American Covenant Quotes

“Our system of government makes sure that they have to persuade a substantial portion of our society for an extended period of time before they could get their way on any matter of real substance, just as we do. This helps us keep our balance as a nation, and avoid large mistakes. And it forces us to act together, even when we do not think alike.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Those with whom we disagree in our society are not our enemies; they are our neighbors.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Instead, he told us that from that day on we should think about America in the first-person plural: in terms of we and our and not them and their.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“At the heart of our republicanism is an ambitious, demanding ideal of the human being and citizen, which recognizes not only our fallenness and our limitations but also our dignity and our potential. It insists on our obligations to one another, and habituates us to recognize them through the practice of our citizenship. That ideal should be the starting point of any constitutional restoration.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Institutions that function well and achieve their ends tend to encourage more responsible citizenship and leadership and to restrain our worst impulses and more responsible citizens, and leaders then, in turn, enable institutions to function better. But when our institutions are dysfunctional or deformed, our habits and behavior become broken as well, and we grow cynical and wary of one another, which further harms our institutions”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“The Constitution forces insular factions to forge coalitions with others and, thereby, to expand their sense of their own interests and priorities. It forces powerful officeholders to govern through negotiation and competition rather than through fiat and pronouncement and so to align their ambitions with those of others. It forces Americans to acknowledge the equal rights of fellow citizens, and”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Many members of Congress and several recent presidents have used the institutions to which they were elected as mere platforms for political performance art for the sake of their most devoted voters. From the point of view of the constitutional system, such behavior seems like dereliction and failure. But from the point of view of the modern primary system, it is both rational and effective. A party system with incentives so thoroughly out of alignment with the constitutional system is a recipe for disaster—and disaster is just what we have experienced.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“This was not the intent of the reformers who advanced such changes in both parties. They sought to democratize the parties’ internal procedures and so to give the public more of a voice in the earliest stages of the political process. But the result has been a less democratic American party system, because it is one that empowers only the most active fringes of both parties—and especially the small percentage of voters who participate in party primaries. Those tend to be the voters least interested in bargaining and compromise and least inclined to see the point of the accommodationist structure of our system’s core institutions. Primaries have actually empowered elites—elites who are amateur activists with a lot of time for politics, not those who are party professionals but elites nonetheless, and not the broad public. By making office seekers most attentive to those voters rather than to the marginal voters essential for broader coalition building and who had been the focus of party professionals, the modern primary system has drawn into politics a type of politician who is not well suited to the work of the institutions, and so to the office to which he or she is seeking election.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Courts do resolve disputes, of course, but they resolve disputes over what the law is, not what it should be, and so they are not the proper venue for mediating among competing visions of the public good. They also usually resolve disputes by designating a winner and a loser, which, as we have seen, is not generally an effective way to build common ground. Our great public disputes need to be resolved through the work of the legislature above all. The most valuable service the courts provide to the cause of national unity is in their policing of the rules and boundaries of constitutionalism, and their restricting of the power of majorities to break those rules and boundaries. The courts can do that by insisting on the adherence of officials and citizens to the structure and procedures of the Constitution, which, as we have seen, are designed to advance common action across lines of difference and to build public confidence in the outcome.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“It was not a coincidence that party reform happened first among Democrats. But the sorts of changes pursued in response to these justified frustrations in both parties were very much a function of decades of progressive intellectual work and activism and were not sufficiently thought through. The system, at first, seemed to digest these changes without a major transformation of political culture. But that could not last. As the parties increasingly took a more Wilsonian shape, greater tensions arose between the aims of the party system and those of the constitutional system. Were elections meant to settle key issues by a decisive choice or to decide who would have a seat at the table when they were settled by incremental negotiation? The gradual adoption of progressive reforms of the parties meant that the people running for office increasingly tended to have one set of expectations on that front while the system of government they populated when they won was built in light of another. The resulting frustration led to growing dysfunction over time and to a political culture ill at ease with our political system and increasingly inclined to reject its emphasis on cohesion.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Austin Ranney and Willmoore Kendall wrote in defense of Van Buren’s model of parties and warned their colleagues not to take social cohesion for granted. “By sustaining and refreshing the consensus on which our society and governmental system are based,” they argued, the American party system “makes possible our characteristic brand of pluralistic bargaining-compromising discussion of public issues, which is probably about as close to the model of creative democratic discussion in the nation-state as a community like the United States can hope to get.