Yuval Levin
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Creative destruction is how you learn, break things, and then see how they fall, and you can build something new. And the civil service just isn't going to work that way. That's not really how this system can learn.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yeah. There's 3 million people who work for the federal government. And I think a lot of people's sense of who the kind of modal federal employee is, is probably off. I mean, I would say now people probably think it's somebody who lives in Washington and works from home and shuffles paper. And that's not actually a very common type in federal employment.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Most federal employees don't live in or near D.C. And there are real functions to perform here. It's also worth remembering that that the federal workforce is about as big now as it was 50 years ago. The government has a lot more contractors than it did then.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's taken on a lot of things, but it hasn't really grown the federal workforce much, which means that in those really essential functions that only government employees could do, the federal workforce is actually stretched pretty thin in some important places. We shouldn't underestimate how much we've assigned to our government and how much would be left undone if there weren't people doing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
If you saw a lot of attrition in the FDA, the effects of that would be pretty serious. It's actually quite important that the agencies that keep us safe and healthy operate and do their basic work. This is the basic challenge of administration in a system as big as we're talking about.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
is that there are a lot of effects on the ground that it's possible to think through if you involve the different parts of the system in coming up with the reform. But it's very hard to think through if you're just sitting in a room and coming up with it on your own or just throwing it out there because it's something that worked at Twitter.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And you don't have very much experience in the government, as Musk and his crew do not. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It runs deeper than that because the federal workforce is constrained by a challenge that isn't really present in the private sector, which is that there are salary caps that prevent you from paying the most qualified people the kinds of pay they could get in the private sector, which means that places like not just the VA, but the FDA, NIH, all the Commerce Department sub-agencies –
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Those places are full of people who spend their day sitting across the table from private sector people that they're regulating or working with and thinking, I have the same skill set as this guy, but he's got a much nicer house. Why am I working at the FDA rather than at Pfizer? And now there's an answer to that question. And, you know, a lot of people in those jobs really enjoy them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They like them and they have, you know, they have real significance and authority and that matters to people. But In the federal government, those are the people who are marginally attached to their job, who are constantly thinking, you know, I got to pay for my kid's college in a few years. Shouldn't I be working at a much higher paying contractor job or private sector job?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So that when you make an offer like this buyout offer, it's those people who are thinking, maybe I don't really want to do this job. Whereas the people who are thinking, I can't get another job. I got to stick with this one. I'll do whatever they want.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Those are probably your lower performing employees or at least your less valuable employees so that you're creating a situation where the people who are going to be hardest to replace are the people who are most likely to leave.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think the key to that point is in the sense that they're trying to look strong but not doing it in a way that actually is strong. They face a very challenging fact. As much as they want to act as though they've just won a massive election victory and they now dominate everything, they've actually won a very narrow election victory.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And their majorities in Congress, especially in the House, are very, very narrow. The House majority is the narrowest majority we've seen since there have been 50 states. And that means they can't get much through Congress on their own.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
and the administration is operating so far without really any sense that they need to get anything through Congress except the one big reconciliation bill that'll take care of taxes and spending for the year, they're not thinking in terms of how to advance their agenda as a legislative agenda. The secret to strong executive authority has a lot to do with stability.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The kind of sense of security that an effective administration can provide depends on knowing where you're headed and moving there incrementally in a way that allows you to achieve big things without making people scared of what you're up to. I think the logic of administrative power that we're seeing operating here so far is just about the opposite of that.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's the sense that you show strength by coming in and tearing everything down and starting everything over and doing big things right away at the start so that there's a kind of shock and awe that leaves people thinking, wow, these people are really assertive. And that has happened. I think people do have that sense. And obviously there are some advantages you gain by conveying that sense.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
