Much of this moment and forces us to confront challenges that our society has had trouble with in recent years, this is a time that makes us wonder how stronger institution will prove to be, how we will rise to a challenge i and i think i cant help but see it as a time of a crisis but because it is a time of testing at the time to think about what americas strengths are, what were good at as a country how we can build on that to address the innermost problems. How did we get here . Thats an awfully complicated question. Our country has always tried to strike a balance between the dignity and equality in the individual one hand and some form of strength of community on the other, every free Society Faces the tension in our society has in the past halfcentury emphasize individual, emphasize liberty and emphasize freedom and diversity and that has brought enormous advantages and benefits but there is another side to that coin and the other side can look Like Division and fragmentation and isolation. It can look like alienation and loneliness and i think we seen all of that in the 21st century. This is been air thats been marked by crises from 9 11 at the beginning to the financial crisis to now, pandemic that has forced us to look through the sources of her strength in ways that have to oneway drive us to think about our history and the other should push us to look to the future which is politics is not always 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 the time to think about fundamentals and to look for ways to draw strength from whats been good about our country to address the problems that it has an very much lives one. Host yuval, in your book the fractured republic, you talk about the norm, have we ever had a norm, what you consider to be the norm in this country. Guest thats a very important question, we live in a time that has Something Like a misperception of the norm, were living in a moment that culturally is very dominated by the baby boomers, the generation of people born between 1946 in the early 1960s, these are still today although there often in their 70s and 60s people who are running our Core Institutions in interNational Politics, President Trump who is born 74 years ago this month in june of 1946, president george w. Bush was born in july of 1946 and bill clinton was born in august of 1946. Barack obama was born in 1961, they are all boomers in the life extremes that they have had has been a pretty unusual version of america in america that came out of the second world war. Unified and having achieve something great by coming together mobilization, a country with enormous confidence in its institution, government and big business and big labor and Big Government working together to solve problems and over the course of the 50, 60 years since that hike, we have lived through fragmentation and diversification, i think a lot has been good particular for people on the margin over society, minority of various types and people who are alienated. It also meant that we have lost the solidarity and define postal america. A lot of our politics now is defined by a sense of law about that. Defined by the sense that the era of the baby boomer childhood was the norm and we fallen from that, that era was not the norm and if you look down america any point in the 19th century, youd find a divided society with little confidence in the institution dealing with some economic and cultural forces what were seeing now, mass immigration, industrialization, urbanization, our country has a lot of resources to draw and thinking about how to deal with a moment like this, it is important to not misperceive the norm, 1950s, early 60s america was a very unusual form of our society and we should not take it to be the norm in some ways were stuck in the place regurgitating in reiterating what the boomers did when they were young. Host should be ideal . Guest no, i dont think so, our ideals are not about one particular moment in history. Our ideals should be about Core Principles, how we treat each other, i think theyre written in the declaration of independence. The core fundamental beliefs that we are all created equal, or government begins from the premise and as a result we have freedom with individuals and we 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 very different kinds of challenges and times. Those kinds of ideals are what we should look to in a moment like this, our politics cannot be organized with returning to golden age, that age was not as golden as people think it was, for Many Americans it was far from that and in any case history does not go backwards our question now should be how do we become strong for the future intermediate conservative that means reisinger principles and seeing how we can apply to the changing circumstances. Thats what our politics should be striving to do and that means coming to terms with the circumstances, understanding our country as it is and thinking how can we be our best selves in this time, not how can we return to a golden age, the left and the right both engage in nostalgia that gets in a way of a construction politics. Host i want to read a little bit from your book, the fractured republic which came on 2016, 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 the very path and is been thrown off course by the foolishness or 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 from content Group Problems and few attractive solutions. Guest that is a description of my frustration with the basic dynamics of contemporary politics. I think you do see him both parties, theres a way in which Republican Party urines for the social arrangement in the 1950s an early 60s, the democrats for that time. We went through a period of liberalization that open up opportunities