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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Yuval Levin. Yuval is a political theorist, author and public intellectual known for his work on constitutionalism, civil society, and the structure of American political institutions. He's the editor of National Affairs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of many influential books including the Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. In this episode, we talk about the differences between liberals and conservatives, both philosophically and psychologically. We talk about the Trump administration's heavy handed approach to higher education reform. We talk about the difference between conservatism and right wing populism. We talk about the decline of religion in American life and much more. So without further ado, Yuval Levin. Okay, you've all live in. Thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [01:05]
B
Thank you very much for having me.
- [01:07]
A
So I want to give my readers a sense of who you are, what your background is before we get into some of the questions that I want to ask you. So how did you start being interested in politics and coming to study the, the Constitution, the importance of institutions, liberalism, all the various political philosophy topics you studied?
- [01:28]
B
Yeah, it's a big question and I'd say I don't have an immediately obvious answer to it. I started being interested in politics very young. I was interested in politics by the time I was a high school student, but I thought that I was interested in practical electoral politics. I went to college in Washington and worked on Capitol Hill as a student and in the course of that really came to the view that I was more interested in the ideas that underlie politics and something like the intersection of political theory and public policy. I ended up taking more and more of an interest in that, ultimately went to graduate school, to University of Chicago, and I came back to Washington to work in the Bush administration, but very much with an interest in that intersection. And in a way, since leaving government a long time ago now back in 2008, I've been in the think tank world working on that intersection. Some of my work is really on public policy, on healthcare and federal budget issues and things like that. But much of it is on the institutions that are the infrastructure and framework of American political life. And I'm interested in them from the point of view of their significance as institutions, how they shape the people in them, how they shape the larger society. So that my interest is really as a kind of political and social theorist who happens to be in Washington and so is working on politics.
- [02:55]
A
And did I read right that you grew up when you were very young, you lived In Israel.
- [02:59]
B
That's right. I was born in Israel. I came to the US When I was eight, so I mostly grew up here. But yes.
- [03:05]
A
Do you think there's any aspect of those first eight years that shaped your later views, or is it too young to be that important?
- [03:13]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's certainly the fact that I am an immigrant to the United States shaped my views. I just live with a profound gratitude for the United States. And frankly, a lot of my everyday work is just applied gratitude to the United States. And I think that's a view that a lot of immigrants have, and frankly, a lot of immigrants who come to the US as children. I found myself a few months ago, really by coincidence, on a panel with a federal judge and another think tanker, I guess I won't name them, but in the course of Talking about the 250th anniversary of the founding and the necessity of civics education, the three of us all realized that we all were born abroad, came to the United States as children, and now really live lives of gratitude for this adopted home. And that's very much how I understand myself. So that's inseparable from who I am and what I do.
- [04:14]
A
Does that put you at all out of step with the core of conservatism? Maybe not intellectual conservatism, but with right wing populism right now and its tenor on immigration?
- [04:26]
B
Yeah, in some ways it does. I mean, I certainly am of the view that we need rules for immigration and that we need to have control of the border, but I am, I would say I'm not a populist. I'm a conservative. And for me, that really, it means that my outlook on politics actually begins from gratitude for the good and tries to address the bad in the world by building on the good. To me, that's almost a definition of conservatism. It's not a definition of populism. And so although there's always been a populist element in American conservatism, I think there's always been a tension. And to the extent that that tension is important in this moment, I'm certainly on the conservative side of that dividend.
- [05:13]
A
So I think a lot of liberals or leftists that have a bad view of conservatism would take issue with how you just defined it. Convince a skeptic when you say conservatism stems first from gratitude. Well, that sounds like something everyone should. It sounds like everyone should be a conservative under that heading. So convince me that that's what conservatism really is?
- [05:36]
B
Yeah, I wouldn't say that everybody should be. I think there really is a deep divide among people who are engaged. The political and social world we all look on, a world that is a mix of good and bad. And I think some of us just almost naturally begin by seeing the good and wanting to address the bad through it, and others begin by seeing the bad and wanting to uproot it. And I think both those views are actually very understandable. There is a lot of good and a lot of bad. There are things in this world that have to be preserved. They're utterly essential and also vulnerable. And there are things in this world that need to be uprooted and changed. And the question for us is, where do you start? Do you first see the good? Do you think that's the exceptional, or do you first see the bad? I'm a conservative ultimately, because I begin from a view of human nature that sees us as fallen and imperfect and prone to vice and to sin. It's a religious view. It's a culturally traditionalist view. And if that's your view, then you think that in order to flourish and really thrive, human beings first need to be formed to be made capable of freedom and virtue. And that formation is the work of society's institutions. Family first and foremost, and education and religion and culture and politics. Those are all there at their best to form us into better versions of ourselves so that we can thrive and flourish. I think that's the conservative worldview. The more progressive worldview begins from the premise that we are actually born ready for freedom, but that where we fail to thrive, it's because we are oppressed by institutions that only serve other people, serve powerful people, and that ultimately, to be free, we need to be liberated from the power of those institutions. I think that to be free, we need to be formed by those institutions. That's a very deep difference, but it's a difference within the framework of the modern liberal society. And I think it maps on relatively well to the traditions of what we've come to call the left and the right. Not perfectly, and it's never this clean, but broadly speaking, my conservatism starts from that lower view of human nature and therefore really high expectations of society's institutions. And I'm just eager to conserve those institutions that do that job well, that really form good men and women.
