On this episode of The Future of Liberty, Governor Mitch Daniels and Yuval Levin explore the vital role of hope as an active virtue in sustaining a free society. They discuss the pressing need to rebuild trust, reconnect with one another, and form coalitions that transcend disagreement. The conversation delves into the enduring importance of the Constitution, the often-overlooked "everyday work" of Congress, and thoughtful ideas for reforming America’s political party system.
On this episode of The Future of Liberty, Governor Mitch Daniels and Yuval Levin explore the vital role of hope as an active virtue in sustaining a free society. They discuss the pressing need to rebuild trust, reconnect with one another, and form coalitions that transcend disagreement. The conversation delves into the enduring importance of the Constitution, the often-overlooked "everyday work" of Congress, and thoughtful ideas for reforming America’s political party system.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:18):
Welcome to our audience for the latest in Liberty Fund’s series, The Future of Liberty, which we invite the today's finest thinkers, most influential scholars to explore that topic with us today is a very special privilege to welcome the person I consider the finest young talent and I hope he'll accept that adjective still in his forties on the scene today. Every bit that the heir to great thinkers like Charles Murray, who is also part of this series to James Q. Wilson. Before him, another success story in the long history of immigration in this country. Having come here as a young person and now established a tremendous record founding editor of National Affairs magazine, contributor to many others in the author of several books, one of which we're going to concentrate on today, his most recent, called American Covenant, which to some extent I think is a summation of some interesting arguments he's made over time. Please welcome. As I say today, one of today's finest and most influential thinkers, Yuval Levin. Yuval, thanks for being with us.
Yuval Levin (01:39):
Thank you so much. I can't live up to that introduction, but I appreciate it enormously.
Mitch Daniels (01:43):
Well, I suspect you're going to over the next 40 minutes or so, you came here to us from Israel at a young age. What brought the family here?
Yuval Levin (01:55):
Yeah, my family came to Israel when I was eight years old and it was really economics and a belief in America. I would say my father is a kind of American born in the wrong place, you might say, and he started a small business, a construction business in Israel in the 1970s, which was not an ideal time to start a business there. They had real inflation, 300% inflation for several years in a row and he found himself having to look for an opportunity and found a home here. And I am about as patriotic and American as you can imagine, a lot of immigrants in part because I know that there are other options out there and they're inferior. I've really come to love this country and I get to work at a job now where my everyday work is gratitude for America, so I couldn't be happier about it.
Mitch Daniels (02:47):
Yeah, gratitude, certainly a candidate for the greatest of virtues and no one manifests it more often in my experience than those who, like you, have seen alternatives and appreciate what they have. So Yuval, a very straightforward, but I thought important distinction. You draw in the earliest pages of your book, which comes out of course at a time when Americans of all types are troubled about our polity and about our societal discord and where we're going as a country and you start by drawing a line between hopeful and optimistic and it's an important distinction. Why don't you just say a word about that?
Yuval Levin (03:40):
Well, I am very hopeful about the future of our country, which in this moment probably puts me in something of a minority among people who are active in our public life, and I think it's important to stress that hopeful doesn't just mean optimistic. I think of optimism and pessimism as two twin vices and they're both vices because they both invite us to passivity. They both say something's just going to happen and we're just observing it and either it's doom and gloom or it's all going to be fine. I don't think either of those is the way that a serious citizen of a republic should think about our country's life. Hope sits in the middle between those two vices. It's a virtue and it's an active virtue. It says things could go well. We have the resources for them to go well, but it's up to us whether that happens or not. And so the opportunities are there, the resources are there, the potential is there, but the question is are we there and hope invites us to be active. I think that's what America needs from us and if it gets that, then we have every reason to be hopeful for the future of this country.
Mitch Daniels (04:46):
Well, let's hope that, let's hope that by the time we wind up this conversation that you've shown us the ways and means to act in a way that makes that better future, a central premise, maybe the central premise of your book, a line that is so I think felicitous, it might be on its way to cliche status, I hope it is, is that the central problem causing so much discord and so forth today is not that we have forgotten how to agree, but that we've forgotten how to disagree. Like many verities, that's simply said, but it contains a lot of wisdom. Would you elaborate on it a little bit?
