[inaudible conversations] good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the American Enterprise institute. My name is ryan streeter, director of policy studies and its my pleasure to welcome you to this event featuring timothy carneys new book and discussion about the findings and claims and i think you will find the remarks in the panel of interest particularly timely given the moment we find ourselves in historically right now so i look forward to the discussion. Hes going to come out and offer a few words and then he will be followed with a Panel Discussion with Charles Murray known to everybody here and then Megan Mcardie known as Washington Post columnist with a lot to say on this issue as well. Tim is a visiting fellow here at aei an and is also the commentay editor at the Washington Examiner where hes been a columnist for a while. His previous books are what many of you probably know him for. The big ripoff and that is where he carved out a name for himse himself. Its a deep dive and its easy for me to say that and you should go out and pick up a copy up on the way out in the hallway. So, he will give us a few remarks followed by this discussion and then we will allow time for engagement with you in the question and answer appeared tanswerappeared to fole here is that you are brief and your question is in the form of a question so without further ado i would like to welcome tim to please come up and give us your thoughts. [applause] thank you, ryan and everybody for coming. My name is timothy carney, visiting fellow and also fulltime journalist so what i did is try to find out new things and tell the story with my reporting and lots of data and a lot of you noticed in 2015 and 2016 there was a surge in interest on the Political Press looking at working class places and parts of the rust belt, places where the American Dream seemed dead. Writing this book i started at the opposite end. In my house have you heard in the confirmation was going but that is part of lesser chevy chase. If you know there is a town of chevy chase and section five, but then theres the elite cobra village, population of 2,000. Its the wealthiest municipality in the wealthiest region and the wealthiest country in the history of the world and its also got 80 of the population that has College Degrees including the majority of men and women and about half the population that have advanced degrees in chevy chase. You would notice if you read Charles Marie is coming apart. Its not just oil or material ways. 95 of the families have two pairings at home. They have all these, the father daughter dance and kids movie night a the teenagers watch his appearance can go out and have actual dinner in town. It is the value that they have. We have six kids, something that allows you to get away from your kids is one of the best way to foster your love for your kids is my opinion that there is also the process the sports teams for the kids and again the outcomes are excellent. The kids get married more than most stay away from drugs. They go off to college and to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Unwed pregnancy. So these elite villages all around the country produce these good outcomes because it takes a village to raise a child in a village like this is exactly the sort of village and speaking of Hillary Clinton if you look at the list of top fundraisers, people that raise the six figures, a dozen of them at least so this is a liberal elite town that practices the values conservatives preach and if you Pay Attention to th what they ae trying to do is make the population be like chevy chase they wish to delete such good outcomes maybe we could make them more like us. Maybe the kennedy Public Schools have the same outcome as Langley High School in mclean virginia or they say maybe if we make college free because it is associated with so many good outcomes and then everybody will have these outcomes. I would argue and i am not going to belabor it you cannot make everybody in america be an elite. It isnt a scalable model. So, in chapter one i visit another village in wisconsin. Its about 50 of the population claiming ancestry. When i was there the Meeting House is 1. 5150000 million. You could go buy ten homes for the price of one. The income is likely above average, but not if you control for the fact that the number of family households is way above average. When i was there on a sunday, and walked the crowd at the First Reformed church in the service at the Orthodox Church and been a little while later and by the way i always thought that always lasted an hour with some of these things go on for hours and hours so they are coming in buying 151 and after that and came the crowd from denying. The First Christian reformed church. The small village of 2,004 different reformed churches plus ththe Evangelical Church and the bus to take you to the catholic church. This village has the same great outcomes as chevy chase. When i asked one of the guys sitting at the counter he said what do you think of this and he said im going to tell you one complaint i had i went to the Christmas Concert a few months back and there were no seats that make it Christmas Concert left because these people that didnt send theithey can send to Public Schools were there watching the concert so i yelled to my neighbor you are taking up my seat, and he doesnt have any kids and said we had to come watch our kids. Like these other conservative religious places out there they both have very strong institutions of Civil Society. Whether it is the sports teams fare or the First Reformed church in the First Christian reformed church or our home Christian Ministries that spun out of all the churches together were the Public Schools. The strong religious communities and to delete it good outcomes not because of Government Programs they run but because they have a strong institutions and Civil Society. So what is the plight of the working class. Alienation is the plenty of middle america. We talk about the factory shutting down but the problem is the church is closing down. I talked about all the secular institutions that could exist for the middle class and working class, the church has always been the Central Institution of Civil Society. The secularization has been tolerable for the elites. Its been tolerable. Its been deadly for the workingclass