We're back with another edition of The Federalist for Radio Hour. I'm Emily Kashenski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. I'm
joined today by Yuvolavn. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
and editor at National Affairs and also the author of the new book, which
is at on June eleventh. It's called American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified
our Nation and could Again you've all thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, this book is so interesting,
and I want to start with the obvious question you're probably going to get
a lot, which is why now, Why write this book right now?
What brought you to this particular project at this moment in time. Yeah,
you know, I think in some ways why now may be the easiest question,
which is where in a moment when, on the one hand, we
clearly want to be a more unified society. We understand a lot of our
problems in terms of disunity and breakdown, isolation, loneliness, deaths of despair.
You know, you find people on the left worrying about the demise of
democracy and all kinds of things, and yet we don't think to look for
cohesion and unity at the very core of our political life, which is in
the US Constitution. And what stands out to me about the Constitution. I'm
not a lawyer, I'm a political scientist and a citizen, and what stands
out to me about the Constitution is that it was created to unify a divided
society and it could very much still do that for us. So I think
this is a perfect time to become reacquainted with the American Constitution, which is
really my purpose in this book. And you know, we've had Patrick Denian
on the show. We've had other people who sort of find themselves in agreement
with his diagnosis, which apparently might even include former President Barack Obama, who
included why liberalism failed on his reading this at one point in time. Is
there something right now that or what would you say? Maybe? What do
you say? I'm sure you have these conversations all the time to people on
the right who believe we're at a failure point of the Constitution, that the
Constitution sort of had the poison fruit of liberalism all along. Absolutely, and
Patrick Denan is a friend of mine and someone I take very seriously, but
I do think we disagree about the potential of the Constitution in this moment.
I do not think of the Constitution as a shallowly liberal document. It is
liberal in some respects. It points to some classical political ideas in some respect,
but it is above all a republican ductor with a lowercase are a document
that focuses us on the necessity of understanding that this society is ours to govern,
and as a self governing people, we have to ask ourselves what our
responsibilities are, what our obligations are, and what the potential of the American
regime is. And it seems to me that we are very fortunate to have
the political tradition that we have, which looks for a balance between the freedom
of the individual and the necessity of virtue and moral formation in a free society.
And the American Constitution is actually very very sophisticated about this challenge and this
tension, and it does look for a way to simultaneously legitimate public action through
majority rule and protect minority rights. And it does that by way of republicanism,
that is, by forcing us to deal with each other, to constantly
engage with one another as self governing citizens. I think that there are people
on the right who miss this about the potential of our political order. The
Constitution is really focused on forcing us to take citizenship seriously. And if we
just dismiss our kind of politics as saying it has no role for virtue,
it has no idea of the human good, it's just about individual rights,
well then we will lose this tremendous inheritance that actually is precisely an answer to
the kind of challenge that we confront in a moment when we seem to be
losing sight of the more than liberal obligations that come with living in a free
society. So I take a lot of Patrick Denin's concerns very seriously, but
I think that he would find that the American constitutional order has much more to
offer the society that has the problems he describes than he tends to give it
credit for. And again, that kind of attitude calls for I think a
reacquaintance with our constitutional order to understand in its own terms is to see that
it does speaks nicely. Are kind of moment and our kind of problems,
and I want to I'm sure we will get back to that, but I
also want to start where you decided to start this book, because I think
it's very helpful you have the beginning. The first chapter is the question what
is the Constitution? Amazing like such an obvious question, But why did you
start there? And what should you know? Yeah? You know. The
first chapter of the book, as you say, it is called what is
the Constitution? The last chapter of the book is called what is Unity?
And I think that these are both harder questions than they seem, and the
book is really an effort to answer each of them by way of the other.
And the question what is the Constitution is hard because we tend naturally to
think of it as a legal framework, as just a legal document for lawyers
and judges to work their way through and apply. And of course the Constitution
is a legal framework, but that's not all that it is. It's also
a framework for policymaking. It was created because our previous form of government was
not good enough. At facilitating government action, and I think it is worth
our seeing that the Constitution is intended to be a more effective government than the
United States had before. It's also an institutional framework. It's a set of
distinct institutions, a legislature with two houses, an executive branch, a judiciary,
and various modes of selection and election that allow us to address the very
complicated challenge of empowering majorities to rule without oppressing minorities, and so finding some
balance between the need for legitimacy and you might say, the need for justice
in our kind of politics. That's a question that is more than legal.
