As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, few people have thought harder about the republic than Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Last week, we spoke about the Supreme Court’s landmark term, why a Congress full of ambitious politicians refuses to use its power and whether America survives the artificial intelligence revolution.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Damir Marusic: How do you think our constitutional order is holding up today?
Yuval Levin: I think it’s fair to say that the system goes through phases of real trouble, and that therefore what we’re witnessing isn’t uniquely unhealthy. But it is serious, and each phase has its own characteristics and requires its own responses.
Part of the trouble is that the sources of the problem have to do with weakness as much as strength. The system is built to respond to excessive strength; it’s not that well suited to addressing real challenges of weakness. And Congress, the core institution, is weak and has been for a generation and more.
The Supreme Court this term handed down a slew of rulings, checking the presidency in a lot of ways but also empowering the executive branch. Is that a problem?
You have to think about the structure of the constitutional system. My rule of thumb is that the court is saying to the president: You’re in charge of the executive branch.
The presidency hasn’t been able to exert authority over people who nominally work for him — a function of the long history of the American administrative state. The court is addressing that problem. But at the same time, it’s saying to the president: You aren’t in charge of our system of government, and ultimately you’re answerable to Congress and to the law.
President Donald Trump came into office trying to push the bounds on that question, and to exert authority that belongs plainly to Congress. The court has pushed back on those fronts very effectively — in the tariffs case, in the birthright citizenship case, in the National Guard case, in various immigration cases. But he’s also now more in charge of his own executive branch than presidents have been for a long time, and you see that in cases that have involved the removal power and the role of the administrative state. To my mind, this was probably the most important term of the last 20 years.
Are there dangers to having an empowered executive? Trump and his recent predecessors have simply governed through executive order.
There are certainly reasons to worry, but I think it’s worth seeing the balance the court is aiming for. The president is being empowered over the administrative state — the executive agencies — but where he’s tried to exert authority in spaces that belong to Congress, he’s met quite a bit of resistance. The court has been creating room for Congress to act.
The challenge is that it can’t force Congress to do so. Congress, unlike the other branches, has only powers. It has no duties in our system. If it chooses to do nothing, it is allowed to do nothing. The idea that you would have an entire institution full of ambitious politicians who don’t want to use the power they’re given does not seem to have occurred to James Madison.
I think you could summarize the last 25 years of administrative law decisions by the Supreme Court as essentially saying: Congress, please do your job. The courts are being drawn into uses of judicial power they don’t think are appropriate. They’re trying to get out of politics, but it’s impossible, because presidents keep filling vacuums created by Congress. Ultimately the way to get the system back into balance is for the legislature to reassert itself.
Are you hopeful that Congress can do so?
Yes. But it will require some changes in the incentives legislators confront. They aren’t acting irrationally. From a distance, Congress can look like a circus full of clowns. But its members, generally speaking, are serious people who want to succeed.
But what is the definition of success? If the answer looks like bringing home concrete benefits, showing that you can legislate, winning substantive policy victories — then members will invest themselves in legislative work. If the answer looks like needing to be famous, having a big voice in the national political culture and on social media — then they’ll do that.
The latter is currently the answer, and the reason has to do with the way Congress has been centralized. All the big decisions are made by four, maybe eight, people. The rest don’t have legislative work to do most of the time, and they do other things instead — to become prominent. To change that, you have to change the way Congress works.
Do you see signs of anyone trying to make such a change?
There are certainly people in both parties who see this as an opportunity. They tend to be in purple states, where persuading voters from the other party is still possible.
The trouble is they’re not rewarded for acting that way. To even make it into the process, you have to win primaries. And voters in those contests are the people who least want to see the constitutional system work properly. The system works well when it’s premised on negotiation and bargaining. Primary voters see that as a failure of nerve, a failure of principle.
