A Balanced Republic with Dr. Yuval Levin

Lindsay Chervinsky: [00:00:00] The United States is the only nation in the world built on an idea. Without a shared religion, culture, ethnicity, or even geographic base, that union can get a little messy sometimes. How can you lead in a nation defined by its differences? This problem is as relevant today as it was in the 18th century.

Welcome to Leadership and Legacy, Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, Executive Director of the Library. In this podcast series, we talk with experts about leadership and history, how studying our past helps us understand our current moment, and how we can apply lessons from leaders in the past to our own lives.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Yuval Levin, the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He has published in just about every major publication, from The New York Times to The Atlantic, is the founder and editor of National Affairs, publishes books like clockwork, and is one of the most genuinely thoughtful people I know.

He has worked in government, so his ideas on the subject are not purely academic, but rather those developed after seeing how the sausage is made. When he speaks, you get the sense that he views words as precious commodities, worth sharing, but never with reckless abandon. He was kind enough to visit me at the George Washington Presidential Library to discuss his most recent book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again, and consider what the Constitution tells us about leadership.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Yuval, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited to talk with you about your work and the Constitution and what we can learn about leadership from it.

Yuval Levin: Thank you very much for having me.

Lindsay Chervinsky: So perhaps we should start with, you have titled this book American Covenant. What does that mean and why did you choose that?[00:02:00]

Yuval Levin: Well, so, to begin with in answering a question like that, you have to admit that titles for books are very hard.

Lindsay Chervinsky: They're so hard.

Yuval Levin: And what to call a book after spending two or three years living with it is always a hard thing for me, and I'm very bad at it. My working title for this book was We, the one word we, and when I informed my publisher of this they were not pleased or amused.

So we worked through a number of ways of thinking about how to understand the message of the book in a way that could be conveyed through a title. And ultimately we landed on covenant, because the Constitution is more than a contract. It describes the shape of the American regime, and in a sense the shape of the American public, and what a covenant is really is a commitment that defines both rights and obligations, that describes the life of a people as a relation, [00:03:00] and so the intention is certainly not to suggest that there's something biblical or sacred about it, I worried about that, the Constitution is just a creation of the American people to govern ourselves, but because it's lasted as long as it has, and functioned as well as it has, it's a part of us in a way that I think is important to understand, and it describes our relations to one another to an important degree, too.

Lindsay Chervinsky: That actually makes me really happy, because I am terrible at titles as well, and I struggle intensely and went through many with my most recent book, and so I'm delighted that I'm not the only one. That's actually incredibly gratifying.

Yuval Levin: There are some people who are very good at it, and I am not one of those people.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah, no, nor am I. But I suspect you were also equally intentional with your chapter titles and the first chapter is “What is the Constitution?”

Yuval Levin: Yeah

Lindsay Chervinsky: So, what is the Constitution and why is it important that we start there?

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: These days, there are loads of Constitutional interpretations [00:04:00] posited by politicians, legal scholars, historians, and journalists. Levin offers a view that's new to me, and I'm guessing new to you, too.

He suggests that one of the best ways to understand the Constitution is as a solution to the problems facing the Founders in the early days of the United States. In particular, the problem of unity. How can we hold the country together despite our differences?

[Transition Noise]

Yuval Levin: Yeah, I really did think hard about chapter titles, and the first chapter is called, “What is the Constitution?”; the last chapter is called, “What is Unity?” and the book is really an attempt to answer each of those questions by way of the other.

The first chapter is what it is because we often think we know the Constitution really well. And one of the things that stands in the way of our understanding it is actually our sense that we already do understand it, that we know exactly what it is.

And we think that what it is, is a legal charter, that the Constitution is law. And it is. The Constitution describes itself as the supreme law of the [00:05:00] land. It is, I think, first and foremost a legal charter, but that's not all it is. The Constitution is also a framework for America's governing institutions.

It's a political document in a very profound and high sense. It is rooted in a sense of what politics is for that I think reaches very far. And ultimately, the Constitution is also an answer to a question, because it is a solution to a problem. And to understand it in its own terms, you have to start with what it was meant to do, and therefore with the set of questions it was meant to answer.

And, so, if you ask me what is the Constitution, I would say it is an attempt to resolve the challenges confronting the American people, early on and ever since. And very high among those challenges is the challenge of unity, of holding together, despite deep differences. That challenge is very much on the minds of the framers.

The first way in which the Constitution describes itself in the preamble is as existing to form a more [00:06:00] perfect union. And the Constitution in some very important ways is an answer to the question, how can this diverse, divided society hold together?

