The Constitution Can Unify America, Levin Says at SPN Annual Meeting

ORLANDO, Fla.—In his keynote address at State Policy Network’s Annual Meeting this week, Israeli American journalist and constitutional studies expert Yuval Levin said that the U.S. Constitution once united our nation—and perhaps, surprisingly, might do so again.

Hot topics at this year’s gathering ranged from data centers and artificial intelligence in health care to school choice, federalism, and building freedom movements in states.

But one topic discussed at the event didn’t address some new technology or policy idea, but instead a very old one: “Can the Constitution Unify Americans?”

“The American Constitution is ultimately a framework for national unity, for a kind of cohesion,” Yuval Levin, the American Enterprise Institute’s director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies, told the audience.

Levin, a former White House domestic policy staff member under George W. Bush and former executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, noted that it often seems like the Constitution is “more a source of our division than an answer to it.”

“We tend to associate the Constitution now with a lot of the problems at this moment,” he said. He added that the division facing America today is, in some respects, a “constitutional failure.”

But he went on to say that the “challenge of unity” was very much at the forefront of the constitutional framers’ minds—the Founders, too, faced enormous divisions.

As an example, he mentioned that James Madison was “uniquely attuned to the dangers of division and faction in political life.” Madison, according to Levin, understood that “the disagreement about fundamental questions is totally unavoidable in a free society, because it is a free society.”

And in a free society, Levin argued, “unity is achievable, provided that we don’t expect it to mean unanimity.” The key, he said, is to understand that “unity does not necessarily mean thinking the same way, but rather, it means acting in step with one another.”

Part of acting in step as a nation is the Constitution’s adherence to federalism, the system of government in the United States where power is divided between a central national government and individual state governments. This constitutional framework allows unity and diversity to coexist peacefully; individual states act with a certain amount of independence from one another and end up being “the laboratories of democracy.”

According to Levin, the Constitution is “intended, in large part, to be a set of answers” to the question of how citizens can act in unity despite having differences of opinion. What works for one state might not work for another.

The Constitution offers a path forward for all by allowing such diversity while keeping everyone united as one nation.

The keynote was a perfect fit for the State Policy Network, which focuses on how individual states can find solutions to problems and promote liberty while maintaining diversity and unity at the same time.

As the author of a book entitled “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation-and Could Again,” Levin was a fitting spokesperson to defend the Constitution as a tool for uniting American citizens.

At State Policy Network’s meeting this week, over 1,500 state policy, nonprofit, and industry professionals gathered to share and discuss concerns that everyday Americans face. The four-day event featured more than 100 sessions and had about 350 organizations represented, with everyone in attendance hoping to discover new opportunities for Americans to flourish.

Within this setting, Levin brought a unique and insightful perspective on how the country’s founding document can bring people together, rather than separate and divide them.

He closed by stating, “An argument we need to make more often … [is that] the work that everyone in this kind of effort is engaged in every day is fundamentally a work of constitutional renewal and recovery.”