“The Constitution which we now present,” George Washington wrote in 1787 after completing his duties as the presiding officer over the Constitutional Convention, “is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.”
If it seems like the Constitution ’s spirit of unity and accommodation has lately eluded politicians , judges, and citizens alike, it’s because it has. The last decade has seen a disturbing breakdown in norms, an erosion of institutions, and an unraveling of national purpose. Worse yet, disputes over the Constitution itself have sharpened our divisions, with partisan armies wielding our founding document as a weapon, not applying it as a balm.
But happily, we have Yuval Levin to help us avoid despair, as he calmly, persuasively, and systematically instructs us in American Covenant, his splendid and timely new book aimed at restoring America’s common cause. Calling the Constitution a “charter of unity,” Levin demonstrates how it “compel[s] Americans with different views and priorities to deal with one another — to compete, negotiate, and build coalitions in ways that drag us into common action even (indeed, especially) when we disagree.”
Levin, the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute (disclosure: I am a fellow), builds on his previous scholarship that emphasized the importance of repairing our fractured institutions. He identifies five frameworks the Constitution represents: scaffolding of law, institutions, policymaking, politics, and unity. As he astutely notes, the first four frameworks traditionally serve as the focal point of constitutional study and practice, but we would do well to examine the final one closely. After all, the very first sentence of our founding covenant exhorts us “to form a more perfect union.” Its very first word is “we.”
The process of fostering unity through constitutional discourse, embodied during the convention itself, entails several “modes of resolution.” First, Levin highlights the role of competition, not only in actual elections but between branches of government, between federal, state, and local authorities, and between the states themselves. The protection the First Amendment accords to speech, religion, and association, for instance, spurs competition, respectively, in ideas, beliefs, and interest groups.
Negotiation and compromise similarly form a key component of the Constitution’s blueprint for national solidarity. “Neither party being able to consummate its will without the concurrence of the other,” James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson , “there is a necessity on both to consult and accommodate.” Counter-majoritarian failsafes and a preference for deliberation frustrate impulsive policy upheavals and nurture collaborative decision-making.
And finally, what Levin calls “productive tension” helps us fashion durable and dynamic resolutions to difficult problems. These dialectics between liberalism and republicanism, centralization and federalism, and individualism and communalism, this ethos of “yes, and,” provide the elan vital of our constitutional system. Balancing often contradictory virtues forces us to acknowledge their benefits. Cultivating these habits enables “citizens to act together when they don’t think alike and, therefore ... mak[es] civic unity achievable.”
Levin demonstrates how the framers deployed all of these tactics at the convention itself. By implementing federalism and the separation of powers, our Founding Fathers confronted without resolving the pressing problems of their day, such as slavery, individual rights, and the tension between agrarian and proto-industrial economic models.
By elevating Congress as the primus inter pares of branches — “in republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” Madison maintained in Federalist 51 — they established within its walls what Levin labels arenas of contention, coalition building, and integration. By constraining the president’s powers while affording him substantial freedom within those limits, they invested the executive with the requisite balance of energy and stability. By limiting the role of the judiciary to interpreting ambiguous statutory provisions — “to liquidate and fix their meaning and operation,” per Hamilton in Federalist 78 — they provided a political backstop, or what Levin calls the “power to keep our system of government true to itself.”
And by harnessing to the broader structure, however grudgingly, the benefits of political parties — “useful checks upon the administration of government,” as Washington put it, that “serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty” — they curtailed their most pernicious characteristics. Perhaps paradoxically, American history has shown, Levin argues, how “parties as institutions actually restrain partisanship and moderate its ill effects.”
So, how have these venerable institutions, which have served the United States so well for centuries, disintegrated? And more importantly, what can we possibly do about it? Levin pinpoints many progressive reforms enacted by Woodrow Wilson as the root cause of this erosion and all it entails. “When those institutions break down, as a number of them have in our time,” Levin solemnly observes, “their deformations become our deformations.”
So, how to repair Congress, the executive, the judiciary, and the major parties in the service of unity? With respect to Congress, whose “dysfunction is not an irremediable reality,” Levin recommends re-empowering congressional committees, revamping the budget process, removing cameras from hearing rooms, and enlarging the House (currently, each member represents a whopping 745,000 citizens).
He also urges the executive branch to rein in quasi-independent agencies, to cease arrogating to itself legislative powers, to deliver the State of the Union in writing, and generally to exercise restraint. In contrast to the outsize public role presidents play in contemporary American politics, they “should self-consciously fade just a little into the background of our national life.”
Moreover, he exhorts us to embrace “a renewed judicial republicanism,” an analog of sorts to the originalism doctrine that dominates the contemporary judiciary. But this republicanism would transcend the interpretive force of originalism by “prioritiz[ing] the work of the legislature over the substantive preferences of judges,” by “valu[ing] steady and effective administration,” and by “grasp[ing] the importance of accommodative consensus building, social peace, and the rule of law.” In short, Levin calls on the judicial branch to patrol the borders of our constitutional regime more rigorously.
And he encourages a restoration of political parties to their traditional role as studied gatekeepers and stabilizing buffers of factionalism. Unfettered partisan primaries have “exacerbated our sense that our society is bitterly divided by persuading Americans that the loudest and most extreme supporters of each party are the essence of that party.” The ballast provided by robust party leadership can reverse this ruinous trend, as might ranked choice voting in primaries, which tends to marginalize more polarizing contestants, and “fusion voting,” in which smaller parties with ballot access cross-endorse major party candidates.
But more fundamentally, we must remember what unites us. In Federalist 14, Madison contended that people are “knit together as they are by so many cords of affection.” Here, our fifth president was invoking the Aristotelian notion of civic friendship, of how citizens can differ substantially in their philosophical and political views yet nevertheless contest and resolve those differences through vigorous but open deliberation. Decentralizing decision-making and lowering the volume of debate can go a long way as well.
However, we must take care to eschew the type of Wilsonian progressive unity that elides differences. This early 20th-century school of thought, Levin asserts, “sought a way to move Americans to think alike, not just act together,” and thereby bulldozed the diversity of thought critical to a functioning republic. By subverting careful legislative bargaining, this uniform approach “tends to raise the stakes and the temperature of our politics” and “has plainly exacerbated our divisions.”
It would, of course, be much easier to implement a program of unifying reform if our nation and its leadership were populated by millions of Yuval Levins — intellectually curious and good-faith interlocutors genuinely committed to the common good. Alas, everyday Americans, including those officials to whom we’ve entrusted our electoral support, rarely live up to these ideals. But in this elegant volume, Levin persuasively points a way forward for us mere mortals to clean up our republican hygiene, inspired as we should be by the Constitution, that supremely benevolent gift of our founding generation.
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Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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