and middleclass. That is what i argue and i think i established in the alienated america. I want to thank you for coming and i couldnt think of two better people to talk about this with you and those that have written on the themes i want. Lets have a conversation. [applause] in the publication he withheld it from me. I will read my favorite passage from the book that this really sums up the insight and the challenge of what tim points out. Talking about the death of diners where Dunkin Donuts opens up and theres a drive through and my grandfather got up for decades and decades and went to the diner to get his toast and eggs. That place is slowly dying off and he says it means losing a meeting place. Over the years this would weaken the connection. He would say theres nothing keeping them from getting together after they finished their breakfast and coffee. Now they can meet at a park or wherever they want because they were liberated from the need to go to a diner. It sounds rational and ignores how the social interaction works. The more obvious and more immediate need brings us together and fills the less obvious but still very real needs. Come together for food, drink or security and end up gaining from come artery. Its obvious they make code less noticeable but devastating in the long run. Everyone complained about the suffocating nature of the extended Family Networks in small towns. If you read fiction to about 1950 this is a dominant theme is how terrible it is and then it went away and we suddenly realized that it had indeed been suffocating but it had also provided a lot of stuff that we would miss when its gone. A great admirer and i think that the weakest part is the obligatory what is to be done chapter and if i had my way we would accept that chapter. Describing a problem as al is ay itself incredibly valuable. We recognize the difficulty of this rather than the one secret thing. But the question i always have at the end of recognizing problems like this because there really is a problem in some of the ways that welfare, the old welfare systems are created in the situation in which people are making completely rational shortterm decisions. It made them more unemployable and created a problem. At any given moment the costs are more apparent in the longterm to the benefits that they were losing become apparent and so the question i have a. What do you do when the structures of society is its set up in the way people are thriving. This works. It doesnt work but it usually gets a laugh. I was deciding how gloomy to be. In many ways the book is kind of up eat and use the functioning communities and i applaud that and wondered if you looked at the problem closely enough to retain that much optimism. As i go back to coming apart, one of the least discussed parts was my chapter on the virtues of a say in all of them said there were a few things that were necessary in this society and if they were really generosity and honesty and industriousness, what was the fourth . These are characteristics of the American People that were going to enable the constitution altogether and you take a look at the trends and the working class. Appointed intellectuals because the university and they do a survey that you go to th the upr middle class and theres been some secularization but its kind of leveled off and you still have maybe 30 that hav ba strong affiliation in the church or place of worship. You go to the working class where i thought it was the backbone of the privileges support and says if you use the central survey you are down about 10 of people in the White Working Class which is the example that i was looking at and if they have a meaningful attachments to a church. When you only have 12 in the community, then they do not provide a kind of core around the pacific functions. They are kind of audibles when you were 12. 5 . Okay so that is religiosity as it has diminished. The whole notion of morality was my fourth one. I dont know if youve noticed nobody talks about virtue anymore because the left has always been down on virtue as being judgmental and so forth. May i just observe it is very embarrassing for the conservatives to talk about the importance of the virtue that character in these states. I am not going to get into an argument about any National Leadership here i am just going to observe that if you say what you really need in a political figure starting out before anything else and the rest of the conversation is silent and it will continue to be silent for the indefinite future. Madison says the idea that a free people can exist without virtue in the people is an american idea, and it is. The United States, our communities dont function in the absence of a strong sense of virtue and here is where we can get into an argument of some kind here or at least a backandforth a central theme of the book is the importance of religiosity. I wish that steve were on the panel because it would be fun with enlightenment now a. I will make one other comment and we can make it more of a back and forth. That is this is what you are have having when you are 76 i forgot what i was saying. Thank you for bringing a virtue because i think that is the theme throughout the book and i came up with a classical education and virtue is a habit. One of the things about habit is they require practice. What if you lack the gymnasium to practice and what is a Strong Family and the Public School and go to church community, these are the places where this can be practiced. Church communities are the only ones that do that very well because the elites are the sort of best practices because your kids then have the best outcomes which is the way sociologists talk about it and i think that is the thinking in the chevy chase and ann arbors of america so you worry about that sort of fertility of the virtue to pass down multiple generations. As you put it and others put it they are not going to preach what they practice. But i would say it is a good guy and its just not about preaching. Its about building the infrastructure it is when its being exercised into people are being trained and its only possible because it does take a village. So, i do think that its the most important thing and the unwillingness to talk about it means a they are too likely to keep them to themselves. With a pushback on a couple of things. First