Barton Swaim reviews Yuval Levin’s most recent book in today’s WSJ:
Mr. Levin has a gift for drawing readers’ attention to realities that should have been obvious but weren’t. He does that in his latest book, “American Covenant,” which was published on Tuesday. The argument could be put this way: The U.S. Constitution was written to bring together a fractious and disunited nation, so if we’re looking for ways to bring together a fractious and disunited nation, maybe we should consider the U.S. Constitution.
The snide antimetabole is mine, not Mr. Levin’s. He writes in an irenic tone, as if he believes reasonable debate and persuasion are still possible. “The breakdown of political culture in our day,” he observes in the book, “is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with each other but of our having forgotten how to disagree constructively.” The framers of the Constitution, he argues, were aware of the dangers both of centralized power and of democracy: They had fought an imperious king a decade before, and in the intervening years they had lived through a democracy so disunited that it fell apart. What they fashioned in 1787 was neither a monarchy nor a libertarian compact but a system whose stability and cohesion arose precisely from the guarantee that its citizens would be forced to deal with each other constantly—always negotiating, competing and forming coalitions.
Maybe the best way to encapsulate Mr. Levin’s contention is to compare American democracy with parliamentary systems like the one from which ours departed. In Britain, when one party wins an election, it can do more or less what it wants until the next election, with the opposition there mainly to criticize it. By contrast, even if an American party wins big, it may not win both chambers of Congress and the presidency, and even when it does, the minority retains enough power to force the majority to negotiate.
The intended consequence: Both parties are compelled to consider the interests of the other. The framers, particularly Madison, understood that the U.S. was far too large, culturally disparate and attitudinally centrifugal to be governed by a parliamentary system.
Last week I dropped by Mr. Levin’s office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow, with a galley copy of his book, its margins rife with scribbled notes and queries.
My first query: Conservatives like me are entirely comfortable with the idea that adherence to the 1787 Constitution, as amended, would afford all sorts of benefits to the republic. Progressives aren’t and never have been. What good is an argument for cohesion and solidarity if only one side can hear it?
“Looking at the Constitution in its own terms doesn’t really happen in a lot of the left’s engagement with it,” Mr. Levin acknowledges. “The striking thing about many of the books on the Constitution by progressive law professors is that they tend to start in the Progressive era. They don’t really talk about the framers’ purpose and reject it.” That’s too bad, he thinks, because one of the framers’ chief concerns was that democracy can menace minorities—numerically small groups or factions that can find themselves abused or treated unjustly by majorities. “That concern should resonate with a lot of progressives,” Mr. Levin says. “Somehow it doesn’t, because there’s an assumption at the root of modern progressivism that it speaks for the majority and that the majority is somehow silenced by the Constitution.”
The progressive left over the past 25 years has developed an unlovely contempt for the Constitution’s countermajoritarian institutions; hence the periodic talk of abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster or even the Senate itself, and adding blue states to the union. All these ideas assume that progressives hold a clear majority and that the Constitution stops them from exercising their rightful prerogative.
But if anything ought to be clear from the last quarter-century in American politics, it is that neither side holds a consistent majority. “Simple majoritarianism,” Mr. Levin observes in his book, “is of no use when there aren’t simple majorities.”
“Throughout most of American history,” he says, “there’s a majority party holding a really complicated coalition together. And there’s a minority party trying to build a coalition. They’re both involved in coalition building.” There was a period of about 18 years at the end of the 19th century when the country was split 50/50, Mr. Levin explains, but this time we’ve been at more or less 50/50 for longer than that already.
“Since about the 1990s we’ve had two minority parties, and they don’t actually do a lot of coalition building,” he says. “Mainly they try to get their people out, as if they hold a big majority already and only need turnout. They don’t do much thinking about how they might bring new people to their side. They don’t ask: What can we offer them? What can we do that would bring them in?”
There’s an assumption among progressives “that if we had a real democracy, we would go left all the time. I don’t know what country they’re living in, but that’s not true. Now, it’s not true that we’d go right all the time, either. But the protection of minorities is entirely overlooked—on the one hand because of the tendency to think about the founding era through the lens of slavery, which is not crazy, but is not sufficient; and on the other hand, because no one now thinks of themselves as a minority.”
The moon in daylight 