>> book tv has covered many books about the supreme court and the justices. if this is a topic that interests you, go to our website at booktv.org and in the searchbar type in supreme court book and you will find a large archive of authors and materials. all these programs available to watch online . >> i have a disgruntled microphone . see that? so i think i'm going to hold it.

well, good evening. i'm charlie copeland and i'm president of the intercollegiate studies institute. in a minute you will hear from cherie herder, president of the trinity forum and i'm honored that we are hosting this program this evening. members of the community believe in a simple axiom. and that is think. live free. think, live free. the trinity forum believes that the distraction incivility, polarization and pathology of our age stems in part 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, or organizations believe deeply that an informedcitizenry , that informed leaders are well read, intellectually

curious and the thinking. but as we build and grow and maintain a community of constituents, students, faculty and alumni, who want to discuss andengage in the big ideas . what makes a society flourish and prosper? what makes a person hope? why does a society in which the rules are above the rulers make a difference? isi focuses on higher education. last year we had 1250 faculty advised meetings which equals over 30,000 educational interactions between our faculty andstudents. we had 155 separate independent lectures and debates . six regional weekend conferences, six liberty fund related conferences, 60

newspapers that accessed over 1000 students as well as made national news on shows like tucker carlson, usa today, national review, dallas morning news and numerous others . our honors conference is considered the gold standard in developing conservative intellectual thought among college students. a de facto minor in conservatism. where we discuss russell kirks the conservative mind, richard weaver's ideas of consequences among other titans. 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 had been the most successful ideas addressing those fundamental intractable 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 evenings are just a step in that ongoing process . on your chairs you will see a promotional handout for the intercollegiate studies institute upcoming dinner for western civilization. held in washington dc on thursday, october 15. early that afternoon we are 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 you will consider supporting i.s.i. in any way that you can. as i said, we are on the college and university stage 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 to support the extremely bright young leaders who have the audacity to question campus dogma. you can help assure that we develop the next generation of conservative leader. in short, you can help save america. help save the west and indeed, you can help save the world. and that's not bad for a day's work. so with that, i'd like to introduce cherie herder,

president of the trinity forum. prior to joining in 2008, she served in the white house as special assistant to the president and director of policy and products for first lady laura bush, earlier, she served as policy advisor to senate majority leader bill frist, advising the leader on social issues and serving as a liaison to outside groups. 2001 to 2005 she was counselor to chairman of the national endowment for the humanities where she helped the chairman design and launch the people initiative to enhance the study of understanding of american history. sherry? [applause] >> thank you charlie for that kind introduction andwelcome to all of you tonight . for this conversation on

identity and dignity. on behalf of all, it's a pleasure and honor to be a partner with you and i appreciate all the work that you've done charlie and you josh as well to help make this a reality. we're also grateful for the support for tonight's event from the democracy fund which has invested efforts to ensure our political system is able to withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the american people and we're delighted there president has joined us tonight along with role members of the democracy fund staff including margaret yeah, paul waters, martinelli, and did not us a condo, thanks for joining us. i want to give just a special shout out to the senate pages who have joined us. i understand around 18 out of 30 of the pages are here tonight and we are delighted to have you here so welcome. as well as thanking each of you for making it out. it is never fun or easy to fight rush-hour traffic and

we are enlightened and honored that you be with us tonight. we also know there are many people who want to be here but could not make it so if you have friends who are among that number, we are live streaming tonight's event and we will also have videoup on our website and our youtube channel . along with photos and clips. 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 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 reading and publications which draw on classic works of literature that explore the enduring question of life and connect

the timeless wisdom of the humanities with timely issues of the day. as well as sponsoring forums like this one tonight that 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've noted evening conversations before, it's been said the three questions of life essentially boiled down to three. what is a good person? what is the good life? and what is a just society? wrestling with those questions is influenced by our sense of identity, on what we base oursense of personhood, individuality and dignity . and the obligations, commitments and relationships that flow from that understanding. for much of history, the constraints of everyday existence largely defined one's objectivity.

one was born to the military, one was likely to die, worship in the same way as one's parents and relatives, marry someone chosen by your family, know the same people throughout your life. choice was limited but once sense of self was uncomplicated. technology, economic opportunity and the freedoms that attend liberal democracy opened up extraordinary choices. opportunities and options for all of us but since our sense of identity is no longer fixed but open and often fluid. and as our mobility and autonomy grows, the power and influence of some of the institutions over us and historically particularly the institutions of moral and religious authority and mediating institutions of society have in some ways waned in their authority or their influence. commitments, obligations and relationships that once bounded us to each other and help define who and whose we are have weekend.

for many, the disappearance of strong communities, moral authorities and stable institutions has led not to a blissful freedombut a profound sense of alienation . such isolation as in turn you'll on an individual level a search to be part of a group and on societal level, and marked increase in populism and tribalism and 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 in our quest for dignity and respect is undermining the stability of the liberal democratic order that makes human rights, religious freedom and freedom in general possible. increasing politicization of our identities and the inevitable resentment that follows is as we perceive our own identities to be best

lends itself to an apocalyptic politics where compromise is seen as an attack on self-worth and accommodation a self negation. so is it possible to construct or to recover a sense of individual identity that recognizes and grounds are identity in something other than tribalism, shared interest or resentment or ethnicnationalism and can we cultivate a shared identity , built around common ideals, of faith that encompasses an inclusive and unifying vision of what it means to be an american? these are important questions and challenging ones and it's hard to imagine a scholar who can engage them with more intellectual courage, thoughtfulness and sober wisdom that our speaker tonight, doctor francis fukuyama. francis is a political scientist, political

economist and best-selling author who serves as distinguished senior fellow at standard universities institute for international studies as well as the mosque director of its center on democracy, development and the rule of law . he previously taught at the paul minsky school of studies at john hopkins as well as the george mason university goal of public policy. is a researcher at the rand corporation, deputy director of the state department's policy planning staff and in addition to his latest book which we've invited him to address tonight, he is the author of political order and political delay, the origins of political order, perhaps his most famous the end of history and the lack of man, trust and america at the crossroads. he's a council member of the international forum for democratic studies, a fellow of the world academy for arts and sciences and advisory council member of the democracy fund and an alumni of harvard university where he will soon receive a phd.

