>> in her new book political drugs, professor amy examines tribalism in america. next she joins a conversation with the author of the

"hilbillyology." good evening. on behalf of everybody at the bookstore at all the staff thank you very much for coming. we are very excited to have amy with us thisnk evening. walt professor at yale who's written and spoken extensively on matters of culture and identity. her new book political tribe addresses the theme that has become topical these days but has little interest in compromising or even try to get

along. one of the founding notions was a democratic system in which the differences of race, ethnicity, religion and so on would be taken up in a shared identity but these days messages that appealed toh the shared values seen repeatedly trumped by messages intended to exploit narrow group identity. she argues those in the international affairs and our domestic dealings, americans have fallen prey to tribalism as we've often been blind to it and we have a debilitating tendency to revert to its. a number of positive reviews, one of the "washington post" insightful, disquieting, hopeful because they are trying to break

out of their political tribes. whether the amount of a definite seismic trend is debatable, but at least they are encouraging and psychological research shows humans can in various ways break the tribal spiral. as an added attraction she will be in conversation with the the authoril of the best-selling hillbillyology, his compelling memoir about growing up poor in a family of appalachian values and habits. amy and jb know each other very well. amy took an interest in him and his background and helped persuade him and ended up

introducing the person who became his literary agent. we should all have such help with our literary undertakings. but she said that it's been a two-way street for her. she learned a great deal from hihim out of a world she had knn little about. so ladies and gentlemen please help me welcome amy and jd. [applause] >> this is my first ever interview as the interviewer so i want to beg your forgiveness

but i thought i would start by talking a little more personally about how we know each other and it of course occurring to me that like you said earlier my book is at least partially because you interested me in my literary agent and gave me confidence that was worth publishing. the only thing i've done to repay u.s. to come here and have a nice conversation so it's been a pretty one-sided relationship maybe talk about where the relationship came from and thosf those that are not familiar with the. the. and i'm curious when i was a student at yale law school where did you think about me and why did you encourage me to write this book lacksou [laughter]

>> i met him his very first day of law school. he was one of ma maybe 70s dividends in my class and he sat in the very back row, tall guy that stood out in the front was now his wife. i think from the beginning i said this on record as superficially isuperficially ite have nothing in common. i'm of chineseou immigrants, my parents have graduate degrees, but i always felt likemm an outsider growing up which is why i'm interested in tribalism and identity and culture. when i go to china i don't fit in there. we have s had so much weird stun

common. a little bit of not liking pretentiousness. we've lacked impulse control. the end oat the end of the store interesting. at january 2011 my life changed. i was a professor writing about ethnic conflict. that's what i do and "the wall street journal" excerpt of my book with the incendiary title like chinese water torture. and it went viral and they probably to his bed in my case

it was very bad. i had no social media, no facebook or twitter, i was getting hundreds of e-mails per second, child abuser, it was terrible. i remember being in a hotel room by myself just so w upset, whene come up in seattle and i get an e-mail from him, two e-mails yet he was studying for an exam in the first asked me some boring question if a contractor builds a house -- one in the morning i get another e-mail and i can tell he has had a beer or two and what is amazing is he has the least money of anybody yet yale law school, it is a pretty privileged place in the part of the problem we will get to. he's like the one guy with no money and he goes into place to look into this is another thing

we have in common in a lot of people talk about books without having read them but he read it and wrote a long e-mail and believe it or not he's a guy can't be thabike ifyou think yor this at least you were trying and he told me about his own family which he had previously not the. you have suggeste had suggestedr mother was a nurse. i said you need to write a story and what's funny is i threw a party for his last year i think i went and dug up my old e-mail because maybe a few days later are not the same evening he sent me something, ten pages of his own thoughts.