It was already diverse by the end of the 18th century. It was already larger than any of the European nations, it was already evident, especially to James Madison, and in some ways also to George Washington, that the problem they faced was the problem of cohesion, of holding together. And the Constitution begins from that premise.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Can you talk about some of those assumptions, especially Madison's assumption about diversity and its role in the Republic?

Because I think that is sometimes a piece that we miss when we're thinking about what the Republic was and always expected to be.

Yuval Levin: Yeah, absolutely right. So, Madison really stands out among the generation of the framers for worrying about disunity and faction and division.

You can find some recognizable ideological voices in that generation. Someone like [00:07:00] Alexander Hamilton who worries about dynamism and freedom and the kind of social order of society. Someone like Thomas Jefferson who worries about equality and social justice in society. These are, very broadly and crudely speaking, recognizably right and left figures in the course of American history. We have a lot of people like them.

There are very few people like James Madison, who worried, maybe above all, about how society would hold together. His biggest fear was social breakdown, civil conflict. That meant his expectations were low, in a sense. Not easy to meet, but low. He thought the purpose of the Constitution was to avert the worst, more than to achieve the best.

And that maybe the biggest challenge was the question of how to prevent the new nation from falling apart. Madison's a very unusual figure among the framers. He's not a lawyer, like Washington, he's not a lawyer. [00:08:00] He is a politician through and through. Literally every job he ever had was either an elected or appointed political office.

He did nothing else in his life. And he grew up that way too, his father was a lifelong politician, and so he really understood the challenges that politicians have to deal with, and he knew from growing up in Virginia politics that the biggest challenge was going to be how to keep this from falling apart.

And so, from the beginning, he's worried about that. He thinks about the separation of powers with that in mind. He thinks about federalism with that in mind. He thinks about the nature of Congress and the presidency with that in mind, in a way that very few people do. And so, I think it's always a little crude to say one person is the father of the Constitution, and I'm not sure Madison deserves that title. There were a lot of very important figures in giving shape to the document, but certainly more than anybody [00:09:00] else, he saw the potential of the Constitution to resolve the danger of division, and he approached it with that in mind in a way that really shows.

Lindsay Chervinsky: So you mentioned that the last chapter is unity, and I think that is what I find to be so unique about your argument and actually gets at a lot of the leadership takeaways from the book.

So what is unity, and how do you define it, and how does it differ from what maybe our expectations of unity are?

Yuval Levin: Here I really do follow Madison, and Madison offers what can seem like a contradictory view on this subject. He says on the one hand, that agreement is impossible. He tells us in in Federalist 10 that in a free society people are never really going to think alike and unanimity is not an option.

I think that's right. A society that could achieve unanimity doesn't need politics and there is no such society. There's no such community. You can't get a dozen people together and agree about everything. But Madison also insists that it is [00:10:00] absolutely possible for there to be a national character and a national experience that brings Americans together.

And at the center of why that's possible for him is an understanding of unity that says unity doesn't mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And the difference between thinking alike and acting together, that is between thinking and acting on the one hand, and between alike and together, are very, very important for Madison, and I think for understanding the Constitution.

The Constitution views politics as a realm of action. Ultimately what matters is what we decide to do together to address common problems. And for that reason, its sense of what's required to achieve a unified society is modest, but achievable. It also forces a natural kind of question, which is just simply, how can we act together when we don't think alike?

And the Constitution, over and over, rises to present itself as an answer to that question. [00:11:00] That is the question to which its institutions are an answer. How can we act together when we don't think alike? The answer is federalism. The answer is bargaining and negotiation in Congress. The answer is the separation of powers which forces very powerful people to deal with each other.

The American system is really distinct still from the other democracies of the world, most of which are parliamentary systems where when you win an election, you win all the power of the state for some period of time or until you lose your majority or your coalition. In the American system, when you win an election, you win a seat at the table.

And what happens at the table is bargaining and negotiating with other people who also want a seat at the table. Every American president finds himself, sooner or later, thinking, why am I talking to these people? I just won the election. They lost the election. Well, the thing is, they won some elections, too.

And they're in the room because that's what the system does. It puts you in the room with them and forces you to deal with them. Dealing with each other. [00:12:00] Literally making deals with each other, is how the Constitution thinks we can resolve the kinds of challenges that confront a diverse society. And I think the fact that it continues to do that well for us is the reason why the American regime has lasted as long as it has, and why the Constitution is so essential to it.

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: Unity is not just a nice concept, or one the Founders grappled with, however. It has real world implications, and offers a model for successful presidential leadership. Levin shares characteristics of successful presidents: their ability to facilitate the work of Congress, negotiate, and bring people together.

