and on -- goodwin. and on sunday, an argument against the expanding powers of the presidency. find more schedule information at booktv.org and on your program guide. .. also a social crisis, the struggle for racial equality and human equality and very much of this moment and forces us to confront challenges that

our society had trouble with in recent years. that makes us wonder how strong our institutions will prove to be, how we will rise to a challenge like this. you can't help but see it as a time of crisis but because it is the time of testing it is also time to think about what america's strengths are, what we are good at and how we can build on that to address the enormous problems we confront. >> host: how did we get here? >> guest: that is an awfully complicated question. our country has always tried to strike a balance between the dignity and the quality of the individual on the one hand and some form of strength of community on the other. every free society faces that. our society has in the past century emphasized the individual, emphasize liberty, emphasize freedom and diversity and that has brought some enormous advantages and benefits but there is another

side to that coin and the other side look like division and fragmentation and isolation, it can look like alienation and loneliness and we have seen all of that in the 21st century. this has been an era marked by some crises, from 9/11 at the beginning to the financial crisis to now the pandemic that has forced us to look to the sources of our strength in ways that in the one hand have to drive us to think about our history and on the other should push us to look at the future with our politics is not good at doing. for somebody like me who tries to work at the intersection of political theory and public policy, theory and practice around politics this is time to think about fundamentals and look at ways to draw strength from what has been good about our country to address the problems it has long had.

>> host: yuval levin in your book "the fractured republic: renewing america's social contract in the age of individualism" you talk about the norm. have we are had enormous and what do you consider to be the norm in this country? >> guest: that is a very important question. we live in a time now that has something like a misperception of the norm. we are living in a moment that culturally is very dominated by the baby boomers, generation of people born 1946 in the early 1960s, still today although often in their 70s and 60s people running our core institutions, in charge of our politics, donald trump was born 74 years ago this month in 1946, george w. bush was born in july of 1946, bill clinton was born in august of 1946 barack obama was born in 1961. they are all boomers and the life experience they had is a

pretty unusual version of america, in america that came out of the second world war a unifying and having achieved something great by coming together in mobilization, the country was confident in its institutions, in its government, in big business and big labor and big government working together to solve problems and over the course of the 50 or 60 years since that kind of height we have lived through fragmentation and diversification. a lot of that has been good especially for people who were on the margins of our society, minorities of various types, people alienated from the mainstream but it is also meant we have lost that solidarity that so defined postwar america and a lot of our politics is defined by a sense of loss about that, defined by a sense that the era of the baby boomers childhood was the norm and we have fallen from that but that era was not the norm. if you look at any point in the

nineteenth century would find a divided society with little confidence in its institutions, dealing with some economic and cultural forces very much like we are seeing now, mass immigration, industrialization, urbanization. our country has a lot of resources to draw on thinking about how to deal with a moment like this and it is important not to misperceive the norm. 1950s, 60s america was a very unusual form of our society and we should not take it to be the norm but in some ways we are stuck in that place, regurgitating and reiterating a lot of what the boomers did when they were young. >> host: should it be the ideal? >> guest: our ideals are not about one particular moment in history. our ideals should be about core

principles, how we treat each other. our ideals are written in the declaration of independence, core fundamental belief that we are all created equal, that our government begins from that premise, that as a result we have some freedom as individuals but we also are a strong united society. those core principles along with ideals that are laid out as forms of government, institutional design in our constitution can provide us with what we need to live through different kinds of challenges. those ideals are what we should look to. in a moment like this as in any moment our politics can't be organized about returning to some golden age, it was not as golden as people think it was. for many americans it was very far from that and in any case history doesn't go backwards. our question now should be how do we become strong for the future and to me as a conservative that means reaching to our principles and seeing how we can apply ideals to changing circumstances. that is where our politics should be striving to do and that means coming to terms with certain things, understanding our country as it is, being at

home in 21st-century america and thinking how can we be our best self at this time, how can we return to some bygone golden age, the left and the right both engage in a nostalgic for midcentury america that gets in the way of constructive politics. >> host: to read from your book "the fractured republic: renewing america's social contract in the age of individualism" which came out in 2016, quote, life in america is always getting better and worse at the same time. liberals and conservatives both frequently insist not only that the path to the america of their dreams is easy to see but also that our country was once on that very path and has been thrown off course by the foolishness, wickedness of those on the other side of the aisle. the broader public meanwhile finds in the resulting political debate little evidence of real engagement with contemporary problems and few solutions. >> guest: that is a description

of my frustration with the basic dynamics of contemporary politics. you do see it in both parties. there's a way in which the republican party often years for the social arrangement and cultural arrangements of the 1950s and early 60s, democrats urine for the economic arrangement of that time but the fact is america changed from that period for some good reasons. we went through a period of liberalization that opens up opportunities for people who had been at the margins of our society and also created options and choices and economic dynamism in ways we have benefited from enormously, they also did common cause and thinking how we address that cause we can't just think about how we go back to an earlier social order, how do we apply ideals to a new situation? we spend too much time, whose fault it is we fell from some

heights rather than thinking about how to prepare for the future? our politics today has remarkably little to say about the future, we don't think about what america will need in 2040. it sounds impossibly far away. it is 20 years from now, as close to others 2000 and it is what we should be thinking about in our politics and so i think there's a need to get out of the rut of los altos for midcentury america and think as conservatives and as progressives, the left and right as americans in general about what we want for the future and what we now need to be building to get there. >> you identify yourself as a conservative. what does that mean to you? >> guest: a lot of my work has been about what that means, what the left/right divide in american politics and the politics of a lot of free societies is about. to meet begins from some basic premise is almost from anthropology. my conservatism starts that

human beings are born less than perfect, born fallen or broken twisted and we need to be for me before we can be free and that formation is done by core institutions, by education, ultimately by politics and culture and those institutions capable of that kind of formation not to be valued, treasured, they proven themselves to be capable of providing generations of people that we need to be a free society and because i begin from the premise that that is difficult to do, that formation is essential and difficult i want to conserve the institutions that are capable of it. people who describe themselves as progressives at their best begin from a different premise, that we are actually born free but a lot of people are not free and living to their potential because they are being oppressed by institutions that impose on them an

oppressive status quo. there is truth to both of these views, what you choose to emphasize runs deep in your character in your sense of what politics is about. a free society does need them both but seems to me ultimately the conservative view offers what society needs most which a sense of how social order can enable justice and so i am a conservative. >> host: your most recent book which came out this year, "a time to build," arsenals and institutions shape each other in an ongoing way. when they are flourishing our institutions make us more decent and responsible but when they are flagging and degrading, our institutions fail to form authority for us to be cynical, self-indulgent or reckless, reinforcing exactly the vices that undermine a free society. >> host: that book is about the nature of the social crisis we are living through.

"the fractured republic: renewing america's social contract in the age of individualism" tries to think in broad terms about social dynamics and the newer book "a time to build" thinks about the constitutional underpinnings of the social crisis we are living through, a crisis we know to be a social crisis, it is how we connect to each other and understand ourselves as individuals to be part of a larger whole, the crisis of alienation, isolation, not only political polarization but in the private lives of many people a kind of desperation that leads people to opioids, an enormous increase in the suicide rate over recent years and a lot of that has to do with a weakening of our institution and particularly with a sense on the part of a lot of people in that institution that the purpose of the institution is not to mold them but to serve as a platform for them to stand on and build a following or build their own

brand or elevate themselves. there's been this to formation of our core institutions from politics to professions to the media to the academy where a lot of people now think of the institutions they are part of as platforms for themselves rather than as molds a character's behavior and some recovery of what it means to be part of an institution, to be shaped by institution is important to the recovery of our societal life. we see that powerfully in politics which has become so performative now or people run for congress basically to get a bigger social media following and a better time slot on cable news rather than to think about how to work from within institutions to change our country for the better.

