“In recent years, there has been a dramatic loss of trust of the American people in the elites and institutions that defined the politics of the 21st century in the USA,” declares Dr. Yuval Levin, one of the prominent intellectual thinkers of American conservatism. “It happened both on the right and on the left. Many of the arguments in the radical left front are voiced in democratic language, as if these institutions stand in the way of a large and legitimate majority that is restrained by the constitution, the courts, the senate or by the electoral system.” And yet, Levin explains that although the progressive side claims that the will of the majority was not expressed, “actually there is no such majority, the elections in the US are very close.”
“Much energy is devoted to attacking the core institutions of the American establishment from the left,” says Levin, “and at the same time part of the right has lost faith in the administrators of our institutions. According to the conservative view, the executives have turned these institutions into tools through which they implement left-wing policies without a political mandate. University administrators, institution administrators government agencies, including the FBI. We also see a tendency on the right, which is very much embodied in the movement around Donald Trump, to reject the establishment institutions and instead promote a kind of popular front.”
These two movements, the progressives’ and Trump’s, are populist, according to Levin. “And none of these populists has a majority. In the last 25 years no party has had a majority, we have been at 50%-50% for a long time, which is unusual. When you look at the US, there is one majority party that maintains a complicated and incoherent coalition, and a minority party trying to expand its coalition. But for almost 30 years we have two minority parties that define themselves against each other. They are not really working on building a coalition, but on recruiting their voter base.”
Yuval Levin
personal: 47 years old, born in Haifa and moved to the USA with his family at the age of 8
professional: Director of research at the American Enterprise Institute, the founder and editor of National Affairs, an editor at New Atlantis and National Review and a writer of opinion columns at the New York Times. He served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff
one more thing: A devout baseball fan
“earn the distrust”
Levin is director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the chair of public policy. He is also the founder and editor of the political journal National Affairs and previously served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush.
“Elections are won by convincing the people in the middle, and not just the base,” he says, “but our politics hasn’t worked like that for a long time. And I think turning against institutions and elites has something to do with it. There is no election system in which there is a clear winner and by a huge margin, and that It creates a strange state of mind. When you lose big, you think, ‘We have to do something else.’
Kamala Harris chose Tim Wells as her deputy rather than Josh Shapiro. In your opinion, the fact that Shapiro is Jewish had an effect?
“I think it was definitely an influential factor, but not decisive. There is not much evidence that the choice of the vice president is important to the decision of the election, but the fact that Shapiro Yehudi influenced, in my opinion, the way the left reacted to him. Everyone said it, it was spoken openly. It was said that ‘people Michigan won’t like the fact that he’s Jewish. I guess it was hard to avoid that in the conversation they had in the campaign about who to vote for, but that wasn’t the only factor.”
In the end there is a large party, which at this point is leading the race for the White House, which takes into account the fact that someone is Jewish when considering whether to elect him to the position. It’s amazing and shocking.
“Absolutely. If Shapiro had been elected, he would have been the second candidate for the Democratic vice president who was Jewish. It happened for the first time in 2000, and then the Democratic Party saw it as something positive, a power multiplier. They appealed to Jewish voters, and also thought that this implied that they were more open . And here 24 years later, the Democratic Party feels that this is a risk that it cannot take. It shows the American elite culture in the direction of anti-Semitism, it cannot be denied.”
Was his Judaism to his detriment? Josh Shapiro / Photo: ap, Matt Freed
You talked about the lack of trust on the right. Didn’t the state institutions rightly snub him? There were lies about Trump’s connection with Russia, Hunter Biden’s story was silenced, and more.
“There’s some truth to that. The institutions in our public life have lost a sense of boundaries about their role. They think this is a valuable platform that can be used to advance the broader cultural and political agenda. And it’s not just in government, it’s the FBI that plays a kind of political role , it’s the press. Sometimes even a corporation or a big company wants to intervene in the debate about abortion or election laws. That’s how you lose trust.”
Levin says that the elites in many Western societies “have become confused about why people trust them. Sometimes those in authority think it’s because they are competent. That’s true, and of course people lose trust when you’re incompetent, but people also trust you because you’re restrained, because they have a feeling that there are things that aren’t right Do to them. You trust an accountant not only because he’s good at math, but because his signature on the paper says he’s checked and decided it’s proper accounting. So when it turns out that a journalist is just another political voice, or the FBI is another place where one side wins They can’t be trusted to advance his agenda. The elites simply can’t help but use the institutions to elevate themselves as participants in the big culture battles. And when you use the fact that you’re the president of a university to take part in a big political struggle, people will think less of your university. There is no way around it.”