virtue idea and then the pessimism idea. On the virtue idea weve all say i dont think that its true that the left doesnt believe in virtue. It just seems things are becoming sacred in that space and its about fighting oppression and that i would say is the leading virtue the upper two middleclass are extremely interested in its schools and all the rest of it. We can argue whether that is a good virtue or not, but it is a good virtue and has less to do however it is true with family formation. And it is in a lot of ways a less personal view. What good would make you personally thrive but very possibly to make other people that are struggling to thrive in a larger systemic architecture so you should take that seriously as they claim to a cli think it is one. Second, im not sure this is even pushing back on the pessimism. Its reframing the timeframe. In a wad of ways, this book like every book on the topi topic and anchored in the 1950s. And there is a simple answer for that we have a lot of data in the 1950s and we dont have a lot of good data from 1910. What we do know paints a different picture from today for example i would say that geographically what we see in 1910 is highly dense social communities in rural areas and extremely fractured community is much like the ones described here in urban areas and outposts where they dont have that network. Weve had these problems before and they get better. Like attachment or defining that in different ways but defining it as attachment peak is in the state in the 50s and we tend to get these narratives. Its Going Forward in one direction and there was an 18th century revolution in britain and then it was followed like stop. So the idea that this is all going in one way and i think that that is very possibly false is that we are in the middle of a big economic dislocation that i think is fracturing the communities and in the middle of the big cultural dislocation that is fracturing communities i think technology is fracturing communities and the technology is really good for the outliers and not good for the media. If you think about what the society is like to m me it is a society that is organized around making the mean of the stock. The society is organized around the outliers and that is on the santhisend and out on that end. Its what our economy is organized and it maximizes for the outliers and that sort of neglects to me but that is what youd expect in the period of dislocation that we have these technological descriptions before and its sort of interesting these big descriptive social movements in the 20th century basically solidified a ten year disruptive communication. Radio comes in the 20s and 1930s to get fascism and in the 1920s in italy, you know, tv comes in in the 50s and 60s and not just here but all over the world. Society is probably eventually these things when the they disrt the break the patterns that we are sustaining and people have to maximize. People are incredibly robust if you think about what the frontiers were like, but they were terrible in the 1880s. They were horrifying and shooting each other like serial killings. And 1925 wyoming is a kind of family oriented nice place to live. So people have an instinct for doing this and they will rebuild new forms but that doesnt mean the transition can be decades and i think in particular, then , thenight. Fullstop as ive d a lot, but in particular a conversation that i had with a colleague of mine at bloomberg who grew up and have actually descended from a desperate poverty he actually had grown up very near their and his grandmother had lived in these swamps. If you read the book youre horrified by the physical description of the conditions people are living. His grandmother moved out when the government was renovating everything. And he said it killed her and the outreach in his voice. He said she had all her time and knew everyone and moved into houses in the middle of nowhere and decided to tie. Shdie. She just got sick of life. If you think about that, these houses that are two or four rooms crawling with bed bugs and vermin, they have toilets at the end of some little back alley that you have to share often with other families. If you think about a community in which coal mining in the worst sort of industrial manufacturing and decades of unemployment these are people but nonetheless in the worst conditions we could imagine compared to someone had pulled something that was sustaining them and so important it was forcibly taken by a government that was trying to make their lives better and they declined. So that is the optimism. That is what humans do. We do hav have a lot of those Wh Technology and government but i worry will persist. They were getting other gatherings into the things that can be a locus of love and i just worry when we do overcome them it wilthen it will be a coe generations. What end it is with this vibrant community in the north of england but what a long time and it was miserable for a generation or two, while the transition to it. Maybe it wont work everywhere. We had a Community Whether it is Chevy Chase Village i fully agree the 50s was about the means and the outliers. In the 20s and 30s and 40s we had the mean streets and the stifling conformists is because of the people that were writing those books were intellectuals so they go off but now you see they have their own communities they can go to and they have communities that work. There is no such thing as going home again in terms of we talk about the great divide in the United States culturally. Its not left and right so much as people that have either in small towns ar or small cities where people but live in these places. Ive got to tell you when we were out there in burtonsville maryland near frederick which is 1940, 50,000 people now, that place functions like a 1950s small city. All kinds of associations and people knowing each other and you get folks together in one room who can make up the difference in whats going on in the community. It is 1950s over again. The problems are concentrated in the minority of the community but still manageable. Maybe we say lets make it easy as possible for people that like those places and be given a love of freedom and people want to be in that kind of environment and are never going to restore the kind of institutions you are talking about. I argue