Yuval Levin Quotes

Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones.

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it. You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.

All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.

by exposing something I have seen to someone with eyes to see it differently from me, might spark some insights that would not have otherwise occurred to either of us. And

The poor are more isolated—economically, culturally, and socially—than they used to be in America.

It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all,” Burke writes.

The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars—whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.

Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T

we must all accept the responsibilities that come with the positions we hold, and we must ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well.

Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.

The influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed,” Burke writes.

Burke believes that Enlightenment liberals’ and radicals’ emphasis on human reason begins from a misunderstanding of human nature—the mistaking of a part for the whole: “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages,” Burke writes in the Reflections.

Human history, Burke writes in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, “consists for the most part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites,” but it also consists of efforts to address these vices, and in both its best and worst manifestations, history offers lessons no statesman can afford to ignore

When we don’t think of our institutions as formative but as performative—when the presidency and Congress are just stages for political performance art, when a university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling, when journalism is indistinguishable from activism—they become harder to trust. They aren’t really asking for our confidence, just for our attention.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Those with whom we disagree in our society are not our enemies; they are our neighbors.

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.

[T]heories inevitably can't be as complex as life itself.

The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desires. This

The Constitution rejects the populist view that the people have the knowledge required to rule, and it rejects the technocratic view that a body of experts has the knowledge required to rule. Instead, it embodies the view that no one has the requisite knowledge, and that government should therefore be designed to force different groups in society to bargain and cooperate. Restraining

The middle layers of society, where people see each other face to face, offer a middle ground between radical individualism and extreme centralization. Our political life need not consist of a recurring choice between having the federal government invade and occupy the middle layers of society or having isolated individuals break down the institutions that compose those layers. It can and should be an arena for attempting different ways of empowering those middle institutions to help our society confront its problems.

Conservatives often begin from gratitude because we start from modest expectations of human affairs—we know that people are imperfect, and fallen, and weak; that human knowledge and power are not all they’re cracked up to be; and we’re enormously impressed by the institutions that have managed to make something great of this imperfect raw material. So we want to build on them because we don’t imagine we could do better starting from scratch. Liberals often begin from outrage because they have much higher expectations—maybe even utopian expectations—about the perfectibility of human things and the potential of human knowledge and power. They’re often willing to ignore tradition and to push aside institutions that channel generations of wisdom because they think we can do better on our own.

The American idea of progress is the tradition that we’re defending. It is made possible precisely by sustaining our deep ties to the ideals of liberty, and equality, and human dignity expressed in our founding and our institutions. The great moral advances in our history have involved the vindication of those principles—have involved America becoming more like itself.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy,” Burke wrote in the Reflections, “which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.”58

Indeed, Burke argues that change, understood in this way as “a principle of growth,” is not only permissible but essential, and essential precisely to the task of preserving the existing order.49 “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” he writes.50 Such a principle of growth or means of change is intended to be a permanent feature of the regime, not just a path to an ultimate and correct arrangement that would not change further.

The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory—and that this was a good thing.

What is remarkable in Burke’s first performance,” wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, “is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself.”4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life.

Burke argued that political parties were not, as many people insisted, factions each contending for its own particular advantage, but rather were bodies of men each united by a vision of the common good of the whole nation. Partisanship, he insisted, was not only unavoidable but also beneficial, as it helped to organize politics into camps defined by different priorities about what was best for the country.

The government of human beings, he argued, is a matter not of applying cold rules and principles, but of tending to warm sentiments and attachments to produce the strongest and best unified community possible.

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle,” Burke writes.

Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.

The idea of forcing every thing to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it,” Burke writes. “It has all the appearance imaginable of justice and good order; and very many persons, without any sort of partial purposes, have been led to adopt such schemes and to pursue them with great earnestness and warmth.

Believe me, sir,” he writes in the Reflections, “those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.

Under a cruel king, Burke argues, members of an oppressed minority “have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds.” But under a tyrannical democracy, the public as a whole is against them. “They seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.”17 Their

an America in which each generation built something solid so that the next generation could build something better. But for many years now, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered.4 Whatever

nostalgia characterizes the thinking of so many of our most able and important scholars, journalists, commentators, and social analysts that it poses a problem for our capacity for self-diagnosis.

The objects and the flavor of our national nostalgia are not random. They draw on the memories of a particular group of Americans who have exercised an extraordinary power over the nation’s self-image.