You do scare people into doing what you want some, and you do give the impression that you're strong. But ultimately, it's very hard to make durable change in that way. Part of the reason I do think is exactly as you say, that durable change actually requires legislation in our system. Anything that isn't legislated isn't durable.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But part of it is also just the sense that doing everything right away, everything at the start, and creating this sense of disjunction, of a break... actually doesn't give people the impression that things are under control. It gives people the impression that things are out of control. Bye.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Well, it's a lot depends on exactly what they mean by presidential priorities here. So the OMB memo was about federal grants and loans. And the thing about grants and loans is they're not specified. Their recipients are not specified in law. They are an amount of money that is designated for a specific purpose.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And then the executive branch is charged with deciding among applicants who should receive them. And in making those decisions, there is a large amount of discretion afforded to the executive branch. Those grants do represent the president's priorities. And, you know, in a sense, they could have done what this memo wants to do without the pause.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They could have just told all the agencies, review all the grants you're giving. And if there are places where they clearly violate one of these new executive orders or something else on this list we give you. You're empowered to stop that now and provide the grant to another recipient or open it back up for competition. They could have done that without a pause and therefore without the chaos.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think the decision to stop it all is a way of asserting a kind of authority over all federal spending. and saying, Congress says how much we should spend, but the president says on what.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And that's a fight they want to have, a fight over impoundment, where they want to suggest that the president basically has the authority to take Congress's legislative authorizations for spending as just a kind of beginning. And fundamentally, this is an executive decision.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
There is a kind of presidentialism here that is, I think, rooted in ultimately in a kind of progressive presidentialism, a Woodrow Wilson argument that the president speaks for the country. Only the president speaks for the entire country. And therefore, presidential actions are more legitimate than congressional actions. And as you say, represent the will of the public.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think they're wrong about this. I think they're ultimately going to fail in court on that front. But they are trying to make that assertion.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think there's always a certain amount of where you sit determining where you stand when people talk about politics. And everybody does this. I'm sure I do it too. Where when the people you like are powerful in Congress but not in the White House, you talk a lot about the importance of Congress. We're going to see Democrats do this over the next two years, for example.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And when it's the other way around, you talk the other way around. But there's also an actual principle difference about the nature of the Constitution between a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats. And I think what we've seen over the last 15 years is a kind of uneasy combination of both of these things. To my mind, this is the way to worry about the Trump administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
A lot of what they want to do in terms of the political valence of federal public policy are things that I agree with. A lot of what they want to do in terms of driving us away from DEI and towards a more kind of colorblind federal policy I think is great and very important. What they're doing on education policy so far I think is very good. I'm going to agree with them about a lot of things.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I'm a conservative. But the approach to the structure of the system worries me a lot. I worry about constitutionalism more than about public policy in this moment. And I think ultimately constitutionalism is more important than public policy. And the two biggest worries that I have about the constitutional system, not just now but in general – First of all, are the weakness of Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think a lot of our other problems come from that fact. And secondly, is the overbearing and arbitrary character of the administrative state. And so far, it seems to me that both of those problems are going to get worse in the next four years and not better. Certainly the weakness of Congress, where a lot of Republican members now just want to surrender their power to a president they now like.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And so they talk in terms of I heard a member of the House say to another during the debate over the vote on the speaker at the beginning of this Congress saying, well, President Trump should have the speaker that he wants. That is not how our Constitution works. And Congress should have a sense of its own authority and its own dignity that is distinct from the president.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And on the other hand, I think this rushing in with arbitrary power and assertions of authority at the beginning of a new administration suggests that even though I may like the policy direction that the administrative agencies are going to take in this administration, they're going to continue to act in an arbitrary and overbearing way that creates enormous problems for our system of government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yeah. The separation of powers is not just a division of power into three so that it's a little safer because it's divided. Power is channeled through three different kinds of institutions. The first one, the primary one, is a legislature. And the reason it's primary is that the legislature is representative of the American public.