Yuval Levin (05:32):
Well, I appreciate that. I think it's easy right now to look at American life and say, Americans just don't know how to agree with each other. We're broken up, we're divided, we're alienated from each other. We're constantly at one another's throats, and so we need to learn how to agree more. I think that's just not quite right. Americans are actually very good right now at agreeing with people we agree with. It's all we ever do. We spend all of our time with people we agree with talking about people we disagree with, and we have all manner of technologies that enable us to do that. All kinds of ways of cocooning ourselves, surrounded by people who share our views of things, and that lets us just treat other people as abstractions and talk about them so that even Americans who are very engaged in politics are not actually spending a lot of their time engaged with people they disagree with and the venues that exist to allow that to allow constructive, actually productive disagreement.
(06:30):
Places like Congress and the state legislatures, places like university campuses, even the op-ed pages have been deformed in a particular way that has turned them all into performative spaces where people talk to a like-minded audience rather than talking to across the line of difference to people they disagree with. It's harder to negotiate and find compromises. It's harder to build coalitions and find ways in which we can agree about some things but disagree about others. Instead, everywhere we're driven to this kind of ideological purity. Everybody is hunting heretics instead of seeking converts, and it's very hard to really find a space where you can practice the habits of disagreement in ways that can point us toward some sort of common action at the end of the day. So those are the skills we need. I think the core missing skills now in American political life are the skills involved in coalition building. Our system is all about coalition building, but we've forgotten how to do it, and the places where it's supposed to happen like Congress or think of the political parties, those exist to build coalitions. They're not good at doing that right now, and that means that the core work of our democracy is not getting done very well because we've forgotten not how to agree, but exactly how to disagree.
Mitch Daniels (07:50):
Well, your book offers, unlike many which just lament the problem, some very constructive and interesting ideas about how to get at it. But before we get there, let me ask you this. I would say that advocates, defenders of liberty and limited governments must start from a premise of humility about what they [as] individuals, what institutions can accomplish and so forth, but in all self introspection, is it not arguable that this polarization we're facing is not really symmetrical? In other words, it's each side is not equally aggressive, culpable and so forth. You described what we've come to term refer to his diversity movement as divisive and domineering, and I think that's fair. I don't see the same impulse to dominate on the other. I see it more as a matter of offense and defense, but maybe I'm clouded by my biases.
Yuval Levin (09:04):
Well, that I have very similar biases and so I may be clouded in the same way, but I do think that there is a particular kind of character to the breakdown of our common culture now that has to do with the fact that we're in a moment where the division is not only left and right, but also up and down. In a sense a lot of our institutions are dominated by a kind of progressive mindset because the American elite today is just more cohesive than it has generally been in our history. I think it's actually an important thing to see about the United States. European visitors to the United States in the 19th and most of the 20th century were always struck by the way in which we had a diversity of elites. The people who ran companies were very different from the people who ran government agencies or the people who ran newspapers or the people who ran the English department at Brown University.
(09:57):
We're now in a place where those people are much more similar than they've generally been in American history. We're a little bit more like 19th century European societies where there's an elite. It's members are almost interchangeable with each other. They all went to the same schools, they all have the same kind of formation, the same kind of cultural instincts that is increasingly true now in American life, which means that there is a way in which there is a sense in a lot of our culture now, there's a kind of aggressive elite that is trying to transform our society and there's a defensive reaction against it, and those in some ways overcome our traditional left right divisions. I do think that the left in the last 15, 20 years has been the aggressor in the American culture wars. That's not to say that there have not been times when the right has been very aggressive and when people on the left have had legitimate grievances to point to.
(10:52):
They certainly have. But I think broadly speaking, the left has been pushing the envelope and the right has been pushed and a lot of the ways in which that's happened, whether that's in the universities or in American corporate culture or in the broader popular culture has had to do with some of these ideas that have gone under the names of diversity or diversity, equity and inclusion. The striking thing to me about Diversity Equity Inclusion policies is that they restrict diversity and they undermine equity and they exclude people so that if you believe in those things, then you should be against them, not for them. A lot of the exclusion takes the form of constraining the range of permissible opinion. In that sense, it is a problem for our public life, just as I've just suggested that it makes it hard for us to disagree constructively because in too many American institutions there are opinions that are out of bounds that are not allowed to be expressed, and very often those are fringe opinions. They're very widely held views of large portions of American society. They're just not allowed to have a place. I think that makes it very difficult for us to have a functional political and cultural life. It also makes it difficult for the institutions of our constitutional system to work. And so yeah, I don't think it's been quite equal. I think it's fair to say.