- [08:03]
A
Okay, so one thing I'm hearing is that conservatism is about forming people. You know, we're naturally born as children. We're limited children can be quite selfish. The last thing they want to do is share. Of course, there's many sweet moments when a child does share, but there's many more moments where they don't want to share the toy. They throw a tantrum because they didn't get what they want. They have trouble seeing beyond their own immediate self interest. And I think a lot of parents, you know, though you love a kid, so all these things don't quite sting as much as they would in a strange adult. Nevertheless, you see these things and over time you try to teach them to share. You try to teach them to say thank you. What do you say? Please and thank you. Right, so you're talking about forming, basically forming a mature adult out of an immature child. And that's, that's the point of conservatism. Well, what if, I mean, and I'm, I'm drawing on, you know, is another way of framing it or another different, different type of conservatism that just human nature makes us self interested our whole lives, right? It's like, yeah, you kind of sand off the edges as you become an adult, but fundamentally you're still flawed, you're still self interested. Most people occasionally lie, some people lie quite frequently. And people are prone to violence, even to take what they want. And that's always a part of human nature. So what conservatism should be about is creating institutions that create incentives for people to behave well, that make it in your interest to be pro social and very much against your interest to, to do, to do bad things. And that's actually a pretty important difference in emphasis because it drops the illusion of being able to form people into virtuous human beings. Virtue would be in that case like sort of self policing without how you behave when nobody's looking, as the saying goes.
- [10:12]
B
Well, I think those two are actually very much connected to each other. So formation certainly is not just about children, although it is in some ways especially about children. Society should be especially concerned with those institutions that form the young, with the culture at large, with schooling, with family. But we all need formation all the time. We're all fallen creatures. We're all prone to, as you say, the darker sides of human nature. And, and that means we all need to be constantly formed within these institutions too. I think adults often are formed in different ways. They're formed by being given a role within the institution, less by being taught by a teacher than by being a teacher. And being a teacher makes certain requirements of you. It puts you in a position of saying, I have an obligation here. I have a role to play. Am I up to playing this role? Somebody cuts me off on the highway and I want to yell at them, and I might do that, but if my kids are in the back, I might not do that. That's a way that the institution of the family, the role I have as a parent, might form me into a better person and force me in that situation, at least to restrain myself when otherwise I wouldn't have. But I think what happens over time is that habits created by these modes of formation also change us. They actually make us into somewhat better people. I would say the best way to become a better person is. Is to pretend to be a better person for a long time. And that's how a lot of moral formation happens, is we get ourselves into better habits, virtuous habits. This is just paraphrasing Aristotle, of course, But I think the idea is that by habituating ourselves to behaving well, we create the possibility that under stress, even if no one's watching, we have a better chance of doing the right thing in a difficult moment. I think that's how moral formation happens. The premise of that is that we need that formation, that we do start out requiring it, that we start out in a bad place, and that ultimately the institutions of a functional society are institutions that form us by habituating us in a kind of virtuous behavior that is pro social and that tends to serve the needs of everybody, but also makes us into somewhat better human beings.
- [12:33]
A
Okay, so when you described the difference between conservatism and progressivism or liberalism a few minutes ago, you. You made reference to the fact that conservatives, when looking at a mix of good and bad, first focus first on the good, how to preserve the good, and then think about what can be done based on those principles to mitigate the bad. And liberals look first at the bad and say, how can we fix it? How can we make this better?
- [13:03]
B
Is that.
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A
Is that just a stable psychological difference between people inclined towards the right and the left? And if so, would that help explain why there's so much research showing that conservatives tend to be happier if one side is looking on the bright side and the other side is looking at the glass half empty?