i found them and they are the same opening as hillbillyology from the same as january, 2011, and almost unchanged page of the book so anyway that's the whole story. >> i remember law school i felt a little bit lost with other kids int and a student info i cd rely on amy for cultural advic. sure i don't have a job to apply to world class i should take or how should i behave in this social and you have advice. i do remember and i don't know if you remember this but i will try to jog your memory a little bibut there was this moment towards the end of the first year of law schoolnt i thought that i burned this bridge with you and the reason i thought that is because we went out as a

class mayla be in smaller groups that reasonably large groups ten or 12 of us if we were out for drinks and i remember a dozen or so of us were talking about law school and life if you like to get too know your students so we did these things every now and then end up a table next to us was this incredibly belligerent drunk guy and i remember we were sitting next to this guy and i kept thinking back like you've been there, don't say what you want to say to this guy but kept suggesting ridiculous thing and was criticizing me and my classmateses and finally i stood up and i think i said can i effing help you and i invited a confrontation with this particular person and immediately i thoughtco to mysef i lost my temper and this person has been kind to me will never

speak to me again but almost immediately thereafter the person who stood behind me backing me up -- >> was my husband. [laughter] said that was a fun experience. enough about that, let's talk about this book is excellent. i will read a bit from what i wrote. she argues that tribalism and violence that goes along with it is the norm all over the world but thanks to the shared national identity there's trouble on the horizon. let's talk about that trouble maybe we can start with those if you could just walk us through the basic thesis of the here it is again if you have not read it yet please go and buy it and then we

can talk about the simplification. the starting point is that human beings are tribal i mean biologically so. some off my favorite parts of te book are not quite about the politics part but there are some fascinating studies i will just tell you about one. recently researchers gave between the ages of four to eight and randomly assigned them to the red team or thehe blue tm and gave them t-shirts of the corresponding colors. they then set them in front of these computethe computer box am computer edited images of children, half of them wearing blue and half wearing red. they then asked for subjects for the reactions. the results were astonishing. even though they do nothing about the children of the

pictures, they consistently and passionately said they liked the children better that were wearing their color. they wanted to allocate more resources to them and they thought they were better in every way, smarter, nicer people. almostst more troubling, they displayed an unconscious bias when they were told stories about these kids and then they asked the children about buzzwords and they remember all the good things about the people wearing on their team in both the negative things about the people on the other side. there are studies likeke this tt show we desperately want to belong to these groups andr once we connect to a grou group thats what the facts don't matter we just want to see everything through the lens of that tribe and if you are presented with evidence that your child is doing something wrong, something

bad coming your response is often to stick toe. your tribe d you're feeling of doing that isn't if you werisand that you d and irresponsible that you are being loyal to that is a starting point. when i originally started writing the book it is only going to be a foreig a foreign-y book and i will explain how it became public that it is. three years ago, i was writing about how for united states league allowed in our foreign-policy and we tend to think of the conflicts in terms of grand ideological battles, capitalism versus communism and cold war and then the next way authoritarianism versus democracy. then after 9/11 it versus evil and freedom.

we always think that democracy is going to beys the panacea so the result is when we go get ino the country like iraq or afghanistan we don't pay any attention to the group identities that matter most to people on the ground and the reasons i got into the book basically part of it is because of her own extraordinary success with assimilation, the idea that in this country germans and hungarians in irish and italian and japanese could all become americans within a generation or two then why can't sunni and shia and kurd. the problem is if you understand these tribalism and demographi demographics, democracy often catalyzes the path to. so, maybe i can talk later but i give an interesting example of

vietnam i know most people here know by now that the united states we sell it through a cold war lens and underestimated the cold war works for some most experts in the field still don't know there was a problem in the next that undermined underminee efforts anwareffort and the ende didn't care about the difference between the vietnamese and the chinese. i was going to go on tv and

someone said don't use this escape because they don't know theau difference. they will think it's the same thing. so, we always assumed vietnam washa a pawn of communis commun. you see him later say if you paid attention to the history of vietnam he would have seen that is impossible, china is a gargantuan country is like a big cheney sitting on a little lamp in vietnam. china has always been the number one enemy. every hero was always fighting china. they colonized for 1,000 years so the idea that it would be a pawn of china is foolish but more importantly, and then i will stop with this the results of this ethnic intervention and that is vietnam had what i call

