today, he instructed his administration to boycott the dinner. what coverage of the presidents rally saturday at 8:00 eastern on c-span. following the rally, watch coverage at 9:30 p.m. eastern of the white house correspondents dinner with featured speaker, author and historian ron the - - >> starting no, it's booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. good afternoon everyone. welcome to the american enterprise institute. i'm the director of the mystic policy studies and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event. featuring timothy carney's new book in a discussion about its findings and claims. i think you'll find both his remarks and those of the panel of interest and timely given the moment we find ourselves in

historically right now. i look forward to the discussion. tim will come up and offer a few words and then he will be followed. we will follow that with a panel discussion with charles murray who was known probably to everybody here. he has his own - - studies here at aei. and megan mcardle of the "washington post" with a lot to say on this issue as well. tim is visiting fellow and he's the commentary editor at the washington examiner where he's been a columnist for a while. his previous books on cronyism are what many of you tim for. but this new book alienated america's enterprise for him. a real deep dive.

if you haven't read this book, you need to buy it. you should pick up a copy on your way out if you didn't pick it up on the way and be there for sale in the hallway. tim will give us a few remarks followed by this discussion and then we will allow time for engagement with you for a question-and-answer period to follow. and that your questions are in the form of a question. without further ado, i'd like to welcome tim. please come and give us your thoughts. thanks for a much. [applause] - - thanks very much. >> thank you ryan and thanks anybody for coming. i'm a visiting fellow and i'm a full-time journalist. what i did in "alienated america" is trying to find out new things and tell a story with my reporting.

i love you notice in 2015 and 16 there was a surge in interest among the political press and working at working-class places and going to appalachia and parts of the rustbelt. places where the american dream seemed dead. in this book, i started at the opposite end. near my house in chevy chase maryland. that's part of sort of lesser chevy chase. there's a chevy chase dc. account of chevy chase. something called section 5. but then, there's the elite chevy chase, called the village of chevy chase. population of 2000. it is the wealthiest municipality in the wealthiest region in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. it's got 80 percent of the population or so has college degrees. including the majority of men and women.

advanced degrees in chevy chase. but here's an important thing and you would notice if you read charles murray's coming apart. it's not just wealth. 90 percent of the families have two parents at home. i visited there a few times and at the village hall, they have all of these events. they have a father daughter dance.you go there and they have kids movie night with the teenagers in the town watch her kids to the parents can go out and have actual dinner in town. this is immense value they can there. i'm a dad. my wife, happy valentine's day is here. we have six kids. something that allows you to get away from your kids is one of the best ways to foster your love for your kids, in my opinion been but they also have classes for the elderly.

they have sports teams for the kids. the outcomes are excellent. the kids get married. kids stay away from drugs be they go off to college. they avoid unwed pregnancy. these villages all around the country. they produce these good outcomes because as a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. a village like chevy chase is exactly that village. speaking of hillary clinton, if you look at her top fundraisers. people who raise six figures, a dozen of them at least live in chevy chase. this is a liberal elite town that practices the values that conservatives preach. if you pay attention, you'll find what they are trying to do is make more of the u.s. population be like chevy chase but they just wish, the elites have such good outcomes but maybe we can make more of them i grasp it if we throw more money at public schools. maybe, silver spring can have

the same outcomes. as langley high school in mclean virginia. or they say, maybe if we make college free, because college is associated with so many good outcomes. i would argue and i want to belabor it, you can't make everybody in america be any leads. - - in chapter 1, i visited another village. it's in wisconsin. 50 percent of the population there claims touch ancestry. when i was there i sat at a diner. in the chevy chase meeting, 1.5 million. and it was for its $150,000. you can buy 10 homes for the price of one in chevy chase. the meeting and come to rest median income is slightly above average but not if you compare the fact that the family

household is way above average. when i was there on a sunday, in walked a big crowd leaving the 9:00 a.m. service. and then a little while later. by the way, i'm a catholic so i always thought church always lasted an hour but some of these things go on for hours and hours. so they're coming up with all their kids. after that, in came the crowd from the 9:30 a.m. at the first christian reformed church. this small town village of 2000 has four different reformed churches plus an evangelical church and the bus to take you to the catholic church out of town. this village has the same outcomes as chevy chase. i said what do you think of this village. he said i will tell you one complaint, i went to the christmas concert the other

day. a few months back. there were no seats and my kids christmas concert left because all of these people who didn't even send their kids to the public school were there watching the christmas concert i yelled in my neighbor i said hey jimmy, you're taking my seat. jimmy who doesn't have kids said, we had to come watch our kids. that phrase. robert putnam use that. the kids are our kids to everybody. these are the two models. how is chevy chase like though ãor salt lake city? they both have very strong institutions of civil society. whether it's the chevy chase country club and the sports teams. for the first form church or our home christian ministries. but because they have a strong institutions of civil society.

