My new Washington Post column takes up Yuval Levin’s excellent new book about what we’ve forgotten about the Constitution.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in surreptitiously recorded comments, said that “there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” While some of his critics have read that remark as combative, it should not be controversial. Maintaining cohesion in a society riven by deep differences is a serious challenge that has been recognized as such by a wide range of political thinkers.

Among those thinkers were the American Founders. . . .