Mitch Daniels (12:17):
Do you think that the ironies that you just mentioned and the excesses of this movement, if we call it that have caused, are beginning to cause a genuine counter reaction? We certainly see some stepping back from it, the investment policies of Wall Street, many campuses rethinking or being forced to rethink by state legislatures there the size and reach of their bureaucracies in these areas. Is that cosmetic and temporary, just a strategic retreat or do you think something some meaningful reformation might be in underway?
Yuval Levin (13:06):
Well, I think that there is genuine concern among some of the people who've been driving these changes that they run real risks, that they run the risk of turning the mainstream of American culture against them, and that is a danger for them. So I do think we've seen some stepping back in some companies that just went too far in politicizing their businesses in ways that are bad for business and that they're paying a price for. And in universities where I think at first it took really exceptional leadership like what we saw from you at Purdue, like what we saw from Ben Sass at the University of Florida and a few other examples. But I think increasingly there's a kind of model here to work with. It's especially evident so far in some public universities, particularly in red states if we're frank about it, where you've seen schools and other institutions formed within large state universities that are trying to create some space for traditional academic pursuit of knowledge.
(14:06):
And I think these are very important. I do think they're more than cosmetic. These are institutions that can hire and tenure and grant degrees. That's a very important trend that I think has to be taken seriously and reinforced. And obviously the universities that are allowing this feel like they're being pressured into it and they would love for it to be just ephemeral and cosmetic, but I think that if we take it seriously, it can be more than that and that the price they're paying is real and the worry they have is real. And so the public pressure in response to some of the excesses of the left does create real opportunities that we have to see as chances to build and not just to tear down. That's particularly important for conservatives now to see that we're trying to fight for these institutions not against them, and therefore we should look for opportunities to make them what they're meant to be
Mitch Daniels (14:59):
Writing about in a way the essence of our system. You write that majorities should rule, but minorities must be protected. Is it facile to suggest, you just talked about the mainstream feeling that it can't express itself, can't be open about its views and values in a way at the moment. Is it tyrannies? Is it minorities who are terrorizing and majorities who need to be protected or let me just ask you who's unprotected these days?
Yuval Levin (15:37):
Yeah, well, in some ways I think that's true, but I would say there are in a sense some competing elites. There's the left commands, many of the institutions of American life that are not elected the right commands, many of those that are, and that should tell us something about who's the majority and who's not. But it also means that there's a reason to think about the balance that the Constitution tries to strike, which in a sense is a balance that every democracy has to reach for. But I think the American system is actually unique in the way in which it takes that need for balance. Seriously, a balance between majority rule, which is the only source of legitimate authority in a democratic society and minority rights, which are absolutely essential. Our system recognizes that majority rule, although it is necessary, is also very dangerous. And you don't have to look too long at the history of democracy or the history of the United States to see that majorities can endanger minorities.
(16:36):
Our system protects those minorities in a very unique way. On the one hand, it protects certain rights just in direct and absolute ways. It puts them out of the reach of majorities through the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment and a few other things. But above all, our system requires majorities to grow before they can have real power. One of the most frustrating things about the American constitutional system for its critics is just that it doesn't empower narrow majorities the parliamentary systems in Europe. If you win an election, however narrow it is, you get all the power until you lose your majority. The American system does not do that. And I think though that is a source of frustration, it's one of the greatest sources of the system's strength that actually takes the need to constrain majority seriously as we all
Mitch Daniels (17:25):
Should. Well, let's hope it's resilient even in recent days as we're taping this one important spokesperson for one side has said if his party achieves even and narrowest the majorities, they'll do some very, very major things that do change our institutions and dismantle some of those frustrating impediments that [James ] Madison and others put in the way of majorities.
Yuval Levin (17:51):
Absolutely, and look, I think we've seen in recent years that Democrats have become dissatisfied with a lot of the constraints on majority power, and you've seen open critiques of the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion increasingly an attack on the legitimacy of the courts. All the while there are also threats to the constitutional order that come from the right. And I think we have to be concerned about both of these kinds of dangers and see that a system that frustrates narrow majorities is at risk in 21st century America because narrow majorities are the only majorities we have, and right now everybody's frustrated, but we have to see that ultimately that's a good thing that creates an incentive to broaden majorities and build coalitions, and that's how we should react to our frustration.
