author geraldine brooks, life sunday october 7 from noon to 7:00 p.m. eastern on book tv. be sure to watch next month with jodi pickard and also. c-span2. >> well good evening. i'm charlie copeland, the president of the intercollegiate studies institute. in a minute you will hear from the president of the trinity forum and i'm honored that we

are jointly hosting this program this evening. members of the isi community believe in a simple, simple axiom and that is think, live free, think, live free. the trinity forum believes that the distraction in civility, polarization and pathology in our age stems from the lack of spiritual and character formation in leaders. there are few opportunities to grapple with, reflect on and discuss fully what matters most. in other words, both organizations believe deeply that an informed citizenry, that informed leaders, are well read, intellectually curious, and deep thinking. at isi, we build grow and maintain a community of college related constituents, students,

faculty, our alumni, who want to discuss and engage in the big ideas. what makes a society flourish and prosper? what makes a person whole? why does a society in which the rules are above the rulers make a difference? isi specifically focuses on higher education. last year we had over 1250 faculty advised student meetings which equals over 30,000 deep educational interactions between our faculty and our students. we had 155 separate independent lectures and debates. we had six regional weekend conferences. we had six liberty fund related conferences. 60 student newspapers that accessed over thousands of students as well as made national news on shows like tucker carlson, usa today,

national review, dallas morning news and numerous others. and our honors conference, our summer honors conference is considered the gold standard in developing conservative intellectual thought among college students. a de facto minor in conservativism where we discuss russell kirk conservative mind, richard weaver's ideas of consequences among other titles. the purpose of all these activities is to take today's college intellectual leaders and allow them to develop their own perspectives, around these foundational ideas and how they can be applied today. i'm fond of saying, for instance, if poverty were easy to solve, we would have solved it already. the principles that drove the success of the western world and brought the rest of the world along with it, have been the most successful ideas at

addressing those fundamental and tractable problems like poverty. however the problems suffered by humans and by humanity are constantly shifting. foundational ideas need constant sharpening and review. and discussions like this evening's are just a step in that ongoing process. on your chairs you will see a promotional handout for the intercollegiate studies institute up coming dinner for western civilization to be held in washington, d.c. on thursday, october the 15th. early that afternoon, we're also hosting a forum on freedom where we will discuss the freedoms that drove the success of the western world and indeed america. and i do hope that you will be able to come. and if not, i hope that you will consider supporting isi in any way that you can. as i said, we're on the college and university space. and it is an unfriendly uncaring

place for those who don't wholeheartedly buy into the identity politics of the current age. we directly confront this maelstrom and support the extremely bright young leaders who have the audacity to question campus dogma. you can help assure and ensure that we develop the next generation of conservative leader. in short, you can help save america. you can help save the west and indeed you can help save the world. and that's not bad for a day's work, huh. with that, i would like to introduce, president of the trinity forum. prior to joining the trinity forum in 2008, she served in the white house as special assistant to the president and director of policy and projects for first lady laura bush.

she also served as policy advisor to bill frist advising the leader on domestic social issues and serving as outreach director to outside groups. from 01 to 5, she was the senior counselor to the chairman of the national endowment for the humanities where she helped the chairman design and launch the we the people initiative to enhance the study, the teaching study and understanding of american history. [applause] >> thank you, charlie, for that kind introduction and welcome to all of you to tonight's evening conversation on identity and dignity. on behalf of all of us at the trinity forum, it is a real pleasure and honor to partner with you. i so appreciate all the work that you have done, charlie, and you, josh, as well to help make this a reality. we are also grateful for the support for tonight's event for the democracy fund which invests

in efforts to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the american people and we're delighted their president has joined us tonight as long as with several members of the democracy fund staff including margaret, laura, paul, liz, mark, jessica harris and donata, thank you very much for joining us. i want to give a special shoutout to the senate pages who have joined us. i understand that around 18 out of 30 of the pages in the u.s. senate are here tonight. we're delighted to have you here. so welcome, as well as thank you to each of you for making it out. it is never fun or easy to fight rush hour traffic, and we are delighted and honored that you are here with us tonight. we also know there are many people who want to be here tonight but could not make it. so if you have friends who are among that number, fear not, we are live streaming tonight's event. you can let them know right now,

and we will also have video up on our website and youtube channel before long along with photos and clips on facebook. i will also be live tweeting the event tonight, as well as hashtag identity and dignity so you can follow along there as well. it's also a pleasure to see so many new faces in the audience. so for those of you who are not familiar with the trinity forum, we work to provide a space and resources for leaders to engage life's greatest questions in the context of faith. and we do this by providing readings and publications which draw upon classic works of literature that explore the enduring questions of life and connect the timeless wisdom of the humanities with timely issues of the day. as well as sponsoring programs like this one tonight, to connect leading thinkers with thinking leaders and engaging

those big questions of life and ultimately coming to better know the author of the answers. as we have noted at evening conversations before, it's been said the big questions of life essentially boil down to three: what is a good person? what is the good life? and what is the just society? and wrestling with each of those questions is profoundly influenced by our sense of identity, on what we base our sense of person hood, individuality and dignity, and the obligations, commitments and relationships that flow from that understanding. for much of history, the constraints of every day existence largely defined one's identity. one was born, married someone chosen by your family, knew the same people throughout your life. choice was limited. but one sense of self was given

and uncomplicated. technology, economic opportunity, and the freedoms that attend liberal democracy have opened up extraordinary choices. opportunities and options for all of us. such that our sense of identity is no longer fixed, but open and often fluid. and as our mobility and autonomy grows, the power and the influence of some of the institutions over us and historically particularly the institutions of moral and religious authority, the mediating institutions of civil society, have in some way waned in their authority or their influence, the commitments, obligations and relationships that once bonded us to each other and helped define who and whose we are have weakened. for many, the disappearance of straw communities, moral authorities, and stable institutions has led not to a blissful freedom, but a profound sense of alienation.

