Yuval Levin is a conservative who is neither an anti-intellectual, nor an advocate of racialized populist nationalism, nor a simplistic anti-statist. This makes him quite the unicorn in the context of contemporary US conservatism.
stitcher.com/podcast/vox/th…
stitcher.com/podcast/vox/th…
I was fascinated by this conversation between @ezraklein & Yuval Levin. I especially recommend it for 2 types of people. 1) those on the Left who value sharpening their own ideas by rubbing them up against an intelligent form of conservatism and 2) conservatives sick of Trumpism.
@ezraklein Imagine this...a 90 minute conversation with an American conservative in which not a single lib is owned, not a single ethnic group is maligned, and no hyperbolic overgeneralizations about "the unhinged, dangerous left" are uttered. Shocking indeed.
@ezraklein The sad part, of course, is that the institutions that currently embody "American conservatism"--the GOP and Fox News--are deeply inhospitable to people and ideas like those articulated by Levin. It's hard to imagine a GOP that moves in the directions he urges.
@ezraklein I'd say that many of the ideas Levin articulates here closely resemble what many conservative intellectuals in post WWII America *thought* conservatism was about. The historical relationship between those ideas and the *conservative movement* however, is more tenuous.
@ezraklein Not sure if Levin would agree with this characterization of his political position, but it struck me that his position most closely resembled 1990s, Clinton-era Democratic centrism, or the Rockefeller republicanism of an earlier era.
@ezraklein To my mind, a GOP that moved in that direction, rejecting the illiberalism and reactionary identity politics it has doubled down on, would be far healthier for our political culture. I'm not holding my breath that this is going to happen, however.
