Speaking at the Democratic National Convention in August, United States Olympic basketball coach Steve Kerr waxed poetic about a motif common to politics and sports: unity. After describing how proud he was to lead the national team to gold just weeks before, he implored the United Center crowd to reject the divisive forces of political life. “Think about what our team achieved with 12 Americans in Paris putting aside rivalries to represent our country,” Kerr said. “Now imagine what we could do with all 330 million of us playing on the same team—not as Democrats, not as Republicans, not as Libertarians, but as Americans.”
It’s an unobjectionable thought, the kind you hear seven days a week and twice a day during election season: We Americans are so divided. We can’t agree on anything. We need national unity. But what does this nice-sounding thing called unity actually mean?
Some doubtless think unity means something like civility, and the two are indeed related. When we view each other as part of a shared enterprise, we are less likely to demonize our fellow citizens and treat them with contempt. And at a high level of generality, unity can mean simply recognizing that we all want what’s best for America.
But “playing on the same team” is different. That’s a metaphor for unity of purpose and action, having all oars row in the same direction, the way you would win gold on the Seine. In a country of 330 million people enjoying freedom of conscience, that image quickly goes from inspiring to horrifying. Since Americans don’t actually agree on everything, or very much at all, many of those 330 million rowers would, in fact, be laboring against their will.
Providing a corrective to this cliché, with a healthy, workable, and meaningful definition of “unity,” is the first of many contributions Yuval Levin makes in his splendid new book, American Covenant. Unity really is crucial to our shared public life, but it means the opposite of putting aside our differences to represent our country. Rather, it means channeling those differences constructively for the public good. In Levin’s memorable phrase: “Acting together when we do not think alike.” To project this insight back onto Kerr’s analogy, unity is when LeBron James and Steph Curry elevate their play to defeat one another as competitors within a set of rules and norms they abide by. In so doing, they create the most entertaining basketball for their hundreds of millions of fans. In the context of American life, unity means always acting through, not around, our most important institutions: the rule of law, norms of ordered liberty, and our Constitution.
The Constitution’s framers knew their nascent nation was already startlingly diverse and would become even more so as it grew. Levin argues that dealing with the problem of diversity of thought was top of mind at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and in the subsequent ratification debates. Levin shows how the constitutional system as a whole is designed to foster unity while honoring pluralism, and how each constitutional institution can do its part to bring the American people into “more perfect union.” What emerges is a clear view of our Constitution’s republican character, characterized not by a political orientation but by its capacity to form a populace that will work through its differences together.
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Levin explains that, contra many of our Constitution’s critics, the compromises that gave us many of the Constitution’s unique features do not make it a hodgepodge of incoherent theories. Yes, we have both proportional and nonproportional representation; yes, we elect our chief executive, but he is not a representative so much as an administrator; and yes, the interplay between the branches of government (and between the federal government and the states) can be unwieldy as a result. But that’s the point. Constant compromise is encoded in our national DNA. Levin writes that several “modes of resolution”—ways that the spirit of compromise lives on—emerge from this. Competition, negotiation, and productive tension keep Americans busy trying to persuade each other rather than viewing each other as existential threats. Interest groups and voting blocs, organized around sets of social or economic concerns, compete to appeal to durable majorities. They negotiate compromises necessary to reach consensus and endure without resolving questions until that consensus emerges. It’s abstract, brilliant, and even beautiful: It is the manifestation of the principle that we Americans are all in this ongoing project together.
Levin really hits his stride analyzing how specific constitutional institutions are meant to, but often fail to, embody a commitment to unity internally and as cogs in our constitutional machinery. Anyone who has followed Levin’s work or that of the institutions he leads—he is the editor of the policy quarterly National Affairs and runs the American Enterprise Institute’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department—knows that Levin is acutely concerned with the atrophying of Congress. (Full disclosure: I worked as a researcher on AEI’s Constitutional Studies team for one year, where I reported indirectly to Levin.) Both National Affairs and Levin’s AEI department have given ample space to leading scholars of congressional procedure, democratic theory, and political science to scrutinize Congress’s self-reinforcing weakness. The other branches of government have been stretched thin and also unduly empowered by the vacuum left by legislators, whose institution was meant to be first among equals.