such isolation has in turn fuelled on an individual level, a search to be part of a group, and on societal level, a marked increase in populism and tribalism, as various identity groups seek recognition, influence and power. in his provocative new book our speaker tonight argues that tribalism and identity politics that has arisen for our quest for dignity and respect is actually undermining the stability of the liberal democratic order that makes human rights, religious freedom and freedom in general possible. the increasing politicization of our identities and the inevitable resentment that follows, if we perceive our own identities to be dissed, lends itself to where accommodation is

self-negation. so is it possible to construct or to recover a sense of individual identity that recognizes and grounds our identity in something other than tribalism, shared interests or resentments or nationalism? can we cultivate a shared identity, built around common ideals, a faith that encompasses an inclusive and unifying vision of what it means to be an american. these are important questions and challenging ones. it's hard to imagine a scholar who can engage them with more intellectual courage, thoughtfulness and wisdom than our speaker tonight, dr dr. francis. he also serves as a distinguish senior fellow at stanford university's freeman's institute for international studies as well as the director of its center on democracy, development and the rule of law. he previously taught at the

school of advanced international studies at johns hopkins as well as the george mason university school of public policy, served as a researcher at the state department's policy planning staff, and in addition to his latest book which we have invited him to address tonight, he is the author of political order and political decay, the origins of political order, perhaps his most famous, the end of history and the last man, trust and america at the cross roads. he's a councilmember of the international forum for democratic studies, a fellow of the world academy for the arts and sciences, an advisory councilmember of the democracy fund and alumni of harvard university where he received his phd. after the doctor's talk, responding to him will be ryan streeter. he is the director of economic policy, studies at aei, american enterprise institute, previously serving as the executive director at the center for politics and governments at ut

austin, as well as serving as a special assistant to the president for policy for president george w. bush and a policy advisor for mayor goldsmith in indianapolis. he's the author of transforming charity, towards a results oriented social sector. the editor of religion and public square in the 21st century. and the co author of the soul of civil society and has been widely published in publications such as the washington post, the "wall street journal," the weekly standard and national review. directly after frank's talk, ryan will offer a brief response which will be followed by a moderated conversation between our two speakers. frank, welcome. [applause] >> thank you, for that generous introduction and thanks to isi

and trinity forum for having me here. i'm astonished at the crowd tonight and really glad there's so many young faces in it. so thank you all for appearing. so let me get right into the book. so quite honestly, the reason that i wrote this book had to do with the elections of 2016, the british vote to leave the european union, the brexit vote and donald trump's election in november of 2016. i think that both of these events are connected to a broader series of developments around the world, which are often times referred to as a rise of a kind of global populism, in which you have democratic leaders that are legitimately elected, but they pursue policies that are often times economically populist but more importantly i believe weaken the institutional basis for modern democracy. democracy is not simply a matter

of elections. it is a matter of a rule of law, the checks and balances, the constitutional constraints that limit executive power in a well functioning democracy and in places like hungary and poland and turkey, you've had elected leaders that have gutted their judiciaries, eliminated any kind of hostile opposition press that would hold them accountable, weakened their impersonal bureaucracies and basically cleared away obstacles to their own kind of personal rule. i hate to report that i believe something like that is afoot in the united states as well, where we do have a president that seems to not appreciate the importance of some of these checks and balance institutions and has been doing a lot i think in a similar vein to weaken them. so this i think represents a broader movement, and what i've been trying to do over the last couple of years is to really

understand the source of this populism and why we are in this current situation. so the usual explanation is an economic one, where globalization is seen, you know, properly to have vastly expanded the output of goods and services in the global economy. everybody has gotten a lot richer, but that wealth has not been evenly distributed. i think anyone that takes a basic trade theory course would understand that although everybody gets richer in the world, not every individual and every country gets richer, and in particular, less educated workers in rich countries have been losing employment and opportunities to rising middle classes in places like china, india, bangladesh and so forth. and so there's been a stagnation in middle class wages in the united states, in britain, and other developed countries basically no increases in per

capita income really for a very extended period of time. and that obviously has generated a lot of backlash and unhappiness and a feeling that the elites that were responsible for creating this liberal world order are very much out of touch. however, the subject of my book is not that because i think that actually there is a cultural and identity dimension to what has happened that often times is not appreciated as one of the drivers of this. so what is identity? this is a word that only came into use with the psychologist eric erickson in the 50s, and the term identity politics really only came into circulation really in the 70s 80s, 90s associated with a certain type of politics in developed democracies like that of the united states. but as i try to explain in the book, this is actually not a recent phenomenon and that it's very deeply embedded in the western tradition. i actually go back all the way

to plato where in the book for socrates says okay what's a human being? there's a desiring part that wants things. there's a calculating rational part. but isn't there another part that he labels a greek word that sometimes translated as spiritness. this part of the soul demands recognition of one's inherent dignity. that in addition to food and drink, we want other people to respect us, to value us at a certain rate and if we don't get that, that recognition, we get angry. and actually because it is recognition, it is inherently political. it draws us into the public square because we want other people to recognize us, and so this is an old concept. i think in the modern world, it has developed in different ways because the concept of dignity is shifted. for plato dignity only was due to warriors, to an a class that

risked their lives. in the course of western civilization, i think christianity played a very important role of shifting the concept of dignity not to a certain limited class of warriors but to all human beings in so far as they have the capacity for moral choice. it is the human moral agency that stands at the root of christian dignity and becomes a universal characteristic. and so if you ask why would anyone think that all human beings are equal? they are equal in this capacity for moral choice. so as the centuries go by, this idea, the seed of this idea that we have an equal dignity, in so far as we are equally free to choose takes a secular form in the writings of writers, other german idealists, i believe it is actually at the basis of modern human rights and our understanding of rights, you

know, as defined in the american constitution. in what sense does thomas jefferson assert that all men are created equal? it really does have to do with the fact that we are equal agents and therefore equally entitled to participate in the process of self-government. now, in that sense -- i guess the final component of the modern sense of identity is that we deeply believe that we have a self that is inside us and that that doesn't necessarily correspond to the external social world. the external social world actually may despise us or not recognize us and the modern aspect of this is that we believe that authentic inner self is morally more valuable than the social rules that, you know, that look down on us and that between the authentic inner self and those external rules, it is the external rules that have to change. and that leads you into a kind of revolutionary understanding

of the relationship between individuals and the surrounding society. all right? so that's the basic kind of the theoretical background, but it manifests itself in politics, in many ways, it is the basis for the drive for democracy. democracy is about this universal respect for the person hood and the agency of the citizens of the democracy that make up the democracy. in 2011, there was a vegetable seller in tunisia who had a vegetable cart that was confiscated by the police. he went to the governor's office and said can i have my cart back. nobody would even talk to him. so he doused himself in gasoline, killed himself and that is what triggered the arab spring. it triggered the arab spring because throughout that region the people that lived in these dictatorships identified with his situation.

