Yuval Levin on Institutions, Influence, and the Difference Between Expression and Action

Yuval Levin’s professional life isn’t a straight-line ascent so much as a sustained commitment to one question: how enduring ideas become workable public action—and what breaks when our institutions stop doing their formative work. In this conversation, Levin looks back on a path that only coheres in retrospect, moving from Capitol Hill (including the final years of Newt Gingrich’s speakership), to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, to Leon Kass’s presidential bioethics commission, and then into the Bush White House and the think tank/editorial world. Across those shifts, his “home base” stays the same: the border between theory and practice.
From there, we dig into the craft and the diagnosis. Levin explains how he stress-tests arguments so they don’t devolve into stylish, self-satisfied commentary—and why the best writing brings “permanent” questions to whatever everyone is staring at right now. That framework sets up his broader institutional critique: authority is increasingly used as a stage for personal branding, not a role that shapes people toward service, and the consequences show up in everything from performative politics to Congress’s diminishing appetite for the hard work of governing.
We close with Levin’s most concrete counsel for students: treat expression as cheap and action as hard, think in decades rather than news cycles, and read widely enough that you can tolerate—and learn from—views you didn’t arrive with. 

-Yuval Levin is the founding editor of National Affairs and the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy.

Finding the through line: theory meets practice
Benjamin Wolf: For readers who may not know your path, what’s been the through line of your career—and what problem have you most consistently tried to work on, even as venues have changed?
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Yuval Levin: It’s an interesting question because it’s one that I can only really answer in retrospect. I definitely did not have a path laid out when I was an undergraduate or early in my career.
I knew I was interested in politics, broadly speaking, and I went to college in Washington, D.C. I was an undergraduate at American University—studied political science—but more than that, being in D.C. meant I got a chance to work on Capitol Hill as a college student, and after.
And in a sense, I came gradually to see that what really interested me was not everyday electoral politics so much as the intersection of theory and practice, as I would describe it now: the place where political ideas really meet public policy.
I was very interested in policy—federal budget issues, health care. That’s what I ended up working on as a congressional staffer, and I became more and more involved in the range of domestic policy issues. But I was also more and more interested in political theory, and it wasn’t obvious to me that there was a career path that could explore that intersection.
I was a congressional staffer. I worked for a member, then for the Budget Committee, and then for the Speaker—at the end of the 1990s. So I worked for Newt Gingrich in the last two years of his speakership. And when he left Congress in 1998–99, I decided it was time to try graduate school, and I went to the University of Chicago to get a PhD, basically in political theory. I did it in a program at Chicago called the Committee on Social Thought—which is a very University of Chicago thing—but it was essentially a PhD in political theory.
If you had asked me during that time, I would have said I was on a path to be an academic, to be a professor somewhere. But George W. Bush got elected president in 2000, and toward the end of 2001 he named one of my professors at Chicago to run a presidential advisory commission on bioethics—which was a big issue in the early 2000s.
That professor—because I had worked in Washington and was his student—his name was Leon Kass. He asked me to come and work for him on the staff of that commission. So while I was finishing my PhD, I came back to Washington and worked on a presidential commission as the staff director.
And that actually—though I could never have designed it that way—was a way to work at the intersection of theory and practice. It was both academic and political. Through that work, I got to know people in the Bush administration. I ended up working in the Bush White House as a domestic policy staffer for most of Bush’s second term.
And then I went into the think tank world, where again I’ve had a peculiar opportunity to work at the intersection of theory and practice—thinking about how political ideas move public policy, and being involved in some of the big policy debates of the time, as those have changed. I worked a lot on health care issues in the Obama years, and then have really worked, above all, on the questions of the health and integrity of American institutions since that time—with a set of books about how to think institutionally, how to think about the American constitutional system.
All of that has really been, for me, a way of hanging out at that intersection: How does theory relate to practice? How does public policy relate to political ideas?
If somebody asked me how you get a job in that space, I have no idea. I think it’s really a matter of being open to walking through doors that weren’t the ones you were looking for—and that’s more or less my career path.

Pressure-testing ideas: avoiding the “clever essay” trap
BW: You’ve been both an editor and a policy thinker. What’s your process for pressure-testing an argument so it doesn’t become just a clever essay—especially when your audience may already agree with you?