in the book part of what makes america exceptionally good at having these small communities be so productive is exactly the sort of federalism and mobility and ability to get it if you don dont i would did orange city which is another one of these churches and i went on reading these and found a kid that said Everybody Knows your business any time anything is happening people are knocking on the doors and i also understand how and the 18yearold discard some smothering and then realizing it is so easy for him to get up and go but at the same time the irony is what makes the institutions valuable as they are not simply transactional. The freedom to move about as part of the community so great, the communities are not just something you enter into, its an actual commitment and putting down of roots so we need to have that combinatio conversation ank america is generally good at having that conversation where you can leave where you are but theres lots of good soil in which to plant roots if you are not sort of feeling inclined immensely. I will point out some of the literature and works really well the feedback loops that you need to run a Civil Society pretty much still occur there. I will tell you where i get a shaky in my libertarian principles i look and ask myself is there any other way to run these except for the great deal of Government Intervention of the samanta control. If you look at the northeastern corner of north traffic its probably going to have to be focused on rails because you cant move the necessary number of people. I understand why they are mad when im like weve got to do high state rail or something that is going to move more people. We need more public transit. Its why there can be a vicious circle where there is more central position that begets more centralization and the more people, the more the government is taking over the role theyve done multiple studies on the government crowding out and had these studies that found the places that got more money and more appropriations. One of the things you talk about the diner. One thing that galls people to church thats where they get to serve other people. You show up at church and state on tuesday we are going to the soup kitchen that as they lose the role they lose some of their membership. The argument is the causality goes both ways. Theres lots of regulation or low regulation and lots of trust and i was imagining this guy walking on a razors edge in the moderate regulation, moderate trust at some point you slip a little. Theres less trus stressed and e regulation, less trust and you just go down one way or the other. It is almost as if its the perfect storm, the regulation. When you get th the multiethnic groups and the social trust soco go through the floor, we live in a multiethnic nation. We are not going to change that but its a problem and effective social trust. Video games which are now projected out ten years from n now. Theres all sorts of forces at work from technological to cultural to economic all of which are fighting against the social interactions. I said to one person you should talk to this other person that went through this. None of these people have ever met in the flesh. Its like these are actually, the communitie communities in to games for example fortnight, kids cant get their middle school boys off of the fortnight. It turns out yes they are playing a game but as i am told by another they dont play for the night because it is just for chatting. [laughter] is it actually this big community. Maybe they wont be as thick. This is the thing that outliers versus the media. That may not be the equilibrium and we shouldnt extrapolate what we see now. Its like an instant technology. It took a while to get the hang of the Printing Press as a result. But we eventually settled down and we are going to pretty good with it now. That is a good point. Currently the best thing technology does in my opinion is facilitate people getting together physically. I was able to have a High School Reunion only because facebook existed and we built a group and we all get together physically. Physically. Physically. An otherwise you think about the parish and the schools at it makes it easier to plan the team. All that stuff is facilitated but i also think that as we are talking about the immediate desire of getting together physically with other people isnt always obvious and one of the perils of technologies that we dont actually have to get together. When you dont get together, you lose a serendipitous encounter and conversation that end up being so valuable. Lets get people so they bump into their neighbors and have a courtyard in the middle of the block, a coffee shop, barbershop, a bar people can go and the more technology and wealth and the ability to have this lifestyle where you will need to everything where where e eucalyptus to be planted and you dont just ge get to accidentaly bump into people. One was called this the best time of the many peoples lives . Purchased their living next to people that have the same shared sort of aspirations and undertakings and the same person that they were engaged in so thats one of my worries of technologies is that makes you think okay now we can plan our lives. That is taking you away from the things you didnt realize were going to be so important to your own life building the virtue and being happy. They are just getting used to the capacities that we have now and the information technology. And we will adapt. Some of us will do exactly as you are saying about using this as a way to facilitate communication and things will get stronger and we will have a combination of the virtual communities. There will be another set of people who do drop out altogether and are sitting in front of the screen in the Virtual Reality machine that is as exciting as the world of the otherwise live in. And maybe the reason that everything is so murky is we dont really know the sizes of those groups are going to be. We dont. And i would say ultimately technology is going to have to foster the community in order to contribute to human thriving. I do think that its right its breaking up the communities in the real world and humans do need those things. Maybe the answer is computers will get so good at simulating and then it wont be a problem because people still be all happy. We have not talked about