Why No One Trusts Anything
01:29:59 Share

This is Honestly. And for today... More than 93,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2020. What if I told you that everything that's broken in American life... That's the highest number ever recorded and a 29% increase from the year before. ...from increased rates in suicide and addiction. For the past six years, the CDC reports birth rates across the country have been dropping. And last year, a historic record low per capita.

to decreased rates in marriage and sex. As U.S. population growth slows to a crawl, fewer Americans are making their way down the aisle.

the aisle. To the crisis of faith we're having in everything, from the CDC to our political leaders to democratic elections. This is the end of democracy in America. What if all of these weren't a series of separate catastrophes, but actually symptoms of a single underlying condition? Well, that's the argument of my guest today, Yuval Levin. Yuval is a journalist and an academic.

He has served as a congressional staffer and also as a staff member under President George W. Bush. He's also the author of several excellent books, including The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build.

But really, I think of Yuval as one of America's most thoughtful political philosophers. Nine months ago, back before this podcast was even a podcast, I sat down and recorded a conversation with Yuval. We talked about why conspiracy thinking is on the rise, why the left and the right are so hard to define right now, and why the culture wars are so dominant in American political life.

And for a million reasons, mostly me being a total rookie and trying to figure out what the heck I was doing, I never published it. But over those months, I kept thinking back to our conversation. And lately, I realized that even though we talked back in May, before the Delta variant and the withdrawal from Afghanistan and another record-setting year of increased murders before the war with Russia and Ukraine, that Yuval's ideas were incredibly prescient.

And since we talked, that they've actually grown more relevant than ever. So today I bring you Yuval Levin. And please stick around for the end where I call him back up for a brief update on the state of American democracy. I promise no matter what your political beliefs are, you are going to find Yuval's arguments inspiring and challenging at once. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Yuval Levin, thank you so much for coming. I'm a fan of your work. I find it incredibly helpful and helps me sort of look beyond the news cycle of the day. So I'm just going to dive right in.

Why is it that so much in our culture, that so much in our society feels so very broken right now? What do you think is the source of this brokenness? Well, thank you. Obviously, that is an enormously complicated and broad and open question. But I think it also is the right way to start because in a sense, we all live with this vague sense that Americans are just living through a social crisis, right?

We can see that in a variety of ways from partisan polarization to just the tenor of the culture war to

really in people's own lives to isolation and alienation and despair and higher suicide rates and an opioid epidemic, it seems like these problems are connected to each other. They have some common roots, but it's not always easy to say exactly what those roots are and how to put our fingers on them. And I would say what

One way to get at that is to realize that when we think about those problems, we tend to think of our society as a big open space filled with individuals, and those individuals are having trouble connecting now. So we talk about needing to break down walls and build bridges and level playing fields.

And that's not wrong. There's something to that. But I think what we're missing is that we're not just individuals lacking connectedness. We're lacking structure for our life together. We're lacking social structure, a way to give some shape and purpose and concrete meaning to the things that we do together so that if we think of American life as a big open space, it's

It's not a space filled with individuals. It's a space filled with these structures of social life, with institutions from family and religion and education and community all the way up through our working lives, through the culture, the academy, and to our national politics. Where the breakdown is happening is in these structures that allow us to be more than just isolated individuals. It's in our institutions. And Americans...

Don't think naturally in terms of institutions. We just see through them. We treat them as invisible.

And that's great when they're strong. We get to feel really free. But when they're weak, when they're in trouble, it creates enormous challenges for us and makes it very hard for us to know where to look to fix problems. And so this is a time, I think, to really think concretely about our institutions, to understand them in their own terms, and to see how the problems we're facing are in a lot of ways institutional deformations and failures. And that requires us

to address them in that way and to think about what we can do for the institutions we're part of so that they can be trusted more and so that they can serve us better. Do you think that one of the reasons that people can't see that is because the idea of an institution itself feels, well, quite frankly, a little boring or like abstract and faceless? Like make institutions real for us. What do you mean when you say that?

Absolutely. I think that is really central to why we tend not to see them and to why we tend not to want to think in these terms, because the term itself is

inclines us to think that institutions are oppressive or they're, as you say, dull and bureaucratic and cold. So what really are institutions? I would say our institutions are the shapes and structures of our common life. An institution, as opposed to just a bunch of people, an institution is a bunch of people organized around a common purpose. And the organized is the most important piece of that because the institution is

puts us in relation to one another in ways that allows us to achieve something important together. Now, some institutions are organizations, right? They have a corporate form, a university, a hospital, a school, or a business.

But some institutions are forms of a different kind. Maybe they're shaped by laws or norms still, but they don't have that sort of corporate structure. The family is an institution. It's the first and foremost institution. We can talk about the institution of marriage or a particular profession, a tradition, the rule of law as an institution. One thing that matters about them is that they're durable, right? They're part of our experience for a long time. They keep their general shape over time. They change slowly. So a flash mob is not an institution.

But most important is to think of institutions as forms. A form is a structure or a contour. It's the shape of the whole that gives it its purpose and logic and meaning. So a social form, an institution, allows us to organize together to achieve something. And that also means, very importantly, that institutions are formative institutions.

They structure how we interact with each other. And so as a result, they structure us. They shape our habits, our expectations. They shape our character. They shape our soul. We're really the products of the institutions we're part of. And I think that has a lot to do with the sort of crisis we're living through in the sense that what we actually mean when we say that we're losing trust in our institutions is that we're losing the sense that they are forming trustworthy people.

So an institution is everything from the Supreme Court to a university to maybe even a sports team, all the way down to the little institution of a married couple. Yeah, exactly. And so obviously it's a broad term. Obviously it encompasses a lot, but it's a valuable term because it allows us to think of the things we do together and the shapes and structures of those things we do together.

and lets us get beyond the simplest sort of individualism that we often kind of carry around in our head and understand that we're all formed by common action, common purpose, common goals, common ideals. And so when we live through what really is a social crisis, right, a crisis of connectedness where people feel isolated, alienated, what's gone wrong has gone wrong at that level of the institution very often.

I think a lot of people are bouncing around the world focusing on any one of the many maladies that are affecting America right now whether it's polarization or political unrest or collapse of trust in the media or you know drug addiction loneliness all of these things and in a way you're like

Like if America is this, the body politic is like racked with all of these different symptoms, you're coming in almost as a doctor to say, these aren't just individual symptoms. These are symptoms of one big illness. And that illness is the crisis or the collapse of these things that you're calling institutions. Yeah, I think that's a very nice way to put it because

the symptoms do seem like they each suggest a different kind of treatment or a different way to understand the problem. In a way, this first occurred to me in looking at some of the public opinion data about the public's loss of trust in institutions. So you say people have lost trust in the media over the last 30 years. Well, obviously, look at the media, right? Or people have lost trust in

in organized religion. Well, we can think about reasons for that. People have lost trust in the police. Okay, well, maybe this is because of that or that. People have lost trust in the professions, right, in accountants and lawyers. Well, I can point to some scandals that have happened that might be the reason. But what really stands out is that people have lost trust in all of these things at the same time.

in an accelerating way that is really extraordinary when you look at it over a generation and now two generations, really. And so something else is going on. And to, you know, if you take your analogy there, if you go to the doctor and complain that you're tired all the time, you might just think, well, okay, you're tired, so get more sleep.

