American Covenant
How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again
By: Yuval Levin
Narrated by: Leon Nixon
Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
American Covenant is of a different ilk than my typical political fare, although I grant that my political reading tends to be sparse rather than something that consumes my life. Levin is interested less in particular policies than in the institutions through which Americans govern themselves. His concern is how a nation composed of people who genuinely disagree can nevertheless function politically. Congress, political parties, elections, primaries, constitutional structures, and even the circumstances under which politicians speak to one another become mechanisms for accomplishing something inherently difficult: bringing competing interests into productive interaction when people disagree not only about what should be done, but often about how anything should be done at all.
Some of Levin’s historical discussion covered territory with which I was already familiar. I have read and studied the Federalist Papers and knew many of the constitutional principles he develops, while my understanding of Progressivism has also grown over time. What American Covenant added was greater detail and, in several places, connections I had not previously made.
One of the most interesting was Levin’s introduction of Woodrow Wilson as a young political theorist. I knew Wilson primarily through his presidency and through the larger Progressive movement. Levin brought forward an earlier Wilson, decades before the presidency, already publishing arguments expressing dissatisfaction with important features of the American governmental system. Seeing those ideas alongside the older constitutional arguments helped me better understand that later Progressive reforms did not simply appear as isolated responses to particular political problems. There was an underlying theory about how government ought to work, how political responsibility ought to be organized, and how some of the obstacles deliberately built into the American system could themselves be understood as problems.
The juxtaposition was valuable even where the constitutional concepts were familiar. It is one thing to understand why the framers divided power, placed institutions against one another, and made significant political action difficult. It is another to place that system beside a later political movement looking at many of those same characteristics and asking whether they had become impediments to effective government. Levin made that contrast much more concrete for me without requiring that I choose one intellectual camp and declare the other mistaken.
His discussion of Martin Van Buren and the development of the American party system was even more fascinating. Political parties are absent from the Constitution, yet they became essential to the way the constitutional system actually functions. Van Buren understood parties as something more substantial than groups temporarily assembled around prominent personalities. Durable national parties could organize political ambition, combine regional and ideological interests, select candidates, and create coalitions large enough to govern.
I had not previously thought as much about the party system as an institution that developed to fill needs left unresolved by the formal constitutional machinery. The Electoral College and other constitutional mechanisms could provide a structure for selecting leaders, but they did not by themselves organize the political coalitions necessary to operate a large country over time. Parties developed outside the Constitution and then became intertwined with its functioning. That historical development was one of the portions of the book I found most educational.
From that history Levin moves into proposals for improving the present system. I found myself agreeing with some, questioning others, and remaining decidedly ambivalent about several.
His broader desire to strengthen Congress appeals to me. Congress should exercise the authority that belongs to it rather than continually allowing important governing decisions to migrate elsewhere. A legislature cannot become a healthy deliberative institution if its members increasingly see their principal function as commentary upon what the executive branch, courts, or administrative agencies are doing. If Congress is going to recover some capacity for political negotiation, it first has to remain a place where governing actually occurs.
Levin’s proposal to expand the House of Representatives interests me less. The House has remained at 435 voting members for roughly a century while the population represented by each member has grown enormously. There is a straightforward argument that a representative institution can remain closer to the people when individual members are responsible for fewer constituents. I have no particular objection to increasing the size of the House, and perhaps it would improve the relationship between representatives and those they represent. I simply do not see it as an obviously transformative reform. It might improve matters. It might also produce a larger House suffering from many of the same problems. I remain largely ambivalent.
The discussion of primaries is more complicated. I am generally favorable toward the primary system. I understand Levin’s concern that primary electorates can be relatively small, highly politically engaged, and more ideological than the broader electorate. A candidate may therefore learn that the road to nomination runs through the most committed elements of the party rather than through those most capable of assembling a broad governing coalition.
Yet the alternative has dangers of its own. Candidate selection controlled principally through party organizations, conventions, and the proverbial smoke-filled room concentrates considerable authority among political insiders. The primary system gives ordinary voters meaningful access to candidate selection and forces candidates to seek broader public legitimacy. The people participating in a primary may themselves constitute a somewhat unusual portion of the electorate, but the process nevertheless remains accessible to the electorate rather than being controlled primarily by a small political class.
Levin’s suggestion of ranked-choice voting within party primaries therefore strikes me as an interesting possible compromise. Candidates would still have to appeal directly to the voters of their party, but they would also have an incentive to become acceptable beyond their narrowest faction. Someone who cannot be the first choice of every voter might still benefit from being the second choice of many. That seems potentially useful if the purpose is to produce candidates capable of holding together a broader coalition.
I am considerably less attracted to ranked-choice voting in the general election. There I prefer first-past-the-post voting and the pressure it places upon political parties to build coalitions capable of winning outright. Ranked choice within a primary may help produce a candidate with broader appeal inside an already existing coalition, while first-past-the-post voting in the general election continues to place pressure on the major parties to assemble those larger coalitions in the first place.
