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host: journalist helen anders, you have a new book. the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster. in the preface, you explain how it came to be. guest: i am a millennial. the idea for the book started when i looked at my peers and i noticed we all felt a little bit dispossessed. first of all, in a material sense. the amount of wealth we had accumulated by the age of 35 is less than gen x had at that age and a order less that the rumors had. materially, without like we were falling behind. but also culturally and socially. there was a sense that a lot of the functioning institutions that boomers inherited did not get passed down to us. they had spent down our social

capital. they lived off of capital and left us with not very much. a lot of the things we were supposed to inherit, we did not. i wanted to look back and see how that happened and why. host: the way you approach the subject has a providence in history. eminent victorious. what is that book and why did it inspire your approach the topic of boomers? guest: eminent victorian was one of the great take town books. the author was part of the blues very group, touting with virginia woolf and her friends. like a good bohemian intellectual, he hated victori values. he thought they were stuffy and repressive. this was quite a minority bohemian opinion. he was lucky to post his big

takedown in 1918 right after world war i when britain was feeling traumatized and had a deep sense and the majority of the population that something must have gone deeply wrong to lead civilization to such a bloody climax. he said all these problems for the old victorian ways and what they believed in. it became a bit of a phenomenon. a lot of the cynicism and frivolity that you see dominating the culture of the 1920s is a hangover of victorians live -- believing in these old things. that was a mistake and we will move beyond that. the thing about eminent victorians i took as a model for me was that he did his takedown in a series of biographies. i like to that. as a reader, i get frustrated about books about generations which is funded to say as someone who wrote one. they devolve into

generalizations about dinner allies asians. i wanted to ground my book in individuals so i picked six representative baby boomers who captured something. -- generalizations about generalizations. host: i had the same reaction that generalization generalizations are just that. what are the qualities of the mers and millennials? that transcend issues or socio- economic issues, gender issues and the like? guest: the one liner about boomers i did not come up with that is permit -- brilliant, is that boomers sold out but would never admit they sold out. there is a great deal of i -- idealism and a sense of themselves as morally liberal but on the other hand, a great

deal of selfishness and narcissism. their agenda knocks down a lot of functioning institutions and left people worse off. the boomers had the selfish idea that as long as they are doing better, it doesn't matter about the institution. that is a toxic combination when it becomes as prevalent as it was among the boomers, this idea of selfishness on the other. glenn neils, living in this world the muted of the old institutions keeping society functioning had to become very scrappy and self-reliant. i think that is the dominant quality of millennials as i see it. we have to fend for ourselves which in some ways is good and promotes self-reliance. it is very untrusting and not a

good way to run a society. host: we better defined millennials and boomers. what years do each one encompass? guest: boomers are born between 1945 and either 1962 or 1964. some of the younger boomers trend into gen x. millennials is a bit fuzzier. rule of thumb is people born after 1980. i was born in 86. host: it ends around 96 so the oldest will be 40 this year. the oldest boomers, these parameters change from site to site you look at. i looked at you for example, the oldest tumors would be turning 75. what was the hand that boomers delivered that they failed to make good on? guest: i have mentioned answer to shins several times so far. i think looking at the various

rounds of society where they have done their damage. that running theme that they are against institutions and see them as constraining but one of the institutions they have torn down is the family. they felt like that was too restrictive and restraining. in the aftermath of the boomer liberation, i suppose they thought we would have some liberated utopia where everybody would be emotionally satisfied with their family lives but we see something that looks like wreckage. functioning families, functioning churches, functioning politics, little parties are different today than when boomers inherited them. they are individualistic. that is the running theme, boomers inheriting these institutions and failing to pass them on. host: since you dealt with

individuals, who were the 60 profiled? guest: they are steve jobs, aaron sorkin, camille paglia, jeffrey sachs, al sharpton, and sonia sotomayor. it is a good spread. host: interesting you didn't pick anybody from your own field of journalism. guest: there were so many people i had to leave out. i would love to have somebody from dental is him or from finance which, is of course a big part as the dominant field. there were a lot of stories i did not get a chance to tell but i did not want to make the books too long. host: perhaps there are some boomers too, and your future. i want to spend some time at these peoples so viewers have an understanding of how you approach it and what you mean. let us start with aaron sorkin.

