The Roots of the Assassination Attempt

This episode delves into the attempted assassination at a political rally and its implications on national politics, examining the societal divisions that may have led to such violence.

1. The assassination attempt is a manifestation of extreme political divisions in the U.S.
2. Despite the severity, the incident narrowly avoided a national tragedy, highlighting the fragility of current political discourse.
3. The episode discusses the role of the Constitution in unifying the nation and addressing political crises.
4. Yuval Levin provides insights into the decline of trust in political institutions and leaders.
5. The discussion underscores the need for a more responsible and restrained political rhetoric to prevent future violence.

1: Immediate Aftermath

Details the assassination attempt's impact on Donald Trump and the immediate political ramifications. Yuval Levin and Barry Weiss discuss the potential for a shift in the political landscape following this violent act.

• Barry Weiss: "As Neil Ferguson wrote in the free press, an inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump's ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him."

2: Political Culture and Brokenness

Analyzes the underlying issues of political division and distrust that may have contributed to the assassination attempt. Levin reflects on the need for constitutional remedies to restore trust and unity.

• Yuval Levin: "Our politics has become too much about itself. It is too much about whether we can afford to have the other party win, rather than about what our party or their party is offering to do."

3: Constitutional Solutions

Discusses how the Constitution might help address the current political turmoil by fostering unity and repairing the nation's political fabric.

• Yuval Levin: "American how the Constitution unified our nation and could again, it gives us a roadmap on how the constitution can bring the country together to solve our present political troubles."

1. Engage in informed and respectful political discussions to bridge divides.
2. Educate yourself on the Constitution and its role in governance.
3. Advocate for political reforms that enhance transparency and trust.
4. Support leaders who prioritize unity and constructive dialogue.
5. Participate actively in the political process to ensure leaders are held accountable.

As you now well know, at 6:11 p.m. on Saturday evening, shots rang out at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person, a 50-year-old man named Cory Comperatore, was killed. Two others, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were gravely injured. Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet.

Before the 45th president was whisked away by Secret Service, he emerged defiant with his fist pumping in the air, blood on his ear and face. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he yelled at the crowd, to which they chanted back: “USA! USA! USA!”

As we would later learn, one of the bullets pierced the top of Trump’s right ear, flying just a hair’s breadth away from his head. One inch. One inch and we would be having a very different conversation. As Niall Ferguson wrote in The Free Press:

“An inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin’s hand, an unexpected move by the former president—for whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day.”

Saturday’s attempted assassination has already shifted the course of this election. How will it shape our politics and our country? And was this violence the inevitable outcome of our painfully divided country, and who is responsible for those divisions?

Those are the subjects of today’s episode. This is an episode in two parts.

The first part is about the unspeakable events that took place on Saturday. Then in the second half, you’ll hear our initial conversation that took place last week about political brokenness, the crisis of trust between the American people and our elected officials—and how to fix it with some help from the Constitution. In light of what happened over the weekend, it feels even more poignant.

The guest in both halves of this episode is Yuval Levin, one of the greatest political analysts and explainers of our time.

Yuval has even been called the “the most important voice in the political culture.” He worked on domestic policy in the George W. Bush administration. He’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress, the presidency, the courts, the Constitution, and American political life.

He’s the author of several books including The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. And he just published American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. It gives us a road map to how the Constitution can bring the country together to solve our political troubles.

What I particularly love about Yuval is that when everyone around us seems to be taking the black pill, Yuval is clear-eyed. He’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Yuval is just realistic, informed by a deep sense of American history that gives him a perspective on what’s happening now while motivated by a true love for this country.

People

Donald Trump, Yuval Levin

Companies

None

Books

"The Fractured Republic," "A Time to Build," "American: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again"

Guest Name(s):

Yuval Levin

Content Warnings:

None

Barry Weiss
From the free press, this is honestly and I'm Barry Weiss, as you now well know. At 611 pm on Saturday evening, shots rang out at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person, a 50 year old father named Corey Comparatore, was killed. David Dutch and James Coppenhaver were gravely injured, and Trump's ear was grazed by a bulletin. Before the 45th president was whisked away by Secret Service, he emerged defiant, his fist pumping in the air. Blood streaked across his face. Fight.

Yuval Levin
Fight. Fight.

Barry Weiss
Fight. Fight.

Yuval Levin
Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight.

Barry Weiss
Fight. He yelled at the crowd, to which they chanted back. As we would later learn, one of the bullets pierced the top right of Trump's ear, flying just a hair's breadth away from his head. One inch, one inch, and we would be having a very different conversation. As Neil Ferguson wrote in the free press, an inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump's ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin's hand, an unexpected move by the former president. For whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day. Saturdays attempted assassination has already shifted the course of this election. How will it shape our politics and our country going forward? And was the violence that we saw in butler the inevitable outcome of our painfully divided country? And if so, who is responsible for those divisions? Those are the subjects of today's episode. This is a conversation in two parts. The first part is about the events that took place on Saturday. Then in the second half, you'll hear our initial conversation that took place late last week. That conversation is about political brokenness, the crisis of trust between the american people and our elected officials, and how to fix that crisis of trust with some help from the Constitution. In light of what happened over the weekend, it feels even more poignant. The guest in both parts of this conversation is the same its Yuval Levin, one of the great political analysts and explainers of our time. Yuval has been called the most important voice in political culture. He worked on domestic policy in the George W. Bush administration, and today hes a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress, the presidency, the courts, the Constitution and american political life more generally. Yuval is the author of several books, including the Fractured Republic and a time to build, which I've recommended to many people. I think it explains almost better than anything the current state of our brokenness and how to fix it. Yuval just published a new book. It's called American how the Constitution unified our nation and could again, it gives us a roadmap on how the constitution can bring the country together to solve our present political troubles. One of the things I admire most about Yuval is that when so many people around us seem to be taking the black pill or giving into nihilism, Yuval is clear eyed. He's neither optimistic nor pessimistic, just realistic. He's someone informed by a deep sense of american history that gives them a perspective on what's happening now and someone that's motivated by a real love for this country. If you're anything like me, this is the only thing you're thinking about right now. It's a conversation you're not going to want to miss. Stay with us.

Yuval Levin
This is the story of the one as head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working. The H Vac is humming and his facility shines with Granger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces, plus 24/7.

Barry Weiss
Customer support, his venue never misses a beat.

Yuval Levin
Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

Barry Weiss
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Yuval Levin
Yeah, I was home with my wife, and it just kind of came across my phone. And there were no details at first, and it was hard to know what happened. And then the early pictures with blood on his face suggested something very, very serious had happened. And I think, in a way, it's just like you say, the idea that we were millimeters away from an entirely new and dark reality is a little bit of a metaphor for how we've often played our politics in the last few years. We run great risks constantly, and it always feels like we're an inch away from the whole thing falling apart. This really would have been, of course, so very much worse. But it's bad enough. I think what we saw here is the real specter of political violence, where a lot of the kinds of rhetoric and actions that we've seen in our politics seem to be bumping up against the boundaries of our constitutional democracy. Here was someone who just broke through the boundaries and showed us what it would be like if we didn't have the political order that we have. I think it should be sobering. I think it should cause a lot of people in our politics to back off a little bit and think about what they say and what they do and how. I don't think it means that our politics needs to stop being intense and that we need to stop being critical of each other and all of that. But we have to start by being grateful for the basic fact that we have social peace in America, that this isn't how we live all the time and to recognize that we run great risks. I mean, this is not the first act of political violence in this phase of our politics. We've been living now for a decade and more with somewhat smaller scale but still very serious instances like this. We've seen shootings of members of Congress. We've seen a foiled assassination attempt of a Supreme Court justice in his family. We did see a mob storm the Capitol to disrupt the certification of a presidential election. We've seen rising threat levels against all kinds of public officials. So I would say at first this seems almost like a natural next escalation. But I also think that it is very different and that it might just force us to ask, what are we doing? And in a way that could help us step back from the brink a little bit. I certainly hope so.

Barry Weiss
As you just noted, this wasn't a bullet or several bullets that sort of came out of nowhere. We have been living in an atmosphere in this country of political violence. You think of Gabby Gifford, Steve Scalise, a number of other people, and then, frankly, the, I guess to call it lower level violence that's been happening in american cities with pretty consistent intensity since the summer of 2020. But the other aspect of this that's getting talked about a lot in the past two days is the extent to which the rhetoric around Donald Trump was sort of inevitably going to lead to something like this. In other words, what did you expect would happen if you called Trump Hitler and say that he is a threat to the very foundation of democracy? Well, you know, if any of us had the chance to take out Hitler, wouldn't we have done it? So I'm wondering what you make of that, because on the one hand, it seems totally within the bounds of reasonable political, passionate disagreement and discourse to be able to say, you know, this person is a threat to democracy, and that should be within the bounds of what's acceptable. But there are other people that are saying, well, the people that did that sort of set the stage for this moment. Contend with those two arguments for me, if you would.

Yuval Levin
I think this cuts in both of those directions in a way that is worth thinking through. There is definitely a problem with a politics that is about breaking its own boundaries, where if the argument you have against the opposition is not that it is wrong about one thing or another or that this person or that person is not fit for the job, these are arguments you can make in a democracy. But if your argument is that the other side is a fascist or that ultimately a whole swath of voters are a threat to democracy, or that the other side is trying to destroy the american constitutional system, and that ultimately, this is an argument about the very foundations of our system. And rather than a debate had within the boundaries of that system, I think the difference between those two is a difference that we have got to come to terms with. Our politics has become too much about itself. It is too much about whether we can afford to have the other party win, rather than about what our party or their party is offering to do. I think we have to start from the premise that our country is going to be here in four years, and that if things are worse, it's mostly not going to be because of the president, and that what we have to offer the country are ways of addressing public problems that are tractable. That is, I'd like to have more of this and less of that. You'd like to have less of that and more of this. Let's figure out a way to do what we can do. That's what politics needs to be more like. Even in a moment when tensions are high, when passions are fierce, there are going to be fierce passions and high tensions in our politics. Not only permissible, that's necessary. We're arguing about how to live out our common future together. But that has to be what the argument is about, not whether we will have a future together, but what kind of future it needs to be. So I do think it's necessary. I wouldn't say that what we should take from this moment is that we need to be more civil with each other. That's not really right. And we're not going to just be simply civil. That's not what democracy is like. But we have to make sure that our politics is about how we're going to live together and therefore that it takes for granted that we are going to live together and that the people we disagree with are still going to be here tomorrow. I think that's necessary. But I would say that I would be wary of accusing people of hypocrisy now when they say they're shocked by this assassination attempt, I think everybody is shocked. And that that is a good sign. The fact that no one says, well, yeah, that was the next step is a good thing for us, and we should allow people to back off from the abyss. And even if they were calling Donald Trump a fascist two weeks ago, for them to now say, this is unacceptable, is good and welcome, even if, on the other hand, they were making all kinds of arguments about the nature of the left and this being a post constitutional moment, or whatever two weeks ago. If they now want to say, we need to back off and calm down, then I think we should allow for that. I am generally friendly to hypocrisy in these kinds of debates. I think hypocrisy is actually a great tool of moral formation.