Mitch Daniels (18:42):
One more definitional question then we'll get to your very interesting suggestions and prescriptions, but you I think talk very persuasively about the need to think clearly about unity and you distinguished unity of thought and opinion from unity of action. Why don't you explain what you're getting at there?
Yuval Levin (19:08):
In a way, now we talk a lot about unity because we have a clear feeling that we're divided and that this is a moment of intense division and breakdown of cohesion in American life. Our politicians talk all the time about unity, but very often they seem to mean that if everyone agreed with them, then everything would be great. And if we all were just on the same side of everything, then it would be wonderful. Now look, I think if everybody agreed with me then things would be great. That's true, but I don't expect that to happen and I don't think anybody should. And we also have to have enough humility to know that nobody knows everything, so it actually wouldn't be great even if everybody agreed with me, there's surely things I'm wrong about, and that's not how our society really advances. The core insight that I would say James Madison in particular brings to his constitutional thought is that although we're never going to agree, disagreement is just a function of freedom in a free society.
(20:05):
Anybody who's ever had any experience with any group of people of any size knows that what people do when they're in a group is disagree, and that's always going to happen. And yet that doesn't mean that we can't be a unified society because in a free society, unity doesn't mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. Politics is a realm of action. It's where we solve problems and answer the question, what shall we do? And to answer that question, we don't have to all agree about all our premises. We don't even have to all agree about what the answer is. We can work our way towards something we all find acceptable. It's a realm for negotiation, for accommodations, for finding a way forward that people take to be legitimate and that addresses the problems. There's a humility at the center of that too because there's a sense at the core of the American system that nobody's technical answer to any of our public problems is the perfect way forward.
(20:59):
And it's more important that we agree about the answer than that it has the particular technocratic character of one side or another. And that's frustrating too. It's frustrating to all kinds of policy wonks who say, well, actually I'm right about this. We just need to do this. But ultimately the system says it's more important that we agree about what we do and that it endures because nobody has a perfect answer. And it's better to have an imperfect answer than none at all. And that insight, the sense that we can be unified around what we should do together even when we're not unified around how to think about broad questions of principle and practice is I think essential to understanding the strength of the American system and to seeing what it would mean to be a more united society. It wouldn't mean that we don't disagree with each other. It would mean that we disagree about how to act, that we negotiate from that disagreement and that we arrive at an agreed upon way forward. That's what our politics can do for us when it works.
Mitch Daniels (21:56):
So I think you have advanced our thinking, or at least taken us in a new direction in trying to answer the question. Others haven't even approached- how do we get out of this fix? And I didn't read the subtitle of the book, but now I will, How the Constitution Unified our Nation and Could Again, you locate possible locus or wellspring of recovery in the Constitution. And so let's talk about that a little bit. You start by pointing out that for some Americans when they think about it at all, it's just a matter of personal rights and so forth. Maybe for some about the limits it tries to draw around government, but you talk about it being much more than that a five part framework. Please explain.
Yuval Levin (22:49):
In a sense, we are kept from knowing the Constitution as well as we should by the fact that we know some things about it really well. We know the Constitution as a legal framework and increasingly in our time we've tended to turn over the Constitution to the lawyers and the judges and lawyers and judges are important, and the constitution is law. I would say it is first and foremost law, and it's the supreme law of the land, but that's not all. It's the Constitution as law is a set of constraints on power in particular. It's a set of boundaries that define the limits of what can be done, but what happens within those limits is also constitutionalism. So we have to see that the Constitution is not just a legal framework, it's also a framework for policymaking. That's actually why it was created. The Constitution was necessary because the previous system under the Articles of Confederation just didn't work well enough as a system of government for the United, not because there weren't enough limits on government, but because government didn't work.
(23:49):
It was not effective and it was the desire for effectiveness that led to the Constitution. I would say this is particularly important for people like me as a conservative to think about because we often look to the Constitution for limits on government and it does offer those, but the Constitution created our government, it created Congress, it created the executive in the courts. It built them first and then limited them. And that's vital to see, but it's also worth seeing the Constitution as an institutional framework. It isn't just a way to channel public power as if power is this undifferentiated thing and the Constitution divides it into three so that it's not too dangerous. It divides it between a legislature and executive and a judiciary. And those are different kinds of institutions that do different sorts of things in different ways. We too often forget that now, and we look to presidents to legislate, we look to the courts to regulate that is not how things should happen.
