Transcripts For CSPAN2 Yuval Levin A Time To Build 20240713

Clearly into the microphone as we are recording it today and cspan, booktv is here as well. Following the q a we will have a signing at this table and if you have not already purchased your books have plenty at the front of the store at the registers. Tonight im excited to welcome yuval levin to politics and prose celebrating his newest book, a time to build from family and community to congress in the campus how recommitting to our institutions can revive the american dream. As the nation faces increasing divisiveness fueled by partisan politics, cultural wars and populist on both sides he argues that rather than trying to tear down existing institutional frameworks we should be looking to these or these as sources of strength and support. Through a time to build it shows that our Current Crisis isnt completely due to the presence of an oppressive force but to the absence of uniting forces and he urges us to commit ourselves to renewing the vitality of institutions. This ranges from the family and schools to churches and the military. To renew our ties to each other. He is the founder, Founding Editor of national affairs, director of social cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise institute and contribute in editor of national review, cofounder and Senior Editor of the new atlantis and has authored the fractured republic in the great debate. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the new york times, washington post, wall street journal among many others. Please join me in welcoming to politics and prose yuval levin. [applause] thank you very much. I appreciate the welcome and i appreciate you being here tonight. I am excited to chat about this book and what it might say for a moment that takes a little work to understand for it this is a book about what has gone wrong in our country in recent years and what we can do about it. Something that has gone wrong i think is reasonably clear but exactly what it is actually isnt as clear as it sometimes things or imagine or pretend. We americans are in a sense living through a social crisis and we can see that in everything from vicious partisan polarization to rampant cultural resentments and upsurge of isolation, alienation, the spirit that has sent to suicide rates climbing and dripping in academic of oil. Abuse in recent years. These are deep dysfunctions and seemingly very different parts of our society but they seem to have common roots and yet it is not easy to say what exactly those routes are, what exactly has gone wrong. Part of the crisis of one of its symptoms is that we cant quite seem to get a handle on just what that is. Traditional economic concerns dont cut it as explained and we certainly went through a severe recession in 20072008 but it ended more than a decade ago and now weve been living through one of the longest economic expansions in the modern era with very low on appointment and inflation and Interest Rates wages are rising. It is not so americans are suffering economically but the problems we have on that front dont add up to the enormous crisis that we are going through with other familiar measures of wellbeing dont offer obvious explanations either. Americans are as healthy as safe as weve ever been in what are we complaining about . In fact, some people argue there isnt anything to complain about or that the frustration and anxiety that seemed to overwhelm us now are rooted in some kind of imaginary grievances driven by our politics but they themselves might be the problem steven of harvard takes these complaints to be what he describes as an irritable gestures of selfindulgence and gratitude in a recent book he looks over mountains of data on wealth and health and health and safety and choice and he concludes the populace complaints are just detached from reality. Its a dangerous and indiscriminate pessimism can lead to fatalism to wondering why we should throw time and money at a hopeless cause and it can lead to radicalism called smash the machine or drain the swamp. But surely although these kinds of responses are understandable and part in public frustration is not some kind of selfdelusion, especially frustration that runs the steep and revealed itself in such a broad range of symptoms. The happy data are not wrong exactly and neither are the encouraging Economic Indicators but if these dont ask plane the reigning sentiments over time we should ask ourselves what those indicators might be ignoring. What signs we might be missing. Our usual measures of wealth and health and personal freedom dont explain the problem because those familiar indicators important as they are to understanding our society are largely material an individual. The ss are wellbeing on her own but none of us can experience wellbeing on our own and it is exactly the joys of society and the junctures of individuals being intricacies of life that trouble showed. Many of our struggles seem rooted and relational problems, loneliness and isolation, mistrust, suspicion, alienation, polarization and these are the things that we have now and their failures of sociality. They fall into a blind spot for our technical culture so how do we explain a crisis of connectedness like this . Some people argue the trouble is fundamentally philosophical, metaphysical that liberalism has failed, they say, because it fails to offer a sufficient vocabulary or architecture for solidarity. Other people say although traditional measures of growth and prosperity might look fine are probably still economic in a deeper sense, socio sons and they say can separate capital zone creates levels of inequality that make it impossible for people to feel like equal parts of a larger hole or to believe in legitimacy of our Political Economic order. Other people suggest external pressures like trade or immigration for internal pressures like racism or identity politics have left us incapable of hanging together and there is some truth to all these things, surely, they all get something important to write treat human person as embedded in a larger hole whether metaphysical or moral or social or economic and they see that what is wrong now has to do with the way in which we live out that indebtedness. I think they are still missing something crucial. When we think about our problems in these ways we tend to imagine our society as a vast, open space that is full of people who are having trouble linking hands. We talk about breaking down walls are building bridges or loverly playing fields, casting unifying narrative but there is a missing step joining together and recovering and belonging and trust and legitimacy. What we are missing although we really put it this way is a structure, a