#1567 Rebuilding Trust in American Institutions

Ken Burns is doing a set of films on the 250th birthday. But I'm afraid that this is going to play out a long sort of predictable lines, I hope not, anyway. I've been looking for people, scholars, thinkers, humanists, scientists, political figures who want to talk about this. Who want to talk about the funk that we're in and how we might claw our way out of it. And so I was attracted to his books. There are a bunch of them, but the ones that I have read are the Fractured Republic, which 2016 tells you sort of where we are in. A time to build how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream, I recommend those books.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about how we got here. His view is that that nostalgia for a kind of a golden age after World War Two is a mistake. That, even though there's some truth to that nostalgia. That was not a characteristic or normal period in American history. And we sort of got spoiled into thinking that settlement of those decades was capable of being perpetuated. And now we're seeing that things are coming apart in all sorts of really interesting but frightening ways. He's an extraordinary scholar, it was great fun and honor to talk with him today. And and I want to share this with you. I'll be looking for people and if you know of people, recommend them to me. And books to read as we get ready for the 250th birthday. People to interview, ideas, to contemplate, you know, are we as bad off as we seem, or are we actually doing well enough, and can we?

Somehow, back away from the brink of our nihilism and and the sort of incessant bickering and find something like a new national consensus. Is every election that the most important election in American history? And we both agreed sort of not to talk about Donald Trump because we see him as kind of an outlier. One of the reasons I'm undertaking this two and a half year airstream trek around the country. I'm gonna take my airstream and my pick up and go to the National Parks and the National Forests, and the National Monuments and the Presidential Libraries. I'm going to interview Steinbeck scholars.

I'm going to follow the Lewis and Clark Trail, I'm gonna examine Theodore Roosevelt's footprint in the American West. I'm going to just meet random people along the lines of Charles Caralt's America or William. Least Eat Moons, Blue Highways, Mike. My goal is to get out there and to listen, listen, listen, listen, and and to try to clear my mind of preconceptions. And and see what the American people's mood is at this point, and to see all the zany creativity of this extraordinary nation. You know, there's so many interesting things going on in America. They get almost no media attention. Because we're in this sort of doom and gloom period of national, I'd say, imaginative bankruptcy.

So that's the program. Today, you've all leaven, and the book to read is time to build. How recommitting to our institutions can revive the American Dream. I hope you're enjoying this. I hope you agree with me that we are in trouble as a people and that we need to talk about this. And it needs to be done in a thoughtful, dispassionate way. That we don't need to argue, we need to talk, we need to listen to each other. And we need to regard every point of view as having some legitimacy, even if we disagree with it. You know Jefferson's famous statement or his quotation from Voltaire? I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it, or as Jefferson liked to put it. We disagree, but we disagree as rational friends.

That's certainly how I think we need to go about this. And we need to be a lot more respectful of points of view that are not our own. And so my goal is to really bring all that to you, and I hope that you will be glad that I'm doing that. Heavy lifting on behalf of all of our listeners and all of your thoughts about the direction of the work that we're doing. And if you can contribute financially, it's gonna be expensive. This is not me just sitting in the studio any longer. And so if you can help, I'll be immensely grateful because I think this is going to be worth it. If you go to the website Lt America. org. I just have a piece that I've posted about John Donne, a new biography and treatment of the poetry and the sermons of John Donne.

Let's go to the program you've all leaven.

Rebuilding trust in American institutions. Thanks for listening, everyone.

Hello everyone and welcome to listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson. As we approach the 250th birthday of the American Republic. I'm talking to all the extraordinary minds I can about where we are, how we got here and where we're headed. And today, I have the honor of having a conversation with you've all. Leaven who, among other things, is the director of Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. The contributing editor to the National Review and a founding editor of National Affairs. The author of a number of books of The Great Debate in 2014, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and The Birth of the Right and Left, Tyranny of Reason, 2001, Imagining the Future.

2008, more recently, a fractured republic, renewing America's social contract in the age of individualism, and, most recently, in 2020. A time to build how reconnecting to our institutions can revive the American dream. That's an enormous amount of writing, so I've read your books and I've gained a great deal from them.