But a doctor with some experience in thinking about this kind of problem could say, well, maybe you lack iron, right? You are never going to complain, never, that you lack iron. That would not have occurred to you. But by thinking about the nature of the organism, the doctor can see that maybe that's what's missing. I think we need to think about the social organism that is our society and understand that what we're missing isn't only what we're asking for.

There are some things that we don't really know to ask for, but that are what we need. And one of those is a kind of institutionalism that allows us to recover trust in people with power in our society.

that allows us to believe again that people who exercise authority are doing it with our interest in mind and not just theirs. And I think thinking that way gets you on the road to seeing what the country needs that goes beyond just answering the direct frustrations that people express.

It's so fundamental, right? Like I remember having a conversation after the election with, you know, two Trump voters who are incredibly well-educated. One's a doctor. And they were talking to me about Dominion and how China controlled Dominion. And did I know that Mark Zuckerberg, like they had lost trust in their vote. And like, how do you come back from that? Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of what

kind of in fancy conversations goes by the name of alienation, looks like that, which is a sense that people start to talk about the country in the third person, in terms of they and them, much more than in terms of us and we and our. And that happens when you lose the sense that these things are here for you.

And I think a lot of the loss of trust in institutions that we've seen has taken that form because it's harder for us to believe that people who are in positions of authority in our institutions are formed, compelled by those institutions to channel their ambition toward a greater purpose. Part of the way I describe this in the book is that

We've gone from thinking of institutions as molds of people's character and behavior to thinking of them as platforms, as just being there for people to be seen, to build their own following, to elevate their profile, build their brand. That's a lot of what's happened in the media, I think, where when journalism can make a demand on our trust, it does it by constraining people, by saying there's a process here so that when this person says something to you, that's because it's been checked.

But everywhere you look, you find elite journalists now taking themselves out of that process, standing on platforms as individuals.

And speaking in ways that make it very hard to know if it's just this person or if it's an institution that can make some claim to our trust. And that loss of professional formation and the loss of the sense of the difference between just a person and someone who's part of this larger whole makes it very, very hard to trust the institution. And I think we've seen something like that

in a lot of our political institutions, in a lot of professional institutions, not just in journalism, but in science, in the law. You see it all over the culture. You see it in corporate America. And I think it's one way to understand the broad pattern that's led to this loss of confidence and therefore this sense of alienation, this sense of, well, this isn't for me, it's for other people. I really want to get back to the media. But before we get there, I want to take a step back for a second and think

And explain to people how we got here. One of your books is called The Fractured Republic. How did we get fractured? Because I think for many of us who are living through the fracturing, it felt like this happened almost all at once. Like it happened so quickly. And I don't think that you would say that. I imagine that you would say that it has deep roots. What are those roots? How did we get fractured? Yeah, well, let me briefly tell you what I think is that longer story, somewhat longer story.

Americans have lived through a phase of liberalization in American life that lasted more than half a century, basically the length of the Cold War and beyond it, and that in some respects now is coming to an end. And that's what we feel when we see that crisis. If you look at American culture in the middle of the 20th century, say in the 1950s, early 60s, which is when so many of the boomers who still run everything look to as the norm,

you'd find an intensely cohesive society that is screaming for liberation from conformity, right? Coming out of war and depression, it was a society with a very strong sense of itself, a lot of confidence in its institutions, but also this desire for more freedom, more openness. You saw that in the culture, not just in the kind of cliche Holden Caulfield kind of things or James Dean movies,

But, for example, look at the opening editorial of National Review, 1955. We know it for saying that the magazine would stand to thwart history yelling stop. Most of what it said was an intense argument against conformism and bigism. It was a very libertarian statement. Similarly, you'd find on the left a lot of people arguing about the dangers of conformity because they lived in a time when every force in American life was telling them to be more like everybody else. Hmm.

And the country reacted to that by instead having all of our institutions say, not be more like everybody else, but be more like yourself. For decades, we went through a period of liberalization in the culture, on the one hand, and in the economy, on the other hand, so that we ended up with a more market-oriented economy, more choices, more options, more control, and a more diverse culture, more openness, broader mainstream. People who had been on the margins were allowed to take much more of a part in American society.

We gained a lot from both of those. Gains in prosperity, in personal liberty, in cultural diversity, technological progress.

choices, options everywhere. But those gains also came at some cost. And over time, there have also been some losses that have piled up, a loss of social cohesion, a loss of faith in institutions, a loss of social structure and order of security and stability for a lot of workers, a loss of consensus in the culture. And those have really been piling up in ways that in the 21st century, I

I think have been overwhelming the gains in our consciousness so that a lot of the pain you find in our culture now is rooted in that loss of cohesion, that loss of the sense that we're in this together. And that's why it takes the form of division and isolation, loneliness, alienation. But it also expresses itself in mistrust. And I think that is where

we have this sense that lately, maybe over the past 10 years, suddenly everything is broken down and we're just not able to trust each other. I think one reason that it feels that way is that this liberalization that was a kind of spreading out

from a very rigid mainstream in the middle of the 20th century has become in our time a bifurcation. Rather than bunching in the middle, Americans have moved to two poles, whether that's in terms of political views, whether that's in terms of economic opportunities or incomes, what we call inequality, whether that's in terms of family patterns, religious affiliation,

increasingly we really are two societies that are different from one another, in tension with one another, fighting each other everywhere. That's the culture war. And that feels new, but it's the product of this very long-running historical process. So that's a brief description, but I think it's a story of what's happened in America that helps us see some of the roots of what we're living through.

So it's like the yearning that you're describing for individuality and for liberty, for freedom, for all of these things that actually sound to my ears like conservative words. But it's like that process has gone so far and so deep that there's been a breakdown in our very ability to talk to each other with a shared language, to communicate.

get along with our neighbors. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I think just as cohesion and conformity went too far in the middle of the 20th century, we're living with some of the ways that that desire for individualism, for being ourselves, which are good things. I want to say that liberalization, generally speaking, has been good for us, has also gone too far in some ways. And the costs we pay are costs in social cohesion. And

And left and right in different ways, you know, only see parts of that. I would say the left is very happy about the social liberation, the cultural diversity, but very unhappy about the more market-oriented economy, the economic dislocation, the loss of social solidarity. Conservatives are the other way. We tend to celebrate the economic liberalization, the dynamism, but to lament the social instability, the moral disorder, cultural breakdown. The trouble is these are connected. They're tied together.

And the liberalization that the left celebrates really is the fragmentation that the right worries about and vice versa. And so we're in a place where we just have to see, I think the coming phase in our politics

is going to involve solidarity as much as liberty, which we haven't seen in a while in American politics. And left and right both are fumbling their way toward ways of thinking about solidarity, about what holds us together. So you see the right talking about nationalism. I think even some of what happens on the left about identity politics are ways of trying to belong, to hang together,

And so far it's really, both are only stumbling toward it and it's pretty dark and pretty ugly. But I think that's what they're looking for is some greater solidarity in their experience of American life. - One more question on this topic of conformity and what that looks like. It's like, you can see on the right that voting for Trump, I think especially in 2016, felt like a middle finger. It felt like a middle finger to a conformist establishment.

