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In this episode of the Pluralist Points podcast, Ben Klutsey, the executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Yuval Levin, editor-in-chief of National Affairs magazine and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about the Constitution as a unity document, the relationship between liberalism and republicanism, the benefits of congressional inefficiency, the problems with primaries and much more.
BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: Thanks for joining Pluralist Points [ [link removed] ]. Today we have Dr. Yuval Levin [ [link removed] ]. He’s the senior fellow and director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s editor-in-chief of National Affairs magazine [ [link removed] ]. He has expertise in political philosophy, bioethics, American conservatism and public policy. He’s the author of several books, including “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left [ [link removed] ]”; “A Time to Build [ [link removed] ],” which is one of my personal favorites; “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again [ [link removed] ],” which is the subject of our conversation today.
The Human Problem
KLUTSEY: Just digging right in: One of the things you highlight at the beginning of your book is that we have come to see other Americans as problems to be solved, and so imagine that the obstacle to unity in our society is the existence of people who do not think as we do. Essentially, we have a hard time dealing with people who are not like us. Why is that? Is this something that has developed over time, or have we always been like this?
YUVAL LEVIN: Thank you, first of all, for having me. It’s a great pleasure to have this conversation.
I think the problem really is, in one sense, a permanent human problem. Human beings always have some challenge in dealing with people who are different from us or who have different interests, different desires, different backgrounds. Our particular kind of society has always taken very seriously the challenge of addressing that kind of internal diversity.
We think now of diversity in demographic terms, and that’s one way to think about it. But a diversity of views, a diversity of desires, is a permanent fact of any free society. I think it’s worth seeing that, in our particular kind of politics, that desire has always been understood as a premise and, in a sense, as a problem. James Madison, in Federalist 10 [ [link removed] ], says very bluntly: “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” Period. We should not expect unanimity in the life of a free society.
Yet that doesn’t mean, for him, that we therefore can’t expect unity. I think it is important for us to see that unity doesn’t mean unanimity, that unity doesn’t mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together.
The question of how can we possibly act together when we don’t think alike is the question that our constitutional system is intended to answer. A lot of what we now find mysterious and frustrating about it is a function of the fact that it’s intended to answer that question.
It does take, as a premise, the fact that we disagree and that disagreement is a problem, is a challenge—that it’s hard to deal with people we disagree with. But it offers us ways to do that, and I think the distinct problem we face now is that we’ve lost sight of a lot of those ways. We’ve lost sight of the notion that it’s possible to act together when we don’t think alike.
I would say you can look at American life in this moment and think the problem we have is that we’ve forgotten how to agree with each other. My view is that that’s exactly the opposite of the problem we have. We’ve forgotten how to disagree with each other, and what our Constitution can teach us is how to disagree in ways that are more constructive and sustaining. I think we’ve got a lot to learn on that front.
The Unity Framework
KLUTSEY: Thanks for that. That’s a great segue to my next question, because you do something in the book that I haven’t quite seen before, but you describe the Constitution as having these five frameworks: the legal framework, the policy framework, the institutional framework, the political framework and the unity framework.
I think in many ways that’s probably the least intuitive aspect, in my view—because we understand the legal, the policy, the institutional and maybe the political, but how do we conceive of the Constitution as a unity document when it has some federalism in there, it has some separation of powers in there, it has a bicameral legislature in there? It’s like—it’s a constant tension, constant competition, constant contestation. So how do you conceive of it as a unity document?
LEVIN: I think it’s, first of all, important to think in terms of those frameworks just to see that the Constitution is not purely a legal framework, that it’s not just law. It is really a political way of life. It describes a regime, and in a sense it describes a society. Once you see that, you can also see your way to grasping that it is intended to facilitate unity.
In a sense the Constitution makes it easy. When it describes its own purposes, in the preamble, the first one it offers is to form a more perfect union, so that it presents itself as a way of addressing division first and then describes all kinds of other very ambitious goals that it’s meant to address, to achieve.
The problem that it arose to address was really, in some ways, above all the challenge of disunity. It was difficult for the 13 original states to hold together in those early years after the Revolution. They had tried to do it by way of a confederation that allowed them to get through the war, but in the five years after the end of the Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783, things were not working well, and the states were very well aware that they were having real trouble holding together. The threat of division among them, even of separation, even of war among them, was very real in those early years.