for people had been at the margins of our society and also created options and choices in economic diamond is him in ways that we have benefited enormously. They did come at a cost and thinking how we address the co cost, we cannot just think about how we go back to an earlier social order, that is not what conservatives ought to do. The question is how do we apply to a new situation and i think we spent too much of her time thinking about whose fault it is that we fell from height rather than thinking about how do we prepare for the future, our Politics Today has little to say about the future. We dont talk much about what america is going to need in 2040, that sounds impossibly far away, 20 years from now close to us as the year 2000 and is exactly what we should think about and our politics. I think there is a need to get ourselves out of the rut of the nostalgia for mid Century America and think think as conservatives and progressives of the left and right in general and what we want for the future what we need to build to get there. Host yuval levin you identify yourself as a conservative, what does that mean to you . Guest i am a conservative, my work has been about the question of what that means or what the left right divide in american politics and the politics of free society is really about. It begins with basic emesis almost from anthropology. My conservatism starts from the sense that human beings are born less then perfect, theyre born falling, broken, twisted and we need to be formed before we can be free, that formation is done by the Core Institutions of our society, by family and community, by religion, education, ultimately by politics and culture and those institutions that are capable of that formation to be valued and treasured and conserved, they proven themselves over time to be capable of providing generations of people with what we need to be a free society and because abby and from the premise thats 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 progressive at their best begin from a different premise than the premise that we are born free but a lot of people are not free and not living up to their potential because are being oppressed by institutions that impose on them an oppressive status quo, there is truth to both of these, which you choose to emphasize runs very deep in your character and your sense of what politics is about, free society does need them both but it seems to me the conservative view offers what Society Needs both is how social order can enable justice. Im a conservative. Host in your most recent book which just came out this year, a time to build, our souls in our institution shape each other in the ongoing way. When they are forging our institutions make us more decent and responsible. But when they are flogging integrated, our institutions failed to inform us, or they do form is to be cynical, selfindulgent or reckless, reinforcing the devices on the mind of free society. Guest that book is really about the nature of the social crisis that we are living through, the previous book recorded from before tries to think in broad terms about the social dynamic, the history that led us to the polarization were living in our society and the newer book, a time to build thinks about the institutional underpinnings of the social crisis were living through, the crisis that we know to be a social crisis, how we connect and how we understand ourselves as individuals to be parts of a larger whole and the crisis of alienation and not only Political Polarization but the private lives of many people and desperation that leaves people to opioid, and enormous increase in suicide rate over recent years and i argue a lot has to do with the weakening of our institution in particular with a sense of a lot of people in those institutions and the purpose of the institution is not to form them, not to mold them both serve as a platform for them to stand on and be seen and build their own brand or elevate themselves, i think theres a been a deep formation over Core Institutions from politics to the profession to the media to the academy where a lot of people think of the institutions they are part of as existing in platforms for themselves rather than a mold of our character in her behavior and some recovery of what it means to be part of an institution to be shaped by an institution and its very important to the recovery of our life. We see that powerfully in politics which is becomes open performative or people run for congress to get a bigger social media following into get a better timeslot on cable news rather than to think about working in an institution to change your country for the better. Host you right in a time to build that weve seen a powerful additional source of dysfunction which takes us deeper toward the core of congress institutional confusion, simply put many members of congress have come to understand themselves and most fundamentally as players in a larger cultural ecosystem and the point of which is not legislating or governing but whether a performance outrage for partisan audience, you specify or you mention matt gaetz, republican of florida and alexandria are causing a test has two people who represent this. Guest i use those as examples but the problem is much more widespread than that, we come to a place where we think of the Political Institution as platforms for cultural performances. As they say people run for congress to get a blue checkmark next to the name on twitter, more than to enact legislation, theyre trying to do good and improve our society but they see the world the politics can play is fundamentally a platform role to put themselves in a place where they can channel the outrage of the voters who got them there, they can perform and stand as