largest publishing trade fair in the united states. for more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and to watch our previous festival coverage click the book fairs tab on our website, booktv.org. >> good afternoon, good afternoon, everyone, welcome to the american enterprise institute, my name is ryan, i'm director of domestic policy studies here and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event featuring new book and discussions and claims and i think you'll find remarks panel of interest particularly timely given the moment that we find ourselves in historically right

now and so i look forward to the discussion, tim will come up and offer a few words and then he will be followed, followed by panel discussion with charles murry who is known to probably everybody here. chair of culture of studies at aei and washington post columnist with a lot to say on this issue. tim is visiting fellow here at aei and also the commentary editor at the washington examiner where he has been a columnist for a while and you're probably aware of his columns. the previous book on cronyism is what you know him for, the big rip-off in obamanomics, that's where he carved out a name, but the book is new enterprise for me, real deep dive of what's

going on in the heartland and i'm holding the book up because you need to buy it. t easier for me to say that, pretends to say it and you should -- you should go out there and pick up a copy on your way out if you didn't pick one on the way in, they are for sale in the hallway. tim will give us a few remarks followed by discussion and then we will allow time for engagement with you, for question and answer period to follow and our rules here at aei that questions are in form of question, i would like to welcome tim up here, tim, please come up here and give us your thoughts. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, ryan, thanks, everybody, for coming. again my name is tim, visiting fellow here. i'm also a full-time journalist, what i did was try to find out new things and -- and tell a story with my reporting and lots of data and a lot of you guys

noticed in 2015, 2016 sudden surge in interest among the political press in looking at working-class, going to parts of the rust belt, places where the american dream seem dead. i started in the opposite place. near my house in chevy chase, maryland. a lot heard during brett kavanaugh confirmation was going, there's a chevy chase, dc, something called chevy chase section 5, but then there's the elite chevy chase, the village of chevy chase, population of 2,000, wealthiest municipality and the wealthiest region in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. it's also got 80% of the population there has college degrees, including the majority of men and women, you've got about half the population with

advanced degrees in chevy chase, but here is an important thing and you notice because you've read charles murray coming apart, it's not just wealth, not just material ways in which they are doing that, also positive outcomes. 95% of the families there have two parents at home, you have -- i visit there had a few times at village hall they have all events. a father-daughter dance, you go there and they have kids movie night, the teenagers in the town watch kids so parents can go out and have actual dinner and immense value that they have there. i'm a dad, happy valentine's day katie is here, we have 6 kids. something that allows you get away from your kids is one to have best ways to foster the love for your kids is my opinion. they also have classes for the elderly in chevy chase, again, the outcomes are excellent, they

have -- the kids get married, the kids stay away from drugs, they go off to college, they avoid unwed pregnancy, so these elite villages like chevy chase all around the country, they produce good outcomes because of the wise woman once said it takes a village to raise a child. speaking of hillary clinton, if you look at her list of top fundraisers, people who raise 6 figures, a dozen of them at least live in chevy chase. this is a liberal elite town that practically values conservative streak. if you pay attention, you find out what they are trying to do is make more of the u.s. population be like chevy chase. they just wish the elites have such good outcomes we could make more of them like us if we throw more money at public schools maybe kennedy public school in silver springs and have the same

outcome as langley high school in virginia. well, if we make college free, everybody would have good outcomes. you can't make everybody in america be an elite. it takes a village. not a scalable model n. chapter 1i visited another village. it's in wisconsin, it's about 50% of the population there is dutch ancestry. the chevy chase median house is 1.5 million. you can buy ten homes with one in chevy chase. median income is slightly above average but not if you control the fact that the number of family households is way above average.

when i was there sitting at judy's diner on sunday, first reform church and 9:00 a.m. church at orthodox church and while later, by the way, i'm catholic, i always thought that church always lasted an hour, some of these things go on for hours and hours. they are coming in with all the kids. .. .. the ticket to the catholic church out of town. this village has the same great outcomes as chevy chase. i asked one of the guys sitting at the counter he was a mechanic he thought the grease under his fingernails and i said what he think, and he i went to a

christmas concert the other day, a few months back and there were no seats at my kids christmas concert left because all these people who did not even send their kids to the public school were there watching the christmas concerts i yelled at my neighbor and said you're taking up my seat and jimmy who does not have any kids say we had to come watch her kids. the kids are our kids to everybody. how is chevy chase like all of these other religious places. they both have a very strong institution civil society whether it's a chevy chase country club or the first reformed church, the first christian reformed kerch for our home church under christian ministry they get good outcomes not because of government programs but because they have a

strong institution of civil society. what is the place of the working class is that they lack those institutions. and we talked about the factories shutting down, that is certainly a factor. but the church is closing down, i talked about all the institutions, but the middle class and working class, the church had always been the church at the synagogue, the mosque, it is always been the central institution of civil society it has been tolerable for the elite. secularization has been deadly for the working class and the middle class. that is what i argue, that is what i think i establish and again, i want to thank you all for coming and i cannot think of to better people to talk about this with who have written on these things a lot. thank you guys and let's have a