politics yet. I wouldnt have written this book with donald trump for not running away with the republican nomination while i was looking at it and the places i named trumped up 16 in a bunch of little pieces trumped up 16 , a bunch of christian conservativ conservatives. The worst state in the primaries against drop off including western michigan where they are people that go to church twice on sunday in these incredibly strong reformed churches for the elite in the primaries rejected the guy saying the American Dream is dead. So, the argument that the American Dream is dead was appealing to the alienated america by the people that chose him over to worry that when they are 16, 17 on stage and however many term of governorships that is the only one willing to save because it seemed it was because everything shuts down and they were not connected to other people. But the next question is how is trump fixing that and this is the former scholar whose definition it wasnt just being disconnected from the communities and societies. Its not even seeing the point. And again turning to the Central Government and a potential strongman. Its about was my political analysis. I dont know if you saw anything different. I am so befuddled i have nothing useful to say. I just am appalled. I think there is a sense as they have broken down and i think theyve broken down for liberals, to back even in places like chevy chase the difference that they mask a lot of that. But theres a phenomenon that you see as people expecting politics to be everything. Its not just politics is going to make you healthy and take care of your needs but its going to fulfill all o of your emotional needs. It is what you belong to and the only thing that matters. So i have these im firmly against this view of politics. It is an error in the politics that you cannot possibly fulfill this need and it is unhealthy for the politics but i will say this and say things like you shouldnt lose a friend over politics. Like what, if you are in nazi germany in 19733. A decent person to vote for trump you shoul u. Should they o hate trump or whatever it is you are mad about you should understand that they disagree with me about something and we can argue about it but ultimately i know all these other things beyond their vote. But i think that they just dont have anything else. What fascinates me is how angry people get when i say that. Some people dont have a choice. Thats true for the purpose of politics is to make People Better off into make people happy. They spend every waking hour being angry about politics. On the definition of politics and a lot of my libertarian friends dont like that idea to me in this. We are supposed to be legislating and regulating. A friendly way to put it we are not supposed to just let our own lives according to what is right and wrong but also shape the world around us. This isnt something i would wod have sent in my teens or 20s but then you realize what is going on in your own house and backyard is not enough. We have a peerage and two other schools our children go to and we belong to a swim club that was incredibly strong and fair we could have pushed and changed the rules by being the guy to be there and carry something from one side of the pool to the other. Even the intersection near my house. While being they should change the way its set up and if they did it. It was accessible and you could get in touch with the people. These Different Levels or i have so much ability to shape the world around me that is what is missing, that is what we have less. And the irony is the politics is so broken in part because everyone hates each other. You cant do anything for the politics because everyone is so angry. You could look back at the new deal and say we did something. If thats what you want to view you cadoyou can look at that any lets accomplish something but the fact that we eat our neighbors so much and everyone is just waiting to get control of the whole thing so that they can do whatever i everything they do doesnt happen. Everyone is porting their hung hunger. People are pouring their hunger from one to something that exists outside and beyond them into the one thing in america right now which doesnt promise any action and by the act of investing so much in it for making sure it cannot do anything because people are so determined to block their opponents. Theres a lot of arguments to be made up of politics is that it is if you are talking about the great religions which is my tradition of these teach the right lessons in terms of loving and in terms of torque moral responsibilities, so if you are deeply engrossed in those and then the traditions you are not filled with hate or anger and so forth and politics by its very nature tends to make people angry. So insofar as that has become, the religion of the secularized society the longterm outlook is not good. Politics come as , the religs institutions dont make Good Governance and the government doesnt make a good religion. I think that is something America Needs to relearn the. Without even knowing if they want to exercise it and flex their political muscles. This is where Bernie Sanders and occupy wall street came from is why dont i have any ability to think and exercise my political muscles around me because all they know, all they think of is washington, d. C. So they say that it must be because the special interests have that much control and of course the special interests have controlled that sort ocontrolbue end of this is i spent the night speaking it wont need to occupy wall street and i told the story in the because they didnt understand what they were talking about because there was occupy dc and when i ask people what they were upset about these of the implementation of the rule. [laughter] usa what are you upset about. The wealthy and putting us had too much control and life of common ground. There will be th a war against bailout and corporate welfare. What are the policies you dont like. Well, the lack of Campaign Finance reform. What else, citizens united. They are in a closed room, its smokefilled and you are logged out. What are they doing in that room that you dislike . And they said we are making sure the voice of the people isnt heard and it seems there is no bottom but it took years writing about the alienation like that is a real complaint is