- [13:25]
B
I'm really not sure how to answer that question. I'm very interested in that research. I think it's a fascinating and sort of deeply revealing set of data about contemporary American life. At least, I don't think it's permanent, and I don't think it's universal. But I would say my Sense is, and of course, these are all broad generalities. My sense is that generally people on the right tend to see the good first because it's exceptional, because our expectations are lower. And so the good seems more outstanding, more unusual, more exceptional, more worth our attention. I think people on the left tend to actually have higher expectations of what the norm should be like. And therefore it's the bad that strikes them as exceptional, as avoidable, as the thing to focus on because it can be made to go away. And so there's a tendency to kind of direct ourselves to what seems like it's not the norm. I wouldn't say that I really know exactly how that connects to the very peculiar fact we see now that people who incline to the right just also incline to be happier and more hopeful and in better spirits in 21st century America. My sense is that's probably not a universal fact. Left and right are not universal facts either, but they're helpful rules of thumb about our life in a free society.
- [14:53]
A
It does seem to me though that if you have lower expectations, as a generality, and I love the quote, happiness is the distance between expectation and reality. And I find that to be very much true in life. If you measure your career success against, you know, people in the top 0.1%, you live your whole life thinking you're, you're. But if you judge it against the people you grew up with and you're actually doing better than most of them, you feel like a huge success your whole life, and it's all about expectation, then it would seem to follow that, that those people with lower expectations would incline towards happiness and conservatism. But I, I share your skepticism that the story is that neat or that that simple. There's, there's a whole lot of outrage on the right as well.
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B
Sure is.
- [15:48]
A
And not only that, what you described, what you described as the left wing perspective on institutions and human nature, that really we need to just get rid of all these oppressive people, all these oppressive institutions, tap into our natural goodness and natural freedom, let it thrive unobstructed, and that's the way to build a better society. I mean, it seems like there's a lot of that on the populist right in the sense that the enemy are the billionaire pedophile trafficking rings that are controlling the world. And maybe it's Israel or maybe it's whomever, it's the Deep State. And if we just got rid of these, if we just decapitated these people, basically, you know, everything would be amazing.
- [16:35]
B
Yeah, you know, One way that I think about this now is that there's always in American life at the same time a left right divide and an up down divide. And the left right divide is what we've been talking about. I think it's real. It doesn't explain everything, but it's meaningful and it's still with us. The up down divide is in some ways a more primordial kind of politics. You know, in Athens, in classical times, they called it the divide between the few and the many. We can think of it in contemporary America as populism and elitism. And it's always been a force in American political life too. There are moments when the up down divide matters more than the left right divide, when our politics is really about populism and elitism. You see this in Jacksonian America in the 1820s and 30s. You see this now, too. I think our moment is very much an up down moment. There's still left right politics in this America as there was in Jacksonian America. But our politics is much more dominated now by up and down. And one of the most significant phenomena that I've lived through being in Washington for the past 25 years now is that in a sense, the parties have switched sides on the up down axis. They're still where they were, left and right. The Democrats are the party of the left, Republicans are the party of the right. That still means something. It tells you a lot about them. But 30 years ago, Republicans were the party of the elite. Their electorate was more elite, their attitudes were more institutional. They sort of operated as if they own the institutions, but they're not being allowed to run them. And so they tried to save American institutions from the people running them, save the university from the professors, save the courts from the judges. These were kind of the crusades of the right. The left was much more populist and understood itself as opposing the American elite. And over the course of the 21st century, so far, the parties have switched sides on that front. I had the very peculiar experience not long ago of watching the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 9 11, that was made after the Iraq War, after the 2004 election. That movie was a left wing movie when it came out 20 years ago. If it came out today, that would be a right wing movie. Everything about it except the attack on George W. Bush would have been very easy to classify as part of the contemporary right. The attitude that the problem in America is the elite oppressing the public and that the institutions can't be trusted, that there's this Kind of global elite that dominates everything and is in charge without our permission. That used to be a much more left wing view. It has become a much more right wing view. Or if you think about it, when the elite party, the inside party, loses a close election, it might say something like, the Russians stole the election. That's something the right would have said for most of my lifetime. It's now something the left would say. When the outside party, the populist party, loses an election, they might say things like, the elites that run the banks and the elites that run the cultural institutions stole this from us. That's something you would have heard from the left for most of my life and did. And that's now something the right would say. That's a real change in our experience of American political life. And it's related to the left right axis, but it has much more to do with that up down axis.
- [20:16]
A
So what's your theory of how the parties switched on the up, down axis? When did it happen? Over what time span, and what actually caused it?
- [20:25]
B
You know, I wish I had a fully worked out story of this because I think it's a very important thing to understand. But I would say that in some respects, there's of course always been a populist element of the American right. It's become much more dominant in the course of the 21st century as Americans in general have lost confidence in our institutions and as those institutions and the people who run them have come to be much more identified with not only the Democratic Party, but really the cultural left and the outer margins of the cultural left. I think that's happened over the course of the last 20 years or so. It particularly accelerated during Barack Obama's presidency. That presidency was in a lot of ways a source of very decisive change in both party coalitions. You know, we always say every presidential election, we say, this is the most important election of my lifetime. I think the most important election of my lifetime was probably the 2012 election, Barack Obama's reelection. If it had gone the other way, Republicans would have ended up as a party led by Mitt Romney, rather than a party leaning toward Donald Trump and then led by Donald Trump. And the Democrats, I think, would have not been encouraged to imagine that they can just be this coalition of the ascendant that doesn't really have to care about the views of Middle America. The fact that that election went as it did turned out to drive both parties in a direction that has really accelerate this transformation of both along the, what we've called here the up, down axis.