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: So under that vision of the Constitution, and the unity that it tries and forces us to have, or encourages us to have, what does leadership look like under that structure?

Yuval Levin: Leadership, I would say, really looks like facilitating negotiation, bargaining, and accommodation in an effective way. It requires you to know what you want, but also to understand what other people are trying to [00:13:00] achieve, and to recognize that you don't have all the power.

One of the extraordinary things about the American presidency, which is certainly a position with a lot of power, is that ultimately presidents succeed by facilitating the work of Congress and of the political system more generally. If you think about the modern presidents who have achieved a lot, we don't think about their administrative actions generally.

Maybe they're important because they led the country in wartime. But most often, they're important because they facilitated successful legislative accomplishments. The New Deal, the Great Society, the transformation of economic policy under Ronald Reagan. These aren't things presidents did on their own, they're things presidents did by enabling Congress to reach some dramatic legislative bargain.

And so leadership in our democracy requires recognizing what's necessary for bargaining and accommodation. That's [00:14:00] not what we naturally think of when we think of leadership. And I think our expectations of the presidency in particular have become distorted by that fact. We think leaders just do what they want, and they're most effective when they're best at achieving their own goals.

And of course that's true in a sense, but they have to see that the achievement of those goals requires bringing other people to the table effectively. And successful leadership in the American system requires recognizing the importance of bargaining and accommodation. It's very important to the legitimacy of American democracy.

And I think the Constitution really prioritizes legitimacy over technocratic effectiveness, over efficiency, over all the kinds of things that we might want to see more of in our government. We should never underestimate the importance of legitimate public policy, and the Constitution really doesn't underestimate it.

Lindsay Chervinsky: You mentioned a couple of examples, but I'm wondering if you could dig into a time when maybe we saw this working well, when the American people had more [00:15:00] accurate expectations for what that would look like—as you said today, we think that the president should be able to fix everything and we reward people who promise to enforce their will even if that is inconsistent with how the constitutional system works, or perhaps you could focus on some individuals who embodied this particularly well to give us examples, or an, example of what it looks like in action

Yuval Levin: There's not exactly a golden age on this front, Americans have always been a little bit confused about the purpose of the Constitution, really from the very beginning, but I would say that there are—the good examples amount to presidents who are extremely good at sharing credit, and at empowering the different factions of our society to negotiate.

Abraham Lincoln's an example, he's a wartime president and wartime gives presidents a lot of power, but Lincoln very often used that power to bring together the factions of the coalition he was leading. You could see that in his cabinet, you could see that in his work with [00:16:00] Congress, in the way that he approached the ratification of the post-Civil War amendments, which he only saw the beginning of, really, but all of that was about recognizing how bargaining and accommodation could work.

I think Franklin Roosevelt was an example of this, too, in recognizing that, although he had massive congressional majorities, He was nonetheless governing a very complicated and divided society, and that meant that negotiating was the essence of what he had to achieve. I think modern presidents have tended to lose sight of this in their rhetoric about their own role some, and to just talk about the Congress and the process of policymaking as obstacles, rather than as ways of broadening the legitimacy of what they want to achieve.

And it's worked to their detriment. It doesn't help them. It makes them look weak, not strong, when they're not able to advance their agenda, when they don't think about what Congress needs from them. And so I think our system really does force people in positions of [00:17:00] leadership to think about their role, their place in the broader system.

This is always what stands out about George Washington to me, that he understood his role, and not just his goals, in a way that was always on his mind. I think effective leaders think that way.

Lindsay Chervinsky: What stood out to me about what you just said was that the idea of treating Congress like an obstacle, it almost—well, first of all, it almost never works because we do have a multiple branch system that—presidents can't get rid of Congress.

But ultimately that ends up making them look weaker in the long run.

Yuval Levin: Yes.

Lindsay Chervinsky: And so that posturing is actually quite nefarious for their long-term success. And I would imagine also legacy.

Yuval Levin: Yeah. I mean, I think forcing confrontations you can't win is not a way to be strong. And ultimately presidents really can't achieve much without Congress.

They just actually can't. There's great strength in recognizing that. I think a president that says, this is what I want, but I don't have the power to do it myself, I'm going to bring these people around to seeing why we ought to do it, [00:18:00] is a strong president.

Our presidents have tended to run roughshod over those obstacles and limits on their power. Or they'll say, I can't do this, and then three weeks later they'll try to do it anyway with executive action. We don't remember our presidents for executive action. We remember our presidents for legislative action, and that's a fact that a lot of modern presidents have had a lot of trouble processing and dealing with.

But ultimately, durable public policy has to be achieved by legislation, because when you do things by administrative action, your successor's just gonna undo them. And that just doesn't last. What lasts is legislation, because Congress is the institution built to represent the diversity of our society.

And so when it's able to advance legislation, it does it by building broad coalitions, and those are harder to undo. They, they're often impossible to undo.

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[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: I was eager to talk to Levin about his definition of moderate leadership. Moderate is a term that usually describes a position on an axis from progressive to conservative, but he has a definition which is not one we typically see in the news. Levin argues that being a moderate is all about working together and moving slow.[00:20:00]

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: In preparation for this conversation, I was listening to some of the other podcasts you've done, and I was listening to the interview you did on EconTalk. And one of the things you mentioned, which I thought was such an interesting way of thinking about this idea, was the importance of moderate leadership.

And your definition of moderate was not the one we typically see in the news, but I think is actually a much more effective way of encouraging participation. So I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Yuval Levin: I wonder if I can remember my definition of moderate—

Lindsay Chervinsky: [Laughter] I’ll prompt you if you can’t.

Yuval Levin: I—I would say, it's important to see that moderation is not an ideological position, but rather that moderation is a temperament and disposition toward politics. And that ultimately even if the goals you have are at the ideological margin of our politics, the way to achieve them requires a capacity to build coalitions.

And that means that you have to understand what you're trying to [00:21:00] do, in a way that recognizes the necessity of gradual movement, and the way in which our system restrains sudden hard turns, sharp twists. This too, it's especially important for American presidents.

What stands out about the way the Framers thought about the presidency, what stands out about it to me, reading it in the 21st century, is how much they valued stability. And they expected the president to provide that. Our contemporary presidents don't really think that way. They think of their jobs in something like the way that Congress should think of its job, which is their role is to be the partisans who advance a policy agenda.

That's part of the president's role, but that's fundamentally Congress's role. And ultimately, the presidency is an administrative job, and that means that it requires stability and temperamental moderation. Leadership requires that you be calm in a crisis, that you be even [00:22:00] tempered, and that ultimately people understand what you're doing as recognizing tradeoffs.

And I do think that that's a kind of moderation that's in very short supply. The moderate is not the person who's between the two ends of the ideological spectrum, but the person who makes decisions in a calm way that recognizes the complexity of the situation.

Lindsay Chervinsky: I think that's such an important distinction, because what you're not saying is that people can't have strongly held opinions, or even somewhat radical opinions on the scale of the options in our political system, but rather how you go about pursuing those things is actually far more important.

Yuval Levin: And I think the Constitution forces us to see that over and over by forcing people in power to deal with one another. You can never imagine that your opinion is the only one that matters, because at the end of the day you're gonna have to get other people to agree, and that has a moderating effect on the kinds of people who seek power.

Lindsay Chervinsky: I want to circle back to one other thing that you mentioned, which is that the Framers really intended the president to be more of an [00:23:00] administrative position, and that really aligns with how the presidents operated at least in a domestic function in the early period.

And it wasn't that they didn't have enormous power, Washington did have enormous power, and he used enormous power. But when it came to legislation and the legislative agenda, he put forward ideas, or his secretaries put forward ideas, but it was up to Congress to actually do it. It wasn't the president's responsibility. And often—I've spent the last six months harping on the Alien and Sedition Acts because to be sure, Adams signed them and at times was supportive, but he didn't ask for them. He didn't pass them. That was really Congress's function. And misunderstanding that relationship, I think, is—is a modern construction.

Yuval Levin: Yeah, I think there's a real vacuum in contemporary political science on the question of administration. What actually is that? What is administration, is a question that we're not really able to answer anymore.

Because it's very hard for us to separate it [00:24:00] from the advancement of policy through the political process. And that's not exactly what administration is. Administration is the management of the instrumentality of the system. Presidents gain enormous power by being administrators, because working the system does give you a lot of control over how general ideas become specific actions. But it's not the same thing as making policy.

And I think contemporary presidents really lack a definition of administration. And in a sense, a definition of their job is a result of that. It's hard for them to distinguish their role from Congress's, and so someone will say, Congress can't change the immigration system, so I'm gonna do it.

Well, that's not how the system works, and for a president to say that, again, I think it gets back to the way in which constraints actually empower a leader. A president needs to be able to say, I can't change the immigration system, Congress needs to do it, I [00:25:00] will work with them to do it, but it is their job.

You have to say that because it's true, and so ultimately, the president really can't solve the problems, that our recent presidents have said they could resolve. And by recognizing what the job is as an administrator, I think they could have a better chance of showing the public how they can be effective, and also where they need Congress to be effective.

The early presidents just had a better understanding of this. There's no question about it. Now, they also had less to do. The American government was much smaller, and its ambitions were much more manageable. The distinction between foreign policy, where the president really has a tremendous policy setting role, and domestic policy was much easier to point to.

Domestic policy was almost entirely in the hands of the states to begin with, so it was easier for them. But, I think modern presidents would be helped a lot by recognizing that the presidency is not, first of [00:26:00] all, a representative office. It's democratically elected in order to be accountable, but one person can't be representative of a massive nation like ours.

And it's also fundamentally an administrative office in a way that we would really help ourselves by understanding better.

Lindsay Chervinsky: As you've described some of these different elements of what perhaps a president who exercises good leadership under the Constitution would look like, a lot of it sounds quite familiar to me when I think of Dwight Eisenhower.

He was quite moderate and temperate in his temperament as you've described it. Often his big legislation passed with as many Democratic votes as it did Republican votes. He was very attuned to the importance of the administrative details, I think perhaps because of the military background, um, and the need to reign those in as president whenever necessary. And I'm wondering what your sense of that is.

Yuval Levin: I very much agree with that. I think Eisenhower, now he had some advantages. He was an unusually unifying [00:27:00] figure, and also in an unusually unified time, but he had a sense of the presidency that was very executive. I think he was well served by having been a general and by never having been a member of Congress.

The worst possible preparation for the presidency is the Senate. I just think we should have a constitutional amendment that people who serve in the Senate cannot run for president. It doesn't work.

Lindsay Chervinsky: [Laughter] I'm sure the Senators will definitely sign that.

Yuval Levin: Well, you'd have a lot fewer people running for Senate, maybe.

It doesn't work. And those jobs could not be more different. I think Eisenhower, because of his own background, really understood that in a very fundamental way. It is also worth seeing that ultimately the—the strength of the president's position is a function of the way in which the system sets up confrontations.

Confrontations between the branches are not failures of the president or of Congress. They're intentional. They're—they're meant to happen. [00:28:00] The veto power is meant to be used.

I think there too, because of the partisanship of 21st century American political life, we tend to see some of these inter branch confrontations as failure of party discipline. Members of Congress think their job is to serve the president of their party, or to oppose the president of the other party. And when the president has Congress under the control of his own party, we think that a veto is a failure.

I worked for George W. Bush, who—I mean, I'll tell you a very quick story. In 2006, there was a bill moving through the House. It had to do with stem cell research funding, which was gonna pass. And the president had said he would veto it if it passed. So we had a little meeting with him, that issue was in my purview, as a policy staffer, and we said we just wanna make sure you're really gonna veto the bill, and he said, yeah, I've said this a thousand times, I'm gonna veto the bill, and we all got up to leave.

And the president says, well, now, a veto, what do we actually do? Do we sign something? I did this as governor, but I don't really know what it looks like. This is 2006, he'd [00:29:00] been president for five years. And, in fact, he had never vetoed anything. Republicans had controlled Congress that whole time, they still did. And they sent him nothing he did not approve of.

And, I will tell you, in that moment, well, my first thought was, oh no, I don't know the answer to this question. I was the briefer in this meeting. I was supposed to answer his question. Somebody else knew, thankfully. But my second thought was, this is not working.

This is not how the system is meant to work. If we're not using the structures, the instruments of the system, something is wrong here. And what's wrong is that the separation of powers has become instead a separation of parties. And I do think that that is one way in which our system has become disfigured that makes it very hard for it to serve its role, including its unifying role.

Lindsay Chervinsky: I don't know if you're a West Wing fan, but the first thing that came to mind is, oh my gosh, this is the West Wing episode where President Bartlett has to do a veto and there's this whole question about does he sign it? Does he stamp it? Does he have to do both? And that's pretty funny that you actually lived that.

Yuval Levin: You know, working in [00:30:00] the White House kind of cured me of being a West Wing fan. It's so different. But I did like that show.

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: Throughout our conversation, Levin had emphasized administrative skills as a critical component of successful presidential leadership—even as administration, as a concept, goes neglected and undefined. Which made me think: have we stopped valuing politics as a particular set of skills?

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: So one of the ideas that I—that has been percolating in my mind for some time and—and when I—I'm putting this together, when, as you were talking, with a line in your book that really stuck out to me, which is that we should, and we need, to take politics seriously, and we don't.

Yuval Levin: Yeah.

Lindsay Chervinsky: And I think what connected that for me is you were talking about the need to administer well and what it means to be a good and effective senator is quite different and requires different skills and background and ability than what it means to be a good president.

