>> you given this indictment but what are some of the birches you find inthese characters even when they stand out in their generation ? >> you're absolutely right i do seek to admire and all of the people that i profile, it seems like my admiration went on, that i admired, i don't

know if that's true or not but that's roughly accurate as a trend line. but my defense is that i admire most of the things about the subject that are the least boomer-ish and steve jobs was a great example. if you were to put the boomers in a sense, you would say they are consideration destroyers. they hate institutions, they think they constrain individual choice and a tear them down which these millennial's growing up in a world 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 was, last after. that wouldbear the imprint of his personality and genius even when he was gone .

and hesucceeded in doing that . after still today is his company in many identifiable ways. the world we live in is sheep by steve jobsbecause he was an institution builder . that's an example of the things that are least boomer-ish and in steve jobs case, that's connected to the bad dad qualities that you mentioned because i never met steve jobs but i get the sense and other people who knew him the sense that he was so driven to make a mark on the world and to leave something that he could pass on because he had no sense of inheritance himself. because you look back in his familytree and saw nothing . being adopted and not having that narrative left and driven to leave something for his kids or if not his kids that his metaphorical kidthat

the company . steve jobs is unusual for a boomer and having that sense of continuity because most of the rest of his generation was content to not look behind or look forward but live in the now. >> what's interesting about what you do in that chapter and others is you don't just talk about one thing with one character. steve jobs is also part of this company that he built and he's with other boomers even at the company including tim cook and his wife and they, being more authentic boomers in some ways also have an effect on the world. namely tim cook outsourcing to china and lorene powell jobs is a former hiker little liberal philanthropy underwritten by chinese spyware. so each chapter has these

virtues and before we turn it to other people in the audience i want to talk a little bit about al sharpton. you show as sharpton again with a kind of paternal connection at the beginning of his story where he has these three surrogate fathers . all of them people we know, literate people know. james brown. >> jesse jackson and adam clayton powell. >> yes, and the chapter is a bit of a meditation on how boomers d institutionalize liberal politics and the institutionalize civil rights and in effect de-democratized

civil rights.i thought it was well drawn, many of them the boomers, weren't involved in civil rights. in a way, l sharpton not to be involved because he was involved as a child and he was literally at the feet of civil rights heroes but you have this beautiful narration of the southern christian leadership conference comes to chicago and confronts the daily machine and tell us a little bit about how that, the boomers affect on de-democratizing our politics . >> i'm glad you liked my telling of the chicago story because i was shocked to learn when i read about that that the first thing local black leaders had done when the fpl see announced after

selma where coming up northeast chicago was hold a conference and say we don't want to hear. we got our own system of power and we're doing pretty well under the daily machine, we don't need you coming in and making trouble , we are all good but in terms of the boomers legacy , it's criminal the way that they have convinced the world that the baby boomers were responsible for the great civil rights achievement of the 60s because unless you work out sharpton and civil rights activists at the age of 10 which he was, then the boomers have no credit to claim for the civil rights revolution . one of the most surprising things that i've learned in the research for this book was something about the civil rights act of 1964.i never knew that at the same time congress was deliberating at, oral warren the supreme court

was preparing to issue a supreme court ruling that would have accomplished essentially the same thing. the supreme court had just heard what were known as the sit in cases where black activists came to private cafcs and restaurants that had whites only policies, were convicted when the owners call the police and said leave my store and they sued the owners of those private restaurants saying this is a violation of the 14th amendment on the same arguments as brown versus board. the fact that you are a private establishment makes no difference. and so what if the supreme court had ruled in favor of the civil rights activists in the sitting care cases which earl warren was prepared to do, that would have accomplished the same thing as the civil rights act of 1964, integrating businesses and private cafcs.

and in the end, pro-warren withheld those decisions because he didn't want to get the court in trouble if he didn't have to. he thought that congress is going to pass this act and take the political heat off me, let's see what congress does and congress did pass the act and earl warrenhaving to issue those controversial rulings . but that relation, that's an alternate path of history that it could have taken was the act is never past and other lunch counters are integrated by supreme court decisions, maybe well, with that have been better? on the one hand it would have come down in february rather than the summer would have been five months of integrated lunch counters and people not having the indignity of being able to eat next to their fellow citizens . obviously the supreme court option have that going for it, it would have been faster but i think we would have lost the opportunity to make a democratic statement against segregation and the nation.

so even though it took congress five months longer than it would have taken earl warren to integrate lunch counters and even though the negotiation was moderate, caused them to water down the 1964 bill insome ways , it was still worth it. in order to have america fix its race problem democratically and that what had been lost under thecooler domination of the civil rights . they prefer to sort out these problems inthe courts . and we watched these transactional compromises. that democracy and legislators rightly entail. i think that's a loss. i think we've lost something by kicking civil-rights completely over to these undemocratic lesions.

>> the chapter is beautiful and it goes along with your chapter on sonja so the mayor in some ways and that the daily machine for all in a way that transsexualism discussed boomers because it's not idealistic but also because the transaction owes him model of politics in the city machine has accountability which boomers can't stand. and so the daily machine if you come to the daily machine with a problem from your, from your ethnic neighborhood , the daily machine is and asking how many votes can you deliver, who do you represent and if you represent someone significant the daily machine often finds a way to make the resources go where they are and go where the people need, ultimately make the markets between different sections of chicago .

and what happens afterwards with the civil rights revolution and then the boomer preference for grand moral statements , private issue from olympus and then enforced on people who are willing to live by the or not is the growth of public interestlawyers , the growth of civil rights advancing not by democracy but by lawsuits or just the threat of lawsuits and ultimately the shakedown. which is where we are at now. one more thing i'll ask before the questions i think turned me from the audience is jeffrey sachs, this is a way i think one of your more provocative pcs and it seems to me in your work is that jeffrey sachs got involved in

this new field of development economics and basically owing to the third world or post-soviet lot and trying to get these countries back on their feet economic. and integrated into the west. and i'd like you to talk about this because in a sense jeffrey sachs has the bullish distaste for, hatred of them. . i think you find that a little bit of what you practice . >> is an about jeffrey sachs that i love that i did not include in the book is a citation i could find were secondhand stories but i'm thoroughly convinced the source is reliable. it's a story from stephen:, the russia scholar who died just a few months ago actually . he said that he was once on

the plane with jeffrey sachs on the way to moscow and happened to be sitting next to him so stephen cohen, star of russia asking what books he was reading to prepare for his journey because that's what you do when you go to a foreign country, you find a couple of books and maybe you read and) and you read a book to get you in the mood and jeffrey sachs apparently told even cohen, i'm not reading anything. i don't feel a need to get up to speed on russia as russia. and i'm an economist, everywhere i go finance ministers telling me you don't understand, our country is different and they're all different in exactly the same way. economics is economics. i don't need to know about russia as russia, just show me the numbers and i love that story was the answer jeffrey sachs gave because that really does reflect the attitude of all the economists.

and the thing that annoys me most about it is that the actual imperialists and in the 19th century frenchman who they love to denigrate, how they're not all like the white man's burden imperialists , kipling would never have said that about india. he never would have said i don't need to know anything about it, i'm going to go in and justice is justice no matter where you are. they had a love for the countries that they supervise . it's funny, i've had people criticize me and this book for being, for silly old impiety, or not being this sufficiently respectful of elders and is this not a conservative virtue, should you not show a little more respect for your elders and i see where people are coming from but the reason why i have a great with the boomers is because they were the people who decided that silly

old i was not virtue we should care about anymore. they invented dismissing their elders, they all hate elders and that is the fall that anointing jeffrey sachs. what he does is obviously imperial and so obviously perfectly analogous to what the old british and french imperialists did that it seems deeply offensive and underhanded and arrogant and wrong for him to then say that imperialists were a bunch of terrible what men who never did anything good in their lives. i know there are a lot of people on the left and right who criticize jeffrey sachs for being so imperial. that's not my complaint within. if you want to go around and fulfill the imperial mission he can probably do a lot of good that way. i just wish he would stop being such a hypocrite about his attitude to be tradition

he's carrying on. >> it you wouldn't be surprised being a boomer if you desire not to do the homework but get full credit for his good intentions anyway . it seems the time. i have a question that's come in from chris scalia for helen. i wonder what the many shortcomings of the boomers as parents and otherwise suggests about their own parents and membersof the greatest generation . for all the virtues of his greatest generation, was their parenting to blame for the worst excesses of their children's generation. >> that's a great christian chris and the short answer is no . there is a sense in which the greatest generation spoil the boomers. as you might understand, if you had grown up in the great depression and world war ii,

of course you would want to give your children the easy life that you never had. and the boomers grew up with indulgent parents who wanted to give them an easy life and also at a period of exceptional prosperity and peace at home so they were spoiled by their parents in that respect but more important than any of those factors was the fact that the boomers were so demographically huge.they were baby boomers, there were a lot of them. and so that simple demographic fact explains a lot about the boomer character . is basically, from the moment they turned 16 had been the most numerous consumers so advertisers catered to their tastes and they been most numerous voters politicians have ported their coats. basically, through sheer demographic catch they were able to make the country

recall around their desires let them to be all whole narcissists they are so all that would have been true even if the greatest generation spoil them for little bit. admittedly, they did but the demographic who was a much bigger factor. >> you can trace itthroughout your book and in a sense , we ourselves, get asked for the millennias and trace through our lives the story of the country. of a nation, the story of governance in our lives is has mostly been a story of boomers changing needs as they get older. part of that we saw when emphasis in response to the financial crisis of 2000 was to save 401(k)s which boomers have been investing in and not to save jobs that

millennial's desperately needed at the time. and maybe we're even seeing it now with covid-19 where the emphasis is on locking down and protecting the elderly. and to hell with economy that everyone else is going to have to inherit. you know, i want to turn to until we get more questions which i hope will come soon whenever you can send those to jackson woolford at aei.org were to them to aei boomers. i wonder if we could talk about neil paglia because you use for life as an academic and kind of, one of the very few, maybe only in our lifetimes academic kind of

rock stars. she's a figure that you see in popular magazines and on popular television, network television even. and probably it is a way for you to explore both the sexual revolution and the transformation of academia itself. and like, what is worth studying and worth communicating to the next generation so i wondered if you could talk a little bit about probably who you seem to admire her on the one hand for her own sentimentality. willingness to scrape, her actual learningthis, the education she was given . and what that gives her.

but you falter for never being able to learn as well. in a sense, the sexual revolution's effects which she notices never caused a real second thoughts or second thinking. so tell us alittle bit about camille . >> i'm so glad my affection for her came through because i love reading. i love watching her, i think she's a great public intellectual and as you say that many public intellectuals left kicking around right now. but a lot of conservatives joined partly is side in the 90s because she was so tough onfeminists . you will stay ac a lot of conservatives who think of her as being as liberal as she is somehow on their side. and it's true that she did

have a point in her horse with the campus feminists in the 1990s. this was the era of take back the night marches and when feminists were being adamant that the campus sexual assault crisis should never be blamed on women. and we could never ever cautioned women against behaving recklessly by going to a frat party and getting super drunk . that even to even mention the things that women can do to modify their behavior to reduce sexual assault is to blame the victims, that was feminism and camille paglia with the hard-nosed realism that i admire about her said i admire, as much of a feminist is anybody, if you get past that drunk at a flat party what do you think is going tohappen . there's a place for rooms. and the irony is that as clear eyed as she was looking

at the feminists position. camille has had has not been so clear eyed about her own position. she's always characterized herself as a pro-sex feminist . she says i loveconstitutions, i love pornography, michelangelo was a pornographer she had said . which is rather less conservative of her. but i as a conservative hearing her state of things i most want to echo her complaint against the feminists. i want to say to her camille, you celebrate sex you delivery everybody's leaders. beating as someone of the generation of the me to movement, what i see as a result of your proposing is sexual assault and sexual harassment and got camille, and the same words that you

said to the feminists then, what did you think was going to happen? as nacve as the feminists were then, she is nacve in her own way, especially about pornography. >> we had similar questions. i'm going to kind of combine two of these questions because they're close to the same one from scott corbin and anotherfrom dennis morgan . it seems we are on the verge of a generational transfer of influence as boomers continue to age out of positions that lead up already, what is a successful transition to post boomer american life look like and dennis morgan asks the other half of the question, what can we do to correct the excesses of the boomers like the destruction of machine politics, responsive to on the ground concerns or is the genie out of the bottle ? >> in many ways the genie is out of the ball but in answer

to the first question what does that post boomer politics look like, the answer is we don'tknow because we haven't seen it yet . even millennial's are still trapped in a boomer mindset. this is a book that's quite tough on millennial's as well asboomers . more so than for their continuing to define ourselves by the boomer standard. the lineal's idea of what school is is based on what the boomers thought making 60. i was writing about the conclusion of 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 furiously was yes, yes it is. millennial's still think that the greatest moments 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 that their great moment was the great moment of the country and everything before that was just him terrible reactionary nonsense. they mercifully over did it, that's the version of american history millennial's have inherited so it's a bit natural that we would then say that was the only good moment in american history at the moment we will reenact . and i don't know what it will take to shake millennial's out of that, to have them declare mental independence of the baby boom generation because even now, that the boomers are nearing retirement age, we still haven't seen it yet. the nobel prize is still going to bob dylan. >> you mentioned right at the top of your book, this

paragraph that i'll quote a little bit from before the renaissance, would be rediscovers of aristotle were told by jack zealous churchmen that anything written before christ was ipso facto not worth rediscovering. this is approximately how the boomers feel about themselves . any suggestion that the western world might not be altogether better off for their influence is met with an indignant limit litany of all the segments of humanity who labored in a sad state of abject non-personhood before the boomers came along and broketheir chains . i actually find this to be true, in a sense it was how my primary and secondary school education went. you basically learned okay, there was this sort of prolapse of slavery in world war ii. and that's kind of lumped

together so slavery, hitler. and then that cleared out of the way and then there's the march of history on which begins with elvis and ends with i don't know, we gave you friends on nbc. and you end up alleging that the boomers have wrought, the boomer generation themselves are an event of cultural destruction and disruption on par with the protestant reformation. which sounds like a sort of paglia and 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 the institutionalizing it. so we have and basically maybe we saw some of their handiwork last week at the capital. this is working people who lack political institutions to give them real leadership and instead turned towards media.we have a crisis of the family where young people are just not even getting married, noteven having all the sex that boomers told them would be so great . not having children, and the boomer obsession with pop culture, this kind of artifact of middle class. has destroyed our connection to as you say culture and high culture. and left us with kind of nothing. and also the boomers failure to pass on religion and in

many cases even understand it as has left people bereft too. i want to turn to a question from brian penn. are you talking, helen 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 these other boomers enter the picture. >> i really wanted to write about individuals in this book. precisely for the reason that the question identifies because so much writing about generation in general ends up being very staid and insubstantial. so i wanted to anchor things in the complete and it's true

that there were boomers who did not share the characteristics of their generation. but i hope that the stick that i picked will be obviously recognizable as typical boomers in some way. >> in the way if i can answer a little bit for. in some ways the boomers being who they are and having this kind of gravitational effect on all of american life, it means in a sense reagan, boomers elicited the most boomer-ish results from a reagan presidency that you could have gotten. conservatives even at the time often imagine a more conservative reagan presidency and they got and what boomers got was what they wanted at the time if you can speak of them asthe

collective which is economic growth . and a little bit -- >> that's what you're saying. >> and a little bit of stability after the 70s that things got too out of hand. >> i have people ask me whether or not this book was inspired by vista for caldwell's book last year. and the answer is no, i thought his book agent entitlement was great, probably the best book i read last leader and in fact wheni opened up and ready , i started to feel like i was on the right track with this one but both of this book was written before i read caldwell's book. but he makes an argument in his book about the 60s and america sense which is in many ways aboutthe baby boomers . that there wasn't really a lot of essential difference between the liberals of the 1960s and conservatives of the 1980s.

that they were both about liberating the individual. in one sense culturally and another sense economically but they were both about tearing down things that stood in the way of the individual so there is something boomer-ish, not backlash against the boomers but boomer-ish about reagan and the way he governed. and i don't talk much about that in my book but if you pick up caldwell'sbook, is got a little chapter . >> even if you just look at it in the 1970s, a boomer candidate was torpedoed by acid amnesty and abortion and ronald reagan was a candidate who had liberalized abortion in california and then passed amnesty in his presidency without the promised enforcement. so you got in a sense the kind of boomer-ish parental style even though he was a figure of an older generation

as a kind of paternal figure as president. you got the permissiveness of amnesty. and you never got the promised structure that would come later. so sort of like years ice cream kids, enough but next week you're going to finish your homework every night before we have ice cream again. and it wasn't to be. listen, i think we are beginning to wrap up but i just wanted to, urge you one more time helen and ask you is there anything of the post i missed. a figure we didn't cover everyone in your book. maybe a little thing about sonia so the mayor. who which i thinkis one of the more fun chapters in the book . and ididn't really get into her . but kind of what is boomer is about sonia sotomayor. >> that was the chapter that i was most apprehensive about undertaking because i'm

painfully aware that law is a profession and there's a reason why they make you go to school for three years before you canpractice it . that in some ways it's a specialized field and that i was venturing into dangerous territory trying to talk about as a layman but the truth is you can't talk about the boomer legacy without the warren court and when it's done to constitutional law and the more i got into sotomayor and constitutional law, the more i came to realize in some ways a layman is best positioned to talk about and particularly talk about the most important thing about it which is the argument of that chapter which is that the warren court broke constitutional law. i mean, not everybody has to be an originalist or a textual list but you can't just make it calvin ball

constitutional law and that's what the warren court did. the problem is that it's very hard to stand up and say constitutional law has lost all meaning, the emperor has no clothes because the very professionals that know that that still have to get up and go to work in the morning . you can have the revelation that this entire discipline has gone completely off the rails, but you can't argue a case on those grounds so if you're going to practice law you can't keep at the front of your mind that common-law has become a disgrace. every once in a while on rare occasions somebody within the field of the law can state plainly just how bad things have gotten. i think this scalia dissent in obergefeld gets up at, we

live in an oligarchy ruled by rhetoric and i think even justice alito has said that constitutional law has suffered deep and irredeemable damage at the hands of the warren court and its successors. so my position as a layman allows me to foreground this really important fact that the professional world can only mention under special circumstances periodically and that is that common-law has just gone nuts . and sotomayor is a great example of that because she's in the successor generation. the pioneers of the warren court revolution in constitutional law had been educated under the old regime and still had a limited sense of how much they could treat the constitution as their personal plaything .

some of sotomayor's generation does not have that because no sense of, no limits on her sense of what she can get away with as an interpreter supposedly of the constitution. so that chapter is about sotomayor as a product of revolution rather than an architect of one but in some ways being a product of a revolution is more revealing . >> one thing that it reveals and i think maybe it could be summed up in kind of foreshadows the fate of that has befallen millennial's themselves. is that the portrait of soda mayor reveals someone who when she comes up upon challenges in her life, or i'll say it clearly gaps in her knowledge, failures of her educators really. her insecurity suddenly

fleshes out. and then 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. and maybe that explains a little bit about what we've seen in our politics in 2020, so far in 2021 and going ahead into the future. i think are we coming up on the final time here? i'm waiting to hear from the bosses over at pei but. >> i'm happy to take one more question if you've got one. >> i don't have one here for me let's wrap it up here. listen helen, thank you so much for this book. this is a book i kind of wish

i had written. i wish i wascapable of writing . you've done your service to the ages with this book. and the thing is great brave about it too is it's not just full of all these great anecdotes . these great portraits . it's also just a lot of fun. and we haven't had a fun conservative i think in a long time so thank you for that especially. everyone who joined us, thank you for taking time out of your day, stuck in your personal prison cells. we wish you well and hope to see you on the other side. i rl. take care. bye. >> thank you michael. >> you're watching tv on c-span2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors.

tv on c-span2 created by america's cable television company, roxio by these television companies to provide book tv viewers as a public service . >> during a virtual event hosted by mother jones doctor file yasmin discussed the dangers of misinformation about public health in medicine . here's a portion of that program. >> a couple of years ago there was a diesel outbreak i think in romania and it was kind of treated something like worst measles outbreak in decades, don't worry, we are disseminating pamphlets, something along those lines. and i thought are you kidding me, like these movements of anti-vaccine messages and faxing hesitancy, they're not defending pamphlets to get their point across, they are sending videos of a mother crying to the camera and

telling you because she's convinced her three-year-old became autistic after getting a vaccine and you're telling me that with a video like that that a person telling the story about child crying deeply emotional you're going to counter that with some bullet points? that does not meet people where they are and some of the thing that frustrates me is i trained in medicine and metals medical school and this is around the world we practice evidence-based networks but we don't practice evidence-based communication even though we know that communication is a make or break it comes to convincing an individual patient, communication is everything in epidemic response or pandemic response and yet there are fellows over here and over here who have decades of evidence about what works and what does not work and yet we keep repeating what we think works even though the pamphlets, the facts delivered from us and delivered in a one-size-fits-all net .

that's rubbish, it just goes over the heads of so many people. it doesn't tell for the fact that we in medicine whether directly involved or not are part of an establishment that has a lovely and unethical history of experimentation on very vulnerable people that even now this isn't just about history. medical racism is very much in the now if you talk to six people and i think people are vaccine hesitant because even though i studiedanti-vaccine, they are more of the fringe . the majority of people are on the fence. i got my flu shot this year but not sure if i could get a vaccine this year, these people would have six different reasons historical, cultural, all of that are being vaccine hesitant. so we have to meet people where they are. we need time to localize communications campaigns two. >> rots the rest of this program visit our website, c-span.org.

use the search box at the top of the page to look for seeing the yasmin or the title of the book viral fiasco. >> here are some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the washington post. topping the list is charlie mcafee's illustratedfables followed by pulitzer prize winning author isabel wilkerson's exploration of what she called a hidden caste system in the united states . after that in each are neurosurgeon signed a group.offers advice on how to maintain brain . then in the first volume of his presidential mentor promised land former president barack obama reflects on his life and political career. and wrapping up our look at some of the best-selling books according to the washington post is catherine mays advice on getting through hardship in wintering. these authors have appeared on tv and you can watch their programs online at book tv .org. >> i'm doctor kimberly greene, presid