shape for our social life, a way to give purpose and concrete meaning and identity for the things we did together. If American Life is a big open space it is not space filled with individuals but a space filled with structures of social life, its a space filled with institutions and if we are too often failing to foster belonging in legitimacy and trust more than a failure of connection we confront the failure of institutions. Institutions do a lot more they connect us in understanding our social crisis in terms of what they are and what they do could help us to see that crisis in a new light. That is the understanding that this book tries to advance. What is an institution . Wants it wont surprise you to learn there are a lot of different academic definitions of the turbid the book thanks through a number of these but for our purposes let me suggest a general definition, it draws together Academic Work but looks to the problem that we confront in our society now. By institutions i mean the durable forms of our common life, the shapes in the structures of what we do together so some institutions are organizations and they have Something Like a corporate form, university or hospital or school or business or Civic Association and these are all institutions and technically, legally formalized and some institutions are durable form and maybe they are shaped by laws or norms or rules but without a Corporate Structure the family is an institution and in some ways the first and foremost institution of every society we could talk about the institution of marriage or political or particular tradition of profession as an institution and the rule of law itself is an institution. That they are durable is essential. And it comes institution keeps the general shape over time and so it shapes the realm of life in which it might be said to operate it. Usually changes only very gradually and incrementally, flash mobs dont count as institutions. Most important what is distinct about the institution is that it will form in the deepest sense, a form is a structure, contour and it is the shape of the whole, the organization that speaks of its purpose and logic and function in meaning. A social form, an institution, is not just a bunch of people but a bunch of people ordered together to achieve a purpose to pursue a goal and to advance an idea and that means institutions are also, by their nature, formative and structure our interactions and as a result of that they structure us and shape our habits, expectations and ultimately they shape our character. They help to form us and that formative role is how institutions relate to the social crisis we are living through now. When we think about the role of institutions in American Life now we might tend to think first in terms of our loss of trust or institutions and we talk about that a lot and is a trend we hear about, measures that are easy to find and paint a grim picture. Gallup has kept track of what it calls on americans confidence institutions for decades and in most cases it started out doing this in the early 1970s and continues to do it on a regular basis and the trend is unmistakable. From big business and banks and professions to the branches of the federal government, the news media, the academy found confidence in our institutions have been plummeting consistently and in the early 70s 80 of americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in doctors and hospitals, for example. Last year at that figure was 37 . Forty years ago 65 of americans that they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in organized religion but last year less than 40 said that. 60 of americans express confidence in the Public Schools in the early 70s, just about a third did last year. Even in 1975 a year after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace 52 of americans expressed confidence in the presidency. Last year 32 did. Gallup even found amazingly that 42 of the public had confidence in congress in the 1970s and last year that figure was 12 and even that seems high and you have to wonder who these people are who say their prominence in congress. This pattern holds for just about all the institutions that gallup asked about. Military is the only major exception will think about that in the second but the overall trend is unmistakable. The iraqi public has gone from extraordinary levels of confidence in our major institutions to really striking levels of mistrust. What do we mean when we say that we dont trust institutions . The answer has a lot to do with what institutions are and do. It takes us back to that question of how they form us in every Significant Institution carries out some important task in society. They educate children, enforced the law or serving the poor just providing service and making some product meeting a need we have. It does that by establishing a structure and process of a form for combining peoples efforts toward a common scene that task but in the process that institution also forms that people to carry out that task effectively and responsibly and reliably, it shapes the people within it to be trustworthy and thats what it means to trust in institutions but we trust in institution and it has an ethic that make the people within it more trustworthy. We might trust the little institution when it takes seriously the Public Interest and forms the people in it to do the same. We trust the military because of als courage and honor and duty and carrying out the defense of the country and it clearly shapes people who do that too. We trust the business because it promises quality and integrity and meeting a need we have and seems to reward its people when they deliver and we trust the school because it builds the culture and makes its people devoted to learning and teaching and keeping kids happy and safe. We trust the Journalistic Institution for example because it has high standards of honesty or accuracy and in reporting the news and it makes its people reliable. We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that a place that kind of ethical or formative role, shaping the people within it to be trustworthy. One way that can happen is when institutions claim to enforce an ethic of response ability but plainly fail to do that and instead shield and empower bad behavior like when a bank treats its customers or when a member of the clergy abuses a child and that kind of gross abuse of power obviously undermines public trust and institutions and is a familiar form of corruption but is not new and there are plenty of examples of it in our time but there are plenty of examples in every time. It does not quite explain the distinct loss of confidence in institutions in our day but another related but different