- [22:04]
A
What was most surprising to you about working in the government in the 2000s? And this is a Bush, Bush era, right?
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B
Yeah. I worked for George W. Bush. Well, I'd been a congressional staffer at the end of the 90s. I worked for Newt Gingrich and for John Kasich. I worked for George W. Bush for most of his presidency. But I was at HHS in his first term and then was a White House staffer in his second term. I would say the most surprising thing to me about working in government. It might be a strange thing to say, but the experience of working government actually made me less cynical about politics and less prone to believe in conspiracy theories. Because what you realize when you work in government is that it's just human beings all the way down. Conspiracies are just implausible. It can't be that hundreds of people in the upper reaches of the government would keep this terrible secret and have this six step plan in which the American public is just a stooge. Nobody could manage that. These people don't know what they're doing tomorrow and they don't know how to deal with the stresses they're facing right now. And in a way, that's bad news. It means there isn't really somebody, you know, some super intelligent person in charge of everything. But it's also good news because it means there isn't some super intelligent person in charge of everything. Politics is much more like it seems. And I'd say the other lesson which is related for me was that just about everybody thinks they're doing the right thing. This is actually really hard to accept when you really care about politics, because there are people I really disagree with who I think are doing terrible damage to the country. But when you work in Washington, you realize those people aren't getting out of bed to do terrible damage to the country in mourning. They, they really do believe that what they're doing is right. And the way to really understand them and make sense of politics is to ask yourself, what are they assuming? That puts them in a place where they think this is the right way forward. I think both of those kind of rules of thumb have been helpful to me in trying to make sense of American politics. They don't explain everything and there are exceptions. There are people who are trying to do harm. There are conspiracies sometimes. But I think broadly speaking, what I really learned about Washington is just that it's a set of human institutions like everywhere else.
- [24:20]
A
Yeah, I've never worked in government, but I know many people who have. And, you know, the more people talk honestly and openly about their experiences, the more you have to chalk things up to incompetence and infighting. Factions within factions within factions.
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B
Yep.
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A
Office politics within politics with a capital piece. And you just really don't, you don't get any picture that conspiracies are really plausible on a wide scale, at least not the popular ones that are, that most energize people. So I want to talk a little bit about the Trump, the second Trump term and some of the policies and positions he staked out that I think you would have a unique window on, given the books you've written and the topics you focus on. One is Trump's sort of high leverage, muscular approach to reforming universities. Universities. The, the political monoculture at universities is. It's been one of my, I mean, my audience is probably sick of hearing me talk about it or, or maybe they're not, but it's one of the defining topics of my career and my life. My four years at Columbia were just an incredible education in how captured an institution of higher learning can be. This is from 2016 to 2020. And nothing that's happened there or at any other institution has surprised me since then because I don't think I'm capable of being surprised at the mob behavior, the persecution of dissidents that are one inch to the right of the left pole, as Steven Pinker says, that the mythical place from which all directions are right. No possible controversy about race or gender issues can be too small to ignite a truly irrational and mob justice reaction. So that's an issue I've talked about over and over again. And not only that, the, the effect that it has on, on the classroom. I was a very curious kid, very open minded. I wanted to be in a class where we read one paper for affirmative action and one paper against it. And you're allowed to think what you think and test your ideas against the ideas of your classmates and so on and so forth. And those spaces are inherently under threat. And I'm not saying they don't exist at these universities they do, but they are under constant threat of, of the hair trigger sensitivities of students and in some cases, professors, administrators, and so forth. So when, you know, when Trump comes along and starts doing things to try to fix it, on one level, I'm very much in favor of that. You know, like they're not going to fix themselves and they're not going to fix without pressure, presumably, because why would they? I mean, as as much of a supporter of organizations like Heterodox Academy that I am, those are. Those can exist in parallel with, with more pressured approaches to, to, you know, in some cases, it's like universities arguably are not following the law, civil rights law, in, in certain cases. So that all makes sense to me. Except the way Trump goes about things, it almost always he does something that I consider really over the line, like, can. Can the president of the United States tell an institution of higher learning to hire more conservatives based on what definition of conservatives? Can he. Can he demand that you hire more professors of a particular political persuasion? How would conservative. How would that land for conservatives if Obama was telling you you have to hire more socialists?