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The president is elected, but the president was not thought of as a representative figure. That office is one person in a vast country. One person can't really represent that vast country. That has to be done by a plural institution like Congress. And Congress has a specific kind of work.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It frames out, it builds out frameworks of law that are then going to direct the work of administration in the future. The president administers, and the idea of administration is almost lost to us now. We think of what the president does basically as saying, this is what should happen, and then things happen.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But actually, the most important part of the president's job is the making of those things happen. It is the working of the arms of government, of the various tools and implements to actually turn will into action. And the courts have a different job than both of those.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They review past actions and determine whether they were in line with the legal frameworks that Congress had created or with the Constitution. These are very different ways of using power. They're not just power divided into three. And the different ways matter enormously. The interactions between them are really what create the dynamics of our system of government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think our presidents now, this has certainly been true of Donald Trump in his first term and now, but it's also true of the rest of our modern presidents, have a conception of their job that's very legislative. They think their job is to produce those frameworks, to do it through administrative action. And essentially, when Congress can't act, the president will.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Barack Obama actually said that basically in those words. But every modern president has acted as though he believes that. I think that's profoundly wrong and creates huge problems for our system. But among the problems it creates is that the other branches respond to this by also not doing their jobs. None of this is how our system is meant to work.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I think the center of why this has happened is actually the failure of Congress to take ownership of the direction of the system.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Well, I think the reason to look to how the Constitution is intended to work is not to lionize the past, but to address exactly the problems we have now. The most stark fact about the American party system in the 21st century is that it's failing. Both parties are failing. Neither one has been able to form a durable majority coalition in 30 years.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And that has left our politics intensely divided, bitterly polarized, very dysfunctional. And the question we have to ask ourselves is what can we do about this? I think it's worth our looking to the Constitution because there are answers there to what we can do about it. Not because that was some kind of sacred moment at the end of the 18th century and they knew all this stuff we don't know.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I don't think that's right. We know a lot of things they didn't know. We are better than they were in a lot of ways. But they did create a system that is distinctly capable of compelling narrow coalitions to broaden. The logic of the American Constitution... is that only majority rule is legitimate, but majorities are very dangerous to minorities.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And that means that we want a system that forces majorities to grow and broaden before they are empowered. This is what's frustrating about our system, right? You win an election, you still can't do anything. And the reason for that is that the system wants you to first broaden your coalition before you're really able to act. We really resist that now. We don't want to do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
We live in a 50-50 moment and you win 50% plus one. You treat it as this massive, you know, Donald Trump just won 49.8% of the vote in a presidential election. Kamala Harris got 48.3% of the vote. And the Trump folks want to say, we won, we won big, we get to act now. The Constitution says, no, you have to deal with the people you defeated in the election. And they won their seats in Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They won control of various state governments. They are still here, and you have to deal with them. To think about our system only through the lens of the parties is to reject that logic. Now, that's one way to do democracy, right? That's how the parliamentary systems work. Those are legitimate democratic systems.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But I think our system is better for us exactly because it doesn't allow us to work that way and ultimately prefers to produce legitimate public action over producing efficient public action. It forces us to build coalitions that include more people. I think that's what we're missing now.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think the question that I'm left with from that description is responsive to what? To whom? Our problem right now is not that there is this American majority out there that's trying to get its will into action and the system is resisting it. Our problem is that there isn't an American majority out there. The elections of the last 30 years have produced 50-50 results over and over.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
If you look at American political life at almost any moment in our history, you would find a majority coalition holding a very, very complicated kind of coalition together and struggling to keep it hanging together. And you find a minority party struggling to build and broaden its coalition and become a majority.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Both those parties are engaged in coalition building, which is how our system is intended to work. In the last 30 years, and there's really only been one other period like this at the end of the 19th century, which lasted about 20 years, we've had two minority parties at the same time. This is a 50-50 moment, and the challenge is there isn't a clear majority will.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