The right is more divided than ever
It seems that for some time now there has not been a single conservative movement in the US, but rather a variety of movements fighting each other for preeminence. Levin agrees: “The only sense in which there is a coherent right is that in a two-party system the right is anti-left. And the conservatives all agree that the left is a problem. When you wonder what we believe and not who we are trying to stop – then the right is much more divided than ever. Trump is part of the reason for that. Parts of intellectual conservatism think he is unfit to be president and lead the right. Therefore, to accept Trump is to betray core conservative principles.”
Do you think so too?
“This is my opinion, but it is not only about Trump. There is a deeper internal disagreement on the right, regarding the direction in which America should be taken. Since the Cold War ended about 30 years ago, the right has been trying to understand the nature of its coalition. That war united the right The American because it brought together people who hated the Soviet Union into one camp, and they held together through the opposition to it. When the Soviet Union disappeared, the question is what holds us together socially? Are the capitalists the right hawkish or separatist “This struggle is still ongoing, and the Republican Party has not built a broad and coherent coalition or won a convincing majority since then. The American right is very divided and fighting itself.”
And what is happening in the Democratic Party?
“It is much more of a traditional coalition of a large party. There is no one big personality at its center so the differences are a bit more ideological. The Democratic Party is also more consciously a coalition of factions. There is organized labor, there are racial and ethnic factions. There is also a huge generation gap within the party, with the young people tending Much more to the left. The older generation of Democrats has a memory of an embarrassing loss by a party that went too far to the left, when in 1984 Ronald Reagan won 49 states – the biggest presidential landslide since George Washington. Many of the young people don’t know that They have the trauma of the older generation, so they tend to go left without fear of political repercussions.”
25 years without a clear political majority in the USA / photo: ap, Charles Rex Arbogast
I’m going back to Wales. George Floyd was killed in his country, and even though it was burning he refused to suppress the riots. He also said that “socialism to one man is good neighborliness to another.” How does a party that has been burned in the past choose such a radical candidate?
“Walz is an interesting example of how the Democratic Party has changed. He first ran for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2005 as a moderate, and for a seat that was often held by Republicans. He was middle-of-the-road on guns, tried to avoid talking about abortion and LGBT rights. Over time he became more and more ideologically left – and that’s because the party became a leftist party. The fact that Harris chose someone with such extreme positions says something about her sense of status in the party – that she needs to prove something to the left in order not to be attacked by it.”
“The system in Israel is bad”
The Israel of before October 7 made a lot of noise about the far-reaching changes in the judicial system. Is this a conservative move? Does this not harm the institutions?
“The conditions in Israel are different from the USA. The structure of the Israeli government is very ill-defined, while the American one is in some ways over-defined. The USA has a written constitution that establishes precise distinctions between the centers of power in the form of government, and much of what the courts do is designed to facilitate the operation of the system, when they are limited by the constitution. In Israel there is a real lack of structured institutions. Israeli democracy is excessively centralized. There is a parliament of One house and little distinction between the executive and the legislature. Of course, the authority of the judiciary is hardly defined. So the courts have appropriated powers for themselves – to limit the center of democratic power. Courts do this in many systems This rule is according to the law or constitution in Israel, they just do it.”
Both sides in the fight over the justice system have a good argument, says Levin. “One side asks where the courts got the right to do all this, how do they tell the elected government that it cannot appoint this minister. And on the other side they say that there must be restrictions on the power of the majority, so that it cannot do whatever it wants. There must be A balance of power, and because this balance does not exist in Israel as a formal matter – it is necessary to somehow conduct negotiations between these branches.
“Part of what the promoters of the reform said echoes what the right says about judges in America, that they should be limited and chosen in responsible ways. And another part of their words is contrary to what the right in the US believes in, and is really not a conservative move. Many of the promoters of the reform only wanted to empower the majority without limit. And it is important that the majority does not think that it is omnipotent, there should be a limit to democratic power. The protection of the rights of the minority and the rights of the individual must be balanced with the legitimacy of the rule of the majority,” explains Levin.
“I have to say, from afar, Israel built its institutions and its system in a bad way, but there is no longer any real chance of reorganizing the form of the regime,” concludes Levin. “For the most part, countries shape their system in the first years after their establishment, not 70 years later when the citizens are in a deep social divide.”
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