after his talk, responding will be ryan streeter. ryan is director of economic policy api, previously serving as executive director of the center for politics and government at ut dawson as well as serving as special assistant to the president for policy of president george w. bush and a policy advisor for mayor stephen goldsmith in indianapolis. he's the author of transforming charity, towards a result oriented social sector, the editor of religion and public square in the 21st injury and the co-author of the slow of civil society and has been published in a location such as the washington post, wall streetjournal, the weekly standard in national review. directly after his talk , i will offer a brief response followed by a moderated conversation between our groups . frank, welcome. [applause]

>> thank you for that excessively generous introduction and thanks to i.s.i. and the trinity forum for having me here. i'm astonished at the crowd tonight and i'm glad there's so many young faces in it so thank you all for caring. let me get right into the book. so quite honestly, the reason i wrote this book had to do with the elections of 2016. the british vote to leave the european union, the brexit boat and donald trump's election in 2016. i think both of these events are connected to a broader series of developments around the world which are often times referred to as the 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, we can the institutional basis for a modern democracy. democracy is not simple simply a matter of elections, it is a matter of rule of law, checks and balances and constitutional constraints that limit executive power in a well-functioning democracy and in places like hungary and poland and turkey, you had elected leaders that have gutted their judiciaries, eliminated any kind of hostile opposition press that would hold them accountable, weakened or 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 tweaking them so this i think represents a broader movement, but what i've been trying to do over the past couple of years is 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 properly to have fastly 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 course would understand that although everybody gets richer in the world, not every individual in every country gets richer and in particular, less educated workers in rich countries have been losing employment opportunities to

rising middle classes in places like china, india, bangladesh and so forth so there's been a stagnation in middle-class wages in the united states and britain and other developed countries, basically no increases in per capita income for a very extended period of time and that obviously has generated a lot of backlash and unhappiness and a feeling that the elites are responsible for creating this liberal world order are very much out of touch. however, the subject of my book is not back because i think that 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 a psychologist eric erickson in the 1950s

and the term identity politics 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 tried to explain, this is 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 republic and where socrates says okay, what's a human being? there's a desiring part that once things. there's a calculating, rational part but isn't there another part that he labels phemos and this part of the soul recognition demands recognition to identity. they want other people to respect us, value was at a certain rate and if we don't get that, that recognition, we get angry and actually because it is recognition, it isinherently political . it draws us into the public square because we want other people to recognize us 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 arrest aquatic class that risked their lives but in the course of the development of western civilization i think christianity played a important role in shaping 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 stands at the root of christian dignity and because the universal characteristics so if you ask why would anyone think all human beings are equal, they are equal in this capacity for moral choice so as the centuries go by, this idea, the seat of this idea that we have an equal dignity insofar as we are equally free to choose

takes a secular form in the writings of writers like russo or emmanuelle kant. it is the basis of modern human rights and our understanding of rights as defined in the american constitution in what sense does thomas jefferson assert that all men are created equal, it has to do with the fact that we are equal agents and therefore equally entitled to participate in the process of self-government. now, and i guess the final component of the modern sense of identity is that we deeply believe we have a self that is inside us and that doesn't necessarily correspond to the external social world. the social world actually may despise us or not recognize us, and the modern aspect of this is we believe that authentic inner self is morally more valuable than the social rules that look

down on us and that between the authentic inner self and those external rules, if the external rules that have to change. and that leads you into kind of a revolutionary understanding of the relationship between individuals and the surrounding society . so that the basic theoretical background, but it manifests itself inpolitics in many ways . it is the basis for the drive for democracy. democracy is about this you will respect for the personhood and the agency of the citizens of the democracy that make up the democracy. in 2011 there was a vegetable seller named mohammed in tunisia who had a vegetable part that was confiscated by the police. he went to the governor's office and said can i have my card back west and mark nobody would talk to him so he doused himself in gasoline, killed himself and that is what triggered the

arrow spring. triggered the arab spring because throughout the region, the people that lived in these dictatorships identified with his situation. the government was so unwilling to even get him an answer. they could have said you did something illegal,that's why he took your cart . they wouldn't even get him the minimum amount of respect a human being deserves and they said that's basically the condition of all of us . in egypt, in libya, and syria, we live in governments that do not recognize our personhood and a lot of the color revolutions that occurred in georgia and ukraine and other parts of the world against dictatorship, those revolution of dignity that took place in ukraine in 2015, 14. the word dignity was important because young ukrainians that were out in the streets protesting against victor janik which