The Constitution—the convention that created it was brought together to try to avert that problem. For several of the framers of the Constitution, and above all for James Madison, unity and cohesion was the challenge.
Madison, for me, really stands out because, although you find in that generation of the people who wrote the Constitution a lot of people who have the kinds of political priorities we would find now—there are some people who worry about equality and social justice, like Thomas Jefferson. There are some people who worry about dynamism and social order, like Alexander Hamilton. And then there’s James Madison, who worries especially about unity and social cohesion. He stands almost alone in our political tradition for prioritizing that, for thinking faction is the problem, division is the problem, “how do we hold together” is the question.
The influence that he had over the direction of the Constitution really reflects that. What you find in the system, when you look at it from this perspective, is that it consists of all kinds of ways of dealing with complicated differences and tensions. It constantly brings people who differ with each other into engagement with each other, into bargaining and negotiation, into competition—which we don’t think about enough, but competition is one of the ways it tries to deal with difference and tension—into a kind of constructive tension that says that we can hold differing ideas in mind at the same time.
The logic of federalism, for example, is that you don’t have to answer every question at the national level. People can live in one way in one place, in another way in another place. There’s also an essential kind of constructive tension at the heart of the Constitution around some of the most divisive questions the convention faced. Should we prioritize the small states or the large states in thinking about the design of Congress? They just did both at the same time. Is the president supposed to be an elevated head of state, or is he just a glorified clerk? He’s both at the same time.
That living tension allows the system to have some room to move with events and to prioritize things differently at different times. All of these are ways of dealing with difference, and I think the Constitution ultimately is a very, very sophisticated system for allowing a divided society to hang together and govern itself.
Liberalism and Republicanism
KLUTSEY: Thank you for that response.
On that productive tension: You talk about, at the level of principle, it means that it embraces both liberalism and republicanism at the same time. How does it do that?
LEVIN: It’s a question that’s newly relevant for us in a lot of ways because we now talk about liberalism a lot. I actually think that a lot of what people mean when they say that they’re not happy with liberalism, that we have too much liberalism, is that we have too little republicanism.
Republicanism has become a kind of unfamiliar concept to us. It was absolutely central to the political vocabulary of the founding generation. A lot of what it meant for them had to do with what we might call civic responsibility: a sense that we own this country, we are this country. Our government doesn’t just act on us: It acts through us and for us and by us. And that means that we have to take responsibility for it.
Republicanism is, I would say, the political vision of a self-governing society. It focuses on taking ownership of our common future. It is distinct from liberalism in some important ways. Liberalism is also a very important facet of the political vision of the Founders and of the Constitution. Liberalism particularly focuses on the protection of the rights of individuals and on ways of allowing people to be free in a variety of modes. It is the political philosophy of liberty.
Liberty is absolutely perceived to be the goal of political life; protecting liberty is the purpose of government. That’s stated plainly in the Declaration of Independence. I think it’s evident in the Constitution. But liberalism is kind of balanced off by the logic of republicanism in the American regime.
There are a lot of tensions between them. To think about individual rights and to think about civic responsibilities often creates a lot of tensions, and you have to ask yourself, “Which way do I lean? Which is more important?” The Constitution wants to say, “These are both essential. You are a republican citizen of a liberal democracy. You are a liberal citizen of a republic. You have certain rights, but you also have certain obligations.”
I do think that in our political vocabulary now, we tend to downplay the obligation side. We tend to downplay the civic-republican side. Because we do that, we feel like liberalism is excessive, is out of control. I don’t think liberalism is out of control. I think liberalism is well balanced by republicanism and that we have to recover that balance. Also that we have to grasp the strengths and the value of liberalism, which is one of the great achievements of human civilization and really embodied in our regime in America.
The Importance of the Constitution
KLUTSEY: Yes. You say that the solution is to look to the Constitution. I think that you’re really making a case for the Constitution here. This is a time when people across the political spectrum are beginning to think that the Constitution is anachronistic: It was meant for a different time, and maybe some of its principles aren’t as timeless as we had imagined.