so what is the plight of the working class. alienation is a play of middle america. we talked about the factories shutting down and that's a factor but the real problem is, the church closing down. i talked about the secular institutions. the church has always been. the church, synagogue, mosque, it's always been the central institution of civil society. secular society has been tolerable. that's what i argue and i think i established in "alienated america". and again, i want to thank you all for coming and i couldn't think of to better people to talk about this with then charles murray and megan mcardle. so thank you guys and let's have a conversation. [applause]

>> megan, i will you go first. >> god, i have so much to say about this book which i love. not because my husband is thanked in the acknowledgment. full disclosure, i did not choose this book for publication that he withheld this for me so i could catalyze on it. but i will read my favorite passage because i think it really sums up sort of both the insight and the challenge. of what tim points out. talked about the death of diners. where you know, in my mother's

hometown.the dunkin' donuts opens up and there's a drive-through and it's fast. so my grandfather who got up at 5:30 a.m. every morning for decades and decades and went to the diner to get his toast and eggs. that place is slowly dying off. and tim says, losing the diner means losing a meeting place. over the years, this would weaken the connections between neighbors. you may say there's nothing keeping you from getting together anyway after they've finished the breakfast and coffee at home. now they can be at a park or whatever they want because they're liberated from their need to go to a diner. this sounds rational but honestly ignores how human social interaction works. our more obvious and immediate needs bring us together for the coming together fills the less obvious but still very real needs. we come together for drinker security and we end up gaining camaraderie. it's often not noticeable in the short run but devastating in the long run. i that i think about an

observation that a science fiction writer robert diamond of all people once made. which is that everyone complained about the suffocating nature of the extended family network in small towns. if you read fiction from up to about 1950, this is a dominant theme. how terrible it is. and then it went away and we suddenly realized that he had indeed been suffocating. but that it also provided a lot of stuff we really missed when it was gone. what you couldn't see it like fish in water until it was gone. and so i see us in a lot of ways. i will say, i'm a great admirer of both tim's and charles's book. i think the weakest part of both books is the weakest part of every book which is the obligatory what is to be done chapter. if i had my way, we were just ask that chapter. i think describing a problem is

all by itself incredibly valuable. i think tim and charles have both recognize the difficulty of this and with proper humility. rather than the one secret thing to fix this problem. the question i always have at the end of recognizing problems like this. right, because it really is a problem. and some of the way that welfare, the old welfare system is arguably created a situation which people were making rational short-term decisions. that welfare was economically better in the short term but because they stayed out of the labor market in the long term, it made them more unemployable and treated more problem. in the same way, all of these are completely rational short-term decisions because the cost of building that camaraderie. the cost of building that our any given morning. when you are deciding whether you would spend an hour at the

diner or drive through the dunkin' donuts in five minutes. at any given moment, the cost is more apparent. it's only over the long term that the benefits you're losing become apparent. and so, the question i have and this is not a question i expect anyone to answer. but the question we have to answer collectively, is what do you do when the incentive structure of society is setting things up so that people are not thriving? what how you alter the incentive structure the government cannot mandate we go to church so weird we do the work and how to do the work? what you're a libertarian, i'm a libertarian. >> when it comes to the solutions, i'm a libertarian. libertarians don't do solutions. >>. [laughter] >> it is true that everyone asks you to give one. >> what i was thinking about coming on the panel today. i was deciding just how gloomy to be. because, in many ways, the book is kind of upbeat.

you see functioning communitie , i applaud that. ijust wonder if you looked at the problem close enough . if you would still retain that much optimism. and i go back to coming apart. one of the least discussed part of coming apart was my chapters on the founding virtues. where i was going back to the founders and i was thing well, you know, they disagreed on a lot of things. all of them said that there were a few things that were necessary for the society to function for the constitution to work. and religiosity and honesty and industriousness, what was the fourth? i hate when that happens. these were characteristics of the american people that were going to enable the constitution to hold together. and you take a look at the trends in the working-class,

and they are devastating. you said briefly, but correctly, that secularization has not progressed as far an upper-middle-class as people think. the pointy-headed intellectuals, yeah. harvard university and they do a survey and they're all atheist basically. you go to the upper-middle-class and there's been some secularization but it's kind of leveled off. and you still have the will ã that still have a strong affiliation with a church or place of worship. you go to the working-class where i thought was the backbone of religious support. if you use a general social survey, your down around 12 percent of people in the white working class. which is the sample i was looking at. about 12 percent a meaningful attachment to a church. when you will have 12 percent,

they do not provide a kind of core around whom there is kinds of civic functions revolves. there kind of oddballs. whereas 30 percent, you're still in the game. so that's religiosity that has diminished. the whole notion of morality. that was my fourth one. several people. i don't know if you've noticed, nobody talks about virtue anymore. because the left has always been a little down on virtue as being preachy and sentimental. may i observe it's embarrassing for conservatives to talk about the virtues of character these days, i'm not going to get into an argument about any national leadership.i'm just going to

observe. that if you say, well, what you really need in a political figure starting out before anything else, is character. everything ultimately stems from character. character is destiny and apart from that, you want something you can hold up to your kids and that conversation. it's completely silent and it will continue to be signed for the indefinite future. well guess what? madison says the idea that a free people can exist without virtue is a comerica idea. and it is. the united states, our communities, don't function in the absence of a strong sense of virtue. here's where maybe we can get into an argument of some kind.