conversation. [applause] >> megan, i will let you go first. >> there's much i want to say. and not just because my husband is in the audience. full disclosure, i did not see the spoken publication, they withheld it for me so i can tell lies on it. but with my favorite passage from the book, i think it goes back to the insight and the challenge of what it points out. it talks about the death of

dimers. i saw this in my mother's hometown, dunkin' donuts opened up, as my grandfather got up at 530 every morning for decades and decades went to the diner to get his toast and his eggs, that place is slowly dying off. and he said, losing the diner means losing a meeting place, this would weaken the connection between neighbors. he may say there's nothing keeping neighbors getting together anyway after this finished her breakfast and coffee at home. they can meet at the park or wherever they want because they are liberated from their needs to go to diners. it sounds rational but also social interaction works. more obvious and more need for us to get together, the coming together feels the left obvious but the knees. we come together for food, drink or security and end up gaining for cooperate. the obvious needs are not noticeable in the long short run

but devastating in the long run. he said that everyone complained about the suffocating nature and if you read fiction from a bout 1960s, this is a dominant scene, how terrible it is. and then it went away and we suddenly realized it had indeed been suffocating and demanded. but that it also provided a lot of stuff that we missed when it was gone but you cannot see it like fish in water until it was gone. and so ics in a lot of ways, i will say a great admirer of tim's and charles' book, but the weakest part of both books is what is the weakest part of almost every book, it's what it's to be done in chapter. if i had my way we would just ask that chapter. i think describing a problem is

often always incredibly valuable. i think tim and charles have both recognized the difficulty and with proper humility rather than the one secret thing. but the question i always have a thin recognizing problems like this, there really is a problem in some of the ways that the old welfare system created a situation in which people are making rational decisions. the welfare was economically better for them in short-term because they stayed out of labor like it in the long term. but in the same way, all of these things are completely rational short-term decisions because of the cost of building the commentary, the cost of building the network on any given morning when you decide whether you're going to drive to spend an hour the driver rejected the dunkin' donuts in five minutes.

at any given moment, the cost is more. it's only over the very long term that the benefits become apparent. the question i have, this is not a question i expect to answer but it's a question we have to answer. enter collectively. what do you do when the incentive structure of society is setting things up so that people are not thriving, how do you alter that incentive structure, the government cannot mandate that we go to church so where do we do the work and how do we do the work. enter ? >> your libertarian and i'm a libertarian and this works. well, it does in work but when it comes to solutions, i'm a libertarian, libertarians don't do solutions. [laughter] it is true however, that everybody continues to ask. as i was thinking i'm coming to the field today, i was deciding just how gloomy to be. [laughter] you know, because in many ways the book is upbeat.

and you see functioning communities and i applaud that. i just wondered if you looked at the problem closely enough, if you have still not retained that much optimism. and i go back to coming apart, one of the least discussed parts of coming apart was my chapters on the founding virtues. where i was going back to the founders and saying well, they disagreed with a lot of things, all of them said that they were a few things that were necessary to the society for the constitution to work. and if they were religiosity and honesty and industriousness, what was it for? i hate it 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, the secularization has not progressed as far in the upper-middle-class as people think. the point of intellectuals you go to the university and they do a survey and they are all atheist basically. basically you go to the upper-middle-class and there's some secularization but it's kind of leveled off and you still have maybe 30% who have a strong affiliation with the church or place of worship. you go to the working class, where i thought was the backbone of religious support, and it's just, you know, if you use a general social survey here down to around about 12% of people in the white working class, which is the sample i was looking at. the white working class about 12% have a meaningful attachment to a church. when you only have 12% in the

community, then they do not provide a kind of core around whom various kinds of civic functions revolved. they are kind of oddballs that your 12% whereas 30% you're still the game. okay, that's religiosity as diminished. the whole notion of morality, that was my fourth one. we needed the moral 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 judgmental and so forth. may i just observe it is very embarrassing for conservatives to talk about the importance of virtue and character these days? i'm not going to get into an argument about national

leadership here. [laughter] i'm just going to observe that if you said, well, what you really need in a political figure, started up before anything else, is character. because everything ultimately stems from character, character is destiny and apart from that and can hold up your kids. that is completely silent and will be selling for the indefinite future. well, guess what? madison says, the idea that a free people can exist without virtue and the people is a miracle idea. and it is. united states, our communities do not function. in the absence of a strong sense of virtue. and here is where maybe if we got into an argument of some

kind or at least back-and-forth. a central theme of tim's book is the importance of rigid lot entered religiosity. i wish you were on the panel. it would be fun to have steve on the panel. i will make one other comment before we make more of a back-and-forth. and that is that folks, this is what happened when you're 76 -- you forgot what you're going to say. [laughter] him i'm going to let you finish. >> thank you for bringing up virtue because that is the theme throughout the book and a rope with tim and aristotle teaches

and one other thing about habits is a required practice. so two different times i use the idea, what if you lack the gymnasium in which virtue. and what is a strong family? what is a good, elite public school? what is a good church community? these are these places where these can be practiced. now i think church communities are the only ones that do that very well because the elite call these virtues. they are best practices. so the reason you stay buried and get involved in your kids lives is because your kid then have the best outcome and then you have the best outcome. that's the way sociologist talk about it. i think that thinking in the chevy chase and ann arbor's of america, you worry about the good purity of the virtue to pass out to multiple generations.