did not want to be dragged back into this kleptocratic russian systems where you had to be personally connected to the rulers if you are going to get ahead. they wanted to live in a modern society like that of the european union that would recognize people on a more impersonal basis so dignity, it's not like this is a weird cultural practice for just certain kinds of cultures or regions. this is at the base 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 exercise of agency through the vote. 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. all of the germans living across central and eastern europe ought to be unified under a single german government. the serbs living in the austro-hungarian empire had a right to their own republic, and it is that pressure to change boundaries on this assertion of group identity that drove the conflicts that ultimately resulted in the world wars of the first half of the 20th century. i own view is that a lot of the young men go off to fight for the islamic state and al qaeda in the middle east are actually not driven by genuine religious piety, but

there driven by identity politics, especially those european muslims who have rejected the traditional islam of their parents and grandparents, but there not fully accepted by the european society for their living in rotterdam or in paris or wherever and then a muslim preacher comes along, a bag daddy or and osama bin laden and says you are a member of a muslim community that is great and glorious, has a great history that is being oppressed, muslims are being killed and disregarded all around theworld . you need to have agency coming to syria to fight back . that's why they grow long beard, picked up an ak-47 and engaged in that violent conflict so these are two examples of identity that lead to very bad political results, they lead to violence so identity not only drives democracy but also

drives these forms of politics. now we get to what's going on in the liberal democracies. so if you think about the united states and now this is 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 in other countries around theworld . this assertion of identity. in the united states, i think the history of this runs roughly as follows. that in the 1960s, you saw the rise of a number of very important social movements. it begins with the civil rights movement for african-americans, feminist movement, the lgbt movement, movement on behalfof the disabled , all these groups had in fact, or were invisible to mainstream american society. they were disregarded, their rights were not respected in

some cases. african-american rights were legally subordinated to those of white people and what they demanded was the quality. a demanded equality of respect so identity politics in america begins with a very just and important striving for the quality and especially this quality 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 theleft in europe , there is a transformation in the way that they see themselves and the way they see their projects because earlier, it had been focused very heavily on the working class. in europe, one of those parties were marxist so they cared about the proletariat and proletarian revolution and so forth, they were speaking 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 of the democratic party as well for like 80 percent 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 particularly groups, a lot of these whites working-class voters began to lift over and vote for conservative parties to this is been a shift that's been going on in the united states for some time. in europe and a lot of former communist voters in france notebook for the national front. or similar sorts of reasons because the left as 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 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 or groups that are treated badly they are members of groups to be pushed back against them and the injustice suffered by african-americans and women and gays and lesbians and all these other groups is not the same. there lived experiences are different and therefore the remedies are going to be different so that aspect of it becomes i think understandable in a kind of 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 way that it is different as opposed to the ways that it is similar and simply wants to join the larger community, poses a problem because not every group identity is necessarily compatible with the kind of universal values on which a

liberal democracy is based. this is the most serious and a lot of european countries where you have muslim groups that express homophobia and anti-semitism, subordination of women, these cultural values that are not compatible with the kind of individual agency that we believe people in a modern democracy deserve. it becomes problematic when a given characteristic with which you are born comes to define the way you will think about politics, about culture, even about sports and things like that, because in fact the premise of the democracy is we are individuals that can make up our minds about important public policy issues and we should not be limited by simply the conditions of our birth , and quite frankly i think that the identity politics as they evolved on the left has now stimulated and identity politics on the

right. and some of the more extreme versions of this in the alt-right and white nationalism, i'm sorry to say but i believe that is why our president has not been healthy for the united states because those people would like to drag the united states into a more ethnic understanding of american identity which is something that i have thought we had gotten past in the period in the wake of the civil rights movement. 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, higher taxes or more regulation, less regulationor whatever . they are lining up with these identity groups into which they are born , and that makes democracy much harder to sustain. solution to this, we can talk

about in our discussion 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. national identity is often times disparaged because it is associated with the kind of out-of-control aggressive at no nationalism of the early 20th century, but national identity does not have to be that and it can be something i've labeled greed identity, meaning it is based on a set of ideas and in fact, i think the way that american national identity evolved and not been to that point by the end of the civil rights era where what it meant be an american was not to be of a certain race or ethnicity or religion but what it means to be an american is to believe in the u.s. constitution and the rule of law and the principle of equality embodied in the declaration of independence and if you signed up to those beliefs, it didn't matter

where you came from, you would be considered an american. if you don't like those principles, you can be un-american in a way that you can't be on german or un-japanese or on something where the identity is really based on your ethnicity. and so that's an important achievement and i think 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 is created based on these ideas that are accessible to the diverse de facto diverse society that we live in today and that we need to emphasize those integrated 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 or 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. education is appallingly under done in our school system. if you look at the statistics on the number of high school graduating high school seniors that can name the three branches of government or one of the bill of rights, one of the rights guaranteed by the bill of rights, it's shocking. and you're not going to defend constitutional government if you start out with that kind of knowledge base. there are other things i think you can say about immigration policy. i have lots of opinions about that because that's the policy issue that is the most nostalgic in terms of identity issues because people feel that with a high level of immigration that has been taking place that in a sense national identity is being changed in ways over

which we don't have control but i'll save that for another discussion. i'm sorry, iwent on longer than i was supposed to . i look forward to the commentary. [applause] >> 19 for those words and the provocation, i look forward to that discussion and due to the trinity forum for organizing this, to organizations that i've had a long admiration for and participated in a number of your events and they're always great so thank you for having me. for those of you who don't know much about me, i'm the person about whom you said and some guy is responding. when you got the email that francis fukuyama was speaking at the press club so it's 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 walk around with names we didn't choose forourselves but that we are defensive of . our parents chose our names and sometimes you might even have bad memories of your parents and not even get along with your parents but if somebody says something negative, you get defensive about that and it's this way in which we get enraptured by our local sports teams. if you got your favorite football, hockey, baseball team you can be in a funk for an entire day when they lose in theplayoffs but nobody on the team knows you . and you have this sense of attachment to this community and it's very strong and it's something fundamental, it's fundamental to we are as human beings that we have this deep sense of connection to community and that our identities are wrapped up in those communities and that's the first of two points i wanted to bring up in response to doctor francis fukuyama's remarks.

