Yuval Levin is back with an optimistic take about the lessons from Kevin McCarthy's agonizing fight to become Speaker
Release Date: 01/12/2023
Eliza Griswold's new book Circle of Hope is a cautionary tale about placing too much hope in your church
The Long Game
Eliza Griswold's new book is about a church in Philadelphia that was started by a couple who became dramatic converts to Christianity in the 1970's. They became Jesus people. And unlike many others in that movement, they stayed pretty radical. Griswold's book tells the story of this couple's attempt to hand the church off to the next generation. It doesn't go well. I thought the book was an example of something I’ve lived, experienced and observed: placing far too much hope in what a local church can do and provide. Griswold is a contributing writing for The New Yorker and directs the...
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Major Garrett talks about Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
The Long Game
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The Long Game
Aurelian Craiutu is the author of Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals. Craiutu is the chair of Indiana University's political science department. He is reclaiming a word and idea — moderation — that is typically despised and criticized as weak and cowardly. This is a misunderstanding of what moderation is, he insists. Moderation is not for the weak or the indecisive, Craiutu says. Instead, it is a fighting creed which requires courage, strength, and savvy. It's not for everyone, he says. In other words, the implication is that some people don't have what it takes to be a...
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Yuval Levin's "American Covenant" is a blueprint for peace-making and effective governance
The Long Game
It is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just finished watching the ceremony in France, where they honored WWII vets who still live, and those who never came home. It was incredibly moving. But we can't just look back and grow emotional during inspiring video montages. We must think about how to avoid the paths of division that could send future young men and women to similar fates. We can honor those brave WWII vets further — now — by listening to those who are trying to help us remember how to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than through violence or force. Yuval Levin is...
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The Long Game
John Inazu's new book is . John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He is also a former Air Force officer who was on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. And finally, he is the son of Japanese-American father in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage. John's book is structured...
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We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy. But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with. Remember ? "Who chooses the choices?" That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the...
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What is a Christian politics? Michael Wear's new book argues it's mostly about who we are
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Break the system. That's what one New Hampshire voter, a 58-year old retired Army officer, said he wants the president to do, in . It's only the most obvious example of many of us tend to do from time to time. We pretend, or actually believe, that politics is a form of magic. In other words, we think we can elect a person, or pass a law — as if we were waving a wand — and this will fix our problems. But Michael Wear argues in The Spirit of Our Politics that a politics of magic is like trying to take a shortcut, and it won't work. "Our society, politics,...
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David Leonhardt's book joins a chorus of warnings for the Democrats
The Long Game
The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial bias and discrimination against them. And things have not improved equally in recent decades. Things have improved since then. But the rate of steady and ongoing improvement and progress has slowed in many ways,
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Tim Alberta's new book portrays a tug of war for the soul of American Christianity
The Long Game
Tim Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age of Extremism, is a sobering look at the results in history when a religious movement morphs into a political movement, and allows its identity to be taken over by political imperatives and goals.
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BUILDERS Interview: Matt Murphy on how community & music help him fight the paralysis of our times
The Long Game
I wanted to interview Matt for my Builders series because, as he says: “There's so much in the world that's challenging ... and all the hard times can have a certain degree of paralysis to them."
info_outlineBack 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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