and as you put it and others put it, too many of the liberally preach with the practice. but it is a good line but it is not just about preaching it is about building the infrastructure where the virtue is being exercised, where people are being trained. where information is all possible because it does take a village. i do think virtue is the most boring thing and the unwillingness to talk about it means that the people who have virtues and know their virtues are too likely to keep them to themselves because it sounds crazy. >> so let me push back on a couple of things. and on the virtue idea in the christmases idea. on the virtue idea i will say, i don't think that it is true that blacks don't believe in virtue, it's just seems that the things are becoming sacred in the space and that is about oppression.

and that is leading virtue. upper-middle-class people are extremely interested in learning for their kids in schools and all the rest of it. we can argue about whether that is good virtue or not but it is virtue. it has a lot less to do and however, it is true with family formation. and in a lot of ways is a less personal virtue. and what good would it make you personally drive within a community but very possible to make other people who are struggling to thrive in a larger systemic part of architecture. so you should take this seriously as a claim to virtue. i think it is one. second, i'm not even pushing back on the pessimism, there's perhaps reframing in time for me. in a lot of ways, this book like every book on the topic ends up incurred in the 1950s, and there is a really simple reason for that. because we had a lot of good

data from the 1950s and not from the 1910. but what we do know about 1910 certainly paints a different picture from what we see today. for example, i would say that geographically we see in 1910 is highly dense, thick social costs of humanities and rural areas extremely fractured communities much of the ones described here in urban areas and in the outpost where a lot of immigrants are writing and they don't have that network. if they have an ethnic cohesion and they develop one but often they don't. in it is a brutal experience for the groups. even after you discount the brutal, the labor has been shipped out to pennsylvania or whatever you have to do. so we have these problems before and i got better. defining that as an attachment of a church, post.

in from the 1950s, so we tend to get the decline narratives in it so true with the narratives. in the sexual revolution is going over forward and what direction. in the 18th century the sexual revolution in britain and that was followed by victorians and they were just like stop, stop, stop. so the idea that this is all going in one way and i think that is possibly false. we are in the middle of a big economic dislocation and i think it's in a big cultural dislocation and technology is fracturing communities. in a way, technology is really good for dollars and not good for the media. if you think about what the 1950s society is like it's a society that is organized around making the memes best off.

that is from every level on economics to political and so forth. we have now with society to organize around the outliers. that is allers on this and in that in. it is what our economy is organized around. not just outliers. that is kind of what you would expect in dislocation. but we've had this hundred these things before. it's a big disruptive social movement in the 20 century basically followed by the tenure disruptive communications. review comes in the 20s, 1930s, we have fascism, and in the 1920s in italy, tv comes in in the 50s and 60s, and not just here oliver. is it society that probably seems disruptive, they break

patterns that were sustaining and people figured out how to maximize it to make their lives better in the communities better? people are incredibly robust, we were horrifying in the 1980s, we were shooting each other, and then by 1925 wyoming is a family oriented nice facility, the fact is people have an instinct for doing this and they will rebuild but the transition will take decades. in particular we are very interested in conversation that i had with a colleague of mine at bloomberg who grew up and descended. it is about total desperate poverty in north of england in the 20s and 30s. he had grown up very near there, it is no longer there but the area and his grandmother lived

in these gross homes. if you read this book you are just horrified by the physical description of the conditions people are living in in his grandmother moved out in her 60s to a different house. when the government was renovating everything. he said it killed her and it was outrage. she had all her friends and she knew everyone and then she decided to die in the middle of nowhere she got sick of life. he takes about these houses that are like two or four tiny rooms, crawling with bedbugs and vermin with toilets at the end of a back ally. you have to share often with other families. if you think about community, a community in which cold entering coal mining and industrial manufacturing in decades about employment, these were people who nonetheless were almost the worst conditions we can imagine

compared to someone who have built something that was sustaining them and was so important and forcibly taken from them. and think about that, that is optimism, that is what humans do, we do sustain herself. >> humans do do that, unless our forces that are actively and continuously pulling us apart. you are describing a gravity bringing people together and sometimes their forces, specific forces the polls apart. i think right now, we do have a lot of those with technology and government that i am worried will persist for at least a generation. hating other gatherings, other things that can be a locust of love besides herself, and i just

worry they will have power. when we do overcome them -- >> i think that's right, part of the thing we went to dickens, what ended in this vibrant community in the north of england. it took a long time and it was miserable for a generation or two while they transition. >> maybe it won't work everywhere ever. so we have a community and those kinds of human connections are really important and i fully agree with megan's point, the 50s were about the allies. why is it that you have in the 40s, 30s, and 40s we have main streets and other books and all of these it's stifling, conformist, boring, middle america, is because the people

who are writing those books were intellectuals who were really bored hanging out with those people and so they go off, but now you see the intellectual of the home communities and they have communities at work. what about the megalopolis? maybe there is no such thing as going home again in terms of cohesive communities in the modern america megalopolis. i will say this, i think if you talk about the great divine in the united states culturally it is not left and right so much as much as people live in small towns are small cities or peoply wife are out there, we were near frederick which is maybe 40 or 50000 people now. that place functions like a 1950s small city.

