Yuval Levin is back with an optimistic take about the lessons from Kevin McCarthy's agonizing fight to become Speaker

The Long Game

Back in the summer of 2017 when I started this podcast, my first guest was Yuval Levin. And over the years, Yuval has been one of my most consistent conversation partners, in informal lunches and on this podcast.

Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). This is his fifth time on this show now. Each time has been a really rich and deep conversation, and this time is no different.

I found myself wondering what Yuval would think about the battle last week in the House of Representatives over the Speakership. All week as the fight raged on the House floor, I kept seeing some of the pioneering work that Yuval has done represented in the ways that observers and pundits thought about and talked about what was happening.

Back in April of 2018, Yuval gave a series of three lectures at Princeton University called, "Why Institutions Matter: Three Lectures on Breakdown and Renewal." These lectures became the basis of the book "A Time to Build," which was released at the beginning of 2020.

One of the fundamental insights of those lectures and that book was that so many of us today think of institutions as platforms, rather than molds. A platform is something you stand on top of, for self-promotion. A mold is something you go inside of, which shapes you. I had, like Yuval, been thinking a lot after the 2016 election about why our institutions were so broken, and his arguments were incredibly penetrating in helping me think more clearly about the problem.

So plenty of people were pointing out that Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and some others were basically just opposing McCarthy to make themselves more famous. Yuval's thinking has helped a lot of people see this more clearly.

But I wondered what Yuval was seeing now that the rest of us might not be. And when we sat down, it was another moment of feeling like someone was giving us a mirror to look around the corner, not at what will be, but at what could be.

We talk about a lot here, and if you have any interest in American politics, or Congress, you'll find this of great interest. But I think those who really know politics well, or who work in Congress, will find this of extreme interest.

In short, Yuval agrees that the Speakership fight was chaotic, but that this was not necessarily a bad thing. He's written a New York Times op-ed this week explaining why to some degree, but he talks at much greater length here about his thinking.

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