Is this why you’re writing this book? To make the counter case: to respond to those critics that the Constitution still holds up and is still relevant for our time?
LEVIN: Absolutely. That’s exactly the reason to write a book like this now, which is, I think we see again (as we have really in some ways from the early 19th century on) that critics of the Constitution tend to describe it as a relic, as an anachronism, as something that might have been fine when it was written but that doesn’t serve us in our time, or that it’s too simple for a complicated modern society.
I think over and over the Constitution has shown those critics that actually it is more sophisticated than they are, particularly because it grasps the complexity involved in sustaining a diverse, divided society and the tensions that are created by the need to balance majority rule and minority rights, which is always the problem we face.
The Constitution is extraordinarily sophisticated about that. I think now, as ever, a lot of its critics are not nearly as sophisticated. When they call it a relic, they think the question we have to answer is, How can we have an efficient government in a modern society? The Constitution explicitly and knowingly subsumes the need for efficiency under the need for social peace and cohesion. It does want an effective government, and part of the reason for the Constitution was that the government the Americans had in the five years after the Revolutionary War was not effective and was not governing well.
They did want a better one, but they also understood that they needed a system that would allow them to hang together in divided times. The fact that that is what the Constitution is intended to do is often ignored by critics of the system. They underplay the necessity for social peace, the value of social peace, and they want a system that is more responsive—that’s more directly democratic, on the one hand, and that’s more efficient, on the other hand: that governs better. These are not crazy things to want out of your government, but we have to recognize that in order to achieve that in our kind of society, we need a system that takes the need for social cohesion seriously.
Oftentimes, in our day, the kinds of critics who make this point will compare the United States to Norway or Belgium and say they’ve got much more proportionally representative systems and more trust in government. I think that the very fact that we can even think of comparing ourselves to Norway and Belgium is an example of how effective our system of government is. The United States is not like Norway or Belgium. The United States is more like India and Brazil and Mexico. It’s a vast, sprawling, diverse democracy, and it’s much better governed than all the other big democracies in the world.
The reason for that is the Constitution. The reason that we can even think that we would be anything like Norway is that we have a very effective system of government for the kind of society we are. Part of what’s really essential about that system is that it does take the need for negotiation and bargaining and social peace very seriously, even as it takes the need for democratic representation seriously.
KLUTSEY: On that: sort of reminds me of Yascha Mounk’s book, “The Great Experiment [ [link removed] ],” where he talks about how the big difference you see in America (and other Western democracies as well) is that you see large, growing, multiethnic democracies. These are new, historically. I think that the examples like Norway and others—these are societies that are much smaller. They are, or at least for the most part historically have been, homogeneous societies. That’s a really major difference with the United States.
LEVIN: Yes, and in a way the United States is better prepared for the modern world than many of the other democracies of the world, because we’ve been diverse in a variety of ways for a long time. Now, obviously, we haven’t always dealt with that diversity well—far from it, when you look at 19th-century America. But we have always seen the fact of immense diversity of various sorts as one of the challenges our system needs to deal with. I think a lot of European democracies are only coming to terms with that reality now.
Congressional Dysfunction
KLUTSEY: So Congress: I think when most people look at Congress right now, they don’t like what they see. I think it has a very low level of trust [ [link removed] ] among Americans. They don’t regard it very highly, in the context of trust, and there’s a lot of dysfunction there. But you seem to be optimistic that Congress’s dysfunction can be corrected. How do you do that?
LEVIN: Yes . . . I wouldn’t say “optimistic.” I’m a conservative, so I lean away from optimism—
KLUTSEY: Hopeful.
LEVIN: But I am hopeful. Yes, that’s right. And there’s a difference, right?
KLUTSEY: Right.
LEVIN: “Hopeful” means that it is possible to improve this situation, that we have the resources to do it. I think a lot of those resources are available to us in the Constitution and its history and in the history of the Congress too.
The U.S. Congress is the primary institution of our national government. It’s the first branch, not by accident. The powers given to the national government in the Constitution are actually given to Congress. They are all described in Article 1 as powers that Congress exercises.