And the slogan of abolishing the police feels the same way to another side. And yet, in a way, they're the ultimate conforms. They're conforming to their political tribes. And those tribes seem like they are bound together more than anything else out of a sense of hating the other side more than sharing roots with one another. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I think we've we see that.

that there is this desire to hang together, but that for the moment, it really has been an organizing principle for polarization more than for unity. So that each party just thinks the other party is the country's biggest problem.

and is focused on preventing the other party from succeeding more than addressing public problems. But there's an underlying desire for unity that's very interesting. I would really recommend to folks to read or listen to Joe Biden's inaugural address. This is America's day.

This is Democracy's Day. And then, Reader listened to Donald Trump's inaugural address. The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans. Biden was clearly trying to mark the differences between him and Trump. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause.

the cause of democracy. But thematically, I don't know that there are two inaugurals that are more alike than those two are in American history. We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people. They are both about unity. With unity, we can do great things, important things.

When America is united, America is totally unstoppable. All about unity. And they both say when the American people are unified, we never fail. I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know.

They are not new. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

And they both stressed that. They both made that the core of their message. Because I think that in their kind of fumbling ways, they both recognized that this is a moment where people are looking for ways to hang together. We're not finding them. We're not doing very well at it. And so far, it's only feeding our divisions. But that hunger, that desire is very strong. Now we're going to be tested. Are we going to step up, all of us? Together, we will determine the course of America.

and the world for many, many years to come. I'm sure all the diehard Trump fans and Trump haters are going to love you for pointing that out. Yeah, yeah. Okay, but speaking of national leaders, I love this idea you've put forward before about how so many leaders in American institutions are behaving, that they're behaving not like custodians of those institutions' values, but more like influencers, building up their personal brands.

Now, obviously, social media is responsible for some of this change, but what else do you see happening here? I think social media has had a lot to do with it. And there's no question that the availability and the power of these platforms and having the option of escaping institutional constraints and just building a following yourself out there has enormous appeal. But social media are a set of tools and tools

How we use our tools tells us something about what we're trying to achieve. They don't simply have their own logic. Obviously, there is a kind of logic to social media. There's a design to them, and that does invite a certain way of behaving. And so surely the way that, say, Twitter is designed is part of the reason why so much of our social discourse now is so short and angry.

And yet, I think that there's much more than that going on here. I think that this transformation from mold to platform has to do with a transformation of our expectations of institutions and also a change in our sense of what we need from institutions. So that we've come to think that what we require for them really is a stage, a way to express ourselves.

rather than to think that what we require from them is a mold, a way to become something better than what we are to begin with.

The traditional, or maybe it's just the conservative way of thinking about what institutions are for, begins from the premise that the human person enters the world unformed, unready, needing to be shaped before we can be free. And that shaping is what our institutions are for, from family to religion to education, ultimately to work and politics.

These institutions exist to shape us so that we can be able to exercise our freedom. And so we need them to be formative and we need to allow ourselves to be shaped by them.

There's obviously also another way of thinking about what our institutions are for, which says we're ready to be free. The trouble with the institutions of our society is they oppress us. They keep pushing down on us. We need to get them off our backs and we need to let all of us express ourselves and be who we are. That is much more like the left's way of thinking about what institutions are for. So it's like...

If you believe that the institutions are fundamentally there as sort of agents of repression, you're kind of able to see the mindset of someone that says abolish the police. Because if you believe genuinely that people are good and perfect by nature, then of course you could get to that position. Absolutely. Now, obviously, these premises are implicit, right? We don't

People don't walk around with these philosophical premises in their minds, but I think that there really is...

a basic difference between left and right that comes down to almost an anthropological difference. Do you start out thinking that the human person is just full of sin and vice and needs to be shaped in order to be a free citizen? Or do you start out thinking that the human person is maybe not perfect, but ready to be free and is born free, but, you know, as Rousseau says, is everywhere in chains so that we have to, politics has to be about breaking chains and

I think that the left tends to think about politics in terms of oppressor and oppressed. And every issue is who's the oppressor and who's the oppressed and how do we free the oppressed? The right tends to think about politics in terms of order and disorder.

And in each issue, the question is, what's causing the chaos we have to overcome so we can be free? And how do we establish greater order here? That obviously really comes to the surface when we think about policing, which is sort of literally either about oppressor and oppressed or order and chaos. But it's actually true on a lot of issues. And it really expresses itself in people's attitudes towards the institutions of society. And

In that sense, the institutional transformation we're seeing is not just the venue, the environment in which our culture war is happening. It's part of the culture war. There's a substantive difference here about what institutions ought to be. And the case that I make about the need for formative institutions is an argument for the conservative side in the culture war, which is my side. And I think that

It's not simply that we need healthier institutions and then we can have a healthy left-right politics. There's a debate about the institutions, the most formative institutions, the family, the university,

Work religion. These are the scenes of the most heated battles in the culture war and it's there that way for a reason So you're saying you've all that the culture war like a lot of people think about the culture war is some fringe Story to the main story and you're saying no the culture war is the main story because the culture was actually about the most deep philosophical question, which is the nature of human beings themselves and

Absolutely. I think at this point, the kinds of arguments we're calling the culture war are really where the deepest left-right differences are. The cultural issues are the deepest issues. Politics is a way of forming the soul, and it's the formation of the soul that's really the subject of the deepest debates any society engages in.

OK, but Yuval, how do you square that view of the general difference that you're laying out between the left and the right with what Donald Trump and many of his supporters represent or feel they represent? I'm thinking specifically of January 6th and figures that emerge from it like the vegan QAnon Viking guy. What does your institutional failure theory do with something or someone like that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think it is worth thinking about that as the failure of a set of institutions. I think what we saw there was

was a kind of alienation from American society, a sort of populist revolt, a person who thinks about our society precisely in terms of they and their, not us and our. I would say that that revolt showed some of the differences between populism and conservatism. There's always an element of populism and conservatism, and I think that there's also a lot of truth in what contemporary populists say and complain about.

But ultimately, conservatism is protective of the institutions of society. Sometimes it wants to protect them from the people who run them, you know, and thinks the university is too good to be left to the professors. It's too important. But to say the university is a cesspool and needs to be burned down is not a conservative argument. And I would think the same way about our constitutional system to to approach the U.S. Capitol as

and say that's the source of evil and it needs to be burned down, you can say a lot of things about what that is, but it's not conservative. That's a person who is alienated from our society and ultimately thinks that what's required is a demolition crew rather than renewal and regeneration and rebuilding, which is how I tend to think about the change we need. But the right has come to understand itself much more as a set of outsiders than has been the case in America for a long time.

I think if you looked in on our politics a generation ago, you would say that the right thinks that it's the proper insider and is concerned that it doesn't have the power that it ought to have over the institutions that it cares about. And the left thinks of itself more as the outsider in our society. I'll give you an example of this.

