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
If you look at American political life at almost any moment in our history, you would find a majority coalition holding a very, very complicated kind of coalition together and struggling to keep it hanging together. And you find a minority party struggling to build and broaden its coalition and become a majority.
Both those parties are engaged in coalition building, which is how our system is intended to work. In the last 30 years, and there's really only been one other period like this at the end of the 19th century, which lasted about 20 years, we've had two minority parties at the same time. This is a 50-50 moment, and the challenge is there isn't a clear majority will.
What we need from our system is not help empowering the majority. What we need from our system is help informing a broader majority. I think we've arrived at this place because we've moved too far from the original intentions of the American constitutional system. which is meant to operate with Congress at its center building coalitions, negotiating across party lines.
So that frustration with this moment should not lead us to abandon that system, but to recover that system. We've had a two-party system for a long time, at least since 1824 and some ways since 1800, so that the system has actually worked as a two-party constitutional system almost from the beginning. What it's failing to do now is facilitate bargaining and deal-making across those lines.
There's not an easy way to do it, but I think to do it would require, first of all, recognizing that that's what we're not doing. The diagnosis makes a big difference because if the problem is just we're not passing big bills, then you want Congress to be more efficient. So you want to get rid of the filibuster, you want to strengthen party leaders, strengthen party discipline.
If you think the problem is we're not facilitating bargaining across party lines, then you're Then you love the filibuster, as I do. It's the only reason we've had any bipartisan legislation in the last 15 years. You don't want to strengthen party leaders. You want to strengthen committees. You want to decentralize the budget process.
The difference over which way we should go is very, very important for figuring out how to resolve the kind of frustration we have now, because I don't think presidentialism is going to resolve it. I agree that it is a response to that frustration, but it is a response that isn't going to work. And a better response would begin from a reacquaintance with the logic of our Constitution.
Why? Why? Yeah, this is a great question, and I really agree with the way that you put the problem. I think that you have to begin from the fact that you began with, which is these are ambitious people. Members of Congress are ambitious, smart men and women. I know they can look like clowns from a distance, and a few of them are clowns maybe, but they're pretty impressive people.
And they're going to do what it takes to succeed. The question is, what does it take to succeed? What is the definition of success that they're operating with? I think a lot of that is a function of the kinds of incentives that the political system sets up for them.
And in this moment, a lot of the definition of success involves having a prominent place in our political theater, which is a very, very fragmented partisan theater. And looking like you are doing a great job of speaking for the team. So every member wants to be seen as the person who really says that thing that the left doesn't want to hear if you're a Republican member.
They define success by social media following, by their prominence in the cable news outlets that matter to their older voters. they don't define their success as much by legislative work by what can you bring home in a funny way the media environment the operating has been both nationalized and fragmented you're not trying to look good on the national news so much as to look good
to the particular social media influencer that your most devoted primary voters follow. And that's created a set of incentives that is distant from legislative work. And it's left a lot of members with a sense that investing themselves in their committee work is a waste of time. And so members who are ambitious are channeling their ambition in a direction that seems like it can lead to success.
And I think that does create a variety of kind of deformations of legislative work that, from the vantage point of our system of government, makes these members seem to be doing very strange things.
I think that's a great insight. And I think people are really understating the possibility that Republicans just won't be able to pass a reconciliation bill in this Congress. They just simply won't be able to pass it together. They have a three vote majority in the House. So what are they going to do about tax reform?
What are they going to do about renewing the expiring elements of the 2017 tax bill? It's entirely possible that ultimately the only way to do that will be through some bipartisan bill. But they're proceeding now as if that's not even a possibility. It gets back to the question we took up earlier about just what it means to be strong as a president.
And this is actually a very longstanding problem for American presidents. In the very first presidential administration, when George Washington was president, Alexander Hamilton started out just writing legislation. And he wrote these big bills on how to arrange the American economy.
And the response that he got before things really broke down between him and James Madison was Madison saying, if you let us work this out, we're going to end up in a similar place, but we'll own it. And people aren't going to feel like they're voting on Alexander Hamilton's bill. Let Congress do this.
Hamilton didn't agree, and it created enormous problems for him and ultimately had a very bad effect on his own political future. And ever since then, there's been this irony that the president is often strongest when he sets the basic parameters and says, look, if the bill doesn't do this, then I'll veto it. But otherwise, Congress works it out.
And I think our modern presidents in particular have so internalized this kind of deformed sense of their role that they don't see that ultimately their success depends on legislative action. They think they can be remembered for being great presidents for their administrative actions. And it's just not true. Who are the modern presidents we think highly of? It's FDR and the New Deal.
What was the New Deal? The New Deal was legislation, right? What was the Great Society? Great Society was not a set of administrative actions. It was big bills that the president shepherded through. He certainly gave them a lot of direction, but there was a lot of negotiation that was not about him in that process. Ronald Reagan's tax bill was not just Ronald Reagan's tax bill.
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