Division isn't the danger. Here's the fix. | Yuval Levin LIVE
Updated: 3 hours ago
What do we owe each other when we can’t stand each other?
Recorded live at the Braver Angels Convention 2026 — in front of 1,000 people split evenly between red and blue — this episode brings that key question to a renowned civic scholar whose work gives Moni the most hope. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute has a surprising answer to what's really threatening the country — and it isn't division. It’s passivity: treating ourselves as spectators instead of citizens. Together, he and Mónica dig into why conflict is our solution rather than our problem, what it actually means to be "responsible" for a country, and — because Levin can't resist a good historical tangent — which founding father would love America today, and which one would be horrified.
Credits
Host & Executive Producer: Mónica Guzmán
Guest: Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute
Senior Producer: Tracy Egbas
Producer: Jessica Jones
Associate Producer & Graphic Designer: Fredo Viola
Contributors: April Lawson & Travis Tripodi
Artist in Residence: Gangstagrass
A production of Reclaim Curiosity
Distribution Partners: KUOW, Braver Angels, and Deseret News
Financial Supporter: M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
Links & References
Books by Yuval Levin
American Covenant by Yuval Levin
Lincoln's Lyceum Address, "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" (1838)
Call to Action
Submit a question: If you've been impacted or taken action because of the podcast, let us know. Or if you found yourself mulling over something, turn it into a question and share it with us. You can send us a quick email at abraverway@reclaimcuriosity.com
Subscribe: If you like what you've heard, hit subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review!
Share this episode: reclaimcuriosity.com/post/a-braver-way-episode-25
Follow us: @abraverway on Instagram and YouTube and @moniguzman on Instagram
Join our text line: Text "brave" to 206-926-9955 to join.
Transcript
[00:00:00]
Yuval Levin:
However worried you might be about our country, and I'm worried about it, I think we have to begin by seeing the good so that the work we do can begin from and be directed to what we love
Mónica Guzmán:
I got to talk to the thinker who has given me the most hope at the event that has given me the most hope. That's right. Today's episode was recorded live at the Braver Angels Convention 2026, days before our nation's 250th birthday. A cool thing about this convention, there were a thousand people there and as a group we were evenly split between conservatives and liberals with independents in the middle. There were actually different colored lanyards signaling to everybody where you tended to come from. So I was wearing a blue lanyard because Eileen left and my guest was wearing a red lanyard. So this is Yuval Levin. Yuval Levin is over at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the founding editor at National Affairs. He writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. He worked in the domestic policy staff under George W. Bush.
Let's see, he has written lots of books but the most recent two that I've read I will highly recommend A Time to Build, which is incredible, incredibly rigorous thinking about our institutions, what they still have to offer us even at a time of low trust in them and also American Covenant. This is a book about the Constitution but also who we, we the people are as a constituted public.
Nobody on either side of the divide has given me more hope than Yuval. I realized this as I was reflecting. I was like, man, that's true, isn't it? There's a substance he brings to his study of who we are as a people, what our founding design and virtue tries to give us and hopes that we inherit. There's a lot he's taught me about the responsibilities we have to each other and it made me want to bring overall this question to him for this episode. What do we still owe each other when we are wary of each other and when we are wary of our shared future?
A couple of fun things about the conversation. He talks about what the strongest citizen can do when approaching some of the trickiest terrain of our contemporary life, like social media, ruptures and divided families, our reflex toward political impatience.
And he names what he thinks is the biggest danger to our society and it is not division. It's something surprising and really compelling.
Last but not least, he is a giant nerd.
But in the ways that I'm becoming kind of nerdy, he's, he's, oh, he's a big historian on all things America. And we talk about which founder, if he were to hop out of a time machine into the 250th year of the nation he helped build, would love everything he saw and which founder would absolutely hate everything he saw. So that and more await.
And with that, let's get to the conversation.
Hey, hey! Welcome! Welcome to the convention again, and also welcome to the first ever live podcast recording of a Braver Way podcast. Whoo!
I am so excited to be here with all of you. I think you are just the living embodiment of progress through unity, and we are here with someone who has some deep insights about what unity looks like and doesn't need to look like, and how our differences really do move us forward, and how we are constituted by all these amazing documents and principles and values and virtues that the American spirit just encompasses and brings to life in so many ways. So, I am really, really, really grateful to be here with Yuval. Hi, Yuval.
Yuval:
Hello. Thank you very much for having me. That's quite an introduction. I need to meet that person you are describing, my guy.
Mónica:
Yeah, yeah. He's right here.
[00:05:00]
Yuval:
Here he is. It's great to be with you, and always great to be at anything Braver Angels does. It's just such an honor and a pleasure to be here.
Mónica:
Excellent.
So, Yuval, I want to start with, I guess, the opening chapter of your American story. You came to the United States when you were eight years old, and you were 19 at your naturalization ceremony in 1996. Tell us about that experience and what the official there said that looks like you never forgot.
Yuval:
Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate that. I was born in Israel. My family came here, as he said, when I was eight years old. We came here to Philadelphia.
This is where we lived for a few years and then moved to New Jersey, and we kind of orbited Philadelphia from my entire childhood.
And, you know, when you make that kind of move as a child, to begin with, the new place is daunting and scary, and there's this kind of them in the life of every immigrant that I think at first is how you approach the society that you've entered. And I would say by the time that I became an American citizen,
11 years later, I was 19, I very much felt part of this place. And exactly how that happened is a story that I frankly try to piece together myself, because it's an extraordinary thing that this country does to bring people in, to give them a sense that they can be part of this.
