Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution.
Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin’s American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines. Uncovering the framers’ sophisticated grasp of political division, Levin showcases the Constitution’s exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society. Clear-eyed about the ways that contemporary politics have malfunctioned, Levin also offers practical solutions for reforming those aspects of the constitutional order that have gone awry.
Hopeful, insightful, and rooted in the best of our political tradition, American Covenant celebrates the Constitution’s remarkable power to bind together a diverse society, reassuring us that a less divided future is within our grasp.
Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. His previous books include The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. A former member of the White House domestic policy staff under George W. Bush, he lives in Maryland.
Shermer and Levin discuss:
- Trump assassination attempt: conspiracy or incompetence?
- Biden cognitive infirmities and why the party can’t replace him
- Out of 340 million Americans why did we end up with these two guys?
- why we have a two party system
- why the country is more polarized than ever before
- historically divided elections: 1800, 1824
- the unique genius of the founding fathers
- human nature and how politics builds on it
- how liberals and conservatives differ in their view of human nature (and thus politics)
- what is unique about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
- The Federalist Papers
- why the three branches of government—legislative, executive, judicial—were established
- what the founders got right and what they got wrong.
Notes
“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.”
“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
In Federalist No. 10, Madison outlined the problem with competing factions in a direct democracy (“a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…”):
“[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
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This episode was released on July 20, 2024.