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B
Right?
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A
I don't think. I don't know that that's the role of the, of the federal government. And on and on and on. So what do you think of Trump's approach to reforming universities? Do you agree with it? Do you feel it's gone too far? And if so, what would your sort of plan be for reform?
- [28:51]
B
So I think the way you describe this is quite right, and it actually describes a lot of my sense of what's happening in the Trump era, which is. I agree with a lot of the what and have a lot of trouble with a lot of the how. A lot of good things are being advanced in bad ways. And in administration, in the work that the president has, the how really matter, the ways really matter. Administration is mostly how. And that means that there are serious problems here. But I think that some of the ways that some of the approach that Trump naturally has to governing, which is to use the weight of the government as a way to throw around and build leverage, which is not a great way to govern in many arenas, actually does create some space for positive change in the universities. The universities, in order to be open to change, did need to be pressured. I just think there's no way that they would have pursued positive change on their own. That's not true in a lot of other arenas. The advance of DEI in corporate America was driven by government pressure. A lot of the companies doing it didn't want to do it, and just if you stop pushing them to do it, they'll stop doing it. That is not the case in the universities. The politicization that we've seen there has been what the people in charge have wanted in a lot of cases, and that means there did need to be some pressure created in order to drive positive change. I think some of what the administration has tried to do has been a move in the right direction. Not only creating pressure by using scientific research, research funding and various kinds of administrative powers to demand change, where I think some of it has been to the good and some of it has crossed the line of what a president should do. But even just putting on the table some basic categories of things that need to change. Admissions rules, the internal governance, questions of hiring in the academy, openness to different views and basic freedom of speech protections, the entanglement of universities with foreign governments in ways that create enormous problems. The administration has put all of these on the table and said these are problems that I think is very positive. The question of what can be done about it going forward is not one where I think the mode of governance that the administration is pursuing is all that likely to work directly. I think where it opens up opportunities is for university administrators who have wanted to change, to push in this direction, have felt they couldn't because of faculty pressure and student pressure. Those people now can do more. And there are such people. There are some university leaders. If you think about many public universities around the country, or if you think about some of the elite privates, places like Vanderbilt, WashU in St. Louis, Johns Hopkins, they have leaders that have wanted to, since long before Trump, were worried about the politicization and wokeness and wanted to do better. Those people now have an opportunity to do better that I think they're going to use one way or another. They're going to make a real effort. But are we going to see change at Columbia? Are we going to see meaningful change at the most politicized of the elite schools? I'm much less sure about that. I think that you would have to see a more focused and more coherent mode of policy pressure that drives them to change in specific ways. And I think that can only happen through legislation. Administrative power ultimately can only do so much. You need to have a kind of reopening, reauthorization of the Higher Education act that puts these categories of change on the table. Enforcing fundamental civil rights laws, when it comes to hiring, when it comes to admissions, and thinking about the role of universities, informing American citizens, the role they have to have in civics. I think we've seen some very positive progress on this front in some places, especially in public universities in red states. The civic thought institutes that you've seen arise at UT Austin, at the University of Florida, at University of North Carolina, in Ohio, in Tennessee and other places, these are very positive changes. They're genuinely academic institutions being constructed within the framework of a large state university. I think they're going to matter. I think they're going to endure. I have a lot of hope for them. But that's public universities in red states. So it's a relatively small subset of American higher education. I think the question of what really endures here, what lasts beyond the Trump era, is the question we have to be thinking about. And there are a lot of players in elite higher ed now who are just waiting out the president. They're not really changing. And I think for change to happen on that front, there would need to be legislation. I think ultimately only changes in law can really create sustained, durable pressure. So there are good things happening. And I think in a lot of ways the moment the possibility of them has been made possible by the Trump administration, we should not ignore that reality. But a lot of the positive change we need is not going to be itself driven by the Trump administration. And the excesses are a real problem because they create a vulnerability, a place for the universities that don't want to change to push back and to resist. And we'll see that. It's still a very open question of what happens to elite higher ed in this period.