(24:48):
And it's important for us to see the Constitution ultimately as a political framework, as a structure for the public life of a free society. And one of the things that lets us do in that way is that it also acts as a unifying framework. It's a set of answers to the question that's demanded by the description of unity that I just gave you. If Unity means not thinking alike, but acting together, that obviously invites a question. How could we possibly act together when we don't think alike? And the Constitution is a set of answers to that question. We do it through negotiating in the legislature. We do it by competition through elections and the inter branch conflict, we do it by building coalitions. I think it's vital for us to see that the Constitution is all of these things so that we don't mistake it for a judge's instrument, a lawyer's instrument, but that we see that it makes demands on us as citizens and ultimately requires a certain kind of civic life that frankly we're not always living up to. Now,
Mitch Daniels (25:49):
You have important things to say about each branch of government and its role, potential role in bringing us back to some agreement about how to act together, but more than any, you assign the responsibility or at least the potential for improvement to the Congress, which is ironic or troublesome in a way because right now maybe it's a candidate for our least respected institution. So I want to ask you just a little bit about this. You say that Congress has designed in the Constitution creates or is supposed to a culture of negotiation. We haven't seen much of that lately, but how might we see more?
Yuval Levin (26:42):
Right. Congress is, it's the first branch of our government, and not by coincidence, we have a republican government, which means it's meant to be representative of the people and Congress is the representative branch, and that means Congress is in the driver's seat, but it also means that when Congress is working well, our system is in good shape. When Congress is working poorly, our system is in bad shape. And that above all, I think it’s what's happening now. The problems with our constitutional system almost all emanate from Congress and those that are problems with other branches like the overactive executive, the occasionally overactive judiciary, I think are responses to an underactive congress. Congress has willfully delegated too much of its authority. It's unwilling to do some of its most important work, and I think it's crucial to see what's wrong. There is broad agreement that Congress is dysfunctional.
(27:33):
Almost any American I think would accept that at some level. But what function is Congress failing to perform is actually a controversial question. The natural answer, the intuitive answer is, well, they're just not passing big bills. They're not passing major legislation to deal with the big problems of the country. That's true, but I think underlying that is a deeper problem. The purpose of Congress is to facilitate cross partisan bargaining and accommodation. That's the way in which Congress can serve as a unifying force. It's also the way in which it can ultimately legislate. It can actually create broad legislative vehicles. And the fact that Congress is not now facilitating cross partisan bargaining and accommodation is the core problem. That's why they're not passing big bills. It's also why Congress is contributing to division rather than unity.
(28:27):
This difference over diagnosis is important because if you think the problem is Congress isn't passing big bills, you want Congress to be more efficient, so you want to centralize power. You want to get rid of the filibuster, you want to let things move faster. If you think the problem is Congress is not facilitating bargains in accommodations across party lines, then you actually want to make Congress less efficient. You want to create the necessity for cross partisan bargaining. So I'm a big defender of the filibuster in this book. I'm a defender in general of the complexity of Congress's systems, and I think that power has to flow through the middle layers of the institution. We don't want to centralize power in leaders. We want to focus power in committees where members actually deal with each other, actually negotiate about substantive legislation. So I propose a bunch of congressional reforms in this book that are, I would say, minority ideas. You find them on the right side, on the conservative side of the congressional reform world because they're all about enabling the institution to facilitate bargaining and accommodation rather than just letting it pass big legislation with narrow majorities.
Mitch Daniels (29:31):
Yeah, no, you comment at one point that serving as a representative teaches moderation. It makes me want to ask, do you ever watch C-Span?
Yuval Levin (29:43):
Yeah.
Mitch Daniels (29:44):
But I'm serious in a way because there are other things going on. The modes of communication, for instance, that I think are making this a problem worse, they're encouraging. You used the word performative a while ago, behavior as opposed to negotiation.
Yuval Levin (30:08):
Absolutely. Congress is in a place now where a lot of its members have lost sight of its basic purpose, which is negotiation toward legislative work, and instead they've been invested with a different purpose. I would say James Madison was right about one thing here. He was right that members of Congress are going to be ambitious people, but his assumption was their ambition would be channeled through the institution. For them to succeed, the institution would have to function well. In the contemporary Congress, a lot of members have a different opinion. They think that for them to succeed, they should use the institution as a platform to elevate themselves in the theater of our political culture
Mitch Daniels (30:46):
At the expense of the institution.