I think the reason that it is so central is that Congress is the venue where bargaining and negotiation can happen. None of our other national institutions are meant to serve that purpose. They have other purposes—the courts and the executive. Congress’s purpose is to facilitate negotiation and bargaining across lines of difference.
That’s crucial to see, because the debates we have about Congress now seem on the surface like they’re founded in a lot of agreement, agreement about exactly the point you raised: Congress is dysfunctional. Almost nobody would say otherwise. There are a lot of people who study Congress or think about it, and we all agree it’s not working well. But what is it not doing? There’s actually a disagreement just under the surface of the congressional reform world among political scientists, and members and staff too, about what Congress is failing to do.
I think the natural answer to that question, and the most common one, is, “Well, it’s just not passing significant legislation that we need.” It’s not addressing the big problems, whether you think those are fiscal policy or climate change or immigration—it’s not succeeding in addressing our big problems legislatively. That’s true. But I think that the underlying problem is a little different than that.
The underlying problem is that Congress is failing to facilitate cross-partisan bargaining and negotiation. That is its purpose. That also results in a failure to pass legislation.
If you think the problem is “we’re not passing the bills I want to see,” then you want Congress to be more efficient. You want to centralize more power in the hands of leaders. You want to get rid of the filibuster. Let it move fast. It’s too hard for Congress to do anything.
If you think the purpose of the institution is to facilitate bargaining and negotiation across lines of difference, between the parties and within the parties, then you actually want Congress to be less efficient. You want members to be forced to deal with each other. That means the leaders should have less power, because the leaders use their power to prevent or to allow members to avoid dealing with each other. You don’t see a lot of negotiation happen in committees. The leaders make all the big decisions.
You also want to retain some supermajority requirements like the filibuster. The filibuster is actually the only reason that we’ve had any bipartisan legislation in the last 10 years. If you look at the kinds of things that have been done, say in the first two years of President Biden’s term, when there was a fair amount of legislation passed to deal with the Electoral Count Act or with infrastructure, the CHIPS Act—all these things started in the Senate, and all of them ended up being bipartisan because of the filibuster. They would not have happened that way if not for the filibuster.
I think it’s very important to see that Congress is cumbersome so that members will have to deal with each other. If that’s how we see it, then reforms of Congress would have to empower the committees, not the leaders, and would have to create moments in which negotiation is required.
So there is a real difference of opinion about how to fix Congress. I would say my view is in the minority; it’s a kind of conservative minority that says the institution needs to facilitate more bargaining, not just more legislation. Or maybe I would put it this way: The problem we have is that our system requires a lot of negotiation and that right now it’s very hard to achieve cross-partisan agreement.
So do we solve it by changing things so that we need cross-partisan bargaining less or so that we do it more? I think most congressional reformers say, “Let’s need it less. Let’s just make it easier for narrow partisan majorities to pass bills.” I think we should go in the other direction and make it more necessary for narrow partisan majorities to deal with minorities. That’s what the institution is ultimately for.
Effects of Technology
KLUTSEY: Now, to what extent does technology exacerbate the dysfunction? In your book “A Time to Build,” you write about how these institutions have become platforms for performance. When you put the cameras on congressmen and -women, you put them on senators, it’s a different act from when the cameras are gone. Is there room for any changes there?
LEVIN: Yes, no doubt about it. This is hard for a C-SPAN junkie like me to say, but cameras have been very bad for Congress. I think that the way in which they’ve been bad is precisely that they’ve encouraged a performative mindset so that members see the institution as a platform for building their own brand rather than seeing it as requiring them to take on the form—the shape—of legislators, of dealmakers.
They’ve been driven to that by a lot of things, not just by technology. They’ve been driven to it in part by the nature of the primary process, the ways the parties operate now. They’ve been driven to it by the centralization of power in Congress. Most members just don’t actually have the opportunity to participate in legislative bargaining, because all of that is done by the party leaders: basically four people who substitute for all of Congress and make all the deals.
But it has also been driven by technology—to begin with by cameras, now increasingly by social media, which allows members to use Congress as a stage, a particularly prominent place to stand and be seen saying things their voters want them to say. They mistake expression for action. Legislative action is not just expression. It is ultimately especially about negotiation. Of course, that doesn’t sell well on the internet. That’s not really what you do online. And so, increasingly, it’s not what you do in the real world either.
