Yuval Levin
speaker
343 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Jan
Yuval Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I think a lot of our other problems come from that fact. And secondly, is the overbearing and arbitrary character of the administrative state. And so far, it seems to me that both of those problems are going to get worse in the next four years and not better. Certainly the weakness of Congress, where a lot of Republican members now just want to surrender their power to a president they now like.
And so they talk in terms of I heard a member of the House say to another during the debate over the vote on the speaker at the beginning of this Congress saying, well, President Trump should have the speaker that he wants. That is not how our Constitution works. And Congress should have a sense of its own authority and its own dignity that is distinct from the president.
And on the other hand, I think this rushing in with arbitrary power and assertions of authority at the beginning of a new administration suggests that even though I may like the policy direction that the administrative agencies are going to take in this administration, they're going to continue to act in an arbitrary and overbearing way that creates enormous problems for our system of government.
Thank you.
Yeah. The separation of powers is not just a division of power into three so that it's a little safer because it's divided. Power is channeled through three different kinds of institutions. The first one, the primary one, is a legislature. And the reason it's primary is that the legislature is representative of the American public.
The president is elected, but the president was not thought of as a representative figure. That office is one person in a vast country. One person can't really represent that vast country. That has to be done by a plural institution like Congress. And Congress has a specific kind of work.
It frames out, it builds out frameworks of law that are then going to direct the work of administration in the future. The president administers, and the idea of administration is almost lost to us now. We think of what the president does basically as saying, this is what should happen, and then things happen.
But actually, the most important part of the president's job is the making of those things happen. It is the working of the arms of government, of the various tools and implements to actually turn will into action. And the courts have a different job than both of those.
They review past actions and determine whether they were in line with the legal frameworks that Congress had created or with the Constitution. These are very different ways of using power. They're not just power divided into three. And the different ways matter enormously. The interactions between them are really what create the dynamics of our system of government.
I think our presidents now, this has certainly been true of Donald Trump in his first term and now, but it's also true of the rest of our modern presidents, have a conception of their job that's very legislative. They think their job is to produce those frameworks, to do it through administrative action. And essentially, when Congress can't act, the president will.
Barack Obama actually said that basically in those words. But every modern president has acted as though he believes that. I think that's profoundly wrong and creates huge problems for our system. But among the problems it creates is that the other branches respond to this by also not doing their jobs. None of this is how our system is meant to work.
And I think the center of why this has happened is actually the failure of Congress to take ownership of the direction of the system.
Well, I think the reason to look to how the Constitution is intended to work is not to lionize the past, but to address exactly the problems we have now. The most stark fact about the American party system in the 21st century is that it's failing. Both parties are failing. Neither one has been able to form a durable majority coalition in 30 years.
And that has left our politics intensely divided, bitterly polarized, very dysfunctional. And the question we have to ask ourselves is what can we do about this? I think it's worth our looking to the Constitution because there are answers there to what we can do about it. Not because that was some kind of sacred moment at the end of the 18th century and they knew all this stuff we don't know.
I don't think that's right. We know a lot of things they didn't know. We are better than they were in a lot of ways. But they did create a system that is distinctly capable of compelling narrow coalitions to broaden. The logic of the American Constitution... is that only majority rule is legitimate, but majorities are very dangerous to minorities.
And that means that we want a system that forces majorities to grow and broaden before they are empowered. This is what's frustrating about our system, right? You win an election, you still can't do anything. And the reason for that is that the system wants you to first broaden your coalition before you're really able to act. We really resist that now. We don't want to do it.
We live in a 50-50 moment and you win 50% plus one. You treat it as this massive, you know, Donald Trump just won 49.8% of the vote in a presidential election. Kamala Harris got 48.3% of the vote. And the Trump folks want to say, we won, we won big, we get to act now. The Constitution says, no, you have to deal with the people you defeated in the election. And they won their seats in Congress.
They won control of various state governments. They are still here, and you have to deal with them. To think about our system only through the lens of the parties is to reject that logic. Now, that's one way to do democracy, right? That's how the parliamentary systems work. Those are legitimate democratic systems.
But I think our system is better for us exactly because it doesn't allow us to work that way and ultimately prefers to produce legitimate public action over producing efficient public action. It forces us to build coalitions that include more people. I think that's what we're missing now.
I think the question that I'm left with from that description is responsive to what? To whom? Our problem right now is not that there is this American majority out there that's trying to get its will into action and the system is resisting it. Our problem is that there isn't an American majority out there. The elections of the last 30 years have produced 50-50 results over and over.
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