Yuval Levin (30:48):
At the expense of the institution, exactly as commentators often commentators about Congress. And so they'll run and look for a camera and say, oh, you wouldn't believe what happens here. And you want to say to them, well, I don't know. You're the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. You're in charge of what happens here. Why are you complaining about Congress? Do your job. But complaining about Congress is often how they understand their job. Too often now, if you go to a congressional hearing, you'll find members producing YouTube clips to send to their constituents rather than producing legislation. And I think that's very much related to the over decentralization of power and leadership and to the ways in which we think about the institution. Members are not wrong to think that spending all their time doing committee work would be a waste of their time because committee work is not allowed to matter. So the Madisonian insight here is that institutional structure creates political culture. If you change the incentives, if you let the everyday work of legislating matter, more members would be more invested in it and would be more likely to devote themselves to that rather than to a kind of communication strategy. So institutional change and cultural change are deeply connected to each other.
Mitch Daniels (31:54):
Right. I want to spend much of our last few minutes on that very central question because it is a hopeful analysis and that you present that if we made certain institutional changes, behavior would begin to adapt to them. Lemme just ask you about a few specifics because again, I appreciate that your book doesn't simply stop at hand wringing and doesn't simply stop at abstractions. So what about getting rid of the appropriations committees and the budget committees?
Yuval Levin (32:28):
The idea here is really to allow the everyday work of members to matter. So a lot of the way that Congress works now amounts to everybody talking about each other a year, and then in the last couple of weeks of the fiscal year, basically four people, the party leaders in each House get together and arrive at a final appropriations package and members just vote up or down. And so they don't really get to do legislative work. And part of the reason for that has to do with the fact that a lot of their committee work is authorizing work that doesn't spend money. And so they can create new programs, they can change programs, but it's only the appropriators in Congress who actually produce the bills that spend money. Now, I used to be a member of the staff of the house budget committee, and I would say that the budget process as it exists today is an act of menace in a deeply divided Congress.
(33:27):
It's not built for the 21st century Congress. It has to be rethought and it has to be rethought in particular in a way that can invest members in their legislative work. I think breaking the barrier between authorization and appropriation so that the committees that write the laws also spend the money so they're firing with real bullets is one way to help members feel responsible and therefore behave a little more responsibly. Congress actually worked this way for about 40 years from the end of the 19th century until 1921. There were downsides to that that we should learn from if we're going to do it today, but I think on the whole modern Congress would benefit a lot from not having the separate class of legislators who are appropriators and who basically do all the work of actually spending public dollars, and if instead every member had some responsibility and therefore some incentive to act responsibly.
Mitch Daniels (34:19):
The budget framework we have now, I guess dating to probably 74 did attempt to impose some total restraint or total limit on spending. That's a little ironic today, having watched how preposterous unthinkable debt and deficit spending that we've been running up despite that framework.
Yuval Levin (34:44):
Yeah, that budget framework was created in the middle of a 40 year period of Democratic control of Congress, and it was built for one party Congress to deal mostly with presidents of the other party. It has a particular purpose. It just has very little to do with what Congress needs. Now. It's not in the Constitution, it's not part of it is in law, part of it is in the rules of the houses. It can change and it should change it's time to rethink the budget process.
Mitch Daniels (35:12):
Another maybe minority idea that you propose is adding seats to the House of Representatives.
Yuval Levin (35:19):
This one is especially peculiar to readers because I think none of us look at the House now and think, wow, I wish there were more of these people. But the fact is that the House was meant to grow with the country. It was meant to grow after each census so that members could remain relatively well connected to their constituents, and it did grow throughout the 19th century and until the 1920 census, the house expanded some, so that redistricting generally meant that no state would lose seats and districts were rearranged and the house would grow in a way that allowed every state to at least keep the number it had. It was a pretty good formula, in fact for allowing the house to grow not too fast, not become too big, but remain connected to constituents. If we had kept that formula since 1920, there would now be 150 more members of the house.