Problems with Primaries
KLUTSEY: Now on the primary process, you have an interesting take on this. In the context of ranked-choice voting, you have a nuanced view: You think that it would be more helpful at the primary level than for general elections. Why is that?
LEVIN: Yes, I think our party system is failing in a particular way. It’s populating our politics with people who are not well equipped to do the jobs they’re elected to do. They’re well equipped to do something else: They’re well equipped to win primaries. Winning primaries requires a very different set of skills than legislating or than serving as president or governor.
The primaries are not an original component of the American party system. Of course, the party system is not an original component of the constitutional system, either. The parties arose to address a kind of missing piece of the Constitution, to facilitate American democracy, particularly by facilitating candidate selection and essentially making sure that the kinds of people who end up populating the American political system are well suited to doing the work of that system.
Over the course of the last half century and more, the parties have contracted out their most important function, which is candidate selection, to essentially almost random primary electorates. In most states—in my state, for example, people can just vote in a party primary without even being registered members of the party, let alone being involved somehow, being in some ways active members or professionals.
The parties originally functioned as repositories of political professionalism. We have a democracy: It’s an amateur political system. Most people don’t spend all their time in politics, but some people do. Those people have a role to play in facilitating the work of the system. The parties are the way in which they did that.
The parties have become less and less that. The parties, as we’ve just said about Congress, have gradually become platforms for performance. They’re just brands. They’re a place for narcissists to come and stand on a stage and get attention. If you succeed in attracting the most primary voters, then you’re the Republican or Democratic candidate. There’s no such thing, really, as the Republican or Democratic Party now that makes a decision in some institutional way.
I think the parties are meant to be facilitators of democracy but not to be democratic internally. The idea that there is a body of voters inside the party that makes all the decisions doesn’t really make any sense. Now, we don’t really think about that anymore because we’re so used to it. Just recently, in the past few days, President Biden sent a letter [ [link removed] ] to congressional Democrats making the case for his continued candidacy. [Editor’s note: This conversation took place before Biden’s announcement that he would not seek reelection.] He basically said, “I won the primaries, and the primary voters decide who our nominee is. If we’re going to be for democracy, we have to be democratic internally.”
I frankly think that makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s how both parties operate now. Part of the reason for the dysfunction of our political system is that that ends up filling that system with the wrong kind of people.
How do we solve that? I don’t think we can go backwards. I don’t think we can go back to a system where political professionals confer with each other and make decisions about who should be candidates for Congress or the president. So how do we move forward?
It seems to me that because we want the parties, the parties have a role to play. We want them to be strong. Something like ranked-choice voting in the general election is not a good idea, because it would only weaken the parties. It would turn all of our politicians into independent contractors. But ranked-choice in the primary, as a way for the party to make a decision, would help the parties choose people who are better suited to doing the work of our system.
Somebody who can win a ranked-choice primary is somebody who’s good at being everybody’s second choice within the party and so at building coalitions, which is the essential skill that we’re missing now in American politics.
I think experimenting with that would be one way for the parties, especially in contested districts, to pick candidates who are better suited to building a broader majority. The fact is, both parties now build narrow majorities. They barely win every election they win. They barely lose every election they lose. That means they’re not learning very much from the electorate. They’re not adapting to contemporary American life. They’re just doing the same thing over and over.
I think a lot of Americans are frustrated with that. When you look at this presidential election, everybody has the sense that we should really have better options than these. Options are what the primary system exists to provide us with. So I think we have to think about how to change it.
Presidential Character
KLUTSEY: On the presidency, you write that [ [link removed] ] “stability and steadiness in administering the government are particularly critical and were exceptionally prominent in the framers’ aims for the office. . . . Securing such stability in an unstable world requires particular virtues of the republican executive—personal character is more important in the presidency than in any other constitutional office.” Were the framers naive about this, perhaps?
LEVIN: Well, I think that part of the problem they had was that sitting in front of them was George Washington. They thought, “We’re building an office for this guy.” They built an office that worked very well when someone had the kind of character that George Washington had.