So my question is, how did we get here? In 1960? People? Presidency for Congress, for the media, for churches, for a whole range of key American institutions. For the police, for law and order, the judiciary, the Supreme Court. And now, as you know, the the changes is vast and really depressing. What happened?

I think that if you looked at American life in the 19th century, almost at any point, even putting aside the crazy 1860s, which obviously were distinct. You would find a country much more like ours than like that post-World War two moment. You'd find a society with a lot of trouble gathering confidence in itself and in its institutions. A dynamic place, a place undergoing a lot of change and growing in some important ways, but changing in any case. And a place filled with a kind of suspicion of authority. A very great and powerful populist movement in its politics, striving at the same time also to be a developed, modern democracy with functional institutions. I think in that particular respect, the America of the 21st century certainly has come down from the highs of self-confidence and and trust of the post-world War. Two moment. But it is in a place we've seen before, in some respects. Now it's important that we that this was a coming down, we did experience that America.

That was not a that was not imaginary, it was very real. And we have experienced the decline from that moment over a long stretch now, at least a half century of.

Falling trust and growing animosity and polarization in our society. So it is worth asking how we got here. But I just wouldn't take the America of the 1950s, early 60s to be a norm. And I think how we got here has had to do with a fragmentation of what was an exceptionally strong mainstream consensus in American life in the middle of the 20th century. That fragmentation was driven, in part, by some good things, by growing cultural diversity in our society, by more openness and a liberalization of our social life. Which I think has been good on net, though it has come with costs.

It's also been the result of of a parallel liberalization in our economy, which also I think has been good on net, but has come with real costs. It is, in that sense, the opposite side of the coin of a liberalizing society. We are here at a moment where that cost is really being felt. The absence of solidarity, the absence of commonality, the absence of immense of a mainstream consensus is our reality in some pretty painful ways.

There was a deep desire for liberalization, whether it be economic or cultural, and it came and here we are a.

That's right.

It's very hard for people to imagine America in 2050. Everybody thinks between now and then there's going to be some kind of calamity because the wrong people are in charge. Our politics is having a lot of trouble building what America is going to need 30 years from now, because we can only think short-term. We think the next election is do or die, and that's no way to live, agreed.

The stakes are higher, and every election matters more than ever. You're warning about nostalgia.

He's, extraordinarily, is really a model of honesty and scholarship. And what they say is, look at America in 1960 and look at how our capacity for community has declined since that time. Now, that's true, it has, but America in 1960 is not when time began. And as you say, it's one of these things where once you notice it, you realize this just happens everywhere. And it really struck me. In the 2012 presidential election, I listened to both conventions and over and over, speech after speech. Yet people born in the 1940s, you know, who were in in charge in power in 2012? Rather naturally talking about the 1950s as the American norm and describing a decline from that. And once you see that, you begin to think it through a little bit and realize. First of all, everybody who's in power and every one of our institutions in that moment came from that generation.

That's been true for an unusually long time. We have an example the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who were president over 25 years. And I exclude Barack Obama from this because he is younger than. The three of them were born at the same time. I mean, they were born within five weeks of each other. They're the same generation precisely over and over. The story we have of ourselves is a story of that period.

It's a story that begins in the 1950s, the 70s and 80s. As young adults. By now, we're kind of, you know, disoriented about where's America heading. This isn't the country I know. We think about our own history as though we, too, were born in the summer of 1946.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm having a great conversation with Yuval Levin, author many books, most recently A Time to Build and The Fractured Republic. To follow up on what you were saying, you know, when I read your most recent books, you talk about this very issue that people of at both ends of the spectrum idealized this 50s, the 50s and 60s. And and they almost say the same things. Kids could ride their bikes in the town, town would look after your children, the things were safe.

Systems worked. They're creating a utopia that never was. It's. What's surprising is how both ends of the spectrum seem to agree on that part of it. At least if these are white commentators, that's very important, too.