What we need from our system is not help empowering the majority. What we need from our system is help informing a broader majority. I think we've arrived at this place because we've moved too far from the original intentions of the American constitutional system. which is meant to operate with Congress at its center building coalitions, negotiating across party lines.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So that frustration with this moment should not lead us to abandon that system, but to recover that system. We've had a two-party system for a long time, at least since 1824 and some ways since 1800, so that the system has actually worked as a two-party constitutional system almost from the beginning. What it's failing to do now is facilitate bargaining and deal-making across those lines.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
There's not an easy way to do it, but I think to do it would require, first of all, recognizing that that's what we're not doing. The diagnosis makes a big difference because if the problem is just we're not passing big bills, then you want Congress to be more efficient. So you want to get rid of the filibuster, you want to strengthen party leaders, strengthen party discipline.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
If you think the problem is we're not facilitating bargaining across party lines, then you're Then you love the filibuster, as I do. It's the only reason we've had any bipartisan legislation in the last 15 years. You don't want to strengthen party leaders. You want to strengthen committees. You want to decentralize the budget process.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The difference over which way we should go is very, very important for figuring out how to resolve the kind of frustration we have now, because I don't think presidentialism is going to resolve it. I agree that it is a response to that frustration, but it is a response that isn't going to work. And a better response would begin from a reacquaintance with the logic of our Constitution.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Why? Why? Yeah, this is a great question, and I really agree with the way that you put the problem. I think that you have to begin from the fact that you began with, which is these are ambitious people. Members of Congress are ambitious, smart men and women. I know they can look like clowns from a distance, and a few of them are clowns maybe, but they're pretty impressive people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And they're going to do what it takes to succeed. The question is, what does it take to succeed? What is the definition of success that they're operating with? I think a lot of that is a function of the kinds of incentives that the political system sets up for them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And in this moment, a lot of the definition of success involves having a prominent place in our political theater, which is a very, very fragmented partisan theater. And looking like you are doing a great job of speaking for the team. So every member wants to be seen as the person who really says that thing that the left doesn't want to hear if you're a Republican member.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They define success by social media following, by their prominence in the cable news outlets that matter to their older voters. they don't define their success as much by legislative work by what can you bring home in a funny way the media environment the operating has been both nationalized and fragmented you're not trying to look good on the national news so much as to look good
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
to the particular social media influencer that your most devoted primary voters follow. And that's created a set of incentives that is distant from legislative work. And it's left a lot of members with a sense that investing themselves in their committee work is a waste of time. And so members who are ambitious are channeling their ambition in a direction that seems like it can lead to success.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I think that does create a variety of kind of deformations of legislative work that, from the vantage point of our system of government, makes these members seem to be doing very strange things.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think that's a great insight. And I think people are really understating the possibility that Republicans just won't be able to pass a reconciliation bill in this Congress. They just simply won't be able to pass it together. They have a three vote majority in the House. So what are they going to do about tax reform?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
What are they going to do about renewing the expiring elements of the 2017 tax bill? It's entirely possible that ultimately the only way to do that will be through some bipartisan bill. But they're proceeding now as if that's not even a possibility. It gets back to the question we took up earlier about just what it means to be strong as a president.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And this is actually a very longstanding problem for American presidents. In the very first presidential administration, when George Washington was president, Alexander Hamilton started out just writing legislation. And he wrote these big bills on how to arrange the American economy.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And the response that he got before things really broke down between him and James Madison was Madison saying, if you let us work this out, we're going to end up in a similar place, but we'll own it. And people aren't going to feel like they're voting on Alexander Hamilton's bill. Let Congress do this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Hamilton didn't agree, and it created enormous problems for him and ultimately had a very bad effect on his own political future. And ever since then, there's been this irony that the president is often strongest when he sets the basic parameters and says, look, if the bill doesn't do this, then I'll veto it. But otherwise, Congress works it out.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I think our modern presidents in particular have so internalized this kind of deformed sense of their role that they don't see that ultimately their success depends on legislative action. They think they can be remembered for being great presidents for their administrative actions. And it's just not true. Who are the modern presidents we think highly of? It's FDR and the New Deal.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
