August 13, 2024
Brad Littlejohn
Nearly all observers of our body politic are now agreed: the patient is very sick. Such unanimity is bracing and clarifying; no more false reassurances to seduce the patient into complacency. But what to do? It’s hard to say without a clear diagnosis. By some lights, the patient is sick unto death and we had best start sorting through the claimants to his inheritance congregating outside, or euthanize him to get it over with. Others think the disease is a cancer in certain members of the body politic, which must be remorselessly cut off if the patient is to survive, while some claim that it is essentially a psychological condition, a kind of paranoid schizophrenia requiring shock treatment. A handful of grave but soft-spoken physicians on the sidelines protest that this is mostly a diet and exercise issue; bring the patient some healthy broth and force him to start taking walks around the garden, and it will work wonders for him.
In the tragicomedy of our ailing republic, Yuval Levin represents the last class of physicians: those convinced that the diseased state of American politics is the product of too little activity, not too much, that the body politic retains the resources for its own renewal, and that we should beware of drastic remedies that seek to fix the problem all at once. Although, if true, this is objectively good news, this is often the doctor we least want to listen to when we are sick, and so it is here.
Levin’s brand of conservative institutionalism and constitutionalism is unsuited to the rhetorical firebombs of a digital age. His incrementalism is maddening to those worn out by our political dysfunctions and desperate for a fundamental reset. And it may, indeed, turn out to be too little, too late. But Levin is worth hearing out.
In his newest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation—and Could Again, Levin challenges the fundamental premises behind much of our national hand-wringing or eulogy-rehearsing. For quite some time on the Left, and increasingly on the Right, critics have complained that the Constitution is too much of a straitjacket, so hemmed in with checks and balances that it’s no wonder our politics is a stalemate. National renewal will come only through muscular leadership willing to cut through the constitutional red tape and enact sweeping changes for the common good. Others are kinder to the Constitution, but think it needs to be politely eased into retirement; it simply was not designed for a world such as ours, and new methods are now called for. In particular, many have pointed out that any political order relies on a level of pre-political cultural cohesion that we no longer possess, on basic shared beliefs that we no longer hold. Accordingly, the Constitution simply cannot do its work any longer, because the prerequisite unity is gone. Such critiques have assumed the status of truisms in some sectors of the Right.
But Levin isn’t so sure. For one thing, while he agrees that unity and cultural cohesion are essential for any polity to survive, he argues that they are not so much pre-requisites, but products of effective political action: of bruising, frustrating negotiation and butting of heads. And as soon as one looks around at everyday experience, it’s clear he has a point. A successful sports team doesn’t start out with a shared ethos and common habits of mind; it acquires them in the course of being forced to practice and play together, even if some players start out hating each other’s guts and never quite learn to like each other. In an office or work environment, we all roll our eyes at cheesy team-building exercises meant to establish esprit de corps; if we succeed in building a sense of common identity, it’s through being forced to work on common projects.
On Levin’s account, then, naming the basic problem of American public life today is not rocket science: “We have grown less capable of dealing with one another because we have embraced an approach to American government that de-emphasizes dealing with one another.” Far from presupposing a basic unity of the body politic, he argues, the Constitution assumes the reality of seemingly intractable division, and is expressly designed to channel that division into constructive disagreement. “The breakdown of political culture in our day,” then, “is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with one another but of our having forgotten how to disagree constructively.” The product of this constructive disagreement is not necessarily agreement, but that’s OK. I don’t have to share the worldview of my football teammates; I just need to be able to agree how to run the next play. As Levin says over and over throughout the book, “unity consists less of thinking alike than of acting together.” This common action, however, is not a least-common-denominator pragmatism; it can become the basis of a genuinely felt unity, as we discover in fellow citizens common ground that we did not expect—or even create a common ground that may not have been there before: “In being forced to describe our aims in terms of the general good of society, we come to actually understand our aims in those terms. By being forced to work together toward common goals, we come to understand ourselves as sharing a life in common.”
As for the Constitution’s maddening checks and balances, Levin offers a subtly different account of them than the standard “liberal” interpretation of the Constitution. On that account, the Framers accepted a view of human nature as incorrigibly self-interested and thus factional, inclined to seize power and use it against others. Accordingly, they constructed a political order full of weights and counterweights that would block such factional interest at every turn, preventing it from ever getting its way—even if that meant accepting the price that no substantive moral agenda could ever get its way. That’s not quite right, says Levin. The checks and balances were not to prevent action, but to frustrate action—to make it more difficult. Why? Because when we are forced to do more difficult things, we usually do them better, more thoughtfully, and more durably than when allowed to do something effortlessly. The Constitution is designed on the premise that by forcing political minorities to first become narrow majorities, and then forcing narrow majorities to widen their majorities, and forcing them, at every step of the way, to compete, bargain, and negotiate with their rivals, viewpoints will be refined and sharpened, fuller understanding will be reached, and most importantly, a sense of camaraderie, however grudging, will be forged.
