American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again
By Yuval Levin.
Basic Books, 2024.
Hardcover, 352 pages, $32.
Reviewed by Michael Lucchese.
Something has gone wrong with America. Even among the politically disengaged, one can detect a certain malaise, a vague feeling that this country’s best days are behind her. More activist critics, on the Right and Left alike, have far clearer diagnoses of the problem. They believe this growing dissatisfaction with the American order can be blamed on our Constitution itself—something about the founding of this nation fails to live up to the highest aspirations of the human soul, and our continued allegiance to that Founding hinders our pursuit of the common good.
Not everyone has lost faith in the Constitution, however. Yuval Levin, the noted conservative intellectual, has stepped into the breach to defend the document’s honor in his latest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again. He believes that, far from being the source of our problems, the American Founding can teach us the best solution to our present discontent. To deal with the growing crisis of faith, he directs our attention to the wisdom at the heart of the Constitution.
Many of the sharpest critics of the Constitution fault it for its “liberalism.” Progressives and leftists argue that the limits it places on centralized power hinder the pursuit of social equity. Reactionaries and other right-wing critics argue that those limits block the government from imposing virtue on the people. Therefore, both camps turn to illiberal politics that would empower their respective faction as a vanguard party of a new order. For them, the Constitution is a mere stumbling block we must overcome as we race towards a more perfect society.
In the midst of all this sound and fury, a veritable cottage industry has emerged to produce defenses of “liberalism.” Many classical liberals and libertarians are attempting to renew a utilitarian or economic case for limited government. Centrists in both parties have urged extremists to respect the “neutral public square” and laud the post-war period of bipartisanship. But none of these arguments has been persuasive—American politics remains caught between warring factions, caught in a downward cycle of bitter partisanship and endless dissatisfaction.
American Covenant stands apart from these ineffectual critiques of illiberalism because Levin advocates for constitutional politics on an altogether different ground. While he praises liberals’ “commitment to equal individual rights” and the rule of law, he also recognizes that the Founders’ vision for the republic includes a “substantive moral end” and an account of human virtue. The genius of the Constitution, Levin maintains, is its ability to balance these competing goods.
The book is particularly compelling when it comes to the concept of federalism. While he has always advocated for less government intervention, Levin has also led a small cohort of thinkers—sometimes called “reform conservatives”—who were more open to federal public policy as a tool than more anti-statist strands of the conservative movement. In the 2010s, this group popularized the rhetoric of “subsidiarity,” the notion that policy ought to be handled by the most local possible authority competent to solve a given problem. But, as Levin explicitly states, “subsidiarity” is not a synonym for “federalism.” One is a principle of competence, the other a principle of legitimacy.
“The heart of federalism is a separation of authorities rather than a layering of them,” Levin writes. When they ratified the Constitution, the people assigned different sets of authorities to the state and federal governments; it is really the administrative state and the massive federal bureaucracy that has undone the careful balancing act of the Constitution. Levin therefore believes that policymakers should “look to disentangle state and federal governance as much as possible.” This agenda goes beyond mere reform and to a fuller restoration of the original vision of the Founding.
Overall, then, it seems that American Covenant marks a greater—perhaps more radical—appreciation on Levin’s part for the Founders’ philosophical profundity. He is especially taken with their acknowledgment of human life’s complexity. “Political life is not a series of geometric proofs and applications,” Levin writes, but rather “requires us constantly to live with tense contradictions, and to see them as sources of strength.”
This is wisdom not unlike Edmund Burke’s in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. There, the Anglo-Irish statesman took aim at both reactionary theories of divine right kingship and the radical social contract theory of the Revolution. Those two forces alike advocated simple, centralized power as opposed to a more complex system of checks and balances such as could be found in the unwritten British constitution. Levin, who has written extensively on Burke in the past, sees the same salutary complexity in the written U.S. Constitution.
Levin argues that our complex, elegant constitutional rigging allows statesmen to trim the ship-of-state’s sails according to the needs of the moment. “This makes the American system a scourge of fastidious political theorists,” Levin claims, “but is also responsible for its extraordinary durability and for the dynamic character of the system, which is always answering its own excesses and seeking balance without ever settling down.” By making citizens deliberate and negotiate, the Constitution provides a procedure for discovering the whole of the common good rather than a single faction’s narrow conception of it.
