, and Americans always tend to that kind of overemphasis. I think one of the things that most stands out about the American character is that we’ve always believed we are on the verge of total disaster. In every generation, Americans think, “This is the end. This is the last generation. Sure, our grandparents were good at being republican citizens, but we can’t do it. Look around. These people are horrible.” That’s a very American attitude. The sense that “it’s a miracle that we even exist at all” is a very American attitude. I mean, look, listen for a moment to our national anthem. Most national anthems are songs about the incredible beauty and glory of the nation. Our national anthem is a song about barely surviving the night. The flag was still there. That’s the most we can say. It’s a very, very, really beautifully American sentiment.

But I think we have to see that we often exaggerate this danger. There’s a lot that unites Americans, and it’s especially true at the interpersonal level. When we don’t abstract to the national level and just think in terms of big divisive questions, but when we think about our neighbors, when we understand the problems we face as problems our communities face, we have the capacity to say that these are our problems and therefore they require our response. That kind of responsibility is the beginning of American citizenship. And I think by beginning that way, by thinking at a human level about some of the things we can do in our own communities and in the institutions that matter to us where we are in our lives, we can begin to see that there are ways forward and that very often they do involve precisely working together with people with whom we don’t agree about everything. Maybe we have different religious views, maybe we have different moral commitments, maybe we belong to different political parties, but as neighbors, as fellow citizens, there are things we can always do together. I think by seeing that, we can begin to see our way toward a broader kind of politics of bargaining and accommodation.

And it absolutely does remain possible. We are not at a point where the differences are so profound that they don’t allow us to have a national life. Americans have been much more divided than this at different points in our history. Obviously in the 1860s, but even in the 1960s, we saw much more political violence and intense breakdown of social order than we do now. We have real problems. I don’t want to minimize them. But we also have an enormous, incredible resource for solving those problems. We have a country in which there are 330 million Americans. That is a great resource.

Cherie Harder: Well, the questions are piling up. So we’ll turn to questions from our viewers. And our first one comes from Ken McElworth and Ken asks, “Much of the anxiety and confusion in our country is rooted in expressed threats to silence those who disagree, leaders who seem to be asking the people to act in ways opposed to our fundamental beliefs and even the Constitution. How does your thesis change if the Constitution itself is under threat or even ignored by elected leaders?”

Yuval Levin: Well, absolutely. I mean, part of the reason to write a book like this is precisely to defend the Constitution against those kinds of threats, and to suggest to people that the notion that you will achieve your political goals by overturning the Constitution or breaking it down are badly mistaken. One of the insights of the Constitution is that we all sometimes find ourselves in the minority on some important question that matters to us, so that the notion that we should eliminate the protections of minorities in our system—the freedom of speech and of religion, the capacity to be engaged in legislative negotiation even if we’re in the minority—these protections are enormously important to every American.

I think there are a lot of people now who walk around with a delusion about this, with the notion that if we just get rid of the system, if we get rid of the procedural constraints, then we could get all we want. Well, I don’t think so. If you get rid of the procedural constraints, someone will end up with absolute power. Is that someone going to be you? I think the chances of that are very, very slim. And the idea that it would always be you or people who agree with you is even slimmer than that.

The reason for these protections is that you will never always be in the majority. No one will always be in the majority. And that means we need a system that protects us when we’re the majority and when we’re the minority. A system that somehow balances majority rule and minority rights. And that is the system we have. It is frustrating. It’s frustrating especially when you are a narrow majority, and many of us find ourselves in such majorities now. They’re the only kinds of majorities we get in the last 25 years or so. But remember that next time you’ll find yourself in a narrow minority, and you’re going to be very glad that the filibuster is still there, or that the freedom of religion has not been taken away. So before you take a hammer to those, imagine yourself on the other side because you’re going to be there sooner or later.

Cherie Harder: So our next question comes from Joni Barth. Joni asks, “How do we balance the benefits of reducing transparency to allow real dialogue with the risk of empowering dishonorable behavior ‘behind closed doors.'”