Even living in poverty in 2023 is far better. And, of course, as you say, you would not want to be a Black American in 1950. And there are a lot of other parts of our society where you would much rather live today than that. But this nostalgia is a very, very powerful force across our political spectrum.

We have to have a politics that asks, what is our country going to need generation from now that it doesn't have? Now? A lot of our catastrophism makes it impossible for us to ask that question. We're thinking, how do we survive the next five minutes? Because if that guy wins the election, we're not gonna make it. Well, that's not true, and it's keeping us from seeing that. There are things we could be doing to make this country stronger in a generation that we're simply not doing. Because we can't pay attention to the future.

He's he's 45 or so and very energetic, has a lot of ideas. Ronda Santas Maybe you don't agree with him about anything, but he's 45 or so. Has a lot of energy, a lot of ideas. He's somebody who's thinking about the future. I think we've got to start pulling our political leadership from those ranks. There are plenty of such people and they have a lot of ambition, but somehow here we are still.

We're forced to ask ourselves, well, what could we be doing differently? And it is very important, I think, when facing that question. To force ourselves to think in terms of institutions, because that doesn't come naturally to us as Americans, we tend to think in terms of individuals. A lot of what is failing us and what is broken down has to do with the institutions of our society, the forms of our common life, the ways in which we act together, institutions from the those closest to us, from the family, the school, the church, all the way to the institutions of our national politics. The way in which institutions can can enable us to live better lives is by forming us in the direction of common efforts, by shaping individuals to take a part in a joint effort with others. And a lot of our institutions are just plainly failing to do that.

They're functioning now more like platforms for individuals, a place to stand, to raise your profile, to elevate yourself individually. Then, as ways of giving us a role in relation to others that lets us achieve something together. The loss of public trust in institutions speaks of an underlying decline in the trustworthiness of institutions. And when we think about what to fix, we have to look to institutional structures, not just individual behavior. Well, said, we're on the other side of Vietnam.

For people who are obviously failing to do that, we find ourselves asking, how could she do that? She's a teacher, right? He's the president of the United States.

How could he think that? That's something you can say? And the fact is, they're not asking that question, they're not thinking that way now. Look, you can't force other people to do that. You have to begin by forcing yourself to do, and and in in moments of decision, by asking yourself, Given the role I've got here, how should I behave? But that also then has to translate into demanding that of other people in your life, and ultimately of other people in your society. So that there's a price to be paid. When you're a politician who just simply doesn't care what the the role of a member of Congress or a governor really is.

There's a price to be paid when you're a CEO who just doesn't care what the responsibility of leadership really entails. I think right now there is no price to be paid in too many of our institutions. And on the contrary, there are great advantages to. Behaving as though you're completely unbounded and unrestrained. What a lot of these people in authority don't see is that behaving as though you're unrestrained is exactly how you lose trust. Trust is a function of two things, above all, of demonstrated competence, the sense that you can do your job and have demonstrated restraint.

The sense that you will not abuse your power. I think today in America, a lot of the loss of trust we've seen as a function of the latter, of a sense that people in power are unrestrained and they will not stop. They are not constrained by any sense of obligation to anybody else. And the people in charge of a lot of our institutions. And just, we have to say, a lot of us as individuals, behave as though we are unconstrained and therefore make ourselves much harder to trust. And this is such a dense problem.

But, you know, if he starts governing by executive order, which is not a constitutionally based power of the president, then there are people who can rightly say, that's just not okay. You know, you've, you've, you know, we get your frustrations. We know you have a pen and a cell phone, but you don't have the power to do major things. In the United States without the legislative process. And if we were a republic, we would have checked that.

And so now we're in this position where a routine politician on the right will say, When I get to Washington the on day one, I'm gonna balance the budget well. First of all, what an idiotic thing to say. But when they can't, then the people who put them there become increasingly disillusioned. And suddenly you wind up with Marjorie Taylor Greene, because it's anarchy, it's Steve Bannon's world.

Let's just tear the whole damn thing down.

