Our society had trouble with in recent years. That makes us wonder how strong our institutions will prove to be, how we will rise to a challenge like this. You cant help but see it as a time of crisis but because it is the time of testing it is also time to think about what americas strengths are, what we are good at and how we can build on that to address the enormous problems we confront. Host how did we get here . Guest that is an awfully complicated question. Our country has always tried to strike a balance between the dignity and the quality of the individual on the one hand and some form of strength of community on the other. Every free Society Faces that. Our society has in the past century emphasized the individual, emphasize liberty, emphasize freedom and diversity and that has brought some enormous advantages and benefits but there is another side to that coin and the other side look Like Division and fragmentation and isolation, it can look like alienation and loneliness and we have seen all of that in the 21st century. This has been an era marked by some crises, from 9 11 at the beginning to the financial crisis to now the pandemic that has forced us to look to the sources of our strength in ways that in the one hand have to drive us to think about our history and on the other should push us to look at the future with our politics is not good at doing. For somebody like me who tries to work at the intersection of political theory and Public Policy, theory and practice around politics this is time to think about fundamentals and look at ways to draw strength from what has been good about our country to address the problems it has long had. Host yuval levin in your book the fractured republic renewing americas social contract in the age of individualism you talk about the norm. Have we are had enormous and what do you consider to be the norm in this country . Guest that is a very important question. We live in a time now that has Something Like a misperception of the norm. We are living in a moment that culturally is very dominated by the baby boomers, generation of people born 1946 in the early 1960s, still today although often in their 70s and 60s people running our Core Institutions, in charge of our politics, donald trump was born 74 years ago this month in 1946, george w. Bush was born in july of 1946, bill clinton was born in august of 1946 barack obama was born in 1961. They are all boomers and the Life Experience they had is a pretty unusual version of america, in america that came out of the Second World War a unifying and having achieved something great by coming together in mobilization, the country was confident in its institutions, in its government, in big business and big labor and Big Government working together to solve problems and over the course of the 50 or 60 years since that kind of height we have lived through fragmentation and diversification. A lot of that has been good especially for people who were on the margins of our society, minorities of various types, people alienated from the mainstream but it is also meant we have lost that solidarity that so defined postwar america and a lot of our politics is defined by a sense of loss about that, defined by a sense that the era of the baby boomers childhood was the norm and we have fallen from that but that era was not the norm. If you look at any point in the Nineteenth Century would find a divided society with little confidence in its institutions, dealing with some economic and cultural forces very much like we are seeing now, mass immigration, industrialization, urbanization. Our country has a lot of resources to draw on thinking about how to deal with a moment like this and it is important not to misperceive the norm. 1950s, 60s america was a very unusual form of our society and we should not take it to be the norm but in some ways we are stuck in that place, regurgitating and reiterating a lot of what the boomers did when they were young. Host should it be the ideal . Guest our ideals are not about one particular moment in history. Our ideals should be about Core Principles, how we treat each other. Our ideals are written in the declaration of independence, core fundamental belief that we are all created equal, that our government begins from that premise, that as a result we have some freedom as individuals but we also are a strong united society. Those Core Principles along with ideals that are laid out as forms of government, institutional design in our constitution can provide us with what we need to live through different kinds of challenges. Those ideals are what we should look to. In a moment like this as in any moment our politics cant be organized about returning to some golden age, it was not as golden as people think it was. For Many Americans it was very far from that and in any case history doesnt go backwards. Our question now should be how do we become strong for the future and to me as a conservative that means reaching to our principles and seeing how we can apply ideals to changing circumstances. That is where our politics should be striving to do and that means coming to terms with certain things, understanding our country as it is, being at home in 21stcentury america and thinking how can we be our best self at this time, how can we return to some bygone golden age, the left and the right both engage in a nostalgic for midcentury america that gets in the way of constructive politics. Host to read from your book the fractured republic renewing americas social contract in the age of individualism which came out in 2016, quote, life in america is always Getting Better and worse at the same time. Liberals and conservatives both frequently insist not only that the path to the america of their dreams is easy to see but also that our country was once on that very path and has been thrown off course by the foolishness, wickedness of those on the other side of the aisle. The broader public meanwhile finds in the resulting political debate little evidence of real