the government was so unwilling to even give him an answer, you know, they could have said well, you did something illegal. that's why we took your cart. they wouldn't even give him the minimum amount of respect that a human deserves, and they said, you know, that's basically the condition of all of us, in egypt, in libya, in syria, in all of these other countries, we live in governments that do not recognize our person hood. a lot of the revolutions that have occurred in georgia, in ukraine, in other parts of the world, against dictatorship, you know, those revolution of dignity that took place in ukraine in 2013, 14, the word dignity was important because the young ukrainians that were out in the streets protesting did not want to be dragged back into this russian system where you had to be kind of personally connected to the rulers if you're going to get ahead. they wanted to live in a modern society like, you know, that of the european union that would

recognize people on a more impersonal basis. dignity it is not like this is something -- this is a weird cultural practice for just certain kinds of cultures or regions. this is really at the basis of our democracy. our democracy recognizes us by giving us rights. it gives us the right to speech, to association, to religious belief, and ultimately to the exercise of agency through the vote, through the franchise, and that's the respect in which we are recognized as equal individuals in a democratic society. the problem is that that kind of universal recognition that is the basis of a liberal democracy often times isn't enough for everybody. and particularly when you can take democracy for granted, you begin to seek other forms of recognition. the first alternative to this liberal universal form of recognition was nationalism.

a nationalist believes that he or she is a member of a cultural community that should be represented in politics. you know, all of the germans living across central and eastern europe ought to be unified under a single german government or the ser bs living in the empire had a right to their own republic and it is that pressure to change boundaries based on this association of group identity that drove the conflicts that ultimately resulted in the world wars of the first half of the 20th century. my own view is that a lot of the young men that go off to fight for the islamic state and al qaeda in the middle east are actually not driven by genuine religious piety. what they are driven by is an identity problem, especially those european muslims who have rejected the traditional islam

of their parents and grandparents but they are not really fully accepted by the european society where they are living in paris or wherever, and then a muslim preacher comes along, a baghdadi or an osama bin laden and says you are a member of a muslim community that is great and glorious, has a great history. it is being oppressed. muslims are being killed and disregarded all around the world. you need to have agency by coming, you know, to syria to fight back. right? and that's why they grow long beards, pick up an ak-47 and engage in that kind of violent conflict. so these are two examples of identity that lead to very bad political results. they lead to violence. and so identity not only drives democracy, but it also drives these forms of politics. now we get to what's going on in liberal democracies, and so if you think about the united states, and now this is the more common use of the word identity,

but i want to point out that this concept is very broad, and it really does apply to a lot of the stuff that's going on outside the united states and other countries around the world, this assertion of identity, all right? so in the united states, i think the history of this runs roughly as follows, that in the 60s, you saw the rise of the number of very important social movements. it begins with the civil rights movement for african-americans, the feminist movement, the lgbt movement, the movement on behalf of the disabled, native americans, all of these groups had in fact become or were invisible to mainstream american society. they were disregarded. their rights were not respected. in some cases, you know, with african-americans, their rights were actually legally subordinated to those of white people and what they demanded was equality. they demanded an equality of respect, and so identity

politics in america begins with a very just and important striving for equality and especially this equality of respect. and i think if you look at the history of the democratic party in the united states and also a lot of the parties on the left in europe, there is a transformation in the way that they see themselves and the way they see their project because earlier it had been focused very heavily on the working class. in europe, you know, a lot of those parties were marxists and so they cared about the revolution, and so forth. but they were seeking, you know, as their main political base, this broad working class, most of whom were members of the dominant ethnic group in their society, and that was true in the democratic party as well, where like, you know, 80% of rural whites in the south voted for roosevelt in the 1936

election. as the left began to shift towards this more identity-based coalition, based on the specific grievances of particular groups, a lot of these white working class voters began to drift over and vote for conservative parties, and so this has been a shift that's been going on in the united states for some sometime. in europe, you know, a lot of former communist voters in france now vote for the national front, for similar sorts of reasons because the left has seen itself located in this identity space where they feel that they don't have a role. now this is the part that gets a little bit tricky because i want to be very careful to say that the impulse leading to identity politics is a matter of justice. it is a perfectly legitimate thing for groups that are treated badly because they are members of groups to push back

against that. and the injustice suffered by african-americans and women and gays and lesbians and all these other groups is not the same, their experience is different and therefore the remedies are going to be different. that aspect of it i think is understandable in kind of a natural outcome. i think that where identity politics has gone off the rails comes in a couple of different areas. when the group begins to emphasize the ways that it is different as opposed to the ways that it is similar and simply wants to join the larger community, that poses a problem because not every group identity is necessarily compatible with the kind of universal values on which a liberal democracy is based. i mean, this is the most serious i think in a lot of european countries where you have, you know, muslim groups that, you know, express homophobia,

anti-semitism, subordination of women, these sort of cultural values that are not compatible with the kind of individual agency that we believe, you know, people in a modern democracy deserve. it becomes, you know, problematic when a given characteristic with which you were born comes to define the way you will think about politics, about culture. you know, even about sports and things like that because in fact, the premise of a democracy is that we are individuals that can make up our minds about, you know, important public policy issues, and we should not be limited by simply the conditions of our birth, and, you know, quite frankly i think that the identity politics as it evolved on the left has now stimulated a, you know, an identity politics on the right. and some of the more extreme versions of this, and the alt right and white nationalism and so forth, again, i'm sorry to

say but i believe -- by our president has not been healthy for the united states because a lot of those people would like to drag the united states back into a more ethnic understanding of american identity, which is something that i had actually thought we had gotten past, you know, in the period in the wake of the civil rights movement. and so in general, i think that we have a little bit of this disease that afflicts other countries around the world, where people are not disagreeing over, you know, policy issues, you know, higher taxes or more regulation, less regulation, whatever, they are lining up with these identity groups into which they are born, and that makes democracy, you know, much harder to sustain. the solution to this we can talk about in our discussion, you know, further, but i think there is a clear set of things that can be done. one of them has to do with a

focus on national identity. so national identity is often times disparaged because it is associated with the kind of out of control aggressive ethno nationalism of the early 20th century. but national identity does not have to be that, and it can be something that i've labelled identity, meaning that it is based on a set of ideas, and in fact i think that the way that american national identity evolved had gotten to that point by the end of the civil rights era, where what it meant to be an american is not to be of a certain race or ethnicity or religion, what it means to be an american is to believe in the u.s. constitution, in the rule of law, in the principle of equality embodied in the declaration of independence. if you signed up to those beliefs, it didn't matter where you came from. you would be considered an american. controversi controversially, if you don't like those principles, you can be un-american, in a way you can't be ungerman or unjapanese