or at least a back-and-forth, a central theme of tim's book is the importance of religiosity. . steve - - i wish he was on the panel because it would be fun. with enlightenment now to say no, you don't have to have the. i think tim's right. i will make one comment if we can make it more of a back and forth. and that is that - - this is what happens when you're 76 point you forgot what you were going to say. [laughter] >> thank you for bringing up virtue. because that's i think the theme throughout the book. i grew up with the classical education and aristotle teaches, virtue is a habit.

one of the things about habits is they require practice. what if you lack the gymnasium in which to practice virtue? and what is a strong family. what is a good elite public school. what is a good church community.these are these places were these can be practiced. i think church committees are the only what they do that well because the elites call these virtues. there sort of best practices. for the reason you stay married and get involved in your kids lives is because your kids then have the best outcomes and you have the best outcomes. which is the way sociologists talk about. i think that's the thinking and the chevy chase's and the ann arbor's of america. you worry about sort of the fertility of that virtue to pass down through multiple generations. as you put in and others put i

, too many of the liberal elites are unwilling to preach with a practice. but, it's a good line but it's not just about preaching. it's about building the infrastructure where the virtue is being exercised. where people are being trained to it. where family formation is only really possible in a strong community because it does take a village. i do think virtue is the most important thing. again, the unwillingness to talk about it means the people who have these virtues and know their virtues, are too likely to keep them to themselves because it sounds preachy. >> so let me push back. first on the virtue idea and second on the pessimism i debate on the virtue idea, i will say, i don't think it's true that the left doesn't believe in virtue. the things that are becoming sacred in that space are different. it's about fighting oppression. and that i would say is the leading virtue.

upper-middle-class people are extremely interested in their kids in schools and the rest of it we can arguewhether that's a good virtue or not but it is a virtue. it has a lot less to do , however it is true with family formation. it's in a lot of ways a less personal virtue be less likely to make you personally thrive and more likely within a community. but very possibly more likely to make other people who are struggling to thrive in a larger systemic oppressive architecture.so you should take that seriously as a claim to virtue. i think it is one. second, i'm not sure this is pushing back on the pessimism and just perhaps reframing the timeframe. in a lot of ways, this book, like every book on the topic but ends up anchored in the 1950s. there's a simple reason for that which means we have a lot of good data from the 50s and

not a lot of good data from 1910. what we do know from 1910 certainly paints a different picture from what we see today. we see highly dense rural areas and extremely fractured. in these urban areas in outpost where a lot of immigrants are arriving. if they have an ethnic cohesion, they may develop one but often they don't. for those initial 5-10 years, it is a brutal experience for those groups even after you discount the brutal physical labor that they've been shipped out to pennsylvania or whatever to do. detachment or defining that as attachment to a church.

post the puritans. we tend to get these decline narratives. there's this idea of the sexual revolution that is going ever forward in one direction. and then it was followed by victorian is him the idea this was all going in one way. i think that's very possibly false. we are in the middle of a big economic dislocation that i think is fracturing communities in many ways. in the middle of a big cultural fractionation. i think technology is fracturing communities. in a way, we've got, technology is good for the outlier and not the median. when you think about 1950s society, to me, it's a society arranged around making the median best off.

that's true on every level. right now, society is organized around the outliers. that's on this end and that end. that's what social policy ends up organizer and what our economy is organized around. it sort of neglects the median. that's kind of what you would expect but we've had these disruptions before. it's really interesting that these big disruptive social movements in the 20th century basically followed by that 10 years of disruptive communication. radio in the 20s and in the 1930s, we get fascism. and in the 1920s in italy. tv in the 50s and 60s. not just here, all over the world, right? society is probably eventually, these things when they disrupt, they break patterns that were sustaining and that people had

figured out how to maximize to make their lives and communities better. but people are incredibly robust. if you think about what frontiers were likely they were terrible in the 1980s. they were shooting each other and serial killers. by the 19 5, wyoming is a nice place to live. that does mean the transition can be decades. i will stop because i know i've talked a lot. but i think a very interesting conversation i had with a colleague of mine at bloomberg who grew up in and had descended, if anyone is familiar with - - which is about total desperate poverty in the north of england during the 20s and 30s. he had grown up very near there. and his grandmother lived in

these just like, gross slums. if you read this book, you're just horrified by the physical description of the conditions people are living in. his grandmother moved out in her 60s. when the government was renovating everything. he said it killed her. the outrage in his voice. she said she had all her friends and knew everyone but now she was in a house where she knew no one and decided to die. she got sick of life. if you think about that. these houses that are like 2-4 tiny rooms. squalid, crawling with bedbugs and vermin. they have toilets that are at the end of some little back alley. that you have to share with other families but if you think about a community in which coal mining and the worst sort of industrial manufacturing and decades of unemployment.what was biting this community together.

