It is commonplace to observe that American politics in the 21st century has been highly polarized. Still, have Americans ever not been at odds politically? Probably not. But the fever of the most hyper-politicized citizens who regard their partisan counterparts not as opponents but as enemies, as traitors to the country, runs very high these days. And when this is combined with institutions and political processes so dysfunctional that they exacerbate the problem rather than ameliorate it, one might say it is time to step back and think about what to do.

Yuval Levin does just this in his latest meditation on our politics. The director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the quarterly National Affairs, Levin will be familiar to many NR readers. In American Covenant, he recurs to the political science of the Constitution’s framers to show us how our founding charter constituted us as a people, as citizens of a liberal democratic republic who learn how to act together even when — especially when — we continue to disagree about many important things.

A word about Levin’s title and subtitle. I don’t believe he ever refers in the book to our constitutional order as a “covenant,” yet the notion permeates his argument. If the Constitution is more than an institutional and legal framework, if it embodies “an ethic of civic engagement and obligation,” as Levin characterizes the Founders’ republicanism, then it is a kind of covenant of each American with every other. As for the subtitle (“How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — and Could Again”), Levin is not nostalgic for a mythic golden age when Americans were all in harmony with one another. What he means by the Constitution’s “unifying” the country is that, by the very design of its institutions, it made good on the motto E pluribus unum. It took a factious, fractious people in all our diversity and compelled us to argue, negotiate, and accommodate our way to transient majorities in making public decisions, learning in the process that while our position in today’s majority or minority is evanescent, we have a durable membership in a federal republic responsible for governing itself.

The Framers gave us layers of political complexity: states possessing power over our nearest daily concerns, united in a federal government of limited powers, its institutions representing different constituencies, operating on different electoral rhythms, set in tension with each other but expected to work together in the people’s interests, with an independent judiciary settling some but by no means all of the rivalries between legislature and executive, state and nation, government and individual. All these moving parts make for a “dialectical institutionalism” that “allows the American system to respond to its own failures by shifting its weight without losing its balance.”

Even our political parties made a positive contribution to the Constitution’s political science. Though they were not part of the Framers’ design, indeed were feared by them, they rapidly emerged as natural growths of republican government’s political class. As reformed and restructured on a mass basis by Martin Van Buren in the Jacksonian period, the two-party system “leaned into the diversity of American society as a way to restrain extremism.”

That theme of restraining extremism is a thread running through the entire book. The bicameral Congress was designed to be a set of spaces where representatives of diverse interests contend with each other, build coalitions by compromise (by definition, the forgoing of one’s most extreme demands), and learn the arts of deliberation in the national interest. The presidency, prior to its modern reconception as the locus of protean leadership power, was understood to be a force for stability as well as vigorous administration of the laws. The judiciary, “kept at some remove from politics,” was to restrain the other institutions in the name of the rule of law, but was expected to restrain itself in its interventions.

All these institutions — our federalism, the separate branches of the national government, the parties — are performing badly today, fostering extreme division rather than moderating and taming it. They appear to be producing the very strain under which they are cracking. Why?

Levin’s answer — his bête noire — is the progressivism represented most notably by Woodrow Wilson. (In certain respects, American Covenant is even structured as a rejoinder to Wilson’s 1908 book, Constitutional Government in the United States.) Many conservatives have learned to recoil from Wilson and company; few have so cogently critiqued their program as Levin — perhaps none so concisely. Where the Framers envisioned a form of national unity achieved “among rival factions through the common work of arriving at negotiated accommodations, the progressives assumed that greater consolidation under centralized leadership would yield a more united society.” It hasn’t worked out that way — quite the contrary.

In Congress, each party views the other as the captive of “special interests,” and itself as truly representing “the people.” Democrats and Republicans struggle bitterly to achieve narrow partisan majorities and are increasingly drawn more to posturing for the next biennial election than to the hard work of legislative deliberation. Thanks to primary elections — an innovation of the progressives — each party is dominated by its most revanchist elements. The presidency today likewise reflects “an essentially expressive ideal of politics,” traceable to progressivism, that is “set up to fail to deliver on its promises.” The administrative state fills the vacuum left by a dysfunctional Congress and is only half-controlled by the presidency, while the judiciary too is increasingly a policy-making institution. “And the full range of domestic issues has been effectively nationalized,” with the states reduced to local satrapies “acting as administrators of federal programs.”

What then is to be done? Levin has some practical ideas that may seem small-bore, but from such small things, big things may one day come. He would like to decentralize Congress — expanding the House by 150 members, restoring power to standing committees, permitting them to elect their chairmen, and combining authorization and appropriations in the same committees. He wants presidents to become administrators again, bringing more of the bureaucracy “under the umbrella of presidential review and control”; on the other hand, presidents “should self-consciously fade just a little into the background of our national life,” which can start with forgoing the State of the Union address and restoring the pre-Wilsonian tradition of written annual messages. And Levin cautions against “a more conservative judicial activism, as if replacing one unaccountable elite with another will restore our republic.”

Perhaps his most fruitful suggestion is to consider ranked-choice voting in our parties’ primary elections. This method of voting “for multiple candidates in order of preference,” which “is essentially an automatic runoff system,” could swing control of parties back from the fringes to the center, resulting in the choice of candidates more appealing to centrist swing voters in general elections. Levin understands the limits of this suggestion, rightly confining it to primaries: “Ranked-choice general elections would undermine the parties, while ranked-choice primary elections would strengthen them, as we should want to do.”

Above all, however, Levin wants us to relearn how to think about the Constitution, this covenant that makes one people of us. Properly understood, American unity is not ideological victory of one side over the other in our partisan and culture wars. It is “less a condition than a way of life,” and “has at least as much to do with disagreeing better as with agreeing more.” At its best, our political order points to a “civic friendship,” achieved by the “habits of moderation” that our institutions were built to encourage.

I almost regret that Levin identified himself as a conservative in the opening pages of this book, because he is right to say at the end that his project is not “a partisan enterprise.” People of every outlook find our politics frustrating today, and all can see in Levin’s argument some hope of alleviating that frustration.

It is difficult for me to be detached about this wonderful book. Levin’s argument is steeped in the teachings of The Federalist, and often draws on the insights of groundbreaking scholars of an earlier generation such as Martin Diamond, Herbert Storing, and Walter Berns, as well as on contemporaries such as James Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvo, among others. In American Covenant I hear echoes of some of my own teachers on American politics, who were students and colleagues of the older men just named. Indeed, I see arguments I have made myself, in a career of teaching the American Constitution that began more than 40 years ago.

This is not a matter for boasting, but for saying humbly that I wish I had had this book to assign to my students during all those years. It makes the case for the Constitution’s political science better than any other book I can think of, and would have helped me be a better teacher. It is surprisingly comprehensive, accessibly written, and imbued with a generous spirit that transcends our divisions. A very fine introductory course on American politics, in fact, could be built on three books in conversation with one another: The Federalist, Wilson’s Constitutional Government, and Yuval Levin’s American Covenant. Add the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and you wouldn’t need anything else.