Levin. I want to thank you all for coming to politics and prose im preventing humor week hosts closer thousand events. Year. Something that is confirmed for the next three months you can go ahead and visit our website or pick up our events calendar. Before i get started today are like tosk ask everyone to silence yourur cell phones, so as not to disrupt the event. And when its time for the q a i would ask you to come up to this microphone right here, next to the pillar, and please speak clearly into the microphone as we areec recording it and cspan book tv is here as well. On the q and a we will have a signing. This table if you havent already purchased this book will have the books up at the register. So tonight i am excited to welcome yuval levin celebrating his newest book, a time to build. How we commit to institutions as nations have increased divisiveness, fueled by partisan politics, culture wars, and populist anger on both sides. Yuval levin says instead of trying to tear down frameworks we should be looking to them as sources of strength and support. Through a time to build, it shows our Current Crisis is due to an oppressive force which is the absence of uniting forces and urges us to commit ourselves to urge the vitality of institutions rage thing from the family, to churches, to the military to renew our ties to each other. He is the Founding Editor of national affairs, director of sulzer, cultural, constitutional studies at the American Enterprise institute, contribute in editor of national review, cofounder and Senior Editor of the new atlantis, and has authored the fractured republic and the great debate. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times wall street journal, among many others so please join me to it welcoming politics and prose yuval levin. [applause] thank you very much i think you the welcome and you being here on a friday night. I am excited to chat a little bit about this book and what it might say to the moment it takes a little work to understand. Its a book about what has gone wrong in our country in recent years and what we can do about it something has gone wrong is reasonably clear but exactly what it is is not as clear as we think imagine or pretend. We americans are in a sense living through a social crisis. We can see that in everything from vicious partisan polarization to rapid cultural resentments. An upsurge of isolation, alienation, despair that is sent suicide rates climbing into an epidemic of opioid abuse in recent years. These are deep dysfunctions and seemingly parts of our society. What they have some common roots and its not easy to say exactly what those routes are. What exactly has gone wrong here. Part of the crisis, one of the symptoms as we cannot quite seem ton get a handle on just what that is. Traditionally economic concerns dont really cut it as explanations. Wegh certainly went through a severe recession in 2007 and 2008 but that ended more than a decade ago and now weve been living through one of the longest economic expansions in the economic era. Its not that some americans arent suffering economically, but the problems we have on that front dont really add up to the enormous crisis we are going through. Other familiar kinds of measures of wellbeing dont offer obvious explanations either. Americans are as healthy andan safe as they might have been. You might say what are we complaining about . In fact some people argue that they will just take anything to complain about or the frustration and anxiety that overwhelms us now are rooted in some imaginary grievances driven by our politics that they themselves might be the problem. Steven pinkard of harvard takes these kind of complaints to be what he described as irritable gestures of selfindulgence and gratitude in a recent book he looks over mountains of data on wealth and health and safety and choice. And he concludes the populace complaints on all sides of the politics are just detached from reality. He says they are dangerous to quote his indiscriminate pessimism can lead to fatalism, to wondering why we should throw time and money at a hopeless cause in leading to radicalism called to smash the machine or drain the swamp or empower a tyrant. But surely, all those these kinds of responses are understandable in part, public frustration is not some kind of selfdelusion. Especially frustration that runs this deed that reveals itself in such a broad range of symptoms. Tinkers happy data are not wrong exactly and neither are the indicators but if these dont explain the sediments of our time than we should ask what are those types of indicators ignoring what signs might we be missing . Our usual measures of wealth, fhealth, personal freedom dont explain the problem because familiar indicators, is as important as they arent understanding our society, are largely material individual. Lthey assess our wellbeing on her own. But none of us can actually experience wellbeing on her own. Its exactly the joints of society, the junctures of individuals the interstices of life that the trouble really shows itself. One way to put that point is that many of our struggles seem rooted in relational problems. Loneliness and isolation, mistrust and suspicion, alienation and polarization. These the kinds of problems we have now. Aand they are failures of sociality. They fell into a blind spot for a very individualist culture. So how do we explain it crisis of connectednessec like this . Some people argue the trouble is fundamental is philosophical, metaphysical that liberalism hasil failed they say because it fails to offer us a sufficient vocabulary for solidarity. Other people say that although traditional measures of growth and prosperity might look fine, our problem is still economic in a deeper sense. Its socioeconomic. They say contemporary capitalism creates levels of eluainequality 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 that external pressures like trade or immigration or internal pressures like racism or identity politics, have left this incapable