America at 250: How Can We Move Past Political Deadlock?

David Young: Welcome to C-Suite Perspectives, a signature series by The Conference Board. I'm David Young, the president of the Committee for Economic Development, which, as you may know, is the public policy center here at The Conference Board, and I'm delighted to be the guest host of today's episode.

Today's conversation is a special edition. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary at a moment of profound political, cultural, and institutional change, we'll explore what the American story can teach us about leadership, citizenship, democratic resilience, and the future of our civic life.

Joining me today is Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation's leading thinkers on American institutions, political culture, and civic renewal. Through his writings and scholarship, Yuval has challenged Americans to think more deeply about the habits and the responsibilities that sustain a free society.

Yuval, welcome. We're so pleased to have you joining us today.

Yuval Levin: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you.

David Young: So Yuval, let's start by stepping back for a moment here and looking at the broader sweep of the American story. As the country approaches, as I say, its 250th anniversary, many Americans are reflecting not only on how far the nation has come, but also on the challenges and divisions we face today.

Throughout our history, periods of uncertainty have certainly tested the resilience of American institutions, as well as civic culture. From your perspective, as the US approaches this milestone anniversary, how do you situate this moment in the broader arc of American history? And does it resemble any periods in earlier American history?

Yuval Levin: Well, you know, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain once said. And I think there are lessons we can learn from prior eras. I think one important thing to keep in mind as we approach the 250th anniversary is the sheer durability of the American system and the way that it has seen our society through very difficult and challenging times.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a young people, as if we just emerged into the world, and we're fresh and energetic. And in many ways, of course, we are. But our system of government is not young. It is maybe the oldest system in the current world. The British can claim they had the institutions with the same names as they did in 1800, but those institutions don't do the same thing they did in 1800.

The United States has the same system of government that it has had since about 1790, with a few changes here and there through constitutional amendments. That system has proven to be very durable through times of intense change and division.

I think that if there's one particular time that especially resembles ours, it is the end of the 19th century, the period that we now think of as the Gilded Age. And what was similar about it was what I think is especially distinct about American political life in this moment, which is not so much polarization as deadlock, an extended period of 50/50 politics in a two-party system.

The American system has almost always been a two-party system, and so we've had polarization very often. But deadlock, a long period without a majority party, is very unusual, and the system doesn't function well in that kind of period. If you look in on American history, at almost any time, you'd find a majority party holding together a very complicated coalition and a minority party trying to expand its own coalition. Both of those parties are engaged in coalition-building, which is the fundamental work of American political life.

For the last 25 years or so, we've had two minority parties at the same time. When one of them wins, it wins barely, and then the other one wins barely the next time. Control of Congress has shifted back and forth. We've had a number of extremely close presidential elections. In that respect, it resembles the period from about 1880 to 1900, where also, we had very, very closely contested elections in a row. Control of Congress shifted back and forth. You had two presidents in that period elected with an electoral college majority but not a popular majority, as we have also seen. You had a president in that period who won one term and then lost and then came back, as we have also seen now.

And what distinguished that time was that the longer the parties spent at 50/50, the harder it was for them to see their way out and to recognize that the purpose of the political party is to build a broad coalition, and therefore to bring in people who are not already in the tent. That's usually obvious to politicians in our democracy. It is not obvious in long-term 50/50 periods like this.

And so I do look to that time. We did make it out of that time. It took a change in some of the core defining issues of American political life. It also took some politicians with real talent for coalition-building, and I do think that's what we need now, too. So there are lessons we can learn, even if it's not a perfect analogy, of course.

David Young: And Yuval, the longer you stay at this kind of 50/50 close minority majority, it fuels greater polarization. Is that what you're saying?

Yuval Levin: Exactly. Because the parties focus on mobilization rather than coalition-building. So they think, "We've got just about enough to win. How do we get every last voter out?" Rather than thinking, "We need to win people who are not already persuaded."

David Young: You mentioned the word durability, and I want to come to that in a moment, but just one additional question just that came to mind here.

You mentioned coalition-building. Likelihood or opportunity of—you mentioned a two-party system—a third party, a substantial kind of viable third party coming in here. I look at different European countries that have multiple parties, more than two, and you see the coalition-building. Would that be a viable option?

