One of the worst things about the character of contemporary partisanship is that because everything

has to be politicized, things just sort of fall on one side or the other of our politics,

and people in one party feel like they have to be against something because people in the other

have made it their big issue. And this certainly happened with family issues. I mean, the idea

that to talk about providing support for families is to take a stark polarized partisan position

is, I think, bizarre. We can certainly argue about how to support families, and I think there may be

just some distinctly left or right ways of thinking about that. But the notion that there ought to be

a role for society as a whole to provide support for family formation and for family durability,

it seems to me, should be uncontroversial. It certainly is controversial. And you know,

it's just the character of this moment is that essentially everything is controversial. I mean,

you can't take any position without it being identified as in one sense or another a rejection

of the opposite party. I think family is the foundation of society. And that's not because

of our kind of society in particular, it's because of what it is to be a human being.

Yeah, that feels fairly universal. Yeah, human beings are never born alone. They're always born

in families. And some one way or another, that's how we're formed to be what we become.

This week on Forward, founding editor of National Affairs Magazine and director of social

cultural and constitutional studies of the American Enterprise Institute author of five books,

Yuval Levin joins us on forward this week.

It is my pleasure to welcome to Forward, one of the smartest guys around in terms of how to fix

this world of ours, the head of social cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise

Institute and the founding editor of National Affairs Magazine, very fancy stuff.

Yuval Levin, Yuval, welcome. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to be here.

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