way which institutions could lose her trust is when it fails to impose an ethic on people within it altogether and doesnt seem to see that formation as a purpose and when the people in the institutions no longer see it as a mold of their character and behavior but as a platform for themselves to perform on and to raise their profiles and to be seen in society. An institution like that seems not to be worthy of our trust, not because it failed to earn above because it doesnt seem to seek it or desired it and i think Something Like that has been happening to a lot of our institutions in American Life in the last few decades. We dont think of our institutions as formative but is performative and with the presidency and congress are just stages for performative political outrage when a University Becomes a venue for virtue signal lean on one side or the other and when journalism is indistinguishable for activism on one side or the other and when the Church Becomes a political stage they become a lot harder to trust because they arent asking for our trust, theyre just asking for our attention. In our time a lot of the most significant social and political and cultural, intellectual institutions in our country are in the process of going through this transformation from old to platform. The few exceptions and most notably the military and unabashedly formative of our National Institutions seem to prove that rule because they tend to be the few institutions in which we arent losing faith. Many of the truly novel institutions of the 21st century, especially the virtual institutions of social media are inherently shaped as platforms and not as molds. It would be strange to trust a platform and we generally dont. That change of attitude that decline in the expectation of our institutions should be formative of the people within them is at the heart of our loss in state of institutions and its at the turn of our broader social crisis because institutions understood as part forms rather than molds is a stage to perform on more than it means to form and shape our character are less able to offer us a but subjects of loyalty and sources of legitimacy and ways of Building Mutual trust. Examples of this transformation from a platform are everywhere around us once you start looking for it. Many cases our institutions are being made into platforms not just for any performance but for a performative virtue and performative outrage in that vast polarized culture war that is so much of our society is living through. In one institution after another we find people who ought to think of themselves as insiders shaped by distinct purpose and integrity of the institutions they are in but instead function as outsiders display themselves, building their own personal brand. This is obvious in politics and is there any doubt that donald trump sees the presidency as a stage for performative outrage in himself as a performer acting on it rather than as an executive acting in and through it. What exactly is he doing when he tweets his displeasure at the department of justice. The department of Justice Works for him and if he had a sense of his job that is shaped by the institutional contours he would direct the executive branch rather than complain about it and maybe its a good thing he doesnt know he could do that but he could and the president normally would and his sense of his job is just another stage for the Reality Television shows that his life has been for so long but is there any question at the same time that many members of congress, both parties now run for office less to be involved and legislate a bark and work of a prominent platform in the culture wars and to become more visible and cable news or talk radio and to build a bigger social media following and to use that elected office mostly as a platform to complain about the various institutions they worked so hard to enter. They see that is what their voters want and so they are always performing with their core partisan audience. Our two Major Political parties now really any other than to platforms other than displaying or elevating narcissism. To even remember what the rule of the palooka party is to be . We look beyond politics and think about the profession of journalism as an example. It is institutional strength and its insistence on a formative integrity and on a process of editing and verification that helps us to be sure that what it provides is reliable. Today a lot of leader journalists constantly step outside of those institutional constraints and address the public directly on social media or cable news building their own personal brands on a platform rather than participating in the work of institutions. If you look in on twitter you will find a lot of professional reporters effectively professionalizing themselves. Journalists who are compliant complaining about how donald trump is in office should consider whether his behavior relative to what the presidency is might be unnervingly similar to the behavior of a lot of leading clinical journalists relative to what journalism is, both are playing out a selfindulgent celebrity version of the real thing and both cases that renders them less able to do their appropriate and very important work. You can see the same pattern in the academy rather than serving the institutional purpose of that university which is to form some portion of the rising generation through teaching and learning we find a lot of people in the university using the institution as a platform for virtue signaling or for political, cultural theatrics and there is a version of the same thing and some version of americans religions were institutions exist to transform souls are being used instead as platforms for political theater, culture war drama so the cachet of the church is used less to form those within it than to let them express themselves. We can see that pattern throughout American Life that the distortion of institutionalism amounts to practice to the great unasked question of our time, given my role here how should i behave and that is what someone who takes an institution they are involved when seriously would ask. A lot of the trouble that faces our core institutions now could be described as a widespread failure to act for that simple kind of question, given my role here how should i behave as a president and as a member of congress and as a teacher or scientist and as a pastor or worker or parent or neighbor what should i do here . I would bet the people they should most respect these days seem to ask this kind of question before they make important judgments and i would bet the people who drive you crazy who you think are part of the problem in america seem somehow to constantly fail to ask that sort of