Timothy carneys new book and a discussion about its claims and i think you will find both tims remarks and the panel of interest particularly timely given the moment we find ourselves in strictly right now so i look forward to the discussion. Tim is going to come out and offer a few words and then he will be followed with a Panel Discussion withCharles Murray who is known to probably everybody here. Hes a high chair and Cultural Studies here at aei and Megan Mcardle who is probably known to all of you, Washington Post columnist with a lot to say on this issue as well. Tim is a visiting fellow here at aei and hes also the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner where hes been a columnist for a while and you are all aware of his columns to his previous books on cronyism are what any of you probably know him for. The big ripoff and obamanomics. But this new book alienated america is a New Enterprise for him, adeep dive into whats going on in the heartland and im holding this book up because you need to buy it. Its easier for me to say that and for tim to say and you should go out there and pick up a copy on your way out if you didnt pick one up on the way in, they are for sale in the hallway know tim will give us a few remarks followed by this discussion and then we will allow time for engagement with you, for a question and answer period follow and our rules here at aei is that you are brief and your answer is in the form of a question so without further ado id like to welcome him up here, come up and give us your thoughts. [applause] matthew ryan, thanks everybody for coming. My name is timothy carney, im a visiting fellow and a fulltime journalist so what i did in alienated america was trying to find out new things and tell a story with my reporting and lots of data and a lot of these guys noted probably in 2015 and 2016 there was a surge in interest among the Political Press in looking at workingclass places, and going to appalachia and parts of the rustbelt. Places where the American Dream seemed dead and in writing this book i started at the opposite end, in the opposite place. Here my house in chevy chase maryland. A lot of you guys are about chevy chase when brett cavanaughs confirmation was going on but thats lesser chevy chase. Theres a chevy chase dc, a town of chevy chase, something called section 5 then there is the elite chevy chase called the village of chevy chase, population of 2000. It is the wealthiest municipality in the wealthiest region in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and its also got 80 percent of the population there as college degrees. Including a majority of men and women. Youve got half the population has advanced degrees in chevy chase but heres an important thing and you would know this ifyou read Charles Murrays coming apart. Its not just wealth, its not just material ways in which they are doing well. Theres all sorts of positive outcomes. 95 percent of the families have 2 parents at home. I visited there a few times and at the village hall they have a father daughter dance day. You go there and you have kids movie night where the teenagers in the town watch your kids so the parents can go out and have actual dinner in town. This is of immense value that they have there. Im a dad, my wife happy valentines day katie is here. We have six kids. Something that allows you to get away fear kids is one of the best ways to foster your love for your kids. But they also have classes for the elderly in the village hall, sports teams for kids and the outcomes are excellent. The kids get married. The kids for the most part stay away from drugs, they go off to college, they avoid pregnancy so these elite villages like chevy chase all around the country, they produce these good outcomes cause of both as a wise woman once said it takes a village to raise a child and a village like chevy chase is that the village and speaking of hillary clinton, if you look at her list of top underwriters , the pill razors, a dozen of them at least live in chevy chase. So this is a liberal elite town that practices the values that conservatives preach. And if you Pay Attention to liberal blocks you find out what they are trying to do is make more of the Us Population be like chevy chase area a just wish elites have such good outcomes, maybe we can make more of them like us. If we throw more money at Public Schools, maybe your Kennedy Public School in Silver Spring can have the same outcomes as Langley High School in mclean virginia. Or they say maybe if we made college free because college is associated with so many good outcomes, college free and everybody will have all these good outcomes i would argue and im not going to belabor it here you cant make everybody in america the an elite area it takes a village to village of chevy chase is not a scalable model area so in chapter 1, i visit another village called duisburg in wisconsin. Its about the percent of the population there claims dutch ancestry. When i was there i sat in a diner and the chevy chase meetinghouse is 1. 