What was the New Deal? The New Deal was legislation, right? What was the Great Society? Great Society was not a set of administrative actions. It was big bills that the president shepherded through. He certainly gave them a lot of direction, but there was a lot of negotiation that was not about him in that process. Ronald Reagan's tax bill was not just Ronald Reagan's tax bill.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And a lot of Democrats voted for that bill because they were involved in negotiating it and they got some things they wanted in it. And at the end of the day, we call it Ronald Reagan's tax bill anyway because we remember our presidents for the legislative achievements that their leadership makes possible. And often that leadership is a kind of careful direction from a distance.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think this gets at actually a very deep point about the lesson to be learned from Trump's first time around. I think the people around President Trump and Trump himself have come to the conclusion that what didn't work last time had to do with Trump being restrained. That where they failed was because they had kind of traditional Republicans in various places.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And their sense that they walked away with was when he was restrained, he didn't succeed. And if he could just be himself, he would do a lot better. I think that's exactly the wrong lesson to draw from the successes and failures of Trump's first time around. And that where he actually did well was where he pressed those traditional kind of Republicans and they pressed him.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And you ended up in a place where some of his distinctly populist approach was able to influence their more traditional conservative approach, and the result landed in a place that worked. I think that's what the tax bill looks like. That's what some of his foreign policy moves look like. But their sense is we just have to have a purer Trumpism.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And so this time around, the insistence on loyalty, on being part of the team, is really intense. You see that in their hiring. You see that in their senior appointments. They're really placing an enormous premium not on having the experience to run this department but on never saying no to Donald Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think they're going to pay a heavy price for that because nobody's always right and certainly Donald Trump's not always right. The sense that if I step up and say, I don't know, this one's not a good idea, that I'm going to be treated like a traitor and ultimately I'll be out of here is very bad for decision making in any institution, in any situation.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
But it's certainly very bad in a presidential administration. So, for example, let's think again about the effects of the order to suspend all federal grants. Think about that guy who runs that Medicaid portal. And he's sitting there thinking, does this mean I should shut down Medicaid payments? That can't be right. That guy should call somebody and say, is this what it means?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I don't think that's a good idea. But if that guy thinks, well, they're just going to call me a wimp, they're going to call me a squish and fire me, then he's not going to do it. And you've lost the ability to administer well by hearing from people on the ground. I think that's going to repeat itself over and over in an administration that doesn't value hearing from outsiders.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And again, the assertion of strength creates weakness. And the sense that what's required to succeed is pushing people around isn't really how any good decision-making can work. It certainly isn't how our system can work. And I think it's going to create a lot of problems.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Republicanism is a very hard term for us to define now. A lot of what it used to mean has been taken over by other terms like democracy and liberalism. But the element of republicanism that's distinct to it is the element of ownership. How do we take ownership of a set of problems rather than who's going to show up and fix this problem for me?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And a citizenship that thinks that way is going to think about the kinds of leaders it selects in terms of the sorts of offices we're asking them to fill. And that means that we think about whether we should elect this person based on some judgment of whether this person can do this particular job. That means we need to know the Constitution a little bit. We need to know what the job is.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
We need to know what we expect of them. I think Americans have generally been fairly good at this, but that it is a skill, a knack we've tended to lose. For the reason you pointed to earlier, which is we just think as partisans now. We think, is this guy on my team or not? Rather than, can this person really be president or not or a senator or not?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yeah, I think it's absolutely central. Character is destiny. I think there's no getting away from character. And the basic reason, especially in the president, the basic reason is that every presidential administration ends up having the personality and character of the president. There is a way in which the Bush administration just had George Bush's personality.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The Obama administration had the kind of feel of Barack Obama at every level. And it's very hard to avoid that. That was certainly true of the Trump administration the first time around. The chaos, the impulsivity, the kind of gruffness was everywhere. It wasn't just him. And it will be again because there's no getting around that. You know, the presidency is a one-person branch of government.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And that means that ultimately the character of the president matters enormously. The character of Congress is a kind of average of 535 people. The character of the president is one person's character. And that means that we need in our presidents the kind of character that we want from the executive branch. This isn't an ideological thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
