Yuval Levin: The Assassination Attempt—and America’s Choice

Yuval Levin is many things—constitutional scholar, former presidential adviser, political analyst. Jonathan Chait in New York magazine called Levin “the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era.” Ben Shapiro called him “the most important voice in the political culture.”

He is also, for my money, one of the most cogent explainers of our current political moment. His books—The Fractured Republic, A Time to Build, and the just-published American Covenant—are essential for anyone who wants to understand how things unraveled and how we might stitch them back together again.

That’s the key theme on my mind—and, I imagine, yours too—in the aftermath of the almost-assassination of Donald Trump. What are the roots of that violence? Does one “side” bear more of the responsibility? How can we step back from the brink? And how can our history—especially our Constitution—help us face our present challenges?

Yuval and I talk about all of that and much more today on Honestly. You can listen to it by clicking just below—or save it for after you read Yuval’s essential essay, which we’re proud to publish. —BW

At first glance, Saturday’s terrifying assassination attempt on Donald Trump seems like an obvious extension of our depressing political drift. 

We have grown more divided in this century, we use more militant rhetoric, and political violence has escalated. In the last 15 years, there have been shootings of members of Congress of both parties, a foiled assassination attempt of a Supreme Court justice and his family, a mob storming the Capitol to disrupt the certification of a presidential election, and rising levels of threats against public officials of all sorts. A near assassination of a once and perhaps future president might seem like all too natural a next step. 

And yet, this moment feels like a sharp break. Maybe because it was by far the highest profile act of domestic political violence in this century, directed at the highest profile figure in our politics, in front of television cameras, that it struck even our cynical culture as a shock. It gave us a terrible glimpse into what it would feel like to live beyond the bounds of our constitutional republic.

We have tested those bounds pretty aggressively in the last few years. Our leading politicians have called each other fascists and enemies of the people, deployed or threatened to deploy the justice system against their opponents, declared that election results were illegitimate, and insisted that our society’s very existence would be imperiled if the other party were in power. Donald Trump himself has been the worst offender on this front, but his opponents and critics have frequently come close. Both sides have seemed incapable of criticizing one another’s violations of essential norms without engaging in their own. All of this has shown contempt for the character of our republic. 

But what Trump’s would-be assassin did on Saturday was different—and not only by degree. 

The bullets fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, symbolize the alternative to constitutional democracy. They constitute the other option—the only other option. 

Our political system allows citizens to share a common life even when they differ fiercely on important public questions. Their disputes aren’t always settled civilly, but they are settled politically, through competition and negotiation rooted in the premise that partisan victories and defeats are both inevitably temporary, and that the people we disagree with aren’t going away. Politics within this framework can be so intense, its stakes can be so high, precisely because we are arguing about what our common future looks like. 

Constitutionalism defines the boundaries of this political realm. It offers the rules for setting priorities, deploying power, resolving disputes, and making demands of each other. Its purpose is not so much to help us agree as to help us disagree constructively and safely.

But beyond the bounds of constitutionalism, there is a realm of violence and pain. In this domain, there is no expectation that the people we disagree with today will still be here tomorrow and have to be accommodated somehow. There are no reliable limits on the use of power, no enforceable rules for competition, and no binding requirements to negotiate. There is only force. 

Throughout most of history, most people have been acutely aware of this deadly potential of politics. But here and now, we’ve had the luxury of being largely ignorant of it. And so we have let ourselves imagine that we can rebel against the frustrating deficiencies of our constitutional republic—like its tendency to become anti-democratic, elitist, morally vacuous, or just plain boring—without taking care to preserve its fundamental achievement: its capacity to sustain a modicum of peace. 

Saturday’s shooting was a reminder of what it would mean to cast aside that achievement, and to really break the bounds of our constitutional republic. The near universal recoil from the assassination attempt suggests that even the people who have tested those bounds don’t actually want to break them. 

It would be easy to dismiss that recoil, to cast the sudden outbreak of a more civil rhetoric as mere hypocrisy. How can the people who spent years calling Donald Trump a fascist and a mortal threat to democracy now suddenly distance themselves from a young man who apparently took their accusations seriously and did something about them? How can the people who denied the verdicts of elections and cheered on Trump’s promises to jail his political opponents be surprised when their rhetoric of war is answered with gunfire?

But this would be the wrong reaction. That we feel repulsed by the alternative to our constitutional democracy, having seen it up close, is a very good sign. In this sense, hypocrisy plays an important part in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be a better person than you are is a pretty good way to become a better person than you are. So let’s allow each other the space to do that. Let’s take one another’s embrace of the boundaries of our politics seriously, even if the people you oppose aren’t about to confess all their past sins. 

But let’s also think practically about what it would take to sustain and reinforce those boundaries. Our constitutional system exists to help us disagree well—and its degradation has meant we have gotten much worse at disagreeing. Our parties have lost sight of their proper work. Politicians want nothing to do with the kind of bargaining and competition that our system of government requires and prefer instead to traffic in extravagant displays of vicious bile. Congress has turned itself into a venue for their performative hysterics rather than an arena for negotiation. 

The constructive reform of these institutions demands a reacquaintance with their purpose, and the purposes of our constitutional system. One of its primary purposes is to facilitate our disputes. And those disputes are bound to be intense and passionate. 

Taking the Trump assassination attempt seriously does not mean censoring ourselves so we don’t argue with each other or criticize politicians we think are unfit to lead. We do need to do that.

Rather, it should reaffirm both the necessity of the boundaries of our politics, and the necessity of the politics that happens within those boundaries. We need to refocus our political debates on tractable public problems. And we need to lower the temperature of those debates by revitalizing the institutions that keep their stakes relatively low—making sure that no person or institution has all the power, no majority gets everything it wants, and no election is the final one. 

Political violence is not the inevitable conclusion of the path we have traveled in our politics. It is a choice we risk making, and which we must now rise to reject by recognizing the options before us. 

Yuval Levin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, has just been published.

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