(36:09):
What I propose is to expand the house now by 150 members and then let it grow slowly with each census. I think it would help the institution be a little more representative. It would also rebalance the electoral college sum because each state's electoral college delegation is just the size of its congressional delegation, and it would create a moment where Congress could think about other reforms too. A kind of shot in the arm that says 150 new members. Those people would want to rethink the budget process, would want to rethink the committee system. Congress would be in a place where it says, we don't have to keep doing things exactly the way we have. Let's think about what's working and what's not and drive some change. So I think of expanding the house as constitutional maintenance, not as some kind of revolutionary change, and it is necessary maintenance.
Mitch Daniels (36:55):
One theme that you delved into that brought, I'm pretty sure an audible hurrah from me was the downsides of what has become a sacred shibboleth, and that is so-called transparency in government. Everything needs to be out in the open, full public view. There are those of us who've attempted to practice a little government. Most of us know a very impractical idea carried to its extreme like everything else in life. The first rule, I think is up to a point where should that point be in the case of transparency?
Yuval Levin (37:44):
Exactly. It's up to a point. So transparency is necessary in a public body and like Congress, absolutely, but I think it should mean that members need to be accountable for the decisions they make, but not that every conversation they have needs to be on television or on the internet. It's vital for an institution whose fundamental work is negotiation that there be some protected spaces for negotiation. The framers of the Constitution knew that themselves, the constitutional convention was held in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, and in the summer they sealed the windows and met in private. They knew they would have to answer for what they produced, but the everyday work of making concessions and making deals and bargains had to be done in private. That remains true. Now, I don't think that we can simply undo the kind of transparency that now exists in Congress, and I wouldn't burn down C-span. I think it plays an important role up to a point, but I think that in committee work in particular, there has to be some room for privacy for members to talk to each other. And so I argue that committees should create a new form of business, a new form of committee work that isn't the televised hearing but is a private business session and that that's where they should do markup. That's where they should negotiate about the substance of legislation. It's just not possible to negotiate in public. If you're watching people negotiate on television, you're watching a show that's not the real work, and Congress knows that because in fact, all the real work is done in the leadership offices at midnight before a government shutdown. Those are the only places where there's any privacy to negotiate. There ought to be more such places so that the work wouldn't have to be done that way.
Mitch Daniels (39:29):
Yeah, no, I mean it's not, by the way, limited to government. You see it all over other public institutions like universities. It makes deceivers out of honest people because in order to get anything actually done, you have to. Too often people have to work around the edges of the rules or even
Yuval Levin (39:51):
Absolutely. Right. I used to be the staff director of a presidential advisory commission, a president's commission on bioethics, and the laws that govern those commissions mean everything is public. And what that meant was that all the real work was done on the phone and the meetings were not as useful as they should have been. So there's got to be a mix of transparency and privacy for deliberation.
Mitch Daniels (40:16):
Well, I think it is an essential element of the change you're advocating, and I hope at some point we'll see some reformation there. Now, if there's another area where you make some suggestions for improvements comes in another institution which is in very low repute these days, and that's our political parties, but you have some important things to say about primaries and how, first of all, what's wrong with what we're doing now and how that might be improved? Share that please.
Yuval Levin (40:53):
I do think the parties are vital and the parties are not in the Constitution. They're not described there. In fact, some of the framers of the Constitution held out hope that American politics would not need permanent political parties or durable political parties, but they quickly saw that they were mistaken about that. And the party system has always been a kind of necessary piece of the puzzle of the American constitutional system. Our two parties, because they're both very broad coalitions, actually contribute to the capacity of our governing institutions to build coalitions when they're working. But the core function of the parties is candidate selection, is to populate the system with people who would be good at building broad coalitions and good at. And the parties now for more than half a century have delegated their most important function candidate selection to what are really essentially almost random electorates in primaries. The people who vote in party primaries are about eight to 10% of the party in most cases, and so a very small percent of the overall electorate. And they're not just a small percentage. They're the people who are most intensely devoted to the party's ideology, which means that they're the people who are least inclined to want a politics of bargaining and accommodation. And that means that we start every election cycle by asking the people in America who least want to see the system work the way it's intended. What they want and what they want are people who will not bargain and negotiate, but instead will grandstand and perform on a public stage. The necessity for coalition building and negotiating is widely accepted by the American public, but it is not widely accepted by primary voters. That creates a mismatch between the people in the system and the way the system needs to work.