>> host: you write in "a time to build" about a dereliction and dysfunction it takes us deeper toward the core of congress's institutional confusion. simply put many members of congress of come to understand themselves most fundamentally as players and a larger cultural ecosystem, the deck of which is not legislating or governing but a kind of performance -- performative outrage for partisan audience, you specify or mention matt gates, republican of florida and alexandria ocasio cortez is two people who represent this. >> i use them as examples but the problem is much more widespread than that. we've come to a place where we think of our political institutions as platforms for cultural reforms and people run for congress to get a blue checkmark next to their name on twitter more than to enact legislation. they are trying to do good, trying to improve our society

but they see the role politics can play as fundamentally a platform role, a way to put themselves in a place where they can channel the outrage of the voters who got them there, they can perform, stand as outsiders and comment about congress rather than inside is an act within congress and that has been happening in the presidency, donald trump exemplifies that more than any president we have had, the sense that the presidency is a stage, a place to perform in the president sees himself as an outsider, spent a lot of time talking about the government, complaining about things the department of justice does rather than understanding himself as the ultimate insider in our system with the responsibility defined by the role. that book ultimately argues to recover something of a functional institutionalism we have to each ask ourselves the question we now don't ask anymore, given my role here, how should i behave into goes beyond politics.

as an employer or an employee, as a pastor or congregant, parent or neighbor, given that, how should i behave here, that is a way of letting our institutional role form and shape the way we behave in society, ways that might drive us toward greater responsibility and sense of obligation to one another rather than just thinking of ourselves as standing alone on a platform and acting out a kind of cultural rage, the logic of social media has overtaken a lot of our core institutions and we need to push back against that. >> technology has played a role in today's political work? >> a role. technology also reserves the role we wanted to so i think the forces here run deeper than technology, we are not just at the whim of social media or the internet, we use them in these ways because that's what we are looking for and the larger social process we have been living through has been a function of a kind of

liberalization, diversification. in the middle of the twentieth century many of the great social forces in our country were telling people be more like everyone else, forces of conformity and that felt very constricting to many people. in our time those same social forces are telling everyone to be yourself, forces of individual liberation. there's a lot of good to that but it also contains society apart and we've got to find a balance and push against places we lean too hard and that means recovering solidarity and how we think about our society. >> -- >> host: you want to read this quote from "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left," the political left and right often represent genuinely distinct points of you and our national life seems almost by design to bring to the surface questions that divide them. how did we become a country of the political left and right? >> that is the subject of that

book, it is a work of intellectual history, a book that began as my doctoral dissertation at the university of chicago and over appear go of years developed into more of a general book, tries to look at the origins of the left right divide which in different ways is been the subject of my work more broadly and does that by looking through the lens of the late eighteenth century debate between edmund burke and thomas paine was edmund burke, the great irish morning was politician thought to be one of the fathers of modern conservatism, thomas paine, english born american, revolutionary war figure who then became a very important figure in making the case for the french revolution to the english speaking world, revolutionary through and through and they engaged with each other, had an argument about the nature of social

change and that argument encapsulated a lot of what overtime would become the core distinctions between the left and the right in our politics. it begins in some respects as i described my own view from a kind of difference in anthropology, difference in how it is the human being enters the world and what we require in order to thrive and flourish and be free and both of these views are generally speaking liberal views, they belong in a free society, they both believe in democracy, individual liberty, they believe in protecting the equal rights of all but they differ fundamentally about what a free society is. they differ about the nature of the human person and that debate, the debate about how to advance the good is still the right way to understand the left/right debate, the left and the right are not factions in the sense that each just seeks its own good. they are parties in the sense that they are divided by difference of opinion about what would be good for

everyone, what would be good for society at large and so it is a constructive difference in partisan politics for all that it can be very ugly and divisive in our country's life is necessary. it is a way of framing and formulating the debates we have about the country's good and i think it still serves us this way and that the difference between team left and right there evidence at the end of the eighteenth century in many ways are still relevant and part of what our politics is about. >> host: what is your background that you came to this point of view? >> i was born in israel. my family came to the us when i was 8 years old so i grew up here, i grew up in mostly new jersey, went to college in washington dc at american university, worked on capitol hill, went to graduate school at the university of chicago and then came back to work in the bush administration, first at the the part of health and human services and then in the bush white house, i was a policy staffer for president george w. bush at second term, then went into the think tank

world where my work has really been at the intersection of what my academic work was about which was political theory, political philosophy and my work in public policy has been about which is political practice so i'm now a scholar at the american enterprise institute and run a quarterly journal called national affairs which i started in 2009 and in some ways i tried to connect theory and practice in politics to help each shed some light on the other. as to how i came to my conservative views, for me is for most people that is a mystery. some of it has to do with influences around me growing up. my father is a conservative but it also ultimately reaches to some mysterious level we never fully understand about ourselves, how we come to have fundamental views we have is often a little bit mysterious but i'm impressed by institutions that enable people to thrive and that means i'm

very impressed by the american social, the american constitutional system and we can draw a lot out of our history to help us with the sorts of problems we confront so i'm a conservative. >> what are the nonnegotiable's in our social contact? >> those are stated in the declaration of independence, we believe in human equality, human dignity. that's why people are on the street now, because we all saw on video a gross violation and abuse of the human person who ought to be treated as an equal and wasn't. that is i think a nonnegotiable fact about america. whatever a political inclination, we can differ a lot, we all believe we are all created equal, we are all endowed with basic rights, government exists to protect those rights and from there on we have a lot of debate, how should government protect those rights, which are institutions look like, what would be most effective but the basic ideals written in the charter of our

society are the nonnegotiables of american politics and i think they are true. >> host: good afternoon and welcome to booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly "in depth" program. we've missed you the past couple months and are glad to be live again with author and scholar yuval levin, author of five books beginning with "tyranny of reason: the origins and consequences of the social scientific outlook" which came out in 2001, "imagining the future: science and american democracy" 2008, "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left". we have discussed came out in 2013, "the fractured republic: renewing america's social contract in the age of individualism" came out in 2017 and finally his newest book, "a time to build," from family and community to congress on the campus, how committing to institutions can revive the american dream. we want you to participate in our conversation, there are several ways of doing that. we begin with the phone

numbers, 202-748-8200 for those living in the east and central time zones you can dial-in, if you have a question or comment, 202748-8201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones, you can also text him a question or comment, please include your first name and the city and state you live in so we can get that context, 202-748-8903. we have all our social media sites, instagram, facebook, twitter,@booktv is our handle. we will begin taking those calls in just a few minutes. yuval levin, back to "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left," what has affected france in this country? >> guest: the french revolution

was one of those core ethical moments in history of the west and its effects have been absolutely enormous. it unleashed the modern wave of revolutions for good and bad and it created the sort of frame, the shape of modern radicalism that ended up shaping 19th-century politics and is still with us. it is important to see the french revolution is not where modern liberalism was born. the liberal society broadly understood, i don't mean liberalizing the left but in as in our way of life really began in the united kingdom well before the french revolution. it is important to remember the american revolution happened before the french revolution, not after. i think of the american revolution as the great turning point in human history, the great birth of truly free society that is made possible the achievement of the dreams of liberalism but after the french revolution the politics

of every subsequent free society, the politics of our society has been divided over a core question about social change. how do we change? do we change by building on the past or by breaking with the past? that basic question which is the distinction between left and right when you come down to it became the defining organizing question of the politics of not only france but britain and the united states and the democratizing countries in europe afterward and every free society today. so before the french revolution you look at english politics and you find parties that are divided basically over the question of whether it is the crown or parliament that should have power. that was changing by then already by the end of the eighteenth century but after the french revolution the question the divided left and right was essentially the question of the french revolution, the question of whether the purpose of our politics is an ongoing constant revolutionary process that ultimately will liberate us entirely from the burden of the

past or whether the purpose of our politics is a process of gradual change to address problems that keeps us connected to the roots of western civilization and enables us to make the most of our inheritance, the former view is the progressive view the latter is the conservative view in the french revolution has an anonymous amount to do with why that is the nature of the debates we have. it was a hugely consequential event, in many ways continues to be. >> host: it fits with your descriptions amendment burke and thomas payne. burke as a patient gradual reformer, thomas payne is an operator. >> exactly. burke was a wig. he was not a story in the sense he came from the reforming party having was politics but his fundamental disposition was gradual reform, reform is not revolution. it is in offered in opposition to revolution, we need to change gradually so we don't

lose what we have built up, what works and we can change what doesn't work. pain had much less patience for that kind of gradual change, he said the status quo is unjust, we need to overturn it and start over. we know the principles that ought to guide a free politics so let's throw out what we've got which came from an age of aggression and start over in the right way. he was much more radical revolutionary in both of those views are contained within the american revolution, the american revolution was both a conservative and radical revolution. you concede in the declaration of independence which begins by stating some very radical principles, true principles i think but then goes on to state prudence demands you don't just overthrow governments for shallow reasons and it lists the reasons why americans want to revolt and they are very conservative reasons, that they have been denied their rights as englishmen, they've been denied recourse to the institutions that have long been theirs was the american

revolution unlike the french which is a purely radical break, the american revolution was both conservative and progressive revolution and contained within it the entire framework of the politics that would become hours. >> host: 200 to the area code, 278-8200, 2027488201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. yuval levin, your first call comes from elizabeth in new jersey. go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: how does he explain the disconnect of conservatives in the senate and congress and how they go along with an amoral and self-serving and divisive, self-absorbed dictator like donald trump? it is not -- things are not adding up. just wondering what he would say about that.

