Among those thinkers were the American Founders. Fostering a complex kind of unity was one of their principal aims in designing the Constitution. That goal helps explain why they sought to create a system in which multiple, overlapping factions would have to contend and bargain with one another. No group was guaranteed to get its way all the time or to be shut out of power altogether. Major changes in government would generally require broad and durable consensus.
In his new book, “American Covenant,” Yuval Levin argues that we have forgotten the Founders’ way of thinking about these issues, and that this forgetfulness is one of the sources of contemporary discontent.
A friend and American Enterprise Institute colleague of mine, Levin makes his case without over-idealizing the Founders or scanting their own disagreements. They weren’t united even about just how divided we were. Arguing against those Founders who insisted we were a culturally unified nation unmarked by European class distinctions — that we were already one people, as the Declaration of Independence somewhat wishfully suggested — James Madison noted that we were not and could not be made into “one homogeneous mass.” He accurately suggested that future events, along with fading memories of the American Revolution, would make us more heterogeneous still.
Their work had flaws, some of which now seem obvious. Levin regards two crucial post-1787 developments — the modern party system midwifed by Martin Van Buren and the Reconstruction amendments — as improvements that furthered the Constitution’s original goals.
The Founders also sometimes wrongly implied that they had created a system that would run by itself. Keeping it in good working order would require more than checks and balances; it would take civic virtue on the part of officials and citizens alike. But we have had more than a century of civic miseducation thanks to the influence of progressivism in the mold of Woodrow Wilson. The progressives of the early 20th century chafed at the limits the Constitution placed on government, and especially the need for building large coalitions before it could take decisive action.
Over the decades, they altered our country’s governmental and political practice. Levin gently but relentlessly argues that theirs has been a disastrous success. Presidents now attempt to act as visionary policymakers more than as administrators, Congress has lost the habit of deliberating, and the judiciary is too often tempted to do the proper work of the other federal branches. State governments today grasp for dollars from the federal government more than for independence from it.
We now have a Wilsonian political culture operating a Madisonian Constitution, with dysfunctional and disappointing results. Which way to resolve that conflict depends on how we think about the trade-off between making coalition-building easier and making it less necessary.
The attraction of the second answer, the one progressives historically favored, and which not a few of today’s rightists have come to embrace, is the prospect of bold and sweeping government action. The Madisonian answer, seconded by Levin, frustrates such ambitions on purpose. The reforms he suggests to nudge our political practices back toward Madisonianism — such as a larger U.S. House, in which committees have more power and the leaders of the parties have less — are therefore not a summons to the barricade. It is a practical agenda, not a romantic one.
As such, it would appear to be a poor fit for an era in which many Americans say they want radical, disruptive change. But the people who speak that way don’t always mean the same thing, or anything in particular, and in recent decades, presidents’ transformative initiatives have mostly brought them grief.
It might, then, be the right time for a return to bargaining and accommodation. When the Constitution comes up in political debates, it is typically in the context of the most divisive issues in our society, such as abortion and guns, on which we read its provisions very differently. But the Constitution is meant to bring us together. Beneath the affection for Americans of all political stripes that Levin expresses is a stern message: If we seem to be coming apart today, it might not be because the Constitution is failing us so much as because we are failing it.
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