who is he? guest: aaron sorkin? he got his start as the young sensation who wrote a few good men. if you can picture jack nicholson saying you can't handle the truth, that is aaron sorkin. when he moved to hollywood where he had been in theater, he started a show called the west wing. that is what he is most known for. he did a few tv shows after that and he is now directing features including funnily enough, he wrote the biopic of steve jobs. host: we have a clip from our archive, dede myers and after she left the white house, became a contributor to the west wing. this is july 4 -- 14th, 2001 where she talks about the impact of the series. >> it portrays people working in

politics as real people who get up everyday and do their right thing. they try to make the country a better plus. they are human. i get up the next day and they try to do it right. i read this pilot. it was great. i thought it would never get made. it was the height of the impeachment scandal and i just thought people will come home after seeing this all day and not want to watch it on television. it goes to show you why i did not pick television as my primary career. the show did get made and nbc bought it. the critics loved it and it found a huge audience among the american people and a cultlike following. i can't tell you how satisfying that has been for everybody involved in the show. we believed in the show. we work hard on it and we took the audience seriously. this is a show the deals with complex issues and all their complexities. it doesn't talk down to the audience or treat them like stupid but because of that, it has found this wonderful, loyal

audience. i can't tell you how many phone calls i've gotten. people saying here is an idea for a story. here's an issue i would love to see in the west wing. because it is intelligent, educating people and changing not just the way people think about the process but the way that people about people who are participating in the process. that is a wonder thing. i don't want to overemphasize it because at the end of the day, it is still a television show. i think it is doing some good. it's not just entertaining us, it is educating us. host: it air for seven seasons, during the george bush presidency. this essay is about the power of television. what are your critiques? guest: well gosh, she said west wing went on tv at the time of the impeachment and she is underwriting that. aaron sorkin has said in interviews that the moment

people asked -- press finish on the script was within 24 hours of the monica lewinsky story breaking. in fact, when he pitched the show, they sat on it for one year because they said they cannot go on with us now because nobody wants to watch a show about white house staffers during the lewinsky impeachment. i have my own personal sense of the timeline of the west wing because i am exactly the right age that my peers are people, people i knew in the yelp political union went into politics because they watch the west wing. they watched it in high school and decided that's what they wanted to do with their lives. i think living in d.c. where i do now, there are an awful lot of people whom that is true. i don't know if that is disturbing to the rest of america that they are being ruled by a ruling class that their careers because of a tv show but it is true.

the tragic irony of that is that aaron sorkin is not himself, and especially political person. that is the substance of my critique. he has said over and over again that he did not make the west wing because he cares about politics. he just likes the sound of smart people debating. smart people talking to each other. it just seemed like politics was a good venue for having smart people talk to each other. he was almost the pied piper to my generation, drawing people into politics without himself carrying all that much about it one way or another. host: that sounds a good thing, drawing people into politics. where is the problem? guest: the problem is this idealism is essentially false. this idea of going into politics because you will change the world. the rosy world of the west drink is very different from the

nitty-gritty of how you actually get things done in washington. you get people who i would say all are naive about politics because they -- their view of what they do what shaped by the west wing. if you watch the show, you will notice that there are many ripped from the headlines examples. dede morris was a consultant on the show and so are clinton there -- veterans. you will be able to recognize oh, that storyline, that is something that happened in 96. the more of the stories you notice, the more it becomes clear that he change the ending. aaron sorkin took the stories from the clinton years and gave them a happy ending. there was an instance where, a funny story from the clinton years is that a phrase from the communist manifesto was dropped in a state of the union address and it went through nine different drafts before an intern pointed out and asked we

should be quoting karl marx. whereas in the west wing, they catch it right away. he altered history in order to make it come out right in the end but the truth is in real politics, things don't always turn out right in the end and the noble idealists don't win. if you go in thinking that they will, you will make mistakes. host: what you say that the people inspired to go into politics inspired bite west wing where like-minded in their ideology or does it cross with equal ideologies? guest: i really want to be fair to aaron sorkin. he did his very best to not make the west wing and exclusively liberal show. he brought in conservative republican consultants. veterans of bush one and tried to write republican characters who were noble and just as

