The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Kevin Roberts Talks With Yuval Levin

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Americans have been losing trust in key institutions for nearly two generations. The reality is that those institutions—government, media, corporations, and education—have been in a state of decay for decades, the real-world effects of which are beginning to manifest on increasingly large scales. Yuval Levin joins Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to detail the origins of the current state of our institutions, why Americans have lost trust in them, and the standards we ought to hold them to. Yuval shares how his experience becoming a U.S. citizen has informed his worldview and helped to forge his career path defending the constitutional principles we hold dear. Yuval Levin, Ph.D., is the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is the founder and editor of National Affairs and is an opinion writer at the New York Times. Under George W. Bush, Dr. Levin was a member of the White House domestic policy staff and the executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, November 15th. I'm Jillian Richards. Today we're featuring a special episode of the Kevin Roberts Show. Dr. Roberts, who's the president of the Heritage Foundation, talks with American Enterprise Institute, director Yuval Levin. They discuss the breakdown of America's institutions, why Americans have lost trust in them, and the standards we should be holding these institutions too. To find out more about the Kevin Roberts Show and other Heritage and Daily Signal podcast,

Go to heritage.org slash podcasts. Now check out their conversation. Everybody wants a stage to be a performer in the culture war. Nobody wants a place where they're constrained into doing responsible work. But the result of it is just a collapse of trust. And it becomes impossible for us to have confidence in what people have to say and in what people do when it seems like all they're working for is attention and a following and prominence. Welcome back to the Kevin Robert Show. You are in for a treat this week. I think one of the serene and insightful voices in the conservative movement is my guest this week.

Dr. Yuval Levin, who is the social, cultural and constitutional studies director at the American Enterprise Institute and whose work can be found in a variety of outlets. Youvall, you are so important to this movement. You're welcome here at Heritage anytime because of your insight. Thanks for joining me. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that enormously. So we're going to get into a lot of topics today because given that you have a PhD from the University of Chicago, you can cover just about anything. I'm not sure a PhD means that, but maybe we'll find out. I was setting you up. Good.

You've asked the test. It doesn't. Pretty sure it doesn't. It means that you and I can talk about a lot of things and use a lot of words. But unless we're really focused on reclaiming, revitalizing institutions in America, we're probably just wasting words. Absolutely. So you and I in this episode are going to cover whatever you would like and whatever is on your

mind, but as we were visiting before we started recording this, we were talking about the state of the country, institutional life, which has been a focus of your work. And I will say, and not at all to be patronizing, really important work for us conservatives who are focused on policy and politics that we also have to be worried about American institutions, plus some other topics. So let's start with institutions. Okay. What's the state of American institutions right now? Well, there's a lot to worry about. We're living in a time when one measure of this is, obviously, Americans have been losing trust in institutions for a long time now, really for two generations. And there's a reason for that. The problem we have is not that we don't trust institutions, but that they're not trustworthy. And I think across the range of American life, we find that in a sense, what we mean when we say we're losing trust in institutions is that we don't really believe that our institutions form trustworthy people at this point. And especially that we don't

think the people who lead are key institutions, whether that's in government, in education, in corporate America, in the media, in the academy, and elsewhere, we have the sense that they're not responsible. And I think the idea of responsibility is really the way in which institutions form people. They create people, they give them a certain shape that enables them to do the work of the institution in a responsible way. And a lot of Americans have the sense that those people now are not responsible to them, are not responsible to the institutions they're part of. And I think that's one way to understand the crisis of contemporary America,

so that looking at it through the lens of institutions can really help you see the failures we're seeing as failures of responsibility, and therefore hopefully it can also give us each something to do about those problems. And that's really important. One of the things that I always try to do in this show and you do in your work, whether it's book-length work or articles, is give the readers a sense of what they can do, because it's easy and perhaps it's even fashionable

on the American right now to complain, to curse end of the wind, and then stop there. And what it does is not only really cause more people who agree with us to be given to despair, which is a sin, after all. It's also really harmful in the American polity. It also means that we're not getting busy, about some urgent work, which is, as you just pointed out, is leaning into institutions.