>> i'm a conservative who is critical of donald trump. i don't think he is fit for the presidency, he wasn't my choice, i don't think he has done well by our country. that said, i think the fact that our politics is as polarized as it is is an important part of the reason why so many republicans in our politics have stuck by trump even has he has done things that they themselves disapprove of or at least should disapprove of. i don't think he is a conservative and i don't think he has advanced the worldview conservatives should want to see advanced in our politics but we've reached a point where each party too often defines the other party as the country's biggest problem rather than thinking of the real challenges we have. we think of one another as the core problems to be dealt with and that kind of intense partisanship means ultimately you prefer your own party over

everything else, republicans have found ways to rationalize and justify too much of what the president has done, been too unwilling to criticize him. i wouldn't criticize everything he has done. he appointed good judges. when it comes to regulatory reform and other things he has done well but generally speaking and especially on the question of character which i think is absolutely essential in executive leadership our president should be people of character, i'm enormously critical of donald trump and i think more republicans ought to be. >> your former boss it was reported in the new york times may be supporting joe biden. >> guest: that is unclear. he hasn't said who he is supporting exactly but george w. bush whatever you might think of the policies he pursued and i generally like the policies he pursued is a man of character and i got to see him in action when i worked at the weiss out is white house and what struck me most of that time as he lived always with the weight of responsibility of

the presidency on his shoulders, he knew that his decisions mattered, a lot depended on them, they had to be taken seriously, that he owed it to the country to approach his job with the gravity that it required and that is clearly lacking in this president, there is no way around that. >> host: back to "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left," politics is a negotiation of pencil differences in response to particular needs and events, party politics should not be looked down upon as unseemly, thomas burke argues, on the contrary, it is the means by which well-intentioned politicians join together as honorable compatriots. >> guest: he's one of the few who makes a positive case for parties. there's always been a pragmatic case for parties, they are necessary to organize our politics but very few people

have made an explicit almost philosophical case for the need for parties in a free society, burke is one, thomas jefferson is another and they would have found themselves in different parties the two of them but both saw what parties enable us to do is form broad coalitions. we think of parties now as fundamentally divisive as bringing us down into factions. there is a broad incentive to form broad, not narrow coalitions. if you're the democratic party you have to run candidates in alabama and oregon, you have to build a broad tent. if you're the republican party and need to do the same you need to find ways to appeal to people in broad terms in different circumstances in different situations and that is a healthy force in our politics. it forces compromise and cooperation. ultimately the institutions we require in a free society are ones that force us, compel us to accommodate each other.

that is why congress is the core institution of the constitutional system because congress exists to compel accommodation was there always going to be fun to little differences in our politics, people will disagree with each other, the question is how do we handle that, how do we live with that and the answer in a free society is compromise. we went institutions that forces into the tent and required to compromise to achieve anything. i think burke is right, parties belong on the list of those institutions. >> host: lynwood is coming in from windsor, maryland. >> what has been said in the first call, by yuval levin, the first, dictator. if all the people who testified were right about the politics, absolutely right, they did not have the right to say to the

president you must follow me because i am white. it is gross stupidity and as to character, pardon the words talked about the march on washington the guy who organized the march on washington, the main guy, not the philosophical guy, martin luther king, they said about him whatever. the thing about him, what will happen, watching that he doesn't grab a little boy, we got to watch him. i'm not into character, not into trump coming into my house. go up to them. thad burke saying about luther martin, he is the best lawyer in the united states drunk or

sober. trump is not violating the constitution, not violated any law, not violated anything, virtue signal, that is fine with me. >> host: we believe it there. a little bit about political character. >> guest: it is important to say donald trump is not a dictator, he's the elected president of the united states. i have a lot of problems with how he has governed, i disagree with them on something that he doesn't have the character it takes to be our president but he is our president, he was elected, he has not violated the constitution at least not in any obvious way that i can see. there are debates about some of the things he has done in those debates will be heading court for a long time but for all the objections i have to him the argument you sometimes hear that he is an authoritarian or a dictator are not well-founded. if anything donald trump is an

unusually weak president who has not use the powers of the presidency in ways he might have in a crisis like the public health crisis we have been living through this year and in other circumstances. i raised some objections to him and i have many more but i don't think he is a dictator. that word should not be thrown around. >> patrick is calling in from a southern of minneapolis. >> caller: excellent conversation. i never read many of yuval levin's books but the subject matter is extremely relevant, now, then, and forever but my question was, in reference to any quality which seems to be the word a lot of protesters are using, one side in the past 5 or 10 years since trump has been elected, has the great

society in done in justice, making us great when we inaugurated this in the late 60s, when we address the subject matter once before and have we watered down the expectations of public schools that is shortchanged generations in order to compete? >> before we get an answer from yuval levin, what is the last couple of weeks been like for you? you are what, 20 miles from downtown minneapolis? >> a privileged community in the western periphery, on the outskirts of minneapolis. i'm originally from wisconsin, i went to community college, barely got through high school,

minnesota gave me a chance. i flourished in school later in life, graduated ten years later and have contributed to the community and grown with it. this has been a real disappointing time to see this fall in front of me. i'm in my mid-50s, got off to a late start but i have a spring in my step that i really care about the future, i am -- have a strong sense of history from the past and i volunteer in all the communities locally and work with addiction communities specifically suffering from the covid-19 crisis that this is been a very challenging time. i was fearful for the first time that it would not end. >> recent headline in the new york times is this, how many -- minneapolis, one of america's

global -- most liberal city struggles with racism. c-span: is a product of these policies that have not worked? not saying a heavy hand is better but other options we have not explored in the character issue that yuval levin has brought up in reference to the possible selfishness of groupthink and individual thought processes, it is about me now instead of collectively our community and our state and culture. >> host: let's bring yuval levin into this, thanks for spending a few minutes with us on booktv. >> it is people like you who make this country great and ultimately that kind of engagement and concern and involvement in local community

that can strengthen our society. first of all on the question of great society the great society was many things. on the one in a set of large public programs that were intended to create a new kind of social safety net in our society, some of those of ineffective, some less so. we are paying an enormous price for them financially, fiscally now in ways that will force us to rethink how they are structured like medicare and medicaid. in that since we have been left with a tremendous bill to pay the is a burden on the future even as these programs have done a good deal of good. the great society was also a kind of social vision, it is connected in our mind and in reality to the civil rights revolution in some ways. civil rights bills succeeded great society, the key ones of the 1960s, 64-65 came before the great society and those

have been largely successful and even as we live through a moment when we see how much remains to do on the civil rights front and the question of basic human equality in our society and the struggle against racism we still should see real progress has been made over the years, the kinds of problems we deal with now are not of the same scale of character as the problems the civil rights movement contended within midcentury america little on what we saw in prior decades and centuries in our society. a lot of work remains to be done but we live in a time that that murderous police officer who killed george floyd in minneapolis was violating the law it will be tried for murder. there was a time in a society the law would have been behind that cop, whether society simply would not have valued the lives of black americans in the ways that now our laws do so that also our people will.