And so if you're running for Congress and saying you're never gonna do it, well, you're telling me you're never gonna do your job. Plenty of jobs where you can get far by being a stubborn jerk. This one just isn't one of them. But a lot of our political culture now consists of people who are not constrained or shaped or formed by those institutional obligations. The absence of a sense of what the institutions are and what the roles involved in them are is a big part of what's gone wrong in our political culture.

The trouble is, it's also evident in our larger culture. It's also something that you see kind of breaking down of the wall between politics and the rest of society in a way that makes it extremely difficult to trust people. So that we think that the people who run the police department or who are in charge of public health are also doing politics. All of them are also just in the business of advancing a political agenda, and that makes it hard to trust all of them too. And the decline and trust, I think, has a lot to do with this breakdown of people's sense of what their institutional roles really are.

The American Constitution is very careful about structuring incentives. It doesn't assume that people are going to be good. That's not a safe bet, and it's not true. But it does, therefore, try to structure institutions in ways that reward better behavior and punish worse behavior. The American electorate has generally been willing to play that role, too, so that usually not always, but usually, voters have tended not to reward antisocial behavior or politics. I think part of the breakdown we've seen is that voters are much more willing to reward that kind of behavior. Now. And some of the incentive structures have changed, they've just fundamentally changed.

In practical ways, I think the adoption of primaries in our presidential selection process, for example, change the incentives pretty dramatically. That confront politicians. The weakening of the political parties, the parties have generally acted as selection mechanisms, and as they've grown weaker, they've just become brands now. The two parties.

There aren't really people sitting around saying, well, who should be our candidate? That's been left to a broad electorate that thinks very differently about what it takes to win, or what matters. Our standards are much lower now in American politics than they've been for most of our history. There's just no way around that. It's hard to avoid nostalgia and making that kind of argument.

But look, at some level, there's been a decline that has to be addressed.

Let's talk about what's possible, let's not, let's not play this game anymore. And you saw, you saw the establishment attempt to put the crown on Jeb Bush in 2016. And that collapsed in in what can only be regarded as sort of almost a national farce. So it's clear that the electorate is wanting, is willing and maybe wanting, to hear the more extreme positions, and they are not rewarding. Someone like Chris Christie, who, I think, for all this faults, is a highly responsible sort of politician.

The answer was extremely unpopular in the crowd. And refreshing. It was great, I thought it was wonderful. Yes, he knows what job he's running for and what that actually involves. I will tell you that it was not well-received and people do want to hear about those things. And they're basically looking for a presidential candidate who will be a kind of commentator on the issues that they most want to hear about on television. Rather than someone who will fill the particular role with its distinct character that is created by our particular system of government for which he's running, and I'm a Jeffersonian and I know.

They have to punish demagoguery and mere rhetoric and corruption. They don't seem to be doing that. In what sense does an 18 year old in this country, graduating from Yale or from a community college in Indianapolis, have a social contract? Most people today seem to think, What have you done for me lately when they look at government?

It's hard to tell people that they ought to be more responsive. The natural reaction to that is, well, who the hell are you? A lot of times, that's a healthy reaction, frankly, and it's an important part of our democratic culture. But I think we're at a point where there's enough agreement that something is wrong, that something is broken. That there is room now to think about both kinds of change, about some structural change.

I would think, for example, about changes to the primary system, the kinds of incentives that confront our politicians. The question is, how do we create incentives to do better? And I do think that election rules and some of those kinds of structural changes in Congress and other things can be part of the solution. But without question, there's also a necessity for thinking about responsibility when we think about our place in society, the responsibility we have to one another, the responsibility our leaders should have. Responsibility is a really wonderful American word.

You know, if you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, some of the first uses they can find in the English language are in James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention. He almost had to create this term to describe what they were talking about. And you know, we have to live that out. Responsibility is a combination of taking ownership and of being accountable, and that's exactly what's required in a democracy. This is our country and its future is our future. And so we can't just sit around with our arms folded and wait for somebody else to show up and do better. We're the ones who have to do better.