Just as solidarity had an underside of repression, so liberalization had an underside of chaos;

Our problems are the troubles of a fractured republic, and the solutions we pursue will need to call upon the strengths of a decentralized, diffuse, diverse, dynamic nation. The

These begin in loving family attachments. They spread outward to interpersonal relationships in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, religious communities, fraternal bodies, civic associations, economic enterprises, activist groups, and the work of local governments.

there are never simple or universal formulas for revitalizing a complex society.

the absence of easy answers is precisely a reason to empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right. This

countless Americans of all parties and no party are practical, experienced experts in putting family, faith, and community first and helping one another in hard times. A

We should look for ways to thrive that are suited to the nation we have become and are still becoming.

There are only perches within society, and we can elevate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others.

we should consider how they came to be, how and why America has changed, and what this might mean for what America is becoming.

called upon personal recollections of a lost ideal, described that bygone time as possessing everything we now take ourselves to lack, and defined progress as a recovery of what that earlier age had to offer. It

We are living in a time of change, and therefore a time that is as much a beginning as an end.

Few of us, including me, would want to return there without major reforms,

prescriptions of these writers are nonetheless fundamentally backward looking, because their standard is a particular point in time.

it was not the paradise that some now suggest, and it was made possible by a set of circumstances—historical, social, economic, political, and cultural—that are no longer with us.

The pervasiveness and intensity of our nostalgia make it hard to achieve the kind of analytic distance that would allow us to address these questions seriously. That

we will only be able to think clearly about what is beginning, and about how we can make the most of it, if we can pull ourselves away from lamentations for a lost youth. The

Rising generations of Americans will soon need to look around and build their own understanding of the present, and sense of the future,

There is an alternative to this perilous mix of over-centralization and hyper-individualism. It can be found in the intricate structure of our complex social topography and in the institutions and relationships that stand between the isolated individual and the national state. These begin in loving family attachments. They spread outward to interpersonal relationships in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, religious communities, fraternal bodies, civic associations, economic enterprises, activist groups, and the work of local governments. They

But that ideal, put forward in the Declaration of Independence and pursued ever since in a variety of ways by Americans of all races, religions, and political persuasions, is most accessible when we allow the mediating layers of our culture and society to flourish. It is not a vision of radical individualism or of consolidated statism. It is a vision of the free society rooted in an understanding of liberty that depends upon our institutions of moral formation and on the kind of person they produce—the citizen fit for virtuous freedom. It is an ideal rooted in natural rights but put into practice by free men and women who are not merely natural but also social achievements. American citizenship is not simply the application of that shared ideal, of course.

To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to moderate its movements, to substitute little by little an understanding of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men—such is the first duty imposed on those who would guide society in our day.

In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration. This

This older idea of liberty requires not only that people be free to choose, but also that they be able to choose well.

Institutions that channel social knowledge from below and address human needs at a personal level are more likely to adapt to problems and circumstances and to find solutions. That

the data actually suggest something else—not a collapse of religious traditionalism, but a change in attitudes among people who were not particularly traditionalist to begin with but have grown more comfortable saying so.10

there has been less social pressure on loosely committed or uncommitted Americans even to pay lip service to traditional views or communities and a greater sense of freedom to express more lax views, or no views at all, on key moral questions. The

greater deference that religious conservatives might once have been given to shape publicly accepted moral ideals could easily have left them with the impression that they spoke for a far greater portion of the country than they ever truly represented.

And what those honest atheists grapple with is what every sinner grapples with, what all of us grapple with, burdened consciences that point to judgment. Our calling is to bear witness.

found themselves locked into conflict with social liberals who present themselves as rejecting all moral judgmentalism, but who in fact, unavoidably, end up trying to judge society by a new standard instead. E

problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.

the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive.

Now, some particularly radical liberals who would aggressively suppress religious and moral traditionalism in the public square are making the same mistake.

there has been on the Left something of a mirror-image of the Right’s exaggerated view of its own dominance in decades past:

The arrogant minority of liberals clamoring to consolidate its victories and crush dissent in our cultural battles is plainly exaggerating its power and ignoring the very trends—the diffusion and fracture of our older moral consensus—that have made its recent successes possible. It

Over time, as liberalization and deconsolidation became the dominant ethic of American life, the consensus broke down and cultural liberalism came to be at least implicitly the ideology of the American elite.

first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public.

social Left is a minority, too, and it is a minority aspiring to dominate our institutions at a time when those institutions are particularly weak and diffuse.

moral anarchy has actually become something like the explicit goal of some of our most influential institutions.

efforts and character of institutions like these can grow into a way of life when the people involved in them put them at the center of their cultural existence and identity and, as it were, fall into orbit around their rich moral core.

The more hopeful mode suggests that emphasizing the needs and well-being of one’s near-at-hand community first and foremost can be, for social conservatives, not an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.