Yuval Levin: It's a challenge in the American system for very deep structural reasons. The way that our presidential system works is that in order to win a presidential election, you have to win an absolute majority in the electoral college. And for a very long time now, since 1828, that has meant that the parties really strive to have just two plausible presidential candidates.

Because if you have more than two, the likelihood is nobody wins a majority and the election goes to the House of Representatives. That happened twice in the 19th century and created very profound legitimacy crises. And since then, it's almost been the purpose of our party system to make sure that there are only two plausible presidential candidates, and the rest of the system is built up around that.

Now, there is coalition-building. A lot of what happens between parties in the European systems happens within parties in the American system. And the parties are themselves very broad coalitions, and that then helps them to form politicians who are good at building coalitions. But that entire system is not working well in the 21st century.

The primaries encourage the parties not to be coalition-builders, but to seek ideological purity. That, in turn, selects for people who are not coalition-builders. They fill the system, and you find polarization growing. So there's work to do. I think there's political reform to do in terms of how the parties choose candidates. There's reforms of Congress that are necessary.

But I think we have to see that ultimately, the goal is to create incentives for coalition-building. That's the only way that a democratic system can operate, and it is also how the American system normally does operate. So it's certainly doable in our system, but the possibility of it has become invisible to us the longer we spend in this 50/50 place.

David Young: Yeah. Yuval, you mentioned, as I said earlier, durability. When you look back at the founding era, and you evaluate or take a look at the habits, the values, the form of leadership, and you put that in the context of durability, are there certain habits, values, forms of leadership that jump out to you that form the foundation of what has made the US system so durable?

And also related to that, are there areas that we've lost, that form the foundation of durability, that we actually need to recover?

Yuval Levin: I think it's a wonderful way to put the question. And I would say one thing that stands out about the American system is the importance that it places on distinct offices, creating or forming and encouraging distinct kinds of character in the people who hold them.

There is such a thing as an executive type and an executive set of virtues. There's such a thing as a legislative type and a judicial type. And I think one thing we have certainly been losing in 21st-century America is the formative power of offices to create those distinctions.

And so people understanding and channeling their ambition through the office they hold, understanding success as legislative success or executive success, doing the job well, rather than understanding success as building personal, individual prominence, building a personal following, building a personal brand. More and more are politicians inclined in that direction, toward understanding the institutions of the system as platforms for their own personal prominence and a way to build their own brand. So that you run for Congress to build a big social media following, rather than the other way around.

And the judiciary, so far, has mostly been able to remain immune to these pressures, and judges are still judges. It's a very distinct office. You wear a robe, and you behave a certain way, and that's still true for most judges in our system. But both legislators and executives, especially at the national level in America, now function as kind of performers on social media and in the kind of political theater of our culture in a way that is not connected enough to the actual character of the office they hold.

And I think that kind of virtue, a distinctly republican, small-R republican virtue, is what we need to recover today.

David Young: Yeah, interesting. Yuval, you've written extensively about the importance of institutions, not just as structures of governance, but as formative places that shape character, responsibility, and civic behavior. Some of this you've already touched on.

Today, I think many Americans feel disconnected from institutions that once anchored civic life. I also think trust in institutions, government, media, higher ed, business, and other institutions has declined significantly, while, as we also mentioned, polarization continues to deepen across the political and cultural lines. I'm really curious as to your thoughts and reflections on how did we get here? And what would it realistically take to rebuild the trust?

We did a webcast, as you'll remember, a couple months ago, and you had this amazing line that has resonated deeply with me, which is, " We've forgotten how to disagree." I'm curious if that plays into your answer here. As well as different forms of communication, notably how I feel like politicians are communicating today, which is via social media platforms. So really curious to get your thoughts on where we are with trust. How did we get here? How do we rebuild it?

Yuval Levin: Yeah, absolutely. I think these things are very closely connected, and that in a way, institutional trust is a peculiar thing. It's a strange thing to trust an institution, and the question is, how do you build and sustain that kind of trust?

I think above all, there are two elements. They're not deeply surprising, but it's helpful to distinguish them. On one hand, people build trust by seeing competence, by having a sense that institutions can do the work we expect of them, and that they're run by people who know what they're doing. And on the other hand, we need to see institutional restraint, and a sense that there's a limit to what these institutions will do to us, that they're here to be of service to us, and that the people who run them are, in a sense, our agents in some important way.

