greater digital access with library archives and support diversity in the next generation of archivists and librarians. the program will be rolled out over the next four years and made possible by $15 million grant provided by the andrew mellon foundation. and the authors guild sent a letter to the pilot of justice requesting random house, america's largest publisher not be permitted to complete their planned purchase of simon & schuster, the nation's their largest publisher. they will dampen competition for others work and reduce advances. when random house argue their market share with the addition of simon & schuster would fall below an antitrust investigation. booktv will continue to bring new programs and publishing news. you can watch all our past programs anytime online, booktv.org. >> hello, everyone. we are here today because helen andrews has been in the book of the year in my opinion, "boomers: the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster". i have known helen for 15 years now.

helen is senior editor at the american conservative, previously managing editor of the washington examiner, journalism fellow whose writing has appeared everywhere, the new york times hedgehog review, american affairs, lives in washington dc with her husband and newborn son and today we are taking on the boomers. i remember 15 years ago i was reviewing the 700 page biography of the soul singer sam cooke. it gave me a chance to reflect on the power of boomers and their fascination with

themselves and this is not a device to get more money out of our gullible parents but a commemorative need to bear adolescence however extensive. they shoved this music in our hands and say this is what my generation is about, listen to this, in memory of me. sometimes i wonder if we indulge them a little to stop talking about themselves. that didn't happen. luckily for us we can start talking about them. here to do that today is someone who i just toyed with anti-boomersism, but helen andrews was born into it. welcome. why don't you tell us about your book and we will do a little back and forth between us and open up to questions. everyone, here's helen andrews. >> guest: thank you so much. i am happy to be doing this

event with michael because this is a book about generational warfare. millennials and boomers are national enemies. it is good to have somebody who is more gen x present as a neutral adjudicator because this book is written from the perspective of a millennial. it is a book that looks at the world we inherited and tries to examine what went wrong from the perspective of the boomers children. however, even though this is a book with that subjective perspective i did my best writing it to be as objective as possible and really examine all of my millennial resentments against the boomer generation to nail down which things are the boomers fault and which ones are not, which

are cases where there generation got lucky and mine was unlucky. i will give three examples from the book of complaints that millennial's have against boomers and my answer to whether or not those complaints are fair and unfair. after that, we can launch into discussion. the first is obviously economic. that is at the top of every millennial's list of resentments, that the boomers just had it so easy economically and we have it so tough. the millennials are poorer than the boomers not just that we have less wealth than they do. you would expect people in their 60s to have more wealth than people in the 20s and 30s but millennials, the wealth that boomers had accumulated than we were only 25% as

wealthy as they were. i remind millennial's friends because they are feeling unwelcome or precarious and trapped, they were born into the golden age of the american economy in the twentieth century and that is not their credit for their falls, they happens to get lucky. things are tougher for millennials today but things back then were as good as they could possibly be. the fact that things are harder now is almost inevitable. on the other hand i do think that a lot of millennial economic for charity is the boomers fault for two reasons. the first is college debt.

it was the boomers who said everybody needs to go to college and take on as much debt as you need to go to the best college that will have you. that was the boomers maximum that they drove into their kids and the result of a lot of kids going to college didn't need to, wouldn't benefit from the college level education and then come out on the other side with 6 pages worth of debt that they will have a hard time paying off and the second reason is the two income trap. a lot of millennials feel trapped into a learner households. they would love to have a middle-class lifestyle with one earner but feel they can't afford it and the reason is the phenomena and elizabeth ford of all people identified which is women, many boomer women russians the workforce in the 70s and 80s thinking that was the only way and it ended up only beating up the price of

middle-class amenities so that now millennials are no better off than one income earner households where in the golden age of the boomers now need two incomes just to make it work. the second complaint millennials have against the boomers is the decline of the family. the boomers are rather proud of their record on this one. they like to think of themselves as the architect of the sexual revolution, but in many ways living in the shadow of that sexual revolution is a lot less fun than undergoing it, as michael put it in his own book. in this case the defense of the boomers is their sexual revolution was a natural swing of the pendulum that after so many decades and centuries every pression it was only understandable that they might