these were people that nonetheless, in almost the worst conditions that we can imagine. had built something that was sustaining them and was so important. that when it was forcibly taken by thegovernment trying to make the lives better. they declined . think about, that is the optimism but that is what humans do. we do sustain ourselves. >> humans do that unless there are forces that are actively and continuously pulling us apart. you are describing almost a gravity of bringing people together and sometimes there are forces, specific forces that pull us apart. i think right now, we do have a lot of those. with technology and government that i worry will persist for at least a generation. big government, being as predicted, hating other gatherings. other things that can be a locust of love besides itself. and i just worry that these

will have staying power. even when we do, it will be a couple generations. >> i think that's right but we went through dickens and what and it was with this vibrant community in the north of england.but it took a long time and it was miserable for a generation or two while they transitioned.>> okay, maybe it won't work everywhere. ever. so we have a community that we like whether it's chevy chase village or whatever. those kinds of human connections are really important. i fully agree with megan!. the 50s were about the mean and now policies about the outliers. okay, why is it that you had in the 20s-40s, main streets and these other books and all of these stifling conformists, boring, middle america. it's because the people who were writing those books or intellectuals who were really

forward hanging out with those people. so they go off. but i see the intellectuals have their own communities they can go to. they have communities that work. what about the - -? maybe there is no such thing as going home again in terms of cohesive communities in the modern american megalopolis. i will say this. i think if you talk about the great divide in the united states, culturally. it's not left and right so much as it is people who live either in small towns or small cities or peoplelive in megalopolis . catherine and i, we are out there in maryland near frederick which is maybe 40,000-50,000 people now. that place functions like a 1950s small city. it's filled with all kinds of

voluntary associations. people knowing each other. you can get folks together in one room to make a difference in what's going on in the community. it's ozzie and harriet and 1950s all over again. in the best kinds of ways. i think that's true of small cities across america. i think is true of smaller towns across america. where basically, for a great many people in those communities, it works really, really well. and the problems are concentrated in a minority of the community. maybe we say, let's make it easy as possible for people who like that kind of place. and to be given a lot of freedom to run their lives as they see fit. and maybe the cities will be run differently people will want to be in that environment. but we will never restore the kinds of institutions you're talking about. >> i do think that some and i

argue in the book that part of what makes america exceptionally good at having these small communities and being so productive is exactly the sort of federalism. the mobility, the ability - - i describe orange city, iowa. another one of these touchdowns. i went and i started reading these online message boards and i found the skin that said, it's smothering here. everyone knows your business. anytime anything is happening with your family, people are knocking on the door. i'm thinking this sounds great but i understand for how an 18-year-old, this can sound smothering. then you're just realizing, it's so easy for him to get up and go. but at the same time, maybe sort of the irony of this is that what makes these little platoons, little platoons but

what makes institutions in civil society valuable, is that they're not simply transactional. the freedom to move about as part of what makes american communities so great. but, communities, it's my conservative idea of marriage. it's not just a transaction. not something you enter into as long as it's useful. it's a commitment. a putting down of roots. we need to have that combination but i think america is generally good at having that combination.you can leave where you are but there's lots of good soil in which to plant roots if you're not sort of feeling inclined immensely to get out and go. >> i will point out that what i'm edging towards with my statement about those two kinds of america's bit our libertarianism works really well in small city and small-town america. all of the feedback loops you need to run civil society,

pretty much still occur there. i will tell you where i get shaky in my libertarian principles is as i look at the megalopolis is and i asked myself. is there any other way to run these except with a great deal of government interventionism and control? >> i think there has to be. i wrote a column. if you look at the northeastern corners traffic problems. you need massive government infrastructure projects and they will probably have to be focused on rails because you cannot move the necessary number of people. i understand why my readers in texas are mad when i'm like, we have to do high-speed rail here. we have to do something that will move more people. we need more public transit because it doesn't make sense for their lives. but i absolutely think is a greater need for regulation and law in cities.

that same concept - - >> why it can be a vicious circle where more centralization begets more centralization. the more that people, the more the government is taking over rules. you remember jonathan kruger of obamacare. he's done multiple studies on government crowding out. and these clever studies that found the places that got more money. more appropriations during the new deal. they saw much bigger drop off and how the churches spent money. on welfare. he talked about the diner. one thing that draws people to church, that's where they get to serve other people. i've never thinking about this as i came into the church as an adult in your reading the bible. saying you have to feed the hungry.i think how will i do that. you showed better than anything on tuesday, going to the soup kitchen. as the churches lose those roles, they lose some of their draw and their membership.