I think in 21st-century America, it's especially the latter of these that we've lost confidence in. There's certainly been crises of competence. A financial crisis or the pandemic can lead us to think that maybe some people who say they're experts don't really know what they're doing. But we've especially lost confidence in our elites as restrained in the authority they hold, a sense that there will be a limit, that they're not just going to politicize it, that they're not just going to use the power they have to advance their own interest or their own opinions or their own party.

And we have lost a sense of that when you look across the range of institutions. There's been a politicization of the American academy, of American science, of corporate America, and there's been a sense also in our actually political institutions that too many of the people who we entrust with power are pursuing their own interests rather than the work assigned to them by the institutions.

I think recovering that would require some demonstrated restraint, and that's very hard to do for people in authority, to show that there are things you won't do. I think, for example, that presidents of the United States in the 21st century would really benefit by saying to the public, "I would like to do this, but I need Congress to do it with me."

That's something that our presidents have each, for a second, kind of said, and then they do it on their own, and leave us with a sense that there are no constraints, there are no limits on what they can do. They set themselves up for failure when they do that, because they can't actually do it on their own, and to claim that they can is only to assert for themselves a goal they can't achieve.

But more than that, they make it hard for us to trust them. And there are versions of that across the range of American institutions, where institutions claim for themselves certain authorities and responsibilities that just aren't theirs, and they end up acting politically. You know, I just don't need to know what my bank thinks about abortion or about the environment. It doesn't need to be part of my engagement with an institution that has nothing to do with those questions. And when they do, and they insert themselves into that place, it becomes very hard to trust them. It happens on the left, and it happens on the right. It happens with American religion, and it happens with universities.

And I think we've lost trust in part because that those boundaries have become worn down, and it's now very difficult for us to see people with real power as our agents in specific domains of American life. We see them instead as partisan agents, and obviously we don't trust them if they're not in our party.

David Young: How, Yuval, how do we do these days around voicing our disagreements? And maybe connect this a little bit to the chat we were having earlier in terms of social media.

Yuval Levin: Yeah, I think we do very poorly at it because we've come to think about disagreement in what strikes me as the wrong way. A lot of Americans who care about politics and are engaged with it now feel like we're very active politically. But actually, most of what we do is surround ourselves with people we agree with and spend a lot of time talking about people we disagree with, and we build these cocoons. Social media makes this very easy to do. You spend all your time affirming yourself and affirming your views by constantly hearing from people who share them.

We spend very little time actually engaged with people we don't agree with. And the fact is the purpose of that kind of disagreement in a free society is to come to some accommodation, to find some way to act together to address a public problem. And I think it's very important for us to remember that in a free society, which therefore is also a diverse society, unity doesn't mean agreement. Unity doesn't mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together.

And when we ask ourselves how are we supposed to act together when we don't think alike, if you look around at our political system, it is meant to be an answer to that question. The purpose of the American Constitution, and of the political framework of every free society, is to answer the question, how are we supposed to act together when we don't think alike?

And the answer is negotiation. It's bargaining. It's competition. It's accommodation of various sorts. It's a kind of constructive tension that ultimately is what our politics is supposed to be. We now think we can't act together when we don't think alike. We think the disagreement is the end of the story and that it's a failure of democracy, but disagreement is inescapable. In any group of free people, there's going to be a lot of disagreement.

The purpose of politics is to find ways to facilitate necessary common action despite that, and we have to let that system work, engage in negotiation. Because otherwise, we come increasingly to think that negotiating with the other side is a failure. That's often how we think now about politics.

If the member of Congress we've elected is bargaining with the other side and giving them something, we think they're betraying us or they're betraying their party, when in fact, that is their job. Their job is, on our behalf, to negotiate and accommodate people with different views so that we can come to some agreement about how to act together. That's really the essential set of skills in a free society.

David Young: Fascinating. Final question before we take a break. Looking over the next decade, what do you think are some of the most significant tests facing both American democracy and civic life?