5 million and increase for its hundred 50,000. You can buy 10 homes for the price of one in chevy chase. And the Median Income is slightly above average but not if you control for the fact that the number of Family Household is way above average in his bird. When i was sitting at judys diner on a sunday, and walked the crowd leaving the 9 am service at the First Reformed church and the 9 am at bethel Orthodox Church and then a little while later by the way, im a catholic so i always thought that church always lasted an hour. Some of these things go on for hours and hours though theyre coming in with older kids 9 15, First PresbyterianChurch Service let out earlier and in came the crowd from the 9 30 at the First Christian reformed church in a small town village of 2000 as for different reformed churches plus an Evangelical Church and the bus to take you to the Catholic Church out of town. This village hasnt seen great outcomes as chevy chase. When i asked one of the guys there sitting at the counter he was a mechanic, he still had greece under his fingernails and i said what do you think of the village and he said im going to tell you one complaint i had, i went to the Christmas Concert the other day a few months back there were no seats at my kids Christmas Concert left because all these people who didnt even send their kids to the Public School were there watching the Christmas Concert so i yelled at my neighbor and i said youre taking up my seat and jenny who doesnt have any kids said we had to come watch our kids and so that phrase, Robert Putnam used that as the title of one of his book in duisburg the kids are our kids to everybody. These are the two models. How is chevy chase like duisburg or like Salt Lake City for these other conservative religious places they both have very Strong Institutions of Civil Society. Whether its Chevy Chase Country Club in the sports teams there or the First Reformed church and First Christian reformed church or our home Christian Ministries which one out of all these churches together for the Christian Schools or Public Schools, the strong religious communities and the elite get good outcomes not because of Government Programs they run but because they have a Strong Institution of Civil Society so what is the plight of the working class where they are struggling . Its that they lack those institutions. Alienation is the plight of middle america. We talk about the factory shutting down and thats a factor of the real problem is the church is closing down. I talked about all the secular institutions that can exist for middle class and working class, the church has always been, the church, synagogue, church has always been essential institution of Civil Society. Secularization of america has been tolerable for the elites although they have not secularized as much as conservatives think but its been tolerable secularization has been deadly for the working class and middle class. Thats what i argue, thats what i established in alienated america and again, i want to thank you for coming and i couldnt think of to better people to talk about this with and Charles Murray and Megan Mcardle so lets have a conversation. [applause] megan, ill let you go first i have so much i want to say. Not just because my husband is in the acknowledgments. Full disclosure, i did not give this book for publication, withhold this for me so i can penalize on but i will read my favorite passage from the book because i think this sums up sort of both the inside and the challenge. Of what tim points out. Because what the death of diners where i saw this in my mothers hometown. A Dunkin Donuts opens up and theres a drivethrough and my grandmother got up at 5 30 every morning for decades and went to the diner to gethis toast and eggs, that place is slowly dying off. And he says and tim says losing a diner means losing a meeting place. Over the years this would weaken the connections between neighbors and you may say theres nothing keeping neighbors from getting together anyway after they get their breakfast and coffee. Nowthey can meet at a park or wherever they want because theyre liberated from their need to go to a diner. This sounds rational and it also obviously ignores how humans social interaction works. A more obvious and immediate needs bring us together and the coming together of the less obvious but still very real needs. We come together for food, drink or security and end up gaining from, roderick. Deprivation in these less obvious need is often not noticeable in the short run but devastating in the long run and i read that and i think about an observation that Science Fiction writer Robert Heinlein of all people once said which is everyone complain about the suffocating nature of Family Networks in small towns and if you read fiction from up to about 1960 this is like a dominant theme. Its how terrible it is and then it went away and we suddenly realized it had indeed been suffocating and all the rest demanded but it also provided a lot of stuff that we missed when it was gone but you couldnt see it like fish and water until it was gone so i see us in a lot of ways and i will say i think i graded both kens book and charles book and i think the weakest part of both books is what is the weakest part of almost every book which is the obligatory what is to be done chapter. And if i had my way, we would just ask that chapter out of the book because i think describing a problem is often all by itselfincredibly valuable. I think tim and charles have both recognized the difficulty of this with proper humility rather than the one secret thing to fix this problem but the question i always have at the end of recognizing problems like this because it is a problem in some of the ways that welfare, the old welfare system arguably created a situation in which people were making completion