It is fundamentally about political morality. And I think the Constitution it has a
lot to say to that sort of concern. And so it makes sense to
begin by asking just what is the Constitution. It's a document, that is
one thing it is, but it's also a system of government, a set
of institutions populated by all kinds of public officials and ultimately by citizens. It's
a framework for American political life, and that means that we do have to
allow ourselves to see the more than obvious facets of it, the more than
simple elements of it. If we're really going to understand what it can do
for us. The Constitution is very deeply connected to the American character, to
our self understanding as a people, to a very unusual degree. Our form
of government is really attached to who we are as an American nation. And
so I think it's worth our while to take it seriously, to think about
it in terms of political philosophy, in terms of political psychology, of sociology,
and not only of law, as we so easily tend to do.
You're right about the importance of republicanism, and I have a quote right here,
especially as Madison saw the concept of republicanism. You say, at both
the conceptual and the practical levels, the tension between democracy and liberalism is often
also mediated in the constitutional system by republicanism. This is another use essential element
of the political framework of American constitutionalism, but one that has become less familiar
to us over time. At its heart, right, is an idea of
the human being and citizen that emphasizes our responsibilities to one another and to the
common good. Now, a lot of this book deals with a really important
question, which is, when we no longer agree on the common good,
how can we return to that point of finding consensus. You know, if
we don't, if we don't have it, how does the constitution kind of
give us the tools we need to get it back. Yeah. The idea
of unity or cohesion that I think is at the heart of the American constitutional
system is counterintuitive. It suggests that unity is not a matter of thinking a
lot about things, of agreeing about everything. Unity is a matter of acting
together. Common action is the essence of it. Now, common action does
require some agreement about fundamentals, and I think Americans do have some agreement about
fundamentals. We do, generally speaking, believe in the principles that are laid
out in the Declaration of Independence. We believe that human beings are equal.
We believe that there is such a thing as rights. Americans across very very
broad political lines that differ about many many things, will at least tell you
that they agree about that. And that is a beginning. That's a real
opening. The authors of the sixteen nineteen project say that those truths stated in
the Declaration are true, though they accuse the United States of failing to live
up to them. That's a serious beginning. We also share in common history
as a nation as a people. We can point to common moments of national
experience, of triumph and of and of failure and success. And that's important
too, But we don't agree about much more than that. The United States
is fundamentally because it is a free society. It's a society in which people
differ about many, many things. And I think the Constitution actually begins from
the premise that a free society is always going to be like that. James
Madison and federalist ten says, as long as the reason of man continues fallible
and he's at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. We're
going to disagree. The question is, given that we disagree, how can
we still act together? And the Constitution's answer that question is a very Republican
answer. It says we are going to act together by working things out,
by dealing with each other, by negotiating, competing, bargaining. A lot
of that happens in our politics, especially in Congress, but also within the
various other branches. Between the branches, it happens through the system of federalism.
The life of American politics is bargaining, negotiation, pushing, pullings,
and looks like discord. It's a way of disagreeing, but actually it amounts
to common action, and the goal of it and the result of it when
it works, is negotiated accommodations and settlements, and on most issues, that
is really the way to achieve a unified outcome, an outcome that everybody considers
legitimate. And so I think this is a profoundly Republican ideal because it suggests
that the work of coming to agreement is up to us. Republicanism is especially
ultimately about public ownership of the common fate of the society. You know,
the first word of the Constitution is we. It starts with we the people,
and it is that we, that first person plural, that is both
the premise and the purpose of this system of government, and the idea that
we can arrive at a we that describes the United States is really what the
Constitution makes possible. And I'm also thinking, just as we're talking about all
of the about things, my friends who work in Congress will say or have
recently worked in Congress and maybe gotten annoyed with it, which is the case
for many people. But you know, they say, it's just not what
it once was. The Institution's works have been gummed up and all of that.
You know, you look at the sprawling executive branch. People now are
really concerned about the Supreme Court on the left for different reasons than on the
right. But are there any flaws in the institutions or any That's probably the
wrong way to put it, but are there any blinking warning signs in the
institutions right now? Yeah? I mean, first of all, there's certainly
flaws, and I would never suggest that the Constitution is perfect. You know,
it was produced by a combination of compromises and it certainly has its imperfections.
But I think the way you put the questions very important. I'm a
former congressional staffer too. I worked on the House side for years, and
there are ways in which I agree Congress isn't what it used to be.