Levin’s argument for allowing more political deliberation to occur outside public view was not a novel concept to me, but one with which I have tangled over the years. My instinct is still to favor transparency whenever possible. Public officials should be accountable for what they do, secrecy creates opportunities for corruption and abuse, and citizens should be able to see how their government ultimately conducts its business. Yet transparency can also become performance. When every tentative position is immediately exposed to voters, donors, activists, opponents, and the press, elected officials have an incentive to defend themselves publicly rather than explore possibilities privately. At some point, transparency can begin to impede the dialogue it was intended to illuminate.
John Godfrey Saxe observed in 1869, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” The image is useful because legislation really is a form of sausage making. Someone enters a negotiation wanting ten things and leaves with four. Another accepts something he dislikes because something else is more important. Ideas are proposed, altered, abandoned, combined, and traded. A provision that looks indefensible in isolation may be the price required to obtain something more important elsewhere.
If the present level of public exposure is encouraging grandstanding while discouraging genuine negotiation, I am willing to experiment with allowing more of that discussion to happen behind closed doors. I do not see this as an obvious improvement or as a principle that secrecy is better than openness. Any change in political institutions carries unforeseen consequences, and greater privacy would certainly carry costs of its own. Yet there is some reassurance in the fact that more private legislative negotiation is not an entirely novel experiment. American government has operated with more of it before, and we have some history by which to judge both its benefits and its dangers.
For me, then, this is less a rejection of transparency than a willingness to test whether limited privacy can restore something that appears to have weakened: the ability of elected officials to speak candidly, explore compromise, and actually negotiate with one another. If allowing more room for those discussions produces better deliberation without sacrificing final public accountability, I am willing to accept some of the costs that come with it. Votes should remain public, legislation should remain open to scrutiny, and elected officials should still answer for the compromises they ultimately make. The question is whether every intermediate step also needs to occur before an audience.
These proposals eventually lead into the larger political theory that American Covenant helped clarify for me. I am suspicious of using efficiency as the primary measure of a political system. If you want an efficient form of government, get a dictatorship. Harry Truman put the thought even more sharply: “Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.” I am a fan of slow government. Our democratic republic, our representative democracy, is filled with obstacles by design. Interests collide, institutions constrain one another, and legislation has to survive repeated opportunities for disagreement. Sometimes the result is that nothing happens, and that does not especially trouble me.
A proposal failing to become law is not necessarily evidence that government has failed. Two legislators might understand one another perfectly, negotiate seriously, consider compromises, and finally discover that they cannot reach an agreement. The result may be no legislation at all, and that may be exactly the appropriate outcome. If a proposal cannot acquire enough agreement to survive the political process, there are circumstances in which the system has done precisely what it was supposed to do. Governmental inefficiency and governmental dysfunction are not the same thing.
What troubles me is not that disagreement sometimes prevents action, but that disagreement can prevent interaction. If political opponents no longer seriously speak with one another, bargain with one another, or attempt to understand what the other side requires, the failure occurs before we ever reach the question of whether a law should pass. My own working definition is that politics is the art of getting something done when no one agrees on what to do or how to do it. I do not believe that most people involved in American political life are attempting to make the country worse. They frequently disagree profoundly about what a better country would look like and about which means are legitimate or effective for reaching it. Those disagreements should not be minimized. They are the substance of politics.
This is also part of why I remain favorable toward the American two-party system. There is an understandable desire for more parties, particularly when neither of the two large parties precisely represents a voter’s preferences. But precise representation is not necessarily the highest political good. Two broad parties are uncomfortable coalitions by their nature. They require people who disagree about significant things to decide that they nevertheless agree about enough to work together. A large political party therefore forces some of the bargaining necessary for government to occur before an election is even won. People do not receive a party tailored precisely to themselves. They have to live politically alongside people whose priorities differ from their own, choose what is most important, determine what can be surrendered, and decide which disagreements they are willing to tolerate in order to accomplish something together.
Truman once described the American system as one “not posed as the most efficient government in the world, but…posed as one that is most just.” Being oriented toward justice does not mean that the system itself is just. Our history provides ample evidence of its failures. What I do believe is that the American system contains mechanisms capable of correcting those failures. Its competing institutions, divided powers, elections, parties, and constant political argument can make change frustratingly slow, but they also force change to survive opposition, incorporate competing interests, and frequently move toward moderation. The process is imperfect, and improvement can require generations, but those imperfections do not prevent the system from becoming more just over time.
The fundamental challenge I am interested in, then, is not to design a political system in which disagreement disappears, but to create and preserve one capable of turning disagreement into productive interaction. Parties should form coalitions. Legislators should bargain. Opponents should argue. People should concede where they can, resist where they must, and sometimes emerge from the process having honestly attempted to reach agreement and nevertheless failed. The purpose is not to manufacture consensus, but to preserve a genuine competition and exchange of ideas, in which competing arguments can encounter one another, be tested, refined, rejected, or adopted, and the stronger ideas have an opportunity to prevail.
American Covenant did not persuade me of every reform Levin proposes. Some I find intriguing, some sensible, and others merely worth experimenting with. Its greater value to me was in examining the mechanisms themselves: why they developed, where they have broken down, and what might allow them to function better. Levin does not offer a simple cure for American political division, nor would I particularly trust one. He instead asks how institutions can channel that division so that political opponents remain engaged with one another and their ideas remain in genuine competition.
The goal is not efficient government. It is productive conflict: the competition and exchange of ideas through which better ones can prevail.