or un-something where the identity is really based on, you know, on your ethnicity. all right? and so that's an important achievement, and i think that we need to emphasize that. so i think that the specific identities will continue to assert themselves, but i do think that we need to focus on rebuilding a sense of national identity that is credal based on these ideas that are accessible to the de facto diverse society that we live in today and that we need to emphasize those integrative aspects of identity, and that's the nice thing about identity. it doesn't have to be fixed. it doesn't have to be based on biology. it can be shaped by leaders. it can be shaped by schools, by education, by the way we talk about our shared history and our shared values. and i think that's an important task that lies ahead of us, civic education i think is

appallingly under -- you know, underdone in our school system. if you look at the statistics on, you know, the number of high school graduating high school seniors that can name the three branches of government or can name even one of the rights that's guaranteed by the bill of rights, it is really shocking. you are not going to defend constitutional government if you start out with that kind of a -- with that kind of a knowledge base. there are other things i think we can say about, you know, immigration policy. i've got lots of opinions about that because that's really the policy issue that is the most neuralgic in terms of the identity issues. people believe with the high level of immigration that's been taking place in a sense national identity has been changed in ways over which we really don't have control. i will say that for the discussion. i'm sorry, i went on longer than i was supposed to, but thank you very much for listening. i look forward to the commentary. [applause]

>> thank you. i look forward to the discussion to follow. thank you for the organizations that are organizing this. i've participated in number of your events and they are always great. thank you for having me. for those of you don't know much about me, i'm the person about with whom you said and some guy is responding when you got the e-mail that francis was coming to speak at the national press club. it is great to be with you. this topic of identity is one that in general has been of interest to me for a long time. and i've wondered for a long time why it is that we all walked around with names we didn't choose for ourselves, but that we're defensive of. if someone ever makes fun of our names -- you know, our parents chose our names. sometimes we -- you might even have bad memories of your

parents and not even get along with your parents very well but if someone says something negative about your name, we're kind of defensive about that. there's this way in which we get enraptured by our local sports teams. if you have got your favorite football, hockey, baseball team, you can be in a funk for an entire day when they lose in the play-offs. but nobody on that team even knows you. they don't even know that you're in a funk. yet you have this sense of attachment to this community that's very strong. and it's something fundamental. it is something very fundamental to who we are as human beings that we have this deep sense of connection to communities and that our identities are wrapped up in those communities. and that's the first of two points that i wanted to bring up in response to dr. fukuyama's remarks and this book. the phenomenon of our tribalistic predispositions which i think is creating this framework where our identities are becoming so divisive today.

not all identity politics are bad. we have experienced changes in workplace behavior, many of which flow from responses to this call and cry for justice to respect the inherent dignity of specific groups of people. but i think what's especially damaging today is the way in which our identity politics has become tribal. we're really more joiners than we are splitters. and we join these abstract tribes in ways that today i think are particularly threatening for the ongoing project of american democracy. it's the proliferation of abstract tribalism that i want to talk about for a little bit here. in 1752, there was an essay written in which it was talked about emergence in modern times about politics of principle, parties of principle, in contrast to parties of interest. if you're in a town or out on a farm, your politics are very much rooted in the way of life

that you have. but he noticed this thing going on in modern politics that he called parties of principle. he didn't have the term ideology. probably speaking of the word principle in more of those terms, but he noted that the way in which emotions were stirred by abstract ideals and abstract ideas was something that was powerful. we'll go join a march on the mall but won't go show up on the local city hall hearing fixing potholes even though we know we will be bouncing across the potholes the next morning. this is something unique to our nature. when we're given an opportunity to find solidarity with people over something that's a very narrowly defined identity or principle, it can cause great passionate responses within us. a little under 200 years after that, george ohr orwell -- george orwell wrote an essay, he says it is an imperfect word nationalism as a habit of assuming that whole blocks of millions of people can confidently be labelled good and

bad. and the habit of placing one group's beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. this habit of what he called nationalism bah really describing -- but really describing tribalism in this essay was marked by certain things, like obsession, any criticism against your group provoked a vigorous and even sometimes violent and forceful response. and in difference to reality in what might be outrageous acts by others are forgiven within your own group or not even considered to be outrageous when they are committed by our side. so identity politics is generated a certain type of crisis of attachment that i think seems to be at a point where we'll see it continue in a pace, if this theory is right, which is that the more our fundamental tribes, family, household, community, break down and are under strain and are shifting, the desire to join more abstract tribes is all the

more powerful. we can talk about that a little bit more in the question-and-answer time or the discussion time. but i think if these trends that we've seen and i won't go through the numbers and the social science now of increasing family instability, civic fabric tearing apart, communities collapsing in terms of their civic health, it should be no surprise that the social commentator wrote about a year ago that we've seen this rise in identity politics when people's fundamental attachments become confusing or even begin to dissolve. but i also want to say that when we look down at the street level, we can see that not all hope is lost and therein might actually be part of the solution to our problem. while others have documented over the years this increase in polarization that we have seen, something to the effect of 50% of parents now would have a hard time if their son or daughter married someone from another political party where it was 5% i think 50 years ago. we realize we have this strong -- these strong forces of polarization, some of which we understand, many of which we

don't. but i think there's also some evidence that at the local level, engagement within our communities, engagement where we're living out the and expressing the american project at the local level has some promise. i will let you consider some of the following not yet released data that some colleagues and i at the american enterprise institute have from a survey we just completed of 2400 americans. when you ask people where they get a strong sense of community in america, we ask them if they have some sense of community and a strong sense of community, we ask people where they have a strong sense of community, 31% of them said they have a strong sense of community as americans in their american identity compared to just 16% who felt that way about their political group and 17% in terms of their ethnicity. so even the sense that you have community with fellow americans because they are americans is still something that is alive and well out there. 25% of people said their city

gave them a strong sense of community. and for people who regularly do attend a house of worship, 46% of those people said strong sense of community came from that house of worship. our survey much like others found that between 66 and 80 percent of americans of all, race, age, income, education, it doesn't matter how you slice it, pretty much between two thirds and 80% of all people think that their local community is going in the right direction while about 40% of the people think that the country is. and 3 in 10 americans say that they have actually worked together with the neighbors that they actually have their physical neighbors in their community to try to solve a problem or to make an improvement in the community. 3 out of 10 is not bad. and so i think these data suggest that part of the solution is close to home. as much as we can promote service and perhaps even require it at times in our schools, in our programs and in our poll sis -- policies, the more big issues like racism and equality can become community issues that