high-minded as his liberal democratic characters. he tried to be fair. the truth is, it did not come off. a lot of them are just in hollywood. it has a liberal slant. despite his best efforts to make an high-minded, i don't think he succeeded. host: i couldn't help that while reading the chapter, it was nbc who gave us the west wing but starting in 2005, they gave us the apprentice starting -- starring donald trump. there is another program that had a big impact on politics. any thoughts about that? guest: if you wanted to put the change in politics in the last 30 years into a sentence, it is been a lot more like a reality show. the election of donald trump is in apotheosis of that. i don't think that's a good thing. there's a funny story where the creator of the -- veep said

where he looked around the obama white house to get a sense of how it is on the west wing. he said the people that showed him around pointed out little things in terms of the west wing. like uh-oh, that is where josh worked. he was thinking to himself, those are fake people. it would be much better if you said that's where i work or somebody else works because you are real. why are you thinking about your own job in terms of this tv show from 1999? it's really not very good to think about your job as a tv show if you work in the west wing but as the story shows, that is how people think of it. guest: both of these series air at a time when tv was the dominant entertainment medium. now, it is a multitude of streaming services and cable networks and lots of choice. is it still possible for a video

series to have as much impact as you think the west wing did? guest: i do. actually. one thing aaron sorkin has been criticized for was being a bitnet phobic. he has dropped into a lot of it shows denigrating comments about online news and things like daca. he is much more comfortable in the old media of -- you get the sense he would be happy when there were three networks and that was it. i think people tend to go too far in the other direction and overrate the importance of online news. i think tv, hollywood, and movies have an immense amount of power. more even than politics.

the decisions made by a hollywood film producers and writers are in many ways more important than the ones made by once in the west wing. aaron sorkin's grandiose sense of the grandiose -- power of tv is much more power. host: who is camille paglia? guest: she is a humble professor. a public intellectual of a time and rather old-fashioned today. there are not many celebrity professors. she burst onto the scene in the nine teen 90's with a book that became a bestseller phenomenon which is unusual for a doorstop of literary criticism but that is a testament to her rhetorical power. she is an inventive writer and when she ventured into punditry and weight into day-to-day

culture in addition to her academic work, she made herself a celebrity commentator undeservedly because she is a really brilliant writer. host: what is your critique of her? guest: if you were to look at the accomplishment -- her compliments, their greatest one is the idea that popular culture is just as legitimate a subject of academic inquiry as the great classics. that is an uphill battle for her in the 90's when she was saying that madonna is just as legitimate a subject for me to be thinking about as a professor as nielsen. i think the consequences of that revolution, bringing pop culture into the academy and overrating its importance and substance has been that nowadays, you have

lots of professors in the academy who know pop culture and nothing else. they get there phd in soprano studies because thanks to her pop-culture revolution, you can do that now whatever else you want to say that about her, she is an immensely educated woman. she was bringing that 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 don't have that grounding. i think it was probably a mistake for her to elevate pop-culture and visual culture to the same level as the great classics. host: let's hear her in her own words. business from 2017 she was discussing her book. >> i was not one of the pro-sex

feminists. in the 70's for example, i loved charlie's angels. i loved cosmopolitan, meanwhile, the other feminists were occupying offices and askg for home magazines to be shut down. there was no way i could be taken into the woman's movement that i was drummed out of it from the start. anybody who says that, i was not made by betty fredette. debt -- she did not create jermaine greer in australia or me in upstate new york. it is about time people realize the transformations and women that happen radically in the mid-20th century are not due to the women's movement. host: in her chapter, you not only talk about the dumbing down of academia at we talked about but you talk about the great rise in another fee as acceptable in our culture.

