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
And nobody thinks that way explicitly, but it's how you actually do your job. I think in the Biden administration, it was hard to know because the president didn't really express clear priorities about anything. It was very hard to know what mattered to him and where he would fall and everything.
Because he was so coalitional, nobody in those lower tiers could really have a clear sense of like, well, this really matters to the president. He would do this and not that. The problem with Trump was that he could go either way on anything at any time. And even if he's stated a clear position, he could say the opposite the next day.
And there's this kind of paralyzing fear of making a choice that then gets you tweeted about and getting on the wrong side of the president because you just have no idea where he's going to be. This was an enormous problem. The people throughout the government were much more afraid of getting on the wrong side of him than they were eager to advance his priorities.
That is an enormous problem for effective presidential leadership. And I think that as a practical matter, it made both Trump and Biden very weak presidents, probably the weakest presidents in the modern era, both of them, because it was very hard for them to exert authority in a concerted, focused way that was durable.
Yeah, it's a very important question. And my biggest fear is the administration deciding not to abide by court orders. What they're doing so far is legitimate. Whether you agree with it or not, it's operating within the system, and then a court said no, and they pulled it back, and they're going to try again, and they'll push and pull, and that's how our system works.
It's fine that it makes people uneasy, and a lot of what they're pushing makes people uneasy for substantive ideological reasons, and that's how politics works. But when the boundaries of the system itself are under threat – and again, this is why it's important to think in constitutional terms. It's not about the politics, but it's about the constitutional structure that keeps things in order.
I think the biggest threat – there are a number of ways that that could be threatened – The denial of an election result, for example, was a very important way in which that was threatened. And I think what happened after the 2020 election should have rendered Donald Trump ineligible for reelection, should have made voters not want to reelect him. And that's not what the American public thought.
That worries me. But if the administration openly defies a court order, then I think we are in a different situation.
Yeah, it's certainly alive and out there, but I would say that there's... often a tendency on all sides of our politics to attribute so much strength and success to the other side that it justifies breaking the system, that that's the only possible response. That's been a relatively common refrain on the left, too.
And there are a lot of people on the left who talk about throwing away the Constitution. Some of them are law professors at Harvard and Yale. And who just talk openly about the need to abandon our constitutional system and the illegitimacy of it. There are certainly voices like that now on the right. I actually would not put J.D. Vance in that category. I don't think that's right.
And I should say I have a lot of respect and regard for J.D. Vance. I think he's a serious person in our politics who we should take seriously. But there are such people.
I mean, it's not exactly what he said, but it doesn't matter. I mean, I would say that reference to that apocryphal Andrew Jackson line points in a very bad direction. I disagree with it. There are a lot of things that he's argued that I don't agree with, but I don't think that you should put J.D. Vance in the category of people who want to throw away the American Constitution.
That's not my sense. I could be wrong, but it's not my sense. There certainly are some people on the right, including younger people as well as older people, who make the argument that we are already in a post-constitutional moment and that, therefore, it doesn't make sense for us to stick to the constraints of the Constitution if the other side's not going to do it.
I think they're wrong about the other side. They're overstating the strength of the left. They're overstating the aggressiveness of the left. They're overstating the success of the left. The left is weak, too, and failing, too, and can't seem to win a durable majority either. And therefore, I also don't think they're right in their prescription.
These, to my mind, do not seem like serious arguments, but they need to be answered because they are out there. It's a reason why it's necessary now to remind people of the argument for the American system. It's an argument that begins from the premise that we're not always going to agree in our country, and we need a system that allows us to act together even when we don't all think alike.
and that that system is what our Constitution provides. And throwing away this system is extremely dangerous to the fundamental rights that we all think are most important. That's an argument that I have to make to younger people now.
I think it's always important to make that argument, but it's certainly under assault in a way that's different from at least what I experienced on the right 15 and 20 years ago. I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question.
So three books these days, you know, I think about this in terms of how to think more clearly about the situation we're in. So one book that comes to mind for me is a book called The Rhetorical Presidency written by a political scientist named Jeffrey Toulas back in 1987.
It's a book that I've just kept coming back to in recent years and really offers a very profound way to understand the evolution of the presidency. A second book is about Congress. It's a book by Philip Wallach, a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, published just a couple years ago. It's called Why Congress?
and is really a wonderful argument about the reasons for the centrality of the national legislature and our national politics. I think it's a book that every member and staffer should read, but that a lot of Americans should read just to understand the logic of why Article I is Article I in the American Constitution.
Showing 321–340 of 343 · page 17 of 18
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