an institution disappears and it's not just a church, a secular institution. that disappears and then you need more government. there's a study that showed the correlation of regulation and social trust. and that the argument is that the causality goes both ways. they say there's to equilibrium. lots of regulation and low trust or low regulation and lots of trust. i was imagining this guy walking on a razor. as you're trying to walk in the middle of moderate regulation. moderate trust. at some point, you slip a little. more regulation, less trust. and you go down one way or the other. >> if you talk about social trust, that is the glue that holds communities together. it's almost as if it's a perfect storm. you've got the regulatory relationship of social trust. if not the thing that nobody is

happy about, which is as you get multi ethnic groups. social trust tends to go to the floor. we live in a multiethnic nation. we will not change that. but it's a fact that it's a problem with social trust. video games, which are now, you project out video games 10 years from now. you think about how attractive they are now as a way of escaping the real world. imagine that extrapolated. there are all sorts of forces at work from technological, cultural. two economic. all of which are fighting against the very kinds of social interactions. >> social trust is really important. i will be the devils advocate for this panel i guess. i belong to a bunch of different online groups discussing various things.

one of them, i have watched people who have never met each other and meet space. reaching out to each other to talk about their marital problems. people going through a hard time. i have said to one person, you should talk to this other person who went through this and talk to this third person. none of them have met in the flesh. these are actually, these communities - - video games as an example. a fortnight which is this big thing. parents can't get there middle school kids off fortnight. yet they're playing a game but hard-core video gamers or so i'm told. they don't play fortnight because fortnight is just for chatting. it's actually this big, it's a community. these communities aren't like physical communities. i actually think this is a thing of outliers versus the

median. the median is probably better off with meet space connections. they can do stuff that they could not have done 20-100 years ago. but that may not be the equilibrium. we shouldn't extrapolate out what we see now. it's very possible we will find new ways to form thick and durable connections. we definitely haven't yet. on a scale of global human history, there is an instant technology. we had a bunch of wars about religion as a result. but we eventually settled down and were doing pretty good with it now. >> i think that's a good point.

>> i think it facilitates people getting together physically. i was able to have a 20th high school reunion only because facebook existed. we built a group, onto down these people and we all get together physically. otherwise i about my parish and my kids school and it makes it easier to plan the 5k and the t-ball team. all of that is facilitated. but i also think as were talking about the immediate desires. that getting together physically with other people is not always obvious with the gains of that are .1 the perils of technology. we don't actually have to get together. then when you don't, you lose the serendipitous encounters and conversations that end up being so valuable. this is what new urbanism is about. let's get people so they bump into their neighbors. have a coffee shop, barbershop or a bar where people can go. and that - - for you only - -

everywhere you go is deliberately planned. then you don't get to accidentally bump into people. bible college the best time. because you were living next to people that had the same aspirations and pursuit you were engaged in. that's my worry about technology. it makes us think, now we can plan our lives. that's the fatal - - for your online. taking you away from things you didn't realize going to be so important. >> so you have a situation where we are going to have really good outcomes because of the technological revolution and really bad ones. i agree with megan. we are just getting used to the capacities we have now. information technology and we will adapt. some both will do exactly what you said about using this as a way to facilitate actual

communication. and things will get stronger and will have accommodation of virtual communities. there will be another set of people who do drop out altogether and are sitting in front of those screens. a virtual reality machine that is a whole lot more exciting than the humdrum real-world that they otherwise live in. maybe the reason we, everything is so murky, is we don't really know what the sizes of those different kinds of groups will be. >> we don't. and i will say, i think ultimately technology will have to foster - - [indiscernible]. in order to contribute to human thriving. that humans do need those things. maybe the answer is that computers will get so good at simulating. that we can all pretend - -

that it won't be a problem. >> we haven't talked about politics yet. i wouldn't have written this book if president trump weren't running away with the republican nomination while i was looking at it. trump got 16 percent of chevy chase but which was a, in the primary bid a bunch of liberals, they all voted for john kasich. - - second worst state was utah and the biggest drop off from romney to trump. world dutch people who go to church twice on sundays. so the elites and the strong religious communities in the primaries rejected the guy who was saying, the american dream is dead.