Barry Weiss
Say more about that, Yuval. Hypocrisy being a great tool of moral formation.

Yuval Levin
Look, I think that ultimately one of the best ways to become a better person is to pretend to be a better person. And so even if you're not really living up to your standards, to say out loud, these are my standards, is important and valuable.

Barry Weiss
In other words, better to have standards and fall short than not to have standards at all.

Yuval Levin
Absolutely. We're all going to fall short. It's a fallen world. Nobody is as good as we would like, ideally, but we should want a world where people claim to be better than they are, rather than the other way around. We should want a world where we set higher standards for ourselves. And what we're seeing in this moment after the attempted assassination is a lot of people saying, our politics should be better than this, and we should not respond to them by saying, well, then what you did was wrong. We should respond to them by saying, yes, our politics should be better than this. Let's try to make it so.

Barry Weiss
The response that I'm seeing among a lot of people, I would say broadly on the political right, is sort of like, you told us Trump was Hitler. You told us Trump was Hitler. You told us Trump was Hitler. Now, thoughts and prayers for Hitler. And you're saying that's an unhelpful response?

Yuval Levin
Yeah, look, I think these arguments can be made against both sides. There are definitely ways in which both sides have used all kinds of militant rhetoric that, taken literally, would invite all kinds of militant action. They generally were not intended literally. And if they were, that was a terrible mistake and leads us in a direction we don't want to go in. So I think when people are willing to back off of that, we should not also demand that they confess all their past sins. That's just not how life works. And we should welcome the willingness to be shocked by this and sobered by this and try to make the most of it, rather than use it as another excuse to bash people over the head of with their own past behavior. Politics just doesn't give us that kind of satisfaction of somebody saying, I was wrong. That's not going to happen.

Barry Weiss
Yuval JD Vance, who may or may not be the vice presidential pick by the time this conversation airs tomorrow tweeted this on Saturday. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. What do you make of a statement like that? Is that irresponsible to say?

Yuval Levin
I think that's the wrong way to respond in this moment. And I think that if you are going to criticize the way that Biden and others were talking, then you should also acknowledge that they've been saying something different since this happened, and that that's important, and that's a good thing. It's not my view that this was the direct implication of what they were saying or that it was their intention in some way. Now, we don't know enough about this shooter to know who drove him to what we just don't know at this point, and maybe we'll learn things that change how we think about this. But I don't think that the right response in a moment like this is to weaponize the occasion so that it can be used for a kind of counterattack in the campaign. If there's a willingness on one side to back off some, then the other side should do the same and we should look for a way to help our politics be a little more functional. Look, it's hard to blame anybody for their immediate reaction here, but I do think that our instincts should be better honed to respond to a moment like this in a way that gives people room to improve rather than that keeps them at their worst selves permanently.

Barry Weiss
There are other people on the left who said, actually pretty immediately after the attack, well, how do you think we got here? Right. Donald Trump sort of dismantled the guardrails of normalcy in american political life. He joked when Paul Pelosi was attacked, he belittled a kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer. He sort of defended those who invaded the Capitol, you could argue, some of whom threatened Pence and Pelosi. And now he's a victim of the atmosphere he helped create. That's the argument. What do we make of that?

Yuval Levin
So, look, I think it's a version of the same case, and I have the same problem with it. It's not that it's simply false. A lot of people in our politics have been guilty of creating an atmosphere in which militant rhetoric comes to be the norm. And ultimately, you always raise the possibility of people turning militant rhetoric into militant action. But I think the response to this moment has to be forward looking in some way, and not simply in a way that blames somebody else for having gotten us here. The fact is, part of the reason we've gotten here is a kind of breakdown of our politics. Part of the reason we've gotten here is a kind of over escalation of rhetoric. But if we ask ourselves, how do we get somewhere better, rather than how do we follow this shooter into the dark abyss of political violence where he has invited us, then I think we have to look for ways to allow our political culture to improve itself. And that requires us to think differently about our own rhetoric. It requires us to think a little differently about how we talk about other people. It also, by the way, requires us to think about our political institutions, all of the things which we've spoken about before that have gotten us to a place where our political culture is a war of all against all, rather than a way of trying to resolve deep disagreements. And so this is also a moment for thinking about how the institutions can work better, how the party system and the Congress can work better. Those kinds of mundane things are ultimately what sustain the conditions that help us avoid living in this place of political violence all the time. That is the great achievement of the liberal society. It is that there are boundaries and that we don't contend with violence, that the answer to an argument you don't like is not a bullet in the head. That is what we're working for and striving to sustain. It's the extraordinary thing that our kind of political culture and political regime make possible. We should see that as a great treasure, to be protected and to be strengthened and reinforced. And a moment like this calls for that above all.

Barry Weiss
Well, speaking of institutions and the weakness of our institutions, I think one of the great themes maybe of the past ten or 20 years is the failure of much of the press, or at least what we call the legacy media. And you saw that sort of in the immediate headlines and even some of the second day headlines in response to the attempted assassination. You know, people were joking. It was a little bit like that infamous CNN Chiron that aired during one of the BLM protests. A violent protest happened to be. And there was a guy, I'm sure you know, the image, it's a famous meme now on screen, and fires are raging behind him. And yet the text beneath him says, fiery, mostly peaceful protests. And one of my friends jokes, this was a mostly peaceful assassination attempt, sort of summarizing a lot of press coverage. And I don't know if you saw it, but I, I thought it was pretty telling that CNN was reporting this morning that you know, it's probably one of the biggest days in politics of my lifetime, right? It's not just the attempted assassination of Trump, it's Biden and whether or not he will stay in the race. It's the fact that this documents court case and the strongest case against Trump was just dropped. And yet, MSNBC pulled morning Joe off the air, reportedly because they were worried that the morning Joe Cru might say something inappropriate about the Trump assassination attempt. What do you make of the press's role in this sort of. And by this story, I mean this whole moment of deep and profound uncertainty and danger. You know, what role has the press played in getting us here, and what would a responsible press response look like?

Yuval Levin
Yuval, you know, I think this is a kind of moment. First of all, we have to acknowledge this is a very unusual time. The sheer volume of basically unbelievable things happening in succession is extraordinary. Now, that's a moment that political journalism could rise to, right? That invites a kind of genuine journalistic excellence if it were there to be had. And instead, I think what we're finding is that a lot of political journalists want to fit reality into a narrative that points in a particular direction. And when reality just will not fit, they ignore reality or they look for ways to force it in. And this is a moment where people just need to know what's going on, and when there need to be asked questions that we are genuinely curious to hear the answers to, and when it's important to just have basic facts. I think the idea that you couldn't trust your own team of journalists to report basic facts is an extraordinary admission in this moment, the fear of what they might say. What they might say is just what they see, right. Things are moving too quickly to be fit into a convenient narrative. And I do think that there's been great reason to be disappointed in the traditional modes of political journalism that we have. And of course, the trouble is, we do need some ways of parsing reality and of distinguishing fact from fiction, and of allowing public officials and others to have their say in a moment like this. We do depend on traditional kinds of journalistic institutions to offer us an avenue into reality here, and I think we're finding that we cannot count on them to do that. It's not news to a lot of us that they're not reliable. But I think you can always hope that people will rise to the moment. We've actually seen some of our politicians do that here. Even people who don't normally rise to much at all. I don't think we've seen political journalists do that at this point.

Barry Weiss
There's a lot of historical echoes in this moment. Some people have been talking about Teddy Roosevelt, who was shot, I believe, in 1919 and yet continued on with the speech. Douglas Murray had a phenomenal column about it in the free press over the weekend. But I think the thing people are thinking the most about, and have been for a while, and now the analogy is only more powerful, is 1968. Right? That year the DNC was in Chicago, as it will be this year. That year the democratic incumbent was sort of disliked, it would be an understatement by his left wing base and seemed out of touch with voters, as he is again this year. That year, college campuses were aflame over a foreign war, as they are again this year. And that year, of course, Martin Luther King, junior and RFK were both assassinated. And that year, as Eli Lake wrote brilliantly in the free press yesterday, well, it threw America into a cycle of, I guess, riots and crackdowns that ultimately sort of led to a shattering, I would argue, in american politics. And I think the fear that a lot of people have had is, you know, are we entering another era of political assassinations or in which that kind of political violence against high profile people will become normalized? You're someone that knows so much about american history. What do you make of the analogy? Where does it hold up? Where does it fall apart? And where do you see us going?

Yuval Levin
I think the analogy of 68 is terrifying. That year set off a period of decline and chaos that the United States had tremendous trouble getting out of, and that in some ways, we've never quite recovered from. It shattered the post world War two consensus that had defined american life by then for some 20 years and created a sense of breakdown and chaos that then went on to define much of the rest of the 20th century. I think in some ways, the extraordinary thing about the latter years of the 20th century is that the United States recovered from that chaos and breakdown in the 1980s and nineties, that it did find a way to reassemble its dynamism and get some of its self confidence back. But 68, we view that year through the lens of the left, the people who wrote the history. But 1968 was a year of loss of confidence in elites. A lot of the ways in which we tell the story of that year, for example, mask the simple fact that Richard Nixon was elected president that year fairly comfortably. That was not a year when the country veered left. That was a year when the country showed that it was terrified of where the left was headed and in some ways, where the younger generation was headed and the years that followed continued that. I mean, look, Richard Nixon, we know him now through the reverse lens of Watergate. But Richard Nixon was reelected, winning 49 states in 1972. What he offered was a kind of respite from chaos. And I do think that some of what Americans need now and want now is a respite from chaos. We are living in a period that feels much too interesting for our own good. And I think there is a real desire for some calm. I don't think we're really being offered that at this point by our political leaders. We can certainly hope that we're not in for another real round of political assassinations as we saw then. There are ways in which this moment is more passive. Activism now, for a lot of people, does look like sitting in front of a screen and expressing strong opinions rather than being out on the street. But we saw in 2020, and we see again that there are also people who are more than willing to be out on the street committing crimes, setting fires, all the things that so characterize that period. I think that we are, again, in a moment of loss of confidence in elites, and that will not change until our elites begin to recognize why the american public is losing confidence in them and what they might have to say in response. And frankly, it feels to me like we're still pretty far away from that recognition.