what do you see is her role in that? guest: she talked about feminism in that clip and i think that is why a lot of political conservatives really like her. she was just a slashing enemy of the second wave feminists. it was wonderful to see her take them down. she saw them as up tight in school girlish. i think that was a case where conservatives thought the enemy of my enemy was my friend. that is not really the case with camille probably appeared she is a pro-sex feminists, she called herself. that was effective when she was trying to take down the schoolmarm a second wave. at let her to be naive in her own way about what would happen in the aftermath of sexual liberation. she has said she loved another

fee. she loves prostitution because she believes they are liberating. however that may have looked to her in the perspective in the 70's for a millennial growing up in a time of streaming video, we live in the most foreign saturated generation and all of human history. it is not an exaggeration. this is unprecedented. it is had a lot of toxic effects that i think she should have been able to foresee but did not. host: such as? guest: let's see. pornography today is a lot more toxic than it ever was. in addition to being a lot more widespread, people are seeing it at younger ages. more people look at it. the rise in streaming videos did something very bad to the pornography industry. because all the videos available

for free, producers are no longer able to compete on price. in order to get their product eyeballed, the only mention they can compete on is going to greater and greater feats of insanity and making things more depraved. that is the only way to set their product apart and ate saturated market for per fee as it exists now on a place like red two. what that does is it leads to a ratcheting up and up and up. another fee is no longer, if you hear it and you are thinking eight 1970's playboy spread, but is not what is out there right now. it is a lot more dangerous and deforming to the sexualities of young people, especially on they are fed a constant diet of it from the age of 13. that is definitely one thing different between her day and

hours. -- ours. host: you say -- you have a stat that most people can't appoint by 11. what is the impact on humans being exposed to point at that early age. what do you see is happening to your children going forward? host: guest: hopefully by the time i children are by that age, things will have changed. sexuality -- think of it as a river, carving out a canyon. if you form certain habits, they might be a matter of choice when you're young but if you persist in them, they become deeper and deeper and harder to get out of that is why so many millennials talk about in the language of addiction. if you like they are addicted to these videos. it is just very hard to break

those habits once you form them. if you are being formed by videos that are more and more depraved because of the dynamic i explained, that will make people sexually different than any other generation. that is why you see millennials with the form sexualities. host: this is a chapter on academia and feminism. i am wondering about the #metoo movement heard whether or not that is a product of the millennial generation and how that intersects with the rise and exposure to pornography in society. guest: in many ways, the #metoo movement was the result of the kind of liberation that camille probably is talking about. when she has her line of pro-sex feminism, that doesn't just liberate women, it liberates men as well. turns out when you liberate men

to act on the sexualities, it's not always pretty. it's funny. i think camille probably a has consistently underrated the damage caused by sexual harassment. she has this idea that women should shut down sexual harassment by being wonderful and empowering and telling men don't do that. when it doesn't always work that way. she wrote a book about the birds. the alfred hitchcock movie. that is a movie that had a notorious case of sexual harassment going on the set with alva hitchcock torturing the start because she would not go to bed with him. camille probably a in her book rights as if she should have been an empowered woman and told him no and stood up to the torture. it wasn't that big a deal. in a way that kind of downplays

how traumatic that moviemaking experience was for her camille probably is inability to talk honestly about alfred hitchcock's sexual harassment in her book on the movie where it happened is an encapsulating example of what is naive about her sex feminism. host: i want to focus on al sharpton. if you look in our library, there are hundreds of videos of us covering him over the course of his career. he is in front of the cameras frequently. the one we chose is quite recent. national action network which is his organization what -- library . let's watch. >> they keep telling me about how it will change.

that black parents have to have these conversations. how we have to explain that if a cop stops you, don't reach for the glove compartment. don't talk back. the 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 knee on our neck while we cry for our lives. we need a new confrontation. host: you say he is different from some of the other people you profiled because he grew up wanting to be what he was: a minister where others had an arc

of their lifetime of change. what are his accomplishments? what start with that. guest: 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 his effectiveness. he is the kind a guy where if you got some kind of racial conflict in your town there has been a police shooting, you can get them on the phone and he will come there. there are dozens of examples of him doing that over the years. in the clip you played, i think that is a great illustration of the downside of that consistency. he is still talking today as if race relations have not changed since he first became a campaigner in the 1960's. there have been no progress. he is just running the same old playbook.