of hanging together. There is someet truth to all of these things. They all get something important right because they treat the human person as embedded in a larger whole. Whether its metaphysical, moral, social economic and wey see whats wrong now something to do with the way we live out. But were still missing something crucial. We think about our problems in these ways, we tend to imagine our society as a vast open space thats full of people who are linking hands. So we talk about breaking down walls, or building bridges, orie leveling playing fields, casting some kind of unified narrative. But theres a missing step between joining together and recovering belonging, trust, and legitimacy. What we are missing although we really put it this way is a structure, shape for our social life. Oh wait to give purpose and concrete meaning and identity to things we do together. If American Life is a big open space, it b is not a space filled with individuals, but a space filled with structures of social life. Its a space filled with institution. And if we are too often failing to foster belonging egand, moral failure of a connection we confront the failure of institutions. They do a lot more than connect us. An understanding or social crisis in terms of what they are what they do, helps us to see the crisis in a new light. Thats the understanding really that this book tries to advance. So what is an institution . It wont surprise you to learn that there are a lot of different academic definitions of the term. The book thanks there are a few of these but for our purposes im in a talk about a general definition that draws together a lot of the Academic Work but looks towards the we confront in our society now. By institutions i mean the forms of our common life. Thee shapes, the structures of what we do together. Some institutions are really organizations, they have Something Like a corporate form, university or hospital or school or business or civic association. These are all institutions that they are technically dgally formalized. Some institutions are durable forms of a different kind. They may be shaped by laws, norms, rules. Though without a corporate structure, the family for example as an institution and sometimes it is the first and foremost institution of our society. We could talk about the institution of marriage or particular tradition, a profession of the institution, the rule of law itself as an institution. That they are durable as essential an institution keeps its general shape over time so it shapes the realm of life in which it might be r set to operate. Llusually changes only very gradually andad incrementally. Flash mobs dont count and institutions. Ibut most important and whats distinct about institution is its a form in the deepest sense, a form as a structure, contour, its the shape of the whole, the organization speaks of its purpose, p its logic, its function and its meaning. Its a social form is not just a bunch of a people, but its a bunch of people order together to achieve a p purpose, to pursue a goal, to advance an ideal. And that means institutions are also by their nature formative. They structure our interactions and as a result of that they structure us. They shape our habits, our expectations, ultimately they shape our character. They shape our souls. They helped to form us. And that formative role has a lot to do with how institutions relate to the social crisis reliving there now. Limit that word about that. We think about the role of institutions in america live now, we might tend to think first about our loss of trust or confidence in the institutions. We talk about that a lot, its a trend we hear a lot about. Measures of it are very easy to find and they painted very grim picture. Gallants have kept track of this for decades in most cases star doing this in the early 1970s and continues to do it on a regular basis. That trend in those figures is unmistakable from big business and banks and professions to the branch of the federal, the news media the academy is founded confidence and our constitutions have been plummeting consistently. Nearly 80 of the american said they had a great dealer quite a bit of confidence in doctors and hospitals for example. That figure blasters 37 . Forty years ago 65 of americans said they had a great deal are quite a bit of confidence in organized religion. Laster less than 40 said that. 60 ofss americans hadls confidence in a Public Schools in the early 70s, just about a third did last year. Even in 1975, one year after Richard Nixon did reside in disgrace, 52 of americans are sparse confidence in the presidency. Laster is 32 . They found that 42 the public had confidence in congress in 1970s, last year that figures 12 and even that seems really high and you have to wonder who are these people that say they have confidence in congress. This pattern holds for just about all of the institutions. The military is the only major exception will speak about that in a Second Period but the overall trend is really unmistakable. The American Public is gone for extraordinary levels of confidence in our major institutions to really striking levels of mistrust. But what do actually mean when we say we dont trust institutions . I thinkon the answer has a lot to do with what institutions really are andit do. Ed takes us back to the question of how they form us. Every Significant Institution carries out an important task in society. Its educating children, enforcing the law, serving the tpoor, just providing some service and making some products. Meeting a need we have. They do that by establishing a structure in a process, a form for combining peoples efforts to accomplish that task. But in the process that institution also forms those people to carry out that task effectively and responsiblyop and reliably. It shapes the people within it to beth trustworthy. That is what it means to trust and institution. We trust an institution when it has an ethic that makes the people within it more trustworthy. So we might trust a Political