a market dominant minority that is the tiny 1% outside chinese minority for controlle control % of the country's wealth this is to go to southeast countries so most were not even vietnamese and the u.s. missed this they are going to support capitalism. they failed to see from the plaintiff view of the vietnamese people weee were asking them to fight and die basically to keep this heated minority of wealthy. the book was originally going to be about how our blindness to these incredibly important tribal and group identities are responsible for some of our greatest foreign-policy disasters and how did i get to domestic part? last february i will never forget it i was teaching a class that i talked for 20 years, it

was a popular classical international business transactions but it's where i talk about my own ideas and about democracy and ethnic conflict and this was one month after president trump has taken office. i was talking to this large class doing this whole thing i said for 20 years saying because developing country dynamics are so different from our own we keep messing up our foreign-policyre front in the developindeveloping countries or example, you often get politicians who sweep to power scapegoating minorities into targeting other people and sweeping to power on a wave of populism and i stopped and there

were 80 i 80 eyes looking at me thinking the same thing it sounds like you are describing america. that was last february and the book took on a life of its own i have to rethink a lot of things but basically a big point in the book is the united states today for reasons i can ge can't get r the first time in history we are starting to display dynamics much more typical of the developing countries, things that we thought that will never happen to us, the populist movement move towards authoritarianism, we are starting to see some of these exact s same patterns and they e very predictable right here in our own country so the book is an explanation, it's not random and i think h it would've people wondered how do we get here. once you start looking through the lens of democracy and

tribalism and the parallels to other countries, it's actually very predictable and if you understand the problem you can better overcome it. >> in a lot of ways it is the most relevant and newsworthy typet of way too a lot of the discussions we are having in the country today but scale back a little bit and talk about why. why is the united states or at least most people in the united states blind to this happening? you see it happening and the sound and it's a big part of the reason we understand the underliningm the dynamics. there wereng some people they we not a majoritarian voice by any means that some argued that it would end in disaster because we were not giving proper credence and understanding.

of course when i deployed to iraq there were a lot of folks i served with who yo we were reads book called the case for democracy that was influential in the bush administration and the basic argument is once you bring democracy to people they vote for people that serve the interest of and the popular will start too take over. why you think they are blind to this, there are certainly ways that your argument is compelling but this has become a phenomenon in the way that it happens in recent history why are we so blind to this fact that all over the world ethnic identity,

racial identity matters more than the national identities in the united states and its people often conceive of why does it matter more than we often give credit to. >> three simple reason >> three simple reasons they tend to be very blind to these identities first ishe the democracy has worked very smooth in this country for a very specific reason america for most of its 200 year history was dominated overwhelmingly economically, politically and militarily and culturally by a white majority. obviously being a moving target not only were considered white basically we dominated the country so what happens is democracy is very stable from the political point of view. there are plenty of tribes and voices into smaller groups but

they are all oppressed so the free-market democracy in a a situation where you have one group that is overwhelmingly dominant economically and politically suffered a lot of people it's why is there so much tribalism now? there's always been tribalism it's just their voices were suppressed before and they didn't have a voice. we have had a very successful history of assimilation so it's also rooted in some of a our deepest and best values, the enlightenment was always about overcoming these sectarian and religious and terrible ethnic things, the idea of the principles and the democracy and individualism, and what law. the experiment was the great enlightenment weekend markets

their natural and what i point out in the book is that democracy is not ethnically mutual. the principles might be that they've disproportionately benefit different groups. the final answer and i hate this term because it is overused at another reason is the been blind to racism. in vietnam i got endorsements from both generals and i do not know that before that they agreed with me to the united states didn't pay enough attention to the tribal identity and in vietnam for example it was chinese, japanese, it was just all what's the difference.