that you dont have the ability like you are reaching out the images. Theres nothing to providetheree resistance or reach out and grab its just sort of you are there standing there not able to shape the world around you and think that the problem is the they are spending too much money. Why dont we start right up here up front. A i would like to get to the subtitle of the book why some places thrive and others collapse. And i identify as a midwesterner cause the veto from wisconsin and when i was back there there was a wellknown small liberal arts were some kind of college and the Elementary School in downtown had been converted to small independent Senior Living because there are no kids and people who lived in a country with farms, etc. , were moving to town to live collectively. And that is what is happening in iowa, wisconsin, doesnt really matter where. The question is part of it used to be small manufacturing with 100, 300 or 400 people, they had the paper industry, the coffee pot industry, these small factories were increasingly bought out by Bigger Companies like kimberlyclark. So im wondering when you talk about some places thrive and why they collapse it isnt also in part the loss of small farming and small manufacturing. I think that a huge part of it often is the first time in a book i have a shuttered Church Rather than a shuttered factory on the look for a reason because i think that the real cause is the collapse of the other institutions that follow and one contrast i paint in the book is between pittsburgh and uniontown pennsylvania. Uniontown is in the county. Its about 45 minutes or an hour south of pittsburgh. Both of these places were devastated by the Steel Industry moving over to first year and then china. Pittsburgh is doing well now. Uniontown was a real city back in the day. Why were they not able to survive the downturn, and my argument is if youve been to pittsburgh and you know that theres all these little neighborhoods, a lot of them are built around a church and are economically extinct. You have the move with irish neighborhoods in all these different neighborhoods and churches into these other institutions including the local Public School where everybody thinks of the kids as our kids while the places that are a little more spread out have a church or two but when the factory shuts down at his just less resilient. It is i sort of imagine it the communities resting on a thin membrane that was easier to smack because they didnt have a Dense Network of Civil Society. I had to clarifying questions. We will get that working in one second period. Technology is a problem. [laughter] we are still adopting. I had to clarifying questio questions, there is one part where you said there is an increased social distress because of video games and an influx of ethnic communities, is wondering if you could explain and go into that more. What was i referring to their . The research that initially establishes is by robert who wrote bowling alone, and he was subsequently doing additional work and what he found was, when you have multiethnic communiti communities, the social trust became very low. It is not just that one ethnicity did not trust another ethnicity, trust within the ethnicities also declined and this was a very consistent finding and has since seen a lot of replication. I think ive seen a couple of articles that ive seen glimmers of hope that some communities its not as universal as we initially thought. I think the bulk of the literature continues to say this seems to be able to problem, lots of reasons that it should not surprise us but it is a problem in a multiethnic country. Its much less of a problem in the communities because if you socialize the college anywhere, first of all youre more likely to have a common language but you also have a globally fairly Common College eat those, thats not where the bulk of immigration in the United States is, there so he seems like a surprising finding to uppermiddleclass and educated people, that is not a finding, you would replicate in a suburb that has a diverse population of collegeeducated people. Just finding that youre more likely to have an communities and have been there for one community and Something Like charlestown and boston, this is where my family came in 1850 and squatted until 1940. It is like people have been there for a long time, education levels are lower, they have very thick ideas and they dont like outsiders. Its hard to have cohesion and a strong if you dont share enough. If you come to my peers, its ethnically diverse. The only diversity is which president nominees to the supreme court. You become to Saint Andrews in Silver Spring even the noncatholics there have invested in the Catholic Education of their children so there is a strong cohesion. I write about this problem, the most followup studies the disagrees that maybe its not the diversity that leads to the rots of collegian but the transition. , thats an uplifting interpretation, its harder to build communities if you dont speak the same language but also the difference in customs, i have a neighbor who lives next door, mr. Patel and so a quick passage here, after a few months of driveway chat and him giving me a ride to the matter, i invited him for a beer on my back deck, this is the most normal way get to know guy. Mr. Patel for religious read reasons does not drink alcohol, it creates a barrier to our bonding. No coffee, no tea, herbal tea, sorry. After months, frustration i approach him with a very awkwardly direct question. Mr. Patel i would like to have you over for a drink but what liquids you actually consume. [laughter] i have some lime look right in my house. He said the waste of putting water in cans and bottles violated his religious obligation to care for creation. So he suggested water with lemon or lime so i sent my kids off to the Grocery Store to pick up a lemon and align, filled a couple big pictures with water, put my children to dead and mr. Patel and i got to know each other on my back deck of citified water. [laughter] this shows is not possible to bridge the cultural gaps but it takes a lot more effort and has a lot of potential pitfalls. Its reasonable to infer that cultural differences tend to weaken Community Bonds and i say at our cookouts, what if we serve pork, then can we invite our muslim neighborhoods, we live in a