And I'm wondering if we, as part of our not taking politics seriously, [00:31:00] is have we begun to devalue the—what it means to be a politician? Because that word has become so loaded, you know, I think all the time we hear people saying like, oh, we want a businessman to come in and run the government or, oh, we want someone who hasn't been involved in politics.

And sometimes I want to say, well, you wouldn't go to a doctor who has no experience being a doctor. You wouldn't go to a lawyer who's never tried a case. Don't you want someone who can actually do the work?

Yuval Levin: Yeah, this is part of what frustrates me about this moment, too, and it sends me back to James Madison, who was unabashedly a lifelong politician, and he knew that that's what he had to offer, and that was not seen as a disadvantage, but on the contrary, it was a reason to take him seriously.

I do think that politics is essential work and part of the reason we've come to devalue it in the way that we have is that we think of politics in very, very performative terms now. We think that politics is fundamentally a [00:32:00] form of rhetoric, that it's about expressing the frustrations of your voters rather than that it is a role in the system that involves a particular job and that that job is different from being a commentator about the system.

A lot of contemporary politicians—and you see a lot of members of Congress who would much rather be talking about Congress than working in Congress. And so they just do—they never vote yes on anything, and their inclination is to just run and find a camera and say, you wouldn't believe what happens here, and you want to say, well, you're in your seventh term in the House, maybe you are what happens here.

That sense that they are insiders is very, very hard for people to embrace now in our system. And it's particularly so in a populist moment like this. To be an insider seems like it is a bad thing. And so you always want to be the outsider, even if you're the president of the United States. You want to say, well, I came here to blow this up.

Well, that's not the job of the president of the United States. There is no greater [00:33:00] insider than our president. There are no greater insiders than members of the House and Senate. And politicians have to be willing to embrace that. If they don't want that, then they shouldn't do it. No one's forcing them to run for office.

But if they do run for office, they should see that what they're asking for is to be made insiders whose job is to negotiate in the direction of legislative accommodation and administrative action, and the unwillingness to embrace that responsibility, I think, is a big part of what's gone wrong in our system, and of course, we as voters encourage that.

We want people who will tell us they're outsiders. We're essentially asking people to tell us that they don't know what the heck they're doing, and I don't know why we value that, but apparently we do.

Lindsay Chervinsky: So I really sometimes wish that I had a magic wand and I could just change some things. So if you had a magic wand and you could get people to care about that, what are, like, how would we go about doing that?

What would be the changes either in our system, whether, you know, it's campaign finance reform [00:34:00] or how do we convince Americans that they need to care about someone actually wanting to do their job well? What are changes that we could try and make to better adjust the incentives in our system?

Yuval Levin: I think incentives is the key word, and this is really a lesson of Madison too.

Madison knows there's no magic wand, but he also knows that people really do respond to incentives. Politicians are ambitious, and that means that they want to succeed, and that means that the definition of success is what determines how they behave. So if the definition of success in politics is you have a big social media following and you're a cultural celebrity, then that's what ambitious people are going to do, and that's what's happening now.

If the definition looks more like you are able to bring substantive policy results back to your voters, or you are able to leave the country in a stronger place than where you found it, ambitious people will find ways to do that too. And I think Madison grasped in thinking about the structure of [00:35:00] the institutions, that incentives are created by institutional rules. That culture is a function of structure in politics.

And so that's why the structure of the separation of powers is so important. It sets people off against each other in a way that drives them to negotiate despite themselves. And it's also how we should think about solving some of the problems we have now.

Part of it is voter expectations. People need to see that their unhappiness with the system should lead them to want a different kind of politician. Not just someone else who will play the outsider. But someone who's actually capable of doing the work, channeling voter frustration, and there's plenty of voter frustration now, in the direction of a more functional system, would take a certain kind of political leader. But I also think the rules of the system can change behavior.

And in the book, I think particularly about the rules of Congress, because I think the weakness of Congress, the intentional, [00:36:00] willful weakness of Congress, is the biggest constitutional problem we face now. Presidents overreach because Congress underreaches. Judges overreach because Congress underreaches.

And Congress underreaches on purpose, because its members don't want the responsibility. So the question is, what can we do in Congress? I think that to invest members more in their legislative work would require a couple of kinds of changes. Some of them are electoral. I think that the primary system and the nature of our election system now encourages a kind of performative politician.

But some of them are institutional, so that we've centralized power in Congress in a way that leaves most members with no real legislative work to do. They think that spending time in committee marking up a bill is a waste of time, and they're right, because that work doesn't actually go anywhere.