this sociological phenomenon of our tried ballistic predispositions which is creating this framework within which our identity politics are becoming divisive today . as doctor fukuyama said, identity politics are not all bad. we've experienced changes in workplace behavior in the way policing is done, many of which flow from responses to this cry for justice and respect for the inherent dignity of groups of people. but i think what's especially damaging today is the way in which our identity politics have become tribal. we are more joiners than we are and we join these abstract tribes in ways that today i think are particularly threatening for the ongoing projects of american democracy. it's the proliferation of tribalism i want to talk about a little bit and think about what to do about it. in 1752 the scottish writer david hume wrote an essay in

which he talked about the emergence in modern times of the politics of principle, parties of principle in contrast to parties of interest. if you're in a seafaring town, your politics are rooted in the way of life that you have what you noticed this thing going on in modern politics that he called artese of principle. he was probably speaking of the word principle more in those terms but he noted that the way in which emotions were stirred abstract ideals and abstract ideas was something particularly powerful. will join the march on the mall but we won't go show up at the local city hall hearing, even though we know aregoing to be bouncing across the apples next morning . this is something unique to our nature and when we are given an opportunity to find solidarity with people over something that they narrowly defined identity or principle, it can cause great passionate responses within us. a little under two years after that, george orwell

wrote an essay called on nationalism and he said it's an imperfect world for this phenomenon that you wanted to describe as a habit of assuming that all millions of people that can confidently be labeled good and bad. and i have no placing one group beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. this habit of what he called nationalism but what he was describing tribalism in this essay was marked by certain things like obsession. any criticism or slur against your group provoked a vigorous and sometimes violent and forceful response and an indifference to reality in that 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. identity politics has generated a certain type of crisis of attachment that i think seems to be at a point where we will see continue at a pace if this theory is right which is that the more

our fundamental tribes, family, household and community breakdown and are restrained and are shifting, the desire to join more abstract tribes becomes all the more powerful and we can talk about that a little more in the question and answer time but i think it's these trends that i've seen and i won't go through the numbers now of increasing family instability. civic fabric, tearing apart, communities collapsing in terms of health. it should be no surprise that the social commentator wrote about a year ago that we've seen this rise in identity politics in people's fundamentalattachments become confusing or begin to devolve . but i also want to say that when we look down at the street level, we can see not all hope is lost and therein might be part of the solution.

while you and others have documented over the years and increase in polarization that we've seen and something to the effect that 50 percent of parents would have a hard time if their son or daughter married someone from a different political party where it was five percent of you years ago, we have these strong forces of polarization, many of which we don't understand but there's also evidence that at the local level, engagement within our communities, engagements where we are living out and expressing the american project at the local level can have promise. i'll let you consider some of the following not yet released data that colleagues and i have had from a survey we just completed 2400 americans. when you ask people where they get a strong sense of community in america, we asked them if they have some sense of community and we ask people where they have a strong sense of community, 31 percent said they have a strong sense of community as americans in their american identity compared to 16 percent who felt that way

about theirpolitical group and 17 percent in terms of their ethnic city . so even the sense that you have community with fellow americans because they are americans is something that is alive and well out there. 25 percent of people said their city gave them a strong sense of community and for people who do attend a house of worship, 46 percent strong sense of community came from that house of worship. our survey found between 66 and 80 percent of americans of all stripes, and it doesn't matter how you slice it, pretty much between two thirds and 80 percent of all people think their local community is going in the right direction while 40 percent of people that the country is and three in 10 americans say that they have to actually work with the neighbors that they have their physical neighbors and their community to try to solve the problem or make an improvement in the community . the other 10 is not bad area so i think the data suggest art of the solution is close to home. as much as we can promote service and perhaps require

it at times in our schools and in our policies, the more the big issues like racism and inequality can become community issues that we all have a stake in overcoming i think we've learned over the past 20 years through performs in community policing and the proliferation of charter schools reforms the public housing and welfare that when communities take responsibility for fixing 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 thought long and hard about the bedrock of civic life and its role to play . so 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 . how do you take the latter to essentially either we can or moderate properly to the former but even if we build on the strength of the local level and shift our identities, we still have

something that is deeply disquieting and this is my second point that i'll make quickly before we sit down and that is a pervasive and i think even dangerous at this am a logical crisis that we have, along lack of confidence and transcendence on questions of human nature and what is the best society? transcendence simply are those things that are true whether we careabout that or not . not only in terms of the truth and i'm not just speaking about truth routed in faithclaims . religious claims, but transcendence in the sense of things that are true that are the basis of our rights and properly understanding what human flourishing is. identity politics is rooted in power and interest. it's not about truth, it's about advancing power and interest of a specific group. even truth that is real and discoverable is really an important thing for a lot of reasons and it has real benefits . there's evidence that when