When I make that case to, people just nod their head and say, Yeah, I need to do better. No, that's not what happens, but I think you have to hope that it gets through. You have to try to do that yourself in your own life and set some kind of example. And I also do believe I'm enough of a Jeffersonian to believe that. Most Americans actually do. Want better than this, want a better life for their children, and would like this country to be in a better place than it is. And we're lacking a sense of how that could happen. But if we had a better grasp on what we could do to improve our prospects, I think a lot of people would be willing to be at least a little more responsible as citizens.

In the last few years, the Supreme Court has really taken a hit. Here. We have an interesting constitution. It says that certain questions have to be resolved by these nine unelected beings. And that, and we dress them up in robes, you know, we make sure that there's that. We do all the accouterments of majesty and reverence to give them a little bit more authority than they might otherwise have if they were in sweats and blue jeans. But now that we're seeing some really serious conflict of interest, refusals to recuse.

The court has really now lost a lot of its luster. And it now appears to many, many Americans as just the third branch of our political system. And no longer anything like what the founders had in mind. It sure feels like there's been some serious loss here. How do you see it?

And so the court has, unquestionably, I think, become more politicized over the past generation or two. I think part of what we're seeing is a function of the court. Taking up questions that don't really belong on the list of those questions that ought to be settled by the court. You know, broadly speaking, courts should resolve disputes about what the law is, not what it should be. In the abstract, everybody agrees with that.

But when it comes to really hard cases, you know, there are a lot of people on both sides of our politics who think that. It would sure be useful if a court majority agreed with them. And we didn't actually have to go through the political process, we could just get it done right now, and nobody could argue. For a long time, the courts were dominated by the left, and the left felt this way and tried to resolve various disputes. That should have been resolved democratically. Instead, judicially. And the right resented that and made all kinds of arguments about judicial restraint. Now the court is dominated by the right, and suddenly you find a lot of people on the right saying, well, let's just resolve this in the courts. And I think the left is gradually discovering the beauty of judicial restraint.

I think judicial restraint is the right approach, whichever side has a majority, and that the reason for that is a judicial restraint. Leaves the key questions of what the law should be to the legislature, it leaves them to Congress, above all, and Congress is where those questions should be resolved. I think a lot of the problem that we face on that front. And the reason why the court finds itself in these positions is actually the fault of Congress. Congress has has been derelict in its own use of its own powers, and over and over has passed laws that make broad delegations of power. And then leaves it to the executive branch to figure out what to do with them, and then leaves it to the courts to decide if that's acceptable. And both the executive branch and the court therefore, find themselves in an impossible situation where they are asked to do things that they are not equipped to do.

I think sometimes the Supreme Court is too willing and eager to do those things, but sometimes it also has really no choice. I don't think the court is more corrupt today than it used to be. I don't think it's about not recusing, I don't think it's about having rich friends. I think it's about making decisions that are fundamentally political. And therefore making it impossible to trust the institution, which is supposed to be outside of those kinds of political boundaries.

I agree with you.

And my view was, well, maybe. But the courts trying to figure out what the treaty requires the Constitution to deliver under the utmost good-faith clause of the Northwest Ordinance, and so on. And so I think the people want the courts to do justice, balls and strikes when that's not the function of the court.

I think we have to see these problems as our problems, as belonging to us and as resulting from our own misbehavior and irresponsibility. We have to both practice responsibility and demand it. A lot of what's missing is seeing that the problem is not them, but us. I'm an immigrant to the United States, I was born in Israel.

My family came here when I was very young. I grew up in the U.S. but I'm a naturalized citizen. I became a citizen in 1996. I was 19 years old. The federal judge who gave us the oath of citizenship made a little speech and what he said was very simple.

He said From now on, you have to talk about America in terms of we and us, and not them. And there, and that's it, that's all, he said. I distinctly recall being disappointed with that speech. I thought he might quote Lincoln or something, but here I am, you know, 25 years later, telling you about it. Because I think it is profoundly important for us to remember that message that when we talk about our country, we have to talk in terms of us. And we have to take responsibility and ownership for it. I think we are really failing to do that in contemporary America, and it's true that doesn't add up to a simple list of things we have to do.

It's not a policy agenda, exactly, but it's the kind of change of mindset that I think we have to start with. You say, I think you're.

