In the Wall Street Journal last weekend, Barton Swaim appropriately praised Yuval Levin and his new book, American Covenant.
Mr. Levin has a gift for drawing readers’ attention to realities that should have been obvious but weren’t. He does that in his latest book, “American Covenant,” which was published on Tuesday. The argument could be put this way: The U.S. Constitution was written to bring together a fractious and disunited nation, so if we’re looking for ways to bring together a fractious and disunited nation, maybe we should consider the U.S. Constitution.
Levin, my friend and colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, displays that gift in the next paragraph:
“The breakdown of political culture in our day,” [Levin] observes in the book, “is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with each other but of our having forgotten how to disagree constructively.” The framers of the Constitution, he argues, were aware of the dangers both of centralized power and of democracy: They had fought an imperious king a decade before, and in the intervening years they had lived through a democracy so disunited that it fell apart. What they fashioned in 1787 was neither a monarchy nor a libertarian compact but a system whose stability and cohesion arose precisely from the guarantee that its citizens would be forced to deal with each other constantly—always negotiating, competing and forming coalitions.
Levin argues that throughout most of American history, “there’s a majority party holding a really complicated coalition together. And there’s a minority party trying to build a coalition. They’re both involved in coalition building.” But for the past three decades, the U.S. has been split 50–50.
“Since about the 1990s we’ve had two minority parties, and they don’t actually do a lot of coalition building,” [Levin] says. “Mainly they try to get their people out, as if they hold a big majority already and only need turnout. They don’t do much thinking about how they might bring new people to their side. They don’t ask: What can we offer them? What can we do that would bring them in?”
The full Levin interview is well worth your time, and it includes discussions of the different ways conservatives and progressives view the Constitution, the importance of counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster, why in 2021 the Democrats governed as if they had received a mandate to reshape the economy, and whether it’s still possible for a party to “win big.”
Of course, the interview is fascinating because Yuval’s new book is fascinating. You can check it out here.
I was particularly interested in their discussion of the role played by republicanism — in contrast with liberalism — in American life. Swaim writes:
I was reminded by “American Covenant” that although we now tend to talk about “liberal democracy”—the word liberal signifying free markets, the rule of law, individual rights, representative government and so on—the founders spoke mainly of “republican” principles and “republican” government. (As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, Benjamin Franklin, asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced, didn’t reply, “A democracy—if you can keep it.”) Republicanism, an inheritance of Greek, Roman and Renaissance thought, emphasized the citizen’s obligation to improve the polity and strengthen its institutions: in short, to seek the common good.
Republicanism is “a concept that’s become extremely hard to define because it’s fallen out of use in our vocabulary,” Mr. Levin says. “It was hard to define in the 18th century for the opposite reason, because it was so universally used. Everybody wanted to claim republicanism for themselves. I think what’s important for us is that republicanism is about taking responsibility for your common fate, about taking ownership of the future of your society.”
In a healthy republic, he continues, “you’re not just standing around waiting for somebody else to fix your problems. You don’t only think about what other people owe you, but also about what you owe them. These are the habits that we’ve tended to lose, I think in part because we’ve come to understand our system in liberal terms. Liberalism is a good thing, too, but liberalism describes rights and privileges. It’s less concerned with duties and responsibilities.”
Levin: “A lot of the problems attributed by some on the American right to an excess of liberalism would be better thought of as a deficiency in republicanism.”
I’ve been wrestling with precisely this framework throughout the past decade of populism because I have been surprised at the degree to which the public debate infantilizes the white working class. Seven weeks after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, I was thinking through these issues, and I published this in the Washington Post:
Members of the working class are not solely the victims of economic change and inadequate public policy. They themselves bear some of the responsibility for the frustration and anger they feel. They have agency. The degree to which our public conversation after the election has implicitly denied this basic fact has been concerning.
As a culture, we feel more comfortable discussing what we want than what we owe. This is generally true. Applied to this specific situation, we want working-class Americans to lead flourishing lives that include meaningful employment, and society as a whole has a moral obligation to work toward making this the case. But working-class Americans have duties, as well.
It seems to me that that sense of duty has eroded, along with the cultural norms that support it. Again, this observation applies generally, across our society. But taking the specific case of the working class, its implications are important: Significantly strengthening the cultural norms that if you can work, you should be working, even if the only job you can find pays a mere 65 percent of what you made in your last job; that if you can work, you should be working, even if you have to move a few states away for a good job; that if you can work, you should be providing for your kids; that you have an obligation to contribute and to add your skills and talent and effort to the fabric of your community — a strong recovery of these basic cultural norms would go a long way toward helping the working class lead full and flourishing lives.
This narrative can reinforce the problems it diagnoses. I wrote in National Review in 2022:
Grievance-onomics indulges a narrative that workers are victims who don’t have agency and are players in a “game” that is “rigged” against them. This is analytically false — e.g., the link between worker productivity and compensation is empirically strong. More than that, it is a terrible message to send to workers. If workers come to think of themselves as victims who can’t get ahead, then why will they try to get ahead? Apostles of grievance-onomics risk creating among workers the very problems of economic stagnation and immobility that they falsely claim beset us.
I’ve long thought that the path to the other side of populism would be marked by several years of broad-based wage growth and low and stable inflation (and the absence of a pandemic). Yuval’s important work has convinced me that greater adherence to our great American covenant is a marker on that path, as well.