Conspiracism is always an issue in democratic politics, but there's a kind of conspiracy that the inside party has and there's a kind of conspiracy that the outside party has. The conspiracy of the inside party might sound like a foreign government is trying to manipulate our elections. That's the kind of thing that the right might have said in the 20th century. It's the kind of thing the left would say now.

The conspiracism of an outsider says the elites who run the corporations and the government are conspiring together against the people's interests. That's the sort of thing the left would have said in the 20th century. It's the sort of thing the right says now. So at the very least, you have to say that the American right has come to think of itself in an alienated way. It's come to think of itself as outside the system, banging on the windows and trying to break them down. And that is a change. It's a change that's happened in recent memory.

So I was thinking that kind of just to go back to where we began, which is, you know, me thinking about you as America's doctor, sort of diagnosing our problems and the problem being the fracturing and the decay or lack of trust, let's say, in the institutions. I wanted to sort of start with government and work our way down maybe to the smallest institution, which is that of the family. So I think that you see that this shift.

change that you've noticed, which is the change from formative to performative or leaders to influencers, that's something that's affecting everyone in American politics, right? Like, it seems to unite even the most polarizing figures. You know, someone like Donald Trump and someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, people that seem totally, totally different. And yet both of them, I think, are incredibly powerful examples of this shift.

When you look at the power of someone like AOC, it doesn't really come from her legislation. It comes from her Instagram videos and her tweets. And a little bit, I think about Donald Trump in the same way. Is that a stretch? Do you see it that way? Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.

They're both examples of individuals who, first of all, think of themselves as outsiders, even when they're insiders, right? You can't be more of an insider than the president of the United States or a member of Congress. And yet both Trump and AOC, and we can point to many other people, try to present themselves in their political roles as outsiders complaining about the system rather than as insiders working the system.

And secondly, there's this tendency to see the institutions as a place to put on a show. So to work on them rather than in them. And that's a very, very... Donald Trump certainly did that constantly, but it's a very powerful trend in Congress in both parties where...

They spend their time in the Capitol not looking for a room where legislators can talk to each other and work out a deal, but looking for a camera where they can talk about Congress. And it's very hard to do the kind of work that Congress is supposed to do, which is ultimately negotiation, really. And you see that in our politics, that bargaining doesn't happen. And

And what happens instead is a lot of performance art that riles up partisans, but doesn't really take on problems and that a lot of Americans find frustrating. How do you see that connecting to the total collapse in trust in the press? Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways there's been a tendency in the media to forget why people ever trust journalists. And the reason people do when they do is

has to do with constraints, with the fact that this is a person who isn't just saying whatever, but is saying something that's gone through some process of verification. That's become much harder to believe because it's just become much less true. I think some of the forces that have driven that have had to do with economic pressures where people

In order to succeed and survive now in the media environment, you basically have to appeal to a very engaged constituency rather than to a broad audience. And that means you've got to tell people what they want to hear. And that's a lot of what happens in the media.

But I think it's also this tendency to want a personal platform, to want to build your own brand and think what I offer the New York Times is a lot of followers if I'm a reporter rather than what the New York Times offers the public is a process by which people can come to trust what I say. The incentives are just all off now. And that means that...

these journalistic institutions are just less in the business of earning the trust of the public. And so they get less of that trust. It's not surprising. They deserve less of it. You know, I think in the latest survey, it was something like more than 90% of subscribers to the New York Times identify as liberals. I'm sure you would get the opposite number if you polled Fox viewers, let's say. And so both of these models are sort of in the business of giving their subscribers, their viewers, their readers, their listeners, a kind of heroin hit.

of what they want. And that seems to be working incredibly well if you look at the viewership or in the case of The Times, the stock price. And yet it's basically in a course of a few years traded that for the authority and the trust that was built up over decades. Why do you think people running these institutions who are charged with

protecting and cultivating that authority and trust were so easily, it seems to me, willing to trade it away. I think there are a few dynamics working here at the same time. One has to do with a change in how they understand the source of their status, their legitimacy, their standing, so that

the people who run a place like The Times now think less in terms of this newspaper is a national institution and is respected for providing authoritative information and much more as our status comes from the fact that we are the place that's standing up against the depravity of the political right. You could see that in the Washington Post in the Trump years,

changing its slogan and sort of thinking about itself in these very dramatic terms. And the same happens at a place like Fox News, where the sense is we stand for this side and our strength, our standing, our status is rooted in that. I would also say that another part of what's happening here is

has to do with the ways in which the polarization that afflicts our politics actually works. There's a tendency to think that our politics is now two parties who are at each other's throats all the time, constantly fighting. But that's not actually quite right. I would say that it's more like two parties who have each withdrawn into its own space to talk about the other. A lot of what people on the right complain about about the left is

are things that people on the left have never even heard about. They wouldn't even know what you're talking about. And the same is true on the left about the right, where these obsessions arise and for a few weeks there's this issue that's on everybody's minds

And it just isn't real. It only exists as the thing this side wants to say about that side. And these institutions that have become captured by their side of the aisle become a home for this and are increasingly disconnected from a kind of shared reality. And, you know, these things feed into each other. And increasingly, these become just kind of headquarters for a political movement, much more than traditional journalistic institutions.

A few years ago, my friend Andrew Sullivan wrote this prophetic essay called We All Live on Campus Now. And the essay was really documenting how things that we had seen on elite college campuses, safetyism, intolerance for difference, disregard for things like due process, that they were soon coming to an office near you. And that's exactly what we've seen. He was totally right.

I saw it in the absurd cancel campaigns at the New York Times, which included a mob of people claiming that an op-ed in the newspaper was actually a call for literal violence against them. But it spread so far beyond that, from these elite spaces down to the rest of the culture, to other corporations, to public schools. There's almost no part of American life that has been immune from this.

And I believe it has to be part of the reason that more than 62% of Americans say that they hold views that they are afraid to share in public. And that 80% of Americans now say that hypersensitivity and political correctness are a problem in our society. Do you agree that a lot of this has its roots in elite college campuses? I think it absolutely does. And that this is really a useful way to think about this broader pattern that we've been talking about where

as these different institutions, which have different purposes, all just become platforms for culture war expression, they also all become alike. So that what happens at the New York Times is an awful lot like what happens at Brown University. They're both just places to stand and yell. And the difference between the purpose of the newspaper and the purpose of the college becomes hard

hard to tell. And part of that has to do with a particular change in campus culture. I think it's important to see that what's really changed in American campus life in recent years has more to do with college administration than with what the professors are teaching or the radicalism of some students or the rest of it. All of that is not very new

What's really new is the idea that now prevails in university administration that a kind of social justice politics, identity politics, can be used as a mode of administration, as a way of exercising power and maintaining order in the university, which administrators have to do. That is their job. But to do it by way of this kind of identity politics is new,

It's very bad for the culture of the university, but even more than that, it gives students the impression that that's how administration works, that that's what power involves in an institution, so that when they then leave the university and enter other institutions, wherever they go to work, they go into those worlds assuming that what it means to be in charge is

is to deploy the logic of identity politics and social justice politics to exercise authority over an institution. And they expect their employers to do that, so that when something happens in the world and they work for some company, they need that company to show that it is on the right side of what has happened in the world. And I think that's confusing to a lot of older people in these institutions, including people on the left who just

don't think that that's how these different institutions should operate. And it also has really changed the culture of journalism, where there's just a sense that the institution exists to enforce a certain view of the world and therefore has to operate internally according to this. And it's just as Andrew Sullivan says, everything becomes a kind of college campus in the sense that it's administered this way, by this logic, by this kind of political logic.