i won't go into it, he did something very successful he was the first person to pay attention and he turned it around for the time he was there. one thing he said as i is if uss a derogatory term for a racist term to refer to all arabs or muslims, you've are basically handinyou are basicallyhanding o that's anotherdi reason we say they'll look the same or we have a negative view of people. >> to take this to the domestic policy brown and the political realm, i remember being in new york city the night of the election and i was attending a party on the nightht held by the republican party leaders who expected it not to go especially well and it was one of these weird ones there by 9:00 we were all sitting around drinking and

we had enough we wanted t we wae susceptible to "newsweek" or the followingon story and there were many skeptics in the room this than just expected to go against trump if it's against the entire party and i remember getting a call about 9:30 or 10:00 they were doing their coverage with georgepa stephanopoulos and they called me and said we need you to come in. we need somebody to talk about the white working class because this isn't going the way that we expected it to go and i said interesting, sure i will come in. so i called a cab and went to the studio's environment arriving there and there were a couple of things i heard in the aftermath and an experience i had that night at the hip huggers that stuck with me. you heard a lot of commentators say in the wake of the election

they voted like an ethnic group and so on but for the first time you could say there was a whitee working class that seemed to be voting in the way the traditional groups voted that's something i heard a fair amount of the bears that the bears a ln your thesis but the flipside of that is the folks over working athat wereworking at abc and the just media folks. they acted almost like somebody that they really loved had just been killed and there was a sense of this deep abiding grief at the studio that night and it occurred to me if the site working class was voting like an ethnic group than the group of people i was spending time with

the studios they were kind of akin to an ethnic group because they were grieving together reacting not just as if they lost but as if something really deep and culturally funding just happened and that experience is what makes me interested in the thesis of your book because i do sometimes wonder that we are behaving our political ideologies or political groupings are behaving more like ethnicities than theic traditiol institutions. i would love to hear what you think about that. >> first i will sa would say i g the few people who wasn't surprised by the election and i can explain that later. it's more what it kept hearing whispered underground, so here's why i think we are where we are. first come of the massive, the c

changes we all know about an immigration in the last 30 years has been bigger and the composition now before it was from europe and now it's asia and africa so for the first time whites on the verge of losing their majority status. the prediction by 2044, so that's what i said. for most of history they were dominant and you could do terriblean things that you could also afford to be more generous and enlightened. what's happened now is every single group in america feels threatened. it's not just the minorities to feel threatened. a study in my success 67% of the white working class feels that they are more discriminate

against them minorities. it's not just muslims and jews and buddhists, christians now feel threatened. it's not just when an women for, straight, at this moment every group feels threatened and every group faces tribalism and thinks the other claim to being persecuted and discriminated against are ridiculous so that's part of this demographic change. the second reason we are where we are has to do with why you are the expert on this and i think when you've read a lot of stuff in the papers it's wrong. there's all this swinging around with white supremacy and nationalism and not helpful to call half the country white supremacisthi. that is and what is happening. what's happening is more what he referreded to which is what i cl

in my book we almost have to wipe tribes now that is class and educational levels in almost like a culturalca divide has spt the white majority and it's interesting he used the term ethnic because my field with ethnicity f is typical o typicae feature of the ethnic divide this isn't a perfect definition but this is something new in america because the drastic decline in the mobility of the

country. it used to be people from the midwest with a few education or whatever can you could go to a california or any of the coasts and come back but now it is so expensive to live on the coast. silicon valley, also education is no longer the route it was teleported mobility. people are stuck. there is much less validity. it's a misnomer because they are not coastal and not all beliefs or wealthy. that term refers to professors, journalists, activists and they are also not all white. i think it's better to describe them as a multicultural pretty

much everyone in this room. [laughter] people like me, whether republican or democrat, you view yourself as tolerant and you know a lot of minorities and believe in religious freedom and travel a lot and see people from all over the world and you probably think of yourself as not tribal because you believe in individual rights, human rights and cosmopolitanismie ths group tends to be very tribal and getting bac giving back to c difference there can be so little intermarriage between this kind of multicultural coastal mixing like my own family and my husband is jewish it's almost like an ethnic divide between the two tribes as much starker than with other ethnic groups. >> we should go to the audience