And I very quickly, first of all, just found this place fascinating and extraordinary.
And by the time I was a college student at my naturalization ceremony, I was a history buff.
I was as patriotic as you can imagine.
And there's just something about America that allows for that to happen. So I took the oath at the federal courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, which is not in itself a place that evokes depatriotism necessarily, but is nonetheless a wonderful American place to be. And the judge, the federal judge who gave us the oath,
in my recollection, he's this grizzled old judge. I actually should really look up how old he was, because I was 19, so he might well have been 45, I don't know, but he seemed like a very old man. And he got up to give a little speech after we all took the oath, and I thought he would talk about Lincoln or Madison or something. And he said this very strange thing to us. He said, "From now on, you have to think and talk about America in the first person plural."
And I would bet you that none of us knew what he meant. He explained it, but in that first instant, all of us who had passed the English test and were all sad and excited, first person plural is not the most obvious thing in the world. He said, "What it means is you have to say us and we when you talk about America. Don't say them anymore. It's not them, it's us.
And it's we." He really stressed we. And I would say that in that moment, that felt like a weird and disappointing speech to give to a group of new immigrants. But it has never left me. It has always stayed with me, because I think that that is advice we all need all the time, not just immigrants to America, but everybody in our country needs to remember that when we talk about America, we should say us and we, and not talk about some they who are really the problem here. If there's a problem, then we're the problem. If there are solutions, then we're the solutions. And that word "we" is a very, very important word in the American political tradition. It's the first word of the Constitution, "we the people." It's the first word of that magical second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths." There's a reason for that. Those documents are written in the first person plural because they amount to people taking common ownership of their joint fate together. And that is really the hard work of citizenship. So I not only am grateful to have become an American back then, but grateful for what that retired judge had to say to us.
Mónica:
Amazing. So you were saying you became a history buff. You've been piecing together the story of how you went from an eight-year-old kid from another country to the most patriotic person, maybe you knew.
Bring us into then what brought you to not just wanting to understand and feeling fascinated by America, but this thing that's all over your work of wanting to help us all understand how to preserve, protect, deserve it. What drives you all 11 towards that?
[00:10:00]
Yuval:
Well, look, I think part of it is a worry about taking for granted what we have in this country. A lot of times our politics begins by taking the good for granted and then fighting to the death about the bad. And politics is about disagreement. It's about what we argue about. And so it makes a certain amount of sense. We're not going to spend a lot of time in our politics just kind of talking about how nice the weather is today. But nobody ever had a feel. You know, I used to work for a member of Congress and I was always struck at how angry people were on the phone. At one point my boss said to me, you know, nobody ever says, what a great day I had. I should call my congressman and tell him that. It doesn't mean everybody's mad all the time. This is just what you do when you're mad. We turn to politics when we have problems. And that's right. But I think that civic life and patriotism is not just politics and it can't just be what we do when we're mad. There has to be some sense that this provides us with extraordinary opportunities to live a flourishing life. The kind of country we have, the kind of society we have is something we should not take for granted. And it's especially important in helping the rising generation of Americans take ownership of this society to help them see that it's not just a bunch of problems that they're taking over. It's actually an enormous opportunity to live a good and happy life. And we should be very grateful to be here now, right, for all that we complain and I'm sure we'll complain.
All of the challenges we face, there are a lot of ways in which there are new problems, there are things that used to be better. But you know what? There are a lot of things that used to be worse. There's not some golden age that we're all working to get back to. I don't know when that would have been, but I doubt you would actually want to go there.
And the idea that all there is is picking pieces up from the floor and complaining just isn't right. If you ask yourself about your life, however worried you might be about our country, and I'm worried about it, I think we have to begin by seeing the good so that the work we do can begin from and be directed to what we love and not what we hate. A politics that is about what you hate is not going to work well. Ultimately it has to be about protecting the preconditions for what makes it worthwhile. And it's hard to do that day to day, but I think it's very, very important to keep it in mind. For
Mónica:
sure. So in American Covenant you wrote that American politics is an endless argument among people who share a set of broad commitments in common and who owe one another something, that sense of obligation. We've been hearing here about that need to think of what we owe each other. What was that the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence? We pledge, do you know it by heart, history,
Yuval:
our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Mónica:
Yeah, amazing, right? So trying to renew that pledge, what would that mean, what do we owe each other? I saw this recent survey that said, and actually I'm going to just ask what you all would think, how many of us privately believe that the greatest threat to this country is other Americans? You know, raise your hand if you think it's, you know, I don't know, 25%, 50% higher than that. Yeah, you guys know what we're up against. It's 62%.
62% of Americans privately believe that the greatest threat to this country comes from other Americans. So the thing that I kind of want to bring to this conversation and explore from many angles with you, Yvonne, is what do we Americans owe each other when we're wary of each other and of our shared future?
Yuval:
You know, I think it's worth a thought about that other Americans point because there is a way that the threats that face our society are not exactly external threats, but they're also not exactly other Americans, right?
And the greatest dangers that we face are about losing sight of what it is that we have to preserve and work with. Abraham Lincoln, when he was a young man, he was 27 years old, he was invited by a boys' high school in Springfield, Illinois to give a talk. It was in a series where they invited people to talk about their lives. And the person before him literally told a story about a trip to Montreal, okay?
Abraham Lincoln gives a speech that he calls the preservation of American institutions. We think of it as the men's lyceum speech. Now, it's really worth your while. And among the things he says in that speech is that no enemy invader will ever drink a drop of the Ohio River. The United States will not fall to an enemy. If the United States falls to anything, it will be to a loss of its own sense of purpose. We can die by suicide or live forever, he said.