And so the expectations of younger people in a lot of these institutions are really deforming the institutions. And you see a generational conflict working itself out, often among people on the same side of politics. They're all on the left, but of different generations fighting for the souls of the institutions. But here's what I want to understand. Why are the administrators and the college presidents and the bosses giving into it? Why aren't they saying no?

Yeah, I think they are not used to being under intense pressure from young people. And part of that is a cultural issue where, particularly on the left, the sense that you're on the wrong side of the politics of justice is unbearable.

So they want to be on the right side, but also they're just not used to a new, you know, a new journalist coming into the New York Times often would be sort of awed by the institution and would look for a way to accommodate himself or herself to the institution in such a way that they could succeed there, that they could be part of its success and

But what you find now are younger people entering these institutions with demands, with expectations that require the institution to advance a certain way of thinking about politics in the world. And oftentimes it's not just journalists. They're getting this from the technical staff, from the IT staff, from the entirety of the younger generation of their employees. And none of our institutions are equipped for handling this. I mean, it's a new kind of pressure that's very, very hard to resist.

I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the people that are expressing this pain or this trauma or this sense that they are victims. Meaning I believe actually that it's a genuine feeling that when someone says, I guess I'm maybe not so cynical, but when someone says this op-ed is putting me in danger or this professor's heterodox ideas are dangerous, I think they genuinely mean that.

I'm wondering if you agree or disagree and how you think, if you agree, that they do genuinely feel that and it's not just put on, how we got to that point. I do agree with that, or at least I think that's the right lens through which to look at this situation. I think in general...

that cynicism about motives actually isn't very helpful as a way to understand American life. I've worked in and around politics now for more than two decades. I've worked for a president, for a speaker of the house, for a variety of members of Congress and in the policy world. And I would say that that time has made me less cynical about people's motives rather than more. Very few people

are truly cynical. That is, they actually are simply lying about their fundamental intention and purposes and motives. And it's worth seeing that because that means that when you find somebody who seems to be doing something that is obviously socially destructive, you have to ask yourself, how do they understand this as a good thing? Because they almost certainly do. And where it points for me is toward

a particular understanding of the kind of problem we confront now in a lot of our institutions, which is a danger to institutions of a particular sort, institutions that are real arenas of contention in American life, places where people who think differently actually confront each other and engage each other. Those are the kinds of institutions that have especially been getting weaker. You see it in Congress, which should work that way, but now less and less so does.

You see it in the university, which is obviously a place for competing ideas to meet, but that becomes increasingly difficult. I think you see it in the media as well. You see it in a lot of American culture. What's become harder is to actually confront difference and actually say, well, that person is just in a different place from me. And the question is, how do we engage with each other? How do we argue? How do we bargain? How do we negotiate?

The muscles needed for that kind of negotiation, which are just essential in a free society, are the muscles that have most been atrophying in our time. And that attitude that says, hearing this different view makes me feel unsafe, is the essence of what has made it impossible for people to really engage with each other and actually confront differences and then find ways to accommodate each other. So for me, it's a sign of grave trouble,

But I do believe they mean what they say. I mean, I think that's their view. After the break, Yuval on the institutions of marriage, the family and more. Stay with us. Yuval, if you could, let's move on to the family.

How does your diagnosis of what's broken in our society relate to the institution of the family? I mean, the family is the foundational institution of any society. And it is, if we think about institutions as forming us, then surely the family is the foundation because it is the most formative of our institutions.

And in that sense, it's important to think about the forms of institutions. We've been going through a crisis of family forms in America for a long time, what we call the breakdown of the family, where a lot of Americans now find themselves

in families without two parents raising children. And there are costs paid for that that are enormous. This has been a reality of American life now for a long time. It's been a reality for a growing number of Americans, an accelerating number until recent years, though it's been slowing some, which is good to see.

And I think we have to understand that some of the other challenges we confront, challenges in terms of unequal opportunity, challenges in terms of the difficulties that people have to overcome before they can even reach the start of the race in the American economy or in the American educational system,

are functions of family breakdown, family deformation. And obviously you can't diagnose your way to a cure here. Seeing that problem doesn't mean we know what to do about it. And I think it's enormously important to acknowledge

in a humble way, the difficulties confronting anyone who wants to improve things on this front. It's not as though we haven't tried. There have been a lot of attempts to strengthen families and communities. I worked in the George W. Bush administration where we tried in probably the most concerted way in American history.

to see what public policy could do to help marriage and family in ways that would produce some data that could be looked at and learned from. And we did learn from it. We learned that nothing that we tried made a difference. There was a null result from that very extensive experimentation. And so this is a brutally complicated problem.

The diagnosis matters. It's important to see that some of the challenges we face really are functions of the weakness and collapse of traditional family structures. But we have to think about how we can help people who don't have the advantages of those family structures. We have to think about how to help people in non-traditional family structures. It can't just be that we say that the choice we confront is either a full return or the total collapse of our society.

But we have to think constructively and creatively, understanding that this is a real source of challenge, a real source of problem. And that ultimately the first place where we have responsibilities to other people, where we have a role to play that makes demands of us, is the family. And we have to begin by taking that role seriously. Where does the breakdown come from? I mean, marriage rates have fallen by something like 50% since the 1970s. What are some of the factors that have led to that breakdown?

There's obviously no simple answer to that question. I think it has to do in part with the broader process of liberalization that we've been describing, where there are just... So like the pill and no-fault divorce and things like that? Yeah, that's been an element of it, no question about it. There are a lot more options. And so, you know, people try other things, and some of them work and some of them don't, and a lot of them are bad for traditional marriage.

You know, I also think there's been a reticence to make the case for marriage as the foundational, essential factor in human flourishing in a free society. We've actually gotten a little better about that. I mean, I would say that case now is made more openly and plainly than it was, say, in the 1970s and 80s. But still, it's not the easiest sort of case to make.

I think there have also been a variety of economic factors that have just changed the kinds of pressures and incentives that American families confront and have made it difficult for marriages to hold together. It's very hard, you know, I think we always should try to resist just being critical of people whose marriages have broken down. I mean, it isn't what anybody wants. It's not as though people aren't trying, people don't want to make it work. It's a challenge. It's hard.

But I do think that we need to see that breakdown as a social challenge and to see making it easier to get married and stay married as a national priority. I mean, I would say what it takes to succeed is getting an education, getting married before having children, and then working. And none of these things are simply easy in a dynamic society like ours, but these should be the goals we have and what we ought to be trying to help people achieve.

