Can American Institutions Roll Back Wokeness?
Editor's Note
Republican government hinges on the assumption that citizens will use their control of public institutions for the shared pursuit of a common good — that “deliberation” will simply be the effort to discern that good and the means of its achievement. But the rise of wokeness has revealed a significant if small contingent in America that does not accept this basic vision, and that would hijack our constitutional order to destroy our way of life. Joseph M. Bessette, reviewing two recent books on American constitutionalism, invites readers to consider whether “coalition building” is a sufficient framework in political deliberation under such wartime circumstances — not just whether “coalition building” is a practical response in the face of a deadly enemy, but whether it actually embodies the principles of the founding.
The following is excerpted from “Back to the Constitution,” published in the Winter 2024/2025 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — And Could Again, by Yuval Levin, Basic Books, June 2024, 352 pages.
Because there cannot be too many good books on the U.S. Constitution, we are fortunate that Yuval Levin, the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has given us American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — and Could Again.
American Covenant and [Dennis Hale and Marc Landy’s] Keeping the Republic have much in common. Both defend the Constitution from the progressive charge that it is insufficiently democratic. Both criticize Congress for delegating its essential lawmaking responsibilities to the executive branch — Levin writing that “congressional dysfunction is now at the heart of our system’s broader problems” and Hale and Landy that “[t]he future of the republic rests on the willingness of Congress to reassert that noble ambition [to fight against executive and judicial aggrandizement].” Both decry the idea — with its openness to demagoguery — that the president is a kind of “tribune” of the people, its “voice” in national affairs. Both defend the Electoral College. Both call for a renewed federalism in order to restrict national authority to national matters, to accommodate the growing diversity of the American people, and to nurture civic virtues through popular participation in state and local government.
Yet, American Covenant is a different kind of book than Keeping the Republic. It is much less empirical and more theoretical. While it defends our fundamental law against its critics, it also calls on all of us to “rediscover[] its fundamental purposes.” In this respect, one might think of the book as a work in the political theory of the Constitution. And, as its subtitle announces, it promises to show how reengaging with the Constitution will help to reunify the nation.
Citing Martin Diamond, another noted midcentury scholar of American political thought, Levin holds that the “spirit of the Constitution” is “plainly democratic” and “actually much more democratic than the Declaration, which, after all, did not specify any particular form of government at all [and] made no reference or commitment to majority rule.” Moreover, it embraces a republicanism that “emphasizes our responsibilities to one another and to the common good.” This “republicanism is the deepest political wellspring of the Constitution, but it has been largely lost to us.” It follows that “American constitutionalism requires a distinctly republican virtue and cannot do without it.”
In practice, American constitutionalism calls for a Congress-centered national government in which the various interests and views that constitute the polity negotiate and bargain with each other to “forge common ground.” The Constitution’s apparent “counter-majoritarian restraints,” like bicameralism and the presidential veto, do not so much “frustrate” majority rule as “build and broaden majorities.” Here, the institutions, in effect, “manufactur[e] common ground in society — producing consensus that otherwise would not exist.” Put most succinctly, we “build common ground through common action.” Resolving our problems in this way “form[s]…our public life” and “help[s] mold the American character.” Ideally, we develop “constitutional habits” that “serve as the foundation of a joint pursuit of the common good.” This, in a nutshell, is how the workings of our constitutional institutions can help to unify the nation.
This deeply thoughtful book is also a challenging one. It raises constitutional issues of the first order. In his introduction, Levin acknowledges the contribution to constitutional studies of “eminent legal scholars, historians, political scientists, [and] public officials,” adding that his own book “seeks only to make a modest contribution to a vital conversation.” In that spirit, I offer the following reflections to advance that conversation. …
For Levin, the nation’s great diversity of interests and opinions simply cannot be represented by a single public official. In general, our national unity, or common voice, is not something “detect[ed]” or “express[ed]” by our presidents, but rather is “formed” “[o]nly where our plurality is represented and its factions can encounter and deal with each other — that is, only in Congress.” The president can make only a “limited” contribution to this process.
Thus, the modern “rhetorical presidency,” in which the chief executive makes direct popular appeals, has become, according to Levin, “likely the single most divisive facet of our politics — an incessant and inexhaustible fountain of tribalism and disunity.” Here it would be interesting to know what Levin thinks about Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical efforts to convey to the American people the moral stakes in the Cold War and to teach the principles of freedom, as recounted, for example, in William Muir’s The Bully Pulpit: The Presidential Leadership of Ronald Reagan (1992). …
Levin’s assessment of the proper roles of Congress and the presidency in American national government, and their respective contributions to national unity (or disunity), turns in large part on how, ideally, Congress should make the nation’s laws. Early in the book, he describes the lawmaking process as one of “negotiation,” “bargaining,” and “coalition building.” Representing the nation’s varied interests and opinions, the members of Congress use these means to “produc[e] consensus that otherwise would not exist.” This is a politics that “puts bargaining at its center” and “is not fundamentally a search for truth so much as for mutual accommodation.” Levin writes that “coalition building” is what we often mean by “deliberation.”
There is, however, another way to think about deliberation, which sees it not so much as synonymous with bargaining as an alternative to it. This is deliberation as reasoning on the merits of public policy. Whereas bargaining may result in accommodation, deliberation, so defined, seeks the best policy. Imagine that the issue before Congress is federal tax policy. We would naturally ask, what is the best tax policy for the United States at this time in our history, given the condition of our economy? We would expect the members of Congress to think about the issue this way and to ask the following kinds of more specific questions: Is the current tax burden in the nation fairly distributed? Are the rich paying “their fair share”? Will increasing tax rates help to balance the federal budget? Will lowering rates stimulate the economy to such a degree that tax cuts will “pay for themselves”? Should taxes on businesses be lowered to attract foreign corporations? Should tariffs be raised to protect American industries, or lowered to promote greater international trade? In a deliberative process, all these questions (and many others) would be addressed. But in a pure bargaining process, all that would matter would be building a majority coalition of interests, with no necessary consideration of the broader national good.