But before we get to the solutions, what are the origins of this? I've thought about this for years. The way I think about it, in a sense, in order to understand why we're losing trust in institutions, we have to ask ourselves, what does it actually mean to say? We trust an institution. And a lot of what it means is that we believe this institution forms people who are trustworthy, who are doing the work that is required of this university. this legislature, this company, this team, in a way that we can count on, that we can trust. And institutions do that in a way that really form people so that you can think, for example, about the professions as institutions. The professions are tremendously formative. There's such a

thing in the world as, say, an accountant, right? You encounter somebody, you know them a little bit, and then they say, I'm an accountant, and you say, yeah, that tracks. I get that. You're an accountant. And it really means something, or I'm a doctor. It lets us understand something about them. And a key to what makes that person trustworthy is not what they know, right? You don't trust the accountant because he knows the tax laws better than you. We hope that's true. You trust an accountant because there are things that person would never do. There are lines, there are boundaries. That's why, for example, if you were to trust a scientist, you trust a scientist, not because they know everything, because what they say they know has been through some process of verification.

If you were to trust a journalist, if you can think back to a time when you trusted a journalist, it's a little hard for me. It's because that's a person whose work seems to follow a process, a set of procedures and boundaries, and when they say something, you have a sense that it's been through some mode of verification. The reason we now find it so hard to trust journalists and some scientists too and even some accountants is that it seems like they don't do that anymore. They don't allow themselves to be formed by the modes of their profession. or their institutions in ways that allow us to have confidence in them.

And instead, they use those institutions as platforms for self-promotion, as ways of elevating themselves, of building a following, of building a personal brand. So if you're looking on Twitter right now, you'd find a lot of professional journalists deprofessionalizing themselves. Rather than working within the framework of an institution that allows their work to be trusted, they operate independently on their own, building their own personal brand, and essentially making it hard for us to tell the difference between their work and their own personal views and their own personality. And that is just a recipe for destroying our trust.

When you think about it, when you step back from a lot of American life now, it's happening in many, many institutions. They're turning themselves from molds of behavior into platforms for performance. It's what's happening in the university. Look at the U.S. Congress now, and too many members are doing that too. you find it in some parts of American religion, you find it in a lot of the professional world. Everybody wants a stage to be a performer in the culture war. Nobody wants a place where they're constrained into doing responsible work. And we can understand the motives for it. We can see why it's happening. But the result of it is just a collapse of trust. And it becomes impossible

for us to have confidence in what people have to say and in what people do when it seems like all they're working for is attention and a following and prominence, and so we can't have confidence. So to ask a gigantic follow-up question before we get back to solutions, you mentioned an article in the last days, a really good article, this problem of a lack of trust, and for that matter, just a lack of accountability regarding the American administrative state. And you even make this reference to this performance art that happens. By some of them, there's one particular doctor who comes to mind, but we'll decide if we want to talk about Dr. Fowler or not.

And I don't mean that in a gratuitous way. Yeah. I mean that as embodying really this problem. But you make the really important point that the strength of the administrative state has really diminished the power of the president ironically. And, of course, there are a lot of things we can talk about that from the standpoint of the Constitution and policy, including that Congress needs to reassert its authority. But I'm really keying in on this connection that is the demise of American institutions, the decline in trust, this not just despair, but disengagement that too many Americans have with the American Public Square and the administrative state. Do you think there is a way that we can begin to address all those problems? And maybe to use another metaphor, we can pull on a particular thread that begins to unravel this problem.

and then we can rebuild it. Yeah, absolutely. I do think that thinking about this set of challenges through the lens of institutions can be very helpful because institutions ultimately are forms, right? They're structures. They have a particular shape,

a set of boundaries that distinguish proper action from improper action. And if you want to define the administrative state, broadly speaking, it is a kind of formless power in our political system. Our system has three clear branches.