question when they should. We always find yourself thinking how could that person have done that given what their response abilities are and that is one way to understand the transformation of our expectation for the institutions which has so much to do with a broader set of problems that we are dealing with. Its left americans with a sense that our institutions can be trusted they arent in the business of earning trust and that has left us short of sources of formation, belonging, legitimacy and social cohesion and the problem does not explain the social crisis we are living through but it is one important factor behind that crisis that we are particularly likely to miss or ignore it because they arent good at seen the institutions and grasping at what they are for. We see through them at the normal times like the air and we only notice it when something is wrong and something is wrong now. What can we do about it . Look like this often have a final chapter were having diagnosed some kind of, get a problem the author offers an agenda and it turns out this moment calls for whatever it is that author has always wanted, government to do. That is true and it calls for whatever it wants it to do but this book does not protect her like that because i think dealing with this problem requires to begin with a change of mindset. Witnessing failure is a response bully of so many of our institutions we are tempted to disposition to demolish and uproot and conclude that on the outsiders can save us. That is why so much of the energy of our politics is spent tearing down supposedly powerful establishments. In fact, we dont need more outsiders who pretend they are critics with no power to act. We need more insiders, institutionalists who will be earnest both in their efforts to build frameworks for common action and in their acceptance of their duties that accompany power. Those in our society that have the most followers arent leaders and they need especially to resist the urge pretend they are outsiders and so many do so often now. Everyone else does too but we should all try to embrace the responsibilities that come with whatever positions we do hold and we should ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabited the institutions that we each are a part of to love them necessary to reform them and help make them more lovely to other people too. We need to understand ourselves as formed by the institutions and to act accordingly and to ask ourselves in moments of decision not just what do i want but what should i do here given my role in my position. Questions like these might seem like an awfully small response to the enormous kinds of problems that i started with and of course they are only a start but they are how we can begin to work to a change of mindset and add up and make a difference but if our leaders asked them more often our politics would be improved a lot and of professionals in many fields thought this way more it would be easier to trust their expertise and to accept their claims to authority. The people who participate in all the institutions that we are a part of try to think this way it would be easier to feel like we belong to something worthwhile. That change of mindset is not a substitute for institutional reform, its an essential prerequisite. We do need Institutional Reforms and i want to be clear i dont think the problem can be solved as a people dont trust institutions enough. The problems is that our institutions are not trustworthy enough. Its also important to organize that there are other serious reasons to be careful and skeptical about institutions in American Society and they are a lot of ways in which institutions can be oppressive and limit our freedom of choice and impose hierarchies on us and can be slow to change and hard to move in more than that some institutions in our society could literally be oppressive, the term institutionalized racism is not a metaphor but a reality of American Life and the disposition of strong institutions arose for serious reasons and the arguments for transparency, for individualism emerged as a corrective to excessively rigid and imperious institutionalism. Words like that are serious and need to be heated but we have to see that populism and individualism and anti institutionalism also involve serious tradeoffs. Institutions can be terribly oppressive and yet we cant do without them. It is true that we can reinforce the rule of the strong or privileged in our society and its true that without functional institutions the week have no hope of vindicating their rights. Our institutions have sometimes and body oppression but they can embody our highest ideal. To defend institutions is not to defend the status quo or the strong or the privileged but functional institutions are most important for people who dont have power or privilege for those who do will be fine whatever happens and those institutions can become cold and bureaucratic and they are essential to our acting on our warmest sentiments to read without them they grow isolated, alienated, disillusioned and we see that around us. This is the irony we confront now in American Life, the failures of our institutions that have led us to demand that they be uprooted or demolished but we cant address those failures without renewing and rebuilding those various institutions but we are right to be fed up with them sometimes and we need them to be respectable and legitimate. It is right that anti institutionalism should guide our reactions of institutional strength in American Life but our problems today are much more like excesses of institutional weakness and so they require recommitment and reform rather than resentment. There is nothing weaker than American Life now then the establishment. I say recommitment and reform in that order because our attitude has to change first. This book does get into structural and Institutional Reforms that could help the particular institutions i talk about, congress and beluga parties with profession and the academy and civic and religious life but the common denominator when it comes to those reforms is that if the people in those institutions have to want them to happen. That means that they have to first see that the ways they are not behaving are a big part of the problem with and that by making key institutions impossible to trust or contribute in to a profound and destructive set of social dysfunctions. In one arena after another of our National Life we face the challenge of trying alienated people back into our institutions but we can point to all kinds of completed theory about how to build the trust acquired to a compass that but the simplest way is for the people who inhabit our institutions, that is for all of us, to try to be more trustworthy. We each can work at that. We can give our Institutional Response bully is more of our time and effort and give them more of our identity or selfconsciousness and we can understand ourselves as defined by those institutions that matter most in our own lives print we can judge ourselves by their standards, hold ourselves up to their ideals and take seriously their forms of integrity and we work to reform them where they are failing to help them work better and be more worthy of trust and confidence. We can youre not for the formless upon me of the independent contractor but for the rootedness and the response bully of the member and partner and worker and the owner and a citizen. There is a word for attitudes like that, the word is devotion. What is required of us now is devotion to the work we do together with other people in the service of a common aspiration and therefore devotion to the institution that we compose and inhabit. That devotion does call for sacrifice and full commitment and calls on each of us to pledge ourselves to some institution we belong to unabashedly to abandon ironic distance and dispassionate analysis and jump in sometimes and that devotion is not only necessary but attractive just now. We want objects of devotion and something to commit to but we often dont see that what we are looking for is right within our reach and it is easy to be fashionable rebels and it is harder to remind yourselves why our core commitments are worthwhile and that is the kind of case that institutionalism now involves and why it is crucial. What i am proposing here is a modest change in our stance toward our country and toward the social crisis that it confronts. Not a social revolution or clinical truth ration, at least not directly, just a greater awareness of how integrity and trust and confidence, belonging and meaning are established in our lives in a greater care about what inhabits has tended to cut us off from them. These habits have left us feeling like there is no one we can trust except cynics and outsiders and nothing we can do except register our outraged people and ideas that we disagree with. That is with the life of our society would look like without functional institutions but the fact is our society has many functional institutions and it could have many more if we devote ourselves to strengthening and reforming those that we are a part of and if we respond to needs and problems by building and rebuilding institutions rather than just expressing frustration from the outside. Thinking and speaking a little differently about how we live together can make a bigger difference than we might imagine what it could help us see what weve been missing to do and what do what weve been neglecting it to say what we only assume are taken for granted for small steps like those are what make great change is possible and are constructive and build upon each other and turn us all into builders. That, in the end, is the character of the transportation we need to. The demolition crews have been allowed for too long to define the spirit of this era in American Life. Where we are headed will be up to the builders in the rebuilders. That is what each of us should seek to be. Thank you very much. [applause] to give you an over view of the book im happy to take questions and dig in a little deeper. There is a microphone appear. Great talk smack thank you. Im curious the extent to which you think this is exclusively an american problem. You look beyond the u. S. And what are the lessons we can learn from that . Well, its not a uniquely american problem. If you think about the picture of the crisis that i start with, similar crises are happening in the west, politics of populism and a breakdown in trust and confidence and trust in government and it is lower in europe than in the United States and has been for a long time. That is saints only because of comments in government in the United States is quite low. I do think there are some distinct ways americans look through institutions and treat them as invisible trade we identify authenticity with unmediated in a different way than many other people our culture is rooted in a kind of protestantism that just doesnt trust mediating institutions that wants direct access so we have always been attracted to outsiders and to mavericks in our politics have drawn that figure. There was an exception coming out of the Second World War and the depression and decades of mobilization we have unusual confidence and high confidence and i was not the norm bid that was an odd moment but it was an odd moment that defined our sense of the default so living now in america that has institutions feels to us much more broken and much more peculiar than it otherwise might and we still live with those norms that the baby boomers grew up with and our leaders still are those baby boomers we are testing them at how elderly our leaders can get. [laughter] it turns out pretty elderly. I do think theres something distinct about this american approach that contributes to this program that it ought to be a part of the solution but the breakdown of social trust and the rise of populism is certainly not just an american problem. Thank you for your talk. We watched two different versions of the reality play out in our politics recently and your points of institutional faith healers in the formative nature of some actors are well taken but i thank you have not properly addressed another contributing factor, opposition to both expertise and expert. This is a longstanding pattern. For example, the client and trust in major newspapers. I tell my students to read more than eight watch and to avoid news engineered to give them a dopamine hit of righteousness. What would you do to address this problem . You are right. Your students are lucky to have that advice. I think its very much connected to what i get at here and its very much a part of the discussion in this book is this loss of trust and expertise. The question is why do we trust experts . That has a lot to do with why we trust institutions which is to say we trust them when we think they are formed in a way that gives them Greater Authority than the average person on some particular subject. The Scientific Method gives scientists more authority because its clear that before they say somebody theyve gone through a process that helps them figure out what is likely to be true and what is impaired we do trust that happens though even our trust in scientists has declined quite a lot in america in the last few decades. I think journalism, as i mentioned, strives for Something Like that to show that it has a method that makes it worthy of our trust. The expertise in general works that way and that the transformation of a lot of the professional institutions that form experts that weigh into, in some cases, stages for political performance but in any case the sense that the public has that all these institutions of authority, no less than they say, has a lot to do with the publics loss of trust and connected to the populism in our politics and its also driven by a set of technological advances that gives everyone the misimpression they know as much as the doctor. People show up with the stuff on the internet and we all now because of the kind of fragmentation of the media and culture we imagine that we have access to all the knowledge in the world and therefore we dont meet experts but that is not actually what experts are. Experts dont just have knowledge but have experience and a prudence that is built from the practice of applying knowledge in a world and i think thats an idea that our culture doesnt want to hear. You can see it in politics two. That is the war of the outsider but it politics requires knowledge and experience. You know, you would not think so now and when people run for office they proclaim how little experience they have and take pride in the fact that theyve never done this before but im not sure thats a great way to prove that you could be president. And so, i think the pattern has a great deal to do with why try to get at which is the sense in which our idea of an institutions exist to form people and to give them a certain kind of shape in the life of a society is a way to make them trustworthy and to make those individuals trustworthy. We still want expertise at some level. You dont want to hear from your surgeon is average and its not great news, you want to know that they know what theyre doing and they can prove it. And a lot of our public life we dont admit to ourselves that that expertise has value but i think thats part of the cultural picture that im trying to draw. Thank you, thank you very much for the presentation but i enjoyed it a lot. It certainly gave me a lot to think about. Most recent comments there i think have a lot to do with my question and may be answering my question. One of the things you said was you wanted to include the professions among institutions and your comments about doctors and medicine and so forth or along those lines. Im not clear about whether it sounds like the loss of faith in professions as institutions and in your mind is true for people from the outside of those but i wonder, i dont get the sense that from within the inside Scientific Community or inside the medical community, for that matter or inside the Engineering Community for that matter, that there is a crisis of confidence in their own institution. I think it is hard to sustain that confidence when the public doesnt trust you. I would say that in a lot of what we think of as the core professions there is a sense that the educational institutions and institutions of practice that give you a place in the profession have lost some of their authority and people do look for shortcuts and look for ways to gain prominence of public profiles more than to work their way through the kind of normal steps involved in gaining expertise. I dont think it has collapsed. Medicine, on some level, you have to know particular things in order to practice medicine. You cant just pretend to know them but i do think there is a way in which the larger societys loss of trust in these institutions is connected to a decline in confidence and not just confidence but satisfaction and people in our major professions now are much less happy with the professional lives and you can see why, the larger public doesnt value you and the way your profession or generation ago than it does become much harder to justify to yourself the kind of commitment necessary to become an expert in rise in the field. It is not the same everywhere but i thank you see it in the legal world and you see it certainly in journalism which the profession is it subjective and i would argue to some extent in medicine to american doctors are much less satisfied than they were even a generation ago, let alone midcentury america just with their place in society. I found myself agreeing with your analysis almost entirely. That is great to hear. [crowd boos] thank you. I would just like to push you more towards a specific policy. My concern and i look at this politics and prose audience and see people at the American Enterprise institute and other think tanks and those who are so inclined and intentional will hear your message and maybe try but for the vast majority of americans this is almost speaking a Foreign Language so wondering what you think about policies such as universal basic income and other reforms that are designed to bring people together. I appreciate that. Im not sure i agree that this doesnt speak to most peoples experience. The sense that it is harder now to find people to trust is a problem for everyone, not just for people in washington or at a certain level of education. And so, ways of trying to diagnose that in terms that relate to peoples experience could apply more than that but i agree with you that at some level they had to take the form of Institutional Reforms. In the institutions that are broken and congress is a great example, congress is the broken institution in our politics. Whatever you think of donald trump and i could spend an hour tell you i think of donald trump but i think the failure of congress is much bigger problem. The various complaints we have about the other branches of government are largely functions of various failures of the legislator to take its response ability seriously and reforms of the congress that would encourage its members to think of themselves as insiders, not outsiders, and to think of themselves as legislators not performers would have to look like changes to the budget process and the Committee System in ways that invest people more in the actual work of the institution and i think weve gotten to a place now where most members take one big vote a year on a big budget bill they had nothing to do with creating and it was created in the Leadership Office in the nights before the government shuts down and the structure of the work of congress had a lot to do that, they are Institutional Reforms that could change that and in some ways its dangerous to see this on cspan but there are ways the transparency has gone too far in congress and there are no quiet spaces for members to talk to one another. The only protected spaces are the Leadership Offices at midnight before the government shuts down and those of the places where all the work gets done. Cspan is a godsend but i think there also has to be some places for members to bargain and deal with each other and there