i think that is probably the biggest weakness of him as a civil rights campaigner. however effective he might be at it. host: this chapter is a discussion with you about the difference between transformational and transactional leadership. you talk about those concepts and how effective each is? guest: there are two kinds of leaders, basically. transformational and transactional. his concept and how he thinks about his own leadership. a transformational reader kind of changes the way people think. martin luther king was a transformational leader. he was changing minds, altering people's hearts but transactional leader is something much more humble. he is a dealmaker. he tries to forge compromises. one of the greatest revolutions that the boomers accomplished

was saying that transformational leadership is the only good kind transactional leaders should be looked down upon. they are compromising with the enemy, there is no nobility in that. they are sellouts. that is what i transactional leader is. the truth is, it is really important. if you got groups of people who disagree and you need to make a deal, you need to make compromises hurt you need somebody who's went to sacrifice a little bit of his sound of idealism and get it accomplished. by denigrating transactional leadership, the boomers made it harder for us to reach satisfactory compromises. al sharpton is definitely trying to be a leader and a transformational mood but at the expense of worthwhile compromise. host: you do reference difference between al sharpton and the black lives matter

movement leaders. what is the difference in how they operate in their potential for success and changing society? guest: the difference is entirely too sharp ends advantage it -- advantage e outclass them in other ways. compared to the black lives matter's leaders, he is better. i would take them over here -- take him over them over days. it is a matter of democracy. al sharpton, even his most bitter enemies know he is a leader with a following. is the kind of guy who can get people on the phone and get thousands of people to his rallies. when he ran for mayor in the 1990's, he very nearly one the democratic party nomination. it wasn't just the black vote that got him there. thousands of people pulled the lever for him. by contrast, deray mckesson one of the big leaders to come out of ferguson tried his hand at a

democratic contest and wanted to run for mayor of baltimore and he got something like 3000 votes. 3%. he did not do well in that spread. the power of the black lives matter movement comes from social media but that doesn't translate to actual people with actual democratic support from normal, ordinary people. whatever else you have to say about al sharpton, he has that. host: what you think about the numerous protests that have arisen and their power to affect change in society? guest: i am quite critical of them and i think they come from a place of anxiety to be honest. at the time, and the golden age of the civil rights movement,

there it was a race problem of black-and-white. today, that is a longer the case. hispanics out number blocks to-one. asians outnumber black. we live in a multicultural america and not just a biracial one. that changes the 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 races. i think there is innings -- and anxiety and that does this mean our day is over? are we no longer the most important minority? we can no longer rush to the front of the conversation went america is talking about racial issues? because there is that anxiety, their issues may no longer be of such preeminent importance the way they were in the 60's. they need to be as loud as

possible and have this huge movement for people say our issues are not as important. and so, the fear of becoming multicultural america people talk about white anxiety being a driver of racial issues. i think that is a kind of anxiety underreported and is feeling a lot of the current protests. host: one of the tangible results of this year in the areas of civil rights and race relations is the removal of confederate symbols across the country. in the american conservative magazine and essay on robert e. lee, you said to use aside with the people who want to tear down those monuments indicating you've changed your mind. why? guest: i used to trust that it would stop there. that the people who wanted to tear down robert e. lee would

not than demand tearing down thomas jefferson and george washington as well. i think the last year has shown that was overly optimistic on my part. the people who wanted to tear down the monuments in virginia would not stop at robert e. lee and that they are going to tear down columbus. and also ulysses s grant who owned a slave for five minutes despite being a great union general, his statue got toppled this year. a lot of the trust i had in the people who were tearing down the statues is gone. that is really what that is coming from. host: does each generation have the right to decide its own heroes? guest: the danger of answering yes that question is that it means everything is always up for grabs. you lose any sense of historical continuity.

it leaves you a great sense of arrogance on the part of being young. we can reinvent history every five minutes if we wanted to. we don't owe anything to our ancestors. the truth is, i think we owe a lot to history. we come into this world as inheritors of a great tradition and civilization, and country. it is our job to first of all be grateful for that and to be good stewards of what we inherited and passed along. the boomers have no sense of continuity in that way. i think that is something we need to recapture. no, each one does not get to reinvent america on its own. we need to act like an link in the chain. host: each of them have 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? guest: all of them are people with enormous accomplishment. i did not want to profile anybody who was a total failure or was someone i did not respect. i respect and admire all of the boomers i profiled. as a writer, i was attracted to stories with a tragic irony to them. they try to accomplish something great and it had affects contrary to their intentions that they did not foresee. that is the essence of good storytelling and tragedy. the accomplishment and achievement of these people is a crucial part of the story. an example would be steve jobs. he contributed enormously to civilization. anybody who owns a iphone owes a