Ultimately, decisions are made by party leaders, that's about, maybe four or eight people out of 535 members of Congress. To change that would require [00:37:00] re-empowering the committee system, allowing the work that members do in their everyday legislative business to matter. I think decentralizing power in both houses, not to individual members, but to committees, the middle layers where negotiation happens, is absolutely essential now.

So, reforms to my mind look like things like letting committees control floor time. Which, if you want to give the Speaker of the House a heart attack, talk to him about that idea. It is not popular with party leaders. But, the way this works in some state legislatures even, is that a committee that clears a bill, and in some states it's with at least one or two members from the minority party, just gets time on the floor.

That bill will get voted on. That would let members kind of fire with real bullets, and make a big difference in how they think about their job. That kind of change changes the budget process in the committee system. The schedule—they seem very mundane, but they make a big difference.

Lindsay Chervinsky: I love [00:38:00] those changes.

I also love that they don't require a constitutional amendment, because so many of our challenges often feel insurmountable, and those do not.

Yuval Levin: Yeah, I don't think that the problems we face now are problems that call for a constitutional amendment. There are times when that's the case, but I don't think that's the case now.

And that's a good thing because I can't imagine getting three quarters of the states to agree on anything, two thirds of both houses to agree on anything. But—

Lindsay Chervinsky: We can't even agree on which daylight savings we're supposed to do.

Yuval Levin: Exactly.

Lindsay Chervinsky: So I don't think that constitutional power is going to be one of the subjects we find to agree on.

Yuval Levin: But you know, getting members to see that their own lives could be less terrible if the schedule of the House was a little different, you only need the House to agree on that. And that's much more manageable.

Lindsay Chervinsky: That makes a lot of sense.

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: This conversation all brought us back to the Constitution itself: what it is, what it isn't, and the way it enshrines the role of compromise in our political system.

[Transition Noise]

Lindsay Chervinsky: When I talk about the Constitution, I personally think it's really important to disabuse people of the notion [00:39:00] that it's this holy thing that has, was handed down from high above. Because understanding that it was a series of compromises that they put together doing the very best that they could is, I think, really essential to understanding its evolution, even just in the early years, and interpretation and use case.

But it is also this thing that is the longest national surviving written constitution and a certain amount of reverence is required for the Republic to continue to exist because it does require citizen buy in to uphold it. Most of our society is not enforced with military might.

How do you square those? Like, when you are personally thinking about the Constitution as this series of compromises that was imperfect in a lot of ways, and yet critically important, how do you put those together in your head?

Yuval Levin: Yeah. Veneration is an interesting word there. It's Madison's word. He says, time bestows veneration on all things. And there is a truth to that. There's something very important about the fact that our system has [00:40:00] lasted as long as it has. Americans like to think about the United States as a young country, and the Europeans are the old ones, but our government is much older than any of the European governments.

We've had the same system of government—you know, I used to give tours of the Capitol when I was an intern for a member of the House, and they tell you to start by saying the Capitol building opened its doors in December of 1800. And you just say that, move on. But that's amazing. The Capitol building has housed the same institution since December of 1800.

There is no other government that can say that about itself. Even in Britain, where the institutions have the same names they had in, in the, in the 18th century. They're not the same institutions. Ours really are. They've changed a little bit at the margins. But the American regime is the most stable and the oldest of the contemporary democracies.

And that's despite the fact that our country is vast and diverse and full of crazy people doing dynamic things all the time. So, we should be very impressed with that, and very grateful for it. [00:41:00] But, we should not imagine that that means that we can't make changes, or that that means that everything about it is somehow perfect.

And getting to know how the Constitution came to be, is definitely a cure for imagining that there's anything perfect about it. The system encourages compromise, and it is the result of compromise. It's the product of compromise. There's no defending it in the abstract as a philosophical creation, because the institutions are all products of deals that could have gone another way.

And that's very important to see. It's actually why there's some room in the joints. They didn't resolve some very important questions. Right? Are, are, are the large states or the small states powerful in Congress? They just said yes, they are. And those, there's a deep contradiction there, and they just let it be.

Is the president an elevated head of state or a glorified clerk? The answer is yes. The president is an elevated head of state and a glorified clerk. And that [00:42:00] tension lets the system kind of shift its weight without losing its balance in a really extraordinary way.

So that there are times when we need the president to be an elevated head of state. There are times when we need the president to be a glorified clerk, and the role lets him be both of those things. I think that's a very important piece of what the Constitution lets us do, but it is a function of its being just a compromise, a mess. There's real beauty in a political mess, and I, I find that in the Constitution as well as in what it lets us do.