I think it's important to avoid blind nostalgia in this regard. Congress never really
was ideally organized to achieve its goals. It's never been There's never been a
real golden age. But I think that when we ask ourselves how Congress is
failing, we can start to dig into the character of the American constitutional system.
There's very broad agreement that something is wrong with Congress, And I think
that's easy to see. Institution's very unpopular. It's not getting a lot of
legislation done. It seems incapable of even the very basics, you know,
choosing a speaker who will hold office for more than a few weeks, or
passing the budget. But what's wrong with Congress? What is it actually failing
to do. I think there's a tendency, especially on the left, to
say what it's failing to do is to pass big legislation. Things just don't
get done anymore. I think that what Congress is failing to do is to
facilitate cross partisan bargaining and accommodation. That that is the purpose of the institution.
And that's actually very different from saying that it needs to pass big legislation.
Because we're living in a moment now where we don't have large majorities.
That's just a fact of contemporary American political life. Neither party has won a
big election in thirty years. We haven't really had a majority party in America
since the nineteen nineties, and so to just say that what we need is
simple majority rule, as reformers on the left say over and over, they
want Congress to be more like a European parliament. They want direct election for
the president. Well, that's a way of saying, we have a majority,
but it can't do what it wants to do. But we don't.
We don't have a majority. What we want from our system is some help
in broadening majorities, in building coalitions, and that actually requires bargaining negotiation.
Coalition building looks like negotiation across lines of difference, and the reforms that people
on the left call for, like getting rid of the filibuster or centralizing the
budget process more so that Congress is more efficient, those kinds of reforms would
make cross partis in bargaining less necessary for Congress's work. What I argue for
in this book are reforms that make cross partis in bargaining more likely. I'm
a big fan of the filibuster. I think actually the filibuster in a moment
with narrow majorities is extremely important for preventing big mistakes and for facilitating bargaining and
accommodation. I think we should empower the committees of the Congress, not the
leader, not the party leaders. I think we should look for ways to
facilitate the kind of cross partisan work that happens at the kind of weird margins
of both parties, where there are people on the left who can agree with
people on the right and drive some strange forms of reform that move our politics
forward. That's what Congress is for. And I think even within the kind
of little community of Congressional reformers, you know, I often find myself as
the token conservative and meetings of people who care about reforming Congress and everybody else
is talking about how to eliminate the filibuster and make the institution go faster.
I want to make the institution bargain negotiate, which in many many instances means
going slower, not faster. It's very important to ask ourselves what problem are
we trying to solve, what actually is the problem to fix? And on
that front, there is I think a real left right difference, and it
has to do ultimately with whether you accept and internalize the logic of the Constitution
or whether you think that what we need is something more like a European parliamentary
system, as at least implicitly many people on the left do. I don't
think they've thought through the implications of that, but it's what their arguments point
toward this is Pastor Matthew Harrison, President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate.
The LCMS operates the second largest parochial school system in the United States. What
can you expect from a Lutheran Church Missouri Centate school. There's one race,
the human race, and Jesus died for the sins of every man, woman,
and child from every land and every nation. Life begins a conception.
All life is precious, from womb to tomb, and every student, parent
and teacher is created in the very image of God. There's right and wrong,
and we know which is which from the Ten Commandments. There are only
two sexes, male and female. He created them. Marriage is the lifelong
union of one man and one woman. There's such a thing as objective,
absolute truth, and it's found in the person and work of Jesus Christ and
his word. To find a Lutheran Church Missouri sentis school near you. Visit
LCMS dot org slash schools. What about And this is a great part of
the book. You talk about the two party system and you specifically zero in
on Martin van Buren, somewhat forgotten character in the centuries long American play at
this point. But what did Martin Van Buren have to say about the way
to party? A two party system fits into this entire question because actually,
as you were just talking about, as people look at what they see,
as you know, a locked up Congress, right, people get frustrated with
that. RFK Junior is ascendant to the summer. But what did Martin van
van Buren have to say? I you know, this is one of those
things. I just love Martin van Burr. If you let me go on
long enough, I will end up talking about Martin Van Buren and it might
just be giving you a ball. It is just me. But that's okay.
A fan club of one still counts. Martin Van Buren in a lot
of ways, is really the father of the American party system. He was.