Each of them has a set of obligations and a set of powers. And what the administrator of state has become is a fourth branch that is not bounded by any of those rules. It does some legislative work. It does some administrative work. It even does some judicial work. And it does all of it without the forms of a legislature or an executive or a court. And that means that it's not bounded in a way that can make it trusted. It is, by definition, abusive of its own power because its power is not constrained, is not limited. And that means that what's required in order to rebuild trust in the work of our government is a way of recovering institutional structure, institutional form, and saying this belongs here,

this belongs there, this is appropriate, that's not appropriate. The administrative state makes all of that impossible to do. And it is important to see, as you say, that among the things that weakens are not just Congress and the courts, but also the president. We tend to think of the administrative state as part of the executive branch, and so it creates this gargantuan presidency, but it's not really true. This is easiest to see when Republicans are president because they spend all their time fighting the administrative agencies. But it's actually also true when Democrats are president, even though those agencies lean left just like

the president does. They act on their own. They're not acting on behalf of a president. And that's bad for our system regardless of what you think of any particular president's views. And so we have to insist on administrative forms and structures. Forms are enormously important for life in a free society because they allow us to structure our desires to shape the energy of our society in ways that are not fundamentally coercive. We're not telling people what to do, but we're creating forms and structures, boundaries that let us use our freedom in constructive ways. When you lose those forms, you lose the ability to use your freedom in constructive ways, and you're either destructive or you're not free. And I think everywhere you look in American life now,

that seems to be the choice we face. And it's an impossible situation. to leave ourselves in. So I think both in politics in that way, but also in our culture, also in our community lives, we have to think about recovering institutional forms by getting people to ask a basic question. Given the role that I have here, what should I be doing? If a president asked that question, there are a lot of things our presidents would not do that they now do. If members of Congress asked that question, they would behave very differently, but it's also true in your community. It might be it's true in our families, where facing a moment of decision, we have to ask ourselves, given the role I have here, what should I be doing? Not just

what do I want, but what's required of me? And it seems as if I hadn't thought about it this way until you emphasize the importance of forms. And the administrative state properly sized, properly scoped out, also sort of brings to life what we mean when we say ordered liberty, right? Exactly. It really is the American, not just the American understanding of how we put order and liberty and some sort of balance, but I've made this argument for a long time, that that's one of the legacies of our American civilization, however long we're going to be around. But I want to swerve from that very important but more academic thought, although it's extremely important to the everyday American, to the perspective of the everyday American. And in particular,

what the everyday American should be doing in reference to the institutional life that is just deteriorated around them. It doesn't matter the community, right? There are more, there are very few exceptions to the rule that American institutional life has deteriorated in our lifetimes. Yeah, that's right. There are very few exceptions, and I think when we look for exceptions now, we have to look at America from the bottom up and not the top down. And that's a first hint about what can be done. I think that question, first of all, the question of institutional responsibility, given my role, what should I be doing, is a question we can all ask in every institution that we're part of. But there's a further question, which is, how can we own this problem in a way that lets us solve it? You know, Alexis de Tocqueville, talking about Americans in the early 19th century, says, The difference between the French and the Americans is a problem happens in your community in France, and you fold your arms, and you stand there, and you wait for somebody to show up and solve it, and you spend your time complaining about why that person's not showing up. Whereas in America, people just, they know nobody's coming. So they get together, and they figure out how to do it. He tells this story about a wagon overturning on the road, and people just show up and come together and figure out, because if they don't do it, then the road's going to be clogged, and they don't want that. They're not even being nice. They understand the problem is their problem. I think that we're a little bit out of that habit in American life. And when we see problems, we've got to think about them as belonging to us and of us as belonging to them. And therefore, thinking, how can we take this on rather than who do I vote for or who do I get mad at or who am I waiting to show up?

The answer is you. You got to show up. And a lot of our problems can be addressed by our thinking about how to take them on. Obviously, there are some challenges that are national in scope and that require more functional politics. But if you think about the problems we face in our communities, the way in which everyday Americans encounter challenges now, there's a lot more that we could be doing locally if we had the freedom to do it, which too often we don't, but also if we had the initiative to do it. And I think recovering the initiative is the first step. It's something we can do.