At the same time, though, Levin understands that this constitutionalism is not a “mere procedure”—it is also a way of life. Within the limits of the Constitution, politics can become “a joint pursuit of the common good through the forging of common ground and the formation of people well suited to living together.” The Constitution both requires of citizens and teaches them certain virtues.
This does not mean that the Founders intended perfect unanimity on all political or social questions. As Levin points out, the Constitution is an instrument for producing unity of action, not necessarily thought. He writes that “[i]t offers up an ideal of unity that is rooted in the practical nature of political life and that works to make common action possible.” That kind of unity certainly requires a particular set of virtues—prudence, courage, temperance, to name a few—but it does not mean all Americans must align on doctrines of faith or absolute answers to life’s eternal questions.
Yet, even within these restraints, there is also a sense that the Constitution compels Americans to think in similar ways. Levin somewhat neglects this, most clearly with regard to his sources. Throughout American Covenant, Levin refers to The Federalist as a sort of architectonic interpretation of the Constitution. However, in a footnote, he explains that he will “distinguish among the three authors (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay)” because each differs from the others with some respect to certain themes. More than any other Founder, Levin looks to Madison specifically to understand the intentions behind the Constitution and how it can address contemporary political questions. He believes the Virginian’s liberal “priorities and emphases” are better suited to the issues we face than Hamilton’s more conservative concern for a “reliable and steady political order.”
This approach to reading The Federalist has certain historical and theoretical limitations. In a 1984 article, “Publius, A Split Personality?”, the late George Carey forcefully argued that the authors of the essays intended them to be read as the product of a single pen. Indeed, he wrote:
[E]ach of Publius’s component parts knew full well the dimensions of the task before them, that perhaps the opportunity for a stronger union might never again present itself, and that, in addition, a united and coherent defense of the proposed Constitution would require them to trim their theoretical sails, that is, to accommodate themselves and their thinking to the implicit values and assumptions of the document, as well as to the sensibilities of each other.
Carey, therefore, always insisted on referring to the author of the essays by the pseudonym “Publius,” and treating the entire work as a coherent whole. Publius was not simply writing an abstract defense of the Constitution, or even a user’s manual for the system—he was attempting to persuade the American people (and specifically the people of New York) to ratify the document as the nation’s fundamental law. But even more than appealing to calculating reason and a clear-headed evaluation of interest, Publius wrote The Federalist to shape the affections and sentiments of the people who would be governed by that law.
In other words, Levin understates the achievement of The Federalist’s authors by dividing them. The men who became Publius did not simply “share some core views” or “often echo each other”—they united and actively worked together to articulate the true nature of the Constitution. By so doing, Publius becomes a model for American citizenship and demonstrates the virtues of “ruling and being ruled in turn” necessitated by free government. Reading The Federalist in this light, it is clear that Publius provides Americans with a complete civic education.
As conservatives survey the chaos sparked by the country’s warring factions, it should be self-evident that our principal task is to revive this kind of civic education. Ultimately, the extremists’ derision of the Founding is in no small part a result of their ignorance; their factionalism itself is at odds with America’s traditional conception of the common good. Our country desperately needs more voices in our public discourse arguing for the Constitution and its Framers’ vision of American unity.
That begins by reversing the process by which the moral and political principles that provided the bedrock of the Founding have been fading away. These ideas, expressed by the Declaration of Independence and embodied by the Revolution itself, were what enabled Publius to argue his case for the Constitution. As he puts it in Federalist 2, Americans were “one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.” Those bonds that made constitutional unity possible have loosened considerably, however, and conservatives need to find ways to re-tie them.
Yuval Levin acknowledges this problem and, by writing American Covenant, has done his part to address it. Despite my small quibbles with his book, I am immensely grateful for it. American Covenant is an inspiring roadmap to national renewal, a distillation of its author’s heroic efforts to preserve our constitutional heritage, and a testament to the kind of mentor he is within the conservative movement. We desperately need more teaching like this.
Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.
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