so the argument that the american dream is dead was appealing to the alienated american. that was his early course of work. not the people who chose him over hillary. when their 16-17 guys on stage and however many terms of governorship and senator ship. that's the only guy willing to say the american dream is dead. it's not because the factory had shut down, it's because everything had shut down. well how is trump fixing that? this is where robert nesbitt, his definition of alienation was, it's not just being disconnected from communities. so they turn toward a central government. so that was my political analysis. i want toknow if you guys saw anything different . >> i am so befuddled by

american politics. i have nothing useful to say. i'm just appalled.>> i think there's a real sense that as these communities have broken down, it's just even in places like chevy chase. i think the difference is there are offsetting benefits that mask a lot of that. i think that, you know, there is a phenomenon you see on both sides. people are expecting politics to be everything. national politics. and it's not even just politics is going to make you healthy and take care of all your needs. it's want to fulfill all of your emotional needs.>> is what you belong to. >> it is the only thing that matters. so i have these, i am firmly

against this view of politics. i think it's both an error that politics cannot possibly fulfill this need and profoundly unhealthy for politics. but, i will say this. you shouldn't lose a friend over politics. if you are in not see germany in 1933, that does not apply. we're not living in nazi germany in 1933. but in general, if you decided to vote for trump or you decided to hate to trump. you should understand, they disagree with me about something. and we can talk about that, we can argue or whatever but ultimately, i know all these other things about this person beyond their vote. i think that we just don't have anything else that fulfills that place for people.

what's fascinating to me is how angry people get when i say that. theywill say, don't you understand . the purpose of politics is to make people better off. to make the most possible people happy. it cannot possibly be true that the most possible people will be happy if they spend every waking hour angry about politics. >> is politics of the new religion? >> in some ways. >> i like pulling on the greek definition of politics. that man is a political animal. a lot of my libertarian friends don't like that idea if they take politics to mean this. that we are supposed to be legislating and regulating.

we are not supposed to live our own lives according to what we think is right and wrong but we are also supposed to shape the world around us. this is something i don't think i would have said in my teens or early 20s. then when you're raising kids, you realize it's one just in your own house and backyard, shaping that is not enough. you have to shape the world around you. we have a parish and two other schools that our children go to. we belong to a swim club a couple years back that was incredibly strong. there we can push and change rules or change it by physically being the guy to be there and carry something from one side of the pool to the other. even the intersection near our house. my wife and i lobbied our county government that they should change the way the lanes are set up and they looked at

it and they did it. it was an amazing thing for me who writes about national politics on how only the special interests get their way.and they did it because it was on a local level.it was assessable and we can get that with people. these different levels where i have so much ability through these institutions to shape the world around me. that's what's missing. >> i think the irony of it, right is that our politics is so broken in part because everyone hates each other so much. you can't do anything a national politics because everyone's so angry. you can look back at the new deal and say we got angry. we did something. you can look at that and say this accomplished something. the fact that we hate our neighbors so much has created gridlock in congress where everyone is waiting to get control of the whole thing so they can do whatever. everything they do is

nonverbal. i would say man is a political animal as much as a moral and normal. so we need more moral communities. for something that exists outside and beyond them and longer than they will. especially as they get older. which doesn't promise, hold out any promise of action. and by the act of investing so much and it, are making sure it cannot do anything. because people become so determined to block their opponents. >> there were are a lot of arguments to me made that politics holds the role that religion used to hold. if you're talking about the

great traditions, these are religions that teach the right lessons in terms of loving and in terms of your moral responsibilities. if you're deeply engrossed in the rules. you are not filled with hate. you're not filled with anger and so forth. and politics by its very nature tends to make people angry. in so far as that becomes the religion of a secularizing society, the long-term outlook is not good. >> politics. the lesson of enlightenment with religious institutions, don't make good governments and government doesn't make a good religion. i think that's something that america needs to relearn. >> i think people naturally without knowing it, want to exercise and flex their political muscles. and they think, this is where

bernie sanders and occupy wall street came from. why don't i have any ability to exercise my political muscles and shape the world around me? because all they know, all they think of is washington d.c.. so they say it must be because special interest have much control. four of the promise at the end of this. i told this story in the book of how i did not understand what they were talking about. because there was an occupied dc. a couple of them. when i asked people what they were upset about. they said the implementation of the - - rule. [laughter] >> most of whom worked at - - >> you say, what are you upset about?

i thought, ground here. they will be against wars, against bailouts, corporate welfare. one of the policies you don't like?the lack of campaign-finance reform.but what else? citizens united. i'm like okay, fine, all of the special interests are in a closed room. it's smoke filled and you are locked out. what are they doing in that room that you dislike? and they said, making sure the voice of the people isn't heard. to me it seemed there was no there, there. it took me a while to say, that's a real complaint. you don't have the ability. that image of the gym again. there's nothing to provide resistance. nothing to reach out and grab, you are there standing alone and alienated not able to shape the world around you. and you think the problem is that there are super packs spending too much money. >> should be go to questions?