I think they weren’t simply naïve: There are protections around the presidency of all sorts. The president is not the leading institution in our system, even though oftentimes as an individual the president is the leading figure in our politics. And I think that the process of presidential selection that they created, using the Electoral College, was in part a way to make sure that presidents were not demagogues, were not just selected by a broad public in a way that did not account for their character.
But obviously this has not always worked. And I don’t just mean in our time, though I think it is not working well in our time. Andrew Jackson, for example, was a kind of demagogue they worried about. The sort of person that they were trying to avoid became president really as soon as the generation of the Founders died out. He was the first second-generation American to become president. He was kind of what they were trying not to have in the office of the presidency.
This system has always faced a challenge. An executive is always going to be inclined to be a person who wants a lot of concentrated power and runs the risk of abusing it.
I do think the kinds of protections we have continue to serve us well. I think on the whole the presidential selection process continues to serve us well, but we obviously have seen what it looks like when presidents who don’t have the character that’s required by the system serve in that office, and I think it doesn’t look good.
Institutions and Civic Formation
KLUTSEY: Speaking of institutions—back to your previous book, which—you highlight that these are places for formation. What are the best institutions to form the kinds of people who appreciate the kind of system that we have, the complexity and dynamism, and the kind of system that sustains the continuous tension that you write about?
LEVIN: I think it’s a great question; it’s a very challenging question. On the one hand, there are some institutions that form politicians. We do have those. They’re not all working, because a lot of our politicians now don’t really work their way up through those institutions. You don’t run for county commission and then state legislature and then Congress and then president the way you might have (or governor). That still happens sometimes, but very few members of Congress now, for example, served in state legislatures—whereas 50 years ago, even, most of them would have.
I think we have less formation in that sense, but the hardest question is citizen formation. How do we shape people’s expectations so that they want the right things? We live in a democracy. Ultimately, our elected officials are going to do what we want. When they do things that drive us crazy, we have to ask, “Why do they think I want this?” Ultimately, it’s often because you kind of do want this. You want the show; you want the entertainment.
Instead, you should want a functional system where your elected officials engage in a process of bargaining and negotiation with one another to arrive at negotiated solutions that can serve the country.
That’s just often not what people want out of politics right now. They want entertainment and they want conflict, and they get it. I think a lot of what’s required to improve and strengthen our system are ways of changing our own expectations. Part of what that means is getting to know the system better. I ask myself, “What can I do?” All I know how to do is write a book like this, so I wrote a book like this that says, “Here’s what we should expect out of the system.” I don’t imagine that’s going to change the country.
But I think civics education should focus on the fact that unity in our society means acting together when we don’t think alike. That’s the skill we should learn. And I do think we need to reemphasize civics education and history education. They are underemphasized now.
But it’s also important that, in the various institutions that we’re part of in our own lives, we engage in these kinds of modes of decision-making too. Americans traditionally have been pretty good at thinking about civic action in terms of coalition building, of negotiating and committee work.
Alexis de Tocqueville says that if you get three Americans together, they’ll elect a treasurer. I think that used to be how we operated. We tended to think in terms of forming structures for collective action. We’ve lost a lot of that knack because we don’t really engage in the life of civil society to the extent that we used to in American life. It’s really in civil society that we learn these skills. So I think part of what’s required is a kind of revitalization of federalism, which allows more power to flow at the local level, and of civic action and civil society.
These kinds of traditional institutions are ultimately the way; they’re places where we operate as republican citizens. We run them. The church committee, the neighborhood pool are places where we have a role to play and where we have to work with other people who are often very disagreeable and are hard to work with. We learn skills that then become essential in shaping our expectations of politics too.
Facilitating Conversations Across Differences
KLUTSEY: How can organizations like ours—research centers, educational institutions, AEI, the Mercatus Center—we host something called the Pluralist Lab [ [link removed] ]. It’s a series of sessions and conversations with students from across different backgrounds and points of view to model this process of having conversations across differences. That’s one thing; what are some of the ways—and obviously we have to exemplify what it looks like to embody this. But are there other ways we can do this?
LEVIN: I think some of the substantive research work that we do should focus on these questions: on the sources of functional pluralism and on the nature of democratic institutions in America. We can help the work of civics education through some of that kind of research.