And I do think there's some truth to that. The challenges we face are about how we can sustain what we have. And I think that speaks to what we owe each other to. What we owe each other is a commitment to that common project that we do have to work at together. And that means we owe each other a lot of patience and tolerance. Look, America's always been a diverse, divided society full of crazy people with all kinds of dynamic dreams. That's just who we are. We're not good at standing in line. We're good at starting stuff. We're good at fighting about things. That's what we're good at. I think we have to be aware of that about ourselves and understand that part of what we owe each other is this common life together.
And that ultimately that does require giving people a lot of room. It requires giving people a lot of patience. But it also requires giving that common work our time, our commitment. This is where, again, as you said, our lives are fortunate, our sacred honor. That's a lot of sacrifice and commitment.
And I think we're very good at thinking about the rights we have as Americans. We do need to be better at thinking about the obligations we have. The Republican side of liberal Republicanism is more about obligations than about rights. And ultimately, to take ownership of this society really does mean taking responsibility for it. And I think part of what we owe each other is responsibility. It's a big, broad word. Responsibility is a wonderfully American word. It actually used to be the case that the Oxford English Dictionary said the first use of responsibility was in the Federalist Papers, which was wonderful. And then they found an earlier use, almost 100 years earlier, which was very frustrating to me, in Britain.
But nonetheless, it seems like maybe the second or third time the word was ever used in English was to describe the office of the President of the United States and the Federalist.
There is something distinctly American about this notion that what characterizes citizens is responsibility. And responsibility is really about taking ownership. It's being responsible for something and being accountable for it. I think that's a lot of what we owe each other. That's amazing.
[00:15:00]
Mónica:
So we've got responsibility. You mentioned patience a couple of times. In my little dips here and there into history, I have been really struck by another word that was used a lot then and very rarely now, and it's a word you just used.
Republican with a small R. And back in the Founders' Time, George Washington, there was a lot of conversation about what it means to be a good Republican. And you've mentioned that that notion seems to have strayed from us in contemporary times. What did being a Republican mean? What force did it have and what did it look like?
Yuval:
You know, it's funny. The American two-party system has a lot going for it, but it's done us the disfavor of making the word Democratic and the word Republican kind of complicated words.
We always have to say small R Republican. But actually, James Madison, when he uses the word Republican and the Federalist, always capitalizes the word. We mean small R in the sense that it's not the Republican party. That's not what it's about. But Republicanism is one of the essential features of the kind of free society we are. And there are a lot of ways to understand it. For Madison, for example, in the Federalist, Republican means not Democratic in the sense of direct citizen participation in all decision-making, but representative democracy. That's one of the things it means. But I think more deeply than that, and you find this especially in the thinking of John Adams and in some ways in George Washington, Republicanism refers to a society in which the citizens are the sovereigns, are the owners. They don't answer to somebody else. And that comes with a lot of freedom and authority, but also with a lot of responsibility. And Republicanism is about exercising the responsibility of citizenship. It's connected to another word that we've forgotten how to use. The word is virtue. Virtue is a...it now strikes as a really old-fashioned word. And it's sort of fallen out of our vocabulary because we don't quite know what to do with it.
It's a very complicated word, right, because in our long tradition in the West, there have always been plural virtues, good habits. Aristotle has 11 of them. And there's always been virtue in the singular, which Aristotle also has, and which describes a kind of a mode, a way of being that's necessary for living a good life. I think civic virtue in the way in which the generation of the American founders used it means something like the strength to play your part. If you think about when they used the word virtue, try to insert that definition into it. And civic virtue means the strength to play the part of a citizen. It's a role, right? It's defined in a certain way. It requires something of you. It limits you in some ways. It empowers you in some ways. But it matters when it's difficult, when it takes some real strength to do it. And I think that's an essential idea of republicanism that we've lost. But I should say, republican has always been hard to define. There's a section in the original Constitution, Article 6, where the national government commits to the states to provide to all the states a republican form of government.
John Adams, famously in a letter, says he asked everybody he knew at the convention, which is almost everybody who was at the convention. He was in there himself.
He was ambassador to England at the time. He asked him, "What is this? What does it mean?" And he said he got as many answers as people he asked. Nobody could really tell him exactly what they meant by republican, even in the Constitution, where they used the term themselves. So we shouldn't feel too bad about not quite being able to define that term, but I do think responsibility is at the core of it.
[00:20:00]
Mónica:
Yeah. So looking into contemporary times and some of the ways we've slipped from being a republican, I'll ask you directly. In what ways might we be right to be concerned that we could slip into behaving like subjects? Because that's kind of the opposite in a way of a republican.
Yuval:
That's right. I think the great danger in a republican form of government is passivity.
The danger is not disagreement, it's not polarization. These can be dangerous, but the greatest danger is passivity, is to understand yourself as a spectator. I think the best source on this is Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville, at the end of the second volume of Democracy in America, comes to the view that the greatest danger that the United States faces in its future is what he calls somnolence, or what Harvey Mansfield, in translating him, calls somnolence.
In other words, sleepiness, a sense that all this stuff is somebody else's fault. When something goes wrong, he says the French have a tendency to fold their arms and wait for an official to turn up.