questions why i ask this question and amy answers it. if you have a question for either of us about anything, please line up at the microphones and we will answer as best we can. i want to throw a couple of provocative ideas out there and the first is from a friend of mine you know recently while he is the executive editor of the national review and the sun of the two immigrants and in some ways because of hiswo experiencs with his family is a deeply patriotic person and very ideological. he sees america as a great melting pot. he wrote a column that got a fair amount of it deserved. i forget the headline but it was somewhere along the line of white supremacist and his point was if you want to have and ethnically off the side in a segregated society you should

support higher levels of immigration because that tends to lend itselfat to ethnic clustering so if you are a white supremacist thought you should want is a large immigrant population because it reduces the rate of. his argument was what you want in thehe united states a sort of happy medium. you have enough there able to come in and contribute to the economy and culturally but not so many in this ethnic clustering and that is something that is relevant to the current immigration conversation. the second point i would love to get your response to is when a lot of folks who were upset about the election of donald trump there were two separate strands of thought i heard a neither coexists super well. one was this is not what america stands for but he's a xenophobia

or this or that or whether you agree on the exact criticism the point is that it's a shining city upon the hill and shoved both self to a higher standard, but as a liberal critique of the election i heard a fair amount in the wake ofofn the election. another critique that i heard from the left as opposed to the liberal side of american politics is that this is precisely what it is. donald trump is worse than anybody says he is from he's just as bad as his harshest critics say that he is in doubt embodiment of what america really is and i think that second argument is not just misguided, i think that they may actually lead to the type of ethnic tensions that you've talkeyou talkedabout in your boe don't have a common idea of an american nation, if we can't at

least appeal to the same shared value, if america is instead a day sitting on a shining hill just a terrible country that elects terrible people, then what argument or common idea, with common sense of purpose can we appeal to when we are arguing for political change whether you like donald trump or you don't i don't know the answer to that and i wondered if you think what i call the left side of the debate is missing something about the way they see themselves when they make that argument. >> first is this interestingcan adjust the e-mails i'm getting even responses to books tend to be in the grips of political tribalism. when the books come out of it is is this anti-trump or want and yoat ucfrom the book i am just diagnosing the problem and i don't throw any punches from

either side, so i really think how we got here i don't think that any side is blameless. both political sides have been complacent as playing with fire. i do think it's very interesting again came back to my point that a lot of beliefs don't reallyy understand the people they are trying to help save on college campuses it's something that we feel is important to expose the american dream as a sham to show i understand where this comes from and i am completely sympathetic to show so many people never have access, so many people were never even part of it and even today people don't have the chance to climb, upward mobility is alive, all

that is actually true, it's truth in the statement but for a lot of working class struggling americans just working class whites but all stripes, they love the american dream, all the surveys they don't hate capitalismte. most of the people that like socialism or want redistribution tend to be pretty privileged ivory elite kids orli privileged kids. so, just to finis finish this ud bring it full circle, i think what's happened over and over in the countriesik like venezuela o iraq, i have seen a small minority that is viewed like the 15% controlling the powers of the far and you get this leader

that says those are not real americans in control of everything. let's take back our country and that's the parallel if you look at what he did it's coded, make america great again. he actually said let's take back our country and going back to the point is a battle right now who are the real americans and folks on both sides from the point of view there is a lot of racism coded in that. why are they not real americans? because they love minorities and immigrants and africa's poor so it's almost like they are not real americans must expect the heartland than the people on the coast were equally to blame. so, i agree with you we can't be atat this point where the people who voted on the other side are not just people they disagree with, but they are actually we

