Teaching the Constitution in a World Without Books
American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again By Yuval Levin (Basic Books, 352 pages, $25) An important conservative intellectual was here teaching an attentive post-graduate audience about the contributions of a dozen intellectual leaders of the early...
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By Yuval Levin
(Basic Books, 352 pages, $25)
An important conservative intellectual was here teaching an attentive post-graduate audience about the contributions of a dozen intellectual leaders of the early conservative movement. But it soon became obvious from the questions posed to him that the students were confused.
After a bit of further discussion, one of the youngish audience’s brightest intellectuals blurted out to the speaker: “The problem is that your generation read serious books and ours has not.”
While a decades-old Pew study suggested that the young still read books, the more detailed studies show that most of this is light reading. Indeed, the more academic studies suggest that reading serious books has declined markedly. Today’s “reading” seems to be “all about the screens.” There is reading, but it is short texts required at school and Instagram captions, rather than long-form articles that explore deeper themes that “require critical thinking and reflection.” And SAT reading scores have been plummeting as a result.
So here comes an incredibly serious and comprehensive book on the Constitution by American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow and National Affairs editor Yuval Levin titled American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. It is essential reading for serious older readers on the right who can benefit from its comprehensiveness and mostly forgotten solutions. And it is receiving good reviews. But the first question that occurred to me was: Who among the younger generation will actually read it? But more on that later.
A short review will not do the book justice, but here is a bit to entice the serious reader. Levin begins by first explaining the U.S. Constitution itself. If you think you understand it already, most Americans would be wrong. Indeed, Levin concedes there are actually five ways to look at the Constitution: as law, as policy, as an institution, as political, and as a common national framework. He considers the first two views conventional and well known, so he concentrates on the latter three, with the fifth as his unifying theme.
The author argues that those who think seriously about the Constitution as an institution start with its power being divided and balanced between three national Article institutions, the legislative, executive, and judicial. But most deemphasize that each branch is to exercise power differently, for a different purpose. And most leave out the states as Article IV institutions and ignore the general political nature of the Constitution throughout, especially voting and politics.
Levin’s guide to the Constitution is the way it was understood at its Philadelphia Convention, especially by James Madison but also Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the rest. Their view was that Congress was placed first by design, a legislature to make the laws, divided into a House of Representatives and a Senate, to force accommodations between their differently composed and geographically diverse divisions. The president was next created singular to give that law the power to act within its confines and to apply it to ever-changing daily events. The Supreme and other courts then are forced to apply the law in concrete cases to resolve specific circumstances. The federated states and political institutions have their own semi-independent institutional lives and interact with the national entities.
As a political scientist, my favorites are the separate chapters, first on federalism, then Congress, the presidency, the courts, and political institutions. He gets to the essence of each institution, stressing what is most important about them. States today are overwhelmed by national rules, so it is essential to rebalance federalism because the more centralized the nation, the “more divided it becomes.” Congress is in Article 1 for a reason, because it is the most important nationally and is now the most weakened by 20th-century progressive reforms. His solutions to better represent ordinary citizens include increasing the size of the House to create smaller representative constituencies, restoring the importance of local political parties, and decentralizing power generally.
But it is the Constitution’s role as a framework for national unity that most motivates Levin throughout his presentation — especially in the concluding chapter that he titles “What Is Unity?” Following Madison’s Federalist 10, he agrees that differing opinions are inherent in a free society and that “unity is less about thinking alike than about acting together.” The U.S.’s cohesion resulted more from having to act together under a common Constitution in common institutions than by agreement on issues. Some agreement on basics like the Declaration truths derived from Western civilizational experience is required, but the Constitution with its opening word “We” provides the real solution, which is to work out differences within its political institutions.
Some actions took time to work out properly, but civilizational principles basically prevailed over time. The result has been a “patchwork of mutual obligations” requiring “an enormous amount of acting together but it does not presume an enormous amount of thinking alike.” While progressivism assumes it is impossible to act together without thinking alike, the Founders believed that majority will and minority rights can be balanced by “procedural protections, structural constraints and institutional mechanisms” balanced by a “we” that develops an historic pluralism and toleration that culminates in the Constitution’s institutional “conception of unity.”
Today, “[o]ur politics has grown more bitterly divided” as a result of the progressive reforms that have tried to force agreement on one single “right” solution rather than building a plural consensus, Levin argues. Congress has become too centralized, the presidency too politicized, the courts too active making laws rather than interpreting them, the parties weakened, and federalism bureaucratized by “one national size fits all” policies. The only way back is to recover the Constitution as the founders understood it.
Levin’s is a sophisticated argument that in years past could have been seriously discussed in a university teaching environment. This simply does not exist very often today. Everyone gets an A and consequently, why read? And why bother with a right-of center author who is not on a faculty? The American Political Science Association professorship is 90-plus percent left of center and the other faculties are not far behind.
A serious book like Levin’s demands one or two lessons a week in a college-like Socratic format, taking one chapter (or less) at a time, for nine weeks or so, one for each chapter. The normal graduate school today is both intellectually and ideologically unable to seriously consider such a book. The only hope today is that conservative institutions will accept the challenge to become de facto graduate schools, places to teach what is not read in today’s mainstream universities. While Levin’s American Enterprise Institute and my The Fund for American Studies and others make efforts in this regard, we all need to do more — and more comprehensively.
The only solution for a true conservative intellectual future today is holding graduate-like classrooms inside or outside the existing colleges to teach the relatively small number of heroes who have survived the modern university experience without turning simplistic or radically Left. And one of the first books to be discussed should be American Covenant.
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
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