And he's impressed that the Americans don't do this, but he worries that they could, that there's something about a free society because it comes with so many rights and because the obligations are optional. That will lose sight of those obligations. And I do think that passivity or a kind of spectator citizenship is still the biggest danger that we face. The sense that when things happen, it's really somebody else's fault. You even find this now in public officials. I think if you look at Congress, you would have to say the tendency to become a spectator is a very dangerous, deforming force in the life of even that institution. Let alone in our lives as citizens.
Mónica:
That's right. I'm really struck by this. Also, it's like a vocabulary lesson today, right? Somnolence? I'll dispel that later.
So the spectator-ness, I think, of the media. You've written about how Congress seems to be... There's more performativeness in our institutions. They become platforms for a show, right? And then the sleepiness. Well, yeah, there's a sense of hopelessness that contributes to that.
But there's also, going back to the beginning when you were talking about your naturalization ceremony, the first person plural. We is really hard to use when we keep blaming them. The other side in some way is at fault. And so even among, you know, citizens, Americans, we're back to them when we should be at the we. That's super, yeah, super resonant to me. Let's move to this. I think one of the most insightful things I've learned from your work is that our division really is truly by design. And it is a brilliant design that we hold America together by keeping it divided. One way you put it in your book, the system allows us to avoid becoming too divided by preventing us from becoming too unified.
Unpack that for us. Yeah.
Yuval:
I would say there's an assumption at the core of the American Constitutional Project that is not obvious to us anymore. And the assumption is that a free society will always be divided.
It's a function of freedom. Madison says this directly in Federalist 10. He's got this one sentence that if it doesn't stop you short, it really should. He says, "As long as the reason of man continues fallible and he's at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed." Period.
In other words, get a group of people together. If they're allowed to think what they want, they will not all think the same thing. When you put it that way, that's obviously right. And yet if you think about our expectations of politics, we're always disappointed at division. And we wish for a kind of unity that isn't real. We talk about unity a lot now in our divided society. Look at the last four or five presidential inaugural addresses. They're all about unity.
That's how a divided country talks. But what do they mean by unity? What they mean by unity is if everybody agreed with me, things would be really great. And I believe that too. If everybody agreed with me, things would be really great. But I don't expect that. And I don't think that the failure to see that is an indication of failure. Madison begins by assuming that division is a fact and then thinking about what unity can look like. And that's not a contradiction because for him, unity doesn't mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together.
And the difference is a very important difference. Thinking alike and acting together are not opposites. It is entirely possible to act together when you don't think alike. I would suggest to you that the American Constitution is a set of answers to that question. How? How do we act together when we don't think alike? And the answers look like negotiation, competition, a kind of constant constructive tension. The Constitution is built to make sure that narrow, temporary majorities can't get their way. It's frustrating, right? Its purpose is to frustrate. Almost everything about it is built to make sure that, nope, I know you won the election, but nope, you got to talk to that guy.
And that's very frustrating when you win narrow majorities, which is really all we've had in America for the past 25 years. But what you're supposed to do with that frustration is build coalitions,
is reach out and broaden your coalition, your majority. The American system is different from every other democracy in the world in this way, and it's really worth noticing. The parliamentary systems, which are most democracies, perfectly legitimate democracies, don't get me wrong, they are built to empower any majority, however narrow, to have all the power in the system until it loses its majority. Now that's accountable, it's democratic, and they can lose their majorities, but the American system is built to restrain narrow majorities and require them to grow. So that in the American system, you never get all the power in the system.
Period. You just don't. And every president finds himself at some point sitting in the Oval Office thinking, "Why am I talking to these people? I just won the election." And the fact is, the Constitution is designed to make sure you have to still talk to those people.
And that, we often look at those features of it as frustrating, as problems, but those are the solutions to our problems in 21st century America. And we're forced to deal with each other, that we stand a chance of acting together when we don't think alike. And so, I like all those frustrating elements. They're the best thing about the system. The separations of powers, the multiple power centers, that's why we don't just have simple majority rule running over minorities in America. We have a very complicated democratic system that forces us to deal with each other.
[00:25:00]
Mónica:
This notion of frustration being the cost of unity, and unity in this sort of interestingly divided way, seems to be the answer. In a prior session, we had a couple of cousins, red and blue, up here on stage.
They've been trying to deal with their differences. An analogy that one of them used was, "You have to learn to live with the pebble in your shoe”. I thought that was so great.
So what you're saying is, "Love the frustrating parts. They are the best parts."
Yuval:
They're necessary. Are they the best parts? They don't have to be the best parts.
Sure, it's very nice when everybody in the room thinks the same way, and we can all act together, and we do that. We do that in smaller groups in America. That's how we engage in politics. It's not just individuals. But I think we have to see that the way that this immense, diverse society can work is by seeing that the conflict is the solution, not the problem.
We have a tendency now in 21st century America to think that we're just disagreeing too much, we're fighting too much. I think we're disagreeing way too little.
Even very politically engaged people spend most of our time with people we agree with talking about people we disagree with, and we think that's what politics is. That's not what politics is. What politics is is actually dealing with those people we disagree with. And yeah, it's not always great fun. That's not the point. You get somewhere by figuring out, "How can I get what I'm trying to achieve given that not everybody agrees?" And the answer is, they also need some of what they're trying to achieve. And building that kind of common ground is not just a matter of putting what you want on the table, they put what they want, and you find a middle place. It's actually not generally about the middle.
If you want to build a bridge, and I don't, we don't build half a bridge, we both lose that way. What we find is something you want. And we find some way to organize and arrange our public life so that I can get what I want and you can get what you want.