>> yes. we have a microphone that will come over to you. are the microphones working? why don't we start right appear in front. [laughter] >> there we go. >> i wanted to get to the subtitle of the book. why some places thrive and others collapse. i identify as a midwesterner. i'm actually from wisconsin. when i was back last summer i was in a town called - - which is the home of the republican party with a well-known small, liberal arts or some kind of college. the elementary school in downtown, had been converted to

small, independent senior living. because there are no kids. and people who lived in the countries with farms, etc. were moving to town to live collectively. and that's what's happening in sort of rural iowa, wisconsin. doesn't matter where. so, the question is, part of it is because there used to be small manufacturing throughout wisconsin. factories with 100, 300-400 people. the paper industry. coffeepot industry. small factories. were increasingly bought out by bigger companies like kimberly-clark that became global companies.so, i'm wondering, when you talk about why some places thrive and why they collapse. if it isn't also in part the loss of small farming and small

manufacturing. >> thank you. i think that's a huge part of it. often it's the first domino. but, i have a shuttered church rather than a factory on the front of the book for a reason. because i think that the real efficient cause, the main calls, is the collapse of the other institutions that follow. one contrast i paint in the book is between pittsburgh and then uniontown, pennsylvania. uniontown is in fayette county. it's about 45 minutes-one hour south of pittsburgh. both of these places were devastated by the steel industry moving over, first europe and then china. pittsburgh is doing well now. fayette county and uniontown

are not. they are - - fayette - - was a real city back in the day. why were they not able to survive the downturn? my argument is that if you've been to pittsburgh, you know there's all these little neighborhoods. all of them are built around church. a lot of them are ethnically distinct. you have the jewish neighborhood. polish and italian neighborhoods bid and irish neighborhood. you've got all of these different neighborhoods in these churches and these other institutions, including a local public school where everyone things of the kids as our kids. while the places that are just a little morespread out. they are thinner. they have a church or two , but when the factory shuts down, it's just less resilience. i imagine the role of communities resting on a dinner membrane that was easier to snap because they didn't have a dense network.

so you are a can't tell the story without the story of the shutting factories. in chapters 2-4, i go through a lot of that. but you're skipping a step if you go from this factory closed to the opioid epidemic. you're skipping the step of this factory closed and it couldn't stay together because then the other institutions closed. ... questions. there's one part where you said there is an increased social

mistrust because video games often miss flux and i'm wondering if you can explain that more. >> what was i referring to their? the research that establishes this is by robert i'm and so he was subsequently doing additional work and what he found was when you have multi-ethnic communities, that social trust became very low and it's not just one ethnicity didn't trust another. trust within the ethnicity also declined and this was a very consistent finding and has seen a lot of replication. i think i've seen a couple of replication that it's not a universal.

there are lots of reasons that it shouldn't surprise us, but it's a problem in a multiethnic country. >> there is a kind of -- you are more likely to have a language that is talked about in the book but there is a fairly common college ethos but that's not where the bulk of immigration in the united states is and so this seems to be very surprising finding to the upper middle class educated people because it isn't a finding that could replicate in a suburb that has a very diverse population of college-educated people finding the communities that are a lot thicker this is where my family

came in 1850. people have been there for a long time. education they have various ideas about the way to do thin things. >> it's hard to have cohesion in the community if you don't share enough. so, if you come to my incredibly ethnic diverse -- the only diversity is which president nominated you to the supreme court. if you come to saint andrews in silver spring, it has an incredible diversity and strong cohesion because they have invested in the catholic education of their children, so there is that strong cohesion.

the follow-up study that disagrees with it says maybe it's not the diversity that leads to the cohesion but it's a transition. of so that's an awkward interpretation. i talk about if you don't speak the same language but also the difference in customs. i have a neighbor that lives next door, and so this quick passage here after a few months giving me a ride to the metro i invited him for a beer on my back deck. for religious reasons he doesn't drink alcohol that's admirable that creates a barrier. after the frustration i approach him with a very awkwardly direct

question. i would like to have you over for a drink but with liquid do you actually consume? [laughter] he said it violated his religious obligation to care for creations and finally he suggested slaughter with someone in our line and i send my kids off to the grocery store to pick up a lemon in a line and go a couple big pictures and put my children to bed and then we finally got to know each other over many glasses of gently citrus tidewater. this shows it isn't impossible but it takes a lot more effort and have potential pitfalls. it's reasonable to infer the cultural differences tend to begin the communities. but if we are serving pork then can we invite our muslim neighbors we live in a very jewish communities. there is one time we actually

use our grail and out of mistake i got a third one for a house at a paris auction where they also had beer because we are catholics. we kept it a grail for one cookout. so, the beautiful cultural differences that make diversity sort of exciting as it is also then make it a little more work to build the cohesion. that's why if you share the only two college or catholics raising our kids easier to get over that. >> in the 50s the big thing was for the battalion and irish catholics to rumble at football games and now they are on the north shore. [laughter] so it is possible to overcome these things.