is no such thing as bargaining in public. If you see people bargaining in public you are watching a show youre not watching the real work of a legislator. I think Congress Needs to be much more selfconscious about the way it structures its work and that could be done. Members are very dissatisfied in their quality of life is pretty low and they could do something about it. They dont behave like they could but they could. I think younger members in particular and both parties now dont even know what they are not doing. They did see congress function, the last real bipartisan big bipartisan bills, i would say it happened in the early bush years which is a long time ago now. Congress hasnt really felt itself functioning in quite a while but i use that as an example because thats an institution that makes its own rules and could change them and if it understood the problem in these terms it would help some incentives to do that so part of the reason to write a book like this is to service these problems in these terms because its not how we tend to see them and it points in the opposite direction from how we tend to see them so that rather than we thinking we need to tear these things down to the astonishment is too strong we can understand that we need to build these things up and we need functional institutions and right now we just dont have it. Hello. I have sort of two questions but thank you for your presentation and i think youre making a wonderful contribution to this discussion and the issues. The first part is since you are from what i gather your presentation is you are asking for a new attitude and a change of mindset. What would it take for us culturally to get launched in addition then youre just writing this book and getting us all to read it but what cultura you should all read it. Absolutely, im all for that but the other part is the other end which is with the reform part what kind of structure or it seems to me the part of the problem isnt it has to do with the way we organized our society and that we are organized our institutions have been handed down to us from agricultural then industrial and out we are in an industrial digital age and the structures and the hierarchies that we created that were worked for them do not work now and in a sense we undermined how we used to be organized by the personal connections and community and the way the personal relationships but what structural reform can you think of that might help restore personal connections and things that restore a sense or order so that organizations are differe different. These are Great Questions in the sense they are impossible questions and those are the best questions. I would say theyre related so if one thing you ask is how do we start to change attitudes i honestly think the only answer to that is to articulate for ourselves with problems in a particular way that causes us to think about our everyday decisions a little differently. I dont think we can really do much better than that. That can be a very powerful way to change grade i dont think this can be a topdown change. Ultimately the trouble with the need for institutional reform is that it has to come from within and the people who now are empowered by the way things work have to want them to change and that is hard to get to there has to be demand for it and a sense that this is the kind of change of attitude we need and we each should do what we can. If you can write a book maybe you should write a book but if you work in an institution that can stand this change i think its important to speak up for it in these terms. At the same time when you ask what kind of reforms might be possible i think the way you but it is valuable. To say that in some ways American Life has changed and germanic ways over the years and we have seen big changes in our culture and society before some of our institutions have proven durable in the face of those changes and some have not. I think what is troubling at this moment is we havent seen a response to it taking the form of new Institution Building. The goal and the armament and making is not just restore recover what we have but to respond to novel problems with new institutions so if you think about the last time our country went through a intense dynamic change was at the end or beginning of the 20th century where we had similar problems in some ways, dramatic economic change, growth in the scale and scope of the economy, massive waves of immigration we responded to those with Institution Building, with a lot of Institution Building alternately but what we think of now on the one hand is the Progressive Movement but you can think of it also as the emergence of a set of both bottomup and topdown institutions in the american psyche to deal with new problems and i think that spoke to a kind of tendency in American Life to respond to problems by building institutions and it is an american thing. Alexis was here in 1830s and wrote a letter to his father which he said if you get for americans together they will elect a treasurer. That is one way to understand our National Character but i think we lost a little bit of that tendency now and to see a problem and respond by organizing around it. We have all these ways now to express our dissatisfaction and we are inclined to express it in forms of response rather than to Structural Organization and we think that by just signaling on facebook that we agree with that guy weve done something about the problem. Saying on facebook that you are on the right side of something is not doing anything at all. Very often its a way of avoiding doing something and in some ways its even worse than that because the kinds or forms of reaction that twitter and other forms of social media encourage lead us to respond to problems in a kind of confrontational weight rather than thinking about how to build around them so i would say part of what we need is a recovery of a kind of Institution Building instinct and again the only contribution i can make to that is to articulate that as a need and to try to help people see that when they face a problem maybe that is one way to think about it. Thank you for your talk. I have good news given the context of this evening. I work and lead a Research Program about modernizing congress and there is a whole committee created a year ago this month to update and modernize institutions it has six democrats and six republicans and it is run an egalitarian participatory way and i go to all the hearings and they i work closely with them. They all asked questions and contribute and it is called a unified staff meeting the staff Work Together all the time and three weeks ago they introduced a bill that was based on a set of, i think, 29 recommendations