of rational shortterm decisions that welfare was better for them in the short term but because it stayed out of the labor market in the short term it made them unemployable and created more problems. In the same way all these things are rational shortterm decisions because the cost of building, roderick, the cost of that network on any given morning you are deciding whether youre going to drive or spend an hour at the diner or thrive through the Dunkin Donuts in five minutes, at any given moment the costs are more apparent. Its only over the long term that the benefits you are losing become apparent so the question i have and this is not a question i expect everyone to answer but a question we have to answer collectively is what do you do when the incentive structure of society is setting things up so that people are not driving but how you over that incentive structure, the government cannot mandate that we go to church so where do we do the work and how do we do the work . Youre a libertarian, ima libertarian and this works well enough. Which is when it comes to the solutions, im a libertarian, libertarians dont do solutions. It is true however that everybody continues to ask me and as i was thinking of coming on the panel today, and i was deciding just how gloomy to be. Because of in many ways the book is upbeat and you see functioning communities, and i applaud i wonder if you look at the problem closely enough, if you still do not retain much optimism and i go back to coming apart, one of the lease discussed parts of coming apart was my chapters on the pounding birches. Where i was going back to the founders and saying well, they disagreed a lot of things, all of them said that there were a few things that were necessary for the society to function, for the constitution to work and they were religiosity, and honesty and industriousness, what was the fourth . I hate it when that happens. These were characteristics of the American People that were going to enable the constitution to hold together and you take a look at the trends in the working class and they are devastating. You said briefly but correctly the secularization has not progressed as far from theuppermiddleclass. The point of intellectuals, you go to the faculty of Harvard University and they do a survey and theyre all atheists, basically but you go to the uppermiddleclass and theres been some secularization but its kind of leveled off and you still have maybe 30 percent who have a strong affiliation with the church or at least a place of worship. You go to the working class where i was backbone of religious support and its just if you use the General Social survey, your down around 12 percent of people in the White Working Class which is the sample i was looking at the White Working Class about 12 percent and have a meaningful attachment to a church and when you only have 12 percent have community, then they do not provide a kind of core around whom various kinds of civic functions revolve. There kind of oddballs when youre 12 and a half percent whereas 30 percent, youre still in the game so that they religiosity has diminished. The whole notion of morality, that was my fourth one. It needed a moral people. I dont know if youve noticed, nobody talks about virtueanymore. Because the left has always been a little down on virtue as being preachy and judgmental and so forth. May i just observed its very embarrassing for conservatives to talk about the importance of virtue and character these days . Im not going to get into an argument about any National Leadership here. Im just going to observe that if you say well, what you really need in a political figure starting out before anything else is character. Because everything ultimately stems from character, character is destiny and apart from that you want something you can hold up to your kids, that conversation is completely silent and it will continue to be silent for the indefinite future. Well, guess what . Madison says the idea that a free people can exist without virtue in the people is a chimeric idea and it is. The United States, our communities dont in the absence of a strong sense of virtue and heres where maybe we can get into an argument of some kind here for at least thebackandforth. A central theme of tims book is the importance of religiosity. Steve pinker, i wish you were on the panel because it would be fun to have steve on the panel with enlightenment now who would say no, you dont have to have that area i think tim is right area ill make just one other comment before we make it more of a backandforth. And that is that both this is what happens when youre 76, you forgot what you were going to say kim, im going to let you. Thank you for bringing up virtue because that i think the theme throughout the book and i grew up, came up with a classical education and aristotle feature, virtue is a habit and one of the things about habits is they require practice so two different times, i use the idea of sort of what about if you like sort of the gymnasium in which to practice virtue . And what is a strong family, what is a good elite Public School, what is a big church community, these are the places where these can be practiced. Now, i think Church Communities are the only ones that do that very well because the elite wont call these virtues. There sort of practices. Well, for the reason you stay married and get involved in your kids lives, is because your kids then have t