I find this to be the most interesting of all your topics because I can see the way that Americans don't trust the press. I mean, I'm among those Americans. I can see why we don't trust elite colleges or Congress. But that feels different than this topic. Like the collapse in trust in those institutions, I see why. But the collapse in trust in marriage, that feels like something different.

Yeah, I think that's true. It's more fundamental. It's more basic to who we are. But there is a way that trust can still be a useful term to think about here in the sense that people's expectations of where their lives are headed are now less reliably focused on family formation, on family, on marriage, on children.

And in that sense, we have less trust in the capacity of marriage to enable us to flourish in life. If you say, you know, we trust the media less and so we look to it less for the kinds of service it ought to provide, there is some analogy there to how we think about the family. We're less confident that investing ourselves in family life is the way to make flourishing possible. I think it's still true that it is the way.

But a lot of, you know, we've seen family breakdown around us. Everybody has. We know that it can happen. We know what kinds of consequences it can have. We all have in some way experienced it in our own lives. And so the sense of confidence in the path ahead, in the shape our lives ought to take

is diminished and it is in that sense related to a broader loss of trust in institutions. So I think it's more basic because the family is so much more formative. How is it connected to the death of religion? Yeah, I mean, I think it's connected in that religion can be a source of those expectations, a source of a sense of who we ought to be in life and what form our lives ought to take.

And again, it's another way in which the profusion of options, which in so many ways is good for us and is liberating,

Also means that life is less secure that we're less sure of where we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to be doing It's less clear what's expected of us. I think the decline of formal traditional religious affiliation has contributed to that sense And certainly the decline of the family has the one thing we haven't mentioned so far is medicine and

And this is the area that kind of scares me the most because it's about, well, families this way too, but it's about life and death in quite a literal way. I'm a little less concerned about the takeover of an English department by lunacy, although it matters to me, than I am about, you know, major public health officials in America admitting to telling noble lies, right?

for example, about masks. And I wondered if you could reflect about how you see this collapse in authority playing out in the realm of health care. I mean, a study came out recently in The Washington Post that said more than one in three health care workers weren't confident that the vaccines were safe or sufficiently tested. In Maryland, which is I know where you live, somewhere between one third and half of the state's nursing home staff opted

not to get the vaccine. Yeah, I mean, I think that what we've seen in public health in particular over the past year is really a powerful example of this pattern that we can see in so many other institutions where in the process of trying to play a part in the broader kind of cultural life of the country, culture war, politics, a profession has lost its capacity to engender trust.

If we say that that happens in journalism when the constraints put on the journalist by the profession are loosened so that this person can have bigger following, there's something like that happening in public health where really what you expect of any profession, the reason you trust a professional has to do with constraint. I trust an accountant not just because that's a person who understands the carry interest rule or something.

but because there are things an accountant wouldn't do wouldn't say he's not going to sign a piece of paper that says something that he knows isn't true

That's what being a professional means. And so when it comes to public health, we expect that what we're being told is what the evidence supports, not more and not less, and that these people are not engaged in some bigger game. They can do that in their private lives if they choose, but they're not going to use the cachet of their profession to advance some other political end.

After this year, it's just a lot harder to believe that kind of thing, where when people tell you that large gatherings are dangerous, but if they're for the purpose of a protest that I approve of, then they're less dangerous. Then you're just going to believe that person's professional judgment less. There's no way around that. What a public health official should say on the question of masks is, here's what we know. I'm not sure...

what people will make of this information. All I can say is, this is all I know. You make a judgment about what to do with it. When instead the public health official decides for himself that he needs to say something he knows isn't true because he thinks people won't be able to handle the truth, that person becomes much harder to trust. And

It's a kind of in miniature. It is what has happened to all of the professions in this century. They have all become harder to trust because they're all trying to do too much and resisting the constraints that professional obligations should impose on them. I guess I'm curious, what can be done, doctor, across the board to recover from the illness that I think you've so astutely diagnosed?

I think that seeing it is the beginning and that seeing it should lead all of us individually where we are to think about how we can be a little more trustworthy. Just as a first step, we have to see that each of us has some role to play in some set of institutions. And we have to ask ourselves, given my role, what should I be doing? Not just what do I want to be doing, but given the position I have here, and maybe it's a position of power, maybe it's not.

Maybe it's the employer. Maybe it's the employee. Maybe it's a student. Maybe it's a teacher. Maybe it's a member of Congress or a president. Given that,

What's required of me in this situation? I think just simply asking that question more in moments of decision can be a beginning, not only toward being a little more responsible and trustworthy, but also demanding more trustworthiness from people in power in our society, seeing that that's what's wrong with what they're doing. They're failing to ask that question. And so demanding that they do.

I think of that as a prerequisite for institutional reforms, for changes in the incentives that confront some of our institutions and elites, because people are responding to incentives. Americans haven't gone crazy. It's just that the way to now achieve success and prominence seems like it requires this kind of deformation. And we need to think about how our institutions can change so that that can change.

This is a cycle, right? Our institutions form us and then we form our institutions and then they form us. And right now that cycle is a vicious cycle. They deform us and we deform them. So where can we enter into that cycle and change things? OK, one more break and then I call Yuval back to ask him some questions about what he makes of all of the talk about American democracy being near death's door. Stay with us.

Yuval, I really appreciate you getting back on the mic. And thanks for being one of my guinea pigs. I think you were the first person, maybe the second, that I interviewed for the show before it was even a show. And I remain really grateful to you. It's really great to be with you. Thank you. So since we last talked, new polling has come out. And it paints a pretty grim picture of where the Republican base is these days.

It appears that somewhere around 60 percent, maybe even a bit more, of Americans who identify with the GOP believe some version of Trump's claim that the last presidential election was stolen or corrupt in some way. A number of them just actually straight up believe that the Democrats successfully conspired to steal the election for Biden.

So the first thing I want to ask is, how do you understand the persistence of this phenomenon and how deep and wide it has traveled? You know, I think in some ways the problem is even more bleak than you suggest, because this notion that about a third of the public and therefore more than half of one party's voters considers the president to be illegitimate is actually not new to the post 2020 situation. So

Almost at any point in the last 20 years, since the 2000 election, if you had asked people, is the president of the moment legitimate, you would have gotten just about a third of Americans saying no. That was true after the 2000 election for that election's particular reasons. And you can find Gallup asking that question.

Exactly a year after the election in 2001, they found 66% of registered Democrats in their survey results said, no, President George W. Bush is not the legitimate president. Have there been any Republicans legitimately elected president of the United States since Eisenhower?

A smaller portion, but still a significant portion, said the same thing about Barack Obama because of a variety of racist conspiracy theories about where he was born. He acts like a Muslim. He talks like a Muslim. Obama is a Muslim. He's a terrorist. Nobody will ever tell me different. We don't even know if he's a citizen. Then with Trump. Voter registration systems in at least two states are...

maybe 10 states or maybe 20 states, had been probed or breached to some level by, again, hackers. The various kinds of Russia conspiracies led to the same effect. This story, our story, our generation's story of the bizarre Russian hacking of our election. So in 2017, you can find...