We think of him as the as the Andrew Jackson's vice president who becomes
president. He's sort of hard to remember in that kind of middle period where
he lose track of who's who. But Martin Van Buren was a profoundly important
figure because he was really the person who saw the electoral logic of the American
political system as it was emerging in the nineteenth century. The founders even the
frames of the Constitution had a very low opinion of political parties. They thought
that they could be avoided, that we could have a system where they weren't
necessary, where politicians would operate essentially as independent agents, and we could avoid
the dangers of party. But very quickly they found out that as a practical
matter, politics, democratic politics has to be organized somehow. People have to
understand what the camps are, what the differences are, what choices they're making
at election time. And even more important than that, the American system,
for a very particular reason that was not entirely understood originally, having to do
with presidential selection, with the electoral college, the American system really needs to
be a two party system. If we have more than two viable candidates for
president, it is very likely that the presidential election will go to the House,
because in order to in the presidency, you have to win an absolute
majority of the electors in the electoral College, and so if you have three
or more candidates, it's very likely that no one will win an absolute majority,
and then the House decides. This happened twice in the early nineteenth century,
in eighteen hundred and in eighteen twenty four, and in both cases the
result was a real legitimacy crisis. And in the second of those times,
Martin Van Buren is a member of the Senate. After the eighteen twenty four
election. He's sitting in the House gallery watching the House choose the president.
The House chooses John Quincy Adams rather than the person who won the most votes
and the most electoral votes, Andrew Jackson, and Van Buren is thinking to
himself, this should not be happening in the House. This should be happening
inside of a political party. Choosing candidates is something that the parties to need
to start to do so that we end up with just two clear choices for
president and two broad parties that are built for negotiation. There'll be ideological differences
between them, but they'll be somewhat permeable, broad, complicated national coalitions that
train the people in them to be negotiators and therefore to be ultimately effective public
officials. And Van Buren offers a framework for how the parties can work,
conventions, ways of selecting candidates, party committees. All of these things come
from him, and ultimately he facilitates the creation of the broad two party system
that is a very good fit for the Madisonian Constitution, and that, like
the Constitution, is all about negotiating and bargaining and building coalitions. Our system
is built to make politicians build coalitions. When it's working is when they do
that well. When they don't build coalitions well, as we're seeing now,
our system doesn't work very well. And I think Van Buren, more than
anybody in that period in the early nineteenth century, understood the lodge of the
Madisonian system and the way in which it required functional political parties, and offered
up real ideas to make it work. He was if you like politicians,
which I know is a big if. Martin van Bura is really great.
He ran for everything, He won everything he ever ran for, all the
way from county commissioner in New York to President of the United States, and
he really helped to work out the logic of American political life. What could
be done now if there's not a sort of structural fix, is it purely
cultural? Is it just a matter of helping politicians develop more intentional coalition building
or those instincts and the muscle reflex. What could be done now to create
a system where there is more coalition building basically among the two parties. Yeah,
I think here the Madisonian insight is key, and that is that the
structure of institutions shapes our political culture. The structure of institutions creates incentives.
Ambitious people respond to incentives, and ultimately we get the system that we incentivize.
And so the Madisonian system was built to incentivize negotiation and bargaining, especially
in Congress. It was built to make Congress central, and it was built
to make Congress a venue for negotiation. That is not happening now. Congress
is not as central as it should be because a lot of the political incentives
in our system point towards the president in some respects also toward the courts,
and Congress has willingly given up a lot of its power and responsibility. Members
pass very vague legislation, and mostly they just want to comment on the president's
behavior. They want to do oversight, and they want to do punditry,
and they don't want to be members. And a lot of the reason for
that is that the incentives they face have really changed dramatically. The centralization of
power in Congress, which has been driven especially by progressive reforms of the institution,
although to some degree also by the Gingrichair, Republican reforms have really centralized
power in Congress so that the big decisions are made by party leaders. The
work that members do in committees barely matters, and so it's understandable that they
look for other ways to matter. They look for other ways to be prominent,
and those very often involve political performance, art and preading for the cameras,
and so that's a lot of what they do. I think there are
ways to change that that are structural, to think about how Congress operates by
thinking about how you empower committees to really matter. I think there are a
few things that I would point to. First of all, it's very important
to give the committees some control of what happens on the floor of both houses
of Congress. A lot of state legislators do this, Congress doesn't. So
in many states, if a committee votes a bill out with at least one
vote from a member of the minority party, that bill gets a floor vote,
whether the speaker wants it to or not. That means that what you
do committee actually matters. You're firing with real bullets. I would also,
for example, eliminate the distinction that exists now between authorization and appropriation in Congress,
so the committees that create programs and the committees that spend money are totally
separated. I think that they should be unified again as they were in the
nineteenth century Congress. And again the goal there is to fire with the real
bullets, so that what members are doing in the committee's matters, and that
means that they will be invested in the outcome, and therefore they will be
invested in the work of negotiated legislation. It's very important that that's how we
resolve big differences, and that that's what members of Congress do, so that
sort of almost technical institutional reform really can matter. But I do think that
the first step toward anything like that, whether it's in Congress or in the
administrative state, where I also think we need some very real change, is
to see what the problem actually is. And I think a lot of our
problem at the moment misdiagnosis. We incline toward a mode of understanding our system
that is very inflected with progressive ideas, with Woodrow Wilson's sense of what our
government should be, and we need to remind ourselves that Congress is the first
branch it is meant to be where the action happens. That its purpose is
negotiation and accommodation. That federalism is intended to separate state and federal authorities,
not to intermix them. That the president's job is to facilitate some stability in
our system of government. That the job of the courts is to keep everyone
in their place doing their proper job, rather than to take over their jobs.