YL: The challenge is to look at what everybody’s looking at and see something that others haven’t seen. It’s very easy to just write what everybody’s writing at any given moment. I’m sure I do fall into that, and there’s no way entirely to avoid it.
But the challenge is always to try to bring some framework—some set of ideas—to a prominent question that isn’t the frame everybody else brings to it. To me, that gets back to the opportunity presented by working at the intersection of theory and practice.
I try to approach the questions of the day from the point of view of some deeper principles or philosophical debates that are always relevant. That’s a way to challenge contemporary assumptions and conventional wisdom. I’m sure I don’t always do that, but that’s the goal: take what everybody’s looking at right now, and subject it to the test of durable ideas—permanent ideas. That’s one way to bring value to public debate.

One failure behind multiple crises: institutions as platforms for self
BW: Going back to what you said about institutions: if you had to name one institutional failure that explains multiple downstream crises—distrust, polarization—what would it be, and why that one?

YL: I think there’s one kind of institutional failure behind a lot of the challenges we face now. It’s an argument I put forward in a book in 2020 called A Time to Build.
In a lot of our institutions, people with authority used their institutional position not as a way of being formed into some particular kind of work, but as a platform for their own self-expression—their own brand, their own prominence.
Having a meaningful place in an institution generally means you have to be formed in some particular way. You have a role to play, and you have to ask yourself: What’s my role here? If I’m a scholar or a student, if I’m a CEO, if I’m a parent—given that role, what should I be doing? That’s what you ask when an institution has formed you.
But a lot of times now—whether it’s in politics, in Congress, or the presidency, or the courts; whether it’s in the professions, in journalism, or in law; whether it’s in American religion or culture—you find people who clearly do have a role not being formed by that role, but using it to elevate themselves and build a bigger following.
A lot of members of Congress now, rather than thinking, “As a legislator, how should I approach this problem?” think: being a legislator means I have a big audience, so let me speak to that big audience. I think our last several presidents have operated performatively in that sense. You find it increasingly in the corporate world, in journalism, in science—people using their position to build a following rather than being formed by the institution they’re part of.
That’s a general pattern—it doesn’t describe everything—but I think it has a lot to do with the particular problems you find in a lot of institutions in American life. And I focused particularly on the ways this shows itself in American political life. I do think that in Congress in particular, this deformation creates a situation where Congress isn’t eager to do its work—and the absence of Congress is behind a lot of our constitutional problems in this moment.

Institutions and authenticity: why “outsider forever” can’t build anything
BW: Many young people hear “institutions” and automatically think “bureaucracy,” or associate it with a negative stigma. What’s the best argument that institutions are not the enemy of authenticity or freedom, but one of the conditions for them?

YL: Institution is a boring word. It’s not exciting. It doesn’t seem like something you’d want to be part of. And American culture encourages us to think in terms of independence and authenticity, and so not to be constrained by institutions.
The trouble is: you just can’t do anything in the world without institutions. What is an institution? It’s really a form of common action. It’s built around a goal. It brings people together around that goal and gives each of them a role in relation to the goal and to each other.
If the goal is to educate children, some people are teachers, some are principals, some are parents, some are students. What they do together is the work of an institution.
It’s not really possible to do anything together in the world without that institutional form. If you always want to be the maverick outsider, there’s a satisfaction in that, but you can’t really do anything. You can’t be influential. You can’t actually change the world if all you are is an individual critic.
There’s value in individual critics, but we can’t all play that role, because then no one’s doing anything.
So I would say to younger people: tell me what you care about in the world, and I’ll show you why you can only do anything about it by being part of a functional institution. The maverick critic can only get you so far. If you actually want to change things for the better, you need to think about how to build institutions, how to play a part in them, and how to see what they do.
They’re more exciting than they seem, because they’re the only way we can have real agency in the world.

“Expression isn’t action”: writing that’s worth publishing even if it won’t go viral
BW: Political and academic writing is increasingly incentivized to be outrageous—performance gets views. When you’re deciding what to publish at National Affairs, how do you make sure what you’re publishing is worth publishing even if it won’t go viral? And how do you dissuade yourself from chasing the more outrageous angle?