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Indeed, the book’s sharpest and most frequently recurring criticisms are directed at the lawmaking branch. Congress is designed to be the place where most of our major national policy questions are mediated. But, Levin points out (in picking up where his last book, A Time to Build, left off), our representatives seem less interested in being formed by the institution through bargaining and compromise than they are in using Congress as a platform from which to perform on cable news and create mic-drop sound bites. Rather than fulfill Congress’s unifying potential through persuasion, our representatives increasingly see their job as dunking on members of the other party. Part of the problem, Levin points out, is that too much congressional procedure is now televised, and compromise by its nature cannot occur in the public eye; a bit more backroom dealing, however old-fashioned and shady it may seem, would be salutary. Some transparency is necessary to democracy, but too much is toxic, because it incentivizes lawmakers who should be invested in constructive common action to become outsiders invested in showing how they stand apart from their colleagues.
Congressional impotence does not merely frustrate those who want Congress to act more decisively. Owing to this excess of transparency, alongside other procedural and incentive deformations, Congress has “not forgotten how to agree, but how to disagree.” Congress isn’t supposed to act without securing majority or supermajority consensus, but even when the nation is sharply divided, it is supposed to channel disagreement constructively through public rhetoric and private bargaining. Today, by contrast, representatives inflame the public discourse and Americans take their cues from them about how irresponsible and disrespectful the other political team is. As lawmakers increasingly act as partisan critics, they become indistinguishable from regular citizens rather than people whose job it is to represent the interests of those citizens. So they simply join the clamorous demands that the other branches of government step up and make laws using whatever tools may be close to hand.
Executive power has rushed to fill the void. We still have lawmakers in the United States, but they are rarely elected representatives. Reams of regulation have piled up as bureaucrats across the alphabet soup of executive agencies institute rules that have the same legal effects as duly ratified laws—all while the bureaucrats avoid the crucible of bargaining and compromise.
Indeed, the great ideological villain of Levin’s book lionizes such aggressive executive lawmaking. Wilsonianism, a brand of constitutional skepticism advanced by Woodrow Wilson during his academic years and his technocratic presidency, lives on in the view that the Constitution is outdated because it is inherently dysfunctional. Wilson likened the nation to an organic body that could not work against itself if it were to support a functioning being. The heart can have no “check” over the brain, and the liver no “balance” against the spleen. There is a lot contained in this metaphor, but fundamentally it presupposes a national unity that cares little for pluralism. In fact, it suggests that pluralism does not really exist. Rather, some Americans may suffer from false consciousness from time to time about what is good for them. It is therefore the job of the president, as the one person who represents the whole nation, to chart the path of true public welfare as he sees it and pursue it full bore.
Wilsonianism in the modern day manifests in a remarkable irony pushed mostly by progressive academics. They have elevated “democracy” to our paramount value in their frequent calls for greater access to the franchise, the elimination of the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote, the restructuring of the Supreme Court, and the retooling of the Senate to give it rules that parallel those of the House of Representatives. These reforms are, in their minds, necessary to deal with the failure to enact federal laws on issues where there is no national consensus—but that the Wilsonians think need to be enacted nonetheless. Wilsonianism offers the solution they crave, in which the president (and the underlings he hires to do his daily work) will make all the laws. For all the talk of democratizing various institutions, they are perfectly content to leave the actual democratic branch of the government as little more than a Potemkin chamber of pundits.
Wilsonianism does not care about distinct forms of power or institutional competency. It cares only that every center of power is pushing in one direction at full speed. But under the system devised primarily by James Madison, each constitutional institution is given authority over certain matters through the rules that govern it.
States are closest to the people, so they have authority to make laws that do not violate basic rights. Congress’s directly elected representatives can argue for their constituents’ interests and, after bargaining, forge laws that enjoy broad consensus and that therefore remain stable in guiding future conduct. The president is one person elected not to represent the nation, in fact, but to administer the rules written by those who do. He can act decisively in exigent circumstances on issues of national importance or where Congress has given its instruction. The Supreme Court is not elected at all and must wait for cases and controversies to arise before it can exercise its jurisdiction over what has passed.
In a republican system, not everything needs to be democratic or push in the same direction to be valuable. What keeps us all “in the game” is not that we pour our views into votes, with the winners securing free rein to do what they please until the next round. Rather, we pour our views into public debates and try to persuade our fellow citizens to see the world as we do. When we lose, that’s just a setback for a time. There’s always another bite at the apple.
Levin writes for reformers in Congress, but the key point he makes is that, in the end, all American citizens must function as reformers of the political system that belongs to We the People. They must reward the political figures who wish to restore meaningful checks and balances and bring about the kind of properly competitive system that actually fosters true unity.
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