| 摘要 | Editor’s Note: Yuval Levin is the founder and editor of National Affairs, a successor to the Public Interest, the great public policy journal Irving Kristol ran for four decades.
He previously served as the Hertog Fellow and vice president of the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC). Before joining EPPC, Levin served on the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He has also been executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer.
This Q&A appeared in the Summer 2019 edition of AEI’s Enterprise Report— a quarterly update on institutional priorities from AEI. Check out AEI’s online archive of Enterprise Reports here.
What brought you to Washington, and what was your experience on the White House domestic policy staff?
I first came to Washington, DC, as a college student interested in politics and eager to get involved in the world of conservative ideas. I worked as a congressional staffer (for a Republican member from New Jersey, the House Budget Committee, and then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich). I then went to the University of Chicago to get a PhD, focusing on some of the fundamental philosophical questions underlying our politics—the foundations of the market economy, constitutional order, the relationship between freedom and tradition, and what it means to be a citizen.
I returned to DC to work for a presidential commission established to advise the Bush administration about bioethics. The chairman of the commission, AEI’s Leon Kass, had been a teacher of mine. At the time, President Bush faced a complicated decision about funding of embryonic stem cell research, and we worked to offer advice on that issue and related policy challenges. That work helped me to see how academic work informs public policy and why it’s necessary to think through the roots of the political questions we confront.
From there I moved to a job on the domestic policy staff at the Bush White House, advising the president on health care, veterans’ issues, some welfare issues, and other matters. It was an extraordinary opportunity to be involved at the highest levels of the policy process, to see how government worked, and to help a president take on some important challenges.
Why did you found National Affairs? What need were you trying to fill?
I started National Affairs as a venue for people on the right to think out loud and at length together. I found myself in conversations in 2008 and 2009 where people were saying there was no place to hash out big ideas. People missed the Public Interest, and National Affairs was founded to address that need. It’s a countercultural enterprise in a way: As the news cycle got shorter, we have made more space for longer writing, historical context, philosophical foundations, and serious policy analysis. That kind of work is an essential middle step between political debate and public policy. It’s a home for the kind of work that people at AEI do.
How will National Affairs fit at AEI?
We think of it as a partnership among close allies. National Affairs will maintain editorial independence at AEI, just as AEI’s own scholars do. And the two institutions have always shared a common perspective: a commitment to intellectual rigor and scholarship in defense of the rule of law, American constitutionalism, democratic capitalism, the necessity of civil society, community, and family for a free society. So AEI will offer the magazine a new and supportive home so that the two can advance some crucial common causes together better than either could alone.
What has your experience as the editor of National Affairs taught you about the state of conservatism today?
I think conservatism is in a state of uncertainty and flux, in good ways and bad. And not just conservatism. In every part of our national life—in politics, economics, world affairs, culture, media, and many other arenas—we Americans have spent the past decade and a half basically trying to extend the arrangements that served us well in the second half of the 20th century into a new era and have been left with the sense that they are overstretched, and therefore increasingly rigid and brittle. But we don’t yet know what might replace them. We have the sense that we are living through the end of something but not yet the beginning of something.
A time like this requires us to distinguish what is more permanent and fundamental—the core ideals, commitments, realities, and human truths that have to guide our politics—from what is more ephemeral and pragmatic. And we have to apply those permanent, fundamental truths to a new set of circumstances. Conservatives in this century have had a lot of trouble recognizing this need, acknowledging new circumstances, and applying our enduring principles to them. So we have been pushed either into just repeating our old agenda over and over and refusing to modernize our policy thinking or else abandoning what should be enduring principles and adopting bad ideas because they might seem popular in the moment.
This is obviously not a good situation to be in. And a place like AEI has an absolutely crucial role to play in helping conservatives out of this situation. Conservatism is in need of a revival, and, fortunately, AEI is in strong shape to lead that revival.
You have joined AEI as a resident scholar and the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies. What will be the focus of the research division’s scholars, and what are your plans to grow AEI’s footprint in this space?