view them as a mortal enemies. if we start to view people on the other side of the political dividert does not real americans then we are going to fracture two or more. i .-full-stop there and start taking questions. >> i have a couple of questions. one, i'm almost done reading your book and number two, we talk about tribalism. does this inter sexuality have a point with regards to tribalism a solution? >> first off, a fantastic example of advice and admonition i was supposed to give just ask a question and not give a speech

to the microphone please follow his example. to answer your question, i think there's a lot of ways and she demanded a certain amountrt and assumed that's probably one of the great hallmarks is they assume children are a little bit stronger and not these the things that need to be coddled and at the end of the day it was colorful and very demanding that she loved me and looked out for me and those are certainly when i read tiger mom i saw parts of my grandmother's story in the book. so the question of inter sectionality -- >> it's one of the most important concepts coming from the left and i think it is a

brilliant point. i know the person who claims the term. and it simply refers to the fact that people can be outsiders or minorities oppressed in different ways so you can be a hispanic woman with a different experience than a caucasian woman. in its conception i try to explain it's been used and spun out into the public sphere like everything else on social media and cable news to mean something that was never intended like the exponential politics.

things becomeba instant symbols. all lives matter, that it now stands for something so it's almost impossible to have a discussion because it's like you signal which tribe you are into how you respond to something. >> you wrote about countrieses that have gone through several wars and we look at america and you mentioned rising insecurity, the anger they are going through a believe it or not by an optimist. both sides.

a bigger concept is among the major powers america is a supergroup of with two characteristics one is that we have to have a strong overarchingg national identity, america and the second characteristic. this is a country where you can be irish-american, croatian, japanese-american and patriotic at the same time. believe it or not this is extremely rare. so you take china that has won this super strong overarching

identity but all of the group identitiesp are squashed. even france is not a supergroup. it's got an overarching identity and the policy you can't wear headscarves, even presidents have said you have to eat, talk and behave like a french person. ..re j.d. referred the attack on the

overarching identity. i happen to agree with j.d.. i will get in trouble for saying this because i was just on a college campus. i think there's a huge difference between saying we have these great ideals but in the united states we have repeatedly failed to live up to them. we have a shamefully betrayed our own ideals and we must do better. that's what i believe. there's a huge difference between saying that and this is a country built on hypocrisy and we have no real values that we are a land of oppression. such a fine difference because i think we have to oppress people. but it's that identity because as they say if america is nothing but a land of genocide and white supremacists why is that we are fighting? it's not worth fighting for if that's all it is pretty think we

are going to go back to that. i think we have within our dna and 2018, 2020 and i myself am among the few politicians. >> would the your critique of the understanding of american politics but in particular political scientist. understand the phenomena you are describing. i think it's a critique of those professionals and the question is if they got it so wrong and you've articulated in the trump election the elites were just as bad as the average elites at the average cocktail party, how did that happen? the cognitive dissonance. i think it was really not much better than the average cocktail

party understanding what was going on. how did that happen to those professionals understanding what you have described seemed to get so wrong. >> i will lancer payday think it's because of tribalism. a lot of these political science and economics models are based on people acting irrationally. it's a rational self-interest and by the way there are a lot fewer started to question this right now. the latest studies actually show that people don't necessarily vote for their self-interest or their policy but they vote much more on a piece of their affinity group or tribe. every day something horrible happens. a new scandal, a star. everyday at all of us say this is it, now this is it.

things come out of his mouth in what happens is people say oh my god that sounds a racist or sexist. he is actually done a better job presenting himself as a member of a cultural tribe that many members of america relate to. when they see him getting in trouble for saying this or that they relate to it as they are always getting in trouble. they just like it that he gets himself back up like a wrestling ring. they are a champion for that. i have some stats that for poor people their experiences such distrust for the establishment. who cares if a democrat or republican comes in? they come in and they go out of nothing ever changes for us so you haven't seen the policies translating to any benefits for you stick with your tribe and