There are conservative and progressive ways to have the right character to be our president. But it is really a matter of character. And so to my mind, look, there are a lot of things that the Trump administration did the first time and will do this time that I agree with as a matter of policy. But the fundamental problem of character cannot be gotten over. It is not ignorable.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I think that it therefore is a permanent problem with Donald Trump being president. There's no way around it. I think that insight also goes to decision making.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think this actually also gets to the character of presidential strength in an important way. And it was a problem for Biden and for Trump. A president is strong internally within the executive branch when the second tier political appointee knows what the president would do if he were in his job.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The president doesn't want to think about what the undersecretary for blah, blah, blah in the Department of Labor is thinking about that day. But that person needs to have a sense that if the president were in this room, I basically know what he would say. And if you don't have that sense, it's very, very hard to make those small decisions that are essential to the big things working.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think both Trump and Biden had enormous trouble helping those people know what they would say. It wasn't that hard in the Obama years. It wasn't that hard in the Bush years. If you're sitting in some secondary office at HHS, and I had this experience myself in the Bush years, you kind of know if the president was here, he would go this way, not that way.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And nobody thinks that way explicitly, but it's how you actually do your job. I think in the Biden administration, it was hard to know because the president didn't really express clear priorities about anything. It was very hard to know what mattered to him and where he would fall and everything.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Because he was so coalitional, nobody in those lower tiers could really have a clear sense of like, well, this really matters to the president. He would do this and not that. The problem with Trump was that he could go either way on anything at any time. And even if he's stated a clear position, he could say the opposite the next day.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And there's this kind of paralyzing fear of making a choice that then gets you tweeted about and getting on the wrong side of the president because you just have no idea where he's going to be. This was an enormous problem. The people throughout the government were much more afraid of getting on the wrong side of him than they were eager to advance his priorities.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
That is an enormous problem for effective presidential leadership. And I think that as a practical matter, it made both Trump and Biden very weak presidents, probably the weakest presidents in the modern era, both of them, because it was very hard for them to exert authority in a concerted, focused way that was durable.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yeah, it's a very important question. And my biggest fear is the administration deciding not to abide by court orders. What they're doing so far is legitimate. Whether you agree with it or not, it's operating within the system, and then a court said no, and they pulled it back, and they're going to try again, and they'll push and pull, and that's how our system works.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's fine that it makes people uneasy, and a lot of what they're pushing makes people uneasy for substantive ideological reasons, and that's how politics works. But when the boundaries of the system itself are under threat – and again, this is why it's important to think in constitutional terms. It's not about the politics, but it's about the constitutional structure that keeps things in order.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think the biggest threat – there are a number of ways that that could be threatened – The denial of an election result, for example, was a very important way in which that was threatened. And I think what happened after the 2020 election should have rendered Donald Trump ineligible for reelection, should have made voters not want to reelect him. And that's not what the American public thought.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yuval Levin, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me, Ezra.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
That worries me. But if the administration openly defies a court order, then I think we are in a different situation.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Well, let me give you a kind of middle-aged answer to this question. I'm 47. I've been in Washington since I was 18, with a little break for graduate school. I've seen presidential terms since George W. Bush's first, and... One thing you learn over that time is that the first few weeks of a new administration are really surreal.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yeah, it's certainly alive and out there, but I would say that there's... often a tendency on all sides of our politics to attribute so much strength and success to the other side that it justifies breaking the system, that that's the only possible response. That's been a relatively common refrain on the left, too.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And there are a lot of people on the left who talk about throwing away the Constitution. Some of them are law professors at Harvard and Yale. And who just talk openly about the need to abandon our constitutional system and the illegitimacy of it. There are certainly voices like that now on the right. I actually would not put J.D. Vance in that category. I don't think that's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And I should say I have a lot of respect and regard for J.D. Vance. I think he's a serious person in our politics who we should take seriously. But there are such people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I mean, it's not exactly what he said, but it doesn't matter. I mean, I would say that reference to that apocryphal Andrew Jackson line points in a very bad direction. I disagree with it. There are a lot of things that he's argued that I don't agree with, but I don't think that you should put J.D. Vance in the category of people who want to throw away the American Constitution.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