Yuval Levin: Yeah, this is a great question. It’s a very important question. I think the key is to find some balance. Transparency is absolutely essential. It’s essential to democracy. We have to know what our leaders are doing in our name, and we have to be able to counteract corruption. The tendency to corruption is vastly increased by secrecy. But we have also learned, and learned this the hard way if we didn’t know it before, that absolute transparency makes a politics of negotiation impossible. No one can negotiate in public. When you see people negotiating in public, you’re watching a show. You’re not watching the real thing. And this is still true now in Congress. The only places where any work gets done are the leadership offices at midnight before a government shutdown. And why is that? It’s because those are the only places where there aren’t cameras. And so there have to be more places, more legitimate places, for engagement and negotiation where there aren’t cameras. 

Now, that doesn’t mean, I don’t think, we have to get rid of C-SPAN. I don’t think we have to get rid of cameras on the floor of the House and Senate, because nobody’s ever really been persuaded of anything on the floor of the House and Senate. It’s fine for that to be a place where people practice rhetoric. But there has to be some committee work that gets done behind closed doors. Maybe not all of it. We can still have hearings where you can berate the president of Harvard. That’s great. But if you want to have hearings where you actually negotiate about higher-ed legislation, well, that meeting has to happen in a way that lets members talk to each other, that lets them make concessions before it’s obvious what they get in return, that lets them acknowledge what they know and don’t know. So committees have to work out some ways to help some of their work happen behind closed doors. I think that’s perfectly doable in a way that still allows for a lot of transparency. We’ve just reached too far in a direction that, while it has a lot going for it, is not an absolute good.

Cherie Harder: So a question from an anonymous attendee who asked, “Do you think that the efforts of Christian churches and other groups would gain more ground for their position if they valued the democratic virtue of ‘working together’ above the desire to support politicians and movements who are only angry and yelling at the other side when it comes to the issue at hand?”

Yuval Levin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it’s important for us to recognize that working together is not an alternative to getting what you want. It is the only way to get what you want. Tell me what your priority is in politics and I will show you why. A politics that refuses to negotiate is a politics that will fail to achieve that good. So, ultimately, we need to be able to negotiate and work together because otherwise nothing gets done. And you just have to look at the last few years in Congress to see how that works. So I think we have to get over the sense that we have this choice between really believing what we believe and striving to get it or, on the other hand, being willing to negotiate and work with other people. The one is absolutely necessary for the other. And to see that is, I think, to see our way toward a more functional politics.

Cherie Harder: So our next question comes from Ellery Armstrong. And Ellery says, “All research indicates that every year, Americans are less likely to identify themselves with faith. In an increasingly secular society, is it really possible to rally around civic virtues and shared desired outcomes? Or was John Adams right that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people? If so, how can we create a shared vision?”

Yuval Levin: Yeah, I think at some level he certainly was right. I think Americans, broadly speaking, still are a moral and religious people. There’s certainly been a long process now of disaffiliation from churches. Americans are still a believing people to an unusual degree. Far more Americans say they believe in God than you would find in any other democracy. And I think that does give us something to work with. But I’m certainly of the view that cultural renewal is going to require some religious renewal, too. And I think that in a lot of ways, if you look at contemporary American society, you find a nation absolutely starving for religious renewal, demanding some way to reconnect with the highest things.

If you look at what’s happening on campuses now, one way to look at that is to say, well, this is just a total breakdown of all moral standards. I actually think if you look at what’s happening, what you’re looking at are people who are begging for some vision of justice. And what they’re getting is very thin gruel. It’s an extremely unimpressive vision of justice, but they’re still clinging to it because the alternative really is nothing. A more appealing vision, a more grounded vision, the truth, let’s just put it that way, would really appeal to a lot of the people who are now taking up that thin gruel.