(42:39):
And it's bad for the parties, not just for the system. It means that the parties keep running candidates who are not broadly appealing. They both know this. They constantly find themselves with candidates who speak to the primary electorate, but in the general election just have real trouble building coalitions and the 50-50 politics we're living in has a lot to do with our primary system. It doesn't have to work this way, and the parties can find ways to broaden the appeal of their candidates. Again, I don't think we go back. I don't think we go back to the smoke-filled back rooms where party bosses choose candidates for Congress, but I think we can go forward and I think the parties can experiment. For example, with something like ranked choice voting in primaries, I don't like ranked choice in the general election because it undermines parties in primaries. Ranked choice can actually strengthen parties by letting them find more broadly appealing candidates. But more generally, what I argue in that sense is that we need to experiment. I don't know the answer to this problem. I don't think anybody knows exactly how to move forward from the failed primary system we have, but our system is decentralized. You can try different things in different states, and that's what we should be doing. This should be a period of experimentation in the way the parties choose candidates.
Mitch Daniels (43:55):
I think you're making a believer out of me on this last point. It was very persuasively argued here in the book. Yuval, I'd like to finish by asking you to ruminate just for a minute on, again, a classic question which is upstream here, culture and values or institutions which can most influence the other or is most likely to. We skipped over the presidency as we moved through the last few minutes, but you did point out that the presidency, you say at one point more than any other office depends on the character of its occupant. Can a president, we’ll say a hypothetical president of poor character or an admirable character lead a reform or improvement in our civic life?
Yuval Levin (44:52):
Well, I'd say a few things here. I think that institutions and culture inevitably are, they exist in a cycle of influence. Neither is entirely upstream of the other. A broken culture creates broken institutions. Broken institutions feed a broken culture. And so the question for me in thinking about this is where can we intervene rather than which drives which they clearly drive each other. But when I find myself saying, well, what we need to do is change the culture, I feel like I haven't said anything. I don't know what that means, change the culture. How am I going to do that? And when you think about how you're going to do that, the answer always amounts to institutional action. It means I'm going to change what I'm doing in my family, in my church, in my workplace, in my school. Those are institutions. At the end of the day, the things we do together, the things we do in groups are things we do through institutions. And so it's easier to imagine interventions in institutions. And if it's true that healthy institutions can change incentives, can improve the underlying preconditions for a healthier culture, then that's something we can do. I can think of ways to improve the institutions that I'm part of. I don't know as an individual how I'm going to change the culture. So it's because I want to be practical that I think about institutions not because I think they matter more than culture
Mitch Daniels (46:15):
One is actionable in a way the other may not be. Absolutely. Yeah. We have made a practice. Now you have all of ending these conversations with the same question and having read the introduction of your book, I think I know which direction you'll go, but the question is, it's 2050. Is America and are Americans more free or less free?
Yuval Levin (46:39):
I do have hope that we will be more free in 2050 than we are now. I have hope in general, I think if you look around the world, there's no where you'd rather be than the United States of America. And if you think about our history, there's no time you'd rather be living in than the present time. We have big problems. Thinking about those problems is my day job and I worry about them a lot. But we also have tremendous resources in the people we have in this country, in the political tradition that we have and the resources that we can draw on. And so I think we're in a good place to be stronger in 2050, that the challenge for us in making that actually happen is recognizing what's wrong now and finding a way to act together toward addressing it. That's the reason to do what I do.
(47:26):
It's the reason you do what you do and that kind of work on a large scale in the way in which it happens in America can work. Our strength is that we're a decentralized society. We're not just sitting around waiting for a great president to show up and solve all of our problems. We can all do that where we are and play a part in it. And a country that lets that happen is a country that's well equipped to be more free and stronger in 2050 than it is now. I get to live in such a country, so I'm a lucky person.
Mitch Daniels (47:57):
We all [are]. Well, Yuval Levin, author of American Covenant. Thanks for the day job you've chosen because of the way you do that job. A lot of us are like you, hopeful about the future and certainly believe that that better future is more likely by virtue of the work you're doing. Thanks for being with us, and
Yuval Levin (48:22):
Thank you so much, Mitch. It's an honor to talk to you as always, and I really appreciate this conversation.
Mitch Daniels (48:27):
Keep the good work coming. Thanks to each of you for joining us today. You can find this and the previous programs in The Future of Liberty series at libertyfund.org/podcasts/future-of-liberty/. Thank you once again. See you at the next show.
Outro (48:44):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.