you're motivated by true claims that are rooted in a transcendent view of the world, that you have a tolerance for other people who are different. just this week emily released a survey of conservative religious conservative voters and secular conservative voters and found religious conservative voters are much more tolerant of immigrants and racial minorities and that white identity we see is very much a phenomenon of secular conservatives and as we know, they form a strong basis of the president's support. another benefit to transcendence role in society is an openness to opposing ideas. there's a body of social science work on scientific curiosity, people interested in exploring what is true about the nature of things aregoing to be more open to debate , disagreement and talking with people who don't share their views and disagree . generosity is related to

transcendence. we know religious people get more negative more frequently but so did people who have an experience of law and elevation comes with 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 doctor fukuyama talked about the need for more civic education and i'd say we have to recognize there's been a certain cratering of our understanding about how we train and pass on these things that are true about our democratic way of life and what we need in order to be successful. we need more than engineers to believe in truth. we need people in the humanities and people in the social sciences who do also. buildings and bridges andfall down . if you don't take claims seriously. the school of engineering came about, you wouldn't

trust the buildings and the bridges of civilizations and societies can collapse too. both of these areas require an understanding of what is true and good and this 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 so the students on campus and he wrote that are running things including our schools and perhaps there's an opportunity for social entrepreneurs to do this at the household level, to help parents and families explore the basic concept natural law through mutual types of products. finally, religious renewal away from therapeutic models, certainly away from politicized theology and perhaps back to the cataclysmic model might not be a bad thing. i don't know if we can pull any or all of these things all but i think we should try. i do. [applause]

>> thank you for that frank and ryan. we have a lot of ground to cover and we want to make sure we have time for audience questions as well so starting this from a 20,000 foot view, frank, you mentioned this is the rise of identity politics is not limited to the united states. we've seen that as well as the growth of liberalism in different trouble democracies through 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 democracies that have done the most to expand recognition of previously different franchise groups? >> i do think that the economic explanation is part of it. if you look at who votes for

populist parties, not just in the united states but across europe, they have a similar demographic. they tend to be older, more rural, less educated, not part of this cosmopolitan globalized economy that's done extremely well in recent years. those are the people that vote for erdogan in turkey. part of it is i think just political opportunism. that orban saw this opportunity by appealing to his definition of gary and national identity, you have to be an ethnic bulgarian which is a problematic way of defining national identity but he can get a firm medical base by doing that because there are a lot of ethnic hungarians in hungary and by the way, he's disenfranchised all the ones that live outside hungary as well so part of it is just the rise

of these kinds of political opportunists. and then i think it is part of this larger pushback against the kind of world that our liberal, global institutions have created where those people have not benefited enough and there's a fact that passing them by. >> anything to add? >> not that. >> we will go to you. you study community in civil society for much of your career and certainly both proceedings and accelerating the rise of identity politics has been the decline of embodied in person communities. what do you blame that on wes and mark why has community and civil society so tax and are there any signs of hope? >> that's a great question. i think we are still trying to understand why it's been tanking because it hasn't

tanked everywhere. as we've seen from a number of different scholars out there including my own colleague charles murray, it's tanked very uneasily so in communities with high proportions of college educated people, two income households, higher incomes in general, you have a lot more engagement incommunities still , a lot more participation at the community level and it's really that, the upper 20 percent of america that looks more like the 1950s america we like to remember idealistic terms been uneven and you have in some of these places where the rise of populism has been starkest are in the areas where you've seen a collapse of confidence in civic institutions, in a non-attendance of religious institutions and i mentioned that survey that came out this week which shows that

precisely the secular white and working-class communities are the ones that aren't going to church. they're not involved in their communities and they are the ones that are most susceptible to this kind of nationalism that been spreading and ascended and i think that is a really difficult challenge for us and i think culturally, it's going to be difficult to turn that around if you're not going to see some bottom-up renewal from within communities. as a matter of policy, we are at a point where we need to help people relocate other communities . there's evidence that when you do this that people started take on the habits of the community where they go and that might sound radical but instead of trying to reunite a dying community from within and might make more sense to help people move around more.that's one of the things that we have to think about but there has been, it's been a long time in the secular decline of participation in local community institutions, faith

based organizations, particularly by people midway on the economic spectrum that doesn't seem to have any force within for self correction. >> coming from silicon valley i would have to say technology has played an important role in this because there is this long debate that was set off by bob putnam as whether a community, whether we were all bowling alone and the community was dying and i think that as i read the empirical evidence in the wake of that, it's actually stronger than ever. it's just occurring not in these face-to-face meetings in small towns and on front porches, a lot of it is moved online but unfortunately the nature of social media is such that it's perfectly made for identity politics. you've got some crackpot conspiracy theory about how the united states works and you go online, you can find the hundred other people in the country actually believe that along with you and you can completely shut out any

contrary evidence and that's what facebook and twitter and all of these technologies i think havebrought us to . one of the issues is how you deal with that. i think that we've now come very rapidly in the last 12 months regarding these as heroes of modern life to being villains and i don't think there 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 raise was that things team to go much better on the local and embodied level than at the abstract national and international level and of course all of our technology is moving as you say towards more virtual,disembodied kind of communication . and with the rise of social media, i think twitter came around in 2006, facebook a

few years earlier,it's amazing how much of that has changed in person . diminished in person, made it much more virtual. what hope if any do you see for that? >> i agree with everything you just said and i think that we don't even fully understand what all these forces will do for longer term and where receiving interesting research coming out right now just on the amount of screen time and the amount of use of social media, direct relationship to things like depression and the behavioral mood disorders so those are going to be with us for some time, particularly when more people are young experiencing that at a younger age. i would also say that we are all on various digital platforms, we all use this technology but not everybody behavior the local level or the lack of participation in their communities, governments and local civil society is collapsing the same way so strong families still matter.religious institutions still matter.