Barry Weiss
Yuval, I couldn't help but notice the speed with which people went reaching for conspiracies. You know, there's twelve of them so far, maybe more, you know, some on the left, including a pretty prominent democratic adviser type figure who advises very wealthy billionaires about where to give their money, talking about how perhaps he knew it sounded icky that this could be sort of some kind of false flag operation along the lines of what Putin does in Russia. And then people on the right wondering, not just on the right, but really a lot of people wondering, how could a 20 year old kid get on a building in such close proximity? And there's all of these videos of people saying they saw him crawling through the field. And then on top of the building, there's a pretty amazing clip where people are pointing to him and saying, what is that guy doing up there? You know, we live in an era where there's so little trust in our institutions, and as you said, in our elites, that it's, I think, totally unsurprising that that's where people are going. And frankly, I have to guard myself from going there. I don't know if you feel the same way. How do we guard against that tendency? Is that tendency just inevitable in a moment where we feel like the truth is often being evaded or misconstrued? Like, how do we prevent the slide into that kind of thinking? It's something I've been thinking about a lot.

Yuval Levin
I think the tendency probably is inevitable, and I'm sure we all feel it. You could sort of feel yourself beginning to pretend to be an expert in presidential security in the course of the last 24 hours. And I asked myself the same thing, how could they do this and not that? And you have to remember that, well, I don't know anything about what they do. I don't know anything about how to do their job. And so the idea that something is obvious here because they did fail, I think it's the wrong way to think about it. I would tell you this. My kind of immunity to conspiracism is a function of having worked in and around government for a long time. Conspiracism begins from the premise that our elites are very capable, that somebody up there knows what they're doing and is in charge of this and controlling it. And the problem we have is something like the opposite. Our elites are not that capable, and nobody in our government could possibly run that kind of complicated false flag operation. I've seen how decisions are made in our government. I think a lot of people have seen some part of it, enough to know that it's very unlikely that the problem we face is a function of the people in charge being so competent that they can mask from us a complex reality that they're in control of. The real problem is different than that. It is that we live in a system which no one really controls on their own. And so things do happen which are implausible, which are results of tremendous incompetence sometimes. And we have to be willing to see them for what they are and to recognize that our limitations are not that we are radically dishonest with each other, but that we're constrained, we're limited. We're fallen human beings. That can be very hard to see. And I would say that some experience close up in government can help you see that. I'll tell you a quick story, Barry. I used to work for Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the House. I was just out of college during the Clinton impeachment. I would write in to work on the metro and read in the Washington Post how the republican leadership had all these plans that they were trying to pull Clinton in that direction. This direction. And then I would get to the office and nobody had any plan of any kind. Nobody had any idea what was going to happen that afternoon. And over and over then, working for a president, working with a lot of politicians over the years, I've encountered the same kind of phenomena. It's easy to tell a story about why things are going a certain way, but the reality is almost always much more messy and complicated than that. So I don't think our problem is that somebody up there is in charge, and I don't think a false flag operation would get very far in american society where no one can keep their mouths shut for 5 seconds. We have a different set of problems than that, and we've got to be alert to those. But conspiracism we really should try to keep in check.

Barry Weiss
So, Yuval, we ran a piece yesterday in the free press by a writer named David Maske, who's the editor in chief of discourse magazine. And I think the headline of the piece was, if you love America, now is the time to turn down the temperature. And here's how the piece ended. No one expects President Biden and former President Trump to share a few drinks and laughs anytime soon. For starters, Trump doesn't drink, and neither man seems in a jolly mood these days. I think Biden doesn't drink either. But hopefully Saturday's tragedy won't go to waste. Hopefully, the american people will demand at least a temporary halt to dangerous rhetoric if Saturday's events prompt both candidates to continue behaving at even the most basic level of civility. There's that word you don't love. That will be a good start. Do you agree? First of all, how has Biden performed, in your view, over the past few days? Has he successfully turned down the temperature? And we've read reports that Trump is tearing up his old convention speech and doing something really different. A, how do you rate how Biden has handled things? And b, what do you think Trump should say at the convention?

Yuval Levin
Yeah, I do think it's broadly right that a more civil kind of political rhetoric would be better, but I think that's only the barest kind of start. Broadly speaking, I think President Biden has reacted more or less the way he ought to in the last few days. He's taken this very seriously. He's treated it with real gravity. I certainly wish that he had acknowledged more of his and his party's own part in the kind of militant rhetoric that our politics has fallen into over the last few years. But he certainly acknowledged the problem in general terms. So I think it all could have been worse in that saying something at this point. I certainly hope that former President Trump uses this moment to reset some and to pull back himself from some of the kinds of militancy that he's tended towards in his own political rhetoric. But I think that at the end of the day, it's not just about rhetoric. The problem of our political rhetoric is a function of the sense we have that the stakes of our elections are absolute, that they're so high that everything depends on how this goes. And therefore, you've got to throw everything at this moment. And I think we've got to recognize that our system does us a huge favor by keeping the stakes of individual elections relatively low. No one wins everything when they win a presidential election or a congressional majority. The basic political reality our country's living in, in which there is more or less 50 50 politics here, is going to still be the case. Whoever wins, there's still going to have to be a lot of negotiation, a lot of back and forth, a politics of recognizing that people with different views exist. That's what we've got to get better at. We have to strengthen the institutions that make it clear to us that the stakes are not absolute, and therefore, that no election requires us to throw out all of our basic sense of neighborliness and think about other Americans as our enemies. And if we can pay some attention to those institutions and help to strengthen them, too, and allow them to actually work so that it's more true that the stakes are lower, then I think we stand a better chance of having a politics that's also at a lower temperature. If it were true that everything depends on who wins the next election, then it would make sense for us to be so totally out of control in how we think about that election. But it is not true. And so we are out of control without warrant. And I think becoming reacquainted with the strengths of our system is a first step toward recognizing that we don't have to treat each other like this in our politics.

Barry Weiss
Yuval, though, what do you say to the people who hear that answer and say, but Donald Trump threatens the very foundations of our democracy? He doesn't care about those institutions you've been talking about for this conversation. In our previous conversation, he does represent, and there are a lot of really, really smart people that truly, like, truly believe that. And if you believe that, well, then the calculations are really different, and you can't sort of stand by and do all of the lovely things that you're recommending we do. What do you say to that, listener?

Yuval Levin
I agree that Donald Trump does not care enough or even know enough about these institutions, and that our presidents should care and know a lot more about them. That's true. Exactly. Because of the nature of our system, it's not the case that if he wins, he can just do anything he wants. We've seen that before. He's already been president. We've seen it with other presidents. There are constraints, there are limits. And if we're especially worried about him, then we should invest ourselves in those. We should see, for example, that when the Supreme Court does a mundane thing like overturned Chevron deference, it's actually constraining Donald Trump's ability to do whatever he wants if he's elected. And rather than pour hot anger on the court for everything that it does that we don't love, we should recognize that these institutions that have their own independent power and that push and pull against administrative power and presidential power are very important. We should invest our efforts in them, too. And we should see that we do have strong institutions in american life. We should see that we should want stronger ones. It's not all about one person. It's not all about who is president. Our system can withstand even a terrible president. It's done it before, and it can do it again, provided that we allow it to continue to function. For me, that's a reason to think about the constitutional system writ large now. Exactly. In a moment like this, we should look for those ways that make it so that no one person is all important. And we have a system that can let us do that if we allow it to.

Barry Weiss
After the break, you'll hear the rest of my interview with Yuval. It's about why our politics feels so broken at this moment and how we might fix it. We'll be right back.

Yuval Levin
Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the first podcast network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, to this, to that. There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented law fair, debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcast. It's America on trial with Josh Hammer.

Barry Weiss
Yuval. A few weeks ago, 50 million people watched as our current president kind of imploded on stage and in front of the world. And while Trump got the better of him in this debate, because he could definitely string a sentence together better than Biden, he was still Trump. So there were half truths and hyperbole and lies. And I think a lot of people ended that debate with two feelings. The first is, how is that our current president? In other words, how is that person actually running the country right now, if that is his state? And the second question is, how, in a country of 330 million people, are those two men the very best options to be the next president of the United States? So what are the answers to those questions?

Yuval Levin
I think that's the sense in which the failure we're living through is a failure of the party system. The role of the parties is to populate our politics. They select candidates, and then they work to win general elections. And those are the two things they're now failing to do. They're very bad at selecting broadly appealing candidates, and they're pretty bad at winning general elections. Neither of them can get more than just a bare majority. I think one way that we found ourselves here has to do with the primary system, which is not inherent or natural to our political system, and which was adopted at the presidential level in the 1970s. And although it took some time to deform the system, the primary system, in connection with social media and other kinds of fragmenting technologies, has created a situation where we begin every election cycle now by asking the question, what do the 10% of american voters who least want our politics to work want? Those are the people who vote in primaries. And then, as a result, we end up with a politics that is not geared to coalition building, to bargaining, to resolving public problems, but rather the politics that is fundamentally performative of frustration and resentment. It's a way of just speaking the thing that these 10% of voters once said. I do think, though, that in looking at this election cycle, some of the consequences of that emerge in a really stark way that is worth our noticing. What is created is a situation where the elites of both parties now just lie to the country and themselves. Yes, political elites in both the republican party and the Democratic Party have been unwilling to say what they believe about their own candidates and what they know. Republicans will just not say what they actually think about Donald Trump.