Is that somehow related to education? and by that I don't just mean what is a problem that, and I know we agree on it, our respective institutions are in violent agreement on it, which is that American government-funded schools have also deteriorated in quality. And it isn't, as has been in the news recently, a deterioration of decline in reading and math proficiency, which should concern us as a people, but also that our government-funded schools have stopped doing what they were supposed to be doing, which is transmitting values, not a particular. particular faith's values, but our values as a people from one generation to the next, it seems

that that is fueling this lack of trust, the demise of the institutions as well. Yeah, I think that's got a lot to do with it. As you say, this is something that Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute and others have been working at for a long time, and the basic challenges, the way I think about it is, an American citizen is not a natural artifact. It's not something you just find. An American citizen is a social achievement. And it has to begin in the family and in the community, but it also has to be formed at some level by education, by real formative civic education. And civic education isn't just something that happens sort of on the side where you find an hour a month to spend, you know, talking about history. That's great.

But civic education's got to be at the core of what our education involves, because we're trying to form a certain kind of person. as we're saying, a person who looks at a problem and says, this is my problem, and I'm the solution to this problem, and let's figure out how, I think that requires an entire attitude toward public problems and toward public life that, in part, has to be the responsibility of our schools. And absolutely, I would say they've not only abandoned that responsibility, I think to the extent that there is now explicit civic education and a lot of American education, it's a kind of oppositional education. It forms people to be fundamentally critics of our society. And look, in a free society, you've got to be able to be critical. You've got to be able to say

the president's wrong. But you also have to take ownership. I mean, I'll tell you a quick story. I'm a naturalized citizen. I was born in Israel. I grew up in the United States. My family came here and I was very young. But I became an American citizen. I was 19. I took the oath at the federal courthouse in Newark, New Jersey. And after giving us the oath, this federal judge got up to give a little talk. And I thought, you know, this is going to be a patriotic pep talk. He's going to quote Lincoln. What he actually said was very simple.

And at the time, I found it disappointing. But ever since then, it has stuck with me in the back of my mind. He said, from now on, you have to talk about America in the first person plural. Don't say they or they or them, say us and hour and hours. And when you see something happening, you say, this is happening to us. And like I say, at the time, I thought, well, this could have been a better speech. But in so many instances in my life since then, I thought that is exactly the missing attitude, is we've got to take a first-person plural approach to American life.

And that has got to be drummed into people through education. That's a lifelong mode of instruction that's got to be part of how we understand ourselves. And, yeah, I think some of the ways our schools are failing have to do with math and science. but many, most of the ways our schools are failing have to do with citizen formation. And, you know, that's got to be part of our way forward. Well, it must, and clearly there's a connection between the summary of education, your own citizenship story, which I didn't know. It's great to learn.

It says a lot about why you do what you do, and that's a question coming your way momentarily, my friend. But before we get there, I just wanted to hang on this point, because as I was reviewing some of the things that you've written this year that I hadn't had a chance to take a look at articles and op-eds. It's clear that what's on your mind in 2022 is hyper-partisanship. You've written about this over the years, but for good reason, in 2022, you're spending some time on that. Draw the connections there for us explicitly, but also we can begin our pivot into doing a quick analysis that's nonprofit-friendly about the

terms. Yeah. So absolutely, this is part of what I think about now, and I think it's very much connected to this question of owning problems, of not saying them and there, because it's very easy to look at American life and say, look, the problem is those damn people. And in a lot of ways, it's true. All right? I mean, the problem is those damn people. Let's face it. But the way forward has got to mean appealing to people who are already on our team to become part of our team. And that means saying these are our problems as Americans and understanding what happens in the public square as a disagreement about how to do what's best for the country rather than about whether to do what's best for the country. Now, you don't want to be naive about this, and the

differences in our politics are very profound, but I think we cannot let partisanship turn us into an us, them, society, because ultimately we need to look at every American citizen as a potential convert to the conservative cause and as somebody who's going to take ownership of American problems in an American way. So to me, the large project I'm engaged in now, the book I'm writing, is a book about how to think about the Constitution as a framework for national unity. I think our Constitution was created to build common ground, not just to occupy common ground, by forcing us to engage with each other over and over, forcing us to negotiate with one another over public problems. And the rejection of the Constitution that you find on the left now

is rooted in a rejection of that purpose. They just want sort of simple majority rule so that all the institutions that force us to deal with each other to build some consensus around solving problems are replaced by institutions that just let narrow majorities do whatever they want. And they want to eliminate all the modes of protecting minorities in American law.