And that's really the magic of democratic politics. It's hard to do, and we've fallen out of the knack of doing it so that it seems so unfamiliar to us now that it doesn't really feel like we're up to it. But our public life is built to facilitate that kind of politics, and I absolutely think it's possible now.
[00:30:00]
Mónica:
So for the sake of inspiring us a little bit, I love your concept of it's not finding common ground, not really. It's creating it. It's forging it. We heard earlier today about the space between us. That's where the work happens. Not us and them, but sort of what we're creating together. So we find the common ground. There's something transformative by coming together in this way that's about unity that doesn't think alike but can act together. What are the areas of substantive contention that still exist? Other than the Brave Angels Convention, it does feel like a lot of the spaces where people come together are not necessarily built for productive tension. So where are they?
Yuval:
Give us a minute.
I think it's true. A lot of those spaces have been worn down or have been turned into silos where disagreement is seen as a failure. I think that's happened in a lot of universities in our society, which are meant to be places where we engage with different ideas. It's happened in some of our political journalism as it's been fragmented.
And so those two have become spaces where people who agree with each other talk about people who don't agree with them. But there are, I mean, I think our public life still does work this way a fair amount of the time. I would point you first to your state capital, whatever state. Now, some states are more functional than others, maybe not whatever state. But in many places, politics at the state level still very much works in this way, where ultimately you have to reach an agreement at the end of the day, and you do it by drawing in various interests so that people know one another pretty well in the state legislature. They know what the other guy needs. They know what it would mean to arrive at a place where you can make a deal and reach an arrangement. A lot of the reasons why this can happen is that it's not as performative as Congress.
It's more boring. Legislative work is supposed to be boring. The fact that it is now interesting to people who are looking for a circus is not good. They should look at Congress and say, "That's much too dull for me. Transportation policy?" Instead, they look at Congress and think, "That seems like fun, and that's a bad sign." But I would say to you that this happens in Congress, too.
I have a lot of criticism to offer of Congress. I think that it is at the center of our constitutional dysfunction now. And yet still, now, too, there's a fair amount of real negotiation and deal-making that does happen. There ultimately is some kind of agreement on appropriations every year that has to be bipartisan and is. And a fair amount of deal-making gets done. You can point to some bipartisan legislation in the last ten years. I would say all of it is a function of the filibuster.
And get me started on the filibuster, because I think we really have to remember the case for defending it. It's extremely important. But it does happen. That kind of work, especially when it's not the most salient, high-profile issue, but when it is just transportation policy or figuring out how we should think about the future of the FAA, these bills do happen.
Our politics still can work. It's just we have to see as a success what we now too often define as the failure.
The deal, the bargain, the arrangement, a lot of members now run for Congress promising not to do that kind of thing. And they feel like they have to do it in secret. But that's their job. That is the job. And if you're running on a promise never to give an inch, then you're running on a promise not to be a legislator. Maybe there's something else you should do with your time. There are a lot of things that the capable people can do in our economy. You don't have to run for Congress. If you do, you really should be somebody who wants to make a bargain. And I don't think we should tell ourselves that never happens anymore. It does happen, but not enough.
Mónica:
And I want to get to how individual citizens who may not be in elected office can get to that. But first,
all of us at Braver Angels and many folks who are interested in making sure that our pluralistic vigor remains think a lot about tone. The way that we say what we say. So you've talked about how there's two kinds of democratic voice, one that's unreflective and spontaneous and one that's more deliberative and considered. And you quoted a writer, I think, that only the latter is fit to rule. And that's Congress's job in our system. You've called yourself a congressional supremacist, by the way. I kind of love that. But Congress is obviously a wall.
[00:35:00]
Yuval:
I mean, the Constitution is a congressional supremacist.
Mónica:
And it comes first. That's right. So unreflective passions are clearly really prevalent right now. And there's lots of pebbles in our shoe to the point where we can't walk, it feels. So I want to read a segment of an interview between the journalist Ross Douthit of The New York Times and our vice president J.D. Vance because they talked about tone and some interesting things were said.
Douthit said, "There's a tone of aggressive un-charity to people who aren't on board with the administration's policies," he told Vance. I'm curious what you think. Vance said, "The tone argument is in some ways. People see what they want to see. And I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences. Take a classic example. The Biden administration had a very humane way of talking about immigration, about illegal immigration. It was very charitable in some of the words it offered to people who were coming into our country. I would say that it was not particularly charitable to the people who were living with the consequences of mass migration into our country. So at a certain level, what I think matters much more than perceived tone is actual conduct. So my question is, is he excusing people from the conduct of good conflict and communication, arguing that we don't really need that? Or is he onto something when he suggests that a preoccupation with each other's tone keeps us from hearing what we're trying to say sometimes?
Yuval:
Well, I think he's onto something, but I think in a way both the argument he's answering and the argument he's making are examples of what happens when we come to think of politics as just talking about stuff.
Politics has to be channeled through institutions.
The core insight that we've been getting at here, the American constitutional system, is that this can only work if it's channeled through a set of structured procedures that require us to deal with each other.
That's what a legislature is. That's what our electoral system is. That's what the separation of powers amounts to. That's what the legal system is.
And those kinds of institutions do demand a certain tone by default. To be effective in the political system, you can't just insult people. If you're trying to get them to come along, you have to talk to them in a certain way. Now, the reason to do that is not to be nice. Nice is fine, but the reason to do that is to be effective.
