Yuval Levin is back with an optimistic take about the lessons from Kevin McCarthy's agonizing fight to become Speaker

<p>Back in the summer of 2017 when I started this podcast, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/yuval-levin/id1248994688?i=1000390098316" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">my first guest was Yuval Levin</a>.&nbsp;And over the years, Yuval has been one of my most consistent conversation partners, in informal lunches and on this podcast.</p><p>Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). This is his fifth time on this show now. Each time has been a really rich and deep conversation, and this time is no different.</p><p>I found myself wondering what Yuval would think about the battle last week in the House of Representatives over the Speakership. All week as the fight raged on the House floor, I kept seeing some of the pioneering work that Yuval has done represented in the ways that observers and pundits thought about and talked about what was happening.</p><p>Back in April of 2018, Yuval gave a series of three lectures at Princeton University called, "<a href="https://jmp.princeton.edu/events/why-institutions-matter-three-lectures-breakdown-and-renewal" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Why Institutions Matter: Three Lectures on Breakdown and Renewal</a>." These lectures became the basis of the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Time-Build-Community-Recommitting-Institutions/dp/1541699270" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">"A Time to Build,"</a> which was released at the beginning of 2020.</p><p>One of the fundamental insights of those lectures and that book was that so many of us today think of institutions as platforms, rather than molds. A platform is something you stand on top of, for self-promotion. A mold is something you go inside of, which shapes you. I had, like Yuval, been thinking a lot after the 2016 election about why our institutions were so broken, and his arguments were incredibly penetrating in helping me think more clearly about the problem.</p><p>So plenty of people were pointing out that