They wouldn't put it this way, but I would. They think the courts are illegitimate. They think the Bill of Rights, they're working their way through the Bill of Rights. Peace by piece, right? Religion is first, and then speech, then we know it's coming. And all of those things are there to protect minorities and to force majorities to negotiate with minorities. They know the framers knew that majorities in American

life are temporary and ephemeral and very often narrow. And everybody at some point is going to find themselves in a minority and in a majority. That's the strength of our society. And if we stop thinking that way, then we really just do turn our society into a war. And our society is not made to be an arena of warfare. It's meant to be a place where neighbors work together to solve problems. I think we can recover that. I think a recovery of constitutionalism is an important first step of that. But building the kind of civic ethos that we're talking about is absolutely essential to it. And partisanship, the intensity of our partisanship has to be seen as a failure on that front. And so it's up to all of us to work on that. So I'll give you an example, which, and you know

that I agree to you 100 percent about that. But I'll give you a that I find really difficult to combat, and it needs to be combated, unfortunately. But also, what I find very challenging is, given the depth of this particular issue and how tied some Americans are to it, that it seems very difficult to find common ground. And that is the radical left's promoting of gender ideology. And frankly, I don't mean this in any rude way, but the mutilation of kids. I mean, that's what's happening. So in other words, you've all, I want to be able to fix that problem, and I know you do too, for the sake of kids, but really for the sake of America, but I want to do so in a way from a policy and rhetorical standpoint

that allows us to find common ground. But what I've found very difficult for the last 15 years as someone of very deep faith is, it seems as if the ability of Americans to find that common ground on what the human person is, about human sexuality, about marriage. Of course, we can get into a whole bunch of issues. But what concerns me now, just being someone who has spent so much time in schools and with young people is this radical ideology, how do we fix that issue and put it to rest while also doing so in a way that accomplishes this very noble aim you articulate so well? So I think that that's one of many examples where allowing our people,

politics to point in the direction of anthropology, as you're suggesting, is very important. To begin from practical concerns and divisions and help people work their way to an understanding of the human person. I would say a lot of the work that I do, especially the work that's directed to a more than just conservative audience, tries to begin from commonly shared problems, from some diagnosis of, you know, we're divided or we're losing trust. And then to work, to offer some plausible solutions that strike people as addressed to the problem, and then to help people see that those solutions are rooted in a particular understanding of the human person. If you look at the structure of the kind of argument I try to make in the book we were just

talking about a time to build my last book, it begins from the fact that we're losing trust, it tries to work its way towards some ways we might rebuild it, and then it says to people, if these make sense to you, let me tell you why. And the reason why is that the human person begins life imperfect and fallen, needs to be formed in order to be able to be free. That kind of formation is the work of our institutions. It's what they do. They're all built on the premise that that kind of formation is required and achievable. They're all built on the premise that we're all created in a divine image and are equal in dignity for that reason. And if you think that this diagnosis and prescription are plausible, maybe you also think that about the human person.

I think we've got to try to grab people by the hand and show them that a lot of our debates, and especially our cultural debates, are rooted in a difference of opinion about the human person, and that ultimately our view on that question is just much more plausible. The idea that all that people require is liberation from oppression isn't actually going to align with your experience of life as a human being. It won't make sense if you've ever seen a three-year-old. It won't make sense if you've ever been involved in a communal effort. It won't make sense if you're a human being with human experience. It only makes sense if you abstract from reality and allow yourself to be radicalized by a kind of disconnected philosophy.