progress really has been made and i would not say that has been a failure but ultimately the progress that needs to be made is moral progress which is not the same thing as social progress, it has to be made a new in every human heart, this too is the reason why the conservative. i think ultimately the problems we have are rooted in in the imperfection of the human person meaning we need to be for him, educated, shaped to be moral people. we require engagement with those moral ideals that can give us the right kind of form to be free people who respect each other, acknowledge each other's coordinate he and that is work that has to be done in every generation. it's not going to end. there are certainly ways we can change social institutions and social structures to make that work easier and to treat people equally under the law. we've made a lot of progress on that front, but there will always be a need for us to put before the rising generation the core principles, the core

ideals of american society, that job will never end and there is no way around it. the fundamental work of forming free people is the work of every generation on behalf of the one that follows. >> host: what is your take on minneapolis? very progressive city that prides itself on minnesota and high morals, this is not the first high-profile incident in that city. >> there is no question having liberal politics is not a solution to basic social and moral problems. these arise everywhere and in some ways there's a way in which the power of the police unions and other structural institutional factors make it difficult for the police department in a place like minneapolis to enforce its own rules and to make sure it's officers treat the public with respect and dignity so that when these problems arise they can be more difficult to deal with in liberal policies in

some ways. i just think we should be ready to deal with evil anywhere. it is not a function of politics in a simple sense. these things happen. we should be glad they happen less than they used to but we should not just accept that they will always happen. we should deal with them, make sure we are engaged with one another as citizens, make sure institutions are formed around the core commitment to the quality of every person regardless of race, regardless of anything and that is where it can be done in liberal jurisdictions and in conservative ones. i don't think politics get it done. >> the most recent book is "a time to build" from family and community to congress and the campus, hurry committing to our institutions can revive the american dream. stewart in seattle, you are on with yuval levin.

>> i would like to know how i as a non-trump supporter, more on the side of berkman on the side of cane although when i was younger i was on the side of pain, i appreciate the sentiment but today as an older person i appreciate burke a lot more but how can i talk to people who are ardent trump supporters who seem to be resistant to compromise, seemed to be absolutely opposed to common cause unless you are totally on that, the partisanship seems to have gotten way out of hand. >> i very much agree with you about this. i think in both parties the unwillingness to compromise is now the core problem of our political life. it is not the fact there's a left and right, not the fact that there are factions within left and right, the we may like or not like but the fact they are not willing to see each other as conversation partners and as partners in compromise, the life of a free society is

compromise and what polarization has meant in the politics of the 21st-century is a loss of the sense that ultimate the compromise is the only way our politics will function. it happen for a variety of reasons. one of those reasons is that we haven't really had a sturdy majority or minority product, we live in american political history, political scientists use the term the sun party and the moon party, most times in politics there is a strong party, might be the democrats, might be the republicans the whigs before them and others and that strong party rains for a time and there is a minority party but it functions as a minority party enforces compromise and uses leverage as a margin and then things change and is a political realignment and the minority becomes the majority and you go through period like that. we have now lived since about

the middle of the 1990s and appear go where power shift back and forth and we do not have a party we could say is the majority party of the country or the minority party of the country. one of the things that means is each party always thinks it can win everything in the next election and it can. every new president we have had who has come into office since 1992 has come in with control of both houses of congress, his own party controlling both houses of congress, party shift back and forth at each party's right to imagine just wait this out, after the next election it could push things in its own direction. of course when that happens those majorities are never very big or strong and you don't get much done unless you are willing to compromise so the major legislation we have seen in this century has tended to be quite partisan and therefore tended not to endure, have a lot of trouble being sustained

as we see power change. i think that has taken away the incentive each party might have to deal with the other. at the end of the day civility just means acknowledging the people you disagree with are still going to be there tomorrow and the political dynamics we are living with now are such that you might imagine that they won't be, another election, we win it all and that is it whoever we might be. helping people see that ultimately political progress only happens in whatever direction you care about by compromise with people you disagree with is the way to advance these conversations and as a practical matter that just means working at the local level or state level where we still do have real compromise. i live in the state of maryland where we have a quite conservative republican governor, pretty progressive democratic legislature and they work together because they have 2. on a practical level there's no other way. that kind of recognition is just more on the surface at the state level and local level and

we should be channeling more such power to the state and local level where problems still get resolved in a constructive way at least until national politics recaptures something of its proper form. >> host: if you can't get through on the phone lines you can send a message via text were social media, the text, 202, text carefully, 748-8903, include your first name and city if you would and larry in st. petersburg, florida texts in, what can an individual do to make politics better? >> it is the question of course. it is very much the question i tried to take up in the latest book we talked about, "a time to build". it has to begin where we are, the institutions we each are part of, those might be community institutions, civic, religious, educational ones, political institutions or they

might be national politics and we have to ask ourselves how we can work together with others to advance a common goal and ask ourselves given my role here, given the institutional response ability i have, how can i do better? that kind of small question is a path toward larger reform, the book lays out larger reforms that are necessary reforms of congress, of the party system, there are some necessary reforms in the academy and the professional world that talks about the media, talks about civic life but before any of those are forms can happen people within our institutions have to recognize they are, we are part of the problem and that means we have to see that all of us are subject to this tendency to think a institutional responsibilities as optional and to think of our institutions as just platforms for ourselves, taking ourselves beyond that misimpression, helping ourselves be a force for good is the beginning of

change, not an alternative or substitute for institutional reform but it is an essential prerequisite. >> host: one of the institutions you tackle in "a time to build" is the education system, higher and lower and posts on our facebook page, or educational institutions fail to educate our children for a prosperous future and worse dividing the country is progressives shaped curricula that literally teaches our children that we are a country dominated by injustice. this includes more on the street now. >> this is raises an important point. it is crucial to see education system in america especially primary and secondary schooling is enormously decentralized, a system where control of a curriculum is held at the local level in different places can

do different things. that is okay. that's the way to live with diversity and make the most of it. just places where ideas will be talked about. i don't like much, ideas will be taught but i like that other people don't. the point about how to teach our history is enormously important and i'm very concerned that a version of our history that denies us recourse to the best in our history is being pushed on a lot of children and a lot of college students. any history of american life would have to take seriously and teach fully the history of racial oppression in our society which is as old as the history of our society and essential to understanding it but it would have to take seriously and teach fully the history of the struggle against racial oppression which also is in our society and offers us a lot to work with in trying to do better as a country. it is not the case that the american story is simply a story of failure on this front,

to deny students access to the modern example of the frederick douglass or abraham lincoln or harriet tubman or martin luther king is a tremendous failure of responsibility. we have to teach the good with the bad, we have to offer a full picture and that full picture offers the rising generation a huge amount to work with in making our country better from the core ideals and principles of equality that have always been the ideals of our society even though we've not always lived up to them, the people who devoted their lives to that struggle in ways we can learn from and be inspired by and efforts that would deny that and say there was only the downside and the dark side failed the young in a way that we should not have done. >> host: from your book "a time to build," campus culture, quote, harvard and yale, america's first two universities were created as

conservatories for puritan orthodoxy and train men of religion to move from larger communities to repent of its sins and seek redemption. this moral aim remains driving purpose of american higher education now largely shorn of its religious roots. it often looks like classroom instruction and campus political activism the demand of the larger society a kind of mass repentance for some grave collective sins. >> that chapter tries to make some sense of what has been going on on american college campuses in the last few years and it does that by trying to offer perspective about the mixed character of higher education and that mixed character has always been part of higher education. we demand a lot of things are universities, we expect them to give people skills they need for the american economy, we expect them to give students access to the deepest truths and highest and most beautiful

things in our civilization and also expecting to be engaged in trying to improve our society to be active in changing things. all these things have always been part of american higher education, the idea the campus activism began in 1960s is untrue. campus activism as i suggest in the quote you just read was the original purpose of the american university, harvard and yale were created to advance moral change in american society. the nature of the moral change now being advanced on these campuses is different but the character, since cut the purpose of higher education involve that kind of social activism is not new. there is always been a tense balance between these different aims, between the aim of giving students skills for economic life, the aim of giving them access to a higher truth and a

kind of liberal education and in a changing society, i think the american elite campuses of fallen out of that balance where now they lean much too heavily in the direction of the kind of campus activism, there often isn't about learning and teaching so it is not fundamentally academic. and displays a liberalism on american college campuses that are enormously troubling, closing off of knowledge and teaching truth rather than building up of that knowledge. the answer is not to pretend we can have higher education completely devoid of political activism. that has nothing to do with what we should want or expect but i think the university has to answer fundamentally to the academic ideal which means everything it does should be done in the form of teaching and learning and that is where some elite schools have become disconnected from their purposes in recent years and the culture of liberal education that sees teaching and learning as fundamental to human flourishing has an

enormous role to play in bringing the culture of our campuses back into balance and providing a rising generation of students the kind of enormous advantage higher education can give us. >> another contemporary headline, ivanka trump rips cancel culture after she is dropped as commencement speaker at wichita state university after students protest. >> cancel cultures a little of what i'm talking about, the idea that students shouldn't hear from people they or their professors don't agree with. that campus is no place for opinions other than the accepted mainstream consensus progressive views of our society and a lot of time it is advanced as though it were a form of rebellion against the establishment but in fact it is the establishment. cultural progressivism now owns dollar institutions and it is enormously important that college students here

dissenting views, a variety of views, not just intellectual diversity for the purpose of diversity, not just anybody and everybody but there's a difference between hearing from people who play some significant role in our society and hearing from people who are just there to stir up trouble but cancel culture broadly understood as it has been used to keep out conservative voices, libertarian voices and others academic voices, people who have ideas to offer but come from a different place politically, then the mainstream of professors and students is an enormous problem on the american campus and a betrayal of the academic -- >> todd, you have been very patient, where is thai county? >> thai valley oregon. it is in oregon. >> where in oregon? >> central oregon. >> go ahead with your question or comment.

>> caller: i have a question, i have a statement. i worry about our self as a country. i worry about ourselves as how we view ourselves as american citizens. i get thanked all the time for being in the military. i don't need to be thanked for being in the military. i consider, i volunteered during the draft. i consider what i did was for my country, okay? i view today a political system that looks like a tug-of-war, two groups basically the same side of the coin, two faces, doesn't matter which one lands on top they all want to be on top. we would be better to divest ourselves of all political parties in the united states and just require people to do

their job and that would be changing the paradigm. i don't think i elect somebody for their views, they don't represent me, not one politician i know in the united states or any state represents the, nobody in the state of oregon represents the. they represent themselves. >> guest: there is a level of frustration there that is understandable but ultimately i disagree. there really is no way around the need for representative politics in a democracy. there are going to be differences in society about how to proceed, how to govern ourselves, what kind of laws we should have come out we should respond to changing circumstances and we have to ask other we resolve these differences, how do we make decisions, what we've got in our country is a system for legitimizing that kind of decision-making. we are coming as close as we reasonably can to allowing people of different views to be heard and allowing the views of the majority to ultimately be advanced in ways that don't trample on the rights of the minority.

it doesn't work perfectly. there enormous problems with it but that is the purpose of the system and very often that is what the system achieves. it is unsatisfying, that is true and one of the things that to me is central and central to why i am a conservatives i don't expect the world to be satisfying. there are going to be contradictions, paradoxes and problems that don't go away, we can't fully resolve, we can mitigate them, we can try to address them, make the most of them but this world is not a perfect world and how to live with its imperfections, how to address problems that confront us in ways that are legitimate and respect each other is the challenge at the core of the design of our system of government and i think the parties are an important part of solving that problem, finding ways to represent different views and to protect minority voices. are institutions of government at the state, federal and local level are a part of that.

the fact that we are still dissatisfied at the end of it is, that's life. we are much less dissatisfied than we would be under a system that didn't take our views as seriously as this one does and didn't make an effort to represent us. there are surely ways we can do better and i'm open to those but there are a lot of ways we can do worse and we should be grateful to our government for allowing us to achieve what we have achieved. >> host: the tear from aubrey in richmond, virginia. >> caller: i am a notorious long-term c-span consumer. i spent a lot of time watching. a little while ago yuval levin said something about the scale and character of discrimination the changes. that is not true. the scale the change, i will agree on that the character has not.

he made some reference to george floyd's murder and the reaction to it. what you don't understand is the reaction to george floyd's murder is not just that it was video. we have been watching videos of police abuse from rodney king coming forward. what we saw this time was quite -- white supremacy at its worst. you had a white police officer murder and unarmed, disarmed, disabled black man casually while looking into the camera. the thing about that, why you seen what you seen on the screen. we have systemic, institutional

discrimination that goes on every day and the worst part of it, the murders aside, i'm talking about in the workplace people don't see everyday, i want to leave that on the side and talk about the false equivalency you create with the current republican party and democrats. we are looking at the evolution, the seeds of what we are looking at our laid by people like newt gingrich and pat buchanan and all that. it came to a head during the obama administration, with the franklin meeting, you know what i'm talking about? >> finish your thought, tell us what it is and we will hang out and let yuval levin respond. >> caller: all right. the frank lutz meeting around

the time of president obama's first inauguration where a plan was put together for republicans not to cooperate at all. in that regard that led to the tea party and now the donald trump republicans who are the ultimate manifestation of the tea party. >> thank you for your thoughts. your response? >> i appreciate those concerns and agree entirely with the first part and what we saw was precisely white supremacy and is utterly unacceptable both in character and in scope and that is why people are out on the streets and why it is perfectly clear we have a lot of work to do as a country on this front and it is essential our politics turned its attention to it. i entirely agree with that. as far as characterizing our polarization as a function of just one party that strikes me as a symptom of polarization

more than a diagnosis. it is simply unquestionable that both parties have moved forward their edges over the past two decades and three decades, driven by various changes in campaign-finance reform, driven by cultural changes, social media and other things, people live more in echo chambers, there's less cooperation across party lines, no doubt republicans in the obama era were part of that, no doubt democrats in both the bush era in the trump era have been part of that. we can certainly point to different people who play different roles in that process but we can agree the process has been a huge problem for our politics in this country and the recovery of politics that is oriented to cooperation that is oriented to compromise, not under some dream that we are all going to agree but by accepting the reality that we are not going to agree and

therefore we have to make bargains and deals and that is what our politics is about giving each party some of what it once in return for giving the other party some of what it once is absolutely essential. that is the way our politics works, but there are some issues that are nonnegotiable, as we talked about before. basic human equality, respect for the human person regardless of race is not negotiable. that's not a partisan issue and not an issue we can ultimately allow to be put to the side so our politics can take up other sides. it is a fundamental question of human rights and equal dignity, it is essential to who we must be as a people in america and it needs to be front and center. >> host: what about our brie's comment that there is systemic, institutionalized racism? >> there is. we have to -- we have to see that racism is both a function of the attitudes of individuals and of the arrangements in

organizations we establish to structure our politics. i do think we made real progress in fighting some of that institutional racism but there is less of it than there was. that doesn't mean we can stop the effort, it doesn't mean the work can be put down. one of the things we see in videos like the one we saw, these things were happening when there weren't phones around to take videos, this is not something that just started on the contrary. this is a deep and enormous problem that has to be taken up as a fundamental challenge in american life and i think there's no question that is one of the ways in which our country has been -- a lot of work until it can claim to have reached to the ideals we aspire to. it is important to see we do aspire to those ideals, we do want to reach that. this is a very very widely shared aspiration in society and that is a good thing but the aspiration alone is not enough. >> gregory in kansas city

emails in agreed that our system requires compromise. how do we -- how did we get to the point where compromise is unacceptable, this attitude seems to be more common on the right. >> we've gone to that point in part through a kind of cultural and political evolution in which our politics especially at the national level has come to be fought around a set of almost symbolic issues where each party essentially treats the other party as the country's biggest problem. if that is the case, if the problem is to be solved is the other party you can't compromise, then the only solution is to get rid of the other party. you are not going to get rid of the other party. our country has actual practical problems, problems of stand in the way whether it is of equality and racial reconciliation, standing the way of our prosperity and the opportunity that is available to the rising generation,

standing in the way of the way of life we want to have together, those problems have to be taken through public policy and that can only be achieved by a process of accommodation of compromise in our political institutions. our political culture has been transformed in a way that understates and undermines the potential of compromise and accommodation. it happened largely at the national level and to say that this has been caused by one party is a symptom of the problem, not a diagnosis of the problem. it's not true. it has been caused by both parties, there's an enormous amount of contempt for the right on the left and that contempt is deeply destructive and makes it very difficult for people to take seriously the reality that we will make progress by working together and there's an enormous amount of contempt for the left on the right and that leads to the same problems and has to be addressed in the same way. we are not going away. people you disagree with are

still going to be here tomorrow and you have to think about politics as a way to reach some arrangement and accommodations, to live together with him as neighbors and fellow citizens, not as enemies as they are not your enemies. >> host: you are watching booktv on c-span2, television for series readers, this is our monthly "in depth" program. this month is author and scholar yuval levin. concentrating on his three most recent books, "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left" came out in 2013, "the fractured republic: renewing america's social contract in the age of individualism" 2017, and "a time to build," his most recent, from family and community to congress and the campus, how recommitting to our constitutions can revive the american dream. charlie in roslyn heights, new york, you are on the air. >> i would like to make two points. i agree with what you were saying when it came to morals

and the question, we don't value character in our society anymore. i don't know if we ever did but i usually tell young people the most important thing in life is being a good decent person. that's the first thing we should be. that is dying in our society. everything you are talking about also, we have a problem in our society not mentioned, he has not mentioned that we have a concentration of wealth, and communication with that wealth, you have a corporate media and i think that is controlling the debate. we need to talk to one another, we need good civil debate and i don't hear it. i would love to hear a debate between two americans who have opposing views.

there are not just two views, there are many views and we need to get them out in the late and talk to one another and that is not happening in the concentration of wealth, the concentration of the wealth and the concentration of media with the well has something to do with it. >> host: yuval levin, my guess is most of us think it would be a good idea to hear two points of view. >> all kinds of reasons that confront the media, and people reading talking points, 12 people lined up on cable news panel, each seeing a few words, an assessment of the public attention span was unfair to the public.

and and engaged with it. and - the question of concentration. and and the architecture, there was enormous cultural power, to a mainstream consensus. things were much more concentrated than they are now. we had a fragmentation of the media with other economic pressures. there were many more voices, it is difficult to tell who to trust and who to believe and whether they were following the

standards we can take seriously, there is greater diversity of voices but there is also a greater, not lesser economic concentration where economic power in the media world with heavily censored around a few large corporate owners of corporate media companies and we have enormous economic concentration in general in our economy that has grown over the last 20 years, things have to be understood in tandem and ultimately breaking up concentration is not good in itself but has to be part of the life of free society and there are dangerous concentrations, real monopolies they have to be broken up but the situation of the media is more complex than that. a fragmentation of voices and ownership. >> host: yuval levin, here is a text from maxwell ruben in california.

i enjoyed reading your book "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine, and the birth of risht and left" in political philosophy class last fall. we have hereditary politics to make reforms. how can we eliminate unhealthy populism from our republic on the left and right and get the general public to trust career politicians who i believe have the experience and wisdom that burke outlined. >> guest: thank you, nice to hear that book being assigned in college classes and gratifying to hear from those who benefited from that and the question of populism that in some ways has always been a core question in american political life and is very much alive in contemporary politics is one way to think about the

condition of our institution. we don't really face a choice between elitism and populism, the view that the people of all the answers should be empowered directly and the few that only some elite has all the answers and it should have the power. the view that is embodied in the constitution is no one has all the answers, arranging around the reality that no one has all the answers meaning no one should have all the power. to elect public officials, exercise power over them through the mechanism of electoral leverage, it gives certain elite institutions significant power, judges are some distance from the public, the president is not as directly answerable to the public as members of congress, competing power centers, layers of power, american federalism,

it began from the premise that no one knows everything and put different power centers in tension with each other, broad agreement indoors over a long period. in their sentiments it will enable, change happens slowly. that slowness can be separated. it will be answerable to the public for public concerns and it means we have to respect experience in government and there is such a thing as expertise in public policy.

with term limits, to create problems in congress, somebody has to have the power in the system and people answerable to the public for election rather than permanent bureaucracy, it is less answerable. the system is good on that. >> host: in portland, oregon. >> caller: hi, thank you for taking my call. to my question, kareem abdul-jabbar, racism is like dust, it is everywhere in the world. you don't see it. to redo its colored -- career leadership and the rest of the world will follow. my question, how we make the

supreme court independent body again, my suggestion is take away the appointmentship for president and also the body to renounce the political dedication in writing, for decision-making. >> we need some balance between accountability and independence. to argue for a fully independent supreme court makes sense if we think the court will always make better decisions which is answerable to the public and a huge practical challenge, how it can be fully independent. why these people who will have this much power without accountability. and it reaches a compromise,

and not answerable to elections or elected officials once they are appointed but they are appointed by elected officials who are answerable to the public so there's a connection between them and our democratic system but there is independence. it can be rethought. for 18 year terms for example so that you don't have justices who are appointed answer for 40 years on the court and stuck with whatever you get but you have a little bit more of a chance, they go to the appellate court. they have lifetime tenure as judges. on the supreme court they only serve appear go of 18 years.

they get 2 or 3 appointments and you are getting more of a balance between democratic politics and independent judiciary. that is a workable idea, framers certainly didn't imagine anybody would be sitting on the court for 40 years when they created lifetime tenure. the balance between independence and accountability will never be perfect. >> host: next call from yuval levin comes from churchton, maryland. >> caller: i have a question that i want to premise with the comments to lead up to the question. i don't see myself as a republican, democrat or independent, the last 45 years, what he just mentioned, the contempt that democrats have for the republicans, keeping up on current events that contempt began in 2000 because democrats feel they were robbed of the

white house continues all the way into the 2010s with the merrick garland seat or appointment of obama and senate republicans holding that up and they were robbed of that seat and it continues into 2016 where they will believe they were robbed of a second seat because hillary clinton was approximately 3 million popular votes more than donald trump. the constitution is what ruled out not very emotionless, the characterization of donald trump's character, how do you put that against beginning in 2016 with the exoneration of

hillary clinton and the email situation that then moved to directly into crossfire a cane at the end of july and continued with as we now know the illegal fisa warrants of which there were four of them, one original and three renewals. and then crossfire razor into general flynn. >> host: a lot there, building a pattern there, what is your take? >> guest: like a good prosecutor. i think the story of contempt begins earlier. you can see the left contempt for the right in the robert burke hearings in the 1980s and earlier than that. the polarization of politics that didn't just begin in -- i agreed is worse for some of the

reasons, i don't defend hillary clinton's character reader, we didn't have a good option in the 2016 election, under fbi investigation at the time of the election completely unprecedented but not ultimately a legalistic question, these particular named scandals, a question of how a person thinks of the kind of responsibility he has when he rises to the presidency, how he treats people and thinks about people and there is a kind of narcissism to make sure it is donald trump's world, some of the attitudes about immigrants and others, not something we should see in our president. i don't think it is ultimately about the particular scandal

but the man's character and character matters in presidents and there is no way around it and it exists real cost, we see that in the crisis we are dealing with now, you can never get away from character. >> host: whenever we have an "in depth" guest on we ask him or her to list their favorite books and here were yuval levin's choices. democracy in america, adam smith, theory of moral sentiment, george will, statecraft and songcraft in two moore, harry joffre, crisis of a house divided and george elliott middlemarch. >> a list you might expect from a conservative or less to those less familiar. it is a very "in depth" study of the lincoln douglas, a political theorist and philosopher, teacher for many

years and california, a book by 1959 was a kind of close reading of the lincoln douglas debates. in the philosophical context of classical political thought. to articulate lincoln's way of thinking about morality, to show the depth of the issues at stake in the lincoln douglas debates and shows depth of the issues at stake in american politics at the moment of the greatest crisis. and it is well worth your while and it is the only work of fiction on that list. it is a great english novel

written by george elliott, the pen name of marian evans, one of the great english writers of the nineteenth century, middlemarch is her best novel, i haven't read are novel so i shouldn't say that. it was published in 1971 but it is set in the 1830s, english midlands and a kind of epic novel that gets hugely important issues of family and community, the status of women, how social change happens, was introduced to it in graduate school by a wonderful teacher, who laid it out for her students, a wonderful thing. >> host: according to yuval levin he is currently reading robert putnam's the upswing and alan jacobs's the year of our

lord 1943 which are? >> guest: a robert's next book is known for bowling alone. and and the rise of loneliness and individualism. .. and extreme form in american life with the century dawned, he is one of the great social observers of american life. this book, upswing, is supposed to be out this summer has now been delay summer and has now been delayed to the fall. it actually looks at, something we took up earlier the pattern of humanitarianism and individualism in the course the past century describing a path that he says shows a coming together and then a pulling apart. look at all kinds of social indicators. not only civic engagement but also immigration, cultural

diversity, also economic inequality in the condition of many of our institutions. we find in americaca that was inclusion was sick at the beginning of the century that mobilized in the direction of solidarity in the middle of 20th century and then pulled apart. now we are at another extreme of having it pull apart is going to be in a very important book again it will be out in apo few months i guess. a alan jacobs is a professor of literature at baylor and texas. has written some wonderful books about intellectual life, theology politics and society this book, the year of our p lord 1993 was published about a group in the final years of the second world world war trying to envision what the post world war or a it would look. it's a group intellectual biology at something would recommend to everybody.

>> is putnam's bowling alone held up? >> yes and no. i think it met with some criticism at the time which i think in some ways was right. which is what part of his is described as the demise of civic life was more like the evolution or doing different things together so the old clubs in civic organizations definitely got weaker but they found other ways to join together i think the fundamentall argument he made that our country was headed in the direction of isolation and a dangerous excess individualism was right and the problem became worse over time with political polarization the growth of technology that social media and other internet technology bringsoc us together but keeps us apart many of the trance he

pointed to have in fact not only been p shown have gotten worse over time her to think on the whole it has periods speed went a little more than a half an hour left with our guests this morning yuval live then he went to participate in rhe conversation also scroll through the text in number and our social media source. michael from latham new york, good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon thank you for having me on and joining the conversation here. i have a a few observations and a basic question. we are group of debaters there's no doubt about that. compromise is essential in

order to arrive at our solutions to our problems. i would also like to interject a gentleman who wrote a book on popular -ism said politics and politicians will not save us. i thoroughly agree with him on that. my question is, although compromise is essential to get to solutions, how can and why should or would one compromise their core belief in something believe runs counter to it? case in point the abortion issue. no matter what side you are on. >> thank you michael. yuval? >> guest: i don't let it compromise means or should means for people giving up on core beliefs. in compromise believes getting

part of what you want on a practical policy question by prioritizing what you want based precisely on your core beliefs. so ultimately you are forced to decide what you are willing to give and what most matters to you. there are certainly issues like abortion and other sorts difficult to compromise but they do compromise even on the questions when it comes to practical matters when we face a choice that is an all or nothing choice, we generally strive to turn into something more like give and take. i think abortion in part because it has been taken over by the courts in our particular country has been less open to this kind of compromise. think there are a lot of people who would say that abortion should be determined in the states. that certainly be a diversity of outcomes if you did that. some states would have very liberal portion regimes and others less so.

there is certainly be more restrictions and we have now. the united states has the most liberal abortion regime in the western world there almost no constraints whatsoever right to the pregnancy. it's much more extreme than any european society from other countries have. i think a lot have very strong views on the moral questions on a more moderate law that allows for their views to be respected to a greater degree and ultimately protect lifestyles. think compromise is about give and take it's not about giving up on your core principles. it's about applying those practical questions in ways that allow you to tell the difference between gaining ground and losing ground. and therefore allow you to gain ground by making it clear what your priorities are, what matters most to you. that is forgive and take becomes possible.ke

>> host: jim from california. >> caller: boomer can't wait to get back to normal and you're in the same room. my question is we saw this last several weeks, two examples of extreme police brutality. one against mr. floyd, the other against the gentleman in buffalo who didn't video anything but was brutally shoved down the police officers walk a pass to one kind of looked down at him and mom was told to get away. even though he was bleeding. how do we look at that? we assume that floyd wasn't racial, horrible and brutal because he wasas black. the other gentlemanan was white. i think the problem is a huge

racial problem there's also a problem with it just simply badly trained police that seemed to be endemic all through the country. in many places there liberal places in thehe liberal places have been getting much more demonstrators and processing than the conservative have been. so thank you for taking my question. >> i appreciate that point. i think some of what we are seeing is simply the tendency of power to corrupt which is undeniable and a reason why there always has to be raised power in check and making people in the society accountable although it is certainly racial. some of it is abuse of power. it is also important to see these are of course exceptions

in the practices of policing in america. there many police officers of all races and backgrounds to do enormously important work as police training practices. the third complicated problem is abuse of power is a constant threat whether done in racism or simply as a form of abuse, it should be totally unacceptable and some of the things we are learning and o away this week but look we have known for years this kind of abuse exists this has to be a moment that changes some of the ways we think about it. it has to be done in a balanced way. it's always in a way that

respects the need for order for police, especially so in the communities were receiving the most significant breakdown for the last few weeks. so it's in a normal sleep complicated social challenge and it really calls on us to take the problems our society trayce seriously. and you never forget giving people power means you have to ultimately be watched with that power to basic principle. >> host: in the time to build you right this is the irony we have repeatedly confronted the failure of our institutions have demand thereof rooted or demolished we cannot address those failures without renewing and rebuilding those very institutions. sealant is a tendency in moments like m this in the past few weeks or decades in our politics they're having different ways that we need to burn down our institutions, get them off of us and be

liberated from them. the struggle against the establishment, the struggle against the elites, all of these things are understandable, they are driven by real frustrations with roots in very real problems. but we need functional institutions and we even need responsible elites that can run the institution that means we need power to be exercised in responsible ways we need to have more of them it's note enough to say we have to get rid of them because ultimately our society cannot function without them.ty the challenge is harder than that the challenges how do we renew and revitalize on hold them to account, not just how we get rid of them. stay went down in pittsfield, massachusetts please go head with your question or comment for yuval live in.r >> caller: inc. is great to talk to you doctor live-in

from massachusetts first i want to give you little background about myself and first of all i have been a student of demographics for years. i've also wrote recently on march 4 to the daily news and article about morality in america which fits in here we think about our missing troops m ia. i like to apply those letter to the morality in america. it connects to a statement to you i liketa your comments on, i kind of have this mantra that is been kind of like my dna years. i will lay it out to you. go something liketh this. the second of the world goes up with a lack of looked vocation civilization goes down and morality. i want your comments on that statement in my closing remarks are i also want to say to you that education or let's

say education of morality in the proper sense would solve many of these problems to beautiful country we live in. thank you. >> host: yuval live in. speak to every form of education is in morality whether it's learning our history in a way that can inspire us to be better people rather than just inspire us to lose faith and hope in our country. whether it is education that's directed specifically at character and helping to shape us, i think ultimately the formation or institutions perform for us is moral formation bird one way or another so if they are deformed they lead to moral d formation. to do the standing of the institution matters in norma sleep. the religion in america in

some way we've seen a decline in religious practice and affiliation. but in other ways we've seen an increase in the demand and hunger for moralism in our public life. that is the hunger that traditionally has been answered by religious institutions and can be answered again if those institutions approach society and the terms of contemporary problems by offering felt as pollutions to the challenges we face now whether it's challenges of isolation and loneliness whether they are talons of a racism and injustice. i think there's an anonymous opportunity that are directed to moral formations they respectable responsible formative institutions. i think we don't see it enough there's a moment that demands it i didn't see how we might make our way forward and revitalize our society make

the coming years better than the last two years, that offering themselves up as ways for each of us for local and personal level always the u national level fauci yuval you using a conclusion it's time to build, speech i think devotion is required for us to be properly committed to the institution we belong to. i think alltu of us look for things to be devoted to things we can admire and respect and look up to. and therefore devote ourselves to making ourselves more like the things we admire. rather than just promote ourselves or put ourselves out there on a platform on her own performing wem really want is to be part of something something worthwhile something

that helps improve our country and our world. and so sources of devotion or one of the things most in need now. we don't think so because we buy the language of easy-going cynicism in our society. as an enormous hunger for proper objects of devotion. and the revitalization of our country will proceed that way. >> host: text message from jon a family doctor in mississippi. would doctor live-in please talk about the political correctness. speech of political correctness is a term that is used topo describe ways in which they demand fealty to certain political tenants generally tends to the left seat can't be a professor for your views are not the views of the majority or you can't

participate in some professional institution you can't be a journalist i think it is a problem i think it's part of the problem we confront is liberalism and a y.t of her institutions in society. there also ways that we on the right can exaggeratehe sometimes and can imagine were being held back because other people have conspired to keep us back. but in fact, we also have to be better at offering ourselves as an alternative is a way forward offering up a moreor attractive that the more informed with the right has a sad think too often what we say t is too exclusive it's not speaking to everyone in america. when that happens we should not be surprised it's not attractive to everybody in america. always ask first how we can do better before imagining from other people holding us back.

>> host: have you ever been canceled on a college campus? >> guest: know i have not. i've spent a lot of time on college campuses, back when that wasas still allowed when you could travel and go somewhere and see people in person. and you know i hope to get back to that when it is allowed again when the pandemic eases. i certainly have seen instances of disorder around some political event start it alsoso happened to beat uc berkeley about three years ago now on a night when there were riots, fire on campus and all because the things were not about mend thankfully, i've seen that happen and i know people who have suffered quite serious forms of canceled anculture. but thankfully not on myself. see went back on your book "a time to build" at the heart of this pressure is what has come to be called identity politics on college campuses interferes to amount to an acute emphasis

on group identity and structure power relationships among different racial ethnic sexual social economic camps. these relationships are understood in a terms of oppressors and oppressed. >> what i'm describing there is really an effort to try to understand contemporary american progressivism at least as presents itself on college campus on its own terms in the best terms possible. you know, i think there is a way of understanding the core distinction between left and .right, getting to those roots that we started withh today, by saying the right tends to think about political challengesle as order versus disorder or civilization versus barbarism. the left thanks of them as oppressor and oppressed. and in a part that is because the right by beginning from the sense of social order is difficult, people are highly imperfect should we enter the world tends to think social order is the hardest thing to

sustain and therefore the necessary prerequisite for anything else he might do in our society. the left seems to think oppression is the core social problem so everything s has to be understood in terms of power relationships between different groups. i think there's obviously truth the both of these. it does seem that ultimately in order to have justice you first need to have order. we have to worry about social order so we can have the kind of society that is incapable of also worrying about justice. this division, the space between left and right runs very deep serious debate both sides of her genuinely serious arguments on how to make the society better. in that sense i think it serves as well. stuart roger and minnesota europe. >> caller: your recent mention of term limits for both the

question in my mind i see term limits as a t possible way of breaking the cycle of the predominant role of money in ourr political lives with the federal legislators voting with the vast majority of their time to raising money for reelection. and beingng paid huge. [inaudible] stay went roger i apologize you'reib cutting in and out there. i think we got the gist of the term limit comment he wanted to make. speech of the question on term limits is exactly what would be a solution too? i think what you end up with if you have term limits in congress is a very powerful permanent staff bureaucracy, people who do not leave who

built up the knowledge and experience over time. and then members would come and go they would be the playthings of this bureaucracy appeared to think that is worse than the situation's are also the people who are answerable to the public. certainly see the case for term limits in the sense that some problems we have seem to mrise out of a corruption that can follow from people being in these jobs for too long. the trouble is simply that term limits would create a worse problem, a much worse problem. it's worse the same problem we have now you still have people who are ultimately corruptible ande corrupted over time because they have been there forever and see themselves as permanent infrastructure of the politics. except those people would not be elected officials. they would be lobbyist, staff, people around the system. i don't think that would be better. i certainly see the problems,

but i don't think term limits are the solution. >> some would call that the deep state would they? >> there is a way of calling that the deep state. i think therefore it is important that the people who remain overtime be elected. i also do think there is real value inexperience buried there is such a thing as being able legislators. there is such a thing as expertise in legislation and we do want people in congress who know what they are doing. i don't think we should underestimate the value of having people who have been around a while establish stthemselves. i think in some ways those people are less, in the grip ofof the power of money. they've built up their own constituency, on their own authority overor time. so on the whole, on net i think term limits would not service well steel before we run out of time i went to read this e-mail from patricia in

new jersey. isn't the continued growth of the federal government making the outcome of speech election more important? federalism need to be taken seriously by the powers in d.c. we no longer have the freedom to experiment with different ways of doing things. the supreme court has power, none of the founders envisioned people are still self sorting and moving to states and areas where like-minded people live. can our public survive such political self segregation? a lot there. >> that raises a number of very important questions i very much agree where there's less and less trust in our government and at the same time given more and more power to the government and resources. and it certainly seems to me and is the core argument of the book we discussed the fractured republic, that one way forward is by increasing the amount of power in the

authority that flows to the state and local government so federalism offers a way to turn growing diversity into strength rather than a debilitating weakness for our democracy. i think government is more functional at the state and local level. we should allow more governing at the state and local level. so it's interesting it's a matter of constitutional principle and as a matter of basic political practice it would make a lot of sense for us now to emphasize the ways our differences can be expressed through a federal system. we've seen some of that work in our response too the pandemic which has hit different places differently and it's requiring them to respond differently. think generally speaking we have been well served by the federalist system in that crisis. and it's something that could service well and a lot of other areas. we went jim o in florida good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon can

you hear me? >> we are listening. >> caller: havoc, and if i coded that a question for doctor live in. first of all of my native of northeastern minnesota, tracing my ancestry for generations people who settled in southern minnesota as farmers, northern minnesota as people who had i'm sorry the homestead act of abraham lincoln afforded them a land i know about the cultural group in a working-class home members of the labour party, and as a young man wanted to serve mccarthy. three incredibly sweet here. i'm now conservative -- reagan conservatism as it were i find it incredibly ironic that this

ultra liberal city and state would have this explosion of violence and horrible murder of a black and. irony is set it off. this is common for my minnesota roots i could go on about racism and the culture of minnesota. i will spare you that. the question i do to doctor levin is in he said earlier, he's immigrated from israel think he said at the age of eight. he is obviously a jewish american. how he explain her what is his explanation to the allegiance of the jewish americans by and large ultra liberal socialist i would even say socialist marxist. but liberal philosophy in

american politics? i just find it crazy. >> host: jim i think we've got the point let's ask yuval live-in if you like to answer that question for. >> 's first point about minneapolis that it is a tragedy more than irony in a terrible tragedy that our entire countries rising up to respond to. on the second t question, there is certainly deep roots both in terms of ethnic politics and in terms of the kind of tendency towards political radicalism among american views. there's also a a fairly large and someways growing segments of orthodox jews inclined to conservatism. my community is diverse i think the argument the left and right ought to make two people in america reach beyond

the bounds of political ethnic and racial communities and to speak to all of us as americans in a single nation to appeal to our highestch desperation's and ideals both parties are at their best when they do that and i certainly think that's the kind of politics we should want. yuval live-in you had someone wanting to buy one of your books which wouldic use it just? [laughter] you can pick them among them it's just like being y apparent. the one that sells the best is the great debate which is red and college courses and has been translated into a few languages seems to speak to people thesl most. obviously think people should read them all. >> host: the other two we've been talking about in our timee is the fractured republic as well as his most recent, "a time to build". yuval for the past two hours has been our guess we appreciate your time. >> thank you very much think of your time. connect tonight on book tv in prime time to take a look at

books about american presidents i will off a new weekly summer series featuring several programs from our archives with their favorite authors such as david mccullough, christopher, tony and others. tonight is a look at award-winning historian goodwin's many appearances on book tv over the past 20 years. for more information check your program guide or visit booktv.org. stomach thank you so much for joining us at the free library of philadelphia my name is andy i'm the director of author events paid before we begin tonight's presentation went to point out a couple of features on your screen. you'll see there is a button below that suggest you buy a copy of our guests new book the undocumented americans.