debt to him. it really came from a noble sentiment from his part kurt he thought that computers could liberate human creativity and in many ways, they did. we certainly owe him attitude for that. the trouble is that it also enabled the uberization of the economy. if you talk about millennial gripes, gig economy is at the top of that list. millennials are economically precarious as employees and any other generation in the last 100 years. that has been enabled by the very technology that steve jobs thought would set us free. it has left us insulated as these types of employees. the two sides of the coin are inseparable and that is a good example. host: you describe the damage is

being irreparable. when i read that, it made me think it doesn't give much credit to the millennial generation and their ability to craft their own way in american society. guest: i will give you another example. one huge difference. if you're a time travel you and from 1960 to 1920, 1 of the huge differences is women in the workplace. it used to be that three quarters of families in america were single earner families. today, it is about two thirds dual earners. there is huge social revolution. i think in many ways, there are a lot of millennials who think they are only in dual earner households because they have to be. the women say they would love to stay home and raise their kids but financially, we could not make it work. i am a believer and what is the two income track. what happened in the 70's and

90's went women flooded the workplace is that it did not actually make their households that are off because it just led to a beating war for middle-class amenities like housing and cars so that now, the requirements for a middle-class life are just more expensive and you need to earners to get them. -- 2. if you are a millennial today thinking ok, that was a mistake to tell women that you have to be in the workforce in order to be a self actualized human being, that is a mistake. maybe you can set you can work if you want to but it should not be a economic requirement. the problem is you cannot do that because of the two income trap. financially, the economic reality now is that you need to earners for this lifestyle.

even if lots of millennials think that was a mistake, we should go back, we can't because of the effect of the two income trap. there are a lot of things like that where millennials are like, we should probably go back but they are just not able to. host: we have about 15 minutes left. our country is about to be led by not a boomer but joe biden will be 78, a member of the silent generation. as is nancy pelosi at age 80. mitch mcconnell is also part of the sound generation. what is the impact on the country of a leadership structure the highest point of structure being members of the sound generation? guest: i think we might've seen our last boomer president. good riddance to bad rubbish. i'd be perfectly happy if we had not another boomer president

ever again. i think even when the personnel in d.c. is no longer boomers, we are still living in their world. politics is still played by boomer rules. kind of the hinge point after which that became true when the ascendancy took over politics was in 1972. when 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 and that is how the left-wing party sees itself. democratic party is still that way today. that is why you see the dramatic shift where it is the left-wing party used to have an advantage

with people without college educations whereas now, people without educations in the working class are bizarrely voting for the right wing party. i think that is a deep tragedy. the whole point of liberalism is to be championing the lease advantage. but if you are dominated by people with college degrees and getting the votes of people without them, you've sold out the people you're supposed 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 all left-wing unions and the working class whether joe biden is president or not, it is still a boomer party and boomer politics we are living in. host: the 117 congress will have 31 millennials in it even though in 2019, millennial's the

majority population. what -- where they're not warm up one else in congress? -- why are there not more millennials in congress? guest: that is another case where lineal who are in congress are not ringing a breath of fresh air. there are not bringing anything new it is almost deserving to see how content many lineal's are to just replace the old boomer style of politics. they campaigned for the same issues. have the same slogans. it is a decadence that we are stuck in this replaying the boomer rail. we still of the 60's and the protests as being the height of american politics. we saw that get replayed this year. millennials went out into the streets and had their own

chicago 1968. i really wish millennials would move past this sense of replaying the same boomer real -- reel. i hope they would bring in something new. host: i wanted to tell our audience about you. this year, you tell readers you not only publish your first book you had your first child in the middle of the pandemic what was this year like for you? guest: it worked out very well for me. when i was pregnant and gigantic and not wanting to leave the house, i did not feel like i was missing out on a lot because nobody else left their house. it was surreal but probably less surreal than it would have been otherwise. i was living the pandemic lifestyle anyway.