these fundamental institutions are the places within which we learn to practice the kinds of things that are civil society and democratic way of life need so you can be on facebook a lot and tweeting a lot and you can be tweeting nasty stuff and participating in a quiet and yet still go to your kids school and help out that afternoon and people are doing that. i think the data i was fighting, when we come up with this study that we will come out within about a month, the first one will be a series, you will see some of that. it's very much like we've seen this long-term decline since the 80s in the federal government and behind that, the state government as well. people confidence in their local government is not the same as it was in 1970. 95 percent of people think their local governments are full of graft and corruption and their more transparent, no but there's a proximity to that area so if you are embedded within punching institutions that you can

affect and work through and make change, people are still doing that. even if they're spending three hours of their day shouting at people on twitter i think , i totally agree that social media makes identity politics so much easier and so much worse but there's these other fundamental aspects of our democratic life that are driving these solutions you are talking about. >> in your book, you write the rise of the therapeutic model midwife the birth of modern identity politics. i know that you have mentioned the therapeutic model as well. it's uncanny when you think about how radically different approach towards understanding of man is that even say an orthodox christian view of man which is basically grounded in unity.

at the same time, the doctrine of original sin. the idea that we are bent by selfishness in need of love and forgiveness but checked on pride and power. in contrast therapeutic model comes more from the idea that we are inherently good. we need to be liberated from societal constraints and free to self actualize . is the therapeutic model compatible with the sustaining of liberal democracy? if so, how and if not, what can we do? >> so the decline for the shared religious moral horizon is related to the rise of the therapeutic function so the fundamental text in this line of literature is a book in the late 60s,the rise of the therapeutic society and that's what he said . he said that previously you went to a priest or a pastor

for counseling about anxiety that you had about your parents, about your job, the way you dealt with your neighbors and with the decline of formal religion playing that kind of role, people then turned to psychoanalysts and ecologists and the state itself took on a therapeutic role and in this respect, self-esteem became the central issue that the goal of the therapeutic society is to raise people's self-esteem. >> ..

i think it's had this -- i actually had a whole chapter on stanford university in this regard because -- i didn't put it in the book in the end. there's a quotation, in 1986, i believe, jesse jackson came to stanford to try to get rid of the western culture core requirement, and there's a quotation from the leader, the black student union leader, that was pushing for this, and he said something very revealing which is that i understand my professors think that plato and all these people are important, but they don't understand how that hurts the mentality of people that aren't of that race and background. and what was interesting was, in a sense universities have taken that to heart, that they've

displaced an educational mission with a therapeutic mission and their main interest is making sure that the steam of none of the groups that have reason to feel disrespected is damaged, and that leads them to make decisions about curriculum and so fort that actually don't have any educational justification but do have a therapeutic jumps. can a society in general survive this shift out of the religious framework? i hate to say but, yes, it can and i would opinion to -- point to europe. europe has been the most secular sew cincinnati human history, and it's much more orderly than the united states and that good demtrack institutions. have skepticism about argument you have to have a certain kind

of religious foundation to maintain basic social order because i can thing -- it's not just europe but i can think of other -- asia doesn't have religion in anything like a western sense. a man very orderly society, so i think that decline, you, survive. the therapeutic bent, though, i think, is tricky because it really does shift the discussion away from a kind of discussion of what really human excellences are and ought to be and what we ought to esteem and towards just a model that says that everybody deserves it. that's something contradictory and unfulfillable goal. >> anything to add? >> well, i'll just be brief. one thought that comes to mind is that i think it is a problem. think the rise of therapeutic

model and the way it is expressed, in the workplace and the ways we communicate through media is a real problem, and i think that what we probably don't talk enough about is the way in which kind of the human aspiration fulfill the potential. a model of pursuit is really important as we're raising young people and teaching our college students and kids to but what it actually means to try to fulfill the potential that you have because what do know is happiness is rooted in that. the therapeutic model doesn't have evidence going four it when it comes to the happiness octobers you get and that's a fundamental objective of public policy and when look at the other research on subjective will being out there and you see after you add a base lick level of income, income makes people happen but other michigans

matter, quality of relationships and halve and stability in institutions and we have kind of wired within us this desire to improve ourselves and-if our educational system is not build rate that notion, you're not where you need to be right now. this is life-long pursuit of earnings success, fulfilling potential, becoming, is something that i think has been lost and i think the therapeutic model hatt has damaged its. remember when i was teaching one class in texas that -- it was public policy course and i would do one segment on political biases and would have students read jonathan height's work from the righteous mind, which talks about the moral language as essentially that progressives and conservatives and speak and i had a student say to me, i just reject that. one of the -- the findings. he said it makes me

uncomfortable i don't want to deal with it. i said -- ran some experiments and research and it just didn't matter. one of these great expressions, this makes me uncomfortable, don't like what it says and choose not to believe it. and i think that's essentially where we are. >> let's talk about where we go from here. francis you mentioned the need to a cradle i'd. but as you also pointed out, civic knowledge is down, and even in people like senator vein saas who says we need a new civics -- a precursor to creedle identity. >> well, that's -- it obviously would require a certain knowledge of history because you

can't understand institutions unless you understand where they came from. it would require a certain amount of theory because there is theory how constitutional government is actually supposed to work. i think actually in the current age i would add some other stuff that wouldn't be in a traditional civic education class, because, for example, turns out that a lot of students, including very sophie tick indicated one does not know how to judge the authenticity and the authority of things they read on the internet, and i think actually a civic skill that has become very important is developing that able to distinguish between more and less credible sources of information. so, this is not a program i really thought through at any great length but i think those would be the basic components of it. >> one point you made was that