Yuval Levin: I think the question for us is whether this moment of frustration, which is very widespread, can be translated into a period of political reform. Not fundamental reform, we're not giving up on our Constitution, but practical reform. We have to ask ourselves, how can Congress work better? How can our party system work a little better? How can the distinctions we draw between state and local responsibilities make a little more sense?

The American people have always engaged in ongoing reforms of this sort. We've always done the work to help our institutions work for us. And I think we now feel so stuck that we've lost the sense that we can turn those dials, that we can make some adjustments to help ourselves operate better as citizens.

The big question for the next decade is whether this can be a decade of political reform, because the frustration is so widespread now, the sense that things aren't working is almost universally shared. And the question is, do we translate that into a rebellion against our system, where we throw away what it's enabled us to do, or do we turn that into a recommitment to American political institutions that allows us to reform them?

It doesn't have to work this way. I think the motto of any successful reform effort in the next 10 years could be, "It doesn't have to be this bad." It can't be perfect. it's always going to have problems, but it doesn't have to be quite this bad, whether that's the financial system or whether that's the political system. We can make adjustments, but that does require building coalitions for common action despite our differences, and that's why it's a big test.

David Young: Yeah, that's an encouraging way to look at the next decade. Can it be a decade of political reform? Is it the fact that we throw it all away, or do we recommit?

We're going to take a short break. Be right back with more of my conversation today with Yuval Levin.

Welcome back to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm your host, David Young, the president of the Committee for Economic Development, the public policy center of the Conference Board. I'm joined today by Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

One recurring concern, Yuval, today is whether our political and civic culture still reward the kinds of leadership qualities that democracies depend on. What jumps to mind? Prudence, courage, restraint, and the ability to build consensus, coalition-building, as we were speaking about earlier. At the same time, many Americans feel the country has become increasingly fragmented, making it harder to sustain a shared sense of national purpose.

Do our current political and civic systems still encourage leadership, Yuval? Or do you think they're increasingly discouraging it?

Yuval Levin: I think it's a great way to ask the question because to talk in terms of encourage and discourage is to speak in terms of incentives. And that is really the ultimate Madisonian insight about political institutions, is that you get what you incentivize. And therefore, you have to ask yourself, what does success look like in this system?

Think about Congress. Congress is full of ambitious people, very smart and able men and women. From a distance, they sometimes look like clowns, but I will tell you from close up, these are serious people who are trying to succeed. And the question is, what does succeed look like?

We've created a set of incentives now in Congress where success looks like celebrity. It looks like having a huge public profile, rather than success looking like effective legislative action, or as we've said, coalition-building, ways of bringing practical benefits back to your constituents that you can point to. It's not even how we think about success anymore. And it seems to me that that means that, when we ask ourselves how to fix the culture, we have to think in terms of concrete incentives. To just say we need to change the culture is basically to say, "I don't know what to do."

How do you change the culture? And the answer is you change the culture by changing incentives, which then changes behavior, which can change expectations, which changes culture. The practical change you can make is incentives. It is institutional design.

And so for me, that points to thinking about changes, for example, in how our political parties choose candidates. The primary system is a very bad fit for a polarized society. And you have to ask yourself, is there a way that might encourage more broadly appealing candidates who could build broader coalitions? Moving away from simple party primaries in the direction, for example, of ranked-choice primaries, as some states have been starting to try, I think is one way to think about what that could look like. And our system allows for a lot of experimentation. It's very decentralized. We should be trying things.

The key to that, oddly enough, is, for the political parties and the people in our system who have authority to make these kinds of changes, to see that it's not working. Their job is to win big, to build broad coalitions. They're not currently doing that, and they need to recognize that they're failing, which is harder than it might seem.

I think more generally, incentives that allow us to see that coalition-building is the way to win, rather than the way to compromise or surrender, are the kinds of incentives we need to be thinking about when it comes to changing Congress and the state legislatures, when it comes to thinking about our political system. It is ultimately, really, about the incentives we create.

David Young: Would you, Yuval, would you throw term limits in there as well as one of the things in this broad bucket of incentives?

Yuval Levin: I really don't think so. So it seems to me that when you think about term limits, essentially what you're doing is, first of all, you'd have to say the biggest problems are created by the people who've been there the longest, which I actually don't think is quite right about our political system now.