Institution when it takes seriously and obligation to the public interest. And forms the people in it to do the same. We trust the military because it values courage and honor and duty in 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 in meetings and need we have in seems to reward its people when they deliver those. We trust the school because it builds a culture that makes his people devoted to learning and teaching and making kids happy and t safe. We trust the Journalistic Institution for example for it has high standards of honesty or accuracy in reporting the news, and that makes its people reliable. We lose faith in an institution we no longer believe that it plays that kind of ethical or formative role. Shaping the people within it to be trustworthy. One way that can happen is when an institution claims to enforce an ethic of responsibility but plainly fails to do that. Instead shielding and empowering bad behavior. Like when a bank cheats its customer or when a member of the clergy abuse as a child. That kind of gross abuse of power obviously undermines public trust in institutions. It is a familiar form of the corruption, but it ison not new, there are plenty of examples of inner time. So it doesnt quite explain the distinctive loss of confidence in institutions in our own day. But another related but different way in which institution could lose our trust, as when itru just fails to impose an ethic on the people within it altogether. Doesnt seem to see that kind of formation as its purpose. When the people in the institution no longer see it as a mold of its character and behavior, just as a platform for themselves to perform on, to raise their profile, to be seen in society. An institution like that, seems to be b worthy of your trust, not because failed to earn it becausest it doesnt seek it or desire appear to think Something Like that has been happening to a lot of her institutions in American Life in the last few decades. We dont think of our institutions as formative but performative. When the presidency and congress are just stages for performing political outrage. When University Becomes a venue for verdure signaling on one side or the other. When journalism is indistinguishable from activism from one side or the other. When the Church Becomes a political stage, they become a lot harder to trust. Because they are not really asking for a trust or just asking for our attention. And in our time, a lot of the most significant social and political and cultural and celestial institutions in our country or in the process of going through this type of transformation. For multiplatform. The few exceptions, most notably the military the most formative institution prove that rule because they tend to be the few institutions in which we arent losing faith. And many of the truly novel institutions of the 201st century and especially the virtual institutions of social media are inherently shaped as platforms. And not as molds. It would be strange to trust a platform a and we generally atdont. And that change of attitude that the client and the expectations should be formative of the people in them is at the heart of our loss of faith in the institution. Is that turn the heart of the broader social crisis because institutions understand as platforms or molds. Its a stage to perform on more than a means to perform and shape our character. Theyff are less able to offer subjects of loyalty subjects of legitimacy, ways of Building Mutual trust. Examples of this mold to platform transformation is all around us if you start looking for them. Our institutions are putting into lat forms but for performance but a formative virtue and outrage in that vast polarized cultural war that t is so much of our societies living through. In one institution after another be fine people who ought to think of themselves as insiders, shaped by distinct purpose and integrity of the institution there in instead functioning as outsiders displaying themselves, building their own personal grand. This is obvious in politics, is there any doubt that donald trump sees the presidency at the stage for performing an outrage . And himself as a performer acting on it rather than an executive acting in and through it. What exactlyhe is he doing when he tweets his displeasure at something that Department Justice is done for example the department of Justice Works for him. If he had a sense of his job is shaped by constitutional contours he would direct to the executive branch rather than complain about it. Maybe its a good thing he doesnt know he can do that, but he could and a president normally would. As sense of his job is yet another stage for the reality intent Reality Television show his life has been for so long. As ernie questioned the same time that many members of congress of both parties now run for office last to be involved in legislative work and more to have a prominent platform and the culture wars, to be very visible on cable news, talk on radio or will the bigger media following to build their office uses a platform to complain for the variouson institution they try so hard to enter. They see that is what their voters want so they are always performing for their core partisan audience. Our two Major Political parties now, really anything other than to platforms for performance. Do they have a function other than to display and elevate narcissism . Do we even remember the role of the clinical parties are supposed to be at this point . Look at the perfect journalism as an example its institutional strength is its insistence on informative integrity. On a process of editing and verification that helps us to be sure that what provides is areliable. But today a lot of lead journalist constantly step outside of those institutional constraints it addressed the public directly with social media or on cable news. Buildingab their own personal brands on a platform rather than participating in the work of the institutions. If you look at twitter right now you would find a lot of professional