you said a necessary precondition to any kind of development of the creedle i'd would be the reinvigoration of a libel reports tradition. why and what would it look like. >> there's a lot we have used in the past that still would be good. the core body of classic texts and really at the university level, having something a little more like a core curriculum wouldn't be a bad thing in this regard. so territorially a body of knowledge but i think the modernized approach to the liberal arts based on some of what we learned the social sciences as well, part of what liberal arts education is together to not just impart a body of um but cultivate certain ables and skills which allow you lead and participate in democratic life and we learned more but the kinds of things that develop what might be call social skills within people. rayed the social skills literature, what people -- the behaviors that the scholars are

writing about are the behaviors we say you're supposed to develop through a liberal arts education to form arguments to analyze, i make judgment and stand up in front of people and make an argument and be able to critique an argue. these sorts of things which we have in tools for actually cultivating that within people which i think could also be used. so, it's not just dusting off the great books and making people read them. i thunder in methods and tool wiz didn't have that would really work well. >> so we're turn now to the most dynamic part of the evening conversation which is hearing from you. so those who have been to to trinity forum event know we have three guidelines for questions from the audience, which 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 interns around the room with

microphones, twice be recognized before going to town. questions from the audience. right here in the middle. maybe stand up so you're easier to see. thank you. >> i'm michael. thank you for become here. i just finished the book this week so still processing to some extent and i recognize as well the reference to allen blume the language we use about talking about these ideas is itself influencing the ideas and how we understand them and something you recognize in your book as well, that society modifies the ideas we have and the ideas we have then impact the society and there's something cyclical at work. i had trouble of tracing the

idea of identity from plato to identity politics and the progressive movement today. you referenced, take your affairs site. this loathing of the self for looking at corpses when one knows one ought not do it. the way i understand that it suggests that there's something that the individual recognizes is intrinsically wrong with the behavior and if you follow that thread to the present day identity politics suggest that which one identifies guess for one self is the thing that goods for one's self mitchell question in brief, with a question mark, is this idea that appears in plato with the present day hat our identity is that which we think is it or this a further identity deeper down that is who we are independently of how we think of ourselves.

>> well, i -- you know, i think one of the characteristics of the modern concept of identity is that we think that the hidden inner identity is authentic, and is something real, and we may not even know exactly what it is but we feel that it is -- that authentic self is the one that we morally value. seems to me what your question is asking is, how does that relate to actually whether it is something morally valuable or not and i have no idea how to answer that. i think that as a psychological phenomenon you have to understand the structure of modern identity -- which is this is what charles taylor says very fully, the structure of modern identity validates that inner self, whatever it is.

for russo, it's a kind of creative expressive feeling, it could be the inner feelings of an artist. it could be, again, art groupish connections that we have with a folk that we are connected to through our ethnos and whether that's transcendently valid or not i doped know how to answer that question. suspect in most cases it's not. >> anything you want to add on plato. >> no. >> all right. well, up here to the front. who has the microphone? maybe right here. >> hi there.

as an australian, part of western civilization from a country where we rotated self prime ministers in a short amount of time it's clear tout whats may be score competenced in in the and you can the u.s. is not inherently unique. we just experience it in a different by a because i suppose our institutions might function a little differently. my question would be, where does a country that hasn't quite ended up where the u.s. has, where do we start to learn how to avoid this current situation? no put it lightly. >> that's actually a very interesting question. canada 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 that canada is like up to 22%, 23%, australia is 20 or

so. and yet apart from polly hansen you have not had a serious pop list movement. no serious populist movement in canada right now. now, of course this could all change tomorrow, but -- so it's an interesting question as to why that's the case. my hypothesis would be something as follows, that what is driving populism in the united states and in europe is not simply simple, seen phobia and the level of for born people in the country. it actually has to do with other things like, example, the degree to which the country is actually in control of its borders and the 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 a's gotten a lot

of criticism for this because you stick automatic -- all of your refugees in other places. it's not a nice way to treat refugees but maybe that's the explanation for why you have avoided this kind of right-wing backlash in a country that has become really multicultural very rapidly. among other thing is think that there's a common assumption that opposition to immigration is simply the result of the majority population resenting the fact that people that don't look like them are there so it's sort of driven by basic racism and seenophobia. what the -- xenophobe ya attempt australian and canadian cases reflect that other cases more legitimate than racism and one has to do with the fact that whether your society is in control of the process.

the other actually has to to do with a point shy heave mentioned earlier which is assimilation, that i think you can legitimately worry but immigration -- you can legitimately worry about whether immigrants are going to be able to successfully assimilate to the national culture, assuming it's democratic, open, so on and so forth. that's a reason to worry but immigration, and that may also be a factor that is playing into the debates in your country and elsewhere. me a explain why you have that difference and why you haven't gone down this american route. >> other questions. over here. >> i'm thomas from india on a

visit. i'm so glad to have been here. i have impression that we -- human beings tend to exaggerate so when there is an emphasis on economy and too much there is bound to be a culture identity superficial. if it is not respectable, it is -- bound to come, and it's bound to exaggerate if the other exaggeration is there. what do you think mr. francis? >> i think that's probably a general principle that i guess 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 political