In American history, the people who have broken out of this level of polarization — and we’ve been this 50-50 only once before, at the end of the 19th century — have been governors from competitive states who push their party in a direction it’s not comfortable going. Such figures have a lot of experience in rooms where not everybody is nodding their head in agreement all the time. They know how to be persuasive; they know that they need to build a coalition.
There are people like that in contemporary America, but their path to leadership isn’t easy to imagine.
You’ve been writing and thinking about AI lately. Do you think it’s challenging the republican order?
The questions raised by AI are questions about us. They’re questions about the nature of the human person, about the character of a free society. That’s always true of genuinely transformative technologies.
These are tools. They have their own character. They drive us in some directions. But what we choose to do with them is a function of how we understand what we should be doing. The characteristic risk that a republic faces — and Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in the 1830s — is being lulled into passivity.
We have seen that danger arise with every wave of new technology in the 21st century. When I was a graduate student, there was a sense that the internet would lead us to direct democracy. I thought so myself.
In retrospect, we didn’t stop to ask whether that’s what people would want to do with it. And of course the answer was no. It made us into more passive recipients of entertainment and information. Social media seemed like it would make us active — we’re the producers here. But it too is mostly now a channel for consuming entertainment and information — short videos that lull us into passivity.
Our first reaction to AI was that it would empower us to be active and engaged — clearly it lets us do a lot more than before. My worry is that it will follow the same pattern. Literally whatever we want can be created for us at will. If you just step back from humanity in the last 20 years and ask what these people want, it’s cat videos and pornography. AI is going to be great at giving us that — if that’s what we want.
But what should we want?
I think AI is a much bigger deal than even the internet and social media. But the worries we need to have about it are the worries we always need to have about new forms of human power: worries about idolatry — about treating this as something we ought to worship rather than something that exists to advance our well-being.
Especially in Silicon Valley, it seems as if some people are worshiping AI. It’s as if there’s a God-shaped hole in people’s lives. Do we need God for a functioning republic?
I think we do, but I don’t think that means there needs to be a single shared religion at the level of theological particulars. We think of ourselves as a young republic, and we’re youthful in some ways — dynamic — but we’re also the oldest republican regime in the world. We’ve had the same form of government for a long time, and it hasn’t required religious unanimity.
But I do think that it requires some conception of something higher than ourselves.
To my mind, idolatry is a shortcut around the hard work that is required of us if we’re to be a virtuous people. The God of the Bible makes demands on people on the path to being virtuous. Religion paves a long way to becoming a good person. That’s also true of many other healthy religions around the world.
But people are always attracted to a short way. You just want the outcomes — you just want the rain, you just want the benefits. Idolatry, in Western traditions, has stood as a kind of shortcut. You don’t have to do the work of devotion and commitment. You just pray to this thing, and you get it.
AI is a shortcut engine. It’s a way around the work. And in that sense AI is uniquely dangerous to our capacity to see the need for taking the long way. One of the things that can help us to see that need is religion.
I think that’s also Tocqueville’s way of understanding the place of faith in a free society. It doesn’t mean we all have to agree on everything about theology. But it does mean we have to understand that there’s something more than our desires in the world — and that this something requires of us a mode of living that can help to form us in the direction of virtue. That’s not a bad definition of religion, I think.
It feels like we’re at a pivotal moment. On balance, are you optimistic? Do we have another 250 years in our republic?
I’m hopeful. I’m not an optimist — I’m a conservative, so I have low expectations of people. But hope says we have the resources to do this right.
Americans have always been attracted to a certain pessimism about the prospects of our society. From the very beginning, we’ve thought we’re not really up to this — or more specifically, our children are not really up to this. Our national anthem is a song about barely surviving the night: The great American achievement in that song is that the flag was still there.
We’re worried now, and we should be. But Americans have proved themselves to be able to act on that worry. And if you think about the next 25 years, the next 50, who’s going to dominate that period? It’s the United States.
This is ours to lose, and we could lose it. But I am hopeful that we may make the most of it.
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