At times, American Covenant seems to embrace deliberation as reasoning on the merits and to recognize that Madison and his fellow framers wanted their new institutions to work just this way: “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” But more often, Levin argues that during this process if you want “to persuade others to go along with you,…you have to show them that what you want would be good for them too and so to present your own interest in terms of a broader good and a broader truth.” Yet if the members of Congress argue with each other about the “broader good” and the “broader truth,” are they still bargaining; or are they deliberating in the classical sense of reasoning together about how to advance the common good?
If deliberation is understood as a reasoning process that calls on the wisdom of public officials to determine “the true interest of their country,” then the Constitution provides a large opening for presidential influence — or, we might say, presidential persuasion — as signaled by its command that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Implicit here is the expectation that the president (or department heads acting on his behalf) would make their case to Congress for the merits of such measures, that is, for why they were “necessary and expedient.” As Gary Schmitt and I show in a recent paper for the American Enterprise Institute, “The Hamilton-Madison Split Over Executive Power” (2022), most members of the First Congress did not balk at the executive branch playing a large role in formulating policy.
Levin makes very clear that his entire argument for forging greater national unity through the revitalization of the Constitution’s institutions and principles rests on a key assumption: that “Americans do have some basic principles in common — especially those laid out in the Declaration of Independence.” The “self-evident truths” of the Declaration “remain as true as ever” and “are foundational to the character of our society.” Though “the Constitution does not restate these truths,…they are a starting point for its essential republicanism.” Indeed, “[w]ithout at least some general agreement about these [truths], no American polity is imaginable, and no constitutional system could be sustained.”
Levin affirms that at most “a few people on the fringes of our two broad political camps…deny these principles and openly reject the Declaration of Independence.” But is this right? Earlier he had written that the Progressivism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially as promoted by Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, rejected “the deepest assumptions underlying the framers’ constitutionalism” and dismissed the framers’ “broader vision of human nature and social thought.” What, then, of natural rights? Levin implies that progressivism rejected natural rights as well. He quotes at some length from the speech President Calvin Coolidge gave in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration. In the speech Coolidge challenges the notion that we have progressed beyond the principles of the Declaration:
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.
Here, Coolidge seems to be countering the kind of sentiment voiced by Woodrow Wilson in a speech to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles in 1911: “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface. Make a new table of contents, make a new set of counts in the indictment, make a new statement of the things you mean to set right.” By “preface” Wilson meant the grand statement of principles in the document’s first two paragraphs. In a speech four years earlier on “The Author and Signers of the Declaration,” Wilson quoted the famous language on inalienable rights but then insisted that “each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is.” “Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues in the Continental Congress,” Wilson explained, “did not attempt to dictate the aims and objects of any generation but their own.” Yet, by the Declaration’s own terms, every generation should have as its “aim[]” and “object[]” the establishment of governments that secured their natural rights and that rest on the consent of the governed.
Very near the end of American Covenant, Levin quotes Harry V. Jaffa: “We must recognize the necessity of preventing the enemies of liberty from gaining power in the regime of liberty; but we must also recognize the extreme difficulty, and the danger, in the possible confusion of those whose interests differ from ours within that regime, and those who in truth stand outside of it.” Levin’s point is to focus on the latter part of Jaffa’s statement: that our political opponents do not necessarily stand outside of the regime of liberty. “We must work to see,” writes Levin, “that our fellow citizens are not our enemies.”
Jaffa would likely respond that we must also work to see that the enemies of liberty do not gain power in the regime of liberty. Consider Brian Lozenski, the “national leader on Ethnic Studies” whom Governor Tim Walz put in charge “of overhauling Minnesota’s K-12 education.” Thanks to Stanley Kurtz of National Review and John Hinderaker of Power Line, we know that Lozenski posted a video on YouTube, later removed, in which he said the quiet part out loud:
The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown, right. And so we can’t be like, “Oh no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and divers[ity].” It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent…. You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says, The United States needs to be deconstructed, period.
Whatever type of regime this professor expects to emerge out of the ashes of the current constitutional order, one thing is clear: it will not be one that embraces the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence.
In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (November 21, 2024), essayist and literary critic William Deresiewicz nicely summarized the “cultural revolution” that “has been imposed on this country from the top down” over the past decade or so:
Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics…. Its agenda includes the decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports); and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
And if this was not enough:
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones…. It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
Though it is surely true that the vast majority of Americans do not subscribe to these views, their “long march through the institutions” of American culture, including even professional and scientific organizations, can hardly be denied. There are, perhaps, some signs of hope that we are already past peak “wokeness” in the United States, and that in the not-too-distant future we will look back at all of this as a peculiar derangement in the culture that burned itself out with no lasting effects. But perhaps the enemies of liberty have just gotten started, and the nation is headed toward a major crack-up, likely along geographic lines. Keeping the Republic and American Covenant both rightly emphasize that sound constitutional practice can improve American culture. Yet there is also deep truth in the view that politics is downstream from culture. If the effect of culture on politics is more powerful than the effect of politics (even constitutional politics) on culture, as seems likely, then fixing our constitutional practice will, in the end, require fixing the culture.