I think we also have to model it by reaching across lines of difference. The world of think tanks and research institutions that we both live in has become more partisan over time. I think that there are ways for us to work with people across those lines and demonstrate how we can talk about something we disagree about in a way that points toward the possibility of a negotiated resolution, of common action where we both get something that neither of us thinks is perfect but both of us think is tolerable.
Building those kinds of habits within our own world, but also modeling them for people who might take an interest in the work we do, I think is a lot of what we might have to offer.
What the Founders Got Wrong
KLUTSEY: What did the Founders get wrong? Besides original sin of slavery—
LEVIN: Right. Well, that’s no small thing.
KLUTSEY: Yes, it’s a huge part of this—but what are some of the things that they got wrong?
LEVIN: I would say the way in which the Constitution in particular got that wrong is that it left the question of slavery to the states. I think there was a sense they had that that kind of compromise could endure, that there were things that could be left up to the diversity of federalism that ultimately couldn’t. I do think they had too narrow a sense of what would come to be required of the national government.
Over time, a lot of the most divisive debates we’ve had have been about whether to expand the set of responsibilities we assign to the national government. We still have those. It’s a hard question. They created a good framework for addressing those questions most of the time, but I do think they underestimated what would come to be required of America’s national government.
I also think that there are ways in which they assumed a certain kind of citizenry without thinking enough about what it would take to sustain it and to create it. An American is not a natural artifact. Americans don’t fall from the sky. They have to be produced by a lot of social action through education, through a certain kind of civic life, through certain habits that are created by example.
The Constitution, in a lot of ways, takes those for granted and assumes that this is the society we have. But of course, in every generation we have to recreate the society. We have to show people why they should have these habits and help them to form them. That work is difficult. We find that in every generation. I think that’s always a lot of the challenge we face in sustaining what they built.
I think they also didn’t build a regime that would become a world-spanning global leader in the way that the United States has, and so the presidency has come to be much more powerful and important than they seemed to expect, just simply because the president has tremendous responsibility for keeping the world safe. That’s just not really quite how they thought about the American presidency. How could they have?
I do think, nonetheless, that despite all of that, the framework they built is so flexible and so capable of change because at the center of it is the right way to think about politics, which is to see that politics in a free society exists to facilitate the working out of differences. That basic core insight was correct. It continues to serve us well, including by offering us ways to modernize our system when we need to.
Expanding the House
KLUTSEY: Should we expand the number of representatives in Congress?
LEVIN: This is one idea that I think readers might find peculiar in the book. I think very few Americans look at the House of Representatives and think, “I wish there were more of these people.” Yet the House was intended to be the most representative part of our national government, and it was intended to grow with every census so that members could represent a manageable number of people.
The House actually did grow with every census, every 10 years, from 1790 until 1920. And in 1920 the House decided to stop growing. They could do that just by legislation, because it’s not stated in the Constitution that they should grow—though I think it was assumed.
So the House is still the same size it was 100 years ago. That means that every member now has gone from representing about 200,000 people 100 years ago, which was already a lot, to representing something more like 800,000 people today. That has changed the very meaning of representation.
I think that we can’t get back to what it was originally. In the first Congress, every member of the House represented 30,000 people. To do that, we would need 3,000 members of the House. I don’t think that’s a good idea. But if the House had kept growing by the formula that it grew in the 19th century, it would now be larger by about 150 members. I think that would be a good idea.
I think we should expand the House by about 150 members and then let it grow with every census. Part of what that would do is improve representation. It would also rebalance the Electoral College a little bit. The Electoral College: each state has—the number of members of Congress are the numbers of electors it has for president. That means that the Electoral College would become a little bit more proportionally representative than it has become, and it would allow for a moment of reform that would be a shot in the arm for other kinds of changes that are necessary now in Congress by the simple fact of the House changing its size. I think it’s a good way to think about how to facilitate other reforms of Congress too.
In Defense of the Electoral College
KLUTSEY: On the Electoral College: It is probably, for my friends and relatives who live in different parts of the world, the most bizarre system that we have here in America. Can you steel-man the Electoral College for us?