YL: It’s vital to ask yourself: is my goal a big following, or is my goal some set of action in the world? Those are not the same.
It’s important to remind ourselves of the difference between expression and action. It’s very easy now, being intensely engaged with the world through social media, to think that liking something—or even just saying something—is the same as doing something. Generally speaking, when you’ve expressed yourself on social media, you’ve done essentially nothing. The question is: how do I do more than nothing?
In our political life, the answer is: build a coalition. Persuade people. A lot of political expression now is not persuasive. It’s directed to people who already agree, and its purpose is to energize them. But the problem we face is that we don’t have broad coalitions for action. Even political parties now generally form narrow majorities when they’re majorities at all, and they’ve lost the knack for building broad coalitions.
So the question I ask myself when I consider something for publishing at National Affairs is: does this make a case for action that has some chance of being broadly persuasive?
I’m in an advantageous place because we don’t depend on a large audience. We try to have an influential audience, but the magazine is a nonprofit supported by people who value its capacity to inform our political life. What we do doesn’t have a mass audience—there’s no chance it would. If you publish a 6,000-word piece on how to fix Medicaid, you’re not going to go viral. The question is: might you reach the people in a position to actually do something about the problem?
One other thing as an editor: our goal is at least as focused on the writers as the audience. We’re trying to build a community of people who think together about public problems. I’m as interested in drawing the right writers together as in reaching the right readers.
We offer our writers an influential readership. In a sense, I think about our audience as a way of getting the best writers, as much as the other way around—because part of what you need to advance political change in a free society is an intellectual community of people thinking through how to address public problems.
So I’m definitely not in the business of going viral. If I were, what I’m doing would be a great failure. But that’s not everybody’s role, and it’s certainly not mine.

Diagnosing performative institutions: “going out of their lanes”
BW: You’ve warned against performative institutions—places that reward status signaling more than service. What’s a diagnostic sign that tells you an institution has drifted from formation into performance?

YL: It’s especially clear when you see institutions plainly going out of their lanes.
When a university feels the need to have an institutional opinion about a war in the Middle East, I think: I’m not sure that’s what we look to you for. Or when a company feels the need to express itself about an election or a big political issue—you can understand why they feel that, but they’re making a mistake, and they’re undermining their capacity to do their actual work.
This happens a lot. It happens with professionals who feel like the authority they have in one arena gives them the authority to speak in every arena. If you work in public health, you feel expected to have a view about civil rights. Well—you’re not. Help us address the problems in your own domain, rather than thinking that being prominent there means you have to express an opinion about everything all the time.
So you see it constantly: why is it necessary for the pastor of this congregation to have a view about that political issue? Why is it necessary for this CEO to tell me what his company thinks about abortion? That question points to trouble on the institutional front.

Career advice: the door you didn’t expect, and the time horizon everyone forgets
BW: As we begin to close: what’s a piece of career advice you wish you had taken earlier? And  what’s one question you wish more interviewers asked because it gets closer to the real trade-offs of this work?

YL: I think the hardest thing to grasp as a student—something I only see in retrospect—is that no one’s career follows a path. Successful people generally are doing something they would not have expected to be doing when they were younger.
The hardest thing is to be willing to walk through the door that isn’t the one you expected, but that’s presented itself and offers an interesting opportunity.
A lot of times the feeling is: there’s risk here; I should play it safe, follow the path, look for the next promotion on the track I’m on. That’s not crazy, but it assumes career paths are laid out trajectories—and that’s almost never true in any profession.
So be willing to try things when you’re young. The risks are higher when you’re older—you have more to lose. You’ve got a family, you’re established somewhere. You can’t just try something for a year and if it fails try something else. When you’re 22, you really can. That’s the time to do it. You’ll regret not trying it when you have less freedom later on.
In terms of a question people don’t ask—what’s hard to grasp about the business I’m in is that change takes time. Politics demands you operate in a short-term way—you think about the issue of the moment—but significant change, whether analyzing it or driving it, requires a long-term view.
You have to ask: what needs to be true in ten years for this to work out?
It’s always worth asking people: what do you see yourself advancing in the long term—not just what are you trying to do next week or next month?

Becoming useful: read widely, seek history, tolerate discomfort
BW: If a motivated undergrad wants to become meaningfully useful in this world, what skills or habits should they focus on developing?

YL: You have to be open to a variety of views—and that means you’ve got to read a lot. Expose yourself to a lot of ideas. Listen to podcasts you might think will get you angry or bored. Maybe they won’t.
Read things that are not what everybody’s talking about right now. Get a historical sense, because things are more different than you imagine. We all assume the world we grew up into has always been the world, and it’s not true.
Broadening your horizons and the range of ideas you’re willing to think about is the key skill.

What to read: Tocqueville
BW: Finally, for those interested in following your path—or a similar field—what piece of literature would you recommend they read, and why?
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YL: In my general field, everybody has to read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It’s not a book of career advice. It’s not analysis of this moment. But it runs very deep to the character of our society in a way that’s always relevant. I constantly find myself thinking back to it.
If you haven’t read Tocqueville, do yourself a favor. You’ll enjoy it, and you’ll really appreciate it.