I’ve frankly been surprised that we haven’t seen a religious awakening on college campuses in the 21st century. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for one. And it seems to me that between us and the future that we wish to see is some kind of religious renewal. That’s always been the story in America, and we still are America. I don’t think that we’re a post-religious society. I think we’re going to understand this time as a time that preceded a significant religious revival. And I really do have that hope. I think our society is asking for that. I think it’s hungry and ready for that. It may not look like the last religious revival. It may not look like what we expect a renewal of faith to look like. But I really do think that America 50 years from now is more not less religious than the country we’re living in.

Cherie Harder: That’s fascinating. So a new question from another anonymous attendee who asks, “What do we do with the tension between maintaining the Constitution in the face of threats to the rule of law and the reality that some of its provisions are simply not working for the benefit of all citizens, such as the Electoral College, which ensures that most votes don’t count, or the ability of states to gerrymander districts so there’s not real competition in the House?”

Yuval Levin: Well, I think it’s worth looking at these institutions and asking what they’re for. I think that when you approach them that way, you can see the ways in which they are serving us. The Electoral College is a good example of this. I think we are actually very well served by the Electoral College, especially when you consider the alternative. Very few, almost no, democracies elect their chief executive by a direct popular vote. And the reason for that is that you run a tremendous risk of a kind of demagoguery in the presidency when in a large, broad, diverse democracy, you have a direct popular vote for chief executive. 

The parliamentary systems in Europe and Asia and elsewhere are even less democratic than we are in how they choose their chief executive. We went through a period before the last general election in Britain, where there were four years between general elections. They had three prime ministers in that period. Who chose those people? They were chosen by the majority of the parliamentary majority party. Right? So 260 people who all have the same political interest and went to the same two universities, more or less. That’s much less democratic than the Electoral College, but it’s intended to achieve something like the same purpose. It’s intended to select the chief executive at some distance from the public, but in response to public desires and priorities.

And that’s what the Electoral College is meant to do too. We have a system of presidential selection that basically involves now 50 separate popular elections, the results of which are then weighted by population. That’s a way to address some of the dangers of a mass selection while recognizing the necessity of electoral legitimacy. And the alternative to that would present us with some enormous challenges. If you have a popular vote for president, the parties would have a very strong incentive to focus on the areas of the country where they’re strongest. On getting more Democrats out in California, more Republicans out in the South, much less of an incentive to speak to voters who are winnable somewhere in the middle, and to speak to each other in some way. The fact that you now have to win Michigan, you have to win Georgia to win the election, you can’t just focus in the places where you’re comfortable, you have to focus on the areas and issues where you’re uncomfortable, is actually ultimately very important to the unity and cohesion of our society.

It also lets us reflect the regional divergences and differences of our society. We are a nation of united states. And it allows the logic of election to Congress to apply to the president, but in an indirect way. Right? Each state has the number of electors that it has in its congressional delegation. I think that that is a better approach to choosing the chief executive than a direct popular election would be. It’s not perfect, by any means. It’s not ideal. But with any political reform, you always have to ask compared to what? And I think compared to the alternative, the Electoral College actually serves our diverse and divided society very well.

And so we have to look at the ways in which the Constitution operates with that in mind. That doesn’t mean that we’ll decide they all work perfectly. That doesn’t mean we’ll decide there’s nothing to change. But I don’t think we should reject these institutions simply because they’re not simply democratic. Our Constitution is democratic. It ultimately says majority rule is essential for legitimacy, but it also knows that majorities can be oppressive, that simple majority rule can be very dangerous, and so it tries to balance majority rule with minority rights and with some basic needs of democratic life that I think it balances pretty well.

Cherie Harder: A question from Scott Crosby, who asks, “Do you have suggestions for how we individually be part of building and strengthening our institutions, rather than unwittingly weakening them?”