And so I think we have to approach people on all these issues by beginning from their own experience and sort of walking them in the direction of the anthropology that's actually at the root of our thinking. Our ideas begin from that premise, but I think for a lot of people, that premise has to be a conclusion before it can be a beginning. And helping them see that is a lot of the work of persuasion that we all have to do if we're engaged in public life. It is achievable work because the people we're arguing with about these issues are often not the people we're trying to persuade. The people were trying to persuade are watching the argument happen. And they are persuadable. You can show them that the people, the person I'm arguing with is kind of crazy. I mean, let's think about our common experience. It can be very hard to accept or to see, especially in the social media age, that the person I'm arguing with is not the person I'm trying to persuade, that this argument is a kind of educational effort for other people who are trying to figure out what's the right way here. But I think if we understand that, and if we recognize that most Americans are just not radical, and most Americans are not even that political. They don't,

have my opinions, they don't have that guy's opinions, they're trying to figure out what to do about this issue. And to be persuasive, to offer a kind of winning argument, you have to start at a human level and not begin at the highest possible pitch and not start by yelling and not start by accusing people of trying to destroy the country, but recognizing that we're all trying to figure out a way forward in a complicated time. And the argument we have is just better. With that advice in mind, thinking that as we'd sit here, we're likely just days away from what seems a very likely Republican win in the U.S. House and an increasingly likely chance of a Republican win in the Senate, as it relates to conservative thought and conservative policy, neither you nor I want to talk about the partisanship of that. Do you think that the political right in this town in Washington, the men and women who will be in power, are equipped to tackle the issue you just discussed in others that way? Well, look, we both spend a lot of time with politicians, and I think it makes sense to have constrained expectations.

Constrained expectations. I'm going to try to internalize that phrase. You know, to see the limits we run into as work for us to do. The politicians do rely on outside help to think about these kinds of issues. And when they have nothing to say, I think we're not doing our job. And so I think we are in a moment when in a lot of ways they don't have enough to say. Obviously, there's some people in our politics who are perfectly capable of engaging in this kind of conversation and who know exactly why they think what they think and who can help voters see that too. But there are a lot of people in our politics who understand that the fight matters, that it's important to win, but who, you know, naturally haven't thought it through in this way. I think we're in a moment when in order to win, you have to think it through in this way. You have to recognize. I mean, I'd say this. I think a lot of our politicians now accept the reality of a 50-50 politics as an unavoidable fact of life. And I don't think that's true.

I think a lot more Americans are persuadable than are being persuaded. And if we assume that it's always going to be 50-50 and we just have to get our own people out, then sure, just ramping up the energy and helping people understand the problem, and frankly, making arguments rooted in despair might be effective. But if we think we can win more than that, if we think we can actually persuade in such a way as to create a majority coalition around the right ideas, we have to make those ideas attractive. and despair is not attractive. Anger's not attractive. It's just not.

Sometimes it almost feels justified, right? Maybe the world is almost ending, but you know what? You're not going to win the argument by starting from that place. You have to speak to people's aspirations. And I think we're well positioned to speak to people's aspirations, but I don't think we're doing that enough. And, you know, to the extent that I can offer advice to folks running for office, it would really be to assume that your potential voters are,

lots more people than your actual voters. You have an opportunity right now and that there's a huge opening to talk to people about what America could be for their children. And I do not think we're doing enough of that. I think that's well said. I want to talk a little bit about 2024, not any particular candidates, for that matter, any particular party, but about the conservative movement writ large, because I agree with you enthusiastically that I think with the right message. And by that, I don't mean the kind of empty message-tested stuff but the right rhetoric around the right political program with policies with the right messenger and messengers that 2024 can be that final end or the final chapter in what is a massive

realignment in this country. But I want to contrast to things that just occurred to me. You worked in the George W. Bush administration. And I don't mean this as a criticism of Carl Rove, who's a friend, but in 2004 in the re-election campaign of Bush, it was masterful in how down to the precinct level, Roeve and the re-election campaign of President Bush knew what they had to say and do, and thank goodness, because it was much better that the President Bush won re-election than electing his opponent that year. Having said that, it seems as if what you're begging for, while we nod in gratitude to that happening, is that in 2024, or whomever is the standard bearer for the conservative movement, whoever he or she may be,

that they are aspirational about not just what the movement can be and who we can attract, but also for America for the next generation. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think our politics can be more than it has been in the past generation. We've lived now through 30 years or so, more than that by now, of a 50-50 politics that basically consists of two minority parties losing every election. And sometimes it feels like a win because he squeaked through, but it's not a win. That's not a win. You know, in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 states in the Electoral College. Seventy-two Richard Nixon won 49 states.