>> the book is fantastic and everybody in the room needs to buy it. >> come back to the ethnicity thing though. you talked about race in the book and the towns that you folded down as my generation sound quaint because they don't have white ethnicity (-left-paren i grew up in an average neighborhood tha but ths just no longer the case. if these places have still observed this remarkable blast from the past of these cohesion what hope ethnic and religious overlap with communities united by --

>> what do you see as the most plausible sources of civic cohesion for communities that don't start out with those if i can call them natural advantages. >> in the past we had the italian neighborhoods in pittsburgh etc. and a quick political points one of the best predictors of how much support in the early primary in 17 was the number of people that went after ancestry and said american. so, not having ethnicity made you more likely to vote for trump because it enhanced the sense of alienation, less religion and less words but again megan is more optimistic so maybe she can offer that, but i do think other forms of identity replace it. one thing mentioned earlier, you do see a lot of people now really developing pride in a specific neighborhood. when i went to dc in 200 there

was a difference which side of capitol hill you lived on but there was no pride. i've never lived in park slope and then in small cities like grand rapids it's another one of these dutch places but also a bunch of twentysomething hipsters with pride. i did speak with grand rapids tattoos and they love the local beer scene and food truck and all that stuff so i do think that there can be justin that we are in a neighborhood and it has a real pride in that. >> i think that it is complicated. america's racial legacy is its

original command the sort of original sin isn't going to be extricated very easily. it's going to require some sort of hero at the sacrifice. are we went to make that sacrifice and what form does that take. i think we are in a metaphor far beyond merely go and we have to drop it. but i think that there is absolutely help. but i think that the periods of enormous social change are not good to kind of try to predict what things are going to look like in 20 years and we are in a period just unusually rapid economic political change, technological change. and i don't know where it ends up, so i don't know how to even frame o how the community will fill these needs and for which groups.

but i will say that i think it is obviously a too helpful plays it can come it's har it's hard t the answers are to make it possible for african-americans to fun places that are not just a socially fixed because there are a lot of theories for the african-american neighborhoods. so, the challenge is the kind of stable economic prosperity which has been much harder for african-american neighborhoods to achieve because of a. >> while there's been a lot of social capital, i talked earlier about the forces that act to pull people apart is easy to think of our racial history and segregation and just talk about

taking away rights from black people and their access to other institutions. part of it was a deliberate attempt to prevent solidarity, family and solidarity. a huge part of the oppression that happened was the powers that be keeping them from forming little platoons that were to provide sort of a robustness and it was a church that provided in the institution it was institutions that ended the worst of the segregation and that part of why there was this trust and efforts to break up the institutions. >> right here in the middle.

can you explain why it isn't just a useful tool, why is it something that needs to be addressed considering there isn't much use for these populations we are talking about economically? >> this is one of the things that you sometimes encounter in the world of policymaking was they say the economy grew while the factories went overseas and people lost their jobs and sort of faded out of usefulness that we are doing fine. i had friends say it's like it's

embedded this collapse. i've said it before every human being is of infinite value and we simply cannot allow that sort of thing to happen and it's not loneliness and people are sad. a year renovation of people when they don't have the ability to connect to others and sort of the economy that allow them to exist and form to do better if

we are not letting them and given the avenue to pursue the greater good it is a disservice. for one more question is all the time for. where is the microphone right now flex. >> all very isolated and it's

the pace of modernity making all of us like those primitive tribes that keeps coming so we have the same future shock if you will even though we are modern. >> it has a brief passage like that where it talks about the ancestors from kentucky and your own sister-in-law telling you how to parent they get on the highway and go to this suburb. >> it is completely different at the same. it's different because you are now separate without the intense

connection that is one of the passages that made me realize i had to write this book without that connection they were living in a culture that theoretically could lift people up. >> is confronted with all this stuff we forget what's important doesn't mean it isn't important if it is objectively true that they flourish you go through a

variety of other things and say these are true so we can afford to say an awful lot of what we are seeing now as a novelist is a behavior that's been pulled out of shape by culture and technological shock. it's whether its place i made the mistake to talk about it for their valentine's day economic issues.

it triggers an argument between the rights sitting in the middle unfortunately they really increased one and -- really angry storm. what you noticed from the conversations back and forth as both sides are trying to get the same thing they want the other side to be committed so that they will have something to fall back on ultimately you have to have norms that people are not able to get what they need and if they don't work for long

enough i looked at a tribe. they try to do this when they are farming and the anthropologist said every morning they would read a bell and go out in the fields together and no one showed up and so they have to evolve new norms about property like this is mike hatch you can't have it. and it has been rapidly.

that's the kind of amazing thing it wasn't like they didn't believe these things it was fundamental to their system that's like my yard is mine and you can't come to it unless i let you, but it changed because the circumstances changed so i had tremendous belief in the short term with some of people and our ability to evolve and adapt and build things that do work and are enduring that take us beyond ourselves. >> that is a good note to end on and what a great discussion. we could go on all day, but we found it's been live stream data available for you to send

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>> i met some of the most amazing people not motivated by money or status or celebrity but the desire to live in a right relationship with each other and the desire to do good. they've taken a heavy burden that leave very inspiring lives. >> now on c-span twos book tv, more television for serious readers. next on booktv "after words," whether the american dream is attainable today. interviewed by daniel belton of the route. "after words" is a weekly