we all have a take in overcoming. we have learned over the last 20 years in reforms, reforms to public housing and even welfare that when communities take responsibility for fixing big problems they can do it. not without friction and not always perfectly, but as communities and not as abstract identities. it's been too long since we've fought long and hard about -- thought long and hard about the bedrock of civic life and its role to play here. i think that's an important -- i think that's an important area for us to talk about as we think about this issue of our tribal identities versus our actual identities in communities. how do you take the latter to essentially either weaken or moderate properly the former? even if we build on the strength at the local level and shift our identities there, we're still beset by something that is deeply disquieting. and this is my second point that i will make quickly before we sit down. and that is a pervasive and i think even dangerous crisis that we have. a loss of confidence on

questions of human nature and what is the best society. it's very simply those things that are true, whether we care about that or not. not only in terms of the truth, i'm not just speaking about truth grounded in faith claims, religious faith claims. but in the sense of things that are true that are the basis of our rights and properly understanding what human flourishing actually is. identity politics is rooted in power and interest. remember what orwell said it is not about truth, it is about advancing power and interest of a specific group. belief and truth that is real and discoverable is an important thing for a lot of reasons. it has some very real benefits. there's some evidence that when you're motivated by truth claims that are rooted in the view of the world, that you have a tolerance for other people who are different than you. just this week, the cato

institute released a survey of conservative religious conservative voters and secular conservative voters and found that religious conservative voters are much more tolerant of immigrants and racial minorities and what we see is a phenomena of secular conservatives. another benefit to the role in society is an openness to opposing ideas. there's a body of social science work on scientific curiosity, people that are legitimately interested in exploring what is true about the nature of things are going to be much more open to debate, disagreement, and talking with people who don't actually share their views and who disagree with them. generosity is related to this. we know that religious people give more and give more frequently but so do people that just have an experience of awe and elevation that comes with discovering something true or seeing and witnessing morally noble actions. i don't know how you recover a

culture of embracing the pursuit of truth without some kind of massive renewal of even in some modernized form of the liberal arts approach to education. and the doctor talked about the need for more civic education. i would go even a step further and say i think we have to recognize there's been a certain cratering of our understanding on how we train and pass on these things that are actually true about our democratic way of life and what we need in order to be successful. we need more than engineers in the hard sciences to believe in truth. we need people in the humanities. we need people in the social sciences who do too. buildings and bridges can fall down if you don't take truth claims seriously. if a school of engineering thought came about you wouldn't trust the buildings and the bridges, but civilization and societies can collapse too. both of these areas require an understanding of what is true and what is good about them. this probably also means taking back primary schools to these fundamental tasks as well.

it's been a generation since alan bloom wrote the closing of the american mind and so the students that were on campus when he was writing are now run things including our schools -- are now running things including our schools. perhaps an opportunity for social entrepreneurs to do thiss a the household levels to help families explore the basic concepts of natural lights and natural law through new tools and new types of products. finally, a way of therapeutic models of conveying theology and certainly away from politicizing ideology. i don't know if we can pull any or all of these things off, but i do think we should try. thank you. [applause] .

>> thank you for that. we have a lot of ground to cover. let's make sure we have time for audience questions. starting from a 20,000 foot view, frank you mentioned that the rise of identity politics is not limited to the united states, that we have seen that as well as the growth of the liberalism in different democracies really around the world. so what is it that has prompted the shift away from economics to identity politics in the first place? and secondly, why the shift towards ill liberalism when it's been liberal democracy that has done the most to expand recognition of previously disenfranchised groups? >> well, i do think that the economic explanation is a part of it. if you look at who votes for populist parties, not just in the united states, but across europe, they have a very similar demographic. they tend to be older, more rural, less educated, not part

of this cosmopolitan globeized, you know -- globalized you know economy that's done extremely well over years. those are the people who vote for putin in russia, vote for erdogan in turkey. part of it i think is political opportunity, you have to be an ethnic hungarian which is a very problematic way of defining national identity, but he can get a firm political base by doing that because there are a lot of ethnic hungarian in hungary, he's also enfranchised those that live outside of hungary as well. part of it is the rise of these kinds of political opportunists. then i think it is part of this larger pushback against the kind of world that our liberal global

institutions have created, where, you know, those people have not benefitted enough and they are resentful of the fact that it is passing them by. >> ryan, anything to add? >> not to that. >> okay. we'll go to you. you've studied community in civil society for most of your career. and certainly, both proceeding and accelerating the rise of identity politics has been the decline of embodied, in person community. what do you blame that on? why has community and civil society so tanked and are there any signs of hope that you see? >> that's a great question. i think we're still trying to understand why it's been tanking. because it hasn't tanked everywhere. as we have seen from a number of different scholars out there, including my own colleague at aei, charles murray, it's tanked very unevenly. in communities with high proportions of college educated

people, dual income households, higher incomes in general, you have a lot more engagement in community still. there's a lot more participation at the community level. and it's really that, the kind of upper 20% of america that looks a lot more like the 1950's sort of america that we like to remember in idealistic terms. it's been very uneven. you have in some of these places where the rise of populism has been starkest are in these areas where you have seen a collapse of confidence in civic institutions, nonattendance of religious institutions. i mentioned the survey that came out this week which shows that precisely the secular working class communities are the ones that aren't going to church. they're not involved in their communities. and they are the ones who are most sort of susceptible to this kind of nationalism that's been

spreading and ascending. i think that's a really difficult challenge for us. i think culturally it is going to be difficult to turn that around if you're not going to see some kind of bottom up renewal from within communities. as a matter of policy, i think we're at a point where we need to help people relocate to other communities. there's some evidence that when you do this, that people start to actually take on the habits and characteristics of the community where they go. they might sound radical, but instead of trying to renew a dying community from within, it might actually make more sense for try to help people move around more. i think that's one of the things that we have to think about. but there has been this -- been a long time in happening, kind of secular decline of just participation in local community institutions, faith-based organizations, particularly by people kind of midway down on the economic spectrum that doesn't seem to have any forces within it for self-correction. >> you know, coming from silicon

valley, i would have to say that technology has probably played an important role in this because, you know, there's this long debate that was set off by bob putnam as to whether community was really -- we're all alone and community was dying, and i think that as i read the empirical evidence in the wake of that debate, it is actually stronger than ever. it's just that it's occurring not in these face-to-face meetings and small towns and on front porches. a lot of it has moved on-line, but unfortunately, the nature of social media is such that it actually -- i mean it's perfectly made for identity politics, right? you have got some crackpot conspiracy theory about how the united states works and if you go on-line, you can find the hundred other people in the country that actually believe that along with you, and you can completely shut out any contrary, you know, evidence and that's what, you know, facebook and twitter and all of these technologies i think have brought us to. and so one of the issues is