We sort of think like that's on a different planet. That's not somewhere where we live. And look, 49 states, we probably can't do that. But could we do better than squeaking by with just the right combination of, you know, some tiny little majorities in just the right few states? absolutely we can do better than that. The notion that we're stuck in a 50-50 place is not right. American politics has been polarized often, but polarized at 50-50, maybe there's one other period where you could point to where that's happened from the 1870s, the 1890s. Generally speaking, we have a majority coalition for a time, a minority coalition that is struggling to beat it, then there's a realignment, they switch sides for a while. That's actually the norm in American political history. And the period we're living through of a

truly 50-50 politics where both parties have persuaded themselves that they can't do better than just getting all their people out, I think it is a huge mistake, and it opens an opportunity for whichever party is the first to recognize that it has actually been losing for 30 years. And, you know, I think there are ways that Republicans have more opportunities than Democrats for various reasons in this moment, but either party could make use of this opportunity. So it's a moment of danger, too. This really could go either way. But I don't think we stay at 50-50 for another generation.

That is not a sustainable mode of American politics. And so I think it's enormously important to think about how do I win a lot more voters than I'm winning now? I think the answer to that is that you cannot make your case by showing people why the other party will destroy the country. You make your case by showing people why you think your ideas will help their children. And neither party is doing enough of that at this moment. Do you think this is a, I agree with that too, I'm trying to figure out the future. And of course, getting a historian to do that is just really bad. But there's a question for you about history. In those episodes you mentioned, those re-elections of Nixon and Reagan in particular, but even going back to the late 1800s,

do you think there has to be the presence, the existence of a very serious external threat to America in order for Americans to realize they need. need to emphasize their similarities over their differences. And I think there's a growing strong consensus that we know what that threat is, and it's the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, look, I think there's always this kind of cloud hanging over every communitarian conversation that says, when this has worked, when we have really been united as Americans, it's been because of some terrible calamity, right? Often a war, occasionally some domestic disaster. we don't want that. So if we want to be more united. Yeah, nobody wants World War III, though America was very united after World War II. And so it can't be that that's what we're arguing

for. The question is, how do we achieve greater internal strength in national unity without that kind of calamity? But as you say, there are dangers, too. There are risks. There are always risks to this country being weaker than it has to be. And oftentimes those risks are external. I do think we face a danger from China that we have not taken seriously enough. And there are ways that that danger could force us to think together a little bit about what we're missing as Americans. Even while we disagree about various other things, are there ways that we can come to understand the sources of our strength and build on those? I certainly have some hope on that front, but I think ultimately we also have to ask ourselves about the sources of those strengths directly.

We have to believe in our constitutional system because it's the right way to govern ourselves. We have to believe that ultimately we're a country that solves its problems from the bottom up because that is the way of free society functions. It can't just be external threats that get us there. We've got to actually understand the reasons why our society should be its best self. So two final questions for you. One's a really big question. We'll save that one for last.

But how did you get into doing the work that you're doing? That's a hard question. You know, as I said, I came to the United States as a child. And in a way, the work I do now is just a work of gratitude for this country. That's easier to see now stepping back. But, you know, what I really do every day is try to make the case for why this is such an extraordinary place and how it can remain one. But, you know, how you get interested in politics as a kid, I really couldn't tell you. I was interested in politics by the time, certainly I was a high school student.