vote for the person of your tribe. that's his miss their battles are built on maximum choice and it's much more primal. >> i think as a profession it has a lot of interesting stuff about what happened in the 2016 election and i think it's a useful discipline if your goal is to understand the various datasets and how they explain the population. i don't think it's especially predictive. i don't think it's the goal of science to predict how elections will unfold. that way they fail. i don't think it's a failure but a mischaracterization of the purpose. why has the broadly speaking myth been missed in the 2016 election? a lot i would agree with but at

a fundamental level i think that it's hard for people to appreciate just how abysmal the elk herds of if that a lot of people feel that they actually have. if you are a guy from my hometown who is seeing globalization and the best estimates suggest the early 90s the united states lost 7 million factory jobs. the working class whites adjusted for mortality rate has been falling in the last couple of years with the opioid epidemic which is very terrible has affected certain communities more than others. there is the sense that a lot of folks have back home that's whatever is different is at least worth trying and the hoax would have been in power for a long time have really screwed up. i think if you were living in washington d.c. where the median

income has exploded in the past 25 years were the opioid academic is something you read in the paper not something your neighbors experience every single day it's hard to imagine why some people are so pessimistic about their political future. it affects those folks voting patterns. let me say the academic clinical science literature is produced a lot of really adjusting thinking about why donald trump was ultimately elected. if you read the pages for example you would be led to think that trump voters were primarily racist or stupid or some combination of the two and there are a lot of academic political scientist so complicated that nrda been a lot of interesting ways. i wouldn't say the political science is the problem. think all of us in our various ways are missing what's going on in the country because we are not looking at any point about geography. we are not spending time with

each other and consequently we are ignoring what's going on. i think that flies in the other direction. i think the folks back home could certainly have a better sense of what's going on among certain communities that don't look or act or think like them so it's not a one directional problem but it's a problem. >> my question is pertaining communication on social media and the rapid increase in identifying tribes and their ability to communicate with each other in a way we have never before. been talking about for years and are membered high school reading the article about the elimination of bowling leagues and the problems that have happened in the neighborhood since then as the example. in 08 it started with the social

media craze and how it changed medication and kind of started to see a divide we have never seen before. it started really hitting home in 2012. i'm a republican and heard something about president obama at the time and my mom sang oh if you were not my son i would totally do a friend you are asked. she said that toomey.wow you really can just totally simply never hear them through that. so what in your experience, have you seen a rapid increase or an increasing speed of this transformation in social media becoming so prevalent in what has been your experience? >> i will briefly answer and then amy i'd be curious to get your thoughts. neal ferguson has an interesting book that came out not long ago i believe it's called the square

of the tower or maybe the tarp the square he talks about the way the social effects shuts us off from other views. i think the effect that you just mention i see something that i don't like so therefore it unfriend that person and consequently i close myself off from views expressed by that person. certainly that's a way that our social media reinforces tribalism that the problem i worry about more is all of us in this room i'm assuming are educated consumers of information and i'm guessing that none of us have a really good understanding of why facebook and twitter and other social media puts the information before the force that it does. in other words while i worry about somebody's parents on friending people who hold views they don't like i worry a lot more about the fact that we don't understand the basic institutional infrastructure that puts information front of

us. we don't understand how the algorithm goes from a to d to information front of my face and consequently i think that we are all and i don't want to understate this really remarkably are in uncharted territory. most of us don't have a good appreciation for why we consume the information that we do other than a bunch of people in silicon valley programs it and puts it in front of us and we are just not dealing with the implications of that. >> i think we will keep taking questions. i agree with that. >> i have a shorter question and one more in depth. the first one is, is there any way to reverse white nationalism or racism or do we just have to wait for certain people to die? [laughter] and the second question is this book is something you began writing years ago. my question is how did the rise

of trump affect the content of your book and what were the main changes you made in the book to your own personal opinion in tandem with white nationalism and any politics with the 2016 election. .. actually broken this down into polls. anyway, but i do claim this term of what i think is going on in