engagement with contemporary problems and few solutions. Guest that is a description of my frustration with the basic dynamics of contemporary politics. You do see it in both parties. Theres a way in which the Republican Party often years for the social arrangement and cultural arrangements of the 1950s and early 60s, democrats urine for the economic arrangement of that time but the fact is america changed from that period for some good reasons. We went through a period of liberalization that opens up opportunities for people who had been at the margins of our society and also created options and choices and economic dynamism in ways we have benefited from enormously, they also did common cause and thinking how we address that cause we cant just think about how we go back to an earlier social order, how do we apply ideals to a new situation . We spend too much time, whose fault it is we fell from some heights rather than thinking about how to prepare for the future . Our Politics Today has remarkably little to say about the future, we dont think about what america will need in 2040. It sounds impossibly far away. It is 20 years from now, as close to others 2000 and it is what we should be thinking about in our politics and so i think theres a need to get out of the rut of los altos for midcentury america and think as conservatives and as progressives, the left and right as americans in general about what we want for the future and what we now need to be building to get there. You identify yourself as a conservative. What does that mean to you . Guest a lot of my work has been about what that means, what the left right divide in american politics and the politics of a lot of free societies is about. To meet begins from some basic premise is almost from anthropology. My conservatism starts that human beings are born less than perfect, born fallen or broken twisted and we need to be for me before we can be free and that formation is done by Core Institutions, by education, ultimately by politics and culture and those institutions capable of that kind of formation not to be valued, treasured, they proven themselves to be capable of providing generations of people that we need to be a free society and because i begin from the premise that that is difficult to do, that formation is essential and difficult i want to conserve the institutions that are capable of it. People who describe themselves as progressives at their best begin from a different premise, that we are actually born free but a lot of people are not free and living to their potential because they are being oppressed by institutions that impose on them an oppressive status quo. There is truth to both of these views, what you choose to emphasize runs deep in your character in your sense of what politics is about. A free society does need them both but seems to me ultimately the conservative view offers what Society Needs most which a sense of how social order can enable justice and so i am a conservative. Host your most recent book which came out this year, a time to build, arsenals and institutions shape each other in an ongoing way. When they are flourishing our institutions make us more decent and responsible but when they are flagging and degrading, our institutions fail to form authority for us to be cynical, selfindulgent or reckless, reinforcing exactly the vices that undermine a free society. Host that book is about the nature of the social crisis we are living through. The fractured republic renewing americas social contract in the age of individualism tries to think in broad terms about social dynamics and the newer book a time to build thinks about the constitutional underpinnings of the social crisis we are living through, a crisis we know to be a social crisis, it is how we connect to each other and understand ourselves as individuals to be part of a larger whole, the crisis of alienation, isolation, not only Political Polarization but in the private lives of many people a kind of desperation that leads people to opioids, an enormous increase in the suicide rate over recent years and a lot of that has to do with a weakening of our institution and particularly with a sense on the part of a lot of people in that institution that the purpose of the institution is not to mold them but to serve as a platform for them to stand on and build a following or build their own brand or elevate themselves. Theres been this to formation of our Core Institutions from politics to professions to the media to the academy where a lot of people now think of the institutions they are part of as platforms for themselves rather than as molds a characters behavior and some recovery of what it means to be part of an institution, to be shaped by institution is important to the recovery of our societal life. We see that powerfully in politics which has become so performative now or people run for congress basically to get a bigger social media following and a better time slot on cable news rather than to think about how to work from within institutions to change our country for the better. Host you write in a time to build about a dereliction and dysfunction it takes us deeper toward the core of congresss institutional confusion. Simply put many members of congress of come to understand themselves most fundamentally as players and a larger cultural ecosystem, the deck of which is not legislating or governing but a kind of performance performative outrage for partisan audience, you specify or mention matt gates, republican of florida and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is two people who represent this. I use them as examples but the problem is much more widespread than that. Weve come to a place where we think of our Political Institutions as platforms for cultural reforms and people run for congress to get a blue checkmark next to their name on twitter more than to enact legislation. They are trying to do good, trying to improve our society but they see the role politics can play as fundamentally a platform