A Harris ABC poll that finds that about a third of the public, so a majority of Democrats, a significant majority, said Trump was not the legitimate president of the United States. In fact, Hillary Clinton for a while was...

saying the same thing herself. I believe he knows he's an illegitimate president. And of course now we find Trump feeding a much more elaborate kind of conspiracy narrative. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing.

We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. And it was more than a theory. He worked to make it a reality in a variety of states and tried really to steal the election.

And now, more than a year later, you still find about 60% of Republicans saying that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States. I think the fact that it didn't begin with the big lie, but in a way has reached its peak, at least for the moment, and let's hope its peak with the big lie.

shows you just how ingrained and how troubling this problem is. Conspiracy theories about elections are not new. They've been part of American life for a long time. They're certainly part of the pattern of our politics in the 21st century. But when you look at them in this context, it helps to put into a clearer light the degree of mistrust of

delegitimization of the opposition, of living in fantasy worlds and self-created bubbles, rather than just dealing with reality and dealing with the reality that your party is just not as popular as you might hope. Both parties have had trouble with this. I think the Republican Party at this point is simply being eaten alive by this kind of delusion and these sorts of lies.

And, you know, we're living in a time now when neither party has had a durable majority for a generation. And I think, among other things, this is one effect of that very, very long period of deadlock when we don't have a majority and a minority and neither party can respect the other as a legitimate actor in our politics. A lot of Republicans that are running for office basically say this. If you want me to win my election,

I've at least got to pay lip service to this or else a Democrat or more likely, you know, an even bigger Trumper is going to win. And wouldn't you rather have me than Marjorie Taylor Greene? That's basically their argument. And if you'd rather have me than that, I have to compromise. I have to please the base.

What do you say to those people? So I think they are underestimating their voters and even Republican primary voters who in the early stages are the voters they obviously care about most.

I think the notion that living in this lie is necessary to win elections is a failure of imagination. And in fact, it's a pretty broad-based failure in our politics, the notion that you have to speak to the most pressing priority of your most loyal primary voters in order to win. It's actually a strange way to think about how democracy works.

And I think it has to do with that dynamic that we basically have had a politics without winners now for 20 years. Since the beginning of the 21st century, neither party's been able to hold onto a majority. And rather than be impressed by the fact that they're not popular enough to win on a regular basis, both parties feel like they're almost there all the time. And their sense is not that they're losing all the time, but they're very close to winning and they just have to try the same thing over and over again.

And they both get stuck in these loops. The Republican loop is particularly self-destructive in this period. A lot of Republican politicians, in order to explain to themselves the kind of hold that Donald Trump has over their voters, which can be hard to understand, have tried to adopt the style and the tactics and some of the substantive arguments that Trump makes. And they feel like they can't walk away from these. They can't put any distance between themselves and these lies. In many cases, that's just all they are.

Rather than try to offer voters something that speaks to their needs, that speaks to their priorities, that speaks to their concerns, they're trying to sort of play again and again to play act that script that they think is necessary to win primary voters.

I think they're putting themselves in this straitjacket. I think it's a failure of imagination. And the notion that this is what voters want is an insult to our democracy. And that if they ask themselves, what can I offer that might actually win me a majority on election day? Wherever they are, they would end up in a pretty different place than the big lie that they seem to be stuck in. So Yuval, to pull back a little bit more broadly here.

We have Donald Trump going around doing these huge rallies, telling his supporters that they can no longer trust the outcomes of elections. And on the other side of the aisle, you have progressives like AOC, but also people we think of as moderates like President Joe Biden, saying pretty wild things, saying things like America is just like it was in the Jim Crow era.

or worse. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. And recently, the president took it even further, where he said that if the Democrats voting rights bill didn't pass and it didn't pass, then there would be reason to question the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. Do you do you think that they would in any way be illegitimate?

I'm not saying it's going to be legit. The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is a direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed. This rhetoric of sowing doubt brazenly and explicitly seems like a change to me.

And I worry if it's heading to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where on the right and left, people are saying, look, your opponents are trying to steal your vote. They're trying to take away your vote until that's just the thing that everyone comes to believe.

and that the only legitimate elections are the ones where your side wins. If the Democrats fail, it might be the end of American democracy. I think we're one election away from the end of American democracy. If they take over in 2022, that is the end of democracy. Death to democracy. The death of democracy. The death of democracy as we know it. I think that that's the kind of concern that ought to guide how we think about taking care of the underlying trust that's necessary for our democracy to work.

We absolutely are in this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy or a vicious cycle where each party reacts to what the other is doing by essentially confirming the fear that motivates the other. And so over and over, and I should say what Donald Trump has done with regard to attacking public trust in elections stands out. It is unique. We shouldn't say that both parties are doing the same thing. That's not right. Donald Trump really tried to steal the last election.

And that is something that we have not seen before. And it's important to see that difference and to recognize how awful that was and that that needs never to be repeated. But it is certainly the case that both parties at this point are attacking the public's trust in elections. I think our thinking about election reform and our election system has to start from a very important premise that almost nobody ever states, which is that our election system is in very good shape.

It is easier than ever to vote in the United States. That was the case before COVID. It is even more so after decades now of making it easier to register, of giving people more options, more time. Everywhere in the country, it's easier to vote than it's ever been. And at the same time, we have basically no fraud in our elections. Levels of fraud are just vanishingly rare. They're not enough to affect any significant elections anywhere.

at any point in our lifetimes. So if what we want is access and integrity, we have that. And we actually have a lot to be proud of. In 2020, under very difficult conditions, the system performed extremely well in every state. And everything worked right up until the day of the final certification in Congress, January 6th. What happened there, of course, was corrupt interference from the president, various kinds of cynical games by some member of Congress.

some members of Congress, and it probably argues for reforms of the Electoral Count Act. But the broader system of administering elections actually turned out to work very well. And yet both parties in the year or so since then

have been telling their voters not to trust that system. The Democrats say that it has to be nationalized and taken away from state officials so that it can be trusted. Republicans say there's rampant fraud and you've got to change all kinds of rules about how people vote and when people vote.

None of these things is necessary. None of these things is responsive to any actual problems. And by the way, none of these things would actually make a big difference either. I think the problem with the Democrats' election bills is not that they would destroy our elections, but that they undermine public trust in our elections. And similarly, the Republican bills in the states are

I actually don't think they'd make a very big difference in terms of access, but they're telling voters that their state legislators want to make it harder for them to vote. And I think that's just crazy. Both parties are essentially telling voters now, if we don't get the laws we're trying to get, you shouldn't trust the next election. And the fact is, you should trust the next election.

because there are a lot of reasons now to think that our election system is in better shape than it's ever been in. It's easier to vote and there's no fraud. If we could start from there...

and think, where are there smaller problems for us to fix? Those could be done, and maybe they could be done in bipartisan ways. There's no excuse for the kind of partisan election laws that both parties have been trying to advance, and really no excuse for the kinds of things that President Biden's been saying, the kinds of things that some Republicans in the states are saying that try to undermine trust. Without trust in the system, democracy just cannot work.

if people can't say well everybody voted it didn't come out the way I wanted and next time I'm gonna have to try again and persuade more people

then we can't have a democracy. And that means that trust, sustaining, rebuilding, and helping that trust operate is absolutely essential if we're going to keep a democratic system of government. So I think there is reason to worry. This is not at all imaginary, and it's not at all the usual way of things to have both parties attacking public confidence like this. One of the things I like about you is that you're so sober and...