the united states. i think that this is a land of immigrants. so when you hear people calling others terrible names, it's not helping anybody, but i think there are many americans possibly a great majority who are terrified about these huge changes and the demographic changes that we are seeing. among the elites and liberals you cannot express the anxiety you have to be excited about the routing of america because that would -- there are incredibly huge demographic changes. i still think that we have to be able to say i'm worried about

immigration. without instantly being labeled xenophobia because happens is thapatterns isthat pushes the cn underground and that is where extremism festers and you see this ugly stuff. that's one of the reasons i was not surprised. i saw what was going underground at yale law school and there was one supporter and i know for a fact there were at least maybe 20 more importantly, there were a people who were against trump that had parents, uncles, cousins, people from all parts of america so i do think

language is important if we need to be able to address terrorism. if you ever say i'm worried about terrorism coming from the middle east, i would never say that because that is islam a phobia and suggesting terrorism and las vegas, the point is we need to allow people to express this anxiety because they are thinking it and so that's why i discussed the term of the nationalism in the. >> the white nationalism that worries me is the 22-year-old kid from the relatively privileged background.

not to sound like a nationalist or a patriot, but my thinking is that the antidote to that is some idea is capturing the notion of the american project that a lot of people to hear and how you beat that they wouldn't be flagged 40 or 50 years ago to remind them that we tend to take those peoples and remind them there's something meaningful about this american idea which by the way is hard to do if all you're hearing is thwe are heare is fundamentally corrupt.

>> i remember thinking i needed to study the sats more and i remember also with my parents and teachers enough to not read the book and since then you said your other books as well the books about mormons and jews and they read that book and it is and what everyone was saying but my question for you is has this helped you understand the liberalism and the left and now on that right a night as well a, how [inaudible] my question for you is on a regulai haveread your book and t started more as an autobiography and a cultural watershed moment.

so were you just writing about yourself? [laughter] >> i didn't think i would become the voice of the white working class, but i wanted to write a book about myself and some of the broad problems that i saw in the community. i didn't mean to scale out a little bit and take a slightly deeper and broader look that i didn't intend for what happened to have been. >> it completely changed me and my family. thing is tribal if people have different sides. just quickly because i know that we are about out of time.

i think how i could see it wasn't as clear is because there were so many people talking to me. i'd like to talk to students like don't tell anybody. but this is not that they wanted to come about worried about this or that and almost all we really did have a day of mourning after both of the classes were canceled and people were sobbi sobbing. students came to my house had practically slept over but a lot of people probably some of them here tonight are for the same demographic.

i think it was kind of a coastal e. eight. >> 65 or so they were not for donald trump but when the results came in and he told me a story about how his daughter and a 3-year-old called and said what am i supposed to tell my daughter and his response was she's 3-years-old so she better tell her to chew with her mouth shut and not worry about politics. [laughter] a pretty good lesson for all of us. your question. >> i wonder does that tie into another side and is there a strength that it can achieve?

>> i didn't hear the first part of the question but again i had some nice questions earlier. i am a very tribal person, but i think that everybody, that's why some of the studies in the book are some interesting one that i love to show people will interpret facts and numbers to support their group views so you can see the same statistics and facts. that's how we need more guns and that's why we need fewer and that's something we need to think about when we do something and study is fascinatingly the smarter you are the better you are at numbers the better you are at manipulating the figures to figure out the tribe's worldview so again, family is

tribal, i'm a very tribal person, so i think of america as a tribal front goin coming backo this idea we should be proud of our identity and what makes us special is we allow individuals and smaller tribes to flourish. >> i was confused about what you said about the four. they were allies in the soviet union. it didn't make a difference. >> so yes, the vietnam war was the north vietnamese were aligned with china and the south

vietnamese were the capitalist part of it so i was saying is that there are two pieces to thithis end and a lot of our des during those years were assuming that the vietnam was a pawn of communist china, that is just a puppet. the wealthy people in vietnam were not actually vietnamese.

the. are you ethnic chinese and they will say we are vietnamese.

thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible]

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