- [34:47]
A
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- [38:40]
B
Philosophically so I think that when it comes to driving policy change, the goal of fighting needs to be winning. We should fight to win. And that actually is the reason to take the procedures seriously. Because fighting around and outside the procedures very often turns out not to be a way to win. Those things get reversed. The procedures are stronger than you think. And in the short term, it seems like you have conquered the world. And by the time you get to the medium term, everything has gotten reversed. The purpose of the kinds of procedural protections that we have in, in American political life is basically to find some balance between majority rule and minority rights to allow the majority to govern, whether in its local domain or at the national level, while also allowing its opponents to have their say, to have their rights, and to be able to participate in the process. And since all of us at one time or another are going to find ourselves in both the majority and the minority, most likely, I think it's worth our seeing the value of these procedural protections. They're not neutral, they're not amoral. They're actually rooted in the deepest moral foundation of our society, which is the commitment to the truth that we are all created equal. If we're all created equal, then the rights of all of us matter, and we don't just get to write roughshod over other people's rights. That's why there are procedural protections. And the fact is, those are pretty deeply entrenched in American public life. So that a lot of what the left thought it was doing that was transforming American culture and uprooting the right already now, maybe five, ten years after they did it, turns out to have unleashed a backlash and not worked very well and created more problems for the left than it solved. I don't think that that's a model to follow. I don't think that that's what the right should do in response. Ultimately, you win durable victories by building broad coalitions. That's how American politics works. In the short term, it can seem otherwise. It can seem like, well, we won the election, so now we can do whatever we want. But it doesn't actually work that way. Unless you've built a durable coalition, what you're doing now will get reversed if it doesn't have a real majority behind it. So I think for the sake of winning, it's important to take the system seriously. And look, I think sometimes you go too far and then you get pulled back and you end up in a place that does make some sense. I think what Chris Ruffo has advanced in a lot of places has been very constructive and very important. Even if not all of it endures, not all of it lasts. It has been done through the process. It has been advanced as legislation. It has been moved in places where there are majorities behind it. I absolutely think that that's something we should be doing. We should be advancing and trying, and the back and forth that results from that is not failure. That's the process. That's how you end up with something durable, even if it's not exactly what you sought out to do at the beginning.
- [42:00]
A
I think what's happening in ice, with ice in Minnesota, is a good example of likely backlash. Right. If the goal is to deport illegal immigrants, to reverse the mass illegal immigration that happened during the Biden administration, which I agree was a disaster. But, you know, presumably, you know, we're all Americans deciding these issues. The vast majority of us are going to be in America our whole lives. The goal is to have, on the right is to have legal and orderly immigration system for the long run.
- [42:41]
B
Right?
- [42:41]
A
Not just for the next three years. So if you basically tell ICE agents you can do whatever the heck you want to do with no accountability, you can question anybody who seems suspicious to you and ask them for their papers like, we live in a fascist country, you can. If someone is peacefully filming you, you should take that as a doxing attempt and treat it as basically a threat to your safety as an officer, as opposed to an American citizen exercising his right to film an officer of the law. And then you get, you know, 100 videos in a month coming out of Minnesota of cops doing really pretty brutal things. And I'm not even talking about the, the shootings because those should be treated as, as legal events. And there's, there's, there's differences between them and, and, but I'm just talking about the casual rough handling of bystanders and, and, and this kind of thing. Well, what are the odds that in three years the country just swings to the left and instead of getting the Obama era first Trump term immigration policy, we get Biden's immigration policy all over and immigrants start flooding the border? I mean, that's just not a durable solution to the problem.
- [44:07]
B
I think it's very important. And the term you use in the long run is something we should all be thinking about a lot here. Because in a way, the problem with our contemporary politics is that everybody thinks that we should operate as though this is the last election, as though only the near term matters, as though the country is on the verge of total collapse, we're about to die, and therefore everything's a life and death decision. And only the short term matters. Well, the good news and the bad news is that that's not true. Our country's not on the verge of total collapse. It is not on the edge of the abyss. And that means we have to govern in a way that can endure for a long time. And our system of government is really built for that. It's built to force us to build in ways that will endure. And it forces us to do that by forcing us to build coalitions. A lot of what both parties have been doing in the last 10, 15 years is resisting all the incentives of the constitutional system, which are incentives for coalition building across party lines, and instead insisting, no, you can't work with those people. And so small as our majority is, we're going to do it on our own. And you can't actually do anything durable on your own in American political life. That, to me, is the reason why presidential governance isn't ultimately viable. Our system wants policy to be made by law, and the way we make law is by negotiation in Congress. The insistence on Congress, from my point of view, that's not antiquarianism. That's not just because that's what the founders said. That's because that's how we make durable change. In a divided society, we're going to remain divided. We have to find ways to act together to address problems we have in common, even though we are divided and will be. And the way to do that is by negotiating, by saying, this is what I need. What do you need? Here's what you can have, here's what I can get. And ultimately the result of that is not perfect. It's not textbook public policy, but it's durable because it was arrived at by a broad coalition, it can endure. And the tendency we have to just say, well, the president just got elected, he's going to do this on his own. That makes for four year long policy. And every president spends his first two years undoing what the last guy did and his next two years doing stuff the next guy will undo. And none of it actually endures at all. I think the logic of our constitutional system points toward a solution to this problem, but we're doing a great job of ignoring it and resisting it.