Lindsay Chervinsky: One of my favorite examples is, you know, the Constitution mentions that they're going to be department secretaries. But not what departments because they leave that to Congress, and then when Congress was creating them, they couldn't come to an agreement about how they were to be removed, so they just didn't say, and they said, when the secretaries are removed, the chief clerk becomes responsible for the documents, acknowledging that it could happen, but not how it could happen.

And so it was up to John Adams to actually try to remove a secretary and when the [00:43:00] Senate confirmed it, then it starts to establish that legal precedent, which of course the Supreme Court confirms in 1926, but it's a great example of how these same people just a couple years later still hadn't made up their mind and they just punt on it.

Yuval Levin: There are all these pieces that are vague and meant to be, as Hamilton says, liquidated by practice. And it's not just that, I mean, we still find them now. There's a conversation now about what does it really mean that the Constitution lets the president adjourn Congress. It's never been done. It's a power of the president in Article Two.

And there's no discussion of it in the records of the convention. It just says it there and—why? And how? And what are the limits of that? When can the president do that? For how long? We don't know and you know—

Lindsay Chervinsky: Someday we might find out.

Yuval Levin: It’s 235 years later, and we have a president who might just be in a mood to try, so we may find out.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah, so one of the things we always try and do when we're talking about these leadership characteristics is discuss how they might be applied to their own lives [00:44:00] and how they might apply to people who aren't presidents or congressmen or justices.

So when we think about this type of constitutional leadership, how would that apply to the day to day for someone either in their own work, or their own nonprofit, or their own business?

Yuval Levin: Well, first of all, I think that the idea that unity means not thinking alike but acting together can apply to everybody's life all the time. The idea that we don't have to all think the same way in order for us to be part of one process, one movement, one effort, one institution. Um, that's an extremely useful thing to keep in mind because—get together with any group of people of any size and you will immediately disagree about something, and the idea that the goal is not to agree about the underlying idea, but about what we can do together is, I think, just very valuable in a free society. It's extremely important.

It's also worth seeing that the way [00:45:00] in which the Constitution thinks about how free people interact has a lot to do with norms and standards that don't all have to be written down and enforced strictly. It's also worth seeing that that has to do with a balance of rights and obligations that is implicit in the Constitution. There are high expectations of what the different constitutional officers, and citizens, owe each other in a way that I think is important to any institution in a free society.

The thing about a free society is we can't be told to do the right thing. We have to choose to do the right thing. And that's a hard burden of responsibility.

I think our constitution is a good example of both how that can be expressed and articulated and how it can be managed in practice. But of course, when it breaks down, it's also an example of how important norms are and how much we need them. And I do think we're living in a period now when it is breaking down, and we have to [00:46:00] think about how to reconstruct its capacity to function.

And that requires us to go back to the foundation of it and think about what it really is.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, for our final question, we always ask when George Washington comes to mind and you think of leadership, what—what do you think of?

Yuval Levin: There's so much to say about that, and I love Washington so much. He's another non-lawyer Founder and Framer, and as a non-lawyer student of the Constitution, I appreciate those especially.

But Washington was really a leader in a way that—I think it's hard to point to any of the other members of the founding generation who thought of themselves as a leader in that way. He always knew that he was being watched, but he did not think performatively in our modern sense about what he was doing.

And he always had an awareness that everything he did was setting a precedent. It's especially important in a first president, but it's important actually in any president, in any leader, that in a sense the future is watching. And [00:47:00] It matters how you carry yourself. I think he, more than anybody, had the sense of what it was to play a role without being a circus performer.

That's very hard for leaders to balance. And it's one of the many things we can learn from George Washington.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Very well said. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. And this was just such an enlightening conversation.

Yuval Levin: Thank you. It's really my pleasure.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership Legacy, and thank you so much again to our guest, Yuval Levin.

You can buy his books, including his most recent, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, wherever books are sold. And read his regular op-eds at The New York Times, National Review, and on the AEI website. I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.

Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and Primary Source Media.

In the spirit of George Washington's leadership, we [00:48:00] feature the perspectives of leaders from across industries and fields. As such, the thoughts expressed in this podcast are solely the views of our guests. And do not reflect the opinions of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

To learn more about Washington's leadership example, or to find out how you can bring your team to the George Washington Presidential Library, go to gwleadershipinstitute.org. To find more great podcasts from Mount Vernon, visit georgewashingtonpodcast.com. And to learn more about Primary Source Media, visit primarysourcemedia.com.

Join us in two weeks for our next great conversation. Talk to you then.