That's not my sense. I could be wrong, but it's not my sense. There certainly are some people on the right, including younger people as well as older people, who make the argument that we are already in a post-constitutional moment and that, therefore, it doesn't make sense for us to stick to the constraints of the Constitution if the other side's not going to do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think they're wrong about the other side. They're overstating the strength of the left. They're overstating the aggressiveness of the left. They're overstating the success of the left. The left is weak, too, and failing, too, and can't seem to win a durable majority either. And therefore, I also don't think they're right in their prescription.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
These, to my mind, do not seem like serious arguments, but they need to be answered because they are out there. It's a reason why it's necessary now to remind people of the argument for the American system. It's an argument that begins from the premise that we're not always going to agree in our country, and we need a system that allows us to act together even when we don't all think alike.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
and that that system is what our Constitution provides. And throwing away this system is extremely dangerous to the fundamental rights that we all think are most important. That's an argument that I have to make to younger people now.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think it's always important to make that argument, but it's certainly under assault in a way that's different from at least what I experienced on the right 15 and 20 years ago. I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So three books these days, you know, I think about this in terms of how to think more clearly about the situation we're in. So one book that comes to mind for me is a book called The Rhetorical Presidency written by a political scientist named Jeffrey Toulas back in 1987.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
It's a book that I've just kept coming back to in recent years and really offers a very profound way to understand the evolution of the presidency. A second book is about Congress. It's a book by Philip Wallach, a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, published just a couple years ago. It's called Why Congress?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
and is really a wonderful argument about the reasons for the centrality of the national legislature and our national politics. I think it's a book that every member and staffer should read, but that a lot of Americans should read just to understand the logic of why Article I is Article I in the American Constitution.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
A third book that comes to mind is a recent book just published at the end of last year by Christine Rosen called The Extinction of Experience, which is really about the ways in which modern technology has changed the basics of everyday human experience.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
The kinds of things that when you first encounter them, they seem like familiar cliches of our time, but when you think them through and see them in some historical context, and Christine Rosen is a historian, you really see how and why our culture has taken some of the peculiar turns that it's taken and why modern life can be so confusing and bizarre.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They're very different from the rest of the time because the administration controls the agenda. And that isn't really the case most of the time. But in the first few weeks, they've made plans. And you don't know those plans generally. They do. And they're rolling them out in a certain pace at a certain way. And it just feels like they are in command of the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I think together these three books are just a way to think about this moment with a little bit of perspective, which can certainly help in a time that seems like it's out of control. Yuval Levin, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Ezra.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
So I think that it's natural in that period to think, wow, these people are really in control. The opposition is totally on the ground, on their backs. They don't know how to respond to this. That's always what it feels like. That happened with Bush. It happened with Obama. It's happened with Trump. It even happened with Biden, if we can remember four years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And it doesn't take very long for that to break. The opposition is back and organized pretty quickly. That takes a couple of weeks maybe. And the world comes back at you too. And the rest of the time presidents spend a lot of their energy just responding to the world and what it throws at them and they're judged by how they do that. That's definitely going on here.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And so it's very hard still to judge what we're looking at. I think a lot of people have come in with a very strong prejudice that this time the Trump team is much more competent. They have a much better idea of not only what they want to do, but how. And a lot of what we've seen is actually a lot like what the first term's first few weeks felt like. There's a lot of ambition.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