The essential conservative revival I was just talking about is exactly the focus of the work we will be doing. I think of that work as meeting the preconditions for effective public policy.
The mission that AEI has can be advanced through three kinds of work: by articulating and explicating the principles that ought to underlie American life, by analyzing the challenges that confront our society, and by applying the former to address the latter. That’s what we do here.
The first of those is intellectual inquiry. It’s history, political philosophy, and constitutional theory. It’s the study of the foundational questions. The second is social analysis—sociology, the study of public opinion, and economic analysis. It’s an essentially diagnostic approach to social science. The third is public policy. It involves proposing ways to improve what our government does and what civil society does to address the country’s problems and sustain our freedom and prosperity.
The first two precede the third. They are necessary preconditions for it. And one way to think about what has happened in contemporary America is that we have become too weak on those first two fronts lately. We have assumed we know the fundamental principles and don’t need to restate them. But you always need to restate those for every new generation, or else younger Americans will fall into easy but false ideas. And we have assumed we understand the country’s circumstances, but in some respects we have failed to modernize our understanding of those circumstances and keep it current.
AEI is a public policy institution, and we can’t serve that purpose unless we meet those necessary preconditions for effective policy. That’s one reason why we are going to be engaging in more intellectual inquiry and more social analysis in the years to come at AEI: articulating core American principles for a rising generation, studying the nature of the novel challenges our country faces, and therefore also offering better, smarter, and more persuasive and effective policy ideas.
And those first two are especially what scholars in this new research division will do. We will be focused on issues related to the nature of the moment we are living through—challenges to liberal democracy, the market system, and the Constitution that require a reimmersion in core American principles and a reengagement with contemporary American realities.
So we will have scholars engaged in questions of constitutional law, regulation and the administrative state, and reform of Congress. We will also take up scholarship about core social institutions, such as the family and community, which are essential to the free society but are in trouble in our time.
Our work will build on AEI’s great history of scholarship in these areas—the work of people like Irving Kristol, Robert Nisbet, Robert Bork, Walter Berns, Antonin Scalia, Leon Kass, and others who have all looked at the relationship between public policy and political thought. We need to make that kind of investment in a rising generation of scholars and scholarship.
In a recent piece for National Review called “The Free-Market Tradition,” you discuss how the free market is under attack from both the left and elements of the right. You write that “for the most part, these complaints are not fundamentally economic but rather are moral.” Why are they actually moral arguments?
As a general matter, I think there basically aren’t truly economic criticisms of the market system in our politics. There is no question that this system provides the best available foundation for overall growth and prosperity. There are moral critiques of that system—critiques of how its benefits are distributed or of its effects on the culture, on politics, and on some workers, consumers, and citizens.
Some of these critiques certainly deserve to be taken seriously, and they need to be answered. Those of us who are defenders of the market, as I am, need to see that we are called to offer moral defenses of the market: defenses of markets as means of lifting the poor, as at least compatible with traditional ways of life, with strong families and communities, and with compassionate societies. I think these defenses are not hard to offer, but we just don’t do it enough. We assume everyone knows why markets are better than command economies. But that’s a dangerous assumption. There is no alternative to making the argument, again and again.
Your next book will focus on institutions: It’s called A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. That book is set for release February 2020. What will it take up, and what moved you to write it?
The book is really about how we ought to think about this era in American life. It begins from the often-heard cliché that Americans have long been losing confidence in institutions. And it asks what that really means. What is an institution, in this sense? What is confidence in an institution, and what has been driving the collapse of such confidence in America? How has that led to this period of populism in our politics and to the rise of identity politics and even socialism on the left?
In telling that story, the book articulates a conservative approach to understanding early-21st-century America and argues that although today’s angry populism treats this as a moment for tearing down and blowing up the establishment, we would actually be wiser to think about this as a time to build: to build new institutions to meet new needs and to build up existing institutions so they can better serve our society. It offers some ways that each of us can help address the country’s frustrations where we are, in small ways that can add up. |