All these things which I think are obvious when you look at the Constitution,
at the debates around it, at the arguments for it, at the
structure of the system it created, but that are not at all obvious to
us now, because we've become so infused with a kind of progressive critique of
the Constitution, we need to be reminded of all of that. And in
writing a book like this, that's my first and foremost hope is that it
might help people remember why our system has the form that it does, and
what it would mean to allow it to work in the way that it's intended
to. I think if we let it do that, it would begin to
ease some of our divisions and disunity. A question that fascinates me is how
technology has shifted culture in a ways that in a way that you know,
small are Republicans like James Madison maybe could not have possibly anticipated. I mean,
obviously there were some very pressient writers who were thinking through these things,
you know, since the dawn of the printing press. But do you have
any insights into maybe the way just the shrinking of the globe even in the
last ten years, with the dawn of social media, what new challenges and
you know, is there any do take seriously any of the arguments from people
who say it's this constant, tuitional Republican system is impossible in the new world.
Yeah, I do worry about this question, and I think it is
important because the logic of our system relies on a certain pace of public action,
and that pace is definitely disrupted by technology. There's a way that and
you can see this explicitly in Federalist ten that Madison assumes that the sheer size
of our country will mean that politics has to move slowly, that it's very
hard for factions to build up that are national because it's hard for people to
connect with each other. That's obviously just not true anymore. And politics now
moves very very quickly. It's very easy for factions to connect across great distances,
and so we have a kind of misperception of the size and power of
various sorts of factions in our politics. People who are very very connected,
who are constantly on Twitter, perceive themselves to be a far greater political force
than they really are. Politicians think of them that way too, and it's
very hard to know who actually has real numbers. It's very hard to know
who has real political power. And a lot of our politics now happens in
the form of a kind of political performance art, through Internet videos and so
on, and surely that is a huge problem for the Madisonian system. I
think that it's important for us, in thinking about what might be done about
that, to again recur to the logic of the Madisonian system, and so
ask ourselves how these kinds of forces could be directed toward the cause of facilitating
bargaining, accommodation negotiation, especially in Congress. And so again I think we
have to think about the incentives we create. I think, for example,
that bringing cameras into congressional committees was a terrible mistake. I don't know that
we can undo it. But I think we can build around found it,
and the committees can build forms of work, new genres of committee action that
are not hearings that are televised. And it's just impossible to negotiate in public,
so that if we want Congress to negotiate, we have to build some
venues in Congress that are not public. And that's extremely important to understand.
I think we've lost sight of it, and a lot of harm has been
done as a result. And you know, more generally, I think we
have to understand that our political culture is now mediated by technologies that are a
very bad fit for what we want that culture to do, and that requires
us to think creatively about how to facilitate political action and engagement that is not
on or through the Internet. I don't have simple answers there, but I
certainly think the problem is very real, and that it's a set of questions
that we have to let the logic of the Madisonian system go ite us through.