Barry Weiss
Just think about JD Vance, who is widely being discussed as a possible contender for the vice presidency. And in 2016, he wrote a piece for the Atlantic about how Trump is the opioid of the masses. What a difference eight years makes. And you kind of wonder, like, maybe he sincerely had a change of heart and a change of mind, that can happen. It's often a good thing when that happens, but you wonder if it's kind of a different sort of motivation.

Yuval Levin
I'm certainly willing to believe that JD Vance had a genuine change of heart. But I know people who will tell you in private that they think one thing and will then say in public that they think a different thing about him. And now we're watching the Democrats do the same thing. They have gone through a process where gradually, over the course of this year at least, they've come to the view that Joe Biden is not fit to be president, and they refuse to say so. And many of them still now refuse to say so. The entire country saw what they've been seeing in private, and so some of them just can't sit on it anymore. But effectively they have refused to say what they think. And then after primary voters vote on the basis of views that aren't true or on the basis of not being given all the information they need to make a judgment, then they'll say, well, primary voters voted, and so it's over.

Barry Weiss
Right.

Yuval Levin
That was President Biden's argument in his letter to congressional Democrats this week where he just said, well, we have no role to play in choosing the nominee. The voters have already voted. I would submit to you that all of that is totally crazy and that the parties should not think of themselves as internally democratic in that way, so that the decision about who is the democratic party's nominee is just made by whoever randomly shows up to vote in a democratic primary. In my state, you don't even have to be a registered Democrat to vote in the democratic primary. And they're just letting random people decide who their nominee ought to be. The political parties are repositories of political professionalism. Now there's a limit to professionalism. Our system should be a democracy, but there is also a role for professionalism, and that role is played by the parties. They have contracted their most important job out to primary electorate constituencies, and nobody really thinks about why they are doing that. The argument for it was made successfully 50 years ago, and we haven't since really stopped to think, what do we need from these parties? What are we getting from them? How do we change it so that those two things are a little better aligned and what we need from them are broadly appealing candidates that are also qualified for the jobs they're seeking. The parties exist to help that happen, and they're just plainly failing to help that happen.

Barry Weiss
Now I want to talk more about the parties and how the party system has changed in a little bit. Let's stick on the theme of the lying for a minute, because I think a lot of people are toggling back and forth between genuine sadness that the president is sort of being humiliated in the way that he is, but also anger that all of these people knew that they knew and they didn't tell the truth. Let's just begin there. Why did they lie? Maybe I'll start by laying my cards on the table. I think they lied for the same reason Fauci admitted to telling noble lies during COVID which is to say they genuinely feel that Trump is a existential threat to democracy and that Joe Biden, they've convinced themselves, is the only candidate capable of beating Trump, or at least the most likely one. And so if the option is the unraveling of our democracy and telling a white lie in order to protect the candidate and surrounding him with very, very smart people who can work after 08:00 p.m. then so be it.

Yuval Levin
Yeah.

Barry Weiss
Is that the argument that makes sense to you? How do you understand it? Because we know these people that have known and said nothing.

Yuval Levin
I think there's some truth to that. I would also say maybe overly generously, but having worked for a president, I worked for George W. Bush as a White House staffer for four years, I think they're also living in a bubble that makes it hard for them to recognize that they're lying. So day by day, they are operating in an environment where their core job is to protect and serve the president. And they're looking at individual things that happen, and they're thinking, how do I keep the president in a place where he is protected from this, or in a place where what he's doing can be effective? And day by day, they're making small kinds of compromises with transparency. They're curbing his schedule. Gradually, he's doing less and less. He's saying less and less. And suddenly, after a while, you turn around, you realize, I'm just hiding a disability here and not telling the country the reality about its president. I think some of that has happened here, too. And so they're not, generally speaking, when people lie, I find in politics, and there are exceptions to this, they don't think they're lying. They understand themselves to be doing something a little more rational and responsible than that. But after a while, you do it long enough, and the fact is you're just lying. I think there's something like this on the republican side, because we're now, in a moment in Washington where, as I say, the elites of both parties are both just lying about their presidential candidates. And I think there, too, there's a kind of compromise with voter attitudes, a compromise with the demands of the media environment and social media. And you're just kind of saying stuff. And when you add it all up, you realize I'm just lying about something that's right in front of my face. But it doesn't feel that way to them most of the time. I would think so.

Barry Weiss
Yuval, you're a political conservative, not a big fan of Trump. Can you diagnose for us the lies that Republicans cause right now everyone's talking about Biden and the lies that elites around Biden have told for who knows how long? What are the lies that Republicans are telling themselves and telling the public about their candidate?

Yuval Levin
Well, I think in an odd way, the idea about Trump has always been, I mean, I would say Republicans think they're using him. Republican politicians believe that they are just manipulating Trump to their own advantage. They did that sometimes when he was president. He advanced the tax bill they always wanted and he signed it. But there's also a way, obviously, in which he's using them and transforming them and turning them into something that they didn't set out to be. And I think that that game has gone on for so long now that a fair number of republican politicians have sort of lost sight of the fact that it began for them as a kind of utilitarian game of like, here's a manipulable guy and he'll sign anything we send him. And so let's just get him in and send him this stuff. There are a lot of people still playing that game. The 2025 stuff that heritage is doing is all premised on the notion that he'll be president and he'll just approve whatever they do. Some of that could be true. Maybe all of it will be true.

Barry Weiss
Just to make it clear for listeners, this is an agenda put out by the conservative. Well, Yuval, why don't you explain what Project 2025 is in a sentence?

Yuval Levin
It's a detailed agenda, much of which, by the way, I agree with. I think it's a fairly standard kind of conservative policy agenda agenda for the most part, that the heritage foundation has put together with the notion that this will be the Trump agenda. Now, the only thing they're missing is any connection to Trump whatsoever. I think he was actually telling the truth that when he said this week that he had never heard of it. But their view is, if he becomes president, he doesn't care about this kind of policy stuff, and our people are going to run the various departments, and so this is what we're going to do. There was a lot of that while he was president. There was a lot of manipulation of him as president, too. I think that's problematic, too, by the way, he got elected president, and a lot of people around him just ignored his instructions and orders, did what they wanted to do. It created all kinds of problems that aren't supposed to happen in the executive branch. But I think a fair amount of the line you find on that side is a kind of self deception that says, I'm going to play this game, I'm going to get him elected, but really I'm just advancing the same things I always advanced. I think there's some of that on the democratic side, too. We know what we want. We have our agenda. Here's a guy who beat Trump, so maybe he'll beat him again, and then we'll do what we need to do and he can nap in the afternoon. People tell themselves these things.

Barry Weiss
We talk a lot at the free press, and I think it's just now an un ignorable theme in general, of the sort of crisis of trust. This was the theme, actually, of our very first conversation on this show. I think we titled that episode why no one trusts anything. But the more I'm thinking about it, maybe the right way to frame it is not a crisis of trust, although that's there, but a crisis of trustworthiness that the crisis of trust follows from. Maybe these people are not worthy of our trust, and maybe the reason that people go into, like, QAnon pizzagate hell holes is because they see they've been lied to over and over and over again, and therefore they make a turn down the dark path of conspiracy theories. What do you think of that?

Yuval Levin
I think there's a lot of truth to that. I would say the loss of trust is, in a way, the characteristic dysfunction of this populist moment. And I think a lot of it is a function of the fact that the source of trust is often not what people who seek to be trusted think it is. So a lot of people, kind of elites in our kind of society, think that being trusted is a function of being competent, of showing that you're good at getting things done. But in fact, being trusted is often a sign of being restrained, of making it clear that there are things you wouldn't do. So if you think about why, for example, why would you trust a journalist if you can remember a time when you trusted a journalist. Why? The reason is not that this is somebody who's really good at uncovering things and laying them out. That's part of it. The reason you trust them is that you believe there is a process that what they say to you has gone through, and that what doesn't clear that process doesn't get set right. You trust an accountant not because they're good at math, but because they wouldn't sign something that isn't true. You trust somebody with your kids because, you know, they have boundaries. There are things they would never do. That's really why we trust anybody. Ultimately, it has more to do with what they wouldn't do than what they would. And I think american elites in the 21st century have lost sight of this and think that when they're trusted, it's because they're competent, they're effective, or when they're credentialed. Yeah, they can prove it. They went to the right school. I am the science, that thing that Tony Fauci said, people said they don't trust him to know where the boundaries of his powers are. And he said, well, I'm a really good scientist, and he is a really good scientist. That's not what they're saying. What they're saying is they don't think that there are any limits to what he would do. And I think we find that here, too, where the loss of trust in people in our politics has to do with the fact that they seem to be willing to do and say anything. And their response to that is to say that they're good at politics, well, that's just not what we're talking about. And I think as long as this mismatch exists between the public in general and various kinds of american elites who want to be trusted, it's going to be very hard to build trust. Because if the answer to I don't trust you is I'm really smart, you're only making it harder to trust you.

Barry Weiss
I keep thinking about the phenomenon of something that was dismissed as misinformation or a right wing conspiracy on Thursday afternoon, the day of the debate became common knowledge in the course of 90 minutes. And it's a really strange thing, because those of us who spend time on places like Twitter, awash as it is in anti semitism, and it is, it is also a place that allows us to see unvarnished clips of the president walking and notice and use our eyes to see that he is just dramatically diminished from where he was even four years ago. You've written so much about how platforms and the Internet in general has sort of transformed our institutions. And I wonder how you're thinking about that aspect of this story and how Twitter, or x, I guess, is now we're supposed to call it, is always going to puncture the politically convenient narrative, because it's always, as long as it remains pretty free, it's always going to allow us to see the unspun version of the raw footage.

Yuval Levin
I think the problem is a little more complicated than that. So the failure is a failure of journalism, right. What we hope to get from journalism is a distinction between what's true and what's not. And instead, what we get is a policing of the boundaries of an elite consensus, which is not the same thing. Twitter is always going to give us what journalism won't, and so it'll give us lies and truth without any distinction between them, but it'll also give us things that are outside of that elite consensus. And so when journalism is drawing the wrong line, rather than a line between true and false, a line between what you are allowed to say and what you are not, then Twitter becomes very useful as a way to see what's on the other side of that line, which is important to know. If journalism is functioning well and helping us distinguish true from false, then Twitter is a pure cesspool. Then it really is just all the things that aren't true are what you would only find on Twitter and not elsewhere. But in our moment, when the things we don't hear through traditional journalism are basically just the things that a certain narrow american elite doesn't want us to hear, then Twitter becomes useful in a different way. And look, I don't want to simply traffic in a kind of attack on elites. I think elites are very important. I think there's also a lot of irresponsibility on the popular side of populism.