actually how you deal with that. i think that we've now come very rapidly in the last 12 months in regarding these as heroes of, you know, modern life to being villains. i don't think they are actually either, but it is a problem we're going to have to deal with. >> let's talk about that because one of the points you raised, ryan, that actually things seem to go much better on the local and embodied level, than at the abstract national and international level. all of our technology is moving us as you say towards more virtual, more disembodied kinds of communication. with the rise of social media, i think twitter came around in 2006, facebook a few years earlier, it is maizing how much that has -- it's amazing how much that has changed in person communication, diminished in person, made it much more virtual. what hope, if any, do you see for that? >> i agree with everything that you just said. i think that we don't even fully understand what all these forces

will do to us longer term. i mean, we're seeing some interesting research coming out right now just on the generation and the amount of screen time and the amount of use of social media, a direct relationship to things like anxiety and depression and some of these behavioral mood disorders. those will be with us for some time. particularly when more and more young people are experiencing this at a younger age. i would also say that we are all on various digital platforms. we all use this technology, but not everybody's behavior at the local level or the lack of participation in their community governments and in the local civil society is collapsing the same way. and so strong family still matter. religious institutions actually still matter. these fundamental institutions are the places within which we learn to practice the kinds of things that our civil society and our democratic way of life actually need. so you can actually be on

facebook a lot and be tweeting a lot, you could be tweeting really nasty stuff and participating in the fight and yet still go to your kids' school and help out that afternoon. people are doing that. and i think the data that i was citing when we come out with this study which we'll probably come out with i think in about a month, the first one, it will be a series, i think you will start to see some of that. it is very much like we have seen this long-term decline since the 80s of confidence in the federal government. and behind that, the state governments as well. people's confidence in their local government is just about the same as it was in 1970, like 75% of americans basically think their local government is okay. does that mean local governments are less prone to corruption and more transparent? no, but there's a proximity to that. and so if you're embedded within functioning institutions that you can actually affect and work through and make change, people are still doing that. even if they are spending three hours of their day shouting at people on twitter. so i think that -- i totally agree that social media has

its -- it's like makes this identity politics thing so much easier and makes it so much worse, but there are these other fundamental aspects of our democratic and communal life that i think are also driving some of the disillusion you are talking about. >> uh-huh. frank, in your book, you wrote that the rise of the therapeutic model -- [inaudible] -- the birth of identity politics. ryan, i know you mentioned the therapeutic modded as well. -- model as well. it is uncanny when you think about how radically different that approach towards understanding of man is than even say an orthodox christian view of man, which is basically grounded in dignity, stamped on us, at the same time, the doctrine of original sin, the idea that we are bent by selfishness, in need of both love and forgiveness but checks on pride and power. in contrast, the therapeutic model as you spelled out in your

book kind of comes more from your soul, the idea that actually we're inherently good, we need to be liberated from societal constraints and free to self-actualize. is the therapeutic model compatible with a sustaining of liberal democracy? if so, how? if not, what then do we do? [laughter] >> so the decline of the shared religious moral horizon is related to the rise of the therapeutic model. so, you know, the fundamental text in this line of literature is the book in the late 60s "the rise of the therapeutic society". that's what he said. he said that, you know, previously you went to a priest or a pastor, you know, for counselling about anxieties that you had about your marriage, about your job, about the way you dealt with your neighbors and so forth, and with the decline of, you know, formal religion playing that kind of a

role, people then turned to psychoanalysts and psychologists, and the state itself took on a therapeutic role. in this respect, self-esteem, you know, became the central issue that the goal of the therapeutic society is to raise people's self-esteem. there's an inherent contradiction in that therapeutic mission, though, because if everybody actually has esteem, then nobody has esteem because you know esteem is due to certain things that are estimable. everybody should have it because everybody should feel good about themselves. that's why, you know, in high school graduations everybody gets an award for being the best of something because you know that's what's going to make them feel good. i think it's had this -- i actually had a whole chapter on stanford university in this regard because -- but i didn't put it in the book in the end.

[laughter] >> but there's a quotation, you know, so in 198 -- i believe 86, you know jesse jackson came to stanford, you know, to try to get rid of the western culture core requirement and there's a quotation from the leader, the student union leader that was, you know, pushing for this, and he said something very revealing which is that, you know, i understand my professors think that plato and, you know, all these people are important, but they don't understand how that hurts the mentality of people that, you know, aren't of that race and background. ::

>> well, i hate to say yes but i think it can and i would simply point to europe. you know, if -- europe has become the most secular spy in human history, and it is much more orderly than the united states, good institutions so i've always been skeptical about these arguments that you actually have to have a certain kind of religious foundation to actually maintain you know basic social order because i do think it is not just europe but i can think of other asia really doesn't have religion in anything like

western -- and orderly society so i think that you know that decline you can survive the therapeutic, i think is is tricky because it really does shift the discussion away from you know a kind of -- a discussion of what really human excellence are and what we ought to asteam and towards you know just a model that says that everybody deserve it is. i think that's something that is in, that's a contradictory and unfulfillable goal. >> ryan. anything to add? >> well, i'll just be debrief the one thought to comes to mind is i think it is a problem. i think that rise of therapeutic model the way it expressed way in the work institution and way that we communicate through media is -- is a real problem. and i --

i think that what we probably don't talk enough about is the way in which kind of the human aspiration to full potential coif a model of pursuit is really important as we're raising young people and teaching our college students and teaching our kids before then about what it actually means to -- try to fulfill the potential that you have because what we do know is happiness is rooted in that. therapeutic model doesn't have a lot of evidence when it comes to kind of happiness outcomes you get and that is of public policy in this country so when you look at paradox and other research on subjective well being and after you add income income continues to keep people happy but quality of relationship in stability and these things and we have wired within us this desire to improve ourselves and if our educational system is not kind of built up

around that notion, that yes you're not -- where you need to be right now but this is lifelong pursuit of occurring fulfilling potential of becoming is -- is something that i think is -- has been lost and i think that model has damaged it pretty seriously. when i remember i was teaching at one of my classes in texas what it was a public policy court and i would do this one segment on political and i would have students read a variety of things including jonathan heights some of the work from the righteous mind that talks about more languagely that progressive and they speak and i had a student say to me -- i just reject that. that, you know, one of the findings i thought what do you mean? i think it makes me unkivel enunder great expression of this experiments and this was fairly serious research behind this -- these findings and it just didn't matter.