air on the side of license but now they say look at the statistics, the divorce rate has gone back down. teen pregnancy rates have gone back down. this does not mean the boomers forged the path and the millennials, their children, can find a happy medium. unfortunately once again the boomers defense, the only reason the divorce rate has gone back down as fewer people are getting married in the first place. it was only in the last five years we crossed the fateful threshold of a majority of adults over age 16 being unmarried and that is certainly suggesting what i see when i look around, a lot of people would like to extract some commitment from their partners, would like to get launched on

their adult lives by settling down but have a really hard time getting over the hump of the tinder economy and obtaining those markers of adulthood like marriage and kids. so the boomers didn't just disrupt the nuclear family, they broke it in a way their children are still dealing with. the third example is drugs. it is important. i mention this because a lot of people underrate just how responsible the boomers are for the prevalence of drugs in all of our lives. a lot of people don't know that before the 1960s you would not have even found marijuana on a college campus. the average middle-class person would be very unlikely to encounter even as soft a drug as part in their day-to-day

lives. it wasn't part of the culture and it was the 60s counterculture that made it more popular and the way you know the boomers were responsible for the drug revolution in the second half of the twentieth century is the drugs we identify with each decade map on to what drugs the boomers were doing. in the 60s they were young and poor. when they had a little more money the drug of the decade is cocaine. in the 80s they were buckling down focusing -- they were all taking valium and finally in the 90s the drug that i identify with that decade is ritalin and this is the reason why the drug revolution was the boomers fault and i consider them morally culpable because that was something that they

didn't just choose for themselves but that they inflicted on their children. the boomers like drugs, they like finding the answer to problems in a pill, but the ritalin adhd overdiagnosis revolution was something more than that and more boomers as well. boomers are allergic to exercising authority even as parents. they love to be the cool mom and the cool dad but as anyone with a small child knows it is impossible to raise a toddler without exercising authority. the early 90s where the moment the boomers had young school-age children and were frustrated with the tension between wanting to be the cool parent and having a little hellion in their house who needed some discipline and the way they square that circle was by filling their kids with drugs. there are a lot of millennials who were put on ritalin and

given some kind of psychiatric diagnosis in their teens and taking it. when they reached their 30s, they feel a bit of resentment because as the adhd example shows, the boomers motivation in drugging up their kids were just as selfish as their motivations for drugging themselves in the 60s in 70s. even david crosby, i will end with a quote from him, a singer who was a consummate boomer and is very rosy on the legacy of the 60s but even he admits the drug revolution was bad. we were right about the war, we were right about the environment, we were right about civil rights, but we were wrong about drugs. if you read this book you will

find that i dissent from many of the items on david crosby's list of things the boomers got right but at least we had the common ground of agreeing on that last one. with that, i will kick it to michael. >> host: thank you so much for that. i want to begin by talking about the structure of this book, profile pieces of boomers, steve jobs, out sharpton, sonja sotomayor, jeffrey sachs, i think your indictment of the boomers is well aimed, and comprehensive. more comprehensive than you even outlined just here. you talked about sexually those that led to the misery of being used and being completely

ignored, and approach to the third world but has all the real and imagined vices of imperialism with none of the wisdom or virtues of actual imperialism, attitude of self actualization and activism that amounts to little more than authoritarian bullying. two things interested me. the first is you accuse the boomers of destroying the left. i was wondering if you could expand upon that a little bit as well as share the great little anecdote about richard branson. >> guest: i'm glad that copyright. as soon as i learned about that anecdote i knew i had to put it in the book. i'm not surprised you were struck by the evidence that the baby boomers killed the left because that is a very counterintuitive thing to say.