it is filled with associations, people knowing each other and you can get books together in one room who can make a big difference, what is going on in the community, in 1950s all over again, i think that is true for all cities across america. i think that is true of smaller towns across america. where basically for a great many people in those communities it works really, really well. in the problems are concentrated in a minority of the community that is still managing. 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. and maybe the cities will be run differently and people will want to be in that kind of our environment. but we will never store the institutions were talking about. >> i do think that, i argue in

the book of part of what makes america exceptionally good at having to small communities and for us it's exactly the federal reserve and movably enter mobility and ability to describe orange city iowa, they reformed churches and when and in road read these it is just mothering, everybody knows your business, anytime anything is happening with your family, people are knocking on the door and i'm thinking this sounds great, but i also understand now for an 18-year-old discontents mothering. then you just realize, it is so easy for him to get up and go. but at the same time the irony of this is that what makes these little platoons, institutions

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

pretty much still occurs there. ultimately where you get shaky in my libertarian principles is when i look at the megalopolis. and i asked myself, is there any other way to run these except for a great deal of government interventionists in the control customer. >> i think there has to be. i wrote a column, and basically every libertarian but if you look at the northeastern border traffic problem, you need massive infrastructure government projects and they will have to be focused on rails which we cannot move. i understand why my readers in texas are mad when i say we need to do high-speed rail. or we had to do something that is going to move more people in public transit because it doesn't make sense for the lights. but i think there is a much greater need for regulation in law for cities. >> that is why there can be a

vicious a girl were more centralization gets more centralization that the more that people, the more the government is taking over roles, you remember jonathan gruber, he has done multiple studies on the government crowding out, he had these studies and found that they got more money, work corporation under appropriations during the deal. they saw a much bigger drop off and how the church is spent money on welfare. and so, one of the things that you talk about, the diner, one thing that draws people to church, that's when they get too unsure of other people. i came into the church as an adult in your reading the bible and you have to feed the hungry. i'm thinking how am i going to do this. what you show up at church and they say on tuesday we are going to the soup kitchen. as a churches loses roles they lose some of their drawing membership. so an institution disappears,

that disappears and then you need more government. and there is a study that showed the inverse correlation of regulation and social prospect. the argument is that it goes both ways there's to equilibrium, there is lots of regulation and low trust. her low regulation and loa lotsf trust. i was imagining this guy walking on a razor edge, if you're trained to walk on the middle of moderate regulations, moderate trust, some point you slip a little, there is less trust in any more regulation, more regulation, less trust, you go down one way or the other. if you talk about social trust by the way. >> no, no no. >> that is the glue that holds communities together, it is almost as if it's a perfect

storm. you've got the regulatory relationships of social trust, he of the think that nobody is happy about which is as you get multiethnic groups in the same community, social trust tends to go to the floor. we live in a multi ethnic nation. we are not going to change a but it's a fact that is probably social trust. video games, which are now, you think about how attractive they are now as a way of a real world. there are all sorts of forces at work from technological to cultural, economic, all of which are fighting against the various kinds of social interaction. >> social practice is very important and i'll be the doubled advocate.

number one, i belong to a bunch of different online groups for various things. one of them, i have watched people who have never met each other in these spaces, reaching out to each other to talk about their marital problems. people are going to hard time and i said the one person that you should talk to this other person and talk to this third person that of winter. none of these people have ever met. these are actually, these communities, a videogame for example, fortnite, a big thing that parents cannot get there middle school boys off. what turns out, yet airplane again, but in fact the hard-core video gamers are so and pulled, they don't play fortnite because it just for chatting. it is actually this big community. these communities are not like

physical communities, but again, i think this is a thing of outliers versus the median and the median is probably better off without errors i want to be libertarian and blogger. but you do stuff that they could not have done 20 years ago. and they may not see the equilibrium. we should not shuffle it out what we see now. it is very possible that the new ways to form sick endurable connections. we definitely have not yet. there has been a lot of toxic stuff going on. on a scale of global human history it is i technology, it took us a while to get ahead of the printing press, and now we eventually settled down and we are doing pretty good for now. >> the best thing technology does in my opinion, facilitates people getting together

physically. i was able to have a 20th high school communion only because facebook existed, we hunt on the people and we all get together physically. in other ways, i just think about my peers or my kids school, and it makes it easier to plan the 5k, and the t-ball team. but i also think that the immediate desires for getting together physically with other people is not always obvious what the gains of the art. so one of the perils of technology is that we don't have to get together, then when you do not get together you lose the serendipitous encounters in conversation the end up being social value. when they bump into your neighbors, have a courier, have a barbershop where people can go. in the more of technology and wealth to have a lifestyle, everything you do and everywhere

you go is deliberately and deliberately plan. and then you don't get to accidentally bump into people. colleges of sms some people's lives, you are just there for living next to people who have the same share of aspirations and undertakings in the same pursuit that you are engaged in. that is one of my big worries about technology is that it makes you think now we complain our lives, that is taking you away from the things you did not realize you were going to be so important to your own -- living your life, building beer under virtue to build on. >> if the situation were you going to have some good outcomes because of technological revolution. in some really bad ones. i agree with megan, we are just getting used to the capacities that we have now. in information technology and we will adapt some of us, some will do exactly as you are saying about using this as a way to

facilitate communication. and some people get stronger and we will have a combination of virtual communities and there will be another set of people to do dropout altogether and sitting in virtually reality machine. that is a whole lot more exciting than the real word and maybe the reason, everything is so murky is we don't really know what the sizes of those kinds of groups are going to be. >> i will start, i think that ultimately technology is going to have two fall in order to the community to contribute to human thriving. i do think that is right, it is breaking up the community in the real world and humans do need those things. maybe the answer is that computers will get so good at

simulating, we cannot pretend we're. [laughter] then it will be a problem. the more individually will all feel very happy. >> we haven't talked about politics yet. i would not have written this book of donald trump was not running away for the republican nomination while i was looking at it in the two places a named, chevy chase and pittsburgh, he got 60%, in the primary, but trunk got 16% in primary. but his worst in the primaries, second were state was utah in the biggest drop off from romney to trump was in all of these places including western michigan where they are all dutch people who go to church twice on sundays in this incredibly strong reformed churches. so the elite and the strong religious communities in the primaries rejected the guy he

was saying the american dream is dead. so, the argument that the american dream is dead was appealing to the innately aided americans. that was the scent of his early for support. but the people when they are 16 and 17 guys on the stage, and however, many terms of government ship that seemed that everything had shut down. and it was connected to other people. but the next question, how is trump fixing that. this is where his definition of alienation is, it is not just being can disconnected from communities and societies, it is not even seen the point. so again they turn towards the central government. and so that was my political

analysis. and i want to know if he saw anything different. >> i am sober settled by american politics. the thing that you told that i'm appalled. >> i think there is a real sense that these communities have broken down but i think even in places like chevy chase, those communities are less than it used to be and i think the differences there offsetting our sort of masking a lot of that in some ways. but, i think that there is an absolutely phenomenon that you see on both sides expecting politics to be everything. >> app. >> politics is not national politics and is not even just politics is going to make you healthy and take care of you all of your needs. this is politics will fulfill all of your emotional needs. it is what you belong to and the

only thing that matters. and i am firmly against his view of politics. i think it is an error in that politics cannot possibly fulfill this need and also profoundly unhealthy for politics. but i will say this, you should not lose a friend over politics. look, if you are in germany in 1933, that does not apply we were not living there in 1933. but in general, if your friend of a decent person before they decided to vote for trump or perfecbefore they decided. you should understand they disagree about something and we can talk about that but ultimately i know all the other things about this person.

but i think that we just don't have anything else that has fulfilled a place for people. and it is fascinating how angry people get when i say that. they will say do you understand, is to make people better off. to make the most possible people happy. he cannot possibly be true that if they spend every waking hour angry. >> in some way. >> i love poland on the greek definition of politics, or the public thing. and that man is a political animal. a lot of my libertarian friends don't like that, they take politics to meanness, we are supposed to be legislating and regulating all of that, the

libertarian are not supposed to live her own life, according to what we think is right and wrong. we are supposed to shape the world around us. this is something i don't think i would've said in my teens or early 20s. but when you're raising kids you realize what is going on just in your own house in your backyard is not shaping that, it is not enough. you have to shape the world around you. we have a parish, and to other schools we belong to us with entrance swim club couple years back and there we could push and change roles or just change it by physically being the guy to be there to carry something to one side of the pool to the other. and even the intersection your house my wife and i lobbied our county government so the way that the lanes are set up and they looked at it and they did it. it was amazing thing for me who

writes about national politics and how the special interest get their ways, the guy who lives around the corner said, and was on a local level and we can actually get in touch with the people. these different levels where i have so much ability, for these institutions to shape the world around me, that is what is missing. that is what is missing in the alienation. >> i think the irony of it. so politics is so broken apart because you cannot do anything for international politics present so angry. >> that is because his 13 million people. >> you could look back on a new deal say we got angry and we did something if that's what you want to do or you can look at that and say let's accomplish something. but the fact that we hate our neighbors so much has created gridlock in congress for everyone to just wait to get control of the whole thing so they can do whatever, everything

that they do is nondurable at best and often does not happen. at worst, everyone present hunger and i wouldn't say it's a much more of a political moral but there point all the hunger to something that exists outside and beyond them and longer than they will. especially as they get older. there point that hunger into the one thing in america right now which doesn't promise or hold up any promise of action and by the act investing so much and it and making sure that it cannot do anything because the people become so determined to block their opponents. there are a lot of arguments being made that politics does follow a role that religion used to follow. that is the thing that you're talking about the great

religions, and christianity which is my tradition, their teaching the right lessons in terms of loving and in terms of your moral responsibility. if you are deeply engrossed in those, and their best traditions, you are not filled with hate and you are not filled with anger and so forth. politics by its very nature tends to make people very angry and hostile and so forth. so as that has become the religion of a rising society, the long-term outlook is not good. >> politics is a lesson of the enlightenment with religion institutions to make a government. in the government doesn't make a good religion. and i think that something america needs to relearn. and people just want to naturally without even knowing it, want to inflect their political muscles.

and i think this is for bernie sanders and where occupied wall street comes from, why don't i have any ability to exercise my political muscles and shape the world around me. because all of the no, all they think of is washington, d.c. so it must be because the special interest has been the most control. of course the special interest has more control. but the promise of the end of this, at the end of the bernie sanders, i spent a night sleeping occupied wall street and i tell the story in the book of how i did not understand what they were talking about. there was an occupied d.c., and when i asked people what they were upset about this at the implementation of the vocal rural. [laughter] >> most of them who work for the omd. [laughter] and he said what are you upset about, well, the banks and the

wealthy have too much control over washington. i thought common ground, they are going to be against wars, bailouts, against corporate welfare, but what are policies you don't like? the lack of campaign finance reform. what else? citizens united. then i'm like okay fine, although special interest are in a closed room, it's smoke-filled, you are locked down because of all these other. what are you doing in that room that you dislike? and they said making sure the voice of the people is heard. and it seemed like there's no there there, but it took me years later writing about the alienation that that is a real complaint. that you don't have the ability, your reaching out, there is no, nothing to provide resistance, nothing to reach out and grab, it is sort of you're there, standing alone and not able to shape the world around you and you think the problem is that there is super tax and spending too much money.

>> let's go to questions. >> questions now from the audience. we have a microphone that will come over to you. are the microphones working? why don't we start right up here in front. >> i am going to get to the subtitle of the book, why some places thrive in others collapse. in identify as a westerner actually from wisconsin and when i went back there there was a town in it was a sound and trip home of the republican party for the college.

the elementary school downtown had been converted to a small independent senior living because there were no kids. and people who lived in the country, farms et cetera were moving to towns. to live collectively. and that is what is happening in rural iowa, wisconsin, it doesn't matter where. the question is, part of it is because they used to be small manufacturing throughout wisconsin factories with 100, 300, 400 people, the paper industry, the pop-culture coffeepot industry, the paper industry, the small factories, were increasingly brought out by bigger companies like kimberly-clark that became global companies. so i'm wondering when when some

places drive and collect with small farming and small manufacturing. >> i think a huge part of it, often is the first domino but i have a shattered church rather than a shuttered factory on the front of the book for a reason. i think that the real efficient cause, the main cause is the collapse of the other institutions that follow. one contract between the book is between pittsburgh and the uniontown pennsylvania. it is in fayette county. it is about 45 minutes or an hour south of pittsburgh. most of these places were devastated by the steel industry moving over to the first europe, and then china. pittsburgh is doing well now.

thefayette county and uniontowne not. uniontown was a real city 20000 to 30000 back in the day. if you been the pittsburgh you know all these little neighborhoods. they are built around churches, a lot of them are ethnically distinct. yet the jewish neighborhood of squirrel hill. you polish in a neighborhood. the virus favorites, all these different neighborhoods and all these churches and other institutions including a local public school for everybody there thanks of the kids in our kids. while the places that are just a little more spread out, they are thinner, they have a church or two but when the factory shuts down it is just less resilient. i sort of imagine -- the rural communities were resting on a thinner membrane that was easier to snap because it didn't have a dense network of civil society.

you obviously can't tell the story without telling the story of the shutting factories. in chapters two through four are go through a lot of that. but you are skipping a step if you go from this factory close to the opioid databank. your skipping a step of the factory closed and they cannot stay together because of the institutions. right there. >> i have two questions. [laughter] technology is a problem. [laughter] >> were still adopting. >> were still adapting. >> i have two clearing questions. there is one part where you said

there is an increase in social distress because of video games and influx of ethnic communities. i was wondering if you could explain and go into that more. >> what was i referring to there? >> yeah. >> the research that establishes is by robert. he was subsequently doing additional work and what he found was that when you had multiethnic communities, that social trust became very low. it is not just the one ethnicity is another ethnicity. the ethnicities also declined. and this was a very consistent finding in a sense seen a lot of replication. i think i've seen a couple articles that have seen some glimmers of hope. that some communities -- it is not as universal as initially

thought. i think the bulk of the literature continues to say there seems to be a built-in problem and there are lots of reasons that it shouldn't surprise us. but it is a problem in a multiethnic country. >> is less of a problem in athletic communities because there is a kind of -- if you can socialize the college anywhere, you have more likely to have a common language but you also have a globally fairly common college thesis. but that is not where the bulk of immigration is. and so in the united states. there is a surprising finding to upper-middle-class educated people. and that is not a finding that you would replicate in the summer. it has a very diverse population of college-educated people. and i find that you're more likely to have a community that are a lot thicker and have been

there for more than one community. and like charlestown and boston and the 1850 that squatted until about 1940. people have been there for a long time, education levels are lower and they have very thick ideas the way to do things that they are theirs and they don't like outsiders. >> it is hard to have cohesion in a community if you don't share enough. so if you have come to my peers, it's ethnically diverse. it has got, not in chevy chase, the only diversity is which president nominated the supreme court. [laughter] if you come to saint andrews and silver springs and has incredible diversity. strong cohesion because even the non-catholics have invested in the catholic education of their

children. so there is a strong cohesion. i write about this problem. the most shearing follow-up studies that disagrees, maybe it is not the diversity that beats the loss of collisio cohesion, e transmission. thus interpretation of it. it is harder to build communities if you don't speak the same language is free but also the difference in customs, i have a neighbor who lives next door, mr. patel. just a quick passenger, after a few months of driving chats and he giving me a ride to the metro i invited him for beer on my back deck, this is a normal way to get to know a guy. mr. patel for religious regions does not drink alcohol. that is admirable but that creates a barrier to our bonding. so coffee, tea? no herbal tea. so after months i approach him

with a very awkwardly direct question. as a mr. patel, i would like to have you over for a drink but what liquids do you actually consume. [laughter] i have some lime look right in my house. he said the ways of putting water in cans and bottles violated his religious obligation to care for. he suggested water with lemon or lime. so i sent my kids off to the grocery store to pick up a lemon and align and filled up a couple big pictures with water and put my children to bed and then mr. patel and i got to know each other off my back deck over many glasses of citified water. [laughter] it's impossible to break these gaps but it takes a lot more effort and has a lot of potential pitfall. it is reasonable to infer that the cultural differences tend to weaken community bonds.

other cookouts, what if we are serving pork, then can we invite your muslim neighbors ? we live in a jewish community. there was one time that we used to grow as a mistake i bought a third charcoal grill for house, it was that appears auction where they also had beer because were catholics. [laughter] we kept it as a kosher girl for exactly one cookout. so these beautiful cultural differences that make diversity thrilling and exciting as it is, also then make it a little more work to build the cohesion. but that is why if we all share in all went to college and were all catholics raising her kids, that allows you and in the 50s the big thing in boston and the irish catholics, now they're all living under the north shore. [laughter] it is totally impossible to overcome these things.

so let's go up, is that a working microphone? >> this book is fantastic and every body in this room should buy. >> multiple copies. [laughter] coming back to the ethnicity thing. you talk relatively about race in the book. in these towns that you hold out as models of working and middle-class, cohesion, to me as an organ under northeaster coming from a impaired generation they sound quaint because i only have one white ethnicity. we don't have much white ethnicities left. this is just no longer the case though. if these places that still have the remarkable blast from the past that these ethnic cohesion, what hope, ethnic and religious overlap communities united, its dutch reform, what do you see as

the most possible sources of cohesion for communities that do not start out with a natural advantages? >> i think it's good that we have a forward-looking thing. in the past we have the italian neighborhood in pittsburgh, et cetera. in a quick focal point, one of the best predictors of how trump's supported in the primary, 70 guys on stage, most went after the ancestry just said american. not having and the city made you more likely to vote for trump i argue, because it enhanced then alienation less religion, less rich. again, megan is more optimistic so maybe she can offer that. i do think that other forms of identity, and replace it. >> one thing that you see, you

see a lot of people developing pride in a specific neighborhood. when i look in 2000, . . . i haven't got my tattoo yet. i think that it is complicated. america's racial legacy is its original sin.

and like the ordinary original sin, it is not going to be extirpated. it's going to require some incredible heroic sacrifices. are we willing to make that sacrifice? what form does it take? i think that there is absolutely hope but i think periods of enormous social change are not good periods to kind of try to predict what things are going to look like in 20 years and we are any period of rapid economic social political, everything change, technological change, and i don't know where it ends up so i don't know how to even frame with the communities will fill these needs and for which groups. but i will simply say that i

think it is obviously america's great moral obligation to make the benefit of the available to help in what ways it can. i don't know what the answers there are but in what ways that it can to make it possible for african-americans to form places that are not merely just socially fixed because there are a lot of socially thick african american neighborhoods. the real challenge is the kind of stable economic prosperity, which has been much harder for african-american neighborhoods to achieve because of a legacy of racism >> while there has been a lot of social capital in some ways in inner-city african american neighborhoods, talked earlier about the forces that act to pull people apart and when we look at it, it's easy to think

of the racial history and flavoring and segregation and just talk about taking away rights for black people, taking away their access to other institutions but part of it was a deliberate attempt to prevent solidarity. >> and prevent family formation. >> in other words, huge part of the oppression there is a racial oppression that happens to blacks in america was the powers that be keeping them from forming little platoons that would provide a robust net. it was the church the black church in the end that provided it was an institution.we talk about these great men, martin luther king, it was institutions that ended the worst of the segregation and that was part of why there was distrust in efforts to break up the family and bricked up ã

>> here in the middle. thank you for mentioning that, that usually glossed over. can you explain why in a zero-sum world the collapse you're talking about is not just a useful tool, why is it something that needs to be addressed considering maybe there isn't much use for it. the populations we are talking about. >> this is one of the worst things he sometimes encounter in a world that's policymaking as people say, the economy grew while our factories went overseas these people lost their jobs and faded out of usefulness but we are doing fine. because we are wealthier we can have a bigger safety net and catch these people as they fall. i had friends say explicitly

that, it was their argument against entropy and protectionism. better to let the towns collapse and catching the safety net. i've said it before and a catholic and a christian and i think every human being is of infinite value and we simply cannot allow that sort of thing to happen and that's why i get passionate about this particular question because i think that the plague of alienation is not loneliness and people are sad, i think it's a dehumanization of people when they don't have the ability to connect to others, the economies of that allowed the small factory towns to exist and that form a local diner and luger church those were literally lifting people

lifting up their souls to be aspiring to someone better and if we are not letting them aspire if we are not giving them the avenue to pursue these greater goods it really is a disservice. if we somehow get wealthier, what we let people slipped through the cracks we are failing as a country. one more question so we have time for. >> i think the discussion reminds me of russell kirk's comment that piety dives on payment. i didn't used to think that in brooklyn and chicago gold but maybe it's true. i've been looking at some studies in 19th century and the 20th century of contacts of primitive tribes with modernity and as soon as they contacted everybody sort of falls apart into drinking, alcoholism. not working. all very isolated tribes.

that's why now when they find them in arizona new guinea ditto just go in with tv sets. is the pace modernity making us all like the primitive tribes so that keeps coming so that we have the same futures shock even though we are modern? >> jamie vance has a passage, a very brief passage where he talks about his ancestors from jackson county kentucky and then how there is no privacy. there somebody always showing up. a sister-in-law telling you how to parent. they get on the hillbilly highway they call it and go up to the suburb gritted suburb where everybody has a house and the yard and offense and he says it was a world completely different yet the same. it was different because you are now separate and not so connected but it was the same because we were all still hillbillies. in other words, there was a culture shock.

they had it adapted to in a different way of living and without that intense connection that was actually one of the passages made me realize i had to write this book without that connection they were living in a culture that theoretically was survivable and could lift people up but not if you are brought up with different habits and you have a different set of needs in a different way of reaching out and aspiring to something. >> may be the optimistic may be the end of the optimistic note. maybe what's happened is like the amazonian tribes confronted with all this new weird stuff we sort of forget what's important. but that doesn't mean it isn't important. if you say it is true, it is objectively true that human beings flourish in contact with other human beings that marriage objectively is one of the most rewarding forms of human intimacy, if you go

through a variety of other things about basic human needs and how human beings work, and say these are true. so we can afford to say an awful lot of what we are seeing now is anomalous. it's behavior that has been pulled out of shape by culture shock by technological shock. sooner or later those things which are true about human beings will shape human institutions. >> i think that is right. it's valentine's day, i'm always getting my former columns production including one i wrote on the disastrous relationship that the reason i now live in washington dc instead of new york where the relationship took place, i made the mistake of going on npr to talk about it further valentine's day economics issues. [laughter] every year they retweet it and get another good it goes into great length about all my bad

decisions. the interesting thing is that also every year it triggers an argument between the feminists and men rights advocates that take place without me. unfortunately sitting in the middle of a really angry tweet storm. ultimately a lot of what you noticed from the conversations back and forth is that both sides are trying to get the same thing. they want the other side to be maximally committed so they will have something to fall back on and wish to make a little commitment as they can. because it would be better if they could get someone else to commit to them without doing the same thing in return. i think ultimately we are humans, we want silly things like this but that's not ãb eventually you involve social norms that figure that out and i think that's true of romance, i think it's true a lot of things. ultimately you have to have norms that will enable people

to get what they need and if the norms don't work long enough, as happens in my book i looked at a amazonian tribe, they were hunter gatherers and they had huge collective sharing norms. unfortunately their terrain was being so encroached couldn't support themselves as hunter gatherers so they removed auto farms and literally had rules, they were so high on sharing that they actually had rules that a man can never eat the meat he himself had hunted. they told them that if they ate it they would lose their ãand be unable to hunt. so they tried to do this on their farming and the anthropologist who told me about this said they would every morning ring a bell for everyone to go out into the fields together about three mornings and they ring the bell and no one showed up. so they actually had to evolve new norms that were about property, about like this is my patch and stuffing in my patch's mind and i you can have it.

and it happened rapidly. that's kind of the amazing thing. it wasn't what they didn't really believe these things, there was fundamental to their belief system believes that my yard is mine and he can't come on it unless i get you. but it changed because the circumstances change. i have tremendous belief both in the short term unwisdom of people but in our long-term ability to evolve and adapt to new shocks. and build things that really do work and enduring. >> thank you. >> that's a good note to end on. what a great discussion. we could go on all day but we want.

per our usual practice this will be available, it will be available online for you to send out to your various social media preferences and the book table is out there don't me without a copy. thanks for coming. here are some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the washington post senior advisors former president obama valerie jarrett recaps her life and career in finding my voice. followed by the hills the dye on politico jake sherman and anna palmer look at president trump's first two years in washington and the battle for congress. after that's former first lady michelle obama's memoir becoming which is the best-selling book of 2018. then tara westover recalls going up in the idaho mountains at her introduction to formal education at age 17 in "educated.". wrapping up our look at some of the best-selling nonfiction books according to the washington post is working,

pulitzer prize-winning biographer robert karen's account of his experiences researching and writing his books. all of these authors that i have or will be appearing on book tv and you can watch them online at booktv.org. now on booktv, a portion of a recent program the manhattan institute's heather mac donald takes a critical look at political correctness in higher education in her most recent book "the diversity delusion: how race and gender corrupt the university and undermine our culture". >> there has never been a more tolerant, more opportunity filled environment in human history then the college campus. it is filled with the most well-meaning faculty who want all of their students to succeed in particular societies traditionally oppressed groups and students are being encouraged by this growing diversity bureaucracy to think of themselves as victims and celebrate the victimhood. there is a