role, a way to put themselves in a place where they can channel the outrage of the voters who got them there, they can perform, stand as outsiders and comment about Congress Rather than inside is an act within congress and that has been happening in the presidency, donald trump exemplifies that more than any president we have had, the sense that the presidency is a stage, a place to perform in the president sees himself as an outsider, spent a lot of time talking about the government, complaining about things the department of justice does rather than understanding himself as the ultimate insider in our system with the responsibility defined by the role. That book ultimately argues to recover something of a functional institutionalism we have to each ask ourselves the question we now dont ask anymore, given my role here, how should i behave into goes beyond politics. As an employer or an employee, as a pastor or congregant, parent or neighbor, given that, how should i behave here, that is a way of letting our institutional role form and shape the way we behave in society, ways that might drive us toward greater responsibility and sense of obligation to one another rather than just thinking of ourselves as standing alone on a platform and acting out a kind of cultural rage, the logic of social media has overtaken a lot of our Core Institutions and we need to push back against that. Technology has played a role in todays political work . A role. Technology also reserves the role we wanted to so i think the forces here run deeper than technology, we are not just at the whim of social media or the internet, we use them in these ways because thats what we are looking for and the larger social process we have been living through has been a function of a kind of liberalization, diversification. In the middle of the Twentieth Century many of the great social forces in our country were telling people be more like everyone else, forces of conformity and that felt very constricting to many people. In our time those same social forces are telling everyone to be yourself, forces of individual liberation. Theres a lot of good to that but it also contains society apart and weve got to find a balance and push against places we lean too hard and that means recovering solidarity and how we think about our society. Host you want to read this quote from the great debate edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left, the political left and right often represent genuinely distinct points of you and our National Life seems almost by design to bring to the surface questions that divide them. How did we become a country of the political left and right . That is the subject of that book, it is a work of intellectual history, a book that began as my doctoral dissertation at the university of chicago and over appear go of years developed into more of a general book, tries to look at the origins of the left right divide which in different ways is been the subject of my work more broadly and does that by looking through the lens of the late eighteenth century debate between edmund burke and thomas paine was edmund burke, the great irish morning was politician thought to be one of the fathers of modern conservatism, thomas paine, english born american, revolutionary war figure who then became a very important figure in making the case for the french revolution to the English Speaking world, revolutionary through and through and they engaged with each other, had an argument about the nature of social change and that argument encapsulated a lot of what overtime would become the core distinctions between the left and the right in our politics. It begins in some respects as i described my own view from a kind of difference in anthropology, difference in how it is the human being enters the world and what we require in order to thrive and flourish and be free and both of these views are generally speaking liberal views, they belong in a free society, they both believe in democracy, individual liberty, they believe in protecting the equal rights of all but they differ fundamentally about what a free society is. They differ about the nature of the human person and that debate, the debate about how to advance the good is still the right way to understand the left right debate, the left and the right are not factions in the sense that each just seeks its own good. They are parties in the sense that they are divided by difference of opinion about what would be good for everyone, what would be good for society at large and so it is a constructive difference in partisan politics for all that it can be very ugly and divisive in our countrys life is necessary. It is a way of framing and formulating the debates we have about the countrys good and i think it still serves us this way and that the difference between team left and right there evidence at the end of the eighteenth century in many ways are still relevant and part of what our politics is about. Host what is your background that you came to this point of view . I was born in israel. My family came to the us when i was 8 years old so i grew up here, i grew up in mostly new jersey, went to college in washington dc at american university, worked on capitol hill, went to graduate school at the university of chicago and then came back to work in the bush administration, first at the the part of health and Human Services and then in the bush white house, i was a policy staffer for president george w. Bush at second term, then went into the think tank world where my work has really been at the intersection of what my Academic Work was about which was political theory, political philosophy and my work in Public Policy has been about which is political practice so im now a scholar at the American Enterprise institute and run a quarterly journal called National Affairs which i started in 2009 and in some ways i tried to connect theory and practice in politics to help each shed some light on the other. As to how i came to my conservative views, for me