Barry Weiss
Unpack that a little bit. What do you mean by the popular side of populism?

Yuval Levin
Well, I mean, I think that today's populist public, the voting public that inclines to operate by first being critical of american elites, tends to revel in resentment, tends to be recklessly dismissive of all authority. I'm the kind of conservative who thinks authority is actually very important. And that's why it's important that people take their role seriously and that people work to be trusted. It's not that we don't need elites, we absolutely do. It's that we don't have good ones, we don't have responsible ones. In most domains of life, not everywhere. And in that kind of situation, you have to look in places that are disreputable to find some contact with reality that's being denied to you elsewhere. There's no way around it. But I think it's a function of the failure of our lead institutions to do their proper jobs more than it is a sheer benefit of Twitter and the fragmentation of media in general.

Barry Weiss
Before the debate, with rare exception, most ambitious Democrats, whether you're talking about pundits or politicians, believed that speaking out against Biden was too politically risky for them to do so. And so basically, they made a choice to do nothing. What is it about our system, or is it just human nature that makes stepping out of line so scary?

Yuval Levin
Well, I do think that there really are risks to them, and they're part of a team, and they want that team to win a, it's a close election, and so they worry that anything they do that might undermine their leader will help the other guy. There's truth to that. But at some point, there has to be some sense of responsibility here. And I keep coming back to that word because I think the word responsibility is actually absolutely core to what it means to live in a republic, to be an american responsibility. It's actually a really strange word. If you look up the origins of it. The first uses of it in English, the second or third time it was ever used was in James Madison's notes on the Constitution. It was a word that was almost imported into English from French to describe what it is to be an american citizen. And that is what is now missing on both sides, I would say, of that elite popular divide that we were just talking about. There's a lot of irresponsibility among voters. I mean, to vote now for Donald Trump after what we've seen him do, is irresponsible. To vote for a lot of the people that both parties have put into office over the last ten years is a failure of civic responsibility. But we are especially living with elite failures of responsibility. And I think to see that what it means to be a senior elected official on the democratic side now is that you have heavy responsibilities. That's what it is to be a senior elected official in general. It's not just that you get to play a game, it's that you've taken on a role that comes with heavy burdens of responsibility. Obviously, people would rather shirk those obligations, but I think we're learning what it looks like when they do that.

Barry Weiss
Earlier in this conversation, you referenced this letter that Joe Biden put out on July 8, and I want to just read a little bit of it. He wrote this. We had a democratic nomination process, and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3900 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin. This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me, and one fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the democratic party have voted, he wrote. They have chosen me to be our nominee of the party. Now, Dean Phillips, if people remember the name who ran against him, came on our show and said something very different. This was months ago, before he had gotten out of the race, and he basically said to me, the DNC is corrupt. They disenfranchise voters. And Joe Biden was coronated.

Yuval Levin
And the fact that my fellow democrats have been so silent in the face of truth is really appalling to me. The people who are the most important protectors of the foundations of this entire country are advocating their responsibilities in the favor of their self preservation and self protection and their aspirations, which is why there is not a single well known democratic candidate other than Joe Biden on the stage right now. Because if it was not about them and it was about the country, most assuredly they would be on the stage with me. I'm not well known, and I did.

Barry Weiss
So who has the better argument here?

Yuval Levin
One of the things we see now, having gotten to look at Joe Biden for an hour and a half, is that what he describes as having happened in the primaries happened on false premises. I mean, the arguments he makes in that letter presents itself as an argument from strength. Right? I won, and now you're sore losers. But that's not what happened at all. It's an argument that depends on the idea that primary voters and potential challengers in the Democratic Party had the information they needed to make a choice. And the fact is, the reason this letter was necessary is that that was not true. They realized that they didn't. And in a sense, it's an argument that begs the question that makes the letter necessary. It's an argument that says I won, hiding the fact that, well, you won by hiding from the public what your condition is. And there's a very strange kind of case there about what is involved in a democratic process. I mean, Biden is really struggling to say that this was fundamentally a democratic process. Right. The very next paragraph, after what you read, he basically says, only primary voters get to decide the nominee of the democratic party. He says, how can we stand for democracy if we ignore it within the party? And the trouble there is that standing for democracy is not exactly the job of the party, and that the process they went through turns out to have been fundamentally dishonest. So I think it's a very strange way to make an argument for yourself, as if these are sore losers who are challenging you. All these people, all these democratic members of Congress supported him in the primary. They all voted for him. They all endorsed him. They all wanted him to win. And they now argue they were lied to. Some of them were the ones who did the lying. But in any case, he's not answering their concern. He's trying to evade it by saying it's too late now to do anything about this. I just think that's not a very strong argument.

Barry Weiss
After the break, can Biden really be removed with the 25th amendment, or is this a pipe dream? We'll be right back. One thing that I'm struck by and sort of find myself laughing about a little bit lately is the uses and the misuses of the word democracy. There's an argument being made that democracy is on the line, right. And lots of people are making it in lots of different ways. And I think it's getting a little confusing. On the one hand, we're hearing that it's anti democratic to keep Biden in the race when two thirds of Americans don't want him as the candidate. On the other hand, and this is obviously the Biden camp's argument, we're hearing it's anti democratic to pull him from the race because he won the democratic primary. And then, of course, there's this sort of meta argument that the Democrats and many never Trump Republicans make, that democracy is on the ballot with Trump running. Yuval, you've just written this masterful book about democracy and about our constitution. And I wonder, as an expert, really, I would say you're an elite that deserves the authority you have, which arguments here actually hold water and who has the better of the arguments?

Yuval Levin
So I think there's tremendous confusion now about what people mean when they say democracy. It has become one of those terms that is just simply used as a bludgeon and is not really useful as a descriptive term. The people who are complaining about Donald Trump and using the term democracy to complain about him mean roughly the opposite of what they are saying. Donald Trump was elected president, and he is now running to be elected president again. And what they're arguing is that if he is elected, he threatens some of the elements of our system that actually restrain majorities. The independence of the courts, the constraints on the power of the president. These are all counter democratic, counter majoritarian elements of our system that I think are very important, but that are not properly described as democracy. Now, there's an element of what Trump did the first time, after he denied the results of the 2020 election that I do think are counter democratic or counter majoritarian, and that were also dangerous. To use the term democracy for both of those things is intentionally confusing or confused. It's not helpful. I think it's worth stepping back and asking ourselves about the nature of the system we have. The american constitutional system balances majority rule and minority rights. These are very hard things to balance. They're almost, in principle, intentionally with each other. And yet our system says majority rule is the only legitimate source of government power. But majorities can be very dangerous. You can't look at american history for five minutes and not see that majorities can do things that are oppressive, that can do things that are unjust. That's always been the critique of democracy. And the american system says we can make democracy safe by having counter majoritarian constraints alongside majority rule. And our system does that. We have independent courts. We have a very indirect way of electing the president. We have houses of Congress that are elected in slightly different ways. We have all kinds of ways that mean that we don't simply have majority rule here. And that's a hugely important part of what is worth defending about our system. The first Amendment is a list of things majorities can't do. That's ultimately how we should think about the protections of individual rights in general. To say Congress can't make a law that restricts the freedom of religion is to say, even if the majority wants to say no, Jews, they can't. That's a constraint on democracy. And we need constraints on democracy even as we need democracy. And so I think to just throw that word around and say whatever I don't like is anti democratic doesn't really help us very much in thinking through what we need to. That's very important to thinking about this challenge of the party system that we've been talking about. Because the political parties are not intended to be internally democratic. They facilitate our democracy by making choices about who should run on behalf of a large coalition of Americans in such a way that would be most likely to win an election and govern effectively. The parties are private organizations, and they're not internally democratic, or at least they don't need to be. They've become so thanks to the primaries, but in the process, they've lost sight of what their purpose is. And so I think democracy is absolutely vital and essential to understanding what's good about America. But it has become a source of confusion, and we need to step back and think about what other word would I use to say what I'm saying here if I'm about to say something about democracy? Because it's very likely that we're just using democracy as a catch all term for all kinds of things, some of which are opposites of one another.

Barry Weiss
Before we move on from Biden, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about the 25th Amendment, which is a thing people are talking about a lot right now. Now, I'm sure people will recall that during the Trump presidency, there was a moment after January 6 when a lot of people in the press were talking about using the 25th amendment to oust Trump in his final weeks in office. Lots of talk about the 25th Amendment. The New Yorker ran a headline this week saying, this is what the 25th Amendment was designed for. Do you agree with that? That this is what the 25th Amendment was designed for, having just written a book about the Constitution, or, and this is the argument the Wall Street Journal editorial board makes today. It's political catnip, they said, and it would only lead to a chaotic power struggle. What do you think?

Yuval Levin
I absolutely do not think that this is what the 25th Amendment was written for. And in fact, I, if you actually look at the 25th Amendment, it's perfectly clear that it cannot be used to remove a president unwillingly. The 25th Amendment is there so that if a president is disabled completely, if a president has a stroke and can't make any decisions and can't resist an effort to remove him, then the cabinet can remove him. This was done because President Eisenhower had a stroke, and it was very unclear what would happen if he had not recovered. He did recover, thankfully. But there was a conversation in Congress about, well, what would actually happen here? Would it be legitimate for the vice president to take over? And the 25th amendment has written very carefully to facilitate the transfer of power when the president is incapacitated. If the president resists, he can regain power. And the process by which the 25th amendment is supposed to operate gives the president the opportunity to essentially push back and file a letter with Congress. And while it's being considered, the president is back in power. There's not a mechanism by which a president could be removed by the cabinet if he doesn't want to go. And so the problem that the Democrats face now would be the same as the problem that the cabinet would face, which is they want him to go, but he doesn't want to. He was elected president of the United States. They were not. He can fire all of them except the vice president. None of them can remove him. So I absolutely don't think there's any solution to be had here in the 25th amendment. It just practically wouldn't work.