the baby boomers were the most left-wing generation in history and even conservative baby boomers are left-wing. but in some ways it is equally true to say that none of the baby boomers were truly liberal and all you have to do is realize that is to look at what they called themselves. the baby boomers in the 1960s called themselves the new left. the reason to proclaim themselves the new left was to declare independence from the old one. if you look at the port here on statement, and the manifesto of the young new left, extremely disparaging, retrograde dinosaurs with no answer to the modern world which was ironic

because in the port huron statement, campground. they have been graciously allowed to use the united are the workers campground, after enjoying their hospitality's they declared the uaw and all unions stupid and obsolete. the aftermath of the new left taker of the democratic party is this total alienation of what was the liberal party and a 2-party system. people who work for a living. you could date it to the 1972 convention that nominated mcgovern as the democratic party gave itself over to identity politics and niche

interests rather than representing the poor and dispossessed which was what they were supposed to be for. you see the same thing happening all over western democracies which is why it was not just a committee decision the dnc made in 1971 but something that was a consequence of the boomers generation. the richard branson anecdote that illustrates this that i love is virgin records, there was a moment in the late 70s when the people at one of his record factories looked at the album cover they were supposed to be printing and said god save the queen, the fascist regime, what? they saw the desecration of the queen and they said too far as too far. these workers liked the queen

and we consider this album something close to treason so we refuse to have anything to do with the production of this sacrilegious artifact and richard branson said you will make the record i tell you to make. he ended up prevailing and i read this anecdote in a booklet described it in celebratory terms. look at those retrograde workers who couldn't understand the revolution. this was a victory for free-speech is what it is. but i look at that story and i see bosses triumphing over workers and cloaking it in the language of liberation and freedom and individual rights and expression, boomerish idealism and that encapsulates the takeover of the left-wing parties of the western

democracies by the college educated and shoving aside of the noncollege educated which if your left-wing party represents the interests of the wealthy and educated and not the interests of the poor and the less powerful in society then i don't think it is fair to call yourself a left-wing party at all. that is what i meant. >> host: i want to remind the audience they can send questions to jackson wolford or they can't we them, hashtag aei boomers. while i have you here i want to talk to you about the people you chose.

if somebody else is writing a book about the boomers they will almost certainly pick hillary clinton, maybe donald trump, someone like tony blair who i don't know if he qualifies but you picked steve jobs, out sharpton and you made this indictment against this generation but you have these individuals in your hands i think you find things to admire about almost all of them and times they were overwhelmed or transgressed from the generation before them or misunderstood by their peers so i would like you to talk about the good side of some of these boomers. you found goodness in out

sharpton and the funniest one to me was steve jobs in a way because steve jobs has been hailed and worshiped as a great innovator and great company man of his generation and has been a bomb unaided partly by another subject in your book as a bad dad and one of our complaints, what you like about steve jobs is his paternalism, can you talk a little bit, what are the virtues you find in these characters even when they stand out from their generation? >> guest: you are right that i

see things to admire, i had someone tell me my admiration went on, that i admire jobs as it moves forward. i don't know if that is true or not but that is roughly accurate is a trend line but my defense, the things that are the least boomers and steve jobs is a great example of that. if you were to put your boomers and offense they are in institution destroyers, they hate institutions, they think they constrain individual choice and tear them down, millennials growing up without institutions which is not great but whatever else you want to

say about steve jobs he was an institution builder. he wanted to make a company that would last after him, that would still bear the imprint of his personality and his genius even when he was gone. he succeeded in doing that, apple is still steve jobs's company in many identifiable ways so the world we live in is shaped by steve jobs because he is an institution builder so when we admire things that are the least boomers of the is ah and that is connected to the bad dad that you mentioned because i never met steve jobs but i get the sense and other people who knew him got the sense he was so driven to make a mark on the world and to leave something you could pass on because he had no sense of

inheritance himself because he looked back in his family tree and saw nothing, being adopted as not having that left him driven to leave something for his kids are if not his kids than his metaphorical kids at the company. steve jobs was unusual for a boomer in having that sense of continuity because most of the rest of the generation was content to not look behind or look forward but to live in the now. >> host: you don't just talk about one thing with one character, steve jobs, he is with other boomers including tim cook and his wife and they being more authentic boomers in some ways also have an effect on the world, mainly tim kirk's

outsourcing to china and maureen's form of hyperliberal philanthropy which is partly underwritten by chinese spyware. each chapter has these virtues. before we turn to other people in the audience. i want to talk about al sharpton. you show him with a kind of paternal connection at the beginning of his story where he has three surrogate fathers all of them people we know, james brown. >> and adam clayton powell.

>> host: the chapter is a bit of a meditation on how boomers d institution allies liberal politics and d institution allies civil rights, d democratized so give us a sense, i thought it was well drawn, the boomers, many of them weren't actually involved in civil rights the way sharpton was involved as a child preacher, literally at the feet of civil rights heroes but you have this beautiful narration, comes to chicago and conference daily machines and just tell us a little bit about d democratizing our politics.

>> guest: i'm glad you liked my telling of that story because i was shocked to learn when i read about that bad local black leaders had done when they announced that after selma we are coming north to chicago. let's hold a press conference and say we don't want you here. we have our own system of power, we are doing pretty well which we don't need you coming in making trouble. in terms of the boomers it is criminal the way they convinced the world that the baby boomers were responsible for the great civil rights achievement of the 60s because after the age of 10 which he was the boomers have no credit for the civil rights revolution.

one of the most surprising things i learned in research for this book was the civil rights act of 1964. i never knew at the same time congress was deliberating that act girl warren at the supreme court was preparing to issue a supreme court ruling that would have accomplished essentially the same thing, we had the sit in cases where black activists to cafés and restaurants with white only policies were evicted when they call the police and said leave my story and they sued the owners of those private restaurant saying this is a violation of the fourteenth amendment, the same argument as brown versus board, the fact that you are a private establishment it makes no difference and if the supreme court ruling in favor of the civil rights activists in sit

in cases which girl warren was prepared to do that would have accomplished the same thing as the civil rights act integrating private businesses. in the end earl warren withheld those decisions because he didn't want to get court in trouble if he didn't have to. if congress is going to take the political heat off me let's see what congress does. and spare earl warren with those controversial rulings. the revelation that this is an alternate path of history that could have taken where the act was never passed and southern lunch counters by supreme court resolutions, would that have been better, come down in february rather than summer and 5 months of integrated lunch

counters, to wheat next to their fellow citizens. so obviously the supreme court option has that going for it but we would have lost the opportunity to make a democratic statement against segregation as a nation. even though it took congress five months later to integrate lunch counters, even though the negotiation with moderates caused them to water down in some ways it was still worth it in order to have america fix its race problems democratically and that has been lost under boomer domination of civil rights, they prefer to sort out these problems in the courts and lost transactional compromising

spirit that democracy and legislative wrangling and that is a lot. we lost something by kicking civil rights to these undemocratic -- >> host: it goes along with your chapter on sonja sotomayor in some ways and that the daley machine, the transactional is an, it is not idealistic but also because the transactional is a model of politics in the city machine has accountability which boomers can't stand and so the daley machine, a problem from your neighborhood, your ethnic neighborhood the daley machine will ask how many votes you can deliver, who do you represent and if you read represent some insignificant the daley machine often find a

way to make the resources go where they are needed and go where the people ultimately and make the bargains between different sections of chicago and what happens afterward with the civil rights revolution and boomer preference for grand moral statements issued from olympus and enforced on people who are willing to abide by the law is the growth of public interest lawyers, the growth of civil rights advancing or the threat of lawsuits and ultimately shakedown which is where we are now. one more thing i will ask before the questions are turns to me from the audience jeffrey

sachs, in a way, one of the more provocative species and the theme in your work, jeffrey sachs got involved in this field of development in going to third world or post-soviet block and try to get these countries back on their feet economically, and i would like you to talk about this because jeffrey sachs has the boomerish case or hatred of imperialism. you have a little bit of what he practiced. >> there's an anecdote of jeffrey sachs that i loved that i did not include in the book.

and and stephen cohen. and he says, on the way to moscow and sitting next to him, scholar of russia, asked him, what books he was reading to prepare for his journey. may be read and a karenina or a book to get you in the mood. and i don't need to take a speed on russia as russia. i'm an economist. everywhere i go, finance telling me, and the same way, economics is economics, i don't

need to know as russia as russia, just show me the numbers. i love the story jeffrey sachs dave, that reflects the attitude, and and and kipling would never have said that about india. he never would have said, justice is justice no matter where you are. they had a love for the countries they supervise. it is funny. i had people criticize me in this book for not being

sufficiently respectful of elders. is that not a conservative issue? should you not show respect for elders? i see where you are coming from with that but the reason, they were the people who decided piety was not a virtue we should care about anymore. they invented dismissing their elders. they hate their elders and that is about jeffrey sachs. what they'd go is so imperial. obviously, perfectly analogous to what the british and french imperialists did, seems deeply offensive, underhanded, arrogant and wrong, to say imperialists were a bunch of white men who never did anything in their lives. there are a lot of people on the left and the right to criticize jeffrey sachs for being so imperial.

i -- can probably do a lot of good that way. i just wish he would stop being such a hypocrite about this in his attitudes to the people his tradition is carrying on. >> host: would not be surprised being a boomer that he desired not to do the homework but credit for good intentions anyway. he seems the type. i have a question that has come from scalia, i wonder what the many shortcomings of the boomers suggest about their own parents, members of the greatest generation. for all the virtues of the greatest generation, to blame for the worst excesses of their children's generation. >> guest: a great question and

the short answer is no. the sense that the greatest generation spoiled the boomers as you might understand. if you have grown up in the great depression and world war ii, of course you would want to give your children the easy life they never have, they wanted to give them an easy life. and great peace at home. and they were so demographically huge. they were a baby boom. that simple demographic fact explains a lot about character.

advertisers cater to their tastes. they were the most numerous voters, courted their votes. through severe demographic tests. they make their country revolve around their desires, and all of that would be to even if the greatest generation spoiled them a little bit. but it is a much bigger factor. >> host: you can trace it throughout your book, the story of the country and the nation, and boomers changing means as

they get older, and the emphasis in the response to the financial crisis in 2000, to save 401(k)s that boomers have been investing in, and maybe we are seeing it now with covid-19 where the emphasis on locking down, to hell with, what everyone has to inherit. you can send those to jackson.wallforward or eight them, aei, boomers. i was wondering if we could

talk a little bit about camille paglia. you use your life as an academic, the few, the only in their lifetimes, and it is a way for you to explore the sexual revolution and the transformation of academia itself and what is worth studying and worth communicating to the next generation, paglia, you seem to

admire her, the on sentimentality, willingness to scrape. the education she was given and what that gives her, but you fault her for never being able to learn as well, the sexual revolution's affects which she notices never caused a real section thought or second thinking so talk to was a little bit about camille. >> guest: i'm glad my affection for her came through because i love reading her and watching her, she's a great public intellectual and there are not many public intellectuals left kicking around.

but a lot of conservatives, she was tough on the feminists, think of her as being, on their side. and the and when feminists were being adamant, the essential the crisis, we should never cautions them against behaving recklessly. to even mention things women can do to modify their behavior to reduce sexual assault is to blame the victim and camille paglia very sensibly, through hard-nosed realism that i admire so much about her says i

admire, there's a place for prudence and the irony is as clear eyed as she was looking at the feminists position she has not been so clear ride about her own position, she always characterized herself as pro-sex, i love prostitution and pornography, michelangelo was a pornographer she said which is rather less conservative of her. but i as a conservative hearing her say those things almost want to echo her complaints about feminists. you celebrate sex, deliberate everybody's libidos.

speaking of the generation of the me too movement, what i see as a result of what you are proposing, sexual assault, sexual harassment and in the same words, what did you think was going to happen? as naïve as feminists were then she is naïve in her own way now especially about things like pornography. >> fantastic. we have more questions. i will combine two of these questions, one from scott corbin and another from dennis morgan. scott wright it seems we are on the verge of a generational transfer of influence as boomers age out of positions of lead authority what does a successful transition to post boomer american life look like and dennis morgan asks what can

we do to correct the excesses of the boomers like the destruction of machine politics responsive to on the grounds concerns or is the genie out of the bottle? >> the genie is out of the bottle, but in answer to the first question, what this post boomer politics look like? the answer is we don't know because we haven't seen it yet because even millennials are still trapped in boomer mindset. this is a book that is quite tough on millennials as well as boomers, never more than for their continuing to define ourselves by the boomer standards. millennial's idea of what is cool is still based on what boomers thought was cool in 1960. i was writing the conclusion to this book over the summer with the riots going on and cities burning and hearing a lot of

people asking is this the 60s all over again and my answer as i scrolled through was yes, yes it is. millennials still think that the greatest moment in american history was the 60s and people marching in the streets partly because the people who taught us american history were boomers who decided their great moment was the great moment of the country and everything before that was a terrible slavery written reactionary terrorist nonsense that they mercifully overthrew. that is the version of american history millennial's inherited so it is a bit natural we would say is that the only good moment in american history, that is the moment we will reenact and i don't know what it will take to shake millennials out of that, to have them to clear mental independence of the baby boomer

generation because even now that the boomers are nearing retirement age. >> before the renaissance we rediscover aristotle, sometimes told by zealous churchmen that anything written before christ was not worth rediscovering and this is approximately how the boomers feel about themselves. any suggestion the western world might not be altogether better off in influence, immediately met with indignant litany, and before boomers came along and broke their chains and i find this to be true, in

a sense it was how my primary and secondary school education went and you basically learned there was this time of slavery in world war ii and that is lumped together. slavery hitler and that is cleared out of the way, then the march of history on word which begins with elvis and ends with we gave you friends on nbc. you end up alleging that the boomers -- the boomer generation themselves are an event of cultural destruction and disruption on par with the

protestant reformation which sounds like a sort of overstatement to sell books which anyone would forgive you for but at the end of this book i had to agree with you because at the end of this book the boomers have destroyed the left by institutionalizing it. we saw their handiwork last week at the capital. working people who lack political institutions to give them real leadership and instead turned toward media. we have a crisis of the family where young people do not have all the sex boomers told them would be so great, not having children. the boomer up session with pop culture, artifact of the middle

class destroyed our connection to high culture and left us with nothing in boomer's failure to pass on religion and in many cases to understand it. i want to talk about brian penn. aren't you talking about a particular subset of elite boomers? boomers also fought in vietnam and voted for ronald reagan, boomers like any group are not a monolith. how do these other boomers fit into the picture? >> guest: i wanted to write about individuals in this book precisely for the reason the

questioner identifies. so much writing about generations is very vague and insubstantial. i wanted to anchor things. it is true there were boomers who did not share the characteristics of their generation, and the 6 that i picked. obviously recognizable as capable boomers in some way rather than another. >> you could also if i could answer a little bit for you. in some ways the boomers being who they are and having this gravitational effect on all of american life it means innocence reagan, boomers elicited the most boomer ash

results from a reagan presidency that you could have gotten. conservatives at the time often imagined the more conservative reagan presidency than they got and what boomers got was what they wanted at the time if you can speak of them as a collective which is economic growth and -- >> that is what you are saying. >> a little stability after the 70s maybe things got too out of hand. >> i had people ask if this book was inspired by christopher caldwell's book last year and the answer is no. i thought his book age of entitlement is great, the best book i read last year. when i opened it up and read it, i was on the right track with this volume but before i read caldwell's book. he makes an argument in his book about the 60s and america

since, about the baby boomers. there wasn't a lot of essential difference between the liberals of the 1960s and conservatives of the 1980s that they were both about liberating the individual culturally and economically but they were both about tearing down things that stood in the way of the individual so there's something boomers, not backlash against the boomers but boomer is about the way he governed and i don't talk much about that but if you pick up caldwell's book -- >> even if you just look at it in the 1970s a boomer candidate was torpedoed by asset amnesty and abortion and ronald reagan was a candidate who liberalized abortion in california and

passed amnesty in his presidency without the promised enforcement so in a sense the kind of boomer ash parental style even though he was a figure of an older generation as a kind of paternal figure, you got the permissiveness of amnesty and the promise of structure came later, here is ice cream, heat it up but next you finish your homework every night. it wasn't to be. we are beginning to wrap up but i wanted one more time to ask you is there anything i have missed. we didn't cover everyone in your book. may be a little thing about sonja sotomayor, one of the more fun chapters in the book and i didn't get into her.

what is boomer is about sonja sotomayor. >> that was the chapter i was most apprehensive about undertaking because i am painfully aware that law is a profession and the reason they make you go to school for 3 years so you can practice it. it is a specialized field, i was trying to talk about it as a leader but the truth is you can't talk about the boomer legacy without looking at the warren court and what it has done constitutionally and the more i got into sonja soto mayor and what constitutional law has looked like the last few years the more i came to realize a layman's best

position to talk about it is particularly talk about the most important thing about it, the argument of that chapter which is the warren court broke constitutional law. not everybody has to be an originalist or textual list but you can't just make it calvin ball constitutional law and say no rules and that is what the warren court did. it is very hard, the constitutional law, the very professionals who know that best have to get up and go to work in the morning. you can have the reservation privately, this entire discipline has gone completely off the rails but you can't argue a case on those grounds. you can't keep it in front of your mind that it is a disgrace. every once in a while on a rare

occasion somebody in the field can state plainly just how bad things have gotten. justice scalia's dissent is a good example of that. i thought we lived in a democratic republic, today the ruling make clear we do not, we live in an oligarchy ruled by nine graduates. even alito, justice alito has said in opinions of his that constitutional law has suffered deep and the word is irremediable damage at the hands of the warren court and its successors. my position as a layman allows me to foreground this important fact that they can only mention under special circumstances periodically and that is just going nuts and soto mayor is a great example of that because

she's in this successor generation. the pioneers had been educated under the old regime and had a limited sense of how much they could treat the constitution in their personal placing. someone of soto mayor's generation does not have that, has no limits for what she can get away with as an interpreter of the constitution. that chapter is about soto mayor is product of the revolution rather than architect of one but in some ways being a product of the revolution is more revealing. >> host: one thing it revealed that can be summed up and foreshadowed, the following millennials themselves is the portrait of soto mayor reveal someone who when she comes upon

challenges in her life or, i will say coyly, gaps in her knowledge, failure of her educators, her insecurity suddenly flashes out and along with that security comes bullying self-assertion where there isn't knowledge, there is at least you can fall back on personal offense and indignation. may be that explains a little bit about what we have seen in our politics in 2020, going into the future. i think are we coming up on the final time here, waiting to hear from the bosses at aei.

>> guest: i will take one more question. >> guest: let's wrap it up here, thank you so much for this book, this is a book i wish i had written, wish i was capable of writing, you have done your service to the ages with this book. the thing that is great about it it is it is not just full of great anecdotes, great portraits, but also a lot of fun and we haven't had a fun conservative book in a long time. thank you for that especially. to everyone who joined us thank you for timing -- taking time out of your day, stuck in your personal covid-19 era prison cells, hope to see you on the other side, ir l. take care.

by. >> you are watching booktv every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. booktv on c-span2 created by america's cable television comedy. today, brought to you by these television companies who provide booktv to viewers as a public service. during a virtual program hosted by the reagan presidential library, douglas ginsburg on the courts and the constitution. providing thoughts on partisanship throughout american history. >> we are united around those ideas because that is what we argue about. how should it be applied and should it be changed and that intense partisanship and division and decisiveness has

rid us from the beginning. you have taught history if you recall in the early american republic was almost, if not more partisan and divided than we are right now at least as much so. newspapers ran constant invective against one candidate because they were in secret correspondence with another candidate, outrageous claims by each side against the other, personal mala factions and so on, it was extremely bitter and it has been that way every year, off and on throughout our history, nothing new. i lived through it before, in the watergate era as recently as a year ago, the attempt to

impeach donald trump was a real spectacle of civics at work because people in the senate and house were arguing about the meaning of the impeachment clause. what could be an impeachable offense in 1789. that was the question they were arguing about it. they don't have to agree. as long as we are both arguing about that the republic is safe. shall be disregard that, overthrow it, then we are in real trouble. >> you can find the rest of this program on our website, booktv.org. use the search function to look for douglas ginsburg or the title of his book, voices of our republic. tonight on booktv in prime time social justice activist tim juan discusses racial touch points during the obama and trump administration's. we look at the work of allied codebreakers during world war ii.

professor tillett explores alice walker's 1983 pulitzer prize winning novel the color purple. investigative journalist amelia paying reports on labor camps in china use to produce us consumer goods. and later it is an author discussion on the state of conservatism. it starts at 6:5:05 pm eastern. for more schedule education, visit booktv.org or consult your program guide. >> i am krystal contreras. welcome to today's program with stephanie schriock. we are here to discuss her new book "run to win: lessons in leadership for women changing the world". she will be in conversation with marisa lagos from kqed. we would like to ask either of our speakers a question during the program you can do