And secondly, it seems to me that there are always going to be people who endure through elections and who ultimately have the institutional memory and the capacity and the power that comes with it. I would like those people to be elected officials, rather than bureaucrats or lobbyists or people who are not accountable to the public.

And so it seems to me that term limits, ultimately, end up being a way to empower those other people, the unelected people, the bureaucrats and the lobbyists, at the expense of the power of actual accountable elected officials. So I've never been drawn to term limits. I don't think that's the right way to think about what's wrong with our system.

Our system shapes people within it over time. And even now, you can see a pattern of members of Congress becoming more inclined toward legislative work and coalition-building over time. They come in unready for the work, and I don't think term limits would help us get them ready for it.

David Young: Yeah, interesting. Let's take a moment to look forward around the topic of renewal and citizenship. The founders placed enormous emphasis on civic virtue, personal responsibility, and the obligations of citizenship. But today there's this ongoing debate about whether Americans still share a common understanding about what citizenship requires.

You've said and argued that democracy depends not only on rights and freedoms, but also on habits of responsibility, compromise, and participation, much of which you've already spoken on today. Do you think Americans have a common understanding of citizenship? And if not, how do we start to rebuild that?

Yuval Levin: I think we do have some common expectations, and we now also have a widely shared sense that those are not being met. Now, we don't incline to turn that on ourselves, to say, "Well, we have responsibilities as citizens." Because, of course, all the challenges we're talking about would ultimately have to be addressed by people who are accountable to voters, which means that voters would have to demand them, or at least to value them.

And if we don't value them, and if all we want is ideological purity, and we don't care how the system is deformed to achieve it, then that's what we'll get. We get what we ask for. And so I do think part of what's required is a sense among citizens that we need to encourage and demand a kind of civic responsibility out of people in office.

That said, I don't think we should overstate how divided Americans are. We're divided, we always are, in various ways. But there absolutely is such a thing as a shared American identity, an American type in the world. Ask anybody from anywhere else in the world, and they'll tell you, "Yeah, there is such a thing as an American." It's not hard to spot.

We have a lot in common. We should not imagine that we're so divided that we can't really share this country anymore. That's not the problem. The problem is we're not trying enough. We're separating ourselves out into distinct political echo chambers, and we're not working through the system that is inclined to compel us to deal with each other. I think we've got to give that system more of a chance.

David Young: Interesting. Final question, Yuval. Let's put you in the scenario of you're speaking to the next generation of younger Americans here who arguably will carry the country forward into the next decade, if not the next century.

What would you say to them? What would you want them to understand about both the responsibilities and possibilities of American democracy?

Yuval Levin: I think the first thing I'd say to younger Americans is that they should start out being grateful for the society they get to inherit. We talk down America an awful lot now, and in some ways, we've even been doing that here, because it's natural to focus on what's missing and what's wrong. But we should also take time to focus on what we ought to be grateful for. The United States has endured for 250 years as an extraordinarily dynamic, free society. We are a very free place. We are a place that genuinely believes that all men and women are created equal. We embody that belief more today than we did a generation ago, much more than we did 100 years ago, not less.

A lot has been achieved on their behalf, these younger Americans. And there's an enormous amount to work with in our society. They have a lot of accumulated political and social capital, let alone economic capital. They should not overestimate the challenges they face. Every generation faces enormous civic challenges, and by no means are those confronting this generation the greatest ever. Think about Americans maturing in the 1930s, in the 1860s. They had immense challenges to face. There was no reason to be confident that the country could endure, but they did the work. And what's distinct about this moment is not that our problems are bigger than ever. What's distinct about this moment is that it's up to us, that it's our turn now to address these problems, and that's especially the case with younger Americans.

They have to take ownership of their common future, to say "we" and "us" when talking about this country, and to recognize that the benefits they get without necessarily having earned, by simply being Americans, also come with responsibilities they get without necessarily having asked for. And they've got to step up to those responsibilities, as we all do.

And of course, it's not just them, it's us, too. Everybody in our society has to recognize that being an American comes with great privileges and also with serious obligations. That's what it is to be a citizen.

David Young: Yuval, what a wonderful and encouraging way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Yuval Levin: Thanks very much. Great to be with you.

David Young: And thanks to all of you for listening to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm David Young, and this series has been brought to you by The Conference Board.