Podcast Episode 2: Yuval Levin

Institutions exist “not simply to show the world who we are” but so that we will “be made something better.”
That’s one of Yuval Levin’s key insights in the second episode of The Long Game podcast.
Yuval Levin is the author of The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left and The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.
Often presidents have tried to “form themselves into the shape of the presidency,” Levin said. Trump has “looked at the presidency as an especially, extraordinarily high platform on which to be himself. I think that actually makes you less effective as president …. The presidency is part of a larger institution of a larger constitutional system, and it’s really when you take the shape of that office within that system that you become most powerful … instead he’s playing this role that’s not the role of the president.”
“That leaves the rest of the system … missing the president, and you very much see that in the way that the policy process is working now, in the health care debate and the tax reform debate. There isn’t a president and the president is really missing. But it also means everybody has to deal with this other thing at the heart of the system, which is just a kind of performance artist doing something else … Everybody’s just trying desperately to figure out what to do with this.”
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