You said something I think so important earlier about how we actually are still
on the same page on a number of different issues, and kind of reminds
me us talking to someone about the campus protests, and you mentioned the sixteen
nineteen project authors, and I was thinking something similar with the campus protests,
because I talked to one actually Jewish student protest leader at Columbia, and she
was talking about justice and in this really bleak and cynical way. Perhaps I
thought, well, you know what, we are on the same page that
justice is something to be sought, and that has not actually been true for
different societies throughout the scope of human history. And if I was hoping maybe
you could talk to us just a little bit about the historic importance of the
Constitution so that we in the book addresses it, but so we don't get
this kind of myopia of thinking. You know, this is the worst time
ever. Absolutely, I think it's very very important to see that, for
one thing, to see that the change of differences in American society, intense
as those differences are, the range of differences is relatively constrained. We are
debating how our free society should live. The fact that we are free society
is pretty broadly accepted, not universally, nothing is universally agreed on, but
pretty broadly accepted. The fact that we believe in majority rule and democracies,
pretty broadly accepted. The fact that we want our politics to pursue justice is
fairly broadly accepted to We disagree about very important things, but we have a
framework for doing that that can still service well. And it's also important to
see that we're not more divided than ever, as we constantly tell ourselves.
Obviously, Americans were more divided in the eighteen sixties than they are now that
you don't need much of an explanation for that. But I think even in
the nineteen sixties, when we had much more political violence than we do today,
the ways in which Americans were divided were extreme to a degree that would
shock contemporary Americans. So we should not allow ourselves to understate the kinds of
challenges that prior generations had to deal with in the effort to overstate the kinds
of challenges we have to deal with. The problems we have are very real,
the differences we have are very real. We certainly have lost some of
the common ground that has been available to Americans in the past. We're arguing
about very important things all the way down to the basic nature of the human
person, and that matters a lot. But we do it as a free
society. We do it as a relatively safe, prosperous society. We do
it as a society with a long history of recurring to these fundamental principles in
moments of crisis and division. And I absolutely think that this generation, just
like past ones, is going to be up to it, provided that we
understand how valuable our political inheritance is and how we can use it to address
the problems we have. I don't think that we should let the bizarre kind
of pessimistic nostalgia that we have now that says everything was easier for prior generations
and everything is so hard for us really guide what we do. In a
lot of ways, they had much bigger problems than we do. Almost every
prior generation of Americans had some set of problems that was utterly daunting and overwhelming.
And the fact that we've got our own challenges to deal with only means
that we are like them and so should try to learn from them. And
you know, maybe to give one more Devil's advocate argument to the sort of
dunin side here and ask what would a country that's incapable of clawing back from
decline look like? You know, if we still have it, you know,
you've all, is there a time when you would say, okay,
this is Could America look like it's past the point of no return? And
if so, what would we expect it to look like? Yeah? Yeah,
I mean, look, it's going to be pretty hard to get me
to a place where I give up on America. So I do think that
it's hard to describe a moment that looks like that. I think it would
have been much easier to lose hope in America, say in the eighteen sixties,
when we really were killing each other over fundamental questions. I think it
would have been easier to lose faith in America than today, Even the nineteen
sixties and seventies, when it seemed like the rising generation had completely lost its
mind and there was no one in charge. It feels a lot like that
today. Look, it just does. The problems we have are very significant.
I think the decline of some core American institutions like the family and religion
are very very significant and create enormous problems for us. But nonetheless, I
think the fundamental truths at the core of how this country operates are still true.
The basic, undeniable, self evident truths to the Declaration of Independence are
still true. Way in which those are applied in the form of our constitutional
system, are still available to us, and that means that it's still possible
for us to recover. I start the book with a distinction between hope and
optimism. I'm not an optimist. I don't think things are just going to
be fine, and I don't think anybody should be an optimist, because optimism
is ultimately an invitation to passivity. It says, don't worry about it,
don't do anything. It's really the same kind of mistake as pessimism, which
says we're doomed, there's nothing we can do. Hope says the resources are
there for us to renew our future if we act, and I do think
the resources are there, but it is up to us to choose whether we
act or not. And I think the decision about whether our future is bright
or dark is ours to make. It's part of why I think it makes
sense to try to get people reacquainted with the principles that have made it possible
for this country to flourish in the past, because I think those principles still
make it possible for us to flourish now, and we need to operate with
the hope the justified hope that we too can provide that world for our children
so they can inherit it and have their own problems to deal with. I
think they will. I like leaving this conversation there. You've all in this
justified hope, and so appreciate you taking the time to talk about this fantastic
new book here on Federalist Radio Hour. Thank you so much, of all,
thanks so much. I appreciate it. You've been listening to another edition
of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky, culture editor here at the
Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray