that's been used by stalin, used by hitler. used during the french revolution and basically the justification was the people targeted by the law under which they were found guilty and beheaded, the actual law uses that phrase and any of the people.>> watched "after words" with jonathan karl sunday at 9 pmeastern on book tv on c-span2 . >> good afternoon. good afternoon everyone. welcome to the american enterprise institute. my name is ryan streeter and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event featuring

timothy carney's new book and a discussion about its claims and i think you will find both tim's remarks and the panel of interest particularly timely given the moment we find ourselves in strictly right now so i look forward to the discussion. tim is going to come out and offer a few words and then he will be followed with a panel discussion withcharles murray who is known to probably everybody here . he's a high chair and cultural studies here at aei and megan mcardle who is probably known to all of you, washington post columnist with a lot to say on this issue as well. tim is a visiting fellow here at aei and he's also the commentary editor at the washington examiner where he's been a columnist for a while and you are all aware of his columns to his previous books on cronyism are what any of you probably know him for.

the big ripoff and obamanomics. but this new book alienated america is a new enterprise for him, adeep dive into what's going on in the heartland and i'm holding this book up because you need to buy it . it's easier for me to say that and for tim to say and you should go out there and pick up a copy on your way out if you didn't pick one up on the way in, they are for sale in the hallway know 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 follow and our rules here at aei is that you are brief and your answer is in the form of a question so without further ado i'd like to welcome him up here, come up and give us your thoughts . [applause] >> matthew ryan, thanks everybody for coming . my name is timothy carney,

i'm a visiting fellow and a full-time journalist so what i did in alienated america was trying to find out new things and tell a story with my reporting and lots of data and a lot of these guys noted probably in 2015 and 2016 there was a surge in interest among the political press in looking at working-class places, and going to appalachia and parts of the rustbelt . places where the american dream seemed dead and in writing this book i started at the opposite end, in the opposite place. here my house in chevy chase maryland. a lot of you guys are about chevy chase when brett cavanaugh's confirmation was going on but that's lesser chevy chase. there's a chevy chase dc, a town of chevy chase, something called section 5 then there is 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 and it's also got 80 percent of the population there as college degrees. including a majority of men and women. you've got half the population has advanced degrees in chevy chase but here's an important thing and you would know this ifyou read charles murray's coming apart . it's not just wealth, it's not just material ways in which they are doing well. there's all sorts of positive outcomes. 95 percent of the families have 2 parents at home. i visited there a few times and at the village hall they have a father daughter dance day. you go there and you have kids movie night where the teenagers in the town watch your kids so the parents can go out and have actual dinner in town. this is of immense value that they have there. i'm a dad, my wife happy valentine's day katie is here. we have six kids.

something that allows you to get away fear kids is one of the best ways to foster your love for your kids. but they also have classes for the elderly in the village hall, sports teams for kids and the outcomes are excellent. the kids get married. the kids for the most part stay away from drugs, they go off to college, they avoid pregnancy so these elite villages like chevy chase all around the country, they produce these good outcomes cause of both as a wise woman once said it takes a village to raise a child and a village like chevy chase is that the village and speaking of hillary clinton, if you look at her list of top underwriters , the pill razors, a dozen of them at least live in chevy chase. so this is a liberal elite town that practices the values that conservatives preach. and if you pay attention to liberal blocks you find out

what they are trying to do is make more of the us population be like chevy chase area a just wish elites have such good outcomes, maybe we can make more of them like us. if we throw more money at public schools, maybe your kennedy public school in silver spring can have the same outcomes as langley high school in mclean virginia. or they say maybe if we made college free because college is associated with so many good outcomes, college free and everybody will have all these good outcomes i would argue and i'm not going to belabor it here you can't make everybody in america the an elite area it takes a village to village of chevy chase is not a scalable model area so in chapter 1, i visit another village called duisburg in wisconsin. it's about the percent of the population there claims dutch ancestry. when i was there i sat in a diner and the chevy chase meetinghouse is 1.5 million

and increase for its hundred $50,000. you can buy 10 homes for the price of one in chevy chase. and the median income is slightly above average but not if you control for the fact that the number of family household is way above average in his bird. when i was sitting at judy's diner on a sunday, and walked the crowd leaving the 9 am service at the first reformed church and the 9 am at bethel orthodox church and then a little while later by the way, i'm a catholic so i always thought that church always lasted an hour. some of these things go on for hours and hours though they're coming in with older kids 9:15, first presbyterian church service let out earlier and in came the crowd from the 9:30 at the first christian reformed church in a small town village of 2000 as for different reformed churches plus an evangelical church and the bus to take you to the catholic church out of town.

this village hasn't seen great outcomes as chevy chase. when i asked one of the guys there sitting at the counter he was a mechanic, he still had greece under his fingernails and i said what do you think of the village and he said i'm going to tell you one complaint i had, i went to the christmas concert the other day a few months back there were no seats at my kids christmas concert left because all these people who didn't even send their kids to the public school were there watching the christmas concert so i yelled at my neighbor and i said you're taking up my seat and jenny who doesn't have any kids said we had to come watch our kids and so that phrase, robert putnam used that as the title of one of his book in duisburg the kids are our kids to everybody. these are the two models. how is chevy chase like duisburg or like salt lake city for these other conservative religious places they both have very strong institutions of civil society . whether it's chevy chase

country club in the sports teams there or the first reformed church and first christian reformed church or our home christian ministries which one out of all these churches together for the christian schools or public schools, the strong religious communities and the elite get good outcomes not because of government programs they run but because they have a strong institution of civil society so what is the plight of the working class where they are struggling? it's that they lack those institutions. alienation is the plight of middle america.we talk about the factory shutting down and that's a factor of the real problem is the church is closing down. i talked about all the secular institutions that can exist for middle class and working class, the church has always been, the church, synagogue, church has always been essential institution of civil society. secularization of america has been tolerable for the elites although they have not secularized as much as conservatives think but it's been tolerable secularization has been deadly for the

working class and middle class. that's what i argue, that's what i established in alienated america and again, i want to thank you for coming and i couldn't think of to better people to talk about this with and charles murray and megan mcardle so let's have a conversation. [applause] >> megan, i'll let you go first i have so much i want to say. not just because my husband is in the acknowledgments. full disclosure, i did not give this book for publication, withhold this for me so i can penalize on but i will read my favorite passage from the book because i think this sums up sort of both the inside and the

challenge. of what tim points out. because what the death of diners where i saw this in my mother's hometown. a dunkin' donuts opens up and there's a drive-through and my grandmother got up at 5:30 every morning for decades and went to the diner to gethis toast and eggs, that place is slowly dying off . and he says and tim says losing a diner means losing a meeting place.over the years this would weaken the connections between neighbors and you may say there's nothing keeping neighbors from getting together anyway after they get their breakfast and coffee . nowthey can meet at a park or wherever they want because they're liberated from their need to go to a diner . this sounds rational and it also obviously ignores how humans social interaction works. a more obvious and immediate needs bring us together and the coming together of the less obvious but still very real needs.

we come together for food, drink or security and end up gaining from, roderick. deprivation in these less obvious need is often not noticeable in the short run but devastating in the long run and i read that and i think about an observation that science fiction writer robert heinlein of all people once said which is everyone complain about the suffocating nature of family networks in small towns and if you read fiction from up to about 1960 this is like a dominant theme. it's how terrible it is and then it went away and we suddenly realized it had indeed been suffocating and all the rest demanded but it also provided a lot of stuff that we missed when it was gone but you couldn't see it like fish and water until it was gone so i see us in a lot of ways and i will say i think i graded both ken's book and charles book and i think the weakest part of

both books is what is the weakest part of almost every book which is the obligatory what is to be done chapter. and if i had my way, we would just ask that chapter out of the book because i think describing a problem is often all by itselfincredibly valuable . i think tim and charles have both recognized the difficulty of this with proper humility rather than the one secret thing to fix this problem but the question i always have at the end of recognizing problems like this because it is a problem in some of the ways that welfare, the old welfare system arguably created a situation in which people were making completion of rational short-term decisions that welfare was better for them in the short term but because it stayed out of the labor market in the short term it made them unemployable and created more problems . in the same way all these things are rational short-term decisions because

the cost of building, roderick, the cost of that network on any given morning you are deciding whether you're going to drive or spend an hour at the diner or thrive through the dunkin' donuts in five minutes, at any given moment the costs are more apparent. it's only over the long term that the benefits you are losing become apparent so the question i have and this is not a question i expect everyone to answer but a 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 driving but how you over 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? >> you're a libertarian, i'ma libertarian and this works well enough . which is when it comes to the solutions, i'm a libertarian, libertarians don't do solutions .

it is true however that everybody continues to ask me and as i was thinking of coming on the panel today, and i was deciding just how gloomy to be. because of in many ways the book is upbeat and you see functioning communities, and i applaud i wonder if you look at the problem closely enough, if you still do not retain much optimism and i go back to coming apart, one of the lease discussed parts of coming apart was my chapters on the pounding birches. where i was going back to the founders and saying well, they disagreed 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 they were religiosity, and honesty and industriousness, what was the fourth? 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 from theupper-middle-class . the point of intellectuals, you go to the faculty of harvard university and they do a survey and they're all atheists, basically but you go to the upper-middle-class and there's been some secularization but it's kind of leveled off and you still have maybe 30 percent who have a strong affiliation with the church or at least a place of worship. you go to the working class where i was backbone of religious support and it's just if you use the general social survey, your down

around 12 percent of people in the white working class which is the sample i was looking at the white working class about 12 percent and have a meaningful attachment to a church and when you only have 12 percent have community, then they do not provide a kind of core around whom various kinds of civic functions revolve. there kind of oddballs when you're 12 and a half percent whereas 30 percent, you're still in the game so that they religiosity has diminished. the whole notion of morality, that was my fourth one. it needed a moral people. i don't know if you've noticed, nobody talks about virtueanymore . because the left has always been a little down on virtue as being preachy and

judgmental and so forth. may i just observed it's 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 any national leadership here.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. because everything ultimately stems from character, character is destiny and apart from that you want something you can hold up to your kids, that conversation is completely silent and it will continue to be silent for the indefinite future. well, guess what? madison says the idea that a free people can exist without virtue in the people is a chimeric idea and it is.

the united states, our communities don't in the absence of a strong sense of virtue and here's where maybe we can get into an argument of some kind here for at least theback-and-forth. a central theme of tim's book is the importance of religiosity . steve pinker, i wish you were on the panel because it would be fun to have steve on the panel with enlightenment now who would say no, you don't have to have that area i think tim is right area i'll make just one other comment before we make it more of a back-and-forth . and that is that both this is what happens when you're 76, you forgot what you were going to say kim, i'm going to let you .

>> thank you for bringing up virtue because that i think the theme throughout the book and i grew up, came up with a classical education and aristotle feature, virtue is a habit and one of the things about habits is they require practice so two different times, i use the idea of sort of what about if you like sort of the gymnasium in which to practice virtue? and what is a strong family, what is a good elite public school, what is a big church community, these are the places where these can be practiced. now, i think church communities are the only ones that do that very well because the elite won't call these virtues. there sort of practices. well, 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 it and that the thinking in the chevy cases, the grosse pointe, the ann arbor of america and so you worry about the fertility of that virtue the past down from multiple generations. as you put it and others put it, too many of the liberal elites are unwilling to preach what they practice but it's a good line but it's not just about preaching, about building the infrastructure where the virtue is being exercised, where people are being trained to it. where family formation is only possible in a strong community because it does take a village. so i do think virtue is the most important thing and again, the unwillingness to talk about mean the people who have these virtues and know that they are virtues are likely to keep them to their cells because it sounds pretty. >> let me push back in a couple of things. first on the virtue idea and economic pessimism and the virtue idea we will say that i don't think it's true that the left doesn't believe in

virtue, they just the things that are becoming secret in that difference and it's about fighting oppression. and that i would say is the leading virtue that the upper-middle-class people are extremely interested in imparting to their kids at schools and all the rest of it really began arguing about whether that is a good virtue or notbut it is a virtue . it has a lot less to do however, it is true with family formation. and it is in a lot of ways a less personal virtue. it is less to make you personally thrive and more 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 could take that seriously as a claim to virtue. i think it is one. i'm not sure it's evenpushing back on the pessimism as reframing the timeframe .

in a lot of ways this book like every book on the topic and anchored in the 1950s and though there's a simplereason for that which is we have the data from 1950s and we don't have a lot from 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 what you see in 1910 is highly dense, social communities in rural areas and extremely fractured communities much like the ones described here in urban areas and these sort of outposts where a lot of immigrants are arriving. they are all from somewhere else, they don't have a thick network. if they have an ethnic cohesion they may develop one but they often don't and it is a brutal experience for those groups even after you

discount the brutal physical labor they've been shipped out to the middle of pennsylvania or what have you to do . so we've had these problems before and they gotbetter but religiosity , attachment or defining that, you can define it in different ways but defining it as attachment to a church post the puritans which peaked in the united states in the 50s so we tend to get these decline narratives and it's also true of progress narratives. there's an idea of the sexual revolution atgoing ever forward in one direction . i was an 18th-century sexual revolution in britain and then it was followed by one in which they were just stop, back. so the idea that this is all building in one way and it is all, i think that is very possibly false is that we're in the middle of a big economic dislocation that i think is factoring communities in many ways or in the middle of a big cultural dislocation that is factoring communities. i think technology is fracturing communities and in

a way we've got technology is really good for the outliers not good for the median. when you think about 1950s the site is like it's a society based around making the mean best off and that's on every level from political and so forth and now we have a society organized around the outliers that the outliers on this and and that in red what social policies are forecast around, maximizes for the outliersand it neglects the mean . but that's kind of what we would expect in a traditional location but we had these technological disruptions before, i remarked in a column it's interesting that these big disruptive social movements in the 20th century basically followed by the 10 year disruptive indications in innovations. radio comes in the 20s and 1930s, we get fascism and in the1920s in italy . tv comes in and the 50s and

the 60s, weget the 60s and not to fear, all over the world . these things when they disrupt, a break patterns that were sustaining and that people have figured out how to maximize to make their lives better and their communities better but people are incredibly robust . if you think about what frontiers were like, they were terrible in the 1880s, they were horrifying, they were shooting each other and there were serial killers talking and then by the 1925, wyoming is a kind of family-oriented nice place to live so it's the fact is that people have an instinct for doing this and they will rebuild new forums but that doesn't mean that the transition can be decades area and i think in particular that i will stop because i know i've talked a lot in particular and interestingconversation i had with a colleague of mine at bloomberg who grew up , who had dissented and if anyone is familiar with orwell's roads with them here which is

about total desperate poverty in the north of england during the20s and 30s . he actually grown up very near their, awakened here is no longer there but the area and his grandmother had lived and it's just like gross swamps. if you read this book, you're just horrified by this physical description of the condition people are living in and his grandmother moved out in the 60s a council house and the government was renovating everything and he said it killed her and outrage in his voice he said she had all her friends, she knew everyone and they moved to a council house where she's in the middle of nowhere and she decided to die. she just got sick of life. and if you think aboutthat it's these houses that are like two or four tinyrooms , squalid , crawling with bedbugs and berlin. they have toilets that are at the end of some little back alley that you have to share often with other families, if you think about a community

and a community in which coal mining and the worst sort of industrial manufacturing and decades of unemployment was what was finding this community can together, these were people who nonetheless and almost the worst conditions and we can imagine compared to somewhere like duisburg had built something that was sustaining them and it was so important then it was forcibly taken from them by a government that was trying to make their lives better . they declined. think about that is the optimism, that is what humans do. click's humans do that and i want charles to talk. humans do that unless there are forces that are actively and continuously pulling us apart. there's almost a gravity of pulling people together and sometimes there are forces that pull us apart and 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 is being asked hope hill predicted hitting other gatherings, other things that can be alocus of love besides itself . and i just worry that these will have staying power, that even when we do overcome them it will be a couple generations. >> part of the thing is we went through dickens and what and it was with this vibrant community and the north of england but it took a long time and it was miserable for a generation or two while they transition quite maybe it won't work everywhere ever. so we have a community that whether it's chevy chase village or its deusberg, the 50s were about the mean and politics is about the outliers, why is it that you had in the 20s and 30s and

40s main street and these other books and babbitt and all these decrying, stifling conformist, boring middle america. it's because the people who are writing those books were intellectuals who were really bored hanging out with those people . so they go off, but now you see the intellectuals have their own communities they can go to. they have committees that work but what about the megalopolis? maybe there is no such thing as going home again in terms of cohesive communities in the modern american megalopolis. i put that upthere as a hypothesis but i will say this , but i think if you talk about the great divide in the united states culturally, it's not left and right so much as people who live either in small towns or small cities or people who live in megalopolis is. i've got to tell you

catherine and i, my wife were out there in maryland but we are near frederick which is 90, 40, 50,000 people. that place is like a 1950s small city. it's filled with all kinds of voluntary associations and evil knowing each other, you can get folks together in one room who can make a difference with what's going on in the community. it's ozzie and harriet and 1950s all over again and the best times. i think that's true of small cities across america. i think it's true of smaller towns across america where it basically, for a great many people in those committees, it works really well. and the problems are concentrated in a minority of the community are still manageable. maybe we say let's make it easy as possible for people who like that kind of place, and to begin a lot of freedom

to run their lives as they see fit and maybe the city are going to be run differently andpeople who want to be on that kind of environment are but we're never going to restore the kinds of institutions are talking about . class i do think that, and i argue in the book that part of what makes america exceptionally good at having these small communities and the be so productive is exactly the sort of federalism, the mobility, the ability to get, if you don't i described orange city iowa which is another one of these townswhere they get these reformed churches and i started reading these online message board and i found this kid was at its mothering here. everybody knows your business . anytime anything is happening with your familyare knocking on the door and i'm thinking this sounds great what i understand for an 18-year-old , six ounce mothering and then you're just realizing its just so easy for him to get up and go.

but at the same time the sort of irony of this is that what makes these little platoons little platoons, what makes institutions of civil society valuable is that they're not simply transactional area the freedom to move about is part of what makes american communities so great communities, like my conservative idea of marriage is not just a transaction, not something you enter into as long as it's useful and you pullout, a commitment to a putting down of roots. so we need to have that accommodation and i think america is just generally been good and having that combination where you can leave where you are but there is lots of good soil in which the plant roots if you're not 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 our libertarianism works real well in small cities andsmall towns america . all of the people, the groups that you need to run civil society pretty much still occur there. i'll tell you where i get shaky in my libertarian principles is as i look at megalopolis and i ask myself is there any other way to run these except for the great deal of government interventionism and control. >> i think there has to be. i wrote a column, i'm basically not libertarian but if you look at the northeastern corridorstraffic problems , like you need massive government construction projects and they're going to have to be focused on rail because you cannot move the necessary number of people. i understand why my readers in texas are mad when i'm like we've got new high-speed rail here or we do something

that is going to move more people. we need more public transit doesn't make sense for their lives that i absolutely think there's a much greater need for regulation and law in cities that same concept is why there's can be what i see as a vicious circle or centralization begets more centralization. the more people, the more the government is taking over roles so you guys remember jonathangruber of obamacare fame . >> ..

>> that disappeared and then you need more government. with low regulation lots of trust and i imagine them walking on a razors edge and with less trust you need more regulation or less trust if you talk about social trust

that holds communities together you have the regulatory relationship and to have multiethnic groups and social trust we live in multiethnic nation and that's a fact and how attractive they are now and imagine that extrapolated. through cultural and economic.

>> but look i have watched people who have never met each other and to talk about their marital problems and going through a hard time i say you should go talk to this person or third person and fortnite is this big thing parents cannot get their schoolboys off but it turns off they are playing a game but i have been told by other adolescent boys.

[laughter] because that's for chatting and this is the same outlier to offer those connections and then i will be a libertarian blogger. and that they do stuff. but there is a lot of stuff going on but on a scale of global history with technology it took us to come up with a

printing press and wars about religion but we eventually settle down and doing pretty good now. >> what technology does in my opinion people getting together physically. we hunt down these people physically and then and then to plan the five k or the t-ball team. and obvious with the games of the are and then to lose that serendipitous encounter in conversations. and then have a big courtyard

and coffee shape one - - a coffee shop or bar where people can go with dad ability everywhere you go it is delivered. so one of the times you were just there living next to people who have the same shared aspirations and undertakings so that's one of my big worries about technology it makes you think now we can plan our lives. takes away from the things you did not realize that would be so important to build virtue. >> you have a situation to have some really good outcomes of the technological revolution.

and we are just getting used to the capacities we have now of information technology and we will adapt. so will do exactly that you said about user risk for communication and things will get stronger and have communities and there will be another set of people who do dropout and sitting in front of those screens. that is a whole lot more exciting. and maybe the reason everything is so murky is we don't really know the sizes those groups will be. >> ultimately technology will

foster thick over thin community to contribute to human thriving. but that is the breaking of the community in the real world and humans do need those things. maybe computers will get so good to simulate we can all pretend. [laughter] and then it won't be a problem. >> we haven't talked politics yet. and then with the primary. and with the primaries to drop off from romney to trump all these places including western

michigan and those incredibly strong reformed churches and those religious communities in the primary to reject the guy who say the american dream is dead and is appealing not those who chose them over hillary that 16 or 17 guys on stage with those governorships and senator ships it's because everything has shut down and not connected to other people so how does trump fix that? and former ai scholar his definition of alienation isn't

just disconnected from community and society but then again they turn toward essential government so that was my political analysis. >> i am so befuddled by american politics i have nothing useful to say. [laughter] i am just appalled. >> there is a real sense of communities that have broken down even in places like chevy chase and the differences they are offsetting benefits to mask a lot of that in some ways. but i think there is absolutely a phenomenon you see what people are expecting politics to be everything national politics not even

that it will make you healthy and take care of all your needs but it takes care of all of your emotional needs. it is what you belong to and rather than say i am firmly against politics i think it is an error that politics cannot possibly facilitate and offer profoundly unhealthy but i will say that you shouldn't say that if you are not see germany 1933 that does not apply. [laughter] but in general if you are friends with a decent person to vote for trump or decided to hate trump whatever you are mad about you should understand they disagree with

you about something we can talk about that or argue about that but ultimately i know all these other things about this person beyond their vote. but i think we just don't have anything else that fills a place for people it's amazing how angry people get when i say that. some people don't have a choice about politics. right. that is true but the purpose of politics is to make people better off it cannot possibly be true they will be happy if they spend every waking hour angry. >> definitely. i pull on that greek definition of politics what the public thinks and that man is a political animal and a

lot of my libertarian friends don't like that with the idea they take politics to mean we are supposed to be legislating and regulating but the simple libertarian friendly way to put it we are not just supposed to live our own lives according to what we think is right and wrong but shape the world around us. this is something i don't think i would have said in my early twenties but then you raise kids and realize what is going on in your own house and backyard is not enough you have to shape the world around you we have a parish and two other schools our children go to we belong to ways swim club that was incredibly strong and from there we can push and change rules and to carry something from one side of the

pool to the other and even the intersection near our house we lobby the county government they should change the way the lanes are set up they looked at it and they did it is just amazing thing to write about national politics only the special interest get their way. these different levels i have so much ability to shape the world around me but that is what is missing in the alienation. >> and that politics is so broken in part because everyone hates each other so much. >> and then to say we did something and then look at

that but the fact that we hate our neighbors so much has created gridlock in congress everybody just waits to get in control of the whole thing so they can do whatever everything is not normal at best and often doesn't just happen everybody puts their hunger it's more of a moral animal and poor all their hunger for something that exist outside beyond them and longer especially as they get older but then that one thing in america right now which doesn't have any promise and by the act of investing so much and it sure that it cannot do anything because they are so determined to block the opponent there are a

lot of arguments to be made. >> it is the thing that if you talk about great religions referring to christianity which is my tradition these are religions that teach in terms of loving and moral responsibilities so if you are deeply engrossed in those and in their best traditions, you are not left with anger and politics by the very nature tends to make people angry. and so far that has become the religion of a secondary seeing society it is not an government doesn't make a good

religion. i think that is something america needs to be learned. >> and then naturally without even knowing it to exercise and flex their political muscles and that's were occupy wall street came from why don't i have any ability for the world around me? because all they think of is washington dc so it must be because the special interest have control. of course they have too much control but the promise at the end of this with bernie sanders i spent a night sleeping at occupy wall street and they tell the story of the book they do not understand what they were talking about there was a couple of them and when i asked them what they are upset about the implementation of the voelker rule. [laughter]

>> actually most of them worked. [laughter] up in the ducati park what you upset about? that the banks have too much control over washington i thought common ground or bailouts or war or corporate welfare. what are the policies you don't like? >> the lack of campaign-finance reform. what else? >> citizens united. okay fine all special interest are in a closed room it is smoke-filled you are locked out what are they doing in that room that you dislike? making sure the voice of the people isn't heard so it seems like there is no bottom but it took me years later to write about the alienation that is a real complaint that you don't have the ability that you are reaching out in the image of the gym there's nothing to

reach out and grab you are there standing alone and you think the problem there are super pacs spending too much money. >> now we go to questions to the audience. >> getting to the subtitle of the book why some places thrive and others collapse. i identify as a midwesterner

from wisconsin when i was back there last summer the home of the republican party with a well-known small regard to some kind of college. the elementary school has been converted to small independent senior living because there are no kids and people who lived in the country with farms were moving to town to live collectively and that is what is happening in rural iowa and wisconsin. the question is part of it is because they are used to be small manufacturing throughout wisconsin factories with 100 or 400 people the paper industry the coffee pot industry they were

increasingly bond out but bigger companies like kimberly-clark the became globa global. i am wondering when you talk about some places thrive and why they collapse isn't that also in part the loss of small farming and small manufacturing? >> thank you. i think that is a huge part of it often that is the first domino but i have a shuttered church rather than a shuttered factory on the front of the book for a reason because i think that real cause, the main cause is the collapse of the other institutions that follow. one contrast is between pittsburgh and uniontown pennsylvania and fayette county 45 minutes or one hour south of pittsburgh.

they were devastated by the industry of steel moving to europe and then japan. pittsburgh is doing well now. and it is a real city of 20 or 30000 back in the day. there will all these neighborhoods that are ethnically distinct so all these different neighborhoods and churches including the local public school everybody thinks of the kids and on

thinner membrane to have dense networks of civil society and if you go to the factory close to the epi on - - opioid epidemic because then the other institutions.

>> technology is our problem. >> there is a part where you said there is an increase because of video games and the influx of ethnic communities of what you are referring to. this was established by robert putnam and then to do additional work and what he found there was multiethnic communities that social trust became very low. that is declined it was a

consistent finding to see a couple of articles the voelker of the literature there are lots of reasons that shouldn't surprise us but it's a problem in a multiethnic country. >> it's a problem in affluent communities that we talk about in the book but globally it is a fairly common call ag those so this seems like a surprising finding for the middle class educated people

is not a finding you word replicate with a diverse population of college-educated people that you are more likely to have in communities that were thicker or charlestown or boston where my family came and squatted. people have been there for a long time and education levels are lower. they have very thick ideas how to do things. >> it is hard to have cohesion and trust if you don't share enough. if you come to my a parish it is ethnically diverse not in chevy chase is just which president nominates you to the supreme court.

[laughter] and that strong cohesion so there is that cohesion. so i write about this problem the follow-up study, maybe it's not the diversity but during the transition. but i talk about the tower of babel. but that's also the difference in customs. or neighbor that lives next doo door. so after a few months of driveway chats and giving rise to the metro invited him for a beer on my back deck.

and part of harry krishna does not drink at one - - alcohol for that is a barrier to bonding so coffee. herbal tea. so after a month i approached him it was with a direct question is that i would like to have you over for a drink what drinks would you consider? [laughter] i have wine in my house no dice he said the waste of putting water in cans and bottles goes against creation he has water with lemon or lime filled a couple of big pictures one - - pictures of the we got to know each other on my deck over many glasses of jet the certified water. it is impossible to bridge the gaps and to have a lot of

potential pitfalls that cultural differences can we can community bonds and then to serve pork there was one time we actually use the girl and by mistake i bought a third charcoal grill was at a parish auction and there is also beer we kept it as a kosher grill for exactly one cookout. but those beautiful cultural differences to make diversity and then to make it a little more work to build a cohesion and just catholics raising our kids that would be easier to get over the hump. >> in the fifties the big thing in boston was the irish

catholics and now we are living on the north shore and it does take work. >> first of all this is fantastic. >> everybody should buy multiple copies. [laughter] >> you talk about race and the towns that you hold out as working in the middle class for civic cohesion as a northeastern or we don't have much white as ethnicity my dad grew up in an average neighborhood so if these places that is still observe this blast from the past of

ethnic cohesion's what hope do you have it with that overlap with those communities? >> it is that reform. - - dutch reform. >> what is that civic cohesion that they don't start off with those advantages? >> in the past and with that political point how much trump support in that primary are those that just said american. so not having ethnicity you might be more likely to vote for trump with that sense of alienation and less roots. and again megan is more

optimistic. maybe she can offer that but other forms of identity. you do see a lot of people now i went to dc in 2000 with the what side of capitol hill that you live on. certainly there is no pride. i would never live in park city or in a small city but grand rapids is another dutch place but there is a ten of twentysomethings and to take the local food truck seen there can be a renaissance and we will have pride in that.

but it is complicated with the racial legacy it will not be extirpated very easily it will require a heroic sacrifice. are we willing to make that sacrifice so we are on that metaphor but there is hope so those periods of enormous social change of what it would look like in 20 years if it is

a don't know where it ends up to frame the communities but obviously america's great moral obligation to make the benefits in the ways that it can. to make it possible for african-americans so the real challenge is that economic prosperity that is much harder for african-american neighborhoods and there is social capital in some ways

with the african-american neighborhoods. and the forces that actually pull people apart it is the racial history and just to take away the rights from by people in other institutions. the part of that deliberate attempt to prevent solidarity. and with family formation and that is the powers that be. keeping them forming little platoons to have that robustness. so that was the black church and with these great men it is the institution with the worst

of the segregation that is why there is distrust and effort to break up the family. >> thank you for mentioning that it is usually glossed over. number two, can you explain in a zero-sum world this collapse isn't a useful tool but white needs to be addressed maybe there isn't much use for these populations that we talk about economically? >> this is one of the worst things you sometimes encounter with policymaking when you say the economy grew when factories went overseas they lost their jobs and faded out of usefulness but we are doing

fine, and then because we are wealthier we can have a bigger safety net and tax them as they fall. i have friends who have said explicitly that because it was their argument against the trump protection system that isn't it better to let the towns collapse and catch them with a safety net? >> i have said it before i'm catholic and a christian and every human being has value. we simply cannot allow that sort of thing to happen. that is why i am passionate about this particular question because the point of alienation that people are sad but when they don't have the ability to connect to others.

the economies that allow the small factory towns to exist and then to form a local diner and local church those were lifting people up and lifting their souls and that's about letting them to aspire are not giving them the avenue to pursue it was a disservice so if somehow we get wealthier while we let people slip to the cracks we are failing as a country. one more question. where is the microphone? >> this discussion reminds me of the conversation maybe it is true.

and then everybody falls apart and not working they are all isolated tribes like an amazon new guinea they just don't go in there but if the case of modernity makes them like the primitive tribes so that we have the same future shock if you will that even though we are modern? >> there is a very brief passage and hillbilly elegy talking about his ancestors from kentucky and that there is no privacy somebody always shows up the sister-in-law tells you how to parent, they get on the high one - - hillbilly highway where everybody has a house in the yard and offense in the world completely different but yet

the same it is different because we were now separate and not connected but the same because we were all still hillbilly so there was the culture shock they had not adapted to a different way of living and without that intense connection that is what made me realize i had to write this book because without that connection they were living in a culture that theoretically was survivable. but not if you are brought up with different habits and a different way of reaching out. >>. >> let's and on the optimistic note. maybe what has happened like the amazonian tribes confronted with this new weird stuff you forget what's important but that doesn't mean it isn't important. so if you say it is true it is

objectively true that human beings flourish in context of other human beings, that marriage objectively is the most rewarding form of human intimacy to go through a variety of other things of basic human needs and say we can look forward to say what we are seeing now is behavior that is blown out by cultural shock so those that is true about human beings will shape the humans. >> i think that is right. it is valentine's day so my former columns including the disaster is relationship and i made the mistake to go on to

npr to talk about it for every year they retweeted and they go to great lengths but the interesting thing is that triggers an argument and it just takes place without me sitting in the middle of an angry tweet storm. and what you noticed from those conversations, they want the other side to be committed so they have something to fall back on to make that commitment as they can. because that's better to get somebody to commit to them and in return ultimately

eventually with those social norms to figure that out that is true of a lot of things ultimately you have to have those norms and what happens with an amazon tribe there were hunter gatherers with huge collective sharing norms that they could not support themselves as hunter gatherers and moved on to farms and were so high on not sharing that the man could not eat the meat he hunted if they aided they would lose their virility to hunt so they try to do this when they are farming. and they said every morning they would ring the bell and then nobody showed up so they

had to if all new norms like this is my property this is my patch you cannot have it. and it isn't what they did bits fundamental to their belief system that that is mine and you cannot come on it unless i let you but that change because of circumstances change. i have tremendous believes both in the short term or long term ability to adapt and to build things that really do work to connect us to that moral community. >> thank you.

>> it's a good note to end on. we could go on all day but we won't. [applause] >> this will be available onlin online. don't leave without a copy.