Yuval Levin

Rather than ideology, our political culture at this point is almost entirely the function of a kind of breakdown of our social psychology, unleashed and unmoored from institutional constraints. Revisiting the Federalist Papers can help us to see our modern dilemmas more clearly.

A defense of academic integrity that can’t distinguish between hearing from a virulent if entertaining troll and hearing from a distinguished if unorthodox social scientist isn’t going to capture the essential purpose of academic integrity, or win the assent of the persuadable. That greater purpose of academic life is what is now at stake in our campus debates, and it is what is always at stake in serious campus debates.

President Trump has put an end to the fighting over entitlement reform by simply refusing to face the problem altogether, in effect denying that any solution is needed at all. He has taken the Democrats’ denial a step further, and Republicans have been all too willing to follow his lead.

Whatever one thinks of tariffs, “paying down large amounts of the $21 Trillion in debt that has been accumulated” is not something they could achieve. Maybe the president knows that, maybe he doesn’t.

Finding local solutions to national problems offers an approach better fitting of the diversity of American communities.

A review of all the paperwork that circulated through Brett Kavanaugh’s office when he was staff secretary would pretty much amount to a review of all the paperwork that circulated through the White House in those years, and yet would also reveal essentially nothing about Kavanaugh. It would mostly amount to a monumental waste of the Senate’s time.

Presidential hyperactivity in recent decades has masked a rising tide of dysfunction—giving us policy action to observe and debate while obscuring the disorder that was overtaking our core constitutional infrastructure. It kept us from facing what should be an unavoidable fact: Congress is broken.

If Justice Kennedy is replaced by a reliable judicial conservative in the mold of Justice Gorsuch, then Chief Justice John Roberts would probably become the swing vote on the Court. And he would swing in response to a different set of priorities than Kennedy’s—a set of priorities that might in time become core concerns of America’s legal and constitutional culture as a result, at least for practical purposes.

Trump has created an unusually complicated political problem for Republicans in Congress in the summer of an election year, and he keeps finding ways to make it worse.

Charles Krauthammer’s example in so dark an hour of his life was yet another reason to be grateful to him, and for him.

In this moment in particular — a time when the question of the very nature of American patriotism and nationalism is much in the air — the flag can offer us one path through challenging terrain.

In both the conservative and progressive imagination, civil society is valued—for opposite reasons—as an arbiter between the individual and the national state. But by viewing civil society as the core of America’s social life, we can see our way toward a politics that might overcome some of the dysfunctions of our day.