Barry Weiss
The goalposts are shifting every day, like the argument for Biden shifting every day. And the argument now that we're supposed to believe is it's okay that he works from ten to four. It's okay that he goes to bed whenever he goes to bed. Although I know the night of the debate, he says he was up till two in the morning, because you're not actually electing a man or a woman, God forbid you're electing a group of people, a group of smart experts around the person. There was a tweet that I saw today that actually said, you're electing a team. And it sort of like, had everyone's glossy face. It was like Kamala and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and the president. That seems very unconstitutional. Makes sense of that for us.

Yuval Levin
Absolutely. That is not how it works. The beginning of article two of the constitution, which defines and describes the presidency, just simply says that the executive power is lodged with the president of the United States, and everyone else in the executive branch acts as a functionary appointed by the president or delegated through the president. The vice president is elected separately, but does not have any independent authority. It's just simply not the case that when you elect a president, you elect a team. Everything that team does is the responsibility of the president and is done in the name of the president. The executive power belongs only to the president. And I think it's very important to remember this simple fact has become maligned over the years because it's come to be known as the unitary executive theory, which was advanced by Richard Nixon and others to make the case against administrative power. The fact is, it's just the constitution. It's just what the document says. And there is no other official who is empowered to act as an executive other than the president of the United States. So it's good that he has a good team. Presidents definitely work at the head of a large body of people, but all of those people act on their behalf. And ultimately, the president is responsible for everything they do. And what they do does not end at 08:00 p.m. there's just no way. The president has to be somebody who can wake up when the phone rings at 03:00 a.m. and make a rational decision.

Barry Weiss
Okay, so let's talk a little bit more yuval about the state of our political parties. And one of the things I'm looking for you to do here is to explain to me if it was ever thus, because right now it just seems absolutely chaotic. I read this very good column by Matt Iglesias, called I was wrong about Biden, and I want to read a few lines of it to you. He writes, people love to get mad about articles, but the democratic party is not, in fact, run by a cabal of center left columnists. More to the point, the democratic party is quite literally not run by anyone. Every time I read a take that expresses bafflement over how the, quote, Democrats could have put themselves in this situation, I get mad all over again. If you call the Democrats, nobody picks up the phone. The reason no major political figure ran against Biden in the primaries is that major political figures are adults with polling operations, and those operations told them they would lose. Do you think he's right, that there's no such thing as the Democratic Party, or really that if there is one, it's not really run by anyone? And if so, has that always been true?

Yuval Levin
I don't think it's always been true. I think it is almost true now. And the reason it's almost true, as we've talked about a little bit, is that the parties have both contracted out their chief function, which is candidates election to the primary electorate. The parties were originally created to be repositories of political professionalism, to be the place where people whose job is politics confer, work together, plan, and ultimately act to advance the interests of a broad coalition of voters and politicians. And that work of facilitation is necessary so that we end up with a plausible election ballot for voters to choose from the american system as particularly required. Organized parties because, and this is the reason we've always had two parties, because we have a very strange way of electing the president. And the electoral College requires you to win an absolute majority in order to win the presidency, so that if there are more than two serious candidates, the election is likely to go to the House. And when that happens, nothing good comes of it. And so from very early on, it's been clear to american politicians that there need to be two candidates for president, and therefore, effectively, that there need to be two major parties. These have always been two broad, messy coalitions. They've always learned from third parties and incorporated them in various ways. But the work they've done has been a kind of facilitation of american democracy. And there have been people you could call who would actually be the Democratic Party, a party committee that then worked with state party committees, that then worked with county committees. All that infrastructure, in a sense, still exists. There still is a DNC. There still are state and county committees, but they have a lot less to do now. And the effect of democratizing candidates election has actually been to turn politicians into independent contractors. They don't really owe anything to the party, and therefore they're not really disciplined in any way by the party. And the result of that is a kind of politics of personalism that is responsible for some of the character of our contemporary political culture. The weird thing about the parties, this is true around the democratic world, is that political parties, as institutions, actually moderate partisanship. It's an odd thing to say, but when you look at it, it's obvious the party needs to win elections everywhere. The Republican Party needs to win elections in the south and in the northwest. Now, it's going to be better at doing it in the south. But the fact that it needs to appeal to a very broad swath of people means that it has an incentive to try to broaden and moderate its appeal. When you personalize it, when you make all the politicians independent contractors, they just need to appeal to a narrow primary electorate.

Barry Weiss
It seems to me that that theme is not at all limited to politics. Right. I think about it just in my field of journalism, where all of the incentives are to become an influencer rather than it used to be that you were a timesman, by the way, I'm a symptom of this phenomenon in some sense now. I'm trying to build an institution with the free press, but every incentive is to sort of go it alone.

Yuval Levin
Explain that broader phenomenon, 21st century. So if you step back from 21st century America, what we're looking at are everywhere incentives to pull yourself out of institutions and stand personally on a platform and perform, and oftentimes also to use the institutions as platforms for yourself. You see this all over our politics. It's not just the parties themselves. I mean, members of Congress face the same pressure now to just to use Congress as a place to raise their own personal profile and build their personal brand. That's what every younger member is doing. That's what they think is natural to do. Whereas traditionally Congress has been very formative of its members, it creates this weird human type that is a member of Congress that loves to make deals and bargain in committee hearings. That type is much more rare now. And generally, what Congress creates are performance artists who are producing YouTube clips in committee hearings. I think we see that all over american life, and you very much see it in party politics as well. And what's lost when this happens to the parties is this capacity to facilitate democracy, to form and shape and choose candidates who are better at building broad coalitions. And one result of that is that we don't see broad coalitions. We see very narrow election victories. We have now for 25 years.

Barry Weiss
The theme seems to be they're subservient to the political ambitions of one person. The original intention was to be the exact opposite, overshadow the specific ambitions of one person. You keep referencing the 1990s as the last time when things were functional. But is that where the change began, or is it.

Yuval Levin
I don't think it started there. We did go through some kind of turning point around the beginning of the 21st century. I don't know exactly where to put it. And it had to do with the transformation of political media. It had to do, ultimately, a little later, with the emergence of social media. All of these things push in that same direction toward fragmentation and personalization. But I think in a more general sense, the tendency to take yourself out of formative institutional frameworks and liberate yourself as an individual is actually the story of american life. From the end of the second world war on, Americans in the middle of the 20th century felt very constrained and constricted and forced into conformity. If you listen to american culture in the 1950s, it's just a bunch of people screaming about conformity on the right, on the left, in all kinds of ways. It's an incredibly libertarian moment. We think of the fifties as really conservative, but that's not at all what the fifties were. And what began in that time is a kind of liberation of individual will. Think it was necessary. I also think it did a lot of good. It did a lot of good, especially for people who were at the margins of that consensus of the middle of the 20th century. It didn't really have a role in it, but it's also undermined the strengths of some core institutions that are really necessary. And I think that story, the story of the fragmentation, is a story that leads to a much more personalized and individualized America. There are many good things about this but what we're discussing here is absolutely a consequence of this. It's a downside of that same effect, and we're paying the price for it. I would say one more thing. I think we are living now in a moment that feels that loss, that feels that pain. There's a desire for solidarity, for belonging to something bigger than yourself. That I think is the strongest force in contemporary american life. It hasn't yet found an articulation. It hasn't yet found a home. Left and right are both trying to contain it. Somehow it's taken really ugly forms. Nationalism and identity politics, I think, are all ways of trying to deal with this. But people are actually asking for solidarity. And solidarity can be a good thing if we can find a way to channel it more constructively, can also be.

Barry Weiss
A very scary thing.

Yuval Levin
Very.

Barry Weiss
I think some people will say, wait, hold on. I thought Barry said that Yuval is a political conservative. And here he seems to be making an argument for solidarity and suggesting that we have too much freedom and too much individualism. Square.

Yuval Levin
That's the kind of conservative I am.

Barry Weiss
Yeah, so square. Explain that to people.

Yuval Levin
I'm not a libertarian. I'm a conservative, which means that ultimately, I think the human person is a social creature. I think the human person is born fallen and unready to be free and needs to be formed in order to be free. And that formation is done by society's institutions, first of all by family, but also by religion, by education, by culture at large, also by politics. In some ways, that work of formation and those institutions of formation is what needs to be conserved. That's what, as a conservative, I want to conserve. So I worry about the family, I worry about religion. I worry about education for that reason, because I think that in order to be free, we have to be formed for freedom. And if we fail to be formed for it, then we won't be able to be free. We'll be tyrannized by our own passions. And a lot of Americans are. A lot of us aren't.

Barry Weiss
I don't know if I'm a conservative or not. Some people call me one. I've always taken the online tests, and it seems I'm a liberal or centrist. But I definitely agree with you that we need some sort of balance between unmitigated freedom without any kind of responsibility. We definitely need institutions to help shape people. And I'm generally an optimist. But I'm looking around and thinking, how do we get that back? Not just because so many of the institutions are shattered or fractured, as you would put it, and have lost our trust. But that a lot of the things people used to believe in, like we can't sort of turn back the clock and hope people believe in God again. Like, for the people that are hearing you and saying, that sounds really nice, yuval, like, how do we get there? Can you maybe point us to some ideas about where people can find examples where that's happening?

Yuval Levin
So I would start on that with one of the words you used, which is optimist. I'm not an optimist and I'm not a pessimist. I'm hopeful. I think optimism and pessimism are related vices. They're both invitations to passivity.

Barry Weiss
They just say, well, your books opens with, you know, talking about hope. Yeah, sorry, yeah.

Yuval Levin
And so I plug your, plug your.

Barry Weiss
Book, Yuval, come on.

Yuval Levin
Thank you. Thank you. It's called american covenant. And it does, it opens exactly with this distinction. Distinction. To be hopeful means to believe that things could improve if we actually act to improve things. I think the most striking thing about contemporary America to me is passivity, is this sense that stuff's just happening and I can't do anything about it. I think that's a very strange way for Americans to be in the world, and yet it really defines a lot of our 21st century culture, especially among younger people, very, very passive and fearful of jumping in and engaging and acting. And I think the first step to seeing how these big problems could be addressed is to see yourself as an actor in the world and to understand that you're not waiting for somebody else to fix these problems. You're asking, how can I do better on this front? The other reason I have hope is actually that people are not satisfied with the problems we're describing.