The basic structure of the book is methodical and easy to follow. After articulating these basic theses, Levin devotes one chapter to each of to the basic building blocks of our constitutional system: federalism, the Congress, the Presidency, the courts, and our party system (a slightly later innovation, to be sure, but one that he considers “a missing piece in the constitutional puzzle”). Each chapter begins with a masterclass in constitutional history, mining the Convention debates and the Federalist papers for insight into how each element of our political order was designed to build consensus through friction. Each then explains how and why we have lost our way, either by misunderstanding the purpose of these institutions, failing to nurture the norms that sustain them, or by consciously trying to do end-runs around them in order to achieve more decisive policy action. Levin draws repeated attention to the Progressive-era reforms, and especially the political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson, as a culprit of this last tendency. Although Levin does not use the phrase, he essentially charges Wilson with inaugurating the “silent majority” myth, the idea that lurking within the body politic is “a preexisting unity waiting to be represented at last” by a suitably wise and confident tribune of the people “rather than assuming durable differences that need to be negotiated and assuaged.” Even today, when such an idea is patently contradicted by the facts, many on the Right continue to behave as if a shared conservative vision of the common good is hiding in plain sight amidst a stifled electorate, just waiting for progressive elites to be escorted from the premises. At the end of each chapter, Levin offers a series of nuts-and-bolts practical prescriptions for how we might begin to reform the deformed branches of our government. Most are unsexy and many seem underwhelming at first glance—can our civilizational crisis really be addressed by tinkering with congressional committee rules? However, sometimes a small change of diet is all that’s needed to put the sickest patient back on the path toward health.
Levin’s prescriptions are not just at the level of institutions; he is also concerned with our habits as citizens. He accepts the “republican” critique of liberalism, that the Constitution depends on a virtuous citizenry. However, recognizing that politics and culture are downstream of each other, he suggests that the American constitutional order was itself designed to create a certain kind of culture, a certain kind of citizen: one committed to the hard work of negotiation, magnanimous in victory and patient in defeat. Of course, this observation significantly heightens the stakes of the constitutional deformation we have inherited and contributed to: if we’ve lost the knack of managing disagreement well within our governing institutions, perhaps we’ve lost it also in social life more broadly, and indeed within our very souls. A quick glance around your Twitter feed would suggest that this is precisely what has happened.
This feedback loop certainly complicates any attempt at reform and renewal. To return to the medical metaphor, what might have begun as a failure of diet and exercise may have progressed to a serious heart condition, which now renders the patient simply unable to rise from his sickbed for the slightest exercise. Sometimes a negative feedback loop just can’t be reversed.
While I found myself nodding in agreement at Levin’s stinging rebuke of catastrophism on both Left and Right—“We now all too easily persuade ourselves that this moment, unlike past ones in our politics, is an emergency”—I also found myself wondering, “Well what if it is?” Levin’s phlegmatic book deserves to be read alongside not only Patrick Deneen’s much more choleric diagnosis in Regime Change, but also James Davison Hunter’s melancholy masterpiece, Democracy and Solidarity. Hunter stresses much more than Levin the need for some shared ideological basis of solidarity, which he defines in Democracy and Solidarity as “a framework of cohesion within which legitimate political debate, discourse, and action take place.” Without some common beliefs and norms—however opaque and flexible—the various members of a society simply will not have enough trust in one another to participate in the kind of politics that Levin calls us to. Levin seems aware of this danger, observing in his final chapter that “The deformation of our politics has made Americans particularly (and understandably) skeptical about the possibility of restraint—restraint of majorities, of public officials, of the opposite party. We increasingly think that anyone with power will use it without restraint.” Once we are in this mindset, it is almost impossible to exercise restraint ourselves if and when we can gain some modicum of power; nothing can break the cycle of mimetic rivalry in norm-breaking.
Levin agrees that some shared ideals are necessary; indeed, he seems to largely agree with Hunter that for Americans, they have traditionally been found within the principles and rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, even as these are capable of many different emphases and interpretations. But whereas Levin seems convinced that nearly all Americans still appeal to these principles at some level, Hunter is not so sure. To be honest, it may simply be impossible to know. Our politics increasingly takes place within the funhouse mirrors of a thousand overlapping media ecosystems, each purporting to tell us what our fellow citizens and governing authorities really believe. Judging by many of those data points, it is certainly not implausible to conclude that we are in uncharted territory, and perhaps past a point of no return: we no longer have sufficient agreement on the basics of anthropology and morality that can serve as the starting points for political negotiation.
What Levin calls us to, then, can be characterized as a kind of leap of faith: let us try, at least once more, to act as if common action were possible, and then maybe, just maybe, it will turn out to be. If we don’t even try, however, then we will seal our own fate, left with nothing but the “I told you so” that is the solace of every self-fulfilling prophet.
Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and President Emeritus of the Davenant Institute. [He lives in Loudoun County, VA, with his wife Rachel and four children.] You can follow his writing at bradlittlejohn.substack.com.