host: you tell your readers you lost your dad and your book is dedicated to them. he described him as a liberal southern lawyer of the atticus finch type. you also describe your mother as a bit of a hippie. how did a conservative thinker like yourself come from these parents? guest: it's not an exaggeration to say it my father was like atticus finch, not just because he was a lawyer but he really did accept payment in kind from indignant clients. in his case, it was not a bunch of people from the cunningham's, it was people who work at a warehouse for books and gave him a complete set of the works of mark twain. a deluxe edition. he accepted that as payment he was a very liberal and in an atticus finch way. if you go back to read to kill a mockingbird or met my father, you would see how wide a conservator streak there is in

that particular brand of liberalism. it is very old-fashioned. i think i could draw the best of what he was able to pass on was not quite liberalism as it was practiced by my millennial peers -- by millennial peers. host: what if you get into journalism? -- why did you get into journalism? guest: it happened by accident. i graduated without knowing what i wanted to do. in a millennial fashion, i just started a blog and from that blog was picked up by a few magazines. i was going to draft it the blogosphere. very millennial story. host: the essay seems to be your preferred format for journalism which runs counter to the age of spare. what is the power of an essay in

conveying ideas today? i think there is a real appetite out there for sustained thought. i think the biggest writer phenomenon when i was young and a teenager growing on was david foster wallace. he was the best writer in america according to the young people i knew. it was a great practitioner of the essay. he finally crafted some of the best essays written in english. incidentally or maybe not coincidentally, he was also a great critic of sound bite addictive media. he was thinking mainly of tv but he would've had things to say about twitter. i think there is a real sense among lineal's and have been since his heyday that the way we

consume media and social media is bad for us. it is bad for our brains. i really hope as a writer, i can offer an alternative to that. i hope to have essays that allow your brain to slow down in substantive thought which you can do over eight tweet. host: what is the best outcome for your buck in the intellectual community? what kind of conversations would you like for it to foster? guest: i want some angry reviews. i want angry pans. i want outrage. i don't think that's true. when i wrote it, i had to make a decision early on. do i want to write a book for conservatives or do i want to read a book for everybody? if you want to sell copies, there's a lot to be said to read

a book just for conservatives. you can read a red meat. it will really gratify people and their outrage. i made a decision not to do that. i note that there aren't liberal millennials out there who are suffering to. i can't quite put my finger on it. i wanted to present my case, my answers to that question. in a way that a liberal reader would not have -- that's what i would hope if good -- it could cross ideological ways. i have my conservative beliefs but this is not just a book for conservatives. host: do you anticipate hearing from the five you profiled who

are still alive? i have -- guest: i approached a few of them. i did not get any bites on that. i hope they think i treated them fairly. if i can get an angry response from any of them, i will be disappointed. i hope that they are flattered. i hope that they at the very least have told their stories very they want to do any promotional events were book tour, i would go up and debate them. host: over the past few months, you've have been on panels representing your support for president trump and as we get to the closing days of his presidency, i wonder what you think his legacy will be? guest: today, four years later,

very proud to have supported president trump in the primary and in the 2016 election. i think there are a lot of issues that the republican establishment didn't want to touch. rings like trade -- things like trade, immigration, skepticism of foreign adventurism. those were untouchable before he talked about them. whether or not he succeeded in making progress on any of those issues and any of the agenda items i care about, at the very least, they are in the conversation now. i think it will be impossible to go back to the world, the pre-trump world where republicans could get away with never talking about trade or immigration or foreign wars. and kind of boring the

passionate leaves of their base. those were contrary to the beliefs of the republican elite. i think a lot of people who were being ignored or a long time are not going to be ignored anymore we have donald trump to thank for that. for that, i have a deep sense of gratitude for him. host: what you think trump voters will find their voice politically? -- where. guest: i don't know. is tulsi gabbard gonna run echo -- run? i think people who voted for trump used to vote democrat. they voted for obama and then voted for trump to i think the question is whether they will go home to the democrats or stick with the republicans. i would be afraid they would go back and vote for the democrats again.

it would be a one-time thing. the republicans cannot get their vote anymore but thankfully, the democratic party is going so far off the left wing and i think it's unlikely to happen which is probably bad for america but good for the republicans. i think those millions of people will hopefully find a home on the right. i hope the right can change and grow in order to make room for them because they would be a very worthy part of any conservative coalition going forward. host: helen andrews new book is called boomers, the men and women who promised them and deliver disaster. available where you buy books. i appreciate it. guest: thank you. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> all q&a programs are available on our website or as a

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