- [46:47]
A
Yeah, the whole ritual of a president getting elected and then immediately undoing every executive order that has been in place for the past four years. There's something really silly about it because the news covers it. People write their articles and op EDS knowing that there's a pretty good chance in four years this executive order will be undone yet again. In a way, it would be more interesting to study the few executive orders that they don't undo and to every four years have a ritual of highlighting the choices that have been retained by the new president, because those are the ones that are going to move the needle.
- [47:27]
B
And.
- [47:27]
A
And there's like an inverse relationship between the attention they get and how important they are in a way.
- [47:33]
B
Yeah, absolutely right.
- [47:36]
A
Another question I wanted to ask you. You know what I. Bush was. The Bush era was the first political era that I remember. And in those days, the Fashionable thing to say in blue areas of the country like I grew up in was that the Democrat party was the party of science. The Republican party was kind of the anti science party. It was the religious party. I know you wrote about this at the time. Stem cell research was the big political flashpoint there. But it was just one example of a set of issues where it seemed evangelical. Christianity was the defining moral framework on the right, and pro science, pro progress was the framework on the left. Fast forward to today. You know, we have the AI boom is set to change everything. Not overnight, but like the Internet, one one day at a time. We're going to be living in a very different world. And it seems that the left is the side that is now saying, slow down, let's regulate much more than the right, which is, you know, which is handshake agreement between the populace and the Silicon Valley. Tech Bros. As they're somewhat dismissively called, where, you know, the right is going to be the side that's charging forward on this revolutionary new technology. And it seems like, it seems like from what I can tell, Christianity hasn't had much of a much of an impact on the right's view of it at all. Is this whole idea of the left as the party of science and tech just completely dead now or was it ever true, or what do you make of that?
- [49:26]
B
Well, I think that both parties have approached these kinds of questions of science and technology in ways that are more political than substantive. And the debates of the early 2000s around biotech were what they were in large part because the left saw in the stem cell debates of those years a way to gain some ground in the abortion debate. They were able to essentially force the right into the most focused possible form of the argument for the humanity of the embryo, literally an embryo, a one cell embryo or seven cell embryo. And the left could say, well, you're saying this is a person and we shouldn't pursue a cure for diabetes because this person has the right to live. To force the right into a position that was harder to defend in the public square, though I think it was the right position and needed to be defended. That advantage was a lot of why there was so much attention given to the stem cell debate in the early 2000s. It's actually, it's almost impossible now to describe to people who didn't experience it how prominent that debate was. You know, if you look at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, both the presidential candidate John Kerry and the vice presidential candidate John Edwards devoted a huge amount of time in Their in their time before the nation at the convention to talk about stem cell research, it was the subject of Bush's first primetime speech to the country. Very peculiar kind of debate. And it had a lot to do with abortion politics. There's just no way around it. Abortion politics has changed a lot since that time. The nature of the Republican coalition has changed a lot. I think the priorities of social conservatives in some ways have changed since then, too. And so I think you're right to say that the voices of a religiously traditionalist Christianity are much less prominent now in our tech debates than they were. They're not entirely missing. They're present in arguments for limits on children's access to social media. I think we're going to see them in some debates around AI too. But, you know, the left has its own kind of natural argument against some of these sorts of technologies. They see them as corporate power. They see them as extensions of elements of capitalism that they don't like. And I think in looking ahead to the kinds of debates we're headed to, because I think that when people look back on our moment, they probably won't call it the Trump era. They're going to think about it as the first phase of the age of AI. And I think we're headed into a set of debates that we have not wrapped our heads around. I think there's going to be tremendous political controversy over AI. I think there will be a lot of resistance to it, both from the left and the right. I don't know that the tech companies are ready for how unpopular they're likely to get in the next few years. And yet at the same time, there's enormous promise here and enormous economic potential, and it's going to take real political leadership to navigate these tensions. So the politics of science and tech are going to take some dramatic turns in the coming years. And I. I don't think we've yet seen the shape of what that will look like, left or right.
- [53:02]
A
I recently saw an AI writer on X write, if you're a CEO of an AI company and you don't want to go to prison, DM me.
- [53:14]
B
I mean, look, to approach the public by saying our technology is going to eliminate a third of white collar jobs, that's just a bad idea. That's really not the way to talk to the American public about what you have to offer here. These technologies have a lot to offer, but I don't think that this kind of drama and doomsdayism is really the way to begin this conversation. And so it's not starting out all that well.