There's a lot of action. There's more than there was the first time. But there's also a kind of inclination to chaos that I think is actually intentional. That's part of what they're trying to do. And it didn't really work all that well the first time, and I'm not sure it's working all that well this time. So I have a mixed impression. I think it's just too early to say.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Yeah, they certainly want to convey that. I think there was a sense that things the first time really started out rough. They actually had had a transition effort, you know, run by Chris Christie that produced some concrete plans and all of it was literally thrown away in a huff at Chris Christie, basically. And they started out on day one with just not all that much prepared.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
That is different this time. This time they've come in with a lot prepared. You know, EOs that have been worked out for a while and that have been thought through and lawyered and all of that, that is a little different than last time. And they do have experience.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Some of the people they've brought in, you know, were in the administration last time, and therefore they know where the meeting's happening. They know where the bathroom is. That's different. It makes a difference. But I think that we are also seeing the same kind of inclination to chaos and maladministration that we saw last time in some very important ways.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They've had a really hard time talking about the government in the first person, seeing themselves as the people governing. They're still approaching government differently. as something they act on rather than act through. And so I think a good example of that is the freeze on federal grants that we've just seen come and go pretty quickly. That felt a lot like the travel ban from the first time.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And in fact, as soon as it happened, I went online and said, when was the travel ban? And so the travel ban was a week after the inauguration. It was January 27th of 2017. The freeze on federal funding was also a week after the inauguration. It was January 27th, exactly eight years later. And they had a lot in common.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They were both bold kind of steps that tried to do something big all at once, and they were not thought through in practical administrative terms. What's this going to look like on the ground? And it's because they're thinking about... presidential power as a concrete reality and the people affected as an abstraction when it's actually the other way around.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Here's how this would have happened in the Bush years. And I don't suggest that George W. Bush was the model of governance in every way, but I worked there and this is how it would have happened. You would have had a meeting at OMB where you bring in the chiefs of staff or senior political appointees from the various cabinet departments and
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
lay out for them what's in this memo, what is it going to mean for you, and then take hard questions and some stupid questions so you can work through what is this really going to produce that we're not thinking about. And somebody in the back of that room would have raised his hand and said, well, so are we shutting down the Medicaid payment portal? And
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Somebody at OMB would have said, well, no, we're saying this doesn't affect payments to individuals. And the guy would have said, well, those payments actually go to hospitals. Am I supposed to shut them down? And there would have been a conversation. They would have said, no, we're not touching Medicaid. Instead, what happened was they just did this.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
And the guy who runs the Medicaid payment portal in Baltimore shut it down. And, you know, there was a banner on the website that says we're shutting it down because OMB told us to. That kind of practical chaos, OMB exists to avoid that, and they're clearly not working to avoid it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
They do come in with a sense that the bureaucracy is hostile to them and has to be fought. but they also come in with a sense that chaos can serve their purposes. And I think these are two different assumptions and that the second one is profoundly mistaken. So the buyout is a very, very interesting experiment.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
A lot of these folks do just want to do their jobs, but there are some among them who really are very hostile to the administration's intentions. The question is, how do you deal with that? How do you make your way through it? Now, look, in the long term, there's certainly an argument for driving some churn in federal employment, for driving some turnover, for bringing in some new blood.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
I can see that. But in the medium term, and politics is a medium term business. In the medium term, this is going to bring chaos. So think, for example, about what they're doing to their new political appointees. You have all these people who are just now getting confirmed by the Senate. They're coming into these departments. Some of them are quite new to these places.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
Some of them maybe have been there before. And they're coming in as, I don't know what, a tenth, a fifth of their workforce is going through a long-term resignation process. And those people have not been chosen on the basis of any sense of which jobs are most important, which people are doing the best work. What government functions are most essential? What actually has to be done by law?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
None of that. This is all happening on the basis of who finds it attractive to not work until September while getting paid and then take another job. That means they're going to come in with chaos. And the way they're approaching it is rooted, I think, in a Silicon Valley argument that says –