Yuval Levin > Quotes

“Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones.”
― Yuval Levin

“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.”
― Yuval Levin

“Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all,” Burke writes.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“The poor are more isolated—economically, culturally, and socially—than they used to be in America.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“we must all accept the responsibilities that come with the positions we hold, and we must ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well.”
― Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

“It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars—whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“At the core of this unity was not just a common set of ideals, but also the notion of commonality itself as an ideal.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“We stand a chance of helping people change their behavior by enabling them to live in communities with norms that encourage better behavior—to live in a culture in which the most obvious and socially acceptable thing to do in a given circumstance is also the morally preferable choice.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“No eager democrat, Burke rejected the notion that a member of the Commons must simply express the views of those who sent him, even telling an audience of his own constituents in 1774 that he owed them his judgment rather than his obedience.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“And it restricts the power of majorities through an assortment of mediating mechanisms that require agents of change to engage in a complicated dance of coalition building. These counter-majoritarian restraints often feel not only frustrating but, in fact, divisive, because they force us to confront the reality of the existence of opposing views in our society, even when our side wins elections and makes appointments. But those divisions are there whether we confront them or not, and it is by being forced to confront them that we are moved to overcome them through negotiation.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“That logic of American partisanship came under a more sustained and ultimately more effective assault in the Progressive Era, however, precisely because of its relation to the logic of the Constitution. As we have seen, the early progressives critiqued the American system for lacking coherence and sacrificing responsiveness, energy, and effectiveness in government for the sake of stability, safety, and cohesion in society. They argued that this trade-off was neither successful nor necessary, and that unity could be achieved by unified leadership, especially presidential leadership, not by aimless negotiation. So they sought a politics in which different parties offered thoroughly distinct and comprehensive policy programs, the public selected among them on Election Day, and then the winning party would have essentially unlimited power to pursue its program until the public voted for someone else. The competition among factions in society would not be resolved by their bargaining within the institutions of government but by voters choosing among them at the ballot box and letting whichever won a majority deploy all the powers of government in the service of its vision.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Institutions that function well and achieve their ends tend to encourage more responsible citizenship and leadership and to restrain our worst impulses and more responsible citizens, and leaders then, in turn, enable institutions to function better. But when our institutions are dysfunctional or deformed, our habits and behavior become broken as well, and we grow cynical and wary of one another, which further harms our institutions”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“There are only perches within society, and we can elevate our sights by considering how things might look from those of others.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Over time, as liberalization and deconsolidation became the dominant ethic of American life, the consensus broke down and cultural liberalism came to be at least implicitly the ideology of the American elite.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“This was not the intent of the reformers who advanced such changes in both parties. They sought to democratize the parties’ internal procedures and so to give the public more of a voice in the earliest stages of the political process. But the result has been a less democratic American party system, because it is one that empowers only the most active fringes of both parties—and especially the small percentage of voters who participate in party primaries. Those tend to be the voters least interested in bargaining and compromise and least inclined to see the point of the accommodationist structure of our system’s core institutions. Primaries have actually empowered elites—elites who are amateur activists with a lot of time for politics, not those who are party professionals but elites nonetheless, and not the broad public. By making office seekers most attentive to those voters rather than to the marginal voters essential for broader coalition building and who had been the focus of party professionals, the modern primary system has drawn into politics a type of politician who is not well suited to the work of the institutions, and so to the office to which he or she is seeking election.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“Conservatives often begin from gratitude because we start from modest expectations of human affairs—we know that people are imperfect, and fallen, and weak; that human knowledge and power are not all they’re cracked up to be; and we’re enormously impressed by the institutions that have managed to make something great of this imperfect raw material. So we want to build on them because we don’t imagine we could do better starting from scratch.
Liberals often begin from outrage because they have much higher expectations—maybe even utopian expectations—about the perfectibility of human things and the potential of human knowledge and power. They’re often willing to ignore tradition and to push aside institutions that channel generations of wisdom because they think we can do better on our own.”
― Yuval Levin

“These begin in loving family attachments. They spread outward to interpersonal relationships in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, religious communities, fraternal bodies, civic associations, economic enterprises, activist groups, and the work of local governments.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Our society does not have to be one big “yes” or “no” question over which we are constantly at each other’s throats. It can consist of a diversity of ends pursued by a diversity of means, united by some crucial common ideals”
― Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

“Our keen sense of our own unease does not mean that we are stuck, therefore. It means that we are already moving. But where, and how?”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“In Federalist 62, Madison lays out, in its fullest form, his case for the importance of stability in holding together a republican regime. Too much unpredictability in government threatens the country’s security because it “forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, and all the advantages connected with national character.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to moderate its movements, to substitute little by little an understanding of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men—such is the first duty imposed on those who would guide society in our day.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

“Indeed, Burke argues that change, understood in this way as “a principle of growth,” is not only permissible but essential, and essential precisely to the task of preserving the existing order.49 “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” he writes.50 Such a principle of growth or means of change is intended to be a permanent feature of the regime, not just a path to an ultimate and correct arrangement that would not change further.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“On college campuses, just as in our political institutions, our degraded capacity for unity and solidarity is the result of a degraded capacity for accepting differences. The trouble is not that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.”
― Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

“Courts do resolve disputes, of course, but they resolve disputes over what the law is, not what it should be, and so they are not the proper venue for mediating among competing visions of the public good. They also usually resolve disputes by designating a winner and a loser, which, as we have seen, is not generally an effective way to build common ground. Our great public disputes need to be resolved through the work of the legislature above all. The most valuable service the courts provide to the cause of national unity is in their policing of the rules and boundaries of constitutionalism, and their restricting of the power of majorities to break those rules and boundaries. The courts can do that by insisting on the adherence of officials and citizens to the structure and procedures of the Constitution, which, as we have seen, are designed to advance common action across lines of difference and to build public confidence in the outcome.”
― Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again

“America needs to be careful not to let aging baby boomers define its outlook. We cannot afford to farm out our vision of the future to a retiring generation. We can already see some indications of where that will lead: our political, cultural, and economic conversations today overflow with the language of decay and corrosion, as if our body politic is itself an aging boomer looking back upon his glory days.”
― Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism