committee for his defense secretary confirmation hearing. more hearings are expected in both the house and the senate on the security situation at the capital, with date to be determined. the senate is scheduled to return to legislative business on january 19. use your mobile devices and go to c-span.org for the latest video, live and on-demand, to follow the transition of power, president trump, president-elect biden, news conferences, and event coverage at c-span.org. next, helen andrews, senior editor at the american conservative magazine, takes a critical look at the baby boomer generation and argues they have left subsequent generations, especially millennials, worse off. after that, the russian ambassador talks about relations with the u.s. and areas for

cooperation with the incoming biden administration. then national institute of doctor examines the mental health crisis caused by the coronavirus caused by thg coronavirus pandemic. ♪ susan: journalist helen andrews, you have a new book. and women whoen promised freedom and deliver disaster. you explain how the book came to be. what is the story? helen: i am a millennial. the idea for the book started

when i looked around at a lot of my peers and noticed we were all feeling a little dispossessed. first of all, in a material sense. they amount of wealth we had accumulated by the age of 35 is less than generation x had at that age and a quarter less than the boomers had. wereially, we felt like we falling behind. but also culturally and socially dispossessed. there was a sense a lot of the functioning as the two had inherited did not get passed down to us. boomers had spent down our onial capital and lived the capital and left us with not very much. i wanted to look back at history and find out how that happened and why. susan: it also -- the way used to -- you approach the subject has a problem nons in history. a book called eminent victorians. what was that book and why did

your approach to the topic of boomers? great it was one of the classic takedown books. it was written by an author who was part of the bloombsbury group palling around with virginia woolf and her friends. victorian values. he thought they were stuffy and repressive. this was for a long time a minority bohemian opinion. but he was lucky enough to publish his takedown of the 1918 right after world war i when britain was feeling traumatized and had a deep sense in the majority of the population that something must have gone deeply wrong to have led civilization to such a bloody climax. along he comes saying the problem is the stuffy old victorians and the stuff they believed in. the book became a bit of a phenomenon.

a lot of the cynicism and frivolity you see dominating the culture of the 1920's is a hangover from those people saying all the victorians believing in stuffy old things like morals and religion, that was a mistake. we are going to move beyond that now. the thing i took as a model for me was that he did his takedown in a series of biographies. i like that because as a reader i tend to get very frustrated with books about generations. which is funny to say as someone who has written one. i find they often devolve into generalizations about generations. representative baby boomers who i thought captured something about that generational experience in their life story. susan: i wanted to point out a bit more. i had the same reactions that generational generalizations are just that. what are the qualities of the

millennial generation and the boomer generation that transcend issues or socioeconomic issues, gender issues and the like? about the one liner boomers i did not come up with but i think is brilliant is they are a generation that sold out but would never admit they sold out. a combination of a great deal of idealism and a sense of ,hemselves as morally noble noble idealists liberating humanity but on the other hand a great deal of selfishness and narcissism and a blindness to the ways that their liberationist agenda knocks down a lot of functioning institutions a list -- and left a lot of people worse off. the boomers have a selfish idea that as long as they are doing better does not matter about the institution. that is a toxic combination when it becomes as prevalent as it

was among the boomers. this combination of idealism and selfishness. and so millennials living in without the old institutions had to become very scrappy and self-reliant and i think that is the dominant quality of millenials as i see it. we have to fend for ourselves, which in some ways is good but on the other hand leaves us very untrusting and is not a good way to run a society. susan: we better defined millenials and boomers. what are the years that each generation encompasses? helen: the boomers are technically people born between 1945 and either 1962 or 1964. some of the younger boomers, you start trending into generation x. lenny owes, that is a bit fuzzier. afterf thumb, people born

1980. i was born and in 1886. susan: the oldest are going to be 40 this year. these boomers in parameters change from site to site. i looked at pew. the oldest boomers would be turning 75 in 2021. what was the hand that boomers were delivered they failed to make good on? i have mentioned institutions several times so far and i think looking at all the various realms of society where the boomers have done their damage, that is a running theme. they are against institutions. they see them as constraining. one of the institutions they have torn down is the family. the institution of the family, because they thought that was too restrictive and restraining. in the aftermath of the boomer liberation, i suppose they

thought we would have some kind of liberated utopia where we would be emotionally satisfied with family lives. we see something that looks a lot more like wreckage. functioning families, functioning churches, functioning politics, political parties are a lot different today than they were when the boomers inherited them. they are a lot more individualistic. that is the running theme. the boomers inherited functioning institutions and failed to pass them on. susan: since you dealt with individuals who are emblematic of society, who are the six you profile? helen: they are if i can get them in the correct order, steve jobs, aaron sorkin, camille polyol, jeffrey sachs, al sharpton and sonia sotomayor. it is a pretty good spread. somebody from tec, hollywood, academia, which is hugely important to the boomer story and a supreme court justice.

helen: it is interesting you did not choose anyone from your own field of journalism. helen: there were so many people i had to leave out. i would have loved to have had somebody from journalism or finance, which is a huge -- the rise of economics is the dominant field. there are a lot of stories i did not get a chance to tell but i did not want to make the book too long. susan: perhaps there are some boomers in your future. i wanted to spend a little bit of time with a couple of these people so viewers have an understanding of how you approached it. let's start with aaron sorkin. who is aaron sorkin? got hisaron sorkin start as the young sensation who wrote a few good men. if you can picture jack nicholson saying you can handle the truth, that is aaron sorkin. once he moved out west to hollywood from new york city where he had been in theater, he started a little show called the west wing.

that is what he is most known for. he did a few tv shows after that and is now directing features wrote the biopic of steve jobs. susan: we have a clip from rrp five -- clip from our archive of the clinton press secretary. she became a contributor to the west wing. she is july 14, 2001 where talks about the impact of the series. let's watch. >> it portrays people who work in politics and public service as real people, as people who get up every day and do their best to do the right thing to try to make the country a better place. yes, they stumble, they fall short. but they get up the next day and they tried to make it right. i read this pilot and went this is great but it is never going to get made. it was the height of the impeachment scandal and i thought people are going to come home after seeing this all day and realize they are not going to want to watch it on

television, which goes to show you why i did not choose television as my primary career because the show did get made. nbc bought it and the critics love it and it has found a huge audience and an almost cult like following. i cannot tell you how satisfying it has been for everybody involved in the show. we believed in the show. we worked hard on the show. took the audience seriously. this is a show that deals with complex issues. it does not talk down to the audience. it does not treat them like they're stupid. it has found this wonderful boy audience. i cannot tell you how many phone calls i have gotten from people saying here is an idea for a story. here is an issue i would love to see you get into the west wing because it is an intelligent dialogue that is educating people, inspiring people and changing not just the way people think about the process but the way people think about people who are dissipating in the process and that is a wonderful thing.

at the end of the day, it is still a television show. but i think it is doing some good. it is not just entertaining us. it is entertaining us and inspiring us. susan: the show aired for seven starting with the george w. bush presidency. this essay about -- it's about the power of television. what are your critiques? said that west wing went on tv at the time of impeachment. she is actually under reading that. aaron sorkin has said in interviews the moment he pressed finish on the pilot script, within 24 hours of the monica lewinsky story raking. when he pitched the story to nbc, they sat on it for a year because they said we cannot go on with this now because nobody wants to watch a show about white house staffers during the impeachment. i have my own personal sense of

the timeline of the west wing because i am exactly the right people --y peers are the people i knew in the yellow political union went into politics because they watched the west wing. they watched in high school and decided this is what i want to do with my life. living in washington, d.c. where i do now, there are an awful lot of people of whom that is true. i don't know if that is disturbing to the rest of america to know that they are being ruled by a ruling class that shows their careers because of a tv show, it is true. thatragic irony of that is aaron sorkin is not himself and especially political person. that is the substance of my critique. he has said over and over again he did not make the west wing because he cares so much about politics. he just likes the sound of smart people debating. smart people talking to each other.

it just seemed like politics would be a good venue for having smart people talked to each other. he was almost a pied piper to my generation, drawing people into politics without himself carrying all that much about it. susan: that sounds like a good thing, drawing people into politics. where's the problem? helen: the problem is that this idealism is essentially false. that this idea of going into politics because you are going to change the world, the rosy world of the west wing is very different from the nitty-gritty of how you actually get things done in washington. you get people who are almost naive about politics because their view of what they deal with shaped the west wing. you willtch the show, notice there are many ripped from the headlines examples. she was an example -- she was a consultant on the show and they

said -- and they fed sorkin stories from their own times. you will recognize that storyline is based on suffering that happened in 1996. the more storylines you notice the more it becomes clear sorkin change the ending. sorkin took these stories from the clinton years and gave them a happy ending. where -- an instance funny story from the clinton years is a phrase from the communist manifesto was dropped in state of the union address and it went through nine different drafts before and in turn pointed out and said are you quite sure we want to be courting karl marx in the state of the union? in the west wing, they catch the quote right away. he altered history in order to make it all come out right in the end. the truth is any real politics, things do not always come out right in the end and the noble idealists do not always win in the end. susan: would you say as the

people who were inspired to go into politics as a result of the politics, they were like in their ideology orders across political ideologies? helen: i really want to be fair to aaron sorkin. he did his very best to not make the west wing and exclusively liberal show. republicanin consultants, veterans of bush one. he tried to write republican characters who were noble and just as high-minded as his liberal characters. the truth is if you watch the show, it did not come off because so many of the people -- it is hollywood. it does have a liberal slant. despite his best efforts to make it high-minded, i do not think he succeeded. susan: i cannot help but think it was nbc who gave us the west wing but starting in 2005, they

also gave us the apprentice starting donald trump. here is another program that had a an impact on politics. -- had an impact on politics. you have any thoughts on that? helen: if you wanted to put the change in politics and the last three years, it has become tvified. ofhas become a lot more a reality show, but i do not think that is a good thing. there is a funny story that armando iannucci tells. he says when he was researching, he went to the obama white house and looked around to get a sense of how it is in the west wing. he said the people who showed him around pointed out little things in terms of the west wing. they would say that is the desk where josh would work. he was thinking to himself, no. those are fake people. it would be better for you to say that is the desk where i

work because you are real. why are you thinking of your own job in terms of this tv show from 1999? it is really not very good to think of your job as a tv show if you're working in the west wing. as the story shows, that is how people think of it. susan: both of these series aired at a time when television was the dominant retainment medium in american households. multitude ofa streaming services and cable networks and lots of choice. is it still possible for a series, a video series to have as much impact as you think the west wing did? helen: i do actually. one thing that aaron sorkin has been criticized for his being a bit of a fuddy-duddy and being net phobic. he has dropped into a lot of his shows deming -- his shows

denigrating comments about online news. he is clearly much more comfortable in the old media. you almost get the sense he would be happy to be back in the good old days when there were three networks and that is it. people tend to go too far in the other direction and overate the importance of online news. i think television and hollywood and movies still have an immense amount of power. more even than politics. by hollywood made film producers and writers are in many ways more important than the ones made by people in the west wing. i think aaron sorkin's grandiose sense of the power of tv is entirely accurate. susan: the next of the six profiles i'm going to highlight is camille. who is she? helen: she has a humble professor. she is a public intellectual of

the kind that is rather old-fashioned today. there are not that many celebrity professors. theburst onto the scene in 1990's with a book called sexual personae, which became a best-selling phenomenon. that is a testament to her rhetorical power. inventive and when she ventured into punditry and started weighing in on day-to-day culture in addition to her academic work, she made herself a celebrity commentator quite deservedly because she is a really brilliant writer. susan: so what is your critique of her? helen: if you were to look at the accomplishment of her, probably her greatest one is the idea that popular culture is

just as legitimate a subject of academic inquiry as the great classics. that was really an uphill battle for her in the 1990's when she was saying madonna is just as legitimate a subject for me to be thinking about as a professor as milton. think that the consequences of that revolution, bringing pop culture into the academy and overrating its importance and substance had been that nowadays, you have lots and lots of professors in the academy who know pop culture and nothing else. they get their phd in sopranos studies because thanks to the pop-culture revolution, you can do that now. she is an immensely educated woman. she knows her milton and spencer. she was bringing that extremely educated mind to bear when she thought about things like

madonna, but by elevating pop-culture in the way she did, she has yielded a generation of younger scholars who do not have that grounding. i think it was probably a to elevate her pop-culture and visual culture and movies and tv to the same level as the great classics. susan: lets hear her in her own words. this is from 2017. she was discussing her book, free women and free men. >> i was not one of what we would call pro-sex feminists. in the 1970's, i loved charlie's angels. i loved cosmopolitan magazine. meanwhile, the other feminists were occupying helen gurley brown's offices and wanting the home magazine to be shut down. there is no way i could be taken into the women's movement. i was drummed out of it from the start.

people who think she was made by feminism -- i was not made by betty. betty did not create jermaine greer in australia. she did not create me in upstate new york. it is about time people realize the transformations in women that happened erratically in the mid-20th century were not entirely due to the women's movement. susan: in the chapter, you not only talk about the more or less dumbing down of academia, but you also talk about the great rise in pornography as acceptable in our culture. what do you see as her role in that? clip: she talked in the you gave about feminism. i think that is one reason why a lot of political conservatives wasly like her because she a slashing enemy of the second wave feminists. it was wonderful to see her take them down and her line, she saw

them as uptight. but i think that is a case where conservatives have thought the enemy of my enemy is my friend. that is not really the case with her. she is a pro-sex feminist she calls herself. it was very effective when she was trying to take down the second wave. it also led her to be naive in her own way about what would happen in the aftermath of sexual liberation. she lovesid pornography. she loves prostitution because she thinks they are liberating. but however that may have looked to her from the perspective of the 1970's for a millennial growing up in time of streaming video, we live in the most foreign saturated generation in all of human history. rn saturated

generation in all of human history. it had effects that she should have been able to see. helen: such as? susan: pornography today is a lot more toxic. people are seeing it at younger ages. more people are looking at it. the rise of streaming video did something very bad to the pornography industry. because all the video is available for free, the producers are no longer able to compete on price. in order to get their product eyeballed, the only dimension they can compete on is growing enter --going to great to greater and greater feats of humanity and making things more depraved. that is the only way they can set their product apart in a

saturated market for pornography as exists now in place like red tube. but that does is leads to a ratcheting of up and up. if you hear pornography and your thinking like a 1970's playboy spread, that is not what is out there right now. it is a lot more dangerous and deforming to the sexualities of young people especially when they are fed a constant diet of it from the age of 13. that is definitely one thing that is different between her day and hours. first age american and children is generally about 11. what is they, impact on humans being exposed to pornography at that early age?

helen: hopefully by the time my children are that age things will have changed. -- think of it as a river carving out a canyon. habits, it certain might be a matter of choice when you're young but if you persist in them, they become harder to get out of. that is why so many millenials talk about pornography in the language of addiction. they feel like they are addicted to these videos because it is hard to break these habits once you have formed them. formed by being videos that are more and more prayer to because of the dynamic i explained, that is going to make people sexually different than any other generation and that is why you see a lot of other millenials with deformed sexualities. susan: this is a chapter on academia on feminism.

i am wondering about the #metoo movement, whether or not that is a product of the millennial generation and how that intersects with the rise and exposure to pornography and society. yeah, in many ways, the #metoo movement was the result of the kind of liberation that she is talking about because when she has her line of protect feminism, that is not just liberate women. it liberates men as well. it turns out when you liberate men to activate -- to act on their sexualities, it is not always pretty. she has consistently underrated the damage caused by sexual harassment. in girl great believer power and she has this idea women should be able to shut down sexual harassment just by being empowered and telling men

don't you dare do that when it does not always work that way. about thea book birds, the alfred hitchcock movie. alfred hitchcock torturing an actress because she would not go to bed with him. if she should as have been an empowered woman and told alfred hitchcock no. and it was not that big of a deal. in a way that downplays how traumatic that moviemaking experience was for her. tohink -- current ability talk honestly -- her inability to talk honestly about for harassment isxual an encapsulating example of what pro-sex about her

feminism. susan: next when i wanted to focus on is al sharpton. if you look at the c-span library, there hundreds of videos covering him over the course of his career. he is in front of cameras frequently. the one we chose is august 28, 2020. the national action network rally at the lincoln memorial in the wake of george floyd's killing and the protests that ensued. abouty keep telling me that black shame parents have to have the conversation with our children. copwe have to explain if a stops you, don't reach for the glove compartment. don't talk back. conversation. we have had the conversation for

decades. it is time we have a conversation with america. we need to have a conversation about your racism, about your bigotry, about your hate, about how you would put your knees on our neck while we cry for our life. we need a new conversation. , you write,arpton is different from some of the other people you profiled because he grew up wanting to be exactly what he was, a minister. others had an arc of their lifetime of change. what are al sharpton's accomplishments? helen: he has certainly been very consistent. he is doing the same thing now he has been doing for the past several decades. that longevity is a testament to effectiveness. he has the kind of guy where if you have got some kind of racial

conflict in your town, you can get him on the phone and he will come right there. there are dozens of examples. in the clip you just gave, that is a great illustration of the downside of that consistency. as ifstill talking today race relations have not changed since he first became a campaign or anything 1960's. there has been no progress. he is running the same old playbook. i think that is the biggest weakness of him as a civil rights campaigner. susan: his chapter is also a discussion by you on the difference between transformational and transactional leadership. can you talk about those two concepts and how effective each is? helen: there are two kinds of leaders basically.

transformational leaders and transactional. this is al sharpton's concept, how he things about his own leadership. a transformational leader changes the way people think. martin luther king was a transformational leader. he was out there changing minds, altering people's hearts. a transactional leader is something much more humble. he is a dealmaker. he tries to forge compromises. one of the greatest revolutions the boomers accomplished is saying that transformational leadership is the only good kind. that transactional leaders should be looked down upon. their compromising with the enemy. there is no nobility in that. they are sellouts is what a transactional leader is. the truth is that transactional leadership is important. if you have groups of people that disagree and you need to

make a deal, you need to make compromises. you need somebody willing to sacrifice a little bit of the idealism and get a deal accomplished. by denigrating transactional leadership, the boomers have made it a lot harder to reach satisfactory compromises. al sharpton is trying to be a leader in transformational mode. at the expense of worthwhile compromise. susan: you do reference the difference between a several large -- civil rights leader like al sharpton and the black lives matter leaders. what is the difference? helen: the difference is entirely to sharpton's advantage/he outclasses them in ended --ays -- sharp sharpton's advantage. he outclasses them. i would take him over them any day. the difference is a matter of democracy.

al sharpton, even his bitterest enemies know he is a leader with a following. his the kind of guy who can get people on the phone. he ran for mayor of new york city in the 1990's, he nearly won the democratic party nomination. it was not just the black vote that got them there. thousands of people came out and pulled the lever for al sharpton. contrast, one of the black to come out leaders of ferguson, tried his hand at a contest and got something like 3000 votes. 3%. he did not do well in the democratic spread. the power of the black lives fromr movement comes social media, but that is not translate to actual people with

.ctual democratic support whatever else you want to say about al sharpton, he has that. susan: what you think about the numerous protests that have arisen during 2020 and their power to affect change in society? helen: i am quite critical of them. from a peso --me a place of anxiety. , in the golden age of the civil rights movement, the race problem was a matter of black-and-white. today, that is no longer the case. hispanics outnumber blacks by almost two to one. in many states, asians outnumber blacks. we live in a multicultural america rather than a biracial america. that changes the civil rights conversation drastically. a lot of the black issues no longer loom as large as they did

because it is no longer a matter of two raises. it is multicultural. there is anxiety on the part of activist thinking does this mean our day is over? that we can no longer rushed to the front of the conversation on america is talking about racial issues? that anxiety is that their issues may longer be of such preeminent importance the way they were in the 1960's, that they need to be as loud as possible as they can be and have this huge movement before people say you're issues are not as important, we need to talk about hispanic america and asian america. the fear of becoming multicultural america. people talk about white anxiety being a driver of racial issues. that is a kind of anxiety that is underreported and is feeling

a lot of the current protests. susan: a lot of the other tangible results of this year and in the area of civil rights and race relations has been the removal of confederate era symbols across the country. in the american conservative magazine, you wrote i used to side with the people who wanted to tear down all the confederate monuments indicating you have changed your mind on this. why? helen: because i used two trust it would stop there. that the people who wanted to tear down robert e lee would not then demand tearing down thomas jefferson and george washington as well. i think the last year has shown that was overly optimistic on my part. at the people who wanted to tear down the monuments in virginia would not stop at robert ely and they are going to -- rubber ely and they are going to -- robert e lee and they are going to tear

down columbus. a lot of the trust i had in people who were proponents is gone. that is where that is stemming from. susan: does each generation have the right to decide its own heroes? answering danger of yes to that question is that it means that everyone -- that everything is always up for grabs and you lose any sense of historical continuity. what that leads to is a great sense of arrogance on the part of the young. we can reinvent history every five minutes if we want to. anything to our ancestors. the truth is i think we do owe a lot to history. we come into this world as inheritors of a great tradition and a great country.

it is our job to first of all be grateful for that and to be good stewards of what we have inherited and passed along. i think the boomers had no sense of continuity in that way. i think that is something we need to recapture. each generation does not get to reinvent america on its own. we are a link in the chain and we need to act like it. ,usan: in those three examples each of them has made contributions to society but in your analysis, those are outweighed by what you call irreparable harm. help me understand the final analysis of the people you profiled and what they have done to american society. helen: you're right that all of them are people of enormous accomplishment. i did not want to profile anybody who was just a total failure or anybody that i did not respect. wayspect and in many

admire all of the boomers i profiled. as a writer, i was attracted to stories with a tragic irony to them. they tried to accomplish something great and it had efax contrary to their -- had ef fects they did not see. be steve jobs.d and arebs contributed mislaid to civilization, to human happiness. an iphone owess a debt steve jobs. it came from a noble sentiment on his part. he thought that computers could liberate human creativity and in many ways, they did. we certainly owe him gratitude for that. enabled ue is it also theberization -- enabled the

uberization of the economy. millennials are a lot more economically precarious as employees than any other generation in the last 100 years. that has been enabled by the very technology that steve jobs thought would set us free and has left us enslaved as uberized employees. the two sides of the coin are inseparable. susan: you describe the damage in your book that these folks and the trends around them as being irreparable. it made me think it does not give very much credit to the millennial generation and their ability to craft their own way in american society. i will give you another example. if you were a time traveler and you went from 1960 to 2020, one of the huge differences you would notice is the rise of women in the workplace.

it used to be three quarters of families in america in the 1960's were single earner families. today, it is about two thirds dual learners. that is a huge revolution. in many ways there are a lot of theynials who feel like are only in dual earner households as they have to be. i am a believer in what is called the two income trap. and happens in the 1970's 1980's when women flitted into the workplace was that it did not actually make their households better off because it just led to a bidding war for middle-class amenities like housing and cars so that now the requirements for a middle-class life are more expensive and you need two earners to get them.

the two income trap is the term that elizabeth warren coined for the. -- for that. if you are a millennial thinking that was a mistake to tell women you have to be in the workforce in order to be a self-actualized human being, that was a mistake. we should say you can work if you want to but it should not be an economic requirement. the problem is you cannot do that because of the two income trap, because financially, the economic reality is you need two earners for a middle class lifestyle. even if millenials think that was a mistake we should go back, they cannot because of the effect of the income trap. there are a lot of things were millenials say we probably should go back, but they are not able to. susan: genii out of the bottle more or less. let me turn to politics. our country is about to be led

not by a boomer but president joe biden will be 78, a member of the silent generation as is nancy pelosi, mitch mcconnell is also a member of the silent generation. what is the impact on the country of a leadership structure, being a member not of the boomers but a silent generation? helen: i think we might have seen our last boomer president and good riddance to bad rubbish. i would be perfectly happy if we never had another boomer president again. thei think that even when personnel in d.c. is no longer we are still living in politicsrs' world and is still plagued by boomer rules. thatinge point at which became true, when the ascendancy 1972 whenpolitics was

the democratic party left behind the old style of liberalism, things like unions and a working-class sentiment and traded that for a new left mentality where the left-wing party is dominated by identity politics interest groups. that is how the left-wing party sees itself. the democratic party is still that way today. that is why you have seen the democrat -- the dramatic shift. the left-wing party used to have an advantage among people without college educations, whereas now, people without college educations in the working-class are bizarrely voting for the right wing party, which i think is a deep tragedy. the whole point of liberalism is champing the least advantage. by people dominated with college degrees and earning

the votes of people without college degrees, you have sold out the people you are supposed to be representing. as long as the left-wing party still looks the way it did post 1972 and is dominated by identity politics rather than the good old left-wing unions and the working class, whether joe biden is president are not, it is still a boomer party and boomer politics were living in. susan: the 117th congress will have 31 millenials in it even though in 20 millenials became the majority population in our country. why are there not more millenials in congress? helen: too busy trying to earn a living. casenk that is another where millenials who are in congress are not bringing a breath of fresh air. they are not really bringing anything new.

it is almost disturbing to see how content many millenials are to just replay the old boomer style of politics. they campaign for the same issues, have the same slogans, have the same mantras. it is almost a kind of decadence we are stuck in the replaying of the boomer reel. we still think of the 1960's as being the height of american politics. we sell that get replayed this year. millenials went into the streets and had their own chicago 1968. i really wish millenials would move past this sense of replaying the same old boomer reel and maybe they would have more success if they did and brought something new rather than getting stuck in the boomer world. susan: i wanted to tell our audience a little about you. this year you tell readers you

not only published your first book but you also had your first child in the middle of the pandemic. what was the year like for you? helen: yeah, it actually worked out very well for me because while i was pregnant and not wanting to leave the house, i did not feel like i was missing out on a lot because no one else was leaving their house either. surreal but probably less surreal than it would have been otherwise because i was living the pandemic lifestyle anyway. susan: you also tell your readers you recently lost your dad and the book is dedicated to him. you describe your father as a liberal southern lawyer of the atticus finch type and you describe your mother as a bit of a hippie. how did a conservative thinker come from these parents? helen: it is not an exaggeration to say my father was like

atticus finch not just because he was a southern lawyer but he did except payment in kind from indigent clients. collardst a bunch of from the cunningham's. it was a client who worked at a warehouse for books and was able to get a complete sense of the works of mark twain. very -- he was very liberal in an atticus finch way. if you take a look at to kill a mockingbird or you met my father, you would see how wide a conservative streak in that particular brand of liberalism. it is very old-fashioned. i was able to draw the best of what he was able to pass on, which was not quite liberalism as it was practiced by millennial peers. susan: why did you decide to go into journalism? helen: it happened by accident.

college without much knowing what i wanted to do. in very millennial fashion, i had started a blog and from that blog was picked up by a few magazines and i was drafted from the blog is fear -- the blogosphere. susan: the essay appears to be your primary format, which seems to run counter to the age of twitter. what is the power of an essay in conveying ideas today? i think there is a real appetite for sustained thought. biggest writer phenomenon when i was young and growing up was david foster wallace. he was the best writer in

america according to all the young people i knew. he was a great practitioner of the essay. they are finely crafted. coincidentally, he was also a great critic of soundbite addictive media. he was thinking mainly of tv but he would had -- would have had a lot of things to say about twitter. there is a sense among millenials and have been since his heyday that the way we are consuming media and social media is bad for us. it is bad for our brains. a writer i cans offer an alternative to that and have essays that allow your brain to slow down and engage in substantive thought, which you really cannot do over the course of a tweet.

susan: what would be the best outcome of your book in the intellectual community? what would you like to see happen or the kind of conversation it fosters? helen: i would really like some angry reviews. i want people to be outraged. i do not think that is true. at, i had toiting make a decision very early on. do i want to write a book for conservatives or do i want to write a book for everybody? if you want to sell copies, there is a lot to be said for writing a book just for conservatives. what is called red meat. you can read a red mean book that will gratify people -- redmeat book that will gratify outrage.sense of i know there are a lot of liberal millenials who are suffering too and have a vague sense that something about the world they are living in just is not right and they cannot put

their finger on it. fornted to present my case -- my answers to those questions in a way that a liberal reader would not have an allergic reaction two. that would be my hope if this book is able to cross ideological lines in that way. own political beliefs and this is not just a book for conservatives. susan: do you anticipate hearing from any of the five you profile who are still alive? helen: i approached a few of they weree if interested in talking to me but i did not get any bites on that. i hope that they think i have treated them fairly. if i get an angry response from any of them, i will be a little disappointed. -- some of them but i hopeflattered,

they all at the very least think i have told their stories fairly. if any of them want to do promotional events, i would be happy to debate them. i think that would be very good for sales. susan: over the past few months you have frequently been on panels representing -- frequently been on panels representing your support for president trump. i wonder what you think is legacy will be. -- think his legacy will be. helen: i am today four years later very proud to have supported president trump in the primary and the 2016 election. i think there are a lot of issues the republican establishment did not want to touch. things like trade, things like immigration, things like skepticism of foreign

adventurism that were untouchable before he came along and started talking about them. whether or not he succeeded in making progress on any of those issues and the agenda items i the very least, they are in the conversation now. i think it will be impossible to worldk to the pre-trump where republicans could get away with never talking about trade or immigration or foreign wars and ignoring the passionate beliefs of their base, which were contrary to the beliefs of the republican elite. werenk a lot of people who being ignored for a long time are not going to be ignored anymore and we have donald trump to thank for that.

susan: of the 74 million who voted for president trump, where do you think they will find their voice politically? helen: i don't know. is tosi gabbard going to run? people whoot of the voted for trump yust to vote for democrats. there were a lot of people -- trump used to vote for democrats. afraid that they would go back and start voting for the democrats again and be a one-time thing and the republicans would not be able to get their votes anymore, but the democratic party is going so far off the left wing deep and that is unlikely to happen, which is probably bad for america but look good for the republicans. change andright can grow in order to make room for

them because they would be a very worthy part of any conservative coalition going forward. susan: helen andrews. the new book is called boomers: the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster. thanks much for giving c-span and our. -- c-span an hour. appreciate it. helen: thank you. ♪ >> all q&a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at c-span.org. >> use our website, c-span.org/coronavirus, to follow the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak. watch our searchable video anytime on demand and track the spread with interactive maps all on c-span.org/coronavis.