Yuval Levin: Yeah. I think it’s important to think about those institutions that you take seriously in your life, the institutions about which you’re inclined to say “we” and not “them,” and pick those institutions and invest yourself in them. Maybe they’ll be political, but maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just be civic. Maybe they’ll be religious. Maybe they’re educational. Maybe they’re professional. Take those and play a part. Really a part. Understand yourself as having a particular role in advancing the cause of that institution. And I think if more of us had that kind of attitude toward the institutions that matter to us in our lives, we’d be in a position to make them more trustworthy. The problem in our society is not that we don’t trust our institutions. It’s that they’re not trustworthy enough because they’re not full enough of people who take them seriously, who take their purposes seriously, and who say, what role do I have in the work of this important institution? I think we’re all in a place in our lives where we could do that more, somewhere, in some institution we belong to.

That’s a way to start. It’s not all. There is a need for reform too. Many of our institutions are broken and corrupted in ways that require change. But the beginning of that has to be a kind of belonging, a taking seriously of the aims of core institutions that I do think we can all make a start at.

Cherie Harder: Great. Thanks, Yuval. And in just a moment, I’m going to give you the last word. But before that, a few things just to share with all of you who are watching. First, immediately after we finish up, we will be sending you an online feedback form. We really appreciate it when you fill these out. We read all of these. We try to incorporate your suggestions. And as a small bit of appreciation for filling out that form, we will give you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice. There are several that we would suggest that go more deeply into some of the themes that we’ve talked about. Chief among them would be our Trinity Forum Reading on The Federalist Papers, featuring the writings of Madison, Hamilton and John Jay, as well as our reading on “Democracy in America, our reading on “Politics, Morality, and Civility,” and George Washington’s reading entitled “To Bigotry No Sanction” on religious freedom. So we recommend all of those to you, and we would love to get your feedback on today’s conversation.

In addition, tomorrow, for everyone who registered for today’s Online Conversation, around noon, you should receive an email from us which will provide not only a lightly edited video link to today’s Online Conversation that you can share with others, we’ll also have recommendations on readings to go more deeply into this topic. And we will also be sending around discussion questions. So if you would like to have a discussion or a reading group on what was said today, you will have discussion questions, readings, as well as the video in order to host that group. So be on the lookout for that video.

In addition, we’d love to invite all of you who are watching today to join the Trinity Forum Society and help support Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. There are many benefits to being a Trinity Forum Society member, including a subscription to our quarterly Readings. But there’s also just the joy of helping an institution that aims at encouraging wisdom in the public square. So we would love to have you join the Society and would really appreciate your gift to the forum. And with your new membership or your gift of $100 or more, we will send you, as a special thank-you, a signed copy of Yuval’s book, American Covenant. So be on the lookout for the invitation to do so.

In addition, there’s a few events coming up that we want to let you know about. If you are in or near the Nashville area, we will be there on November 14th, hosting former governor Bill Haslam, as well as James Davison Hunter, to discuss “Democracy and Solidarity.” We would love to see you there. There should be a link to sign up for that in our chat feature, as well as on our website. And also stay tuned for a number of new Online Conversations coming up. We will be announcing far more soon, but future guests include Tom Holland, Curt Thompson, and many others.

As we wrap up, I want to give another shout-out to our partner and co-hosts the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, our sponsor, Howard Dahl, and my team at the Trinity Forum, Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Daskam, Marie-Anne Morris, and Macrae Hanke who all put the mission of the Trinity Forum into action.

And finally, as we close out together, Yuval, the last word is yours.

Yuval Levin: Well, thank you Cherie. I really want to thank you and everybody at Trinity for what you do. And also Pete Peterson at Pepperdine, an extraordinary institution. You know, for those of us in the United States, we’re approaching an election and I thought the thing to remember this week might be just that simple line from Psalm 146, “put not your hope in princes.” I would only add, maybe, put not your fear in them either. There’s more to life than princes, and let’s focus on that. Thank you very much.

Cherie Harder: That’s great. Yuval, thank you so much. And thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.