- [53:43]
A
Well, there's sort of an epicle because if I'm looking for investors in the machine I'm trying to build, I have to pitch it as a labor saving device or else who's going to buy it? And so there's basically a gold rush in AI right now. People are leaving venture capital and going to the startup because they're getting paid more as a startup. And if you can persuasively pitch yourself as an AI startup, I don't know if it's still true or for how long it will be true, but the amount of venture capital, private equity money that you can land very quickly and relatively easily compared to other times in the market and other sectors is huge. So, yeah, you have to pitch it as some kind of labor saving device. And then how does that not also land on people's ears as I'm going to be out of a job, lawyers are going to be out of a job, accountants are going to be out of a job, and so on and so forth. But I mean, do you think this is any different, any different than previous technological revolutions? I mean, all of our ancestors were farmers at a point. And I think we're better off. I don't know if you would agree, but I think we're better off now than then.
- [54:58]
B
Yes.
- [54:59]
A
And most of those jobs have been eliminated, but really they, you know, people. Because demand is infinite, people find new things to do that others want them to do.
- [55:09]
B
Yeah, I do think we're better off. And I do think that ultimately it's, it's pretty likely that these technologies will create jobs as well as eliminate jobs. But, you know, the transitions are not easy. The transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy was no simple matter. And the politics of that for several generations was very tumultuous and dangerous. And, you know, if that's where we're headed, I'm not sure that it's a great relief to say we've been there before. But yeah, I do think that ultimately there's a lot of promise in this technology. And navigating getting from here to there will take real political leadership and I don't know that we have it. So we're probably in for some rough waters. No way around it.
- [55:59]
A
Do you think the decline of religion in American society is a net loss for us culturally, politically? How do you think about the decline of religion?
- [56:10]
B
Certainly, yes. I mean, I think religion is ultimately essential to human flourishing and it's essential to the character of a free society. We are still a religious society, certainly relative to many other free societies around the world. The United States looks quite religious. I think in some ways. We are also beginning to see a modest turnaround in the direction of more religiosity or spirituality. I hope it takes some. Some traditional religious forms, but we'll see. But yes, I mean, I think we've lost a lot in losing the kind of broad based religious affiliation and practice that characterized America in the middle of the 20th century. That wasn't always America. We've been through periods like this before. You know, I think there's a tendency, especially among conservatives like me sometimes to think that basically everything was fine until some point in the 1960s, and then it's been downhill ever since. But the fact is it's been up and down. And 19th century America was a very, very tumultuous place. It was extremely uneasy in all kinds of cultural ways. There was all manner of breakdown of culture and family and religion. And so we've lived through these kinds of challenges before. But that doesn't mean they're not very great challenges. They sure are. I think the decline of religion is behind a lot of the other social breakdowns that we see in 21st century America.
- [57:43]
A
What do you make of originalism as a constitutional philosophy? And then second question. What do you think most Americans get wrong about the Constitution?
- [57:56]
B
I think originalism is the right way to think about the role of the judge. And so originalism is the right approach to judicial interpretation of the Constitution, because ultimately anything else is a way of empowering the will of the judge to decide the direction of the law. And we don't empower judges to do that. We do empower other people to do that. We empower members of Congress and to some degree also presidents to decide the direction of things. And so originalism is not exactly how I would think about the Constitution if I were a member of Congress or a president. But as a judge, I think there isn't really a legitimate alternative to asking what do the words of the law mean? And how should we understand what they were intended to achieve? More broadly, I think what people often miss about the Constitution is that one of its primary purposes is to address exactly the problem we face now in contemporary America, which is social division and breakdown. The Constitution is not just there to create a government capable of advancing public policy effectively. It's not just there to organize the relationships between layers of government and institutions in our society. It's also there to hold us together, to allow us to achieve some degree of national Cohesion and unity. That's a core purpose of the Constitution. It's the first purpose that's stated in the preamble, to form a more perfect union. And when you look at the different institutions, you can see that they're built to allow a divided society to address its problems in a relatively unified way. Unified not in the sense that everybody agrees with each other, but that we're capable of acting together to address common problems. Unity, in James Madison's terms, doesn't mean thinking alike. It means acting together. And so you have to ask, how can we act together when we don't think alike? And the Constitution is a set of answers to that question. We act together through competition, through negotiation, through a kind of constructive tension between institutions. The Constitution is there to force us to deal with each other, to engage with people we disagree with, and to do it through negotiation and bargaining that can lead ultimately to some common action. I think Americans in the 21st century really resist all of this. We feel like we're constantly fighting, like we're at each other's throats all the time. But actually we're avoiding fighting. We spend all of our time in cocoons with people we agree with, talking about people we disagree with, rather than talking to those people. And even the people who are most engaged in politics spend fairly little time in direct engagement with people on the other side. I think the Constitution is built to force us to spend more of our time that way, and I think we should let it do that.
- [60:56]
A
Okay, on that note, Yuval Levin, thanks so much for coming on my show. Your most recent book is American how the Constitution Unified Our Nation and could again. Thanks, Yuval.
- [61:08]
B
Thank you so much.