Careful and calm. But I don't feel that calm about this. And I wonder why we don't just say explicitly these people are lying. They're lying. This country is not anything like it was in the Jim Crow South. No. Sorry. The outcome of the 2020 election was not rigged. It was not stolen.

Why can't we just put it that way? I think it is very important to say the truth plainly. We're not living in the Jim Crow South. The last election was not stolen. A lot of people in our public life are saying things about our democracy that they know are not true, or at the very least that they should know are not true. And it is important to say that. But I also think that it's important in the heat of our political moment to

to maintain some degree of calm. Because once we enter into the hysterical debate that is at this point our cross-partisan culture war, it's very, very hard to step out of it. And I think particularly for people who do have a point of view, who do have a side, and I'm on the right, I'm a conservative, it's very important not to become

the hysterical advocate for that side, because at that point it becomes impossible to see the weaknesses in your own position. It becomes impossible to tell the difference between what you know and what you don't know. And some level of calm really is required of us as citizens. You know, there are a lot of things that are demanded of leaders in a democracy, and we all kind of have a sense of what that is, and we can tell when people are failing to do it. And a lot of people are failing to do it now.

the kinds of leadership responsibilities that would allow politicians to avoid the sorts of lies they're engaged in, to avoid the kind of breakdown in our system that's made this possible. But there are also responsibilities of citizens in a democracy.

And I think there is a certain level of maturity that's required of citizens who are going to operate in a situation where we're constantly being assaulted with various kinds of extreme and hysterical arguments. You know, at the very beginning of the Federalist Papers, Federalist One, which isn't really one of the classics, people don't read it, Alexander Hamilton

introduces the papers by talking to his readers about what they're about to experience in the debate about the ratification of the Constitution. And he says there are important questions in this argument, but it's not going to feel like we're debating important questions. People are going to call each other names. It's going to be hysteria. It's going to be insanity. It's going to be all kinds of crazy accusations. And you've got to think your way through that and ask yourself, what actually is at issue and what do I think about it?

I think we have to take that to heart now. And in a moment like this, when nobody can really get to the core issues that might point us towards solutions in our country, or that might make some room for accommodation, for bargaining, for compromise, if all we're doing is engaging in our worst fears and assuming the worst about one another,

then we really can't get out of this situation. And I think we have to ask ourselves, how do we get out of it? How do we build our way back to a more functional democracy? And the answer to that does involve a certain kind of civic responsibility that, among other things, means keeping your head while things are going crazy. And that's not just something our leaders need to do. It's something we all have to try to do anyway. Yuval, last question.

A recent poll from Georgetown University found that eight in 10 American voters said that they want compromise and common ground from their political leaders. But two thirds of them said that if they don't get that, if we don't arrive at a place of a shared reality, that America could be on a path to civil war. Do you think that that's overblown?

What do you make of that sentiment? And most importantly of all, how do we rebuild the trust that we so desperately need? I would say that a fear of actual civil war probably is overblown, but a fear of genuine breakdown, of it becoming impossible for this vast, diverse society to hold together and address its problems again.

That's not overblown at all. That fear is very well grounded in the experience of this past generation in our politics. And I think there are a lot of reasons to worry now that we've lost the knack for solving problems through the institutions of our government in ways that enable accommodation and bargaining and compromise.

I think that is the question now. How does this society, this vast, diverse, divided democracy address the problems that it has without social breakdown, without falling into something that if not a civil war is at least a breakdown of our governing institutions?

My own sense, and this is the subject of the next book I'm writing actually, is that the answer to that question is the Constitution. That our Constitution was created for that purpose, to allow a vast, diverse society to govern itself, and that the tools that it gives us to do that are tools that take our differences very seriously. They don't imagine that these differences are going to go away. They let us negotiate. They let us bargain. They really prioritize stability,

in a way that allows us to avoid our problems becoming civil war. And of course, we haven't always succeeded in doing that in America, and we've had an actual civil war. But broadly speaking, our constitutional system gives us tools to deal with our problems in ways that can allow us to rebuild trust, even when it has been lost. One of those tools... I love everything you're saying. It's exactly where I am.

I'm also right now just today editing a very big piece about sort of the unraveling of the law and the undermining at our most elite law schools, but increasingly now like in actual courts of the idea of equality under the law, due process, the idea that, you know, people should be judged based on their deed, not based on their identity.

There was one anecdote that came to mind as you were just speaking, which is at Boston College Law School recently, a constitutional law professor asked the students in his class, who does not think that we should scrap the Constitution? And according to a student in the class, not a single person raised their hand. So what do we do about that?

Because as you would, I think, agree, institutions are people. And if people sort of lose faith in what those institutions stand for, then we're lost. And I fear that that's sort of where we are. Absolutely. I think that so many of our elite institutions have lost the sense of their purpose. And, you know, the purpose of a law school ultimately is a professional purpose. It's to form lawyers who serve other people in our society as agents, right?

And very few of our elite law schools really function that way anymore. And of course, contemporary progressivism attacks the Constitution in an extraordinarily direct way and treats the Constitution as the problem to be solved. I think that part of what it would take to respond to that and to effectively answer that and ultimately defeat that

is an argument that treats the Constitution as a solution to the problems that we face. Not just as necessary because it's always been there or as required because it's the supreme law of the land, but as an actual solution to the actual problems we confront, as a system that lets us address problems in ways that respect majority rule but also protect minorities, which the Constitution does in an extraordinary way,

and a system that allows us to solve problems by bargaining and accommodating each other, that takes seriously the reality of different views and different priorities and different interests, and says the way for these to be resolved is for them to be worked out through negotiation, particularly in Congress. I think that takes a way of arguing and speaking to the public about the Constitution that has been almost completely lost now in American political life.

It takes a way of understanding the Constitution as a problem-solving tool, and the problem it is meant to solve is exactly the problem we have now, is how does a diverse, mass society address its problems? That's going to take working almost from the ground up to rebuild a case for our Constitution and ultimately for our society in the face of a set of assaults on our Constitution and our society that

that are unfair, that are not well-founded, that are in many cases untrue, but that are winning the day because they're not being answered, because they're not being taken on. And so I think when we ask ourselves, how do we begin? Not just despairing at instances of these kinds of

of failures of elite institutions. But what do you do in response? What do you teach the rising generation? What do you say to your children about America? I think that argument has to begin with a sense of how our society is built to address exactly the problems we face.

and why it's a mistake to see it as some kind of anachronism that has nothing to say to our moment. It was made for this moment. And so this is the moment when we've got to recover our confidence in it, first as individuals, and then ultimately as a society. Yuval Levin, thank you as always so much for your time. Thank you.

Thanks for listening and thank you to Yuval for recording not just once but twice. As always, if you have guest ideas, topic ideas, debate recommendations, please email us at tips at honestlypod.com. See you soon.