jewish community. There was one time we used our grill, we bought a terkel growth that without an action and where we also bought beer because were catholics, we kept as a kosher grill for one cookout so these beautiful cultural differences that make diversity as throwing and exciting as it is, also make it a little more work to build the cohesion. That is why if you all share, we all went to college or were all catholics raising our kids, that makes it easier to get over the hump. I will say in the 50s is a big thing in the boston was the italian and the irish catholics, High School Boys at Football Games and other living on the north shore and the hipsters. It is totally possible to overcome these things and it takes work. Is that the working micro . First of all this book is fantastic and Everybody Needs to buy it. Multiple copies. Give them as gifts. [laughter] come back to the ethnicity. You talk about race in the book, these towns that you hold as models of workingclass, to me as a northeastern or comingout for my brain entering imprints for my generation, they all have one white ethnicity, we have white ethnicity left in my dog robin irish neighborhood and this is no longer the case. If these places that still have this and preserved a remarkable blast from the past, the ethnic cohesions, what hope ethnic and religious overlap, Communities United dutch reform. What do you see as the most plausible sources of civic cohesion for communities that dont start out with the natural advantages. I think its good that you have a forwardlooking thing, in the past we had the italian neighborhood in pittsburgh et cetera. In a quick focal point, one of the best predictors of how much trumps support in the early primary, 17 guys, number of people who went after the ancestry that just said american. So not having ethnicity made you more likely to vote for trump, i argue because it enhance the alienation, less religion, less roots. Again, make it is more optimistic so she can offer that. I do think other forms of identity, and replace it. One thing you see, hipsters were mentioned earlier, you see a lot of people now developing pride in a specific neighborhood, when i went to d. C. In 2000, there was a little bit of difference of what side of capitol hill you lived on but there was certainly no pride. Now we are pet work people or i would never live there, thats way too chichi and in small cities like grand rapids, im so cheery grand rapids is another dutch place and also a ton of twentysomething hipsters who are real grand rapids pride. I bet there are people with grand rapids tattoos Walking Around their and love the local piercing and the local food trucks. I do think there can be a renaissance justin that that we are neighborhood and were going to have real pride in that. I have not gotten my tattoo yet but i think it is complicated, americas racial legacy its original sin and like the ordinary original sin, it is not going to be extirpated very easily, it will require some sort of incredible heroic sacrifice. Are we willing to make that sacrifice, what form is that sacrifice take, i think were in a metaphor far beyond where we go. I think that there is absolutely hope, periods of a social change are not good. To try to predict what things are going to look like in 20 years. We are in a period of unusually rapid economic social, political, everything change, technologically change and i dont know where it ends up so i dont know how to frame with the community will fulfill the needs and for which groups but i will simply say that i think it is obviously americas great moral obligation to make the benefits available to help in what ways it can, it is hard, i dont know what answers but in what ways it can to make it possible for africanamericans to form places that are not just that socially fixed because theres a lot of socially thick africanamerican neighborhoods, the real challenge is a stable Economic Prosperity which has been much, much harder for africanamerican neighborhoods to achieve because of racism. While there has been a lot of social capital in some ways in innercity africanamerican neighborhoods, i talked earlier about the forces that act to pull people apart and when you look at, its easy to think of the racial history and flavoring segregation and just talk about taking away rights from black people, taking away their access from other institutions. Part of it was a deliberate attempt to prevent solidarity. And to prevent family formation and solidarity. In other words, a huge part of the oppression, that happened of blacks in america, it was the power of keeping them from forming little platoons with the robustness. It was the church in the end that provided, it was an institution we talk about these great men with Martin Luther king. It was an institution that ended the segregation and that was why there was distrust in effort to break up the family and breakup institution. Right here in the middle. Thank you for mentioning that, that was glossed over. Can you explain why its not an useful tool in white needs to be addressed considering that maybe there is not used for in these populations that were talking about economically. Ive heard that said. This is one of the worst things that you sometimes encounter in the world of policymaking, people say you know what, the economy grew while our factories went overseas, these people lost their jobs and faded out of usefulness but were doing fine, and because were wealthier we can have a bigger safety net and catch these people as they fall and i had friends say explosively that because it was their argument against a trump protectionism of the factory of his and it better to let the towns collapse and catcher with a safety net. [inaudible question] i am a catholic and a christian and i think that every human being is that infinite value and we cannot allow that thing to happen, thats why get passionate about this particular question because i think the plague of alienation is not loneliness, and people are sad, i think its a dehumanization of people when they dont have the ability to connect to others in the economy that allowed the small factory towns to exist and form a local diner in a local church and all that stuff, those were literally lifting people up and lifting up their souls to be expired and Something Better and for not letting