over the last year they came out that his legislation to reform the institution and it is huge because it takes into account Building Digital infrastructure, bring back a deliberative process and all the things we hear about like devolving power to the committees and allowing members chances to lead in the process and i think relating to the other comments that congress is down to 3050 of its hearings. We see the show pony hearings like benghazi and the impeachment but its really no not it is stopped doing the deliberative process. It is now funding itself at 1980 levels of inhouse expertise. The thing that ive noticed a lot and id love to hear your comments on this and is this a possibility is that the problem with data in digital is that it has weapon iced transparency. Every public place you can imagine has weapon iced it at this point and our hearings as people want to watch you can watch all of them and they are tremendous and bring in a lot of people working on this is that congress does not have ways to show it, we love cspan, by the way, but we need a cspan channel four. It doesnt exist at this point but it would be far more curated and local and create a voice that talks to congress on its calendar like its committees of jurisdiction, not all members care about everything at all times. It seems that there has to be some kind of real fundamental coming to terms with the monetization of data and it is not serving deliberative democracy right now but that has to do with having been in this free market fundamentalist model and unless we come to terms with unregulated capitalism as it is going thats another massive institutional set of changes that we need and i would love for you to talk about that because you are from ai and i received a lot of your memos on the other side. Thank you for that. Thank you for the question. Ive been involved with that committee to because theres a twinned committee of the american plan goal Science Association that ive been a member of and a recovering Political Science myself and weve offered some recommendations to the House Reform Committee and they have taken some of those. I think the work theyre doing is enormously important. I would say at the core of it theres a question that needs to be asked in a more explicit way which is what is the purpose of congress . There are two answers to that question that cut in opposite directions and that we are going in both directions at the same time when we tried to reform congress. On one end you would state the purpose of congress is like the purpose of the European Parliament which is to empower the majorities to govern while their majorities until the government takes away their power but on the other hand it is the purpose of congress is to compel accommodation among differing groups and factions and American Life to force come from eyes and i that is the original purpose of congress and i also think its absolutely essential under the American National legislator is decidedly not the European Parliament. It is intended to force people with differences to come to some agreement and congress has become very, very bad at this because implicitly at least both parties now want it to function like a European Parliament did that when they have the majority they want to say now weve got it and we should do everything we want to do and get whatever we can push through but the trouble is then you lose it and the other party takes away everything you did and tries to do we live now since the 1990s through a time where weve not had a stable Majority Party in congress which itself is pretty unusual. Both parties always think next time we will and everything so dont come remise now just wait until our people get in and we will do everything we want. It never works that way. Congress basically sits around waiting for the next election when we really will finally be able to do our work. I think accepting the fact that ultimately the people you dont like arent going away is the beginning of a Civil Democratic politics. Our politics now is premised on the idea that maybe next time the people we dont like will just go away. That is how we approach every election cycle and both parties do this and it is just bonkers. Its completely disconnected from any understanding about American Life actually looks like right now because its a very divided society and it needs help coming together. I think that a set of congressional reforms that tried to address itself is that need and would try to force a less majoritarian and more accommodative congress and i would not, for example, get rid of the filibuster. Id much rather have a filibuster and house and get rid of the one in the senate because it does force them to have a more narrow majorities to get anything significantly dogged those kinds of changes that break down the sort of big to where we just have these two parties at each hopes the next woman everything and tries to create other dynamic coalitions that change over time that reflect more of the actual quite completed Political Society we live in that might require some electoral reforms and certainly require some Structural Reforms so congress re empowering the committees and i think the power is much too centralized in the leadership now and all these things were done for a reason but we have to see this is a moment when the institution is not functioning and as happened in the 1940s and as happened in the 1970s Congress Needs to take itself by the arms and make a change. Members are not there and those 12 members of that committee are basically the only tall people and house who want to do anything right now. There are maybe ten senators between the two parties who are really interested in structural reform and i think getting more of them interested is absolutely essential to anything happening that helps them work out. I think that is it. Thank you very much. [applause] i want to thank you for coming tonight and especially you all for being here. We will have a signing up here at this table and the book is available at the registers. If you could fold up your tears and leave them against something solid that would be fantastic. [inaudible conversations] on cspan2, a conversation on communitarian response of the conflict in syria. Hosted by the middle east institute, live at 10 00 a. M. Eastern. The focus shifts to the Indo Pacific Region and u. S. Strategy toward china at 12 00 p. M. That is live from the Hudson Institute also on cspan2. Online at cspan. Org and on the free cspan radio app. Cspans washington journal live everyday with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up friday morning. Be sure to watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern on friday morning to join the discussion