I think there are some younger politicians on the left as well. I mentioned Jared Polis, who is a Democratic governor of Colorado. These are not the most prominent people in our politics. But there are people who are speaking very frankly about what they think is wrong. In a way that I think has real power to move people and to change souls. But is there a leader who can really catch fire? I don't think I've seen that person yet in 21st century America.

And you know, if you're gonna run for president, you know, run for mayor first. I do something else. So I'm critical of her in that way. But I think that you have to think about where to deliver that message. That's the right question, and to me, the answer has to begin with. Younger Americans, I'm really struck, you know, in some ways, younger Americans in our politics are some of the craziest people in America.

I mean, it's not the healthiest place. But that is a function of the fact that there is a desire for a different way forward. And I think you've got to see that desire as a starting place and look for ways to speak to it.

Material luxury can we have and still save the planet? And so on. I'm afraid, however, that at our most elite universities, the faculty are our leftists who are taking those those really earnest and important energies. And saying, And I'll tell you what it's you need to attack and culture, I'll tell you what it. You know that they're fascists on the right. And so instead of finding a way to leave in that into sort of citizenship. The leftist faculties, which are in control of all the elite institutions, are leading young people down a path of social justice activism rather than inquiry.

I'm asking, they're not getting any other answer, and that's the real failure.

I think that we have to use the opportunity of the 250th to ask ourselves who we are and who we mean to be. And in some ways, that was done successfully in 1976. Look, 1976 was not a high point in American civilization, there was a lot wrong. There was also a crisis of confidence in America in those years. And not everything about the bicentennial celebrations was great. But there was a genuine engagement with the American founding that lasted, I mean, I'd say we're used to now.

We're used to there being a lot of popular books about founders and the founding that actually really only began around the Bicentennial. The idea that people would be reading biographies of John Adams would have been bizarre in 1970, it was not bizarre by 1980. And the reason is really a concerted effort to use the Bicentennial as an opportunity to think seriously about our country. And that extended well beyond academics and and scholars, to the general public. I think we have to look for ways to make that happen. It's not going to be easy.

You know, this is also a moment of low self-confidence in our society, where people are not eager for a serious discussion of history. I think we have to try, and I think some people will try. I. I know, for example, that there's going to be a Ken Burns serious of documentaries about the Revolutionary War, which I have high hopes for. I think there will be a variety of institutions who try to do this in the right way. But yeah, I've got the same fear you have, which is it's just gonna be an opportunity to do what we're already doing. But louder, and that I don't want, not only louder.

They're written in plain English, for the most part, the declaration more than the Constitution, but I think it's worth becoming more familiar with those. I think if you, if you have a knack for political theory and political arguments, it's really worth reading the Federalist papers. They're really extraordinary and quite accessible. I think there's also quite a lot of really wonderful American history out there, a lot of it produced over the last 50 years. And, you know, people could do worse than than to read Gordon Wood and and and David McCullough, and take those, take those books seriously, and take the founders seriously.

And, you know, I do think that there will be some valuable new historical literature created around the 250th, and people should be open to it. But our tradition is is exceptionally articulate about itself. There's a lot to read, and so I think approaching it as a reader is the right way to think about. But you know, Jefferson said.

It has some blind spots and it's worth seeing those two. I think Tocqueville could not have imagined abolitionism, for example, which is strange, given that he was in America in the 1830s. But there's a lot that he saw about us that remains true and that remains enormously important to understand. Absolutely, he's got to be on your list. How about the education of Henry Adams?

A wonderful book. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm with you, but still, yeah, well, that's right, that's right. but yeah, absolutely.

But then if you think of, say, well, Whitman's Democratic vistas, what I would put in this list, I certainly would put the education of Henry Adams. Can you think of any 20th century books? On the other side of bowling alone that are there would be essential reading to prepare?

So I'd certainly have that on the list. You know, it's hard for us to be impressed by more recent books. I think there are books. Having lasted is part of what makes it impressive. But you know that there's a lot of good American history and good American political thought being done all the time.