correctness. political correctness arise out of identity politics in certain ways, 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 in itself has driven a lot of people to support someone like donald trump, who is -- gets a lot of credit for saying what he really thinks even its racist, have itful, spiteful and at least he is authentic. that is one form of speech actually triggering 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 think that is one of the elements that is now playing out in our politics, where -- that's why trump can get away witch saying all these really i think sort of disgraceful things because people say i may not agree with his particular comment about

women or football players or whatnot but at least he is saying what the really thinks and that's something that other politics have not 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 and some sort of christian tradition, coming primarily out of moral agency or moral choice, i think is in part right but you're surely aware of maybe this other alternative idea that is grounded in modern day or something along what -- ryan streeter had to say in terms of tran scene dense and then your los angeles on what is to be done in the end of the book regarding the kind of this -- is

that any sort of concession to transcendent for us to get away from a place where our identities ore yeped around our choices and dom -- come to a place where they're more unified behind something transendental? >> i think as a realistic project. >> , getting any kind d getting any kind of agreement on tran -- it's going to be difficult. one of the fact of the matter is that national identity in this country is going to have to be pretty thin because it is such a diverse country. you think about, like, oil field worker in louisiana versus a hipster waiter in san francisco, in terms of all the things that a culture would hold in common, religion, even things like

sports, dress, cuisine, they're all different for these different groups in the country, and so unlike europe, where you actually -- again, that it getten away from any understanding of tran scene dense but have much thicker cultures bases 0 deeper historical traditions of shared experience, that manifests itself in things like food and dress and speech and so forth. we don't have that in the united states. so any kind of identity is going to have to be fairly thin gruel, has to be thing that of acceptable to people that come out of really different religious traditions or tradition of no religion at all. and that mean is think it has to be basically political in nature, has to be built around certain beliefs and we're actually going to have to such aside the discussion of where the grounding of those beliefs

comes from because the natural right that jefferson tacks about in the declaration of independence, a lot of americans would disagree we that. that there is -- that it is possible to ground thing -- i had a long discussion with richard schultz, the head of amnesty international, about universal human rights, and i just said, well, okay in europe, where do human rights come from? what are they grounded in? and he said, well, basically just -- evolved over time and they're kind of what the culture has processed. said, okay, in china you have a culture that doesn't believe in our view of human rights. dot that mean they're right analysis? -- also? he said, no -- he didn't have any grounding for this him could have made an argument that referred to natural right, but someone like him would not accept an argument like that. so i think that unfortunately we're never going to get

agreement on those kinds of first principles and therefore we have to fall back on political ideas that we can commonly accept and that allow to us live together in a kind of pragmatic way and i also -- if you can do other things, if you can add other very tours to -- virtues to it. i 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 the law, is a way of cultivating a sense of active citizenship and so if we can get to that point, that would be a very good thing. but anything beyond that gets to real first principles irsuspect we're not going to get to. >> brian you oak about tran send skins, anything --

transcendence. >> i walk making more in generalities the idea that we have basic rights which are enshrined in law, which are rights whether we like them or not or we think of them the same way was someone else is an important thing. i think we can actually recultivate an interest in these kind of enduring and permanent things without having to have discussions about the sort of oncology of them and getting theological. i think john wrote the theory of justice in 1971. his entire famous kind of veil of ignorance experiment that is the most famous part of the book, wouldn't even be possible without an idea that there was a universal application for this notion of justice and that the book today couldn't even really be published in this identities fraught environment. that understand offering justice -- just one example --

is an example of some presupposed principles that are just -- they're just drew they're what our institutions are based on and some unapologetically talk boat those and form the basis of a renewed civic education. >> one last question. we'll go right here. >> thanks so much. i'm ham, a student at howard. my question deals with the current political situation in europe because a lot of my friends and i often discuss this topic, buy identity politics is on the rise in places where socialist tradition used to be pretty strong through the 20th 20th century. so this some extent, some confusion that why populism is on the rise there. >> i think it kind of depends on

the country. in a way the strongest populist movements have been in eastern europe where you really do have a lot of these kind of quasi-authoritarian leaders and part of that is think is eastern europe went directly from communism to democracy without this cultural liberalization of sew it's. it's ironic they have this anti-immigrant movements because they don't have foreigners there. the rate of immigration into these countries is almost zero. andso for. the it's a completely theoretical issue like they're saying saying we don't wanting to become lick netherlands order france because they have never had this slow process of learning to live with diverse minority populations that don't look like you. so i think that's what is

driving it there. in other parts of europe, it's more similar to what is going on in the united states. i you look where marine he pen's national front vote comes very heavily in northeastern france, the most deindustrialize part of the country, the industrial heartland of france in the 19th century, and then has gone interest this long-term decline, and so there i think these economic factors can explain a lot of the voting patterns. >> ryan, the last word. >> i think i agree with what francis just said, and i think the -- you have a -- depending on which country, you have very serious assimilation issues which he referred to earlier and the sense of identity which is much more -- much more rooted in the history of the country there's some places where you cannot assimilate very well and

then when you increase the amount of people who didn't grow up in that country, creates a particular backlash and that's what we're seeing in stark numbers across the continent. >> francis, ryan, thank you. [applause] ... >> absolutely. and one of the things i talk about is that america is

really an aspirational nation and it's in thoseaspirations , we the people, we hold these truths to beself evident. leader of the free world. those kind of aspirations . it's based on those aspirations and not those hard-core realities where people have fought in order to gain access to their citizenship rights. >> watch this weekend on cspan2's book tv. >> that evening. good evening, i'm bradley graham, co-owner of politics