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“That view came to be embodied in a highly influential 1950 report by a special committee of the American Political Science Association, titled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The commission, chaired by political scientist E. E. Schattschneider of Wesleyan University, argued that the parties should sharpen their ideological appeals, better highlight their differences, nationalize their internal infrastructure, and work to make their core voters more energized and engaged. Some critics could see the risks of such an approach, and they focused precisely on the threat it posed to the capacity of our system to engender cohesion. Political scientist James Q. Wilson warned in 1962 that such reforms would “mean that political conflict will be intensified, social cleavages will be exaggerated, party leaders will tend to be men skilled in the rhetorical arts, and the parties’ ability to produce agreement by trading issue free resources will be reduced.” In retrospect, he was prophetic.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“That logic of American partisanship came under a more sustained and ultimately more effective assault in the Progressive Era, however, precisely because of its relation to the logic of the Constitution. As we have seen, the early progressives critiqued the American system for lacking coherence and sacrificing responsiveness, energy, and effectiveness in government for the sake of stability, safety, and cohesion in society. They argued that this trade-off was neither successful nor necessary, and that unity could be achieved by unified leadership, especially presidential leadership, not by aimless negotiation. So they sought a politics in which different parties offered thoroughly distinct and comprehensive policy programs, the public selected among them on Election Day, and then the winning party would have essentially unlimited power to pursue its program until the public voted for someone else. The competition among factions in society would not be resolved by their bargaining within the institutions of government but by voters choosing among them at the ballot box and letting whichever won a majority deploy all the powers of government in the service of its vision.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“In Federalist 62, Madison lays out, in its fullest form, his case for the importance of stability in holding together a republican regime. Too much unpredictability in government threatens the country’s security because it “forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, and all the advantages connected with national character.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Real bargaining and accommodation simply cannot happen in public, as negotiators fear being seen to make concessions before they can point to what they gain in return. The Constitution actually owes its origins to its framers’ understanding of that fact, as the Philadelphia Convention was held behind closed doors for just this reason. “Had the deliberations been open,” Alexander Hamilton argued in 1792, “the clamours of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result.” The point was not to keep out the public’s interests and views but to provide a protected arena to work out deals.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“But frustrating narrow majorities is a key feature and aim of our system of government. And measures adapted to appeal to broader coalitions are more likely to be perceived as broadly legitimate and to endure.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Each House of Congress makes its own rules, but Congress can legislate much of the scope, budget, and organization of the other branches. The familiar notion of “coequal” branches is largely an invention of modern presidents. In a number of Federalist essays, Hamilton and Madison used the term coequal to describe the relations of the states with one another, the taxing powers of the state and federal governments, and the relations of the two houses of Congress, but never the relations of the three branches of government.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“The fundamental premise of our regime—that majorities should rule but minorities must be protected—shapes every facet of the constitutional system, as we have already begun to see, and it can therefore also shape the souls of citizens.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“That republican vision can help us see what it would take to both establish and sustain meaningful individual and communal self-rule. It aims at a politics of common action and of solidarity achieved by engagement and accommodation, not hostility and exclusion. In this sense, seeing how the Constitution can serve as a means of greater unity in our society also involves seeing more clearly what the republicanism that underlies it might consist of. But the Constitution is not just an expression of that republican worldview. It is intended to inculcate it and to convey it to citizens, so that life under the kind of regime created by the Constitution can be understood in part as a formation in republicanism.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“American republicanism also assumes an aptitude for forbearance and self-control that is essential for resolving disputes and sustaining unity but is not necessarily implicit in the liberal ideal of the citizen.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Thanks to the Electoral College, our presidents are chosen by virtue of the number of states in which they can win popular majorities and the relative sizes of those states’ populations. As noted in chapter 2, one consequence of this is that presidential races are focused on competitive states, and therefore, on competitive slices of the electorate and of the issues facing the country, rather than on the voters and issues with which each party is most comfortable. Election campaigns naturally follow the lead of the voters whom the candidates most need to win”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“The Constitution clearly envisions Congress—its first and foremost branch of government—as an arena for bargaining and accommodation. The institution is built to be representative of key constituencies in American society but also to refine and elevate the wishes of those constituencies through negotiations among representatives”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“But the American system does not assume that the instinct for bargaining will come naturally to citizens or even to their representatives. Rather, it forces people with differing interests and views to engage with one another by making some degree of bargaining unavoidable”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“And it restricts the power of majorities through an assortment of mediating mechanisms that require agents of change to engage in a complicated dance of coalition building. These counter-majoritarian restraints often feel not only frustrating but, in fact, divisive, because they force us to confront the reality of the existence of opposing views in our society, even when our side wins elections and makes appointments. But those divisions are there whether we confront them or not, and it is by being forced to confront them that we are moved to overcome them through negotiation.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“That we have lost some of our knack for unity in America does not mean that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again