outsiders in, about Congress Rather than insiders. Obviously thats happened in the presidency as well, President Trump is impolite that more than any other president the house. The sense of the presidency is a stage and a place to perform and the president sees himself as an outsider and he spent a lot of time talking about the government, complaining on twitter that the department of justice says rather than understanding as ultimate insider with the responsibility that is defined by the role he plays, that book argues to recover something of a functional institutionalism we have to ask yourself the question that we dont ask anymore in our politics, given my role, how should i behave, goes well beyond politics, as a member of congress, how should i hate behave, as a employee, pastor, congregant, neighbor, given that how should i behave, thats a way of letting her institutional role form and shape the way that we behave in society in ways that might drive us toward greater responsibility and a greater sense of obligation rather than just thinking of ourselves of standing alone on a platform and acting out a cultural enrage in the logic is taken over the Core Institutions and i think we need to push back against that. Host technology has played a role in todays protocol world . Guest i think technology serves the role that we wanted to. I think the forces he ran deeper than technology, were not just the whim of social media or the internet, we use them in these ways because thats what were looking for. The larger social cross that we lived there has been a function of liberalization diversification, in the america we were talking about before in the middle the 20th century, many of the great social forces in our country were telling people to be more like everyone else, they were forces of conformity and that is very constricting. In our time those same social forces are telling everyone to be ourselves, forces of individual liberation, theres a lot of good to that but it can tear society apart and we have to find a balance and push against the places that we tend to lean too hard, right now recovering solidarity and how we think about our society. Host i want to bring your book to great debate in our conversation as well, i want to start by reading this quote, the political left and right often seemed to represent genuinely distinct point of View International life seems almost by design to bring to the surface questions that divide them, how do we become a country of the political left and right. Guest thats a subject of the book, it is a work of intellectual history, its a book that began a my visitation at the university of chicago and over a period of years developed into a general book in a trace to look at the origins of the left right to bide and its been a subject more broadly. It does that by looking through the lens of the late 18th century debate between edmund burke and thomas paine. Edmund burke, the great irish born english politician sought to be one of the fathers of modern conservatism, thomas paine, an english born American Revolutionary war figure became a very important figure in making the case for the french love revolution. And they engage with each other, they had an argument with the nature of social change in the argument encapsulate a lot over time what would become the core distinction between the left and right in politics. It begins in some respects as beginning from a different of anthropology, just how it is that the human being enters the world and what we require in order to thrive and flourish and be free, both of these views are generally speaking liberal views, they be wrong in the free society and they believe in democracy and individual liberty, they believe in protecting the equal rights of all but they differ fundamentally, what the free society really is because they differ about the nature of the human person and i think that debate which is the debate on how to advance the good is still the right way to understand the left right debate in our politics. The left and the right are not factions in the sense each speaks their own goods, the parties that are divided by a difference of opinion of what would be good for everyone in society at large, that difference is a constructive difference and i think partisan politics can be very ugly and very divisive in our countrys life and is necessary in its way of framing and formulating the debates about the countries good and i think it still serves this way in the differences between left and right there were evidence in the 18th century in many ways still relevant that is what politics is about. What is your background that you came to this point of view. Guest im an immigrant to the United States and was born in israel, my family came to the u. S. When i was eight years old, a. , a mostly in new jersey and i went to college in washington, d. C. In American University and worked on capitol hill and i went to graduate at the university of chicago and came back to work in the bush administration. First the department of health and Human Services and the bush white house, i was a policy staffer and president george w. Bush second term. Then i went where my work has been at the intersection of what my Academic Work was about which is political theory and philosophy and what my work in Public Policy has been about which is political practice. Im now a scholar at the American Enterprise institute and iran a quarterly journal called National Affairs which is started in 2009 and in some ways i try to connect theory and practice in politics to help each should light on the other and how i came to my conservative views, for me as most people that is a mystery, some of it has to do with influences around me growing up, im sure my father is a