Continuing my effort to highlight, if only very quickly, some excellent books I’ve recently read that should be of interest to Bench Memos readers:
My friend Yuval Levin’s American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—And Could Again is a rich and brilliant reflection on the Constitution—not just as a legal framework but also as “an institutional framework; a policymaking framework; a political framework in the highest sense of the political; and, finally, a framework for union and for solidarity.” It has wise and insightful chapters on Congress, the presidency, the courts, and federalism.
The book is hopeful but not naïve. Levin argues that genuine commitment to the Constitution calls for Americans to see each other as friends to be persuaded, not enemies to be crushed. The Constitution is not a set of “empty procedures.” The system of representative government, or republicanism, that it creates
is an ambitious, demanding ideal of the human being and citizen, which recognizes not only our fallenness and our limitations but also our dignity and our potential. It insists on our obligations to one another, and habituates us to recognize them through the practice of our citizenship.
If the Constitution seems to be failing us, that is because we have been failing it. To repair “our broken constitutional practice …, we will need to recover the understanding of unity that undergirds the Constitution, grasp its appeal and its truth, and think about reforms in its light.”
The reader who wants a fuller account of the book should read this Wall Street Journal interview with Levin and these two reviews: Charles C.W. Cooke’s “A Roadmap—If We Want It” and Ramesh Ponnuru’s “The Constitution was supposed to be a united, not a divider.” Or, much better yet, of course, buy the book and read it.