The reason to do that is to actually succeed in our system. I think we've arrived at a place where some of the people in our country who are most engaged in politics think that the way to win is to go around the system and be more direct. But that is not the way to win. That is the way to be totally ineffective, to just talk and talk and talk. How do you actually achieve something in politics? It is still now by going through the system and actually taking the steps necessary to change policy, to change the direction of our public life. And there's not a way around. There's not a shortcut. The president doesn't have a shortcut at his disposal to just do stuff.
Our presidents have all had to learn this. All of our recent presidents have come in and tried to do by executive action, all kinds of stuff that, guess what, you just can't do by executive action. And then they get frustrated and they blame everybody else and they want to pack the court and they want to end the filibuster. No, just do the job. It's right in front of you. There is a way to do this. You have a very powerful position. But it is only powerful if you operate within the system of which it is a part.
And one of the things that working that way does is change your tone because you just have to be persuasive to people you don't agree with. And I think that's one of the things we've gotten just very bad at in American political life. We think that there's some kind of authenticity to just being a jerk. But that's, maybe it's authentic, I don't know, but it's totally ineffective.
The problem with it isn't that it is not nice. The problem with it is that it is a waste of time and energy. You get nothing done that way. And we do have a system that is structured to align a certain idea of tone with also a certain idea of effectiveness. The incentives really are aligned in the system. And so the problem with the kind of tone that Ross Douthat is criticizing there is not just that it's uncharted. It's just that it's a terrible, the problem with it is it's totally ineffective in the American political system. And I think the answer that the Vice President gave him suggested he doesn't see that. It's very important to see it. Tone is part of substance. And that's not about civility. And it's not about just being kind to people. That's really important, by the way. Civility is very important. Being kind to people is essential. But you know what?
Failing to do that is also totally ineffective. And I think we have to see that connection. That's part of what our system of government offers us. So yeah, I don't think the tone arguments are about policing people's speech. On the contrary, I think they're about channeling our political energies in a direction that can actually change things.
[00:40:00]
Mónica:
Right. So effectiveness. To your point about the tension between authenticity and civility, I guess I want to push back on a piece of it, which is that I do wonder if there's really two sides to the coin.
It's we owe each other. We're talking about what we owe each other when we're wary of each other. We owe each other the effort of being effective by communicating productively across our differences. Yes. I also wonder, though, if we owe each other the effort to grow our capacity to withstand incivility when it comes because it is authentic and it is revealing something true about our fellow Americans' concerns.
Yuval:
Yeah, absolutely. But I think these things have to work together in the sense that authenticity can't just mean that I don't have to take account of you.
Right? I do have to take account of you. That's what living in a free society together when we don't agree means. It's beautifully said. And so it can't just be, well, you just have to take me as I am. No. The whole point of civilization is we don't take human beings just as they are. We turn ourselves into something better than we were at the beginning. That's what life is for. Everything about it is an effort at formation that can enable us to be better than we otherwise would be. And so that's not inauthentic. That's what it means to be a serious and civilized person. So
Mónica:
there's a new friend of mine, Elizabeth Oldfield. I don't know if you know of her work. She's incredible. It leads the Sacred Podcast,
just an author and a very spiritual thinker. She's great. And she wrote in her book, Fully Alive, something that I think captures a longing that I'm hoping can give us some hope that some of these things we're talking about, about our obligations might be catching on, or at least there's the desire. And she said, "If we are headed into even more turbulent times, I want to be someone who is of use, not overwhelmed and panicking, but steady and hopeful, able to contribute to weaving a canopy of trust under which other people can take shelter."
Does that hit you all the way? It kind of hits me.
I just, I think she nailed something there.
So your thoughts on that before I weave us into it.
Yuval:
I think that's wonderful. And it's right. I mean, it requires a kind of courage to confront the fact that the future is uncertain, that things do seem turbulent. I would say we can gain some of that confidence from our history, too. I think that we understate how turbulent the American story has always been. We look at our moment now and we think, "Wow, this could really go anywhere." But talk to Americans in the 1850s. Talk to Americans in the 1960s. Talk to Americans at the bicentennial. How do they feel about the future? They felt like this about the future. I think it's actually very important for us to remember that maybe the most stable characteristic of the American national character has always been a foreboding sense of doom. From the very beginning. I mean, you know, John Adams talked this way, like on July 5th, 1776. It didn't take any time to think, "How are we going to be able to sustain this?" And to talk about the end of the Roman Republic. I mean, you find that in 1810. It is not new. And it is not just ours. And this country's always had the sense that it's going to be really hard to hold this together. And I don't know if this survives in other generations. You know, most countries, their national anthem is a song about how beautiful the country is or how great the king is or something.
The American national anthem is a song about barely surviving the night.
Okay, that's what it's about. That's the subject.
The flag was still there. I mean, is that really that impressive?
[00:45:00]
Mónica:
Actually, somebody pointed this out to me. It ends in a question. Oh, say, does the Star Spangled Banner yet hang? Like, isn't this still there?
Yuval:
It was written by a man who was falling asleep as a prisoner on a British ship and looking at a flag across Baltimore Harbor. Pretty sure it wasn't going to be there in the morning. Okay, and the song starts at dawn thinking, "Oh, the flag's still there." That's very American. Okay, and we still have the answer.
Mónica:
So we're just doomed to be stressed out and worried because we can.
Yuval:
That's right. But don't take the wrong lesson from that. He was right to worry.
And Americans have always been right to worry because what we're trying to sustain here is not easy. It's not a simple matter. And so we're not wrong to worry about this. It's just prior generations have had to deal with challenges like this and some of them much greater than this. And the fact that we have challenges to deal with is not new. What's new is that we have challenges to deal with. So when you read history, you already know how it ended up. And you think, you know, at the very beginning of the story, you know that it's going to be impressive.