I was a conservative by then, too, although I wouldn't have been able to put a lot of words to that. I had a wonderful friend in high school who gave me a book, a book called Statecraft to Soulcraft by George Will. They'd have been written maybe 10 years earlier. George Will doesn't even like that book anymore, but I still love that book. I do, too. I'm still reading it in my head all the time. And it's really a book about why we should take ourselves seriously as a society and why politics matters. and it put some words to some of the ways that I'd been thinking.

And so, you know, I went to Washington. As a college student, I went to American University in D.C. After that, realized I actually needed an education that was about the fundamentals, the philosophical underpinnings. So I went to the University of Chicago and then came back to D.C. And I've been working since then really at the intersection of theory and practice in politics. And America's full of amazing things, but to me, one of the most amazing things is that I get to do this every day. I mean, I, you know, if I had all the money in the world and I could do whatever I wanted, I'd pretty much be doing this.

That's pretty obvious. And thanks for doing what you're doing. You're someone and your story just revealed why. You're just very interested in America because of your gratitude who spends a lot of time thinking about best case scenario. And so I want to conclude this episode with you. And we'll have you back many times over the year. So hopefully we can continue this story by asking you this question, what's the best case scenario for the Constitution for American politics and America. society over the next decade. Yeah, you know, I guess I would say best case scenario isn't quite right either, but I certainly think worst case scenario isn't where I'd be. I would emphasize the difference between hope and optimism here. I think optimism and pessimism are both terrible mistakes because they both make you passive. They both lead you to think what's going to happen is just going to happen. And either it's going to be great and, you know, best days are ahead, just watch or the world is over. What's the point? Don't get involved. Hope says things could

be better if we act. And I'm very hopeful about America. I don't see how you could look at America and not be hopeful. We've been through much darker times than this one, and ultimately by rooting ourselves in our best traditions, by looking to the best of what we've been, we have been able to rise to every occasion. And I do think we will rise to this one too. But we face serious challenges. One reason for hope, it seems to me, is that there's going to be a kind of generational transition in American life. I mean, how could there not be? All of our leaders are 80 years old, and I frankly think that has to do with some of the despair that we're drowning in in our politics. And I think a generation that is fundamentally a generation of parents, of people who are

thinking about the future in very personal terms, is going to be a little more constructive, a little more productive, a little more concrete in how we think about challenges. I also think the fact that people are aware of the problem is a reason to think that there's some hope for solutions. That is, nobody walks around right now saying, this is great. Let's just keep doing this in America, and it's going to be wonderful. And so there's an implicit question on everybody's mind, which is, how can we do better than this? And we have an answer to that question. I think that answer begins with the American Constitution and the principles that it's rooted in, and through that, it works its way toward a set of solutions. If we begin from the right

principles, and then we have the right diagnoses, that is we understand what's actually wrong in America, which has been a challenge for the right sometimes until fairly recently, really, to actually look at contemporary America and ask ourselves what's going on. And then we think about how do we apply those principles to those problems and arrive at solutions. Some of them are public policy solutions, like what you do and what we do. Some of those are different ways of life, different new institutional forms to try, different ways of solving problems. I think that's what we as a society do. And so if we can get out of our own way, and that means sometimes getting government out of the way, it means sometimes getting a bad attitude out of the way, a despairing attitude

that just says other Americans are the problem I have, and instead try to ask ourselves, what's missing that I'm not doing? What could I be doing to help this problem be addressed? That's ultimately how Americans solve problems. We organize, we find a way, you know, to think about Tokville again. Tockville says you get three Americans together and they elect a treasurer, right? And And there is something of that in our mode of being. I think we've lost a little bit of it. And to recover it is how we start to find our way forward. And I absolutely think we're going to do it.

I have a lot of hope in this country. Well, great exhortation towards some action items. The first is look in the mirror and if you see despair, get rid of it. This country is worth being hopeful over. Well, you've all of been. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much. Thanks for everything you do.

We look forward to have you back. Thanks a lot. Thanks for joining this episode of the Kevin Roberts Show. We will be back next week with another person who is hopeful about the American future. Take care. The Kevin Robert Show is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producer is Crystal Kate Bonham. The producer is Philip Reynolds. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and Tim Kennedy. For more information and to subscribe,

please visit heritage.org.