them aspire for not giving them the avenue to pursue the greater goods, it really is a disservice, if we somehow get wealthier and let people slip through the crooks, we are feeling as a country. One more question is what we have time for. Where is the mic right now. You have both of them okay, right there then. I think the discussion reminds me of russell kirk the piety dives on pavement. Ive been looking at a study in 19 century or the 20 century of context of primitive tribes with modernity and as soon as they contacted everybody falls apart into drinking, alcoholism, not working, all very isolated tribes, this happens too, thats where they find them in amazon a new getty, they dont go in there with tv sets, is the pace of audito soy keeps coming for e seams future shock is you will even though we are modern. We have a passage in hillbilly elegy where he talks about his ancestors from Jackson County kentucky and youre saying theres no privacy, somebodys always showing up and telling you how to parent, they get on the hillbilly highway and they go up to a suburb, grated suburb where everybody has a house in the yard and offense and says it was a world completely different yet the same. It was different because you are now separate and not so connected, it was the same because we were all still hillbillies. It was the culture shock, they had not adopted and without the intense connection, that was one of the passages that meaning realized i had to write this book, without the connection they were living in a culture that theoretically was survivable and could lift people up but not if youre brought up with different habits and you have a different set of needs in a different way of reaching out an aspiring. Baby optimistic. May be what is happened is like the anima zoning and tribes and confronted with all the new weird stuff, we forget what is important but that does not mean its not important. If you say it is true, its objectively true that human beings floor in contact with other human beings that marriage objectively is one of the most rewarding forms of human intimacy, you go through a variety of other things about basic human needs and how human beings work and see these are true, we can afford to say an awful lot of what we see now is a nominal, it is behavior that has been pulled out of shape by culture shock, technological shock and sooner or later those things which are true about human beings will shape human institutions. I think that is right, it is valentines day so im always getting my former column sent up to me including one that i wrote on a disastrous relationship that i have and its a reason i live in washington, d. C. Instead of newark where the relationship took place. I made a mistake going on into your to talk about it further valentines day and economic issues. So every year they retreated and i get another one that goes in great links with only bad decisions. But the interesting thing also every year it triggers an argument between the feminist in the mens right advocate of people and it takes place without me, unfortunately sitting in the middle of her really angry tweet storm. Ultimately a lot of what you noticed from the conversations back and forth is both sides are trying to get the same thing, they want the other side to be committed so they will have something to fall back on and they wish to make as little commitment as they can because that would be better if they could get someone else to commit to them without doing the same things in return. Ultimately we are humans, we want silly things like this but that is not in equilibrium and eventually you have social norms to figure that out and i think that is true romance and a lot of things that ultimately you have to have norms that will enable people to get what they need and if those norms dont look long enough and it happens in my book, i looked at a amazonian tribe, hunter gatherers and had huge collective sharing norms but importantly the terrain was so improved they cannot support themselves as hunter gatherers so they moved on to farms and they literally were so high on sharing that they had rules that a man could ever eat the meat that he himself headhunted because if they ate it they would lose their bro realty and be able to un hunt. They said every morning they would ring a bell to go in the fields together, about three mornings and they bring about and no one showed up. So they actually had to evolve new norms that were about property and like this is my patch and the stuff in my patch is mine and you cannot have it. It happened rapidly, that is an amazing thing, it was not like they did not believe these things, there is fundamental to their belief system and our belief that my yard is mine and you cannot come on and lest i let you. Its a fundamental to our society, they change because their circumstances change. I had tremendous belief, both in shortterm unwisdom of people but in our longterm ability to evolve and adapt to new shocks and to build things that do work and are enduring and connect us to the more communities that take us outside and beyond ourselves. Thank you. That is a good note to and on. Thank you for that. What a great discussion. We could go on all day but we will not. [applause] for the usual practice, this will be available, its live streamed and will be Available Online through your various social media preferences and once again the book table is out there, dont leave without a copy. Thank you for coming. I still have to get you to sign my book. [inaudible conversations] you are watching a special edition of book tv, area now during the week while members of congress are in their districts because of the coronavirus outbreak, wednesday night we take a look at pandemics, first the National Institute of Health Germany brown provides a history of the 1918 flu pandemic and his thoughts on how prepared we are for the next outbreak. Then a discussion about viruses from the 2016 brooklyn festival featuring carl zimmer and eddie young and later john berry describes in 1918 flu pin to make which killed as many as 100 Million People worldwide. Enjoy book tv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan2. I am pleased to be with you to talk to about the new book that you put out, tight rope. In particular because it is taking a look at a small town in oregon, a town that you come