it was one of the great expressions of this makes me uncomfortable i don't know what it say about people with politics and choose not to believe it. and -- and i think that's -- that's, you know, essentially kind of where we are. >> let's talk about where we go from here. francis you mentioned need for a cradle identity, but as you also pointed out to acknowledge is down. and people like senator who said that what we really need is a new civic as a precursor so any cradle identity if you could develop a civic what would it be? >> well, that's -- i mean, it, obviously, would require, you know, a certain knowledge of history because you have to -- can't understand institutions unless you understand where they came from. it would require a certain am of theory because there is theory as to how constitutional

government is actually supposed to -- is supposed to work. i think actually in the current age i would add some oh stuff that wouldn't be in a traditional education class because, for example, turns out that a lot of -- a lot of students including very sophisticated ones do not know how to judge the authenticity authority of things they read on the internet and i think actually a civic skill that has become very important is developing that ability to distinguish between more or less credible sources of information. so you know this was not a program i thought through at any great length but those would be the the basic components of it. one of the points that you made was a necessary precondition to any kind of -- of development the cradle identity would be the reenvying ration of a liberal art tradition. why is that what and what would it look like?

>> well, i think there's a lot that we've used in the past that still would be good. if we remain committed to it so i think the core -- body of classic texts and really at the university level having something a little bit more like a corker wouldn't be a bad thing in this regard so there's certainly a body of knowledge but i think modernized approach to liberal arts based on swhaf what we've learned in social science as well. part of what that is supposed to do is not just part of body of knowledge but cultivate skills that allow you to participate in democratic life, and we've learned a lot more in the last 25 years about the kinds of things that develop what might be called social skills within, when i read social skills literature what behaviors that the scholars are writing about is typically used to say to develop through liberal art and ability to analyze the ability to make judgments the ability to stand up in front of people to

make an argument and be able to -- critique an argument and these sorts of thing which is we have new tools actually in cultivating that and people that also could be used but not just dust off great books and sit around an read them and new methods and tools that we have now that we didn't used to which i think would really -- work well. >> so we're going to it turn now to most dynamic part of our evening conversation which is hearing from you. so those of you who have been to turning event before know that we have three guidelines from questions from the the audience is we simply ask that all questions be brief, all questions be civil, and all questions be in the form of a question. so we have -- our cracker jack intern around room with microphones please wait to be recognized have a microphone in front of you before going to town. questions from the audience. all right here in the middle -- maybe you could stand up so

you're easier to see. thank you. yes new wavelength okay i'm michael smith thank you all for being here. i just forked the book this week still processing to some extent. and i recognize as well with reference to alan bloom that bodily language to talk about these ideas is -- is i.t. influencing ideas and how we understand and recognize in nor book as well that's society. modified -- the ideas that we have and ideas we have impact society in turn that there's something at work. ia little bit of trouble tracing this idea of identity to most from plato all the way to identity politics to progressive movement today. you referenced you know with

look take your fill of the fair site on this loathing of the one not do it. the way i understood that in plato in republic is to suggest that there's something that individual recognizes is wrong with the behavior undertaken. i think as you follow that threat to the present day, identity politics qowld suggest that that which one identify is good for one self is good for one self so my question in -- in brief -- with a question mark -- is this idea this appears in plato present with day that our identity is that which we think it is or is there a further identity deeper down independent of how we think of ourselves. [laughter] >> well, i -- you know, i think one of the characters, characteristics of the modern concept of identity

is that we think that that inner identity is authentic, and is, you know, is something real. and we may not even know exactly what it is but we feel that it, you know, it's that authentic self is one that we morally value. that seems to me with your question is asking is -- how does that relate to actually whether it is morally valuable or not and i have no idea how to answer that. i think that as a psychological phenomenon you have to just understand the the structure of modern identity is this belief, i mean, this is what charles taylor shows i think very fully. the structure of modern identity directly coming out of a writer like -- so value dating that inner self whatever it is for -- it gets the kind of creative, you know -- expressive feeling. you know, it could be the inner feelings of an artist --

it could be, you know, again, groupish, you know, connection that we have with a folk, you know, that we are connected to through our you know -- so a lot of forms of it and -- you know whether that's somehow, you know, valid or not, i don't know how to answer that question. i suspect in most cases it's not. >> why is there anything to add in plato? [laughter] great. >> all right. well go up here to the front -- who has the microphone? maybe right here, that would be great. yeah, right here. country where we've rotated several in the short amount of time it is quite clear to us that what experience in the u.k.

and u.s. isn't inharntly unique. we experience because it might function differently so my question would be where does a country who hasn't quite ended up where u.s. has where do we start to learn how to avoid this current situation? [laughter] put it lightly. >> so that's actually a very interesting question. kngt and australia both have higher proportions of their population born outside of the country than the united states, the united states right now is 15% i think canada is like up to 22, 23% australia is around 20 or so. and yet -- apart from pauly you haven't had a serious populous movement with no serious populous movement in

canada right now, of course, this could all change tomorrow is it is an interesting question as to -- why that's the case. my hypothesis would be something as follows that what's driving populism in united states and in europe is not simply racism june phobia and level of foreign born people in the country. it actually has to do with with other things like, for example, the the degree to which the country has actually in control of its borders and degree to which it can select the kinds of people that is -- legally allowed in. both canada and australia have skill-based immigration policies. and they both have very little illegal immigration. now australia has gotten a lot of criticism for this because you stick all of your refugees on -- new guinea not a right way to

treat refugees oarngd maybe that's the explanation why you have avoided this right wing backlash in a krkt that is multicultural, you know very rapidly. so this is why i wanted to get into this discussion of immigration because -- among other things i think that -- there's a common assumption that it is as a result of the the majority population resenting the fact that you know people that don't look like family there, so sort of driven by june phobia, but the australian and canadian cases suggest to me that there are other factors more lingt than racism, and one has to do with the fact of whether -- you know, your society is in control of the process and other point that i should have mentioned earlier is the simulation that i think you can legitimately worry about

immigration -- you can worry about whether immigrants are able to assimilate to national culture assuming it's democracy open and so forth that's a reasonable worry to reason to worry about immigration. and that maybe a factor you know that is playing into the debates in, you know, in your country and elsewhere and they plain why you have that difference and where you haven't done this american route. other yeses over here. and in india on a visit -- i'm glad to have been here. reasonable question. i have the impression that the