Barry Weiss
That's very true.

Yuval Levin
It's very hard to find people now who say, everything's going great. Most people will say, what the hell's going on? Talk to almost anybody, anywhere now, and they'll say, well, you know, my family's okay, but the world's going to hell. That's an opening. I think that every successful reform movement of the next ten years is going to start with the simple motto, it doesn't have to be this bad. That's not a utopian motto. That's not a way of saying we're going to transform the world fundamentally, but it actually doesn't have to be this bad. We don't have to have an election between 280 year olds. We really don't. We can do a lot better than that. It doesn't have to be this bad in your kids school. It doesn't have to be this bad in politics or media or culture or anywhere else. It doesn't, it's not going to be perfect, but it can be better. And I think that getting there and seeing how you could is a matter of changing what you're asking for, changing what you want, changing what desiree you express. We live in a market economy. If you really want it to be better, somebody's going to sell you a better version. And I think in a lot of ways, we have to stop thinking that this is just happening to us and see that we're making choices that have created a world we don't like. And to change that, we have to make other choices. I do think that calls for diagnosis. It calls for, in a sense, books like this, for helping people understand the framework for what actually is going on and how could I do it differently. But above all, it calls for a sense that we are actors here. We are not observers.

Barry Weiss
We live in a market economy. And I really, the free press, and honestly is a part of the free press, which I always need to remind people. But the free press is an example of. You don't like something, you're dissatisfied, go out and make something new.

Yuval Levin
You're a builder. Barry. I think that's exactly what people need to be doing.

Barry Weiss
But that can work in a field like journalism or Mediaev, that can't work when it comes to Congress, when it comes to the Supreme Court, we can't erect an alternative justice system, an alternative political system. So let's maybe spend a minute on those two elements. Now that we've covered the political parties, you've mentioned sort of the failed incentives in this conversation, not just in our party system, but also, as you write about in your book, in Congress. And so let's just talk about that for a second. You know, our system is not only failing to deliver candidates that people want, but also policies that people want. Last year, there was this pew poll that showed that just 16% of people said they trusted the government always or most of the time, and that was an all time low. In something like seven decades, 65% of people said that most political candidates run for office to, quote, serve their own personal interest, and 62% of Americans said they're unsatisfied with the way democracy is working. Explain that to us.

Yuval Levin
I'd say a few things about that. First of all, I think that the polls that say that people don't trust Congress themselves probably don't tell us all that much. Americans have never liked Congress, right? I think anybody who says, I think the government does the right thing most of the time is just a strange American. That would be true at any time. But there is no question that Congress is dysfunctional. It's having a lot of trouble doing its basic work. Passing an annual budget, dealing with the simplest kinds of legislative action now becomes impossible, and anybody who watches Congress for any period of time will agree that it's not working. Well, I think that just under that agreement, though, there is a disagreement about what is Congress failing to do? And to me that's a very important question, because I think the natural answer to it is it's just failing to pass the bills I want, the things I care about. So it's not addressing the fiscal crisis or whatever. That's true. But my answer would be Congress is failing to facilitate cross partisan bargaining and negotiation. That's the purpose of the institution. The purpose is to address the divisions that define the politics of a diverse society. When you look at the origins of the constitution, at the problems it was meant to address. The purpose of Congress is not to advance perfect technocratic solutions to problems. It's to facilitate negotiation and bargaining. Now, why do I emphasize that? Because if you think the problem is they're not passing enough bills, then you think Congress needs to be more efficient. The leaders need to have more power, there needs to be less chaos, get rid of the filibuster, all these kinds of things. If you think Congress exists to facilitate negotiating and bargaining, then you actually think there need to be more incentives to reach across party lines. And ironically, that means Congress needs to be less efficient. The filibuster is the only reason that there's been any cross partisan legislation in the last ten years. The centralization and leadership makes it more difficult to have strange coalitions across party lines, not easier. Once you see that, you can't unsee it about the contemporary Congress. And I've come to think that what's necessary to help Congress work better is to allow the middle layers of the institution, especially the committees and the intra party factions, to have more power, to take power away from the leaders, and not to give it to individual members, but to give it to the committees, where the real work of negotiating is done. Because ultimately, the purpose of Congress is to facilitate bargaining and negotiating. It's the only place in our system where groups of Americans who disagree with each other are represented by people whose job is to deal with each other. And that's where we can ultimately achieve the kind of unity that is achievable in a diverse society. At the core of this new book of mine is an idea of unity that I think is implicit in the american constitutional system, but is not self evident to us. Unity in a diverse society doesn't mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And the difference between thinking alike and acting together is really important to understanding modern american life. We're not going to think alike. This is a huge country. We have all kinds of people here. They're free to think what they want and do what they want, and it's not going to be the same thing. But the fact that we don't think alike doesn't mean we can't act together. The question how can we act together when we don't think alike? Is the question to which the american constitution is an answer. Over and over in all of its institutions, and especially the ones that are most kind of mysterious and frustrating to us. It exists to answer the question, how can we act together when we don't think alike? And the answer is negotiate, bargain, allow for a diversity of actions through federalism, all kinds of mechanisms for letting a permanently diverse society find ways to deal with its problems together. I think that's the beauty of the Constitution.

Barry Weiss
Well, there's a balance, or I guess a tipping point between frustration and dysfunction. Right. People often talk about how nothing gets done in DC, but you sort of say our system was meant to be slow. You write that frustration is frequently the price of union. It's a beautiful phrase.

Yuval Levin
I.

Barry Weiss
How did the framers Yuval think about the balance between intentional gridlock and total dysfunction, which it sounds like what we have now.

Yuval Levin
Yeah, I mean, this is really an important question because I think it actually defines a lot of the difference between progressives and conservatives in thinking about the constitution. The core progressive frustration with the constitution, and it's a reasonable frustration, is that it doesn't allow government to get enough done. And that's true. The constitution makes it very hard to move legislation and public policy. The reason for that is that we are a divided country. It does get back to that problem of balancing majority rule and minority rights. And the constitution implicitly says social peace is more important than good public policy. Ultimately, it's more important that people believe that what the government is doing is the product of a legitimate process, is fair, that they were heard, that it includes somehow their priorities, then that what government does is exactly technically the right way to solve this problem. And the challenge of social peace is at the center of how particularly James Madison. But in some ways, the other frames of the constitution really thought about what they were doing. The danger they were trying to address was the danger of social breakdown and division. And in order to address it, they were willing to pay a price in the currency of efficient government. I think the question of whether that's worth it has always been a question between progressives and conservatives. But part of what it means is that progressives originally and today understate the danger of social breakdown, of the collapse of civic peace. They take for granted the fact that we have very little political violence in America, and that ultimately, people are willing to accept the results of the political process. That doesn't always happen, but you'd have to live in a society where it routinely doesn't happen to recognize how incredibly valuable it is, that for the most part, it really does work here. A lot of progressive political scientists will compare us to Norway and Belgium and say, these are much more representative democracies. I would argue that the fact that they can even do that is evidence of how successful our system is, because the United States is not like Norway and Belgium. The United States is like India and Brazil and Mexico. We have 330 million people here, and they are extremely diverse and very independent minded. And the fact that they are not constantly at war with each other is a sign of how incredibly successful. The fact that we can even think of comparing ourselves to Belgium is an example of how successful our constitution is.

Barry Weiss
One of the things that we cant build an alternative version of, of course, is the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court in the past few weeks, granted Trump immunity for actions undertaken while he was serving as president. And there were sort of broadly, I know there are many interpretations, but lets just say broadly, two of them. One is that the court saved Trump from a brazenly political witch hunt. And the second is Trump is above the law. And that was sort of guaranteed to him by a political court. How should we see it?

Yuval Levin
I, broadly speaking, am a fan of this court. I think the Supreme Court is the only one of our governing institutions that is in better shape today than it was half a century ago. That's closer to doing the job it's supposed to do than it was a generation ago. And I think that's because the court now has a majority that thinks that its job is to keep the other constitutional actors in line, the president and Congress and the state governments and the public. The majorities that its role is ultimately to say what the law is in a way that allows the rest of the system to function. It's a relatively restrained court. It values a certain kind of stability. I do think that, generally speaking, this decision was in line with that, though I think there are elements of it that trouble me.

Barry Weiss
Like what?

Yuval Levin
Well, I think that in looking for a balance, what the chief justice ultimately did here was define a very general framework and then ask the lower courts to determine how the facts of Trump's behavior fits into that framework. And I think the framework leans too much in the direction of presidential immunity. It is only a framework. And ultimately, the message of the decision was to the lower courts saying, do this again. You did not give us a case we could decide. I think that's what the majority said. That's what it actually did. The case was remanded back to the lower federal courts. I'll tell you why I think this happened, and I don't know this. It's just what my sense of reading the decision is that the chief justice was confronting a situation in which there could have been no majority in this case. He had the three liberal justices. On the one hand, he had Justice Thomas, who wanted even more presidential immunity than the ultimate decision gave. He had Justice Barrett, who wanted much less, and he had himself and three other conservatives who were just looking for a way through this. 3311. That means no majority. And in this case, where there's actually an ongoing federal case, no majority was not acceptable. There was no way to do that. So he had to bring together Justice Thomas and Justice Barrett with the other three conservatives. And the way to do that was an incoherent decision, which says one thing and its opposite, which says there's a limit and that there's no limit, and ultimately remands the case to the lower courts. I think this was a practical decision on his part, a way to patch together some majority that would allow him to remand this case to back to the lower courts. I don't love the way it was done, and I think that some of the critics who say that it creates too much space, too much immune space around presidential action are right, but there is a need for some immunity for official actions. Ultimately, exactly how that set is still going to be a matter for case by case decisions in hard cases. I think, broadly, what people miss about this case is that it would constrain a future President Trump as much as it would empower him. Trump's going around saying he's going to prosecute Joe Biden. Well, he can't do that now. The same is true, by the way, of the decision that constrains the administrative agencies, the so called Chevron deference case. A lot of what Trump has said he would do actually becomes much less likely because of that case. This court, I think, is not making partisan decisions, broadly speaking, it's making constitutional decisions.