We're looking now at ourselves. We're not that impressed. And we're looking at the future. And it's really uncertain. And we don't know. And I think we have to be capable of approaching that with some courage and a sense of confidence that we have the resources to do this. We have a lot to work with. We're inheriting an extraordinary society that has endured for a very long time for a reason. And as long as we are up to keeping that banner high, we will succeed. And so I think having that kind of trust is not just a matter of blind hope. There's reason for it.
Mónica:
So we're entering something that I want to call a lightning round, but it probably won't go that fast. But I'm really curious to hear what you think of this.
We're trying to focus on what us as individuals, what we can do as part of this way of owing each other, renewing this pledge to each other, not being sleepy, not being spectators, being agents, right, of the America that we inherited.
And you and I are both immigrants, so we kind of come with sort of this sort of, oh, it's my adopted home. And I get it. I love it. So I would like to know, how does a strong and hopeful Democratic Republican in today's real world approach, we'll start with social media.
Yuval:
Yeah, social media, I do find hard to approach with hope, but, you know, one way to think about it is to see the need for some restraint. Social media is a test of our character. Human history has been full of these tests, and we haven't always done well with them.
It's not entirely new. It's not totally unprecedented. It calls for the kinds of things that cultural temptations have always called for. A sense of restraint and responsibility, a Sabbath.
A Sabbath? A Sabbath, yes.
The challenges to our character have always called for the kind of restraint that's only possible by really stepping back from everything for a while. This is a very Jewish view, but it's not only that. The Sabbath is in a way an answer to the challenge of idolatry. Why? Because the danger of idolatry is that we're constantly tempted into shortcuts from the formative path that we're actually called to follow. And the way to resist those temptations is now and then to just step back from them and take some time away from them.
Mónica:
Otherwise you're just going to want the easy answer, the quick one.
Yuval:
Exactly. Because if you're always on, you're going to want the shortcut. But if you take a little, if you take a moment that's devoted to genuine rest, but also genuine reflection, what we used to mean by leisure, there's another word we don't know how to define anymore.
Then you're able to recover the energy you need to then deal with those temptations again. So I think one answer to social media is to take a break now and then. And you know, on a regular basis, however hard it is. And in general, you know, these kind of tools, they're only as bad as they are because that's how we use them.
If someone told you that we were going to have an extraordinary resource like the internet where you can have access to all the world's knowledge at your fingertips and communicate with anybody on the planet.
And this is how we use it. We use it for what? For cat videos and pornography. You would say the problem here is not the internet. The problem here is why is this what you're doing with it? And that's a more traditional kind of problem that we can wrap our head around and we shouldn't lose hope about. So
[00:50:00]
Mónica:
next up, how does a strong and hopeful Democratic Republican approach ruptures in personally formative institutions such as family?
Yuval:
I think this in some ways is the deepest problem we have because family is the most essential of the formative institutions we have. And I think I use that term. I think institutions fundamentally are most important because they are formative. They shape us in ways that we require in order to flourish.
They make us into something we wouldn't otherwise be. That's true of the family. It's true of religion. It's true of our work. It's true of our civic commitments. They aren't just things we choose to do. They make demands on us. They give us roles. Right? And there are moments in life when you would behave one way if your kids are in the car and another way if they're not. And that is a moment where family is forming you in a better direction. And the breakdown of those institutions, and that happens in every part of your life. Right? There are things you do because you're a teacher that you might not otherwise do and they're good for you. They make you a better person.
I think the loss of the formative power of core institutions really runs the risk of leaving us unformed in this way. Of leaving us unready to deal with the challenges of life. And that does mean we have to invest ourselves in these institutions. We have to let them form us even when we don't have to. A lot of the most challenging things in a free society are accepting constraints that are optional.
And we have to see that the reason to do that is because we need them in order to be better. That's not an easy thing to see. It requires a certain kind of education. It requires a certain kind of life experience. And so I worry a lot about the decline of the formative power of these institutions. But they do answer a need we have, a longing we have. I think a lot of the hope that I have comes from the fact that these longings are permanent. We cannot do away with them. And therefore the ways in which we can respond to them well are always going to be there ready for us to draw on because the longing itself is never going away. The good news is the bad news. The fact that we need these things is why I don't think we're going to permanently lose them.
Mónica:
Right, right. We can feel that hunger, that craving. This one has come up a lot. How does the strong and hopeful Democratic Republican approach the constant reflex toward political impatience? Change is not coming fast enough. This institution or system isn't working because it's not delivering the results.
I don't want to hear what this person is thinking. I want them to get out of my way.
Yuval:
Yeah, look, I think the answer to that is not simply to tell people they're wrong about it or tell them a different story about it. The answer to that is to help people see that that impatience leads to failure, practical failure. If you really want to achieve this, the long way is the only way that will work. I think that's good. It's a good thing that things are set up that way. But whether you like it or not, it's true so that the case for political reform is not just a moralistic case for we should be better. It's in fact an argument that begins from the fact that what we're doing isn't working.
There's actually something very strange about this moment in our politics. Both of our political parties for 25 years now have been doing something that isn't working. It isn't working for them. Neither of them has really won a persuasive electoral majority in 25 years.
And somehow they don't see it and they keep doing this thing that isn't working.
To help them, to help us, to help one another see that that kind of impatience doesn't work is, I think, the essential first step. And that the argument for our system is a practical argument. It's not just an argument for being better. That's good too, but it's not always very persuasive. It's an argument that says if you really want to solve this problem, this is actually more or less the only way we know.
Mónica:
Let's do one more.
So how would that strong Democratic Republican approach their own fear for the future?
Yuval:
I think that the only way to really approach your own fear is by seeing that fear is dangerously debilitating and that it's self-fulfilling.
And so some amount of confidence and courage is required to avoid what it is you fear. It's not easy to persuade. This is much easier said than done. I mean, we all in our own lives can point to many ways that we fail to do this. But I think that in our civic life together,
we should just make much less room for fear.
We're Americans. We have less to fear than just about anybody in the world. We live in a free society. It's going to dominate the 21st century because really who else is? There's not even anybody that can make a plausible claim. You don't want to be China in 20 years. You want to be the United States in 20 years. We have a lot of work going for us. We have a lot of reasons for confidence. But to really make the most of the potential we have, we have to take some chances. We have to do some work. We have to invest ourselves in long-term projects that are not immediately going to bear fruit but that we have to believe are ultimately going to get us somewhere.
And so I think that the answer to that kind of fear is the very difficult, challenging answer that has always been the only answer to fear, which is have some courage and confidence in one another and in yourself.
I wish there were a more practical answer to that one, but that really does require the kind of confidence that I think we're all working for.
[00:55:00]
Mónica:
Yeah, that's for sure. That maybe we can find together, right? By approaching somebody who scares you, something about what they believe scares you, get close enough and maybe that thing is not even there.
I saw a really interesting statistic. 71% of the public overall in America says they're proud of their country. That increases in private.
For members of Gen Z, that goes up 9 percentage points in private if they're not asked publicly. And for boomers, it goes up 8 percentage points.
Do you think that we owe each other a love of country? Is it important? I mean, you were saying that one of the features of being American is to always be kind of awaiting doom with the sense of foreboding.
And patriotism itself is debated, what it means and what it reflects about us. But in my own personal life, I have a hard time investing in things I don't love.
Yuval:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I don't know if I would quite say we owe each other a love of country. I think that our country deserves our love.
And we owe that to this thing we are together. And in that sense, we owe it to each other too.
I think at some level, people recognize that. And patriotism does come relatively naturally. Even when we disagree, we often disagree about who's living up to some American ideal and who's not.
Our disagreements are very often channeled through a kind of love of country. And I also think it's important that people are more willing to say they're patriotic and private than in public. It's a peculiar thing. I mean, you would think that peer pressure would work the other way. But there is actually something that feels almost uncool about saying you love your country.
And we ought to work on changing that too. I mean, that just can't be the way. And it suggests something about our civic culture and our public life that ought to change. But it does seem to me that ultimately the conviction that we are engaged in public life because of something we love is the only way to really engage in public life. If you're in politics because you hate those other people, it's not going to work. And I think it's actually true of very few people. Most people are in politics for some kind of defensive, protective purpose. There's something they care about. Maybe they worry those terrible other people are threatening it. But they're not in it first and foremost out of what they hate. I think we can all think of some people in politics who are. And they're not generally constructive models for everybody else. So
Mónica:
to wrap up, imagine a time machine and all your favorite founders hop in and they come out here 250 years later. Now you know enough to know each of the founders. I know you love Madison. I mean, we've all know, but a lot of us know Hamilton because of the musical. And you just kind of go down. Tell us we can probably guess some of the things that they would be aghast about. What do you think their actual first reaction would be? Stepping out of that time machine, taking a look around. And then what do you think would really be encouraging to them? And please feel free to isolate. Just educate us a little bit.
Yuval:
That's a great question. So look, Ben Franklin would love everything, everything about the 21st century. I think absolutely everything about it. This is where he hoped we were going.
And that wouldn't be true of everybody else. John Adams at first glance would probably dislike everything.
He felt that way about his own time too.
But ultimately would come to see some of what he, the ways in which some of what he really cared for has survived and thrived.
I think what would strike a lot of the most, and I think they would be most pleased with and proud of, is actually the sheer fact that we're still doing this. 250 years is a long time. You know, the United States, we like to think of ourselves in America as a young country. And in some ways we are. We're dynamic, we're a little nuts, we're careless, reckless. That's great. But we're not actually a young country. Politically, the United States is the oldest country in the world now. The United States is the only society that has the same government it had in 1800.
The British can say, I mean they can point to institutions with the same names as the ones they had in 1800, but none of them do anything like what they were doing then. And nobody else could even say that. Every other society has been through conquest and revolution and changes of regime. Even the most stable societies in the world have had three or four or five governments since 1800. The United States has essentially the same regime we did then. We've made a few amendments, but really they've been very modest in the big picture. We're still doing what they were doing. And the reason for that is that they did build for dynamism, for division, for tension.
And I think they rightly would have been very proud and surprised to see that 250 years later, we're still, you know, the Supreme Court today is resolving cases by reading what they wrote. Because those are still our laws.
That, you know, there are certainly people in our society who think that's a bad thing, that that's a sign that we're behind the times. I think it's just the other way. It's an extraordinary thing. It is evidence that we have a system built for evolution and for dynamism.
And I think they'd be proud of that and I think we should be proud of that.
[01:00:00]
Mónica:
But Madison would go to Congress and yell at everybody all day long, right?
Yuval:
Madison would be shocked by Congress. Congress, his assumption was always the danger is Congress will be too strong, too assertive, too demanding of authority and power. I think the problem we have on that front really is one that he did not foresee and then none of them did, that Congress wouldn't want to do its job is not a problem they thought about.
Mónica:
Yeah, that's right. So