human beings came to exaggerate. so on the economy and too much and bound to be a culture -- [inaudible conversations] if it is not -- what do you think mr. francis? >> the question is how do you see it actually playing out in contemporary politics. i think that the way that i would illustrate that principle has to do with this fully critical correctness. because political correctness arises out of identity politics in certain ways this you don't want to say things that are perceived as demeaning to particular identity groups and therefore you have to be very careful about the language you

use and so forth and i think that that in itself has driven a lot of people to, you know, support someone like donald trump who is -- you know, gets a lot of credit for saying what he really think even if it is racist, hateful, spiteful so forth at least he's authentic and that seems to me a case of, you know, one form of -- speech actually triggering you know -- a reaction on the other side so i don't know whether -- that's a good example of what you were trying to illustrate but i do think that that is you know one of the almosts that is now playing out in our politics where -- i mean, that's why trump can get away with saying all of these really i think sort of disgraceful things because -- people say well i may not agree with his particular comments about women or -- football players or whatnot. but at least he's saying what he really thinks and that's something that you know, other politicians haven't been willing to do. >> go back over here --

in the back there -- if you could stand up so you're more visible. thank you for coming i'm bishop davidson. your grounding of dignity in some sort of christian tradition, coming primarily out of moral agency or moral choice, about i think is -- in part right but you're surely aware of maybe this other alternative idea what is grounded in modern day or something along what -- shooter had say in terms of tehran and then conclusion as to what is to be done in end of the book regarding this -- this crayto identity is that any confession to that? for us to get away from a place where identities are -- are oriented around our choice and cool to a place where

they're more unified behind something -- >> you know, i think as a realistic project, getting any kind of agreement on, you know, transdental grounding for identity is pretty difficult. i think that, you know, one of the -- one of the fact of the matter is that i, you know, national identity in this country is going to have to be pretty thin because it is such a diverse country. you know, you think about like -- oil field worker in louisiana versus a weighter in san francisco, you know in terms of all a of the things that a culture would hold in common, religion, you know, even things like sports, dress, cuisine all things are different for these different groups in the country and so -- unlike europe where you actually, you know, again

they've gotten away from any understanding of that. but they have much thicker cultures based on, you know, much more -- much deeper historical traditions shared experience that manifest itself in things like food and dress and you know speech and so forth. we don't have that in the united states so any identity is going to have to be fairly thin gruel, it will have to be things that will be, you know, acceptable to people that come out of really, really different religious traditions or you know at all that means that i think it has to be basically political in nature. it has to be built around certain beliefs and we have to actually of where grounding of those believes comes from because you know, natural right that jefferson talks about in the declaration of independence a lot of americans would disagree with that.

that that is possible to ground things, in fact, i had a -- i had a long discussion with richard in head of the amnesty e international about universal human rights, and i -- i just said well you know okay in europe where human rights come from what are they grounded? and he said well, you know they're basically they've evolved over time and kind of what the culture has produced and i said well okay in china you have a culture that doesn't believe in, you know, our view of human rights so does that mean they're right also? and he said well no. i mean, but that, you know, he department have any -- didn't have any grounding for this. he could have made an argument that referred to natural rights that someone like him would not, you know, accept a -- an argument like that so i think that -- fun unfortunately we never get agreement on those kinds of first principles therefore we have to, you know, fallback on political ideas that we have been commonly accept and that

allows to live together in a kind of pragmatic way and -- i also, you know, if you can do other things if you can add other virtues to it, you know, i didn't mention this but i think national service is a good idea. i think that the idea that you owe something to your society beyond paying taxes and obeying law is way of cultivating a sense of active citizenship so if we can with get to that point that would be a very good thing. but you know, anything beyond that that gets to real first principles i suspect we're not going to get to. >> you spoke about that anything to add there? >> i would just say -- because i was speaking nor in generalities to make it less -- sort of lofty. the idea that we have basic rights which are shrined in law which are rights whether we like them or not or think of them the

same way as someone else is an important thing i think that -- that i think we can actually recultivate an interest in these kind of enduring permanent things without having to have discussions about the sort of ontology of them getting theological. i think john wrote series of justice in 1971, his entire famous kind of vail of ignorance experience, experiments is most famous part of the book -- wouldn't even be possible without sort of an idea that there was a universal application for this submission of justice and that that book today couldn't even really be published in this identity fraud environment because you can't claim to actually know what we just for people outside of your people group so that understanding of justice and i'm picking that out as one example is -- is an example of some presupposed principles that are just -- that they're just true and they're what our institutions are based on we should unapologetically talk about

those things and force a civic education. ening one last question -- let's see so many hands in front -- yes. thanks so much my name is haman -- howard my question to use current political institution in europe a lot of my friends and i often discuss this topic -- why politics is on rise in places socialist tradition used to be pretty strong to 20th industry so this -- extent some confusion that why populism is on rise there. strongest have been in eastern europe where you really do have a lot of these kind of authoritarian political parties in leaders in hungary poland the

czech republic and so forth and part of that is that i think that -- eastern europe went from communism to democracy without this throw going cultural of this society it is ironic they have this anti-depressant immigrant pop list movements because they don't have foreigners there and way of immigration into these countries is almost zero, and for them it is a theoretical issue like they're saying to themselves they don't want to become like netherlands or france because they actually have never had this slow process of learning to live with, you know, diverse -- minority populations that don't look like you. and so that i think that that's what's driving us there and other parts of europe it is more similar doing what's going on in the united states. if you look where marine lepen national front comes heavily in

northeastern france and most industrialized part of the country that had been the industrial, you know, kind of heartland of france and the 19th century and then you know has gone into this long-term decline and so there, i think, these economic factors can explain a lot of, you know, voting patterns. >> giveout chance for the last words. >> i think i agree with with what francis just said, and -- i think yeah i think that the depending which part of the country you're talking about you have serious issues which referred to earlier in the sense of identity which is much more -- much less and rude in the country so you cannot assimilate well and when you increase amount of people who didn't grow up in that country and creating a backlash and i think that's what we're seeing across the

continent. 20 year ago c-span launched booktv on c-span2. since then we featured over 15,000 authors, book festivals and more. in 2008, the late author civil rights activist discussed her collection of essays letters to my daughter. >> goes to my room, and there i have -- the bible, the bolts of sherry. yellow -- [inaudible conversations] get in there and try to entreat myself enchant myself, into a place where i don't know. i don't know.

and then i go to work watch this and past 20 years at booktv.org type authors name and book in the search bar at the top of the page. good evening of pros along with my wife elsa and on behalf of everybody at politics and pros and staff here george washington university. welcome, thank you, thank you very much for coming. [applause]