LEVIN: You know, the Electoral College is not that strange. No modern democracy selects its chief executive directly. The parliamentary systems are actually less democratic than we are about how they choose their chief executive, because the prime minister is chosen by the members of the parliamentary majority.
The British, until the election they had just a few days ago [ [link removed] ], they’d gone through three prime ministers since the last election. Who chose those people? They were chosen by about 250 members of the majority party in Parliament, a very small group of people who all have the same political interest, basically all went to the same two universities. That’s much less democratic than the Electoral College.
The reason they do that is because the direct election of a chief executive presents the potential for a very dangerous kind of demagoguery, for the selection of a demagogue. The Electoral College was created to address the same kind of problem, but in a much more democratic way than that. The way it works is basically, there is a popular vote in each state, and the results of those are then weighted by the populations of the states to choose the president.
It’s true it’s not a direct election. It’s also true that sometimes the results of the overall popular vote look different than the results of the Electoral College. That’s happened rarely, but it’s happened now twice in the 21st century.
I don’t think that really means what the critics of the Electoral College think it means. The election we have is based on the fact that our presidents are chosen through the Electoral College. That’s how people campaign. That’s how everybody thinks about the election, so that the popular vote result of that election doesn’t actually tell us very much. If we had a direct election for president, people would campaign in different places, in different ways. The results could look very different.
I think overall, and especially when we keep in mind the need for social cohesion, the Electoral College serves us pretty well. It forces our presidential elections to happen in the middle of the electorate. If you think about it, if you just had a popular vote, the parties would focus on where they’re strongest, where they can get the most people out. Democrats would focus on getting every last Democrat out in California. Republicans would focus on the Deep South. They wouldn’t even talk to each other. They would talk to their own voters.
But, as it is now, it doesn’t matter how big your win is in California or Texas. You need to win Michigan, which means you need to talk to voters who could go either way. The presidential election is ultimately about the issues that divide the parties, that make them uncomfortable. I think that serves us well.
It’s not perfect. Obviously there’s always a downside to any electoral system. It’s not proportionally representative; that’s true. But the presidency is not a representative institution. It’s an administrative job. The president is elected so that he’s accountable to the public.
I think, on the whole, the Electoral College has actually served us pretty well throughout American history, and it does so now too.
KLUTSEY: I think the challenge is that, while oftentimes you’ll have the one who wins the popular vote ends up winning the Electoral College, there are a few cases where that’s not the case.
LEVIN: That’s right.
KLUTSEY: That creates the concern, worry, that people have.
LEVIN: Definitely.
Social Cohesion and the Constitution
KLUTSEY: As we wrap this up, is there a call to action that you want people to take after reading this book?
LEVIN: I think it’s very important for people to see that social cohesion and unity is a fundamental purpose of our system of government. And so that the solution to the kinds of problems we face now, which are very often problems of division, of social breakdown, can be found by looking to the logic of the Constitution for help.
That doesn’t mean the Constitution is perfect. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing to change about how we do things. When we ask ourselves, “What’s broken down? What’s wrong? What are we not doing?,” the Constitution can help us to answer that question more clearly and more effectively than we tend to do, because our inclination is to say, “What’s wrong is these other damn people. They’re standing in my way. I won the election.” The Constitution wants to say, “No, that’s not enough.” To have a narrow majority doesn’t mean you get all the power in our system.
The reason for that is that majorities can be very dangerous to the rights of minorities. To simply say that we should make everything proportional-democratic ignores the challenge of social peace and social cohesion and ultimately also social justice. To think about what we need: We need to look to the logic of our Constitution, learn from our own political tradition and then try to help our system do its own job better.
Its job is to make us less divided, and that’s what we need now. And so I think the Constitution is more the solution than the problem.
KLUTSEY: Right, so let’s not burn it down.
LEVIN: Exactly.
KLUTSEY: All right. On that note, thank you very much, Yuval Levin. This has been a wonderful conversation. I appreciate you joining us—
LEVIN: Thank you very much.
KLUTSEY: —at Pluralist Points. The book is “American Covenant [ [link removed] ].” Everyone should get a copy and check it out. It’s really good. Thank you.

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