Barry Weiss
Most conservatives feel the way you do that. I know this is a fair court. It's above the fray of politics. It's sort of the last thing in american life that's above the fray of politics. Liberals and progressives look at the court and say, this is the most politicized institution in our whole system. How do we live with that split screen reality?

Yuval Levin
It's very hard, and I think it's hard for me to answer that question, because I genuinely think the court is generally not partisan and that this court is much less partisan than the Supreme Court has been for most of my lifetime. And what I mean by partisan is that the decisions it makes are not based on the policy outcomes the justices want, but on a particular conception of how the Constitution is intended to work. I think it is that the trouble is the partisan divide about the constitution is actually about the role of the judge. And so the left really does tend to think that judges should be more assertive about policy outcomes, and the right tends to think not. And so there's a kind of inherent partisanship here. The thing to look for is whether conservatives become judicial activists in the coming years. There's no question that some of that is happening, that people who wanted a much more restrained court when there was a liberal majority now are much more inclined to be open to an assertive court. And frankly, one of those people is Justice Thomas. And so I do think that there is some sense that there's a desire to see the court just as active as it was in the seventies, but in the direction of the right. That's not my desire. I think the court should be a restrained policer of constitutional boundaries. And I think, for the most part, that is the view of this majority. That's certainly the view of the chief justice and of Justice Alito and Barrett. And most of what the court has done on the most controversial constitutional cases has worked that way. I would also say most of what the court does is not six three. Most of what the court does is not along those partisan lines. We might say the most controversial cases break down that way, but that's just circular reasoning. The cases that break down that way end up being the most controversial. They are not the majority of cases. And for the most part, this court is held together pretty well.

Barry Weiss
We've been talking a lot about things that are broken in american life, in american political life, our elections, our party system, our congress, and you've just written a book about the constitution arguing that this, well, very old, in american terms, this very old document is the solution, or at least points to the solution for fixing many of those problems. Explain that to us.

Yuval Levin
Well, I would say to look to the Constitution as a source of solutions is not to say that things are not broken, but rather to say that calling something broken is not enough. You have to tell me how it's broken, what is it not doing? And to have a clear answer to the question, what is it not doing? You have to first know what it's supposed to do. You have to also have an idea of why. You have to decide whether that's a good thing to want to do and then to think about how it could be achieved from where we are. I think that, first of all, requires a reacquaintance with the American Constitution, because a lot of Americans now just don't know it. We think we know it because we hear a lot about the Constitution, especially when it comes to controversial judicial cases. But to really know it is to see it as much more than a legal document, to understand that it's meant to frame a political life for a free society that allows us to hang together without requiring unanimity, that allows us to disagree constructively with each other. I think looking at american life now, it's easy to say, well, we just don't agree anymore. I think actually what we've lost is the ability to disagree. The places where we disagree, like Congress, like the universities, like the opinion pages of a healthy newspaper, those places are all breaking down. We've forgotten how to disagree. And the constitution is really about how to disagree. And so I think it can teach us what's broken and then can help us see what ought to be fixed. That's not going to leave us thinking that the original constitution is perfect, but I think that the logic of what the framers of that document were trying to achieve is still what we are trying to achieve. They were offering an answer to a question we are still asking, how can a diverse, divided society hold together and thrive? And they offer a pretty good answer. So that in a lot of ways, we can learn a lot from them, and we can also learn from the places where their answer could use improvement, but only if we understand it well. So this book is first and foremost a reintroduction to the Constitution.

Barry Weiss
That sounds very nice. Most of us are going to listen to that answer, though, and think that sounds so poetic, romantic, but also abstract. Give us an example, please, of how the Constitution teaches us how to disagree. A specific example.

Yuval Levin
Well, so, for example, the constitution was framed around a set of intense disagreements about whether power should reside at the national level or at the state level or local level. This was a source of intense disagreement and dispute in the first hundred years of american life. The answer that the Constitution offers to that seeming stark choice between centralization and decentralization, the answer it offers is yes. It says yes to both at the same time. And there are some issues where power should be centralized. There are others where it should be decentralized. I think in that answer, there's a lesson for us about how to resolve what seemed like stark disputes. And the Constitution actually does this over and over. The question, should the president be the head of state, this elevated figure like a kingdom, or should the president be the chief bureaucrat? The constitution says yes, even though those things are obviously contradictory. The president should be both of those things. I think that that's one way in which we could learn to disagree. When we say, should we live this way or that way, the Constitution gives us the opportunity to say, yes, I live in Maryland, you live in California. I can live this way, you can live that way. That's okay. We have to be able to tolerate a certain amount of diversity in american life. That's a teaching of federalism, which is an essential institution of the Constitution. It's become very hard for us to do now, especially in the age of the Internet, where it seems like everything's always in our face. So the person doing that thing I don't like isn't actually in California. He's in my phone. He's right here. And I have to be able to say, no, he can do that, and I can do this, and that's going to be okay. Learning that lesson is one thing we can learn by using our constitution as a kind of teaching tool. I think the most important, the core lesson is that most intense disputes need to be resolved by negotiation, by some kind of bargaining that allows me to get what matters most to me by giving you what matters most to you. That does not come naturally. It's a kind of liberal skill that is very unnatural and artificial that we really have to work at to do well. And the Constitution says work at it is the only way to live in peace in a diverse society. The other lesson it offers is a lesson about the importance of competition so that a lot of our differences and difficulties are resolved by just letting the options exist and letting people make choices among them. Again, that's how federalism works a lot of the time. It's how our elections work. It's how the relationship between the houses of Congress work. These seem like abstract things. They seem like political science lessons. They're actually about how to live with people you disagree with, which for us is the hardest thing of all.

Barry Weiss
I think a lot of Americans have internalized a lot of constitutional principles, right, the First Amendment, the right to bear arms, things like that. But most Americans, I imagine, have not read the Constitution in full. And I'm thinking now, as we talk of, you know, a single mom of three trying to put food on the table, and it probably feels a little indulgent or even silly to say, hey, you know what you need to do? Think about your relationship to the constitution. You know, nevermind that probably a lot of her information is dictated by ten second videos on TikTok, not documents that are old, that are thousands of pages. So convince the average very busy. I'm thinking of my friends, busy moms who feel probably removed from the kinds of things you think about every day, like, why is this urgent and important for them? Why should this be a priority for them?

Yuval Levin
I think that a lot of what isn't working about american life now is a function of our having forgotten some of the lessons we could learn this way. Now, this isn't the way for absolutely everybody to learn them. I don't imagine that reading the constitution is how everybody wants to spend their time. But if you did, I think what you would find is not a dry, stark kind of cold legal document, but a picture of how it might be possible for things to work better in a society where we're not always going to agree. A lot of the problems we have, a lot of the complaints we have, are a function of our just not being very good now at living out the public life of a society that is very diverse. And we could learn a lot about how to do this by thinking about what our system of government is about and what it can offer us. And if you care about history, it's awfully interesting history. And what you find is a collection of extraordinarily smart people dealing with very difficult problems in a pretty interesting way. We've rented out too much constitutional thinking to lawyers and given ourselves the wrong impression about what this is. It has more to offer us than we might imagine.

Barry Weiss
Your new book, American Covenant, is coming out at a time that I would not describe as calm in american life. A lot of sober people I know, people that are not hyperbolic are talking about sort of not civil war, but the groundwork being laid for something like that. What do you make of warnings like that coming from quarters that, as I said, are not given to histrionics or hysteria?

Yuval Levin
Yeah, I think a lot of that kind of despair is actually a form of escapism. It's a way to avoid doing the hard work of making this function. I don't think this generation of Americans is burdened with heavier problems than most of. I think every generation has faced some very difficult challenges. The past always looks calmer than the present. And there is a sense that somehow we don't get to be as lucky as those people who just lived in an easy time. And, you know, it was easy to get married and buy a house and afford kids on one salary. I don't know when that time was. A lot of my friends talk about that time, and I can't find it. I think Americans have always faced tremendous challenges, and the burden on our shoulders is the burden of making sure that this country remains worthy of our children, that when they are our age, they can complain about how easy it was for us, but how hard it was for them. And if we do our job right, it's going to seem that way because we will address some of the big problems we have. I don't think there's any excuse for shirking that responsibility and saying, well, it's already too late. We've already lost all of this. We're in a post constitutional age. I think that's ridiculous. And go and say that to people living in America in the 1850s, to people living in America in the 1960s, eras within living memory of a lot of Americans saw intense political violence, a kind of breakdown of social order that. That we don't begin to imagine just sitting in front of computers and saying, the sky's falling. And I think it's very important for us to see that we have the same obligation as that first generation of Americans and as every other. We have to keep this working. We have to make it better. We have to strengthen it. I say this as an immigrant to the United States. I came here as a child, and I have never lost the sense. And this is really. This is the underlying, unstated premise of all the work that I do, just the simple fact that America is awesome. It has a lot of problems. I mean, my day job is to deal with the problems. It has to think about those and what we might do about them. But let's not forget, just go outside and look around this country is incredible. And the kinds of lives it lets people live, the kinds of achievements it's had. There's an american flag on the moon. We are.

Barry Weiss
No, you've all started. That's a conspiracy.

Yuval Levin
Uh huh. Yeah. And look, we do conspiracies, too. I sort of half love that, too. This country is crazy and wonderful and it's never been easy. It's never been a simple thing to sustain. But it is our responsibility and it is doable. And we've inherited a lot of material we can use to make it more doable. The constitution is part of that. And that's all I'm trying to remind people of here.

Barry Weiss
Thanks for listening, and thanks again to Yuval for coming on today and helping us make sense of this moment that's still unfolding and that we'll continue to cover on this show. One fun thing that I'm excited to tell you guys about. We have an honestly episode on the Horizon, hosted by the one and only Suzy Weiss and joined by the brilliant Caitlin Flanagandeh. It's an advice show and we need your questions. You can ask them anything. How to get over a guy who ghosted you. How to navigate a career change. How to work through a family drama. How many times is reasonable to drink in a week? Literally anything. The way that you ask a question is by calling in and leaving us a voicemail with your first name and your question. Get a pen, get a piece of paper, take out your notes app in your iPhone and write this down. The number is 805-387-2530 I'm going to read it again. 805-387-2530 we cannot wait to hear from you. Last but not least, if you want to support honestly, there's one way to do it. It's by going to the Free press@thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.