Can the Republic be Rebuilt?

good afternoon internet and welcome to can the republic be rebuilt a provocative and stimulating discussion um i hope that will be conducted this afternoon under the auspices of the institute for human ecology at the catholic university of america um which is um a institute officially the uh the country's leading academic institute committed to increasing the scientific understanding of the economic cultural and social conditions vital for human flourishing um that's the sort of official slogan i know the institute as a tremendous place to have a really wonderful discussion um and i've been lucky enough to participate in and help organize panels like this one um for going on several years now and they've never failed to be stimulating and entertaining so if you're entertained by this one i hope you will check out all the other great stuff that ihe does and i realized that i haven't actually introduced myself i'm ross douthit i'm an op-ed columnist for the new york times and when i'm not doing that i'm a media fellow at ihe under which eminence i conduct and participate in these conversations so today i'm joined by two of i think it's fair to say america's leading conservative thinkers um first yuval livin who is the founding and current editor of national affairs and also the director of social cultural and constitutional studies at the mayor at the american enterprise institute and most importantly for the purposes of this conversation he's the author of a book that came out about a year ago now called a time to build from family and community to congress and the campus how recommitting to our institutions can revive the american dream and he's joined by christopher caldwell who is a contributing editor at the claremont review of books and a contributing opinion writer at my own new york times he was previously a senior editor at the weekly standard columnist for the financial times and he's the author of the age of entitlement america since the 60s which also came out almost exactly a year ago and in fact that was the genesis for the idea that became this event um because both chris and yuval and myself in fact published books that came out within a month or two of the arrival of the coronavirus on america's shores um and all of our books but maybe especially uvol's and chris's were focused on sort of the state of the american republic the big questions about the fate of our society in the early 21st century um but both of them were you know written and their arguments put together before we went through and obviously continue to go through the remarkable disturbances of 2020 and 2021 so i thought it would be great to get the two of them together to talk a little bit about not just the arguments they make in the book but also how their view of the situation um the state of the republic as it were has changed over the course of the coronavirus year so i'm going to take the moderator's privilege and offer really quick you know one to two to three sentence summaries of what i think um the the core claims of yuval and chris's book are which they can then correct and amend um and then ask them questions um about uh how their theses look and in the light of the last year and hopefully we will talk for about 35 or 40 minutes and then try and take a few questions um the chat i think is open and if you leave questions there um at about 2 45 or 250 or so i will go in and try and fish out a few of the best the hardest to answer the most ruthlessly provocative so that's the preamble um so the books themselves so i'll start with you all whose book as his as his title suggested was you know maybe maybe on the more optimistic end of the spectrum of conservative books about america these days um i think you can see the book as kind of a sequel to a earlier more diagnostic book that you've all wrote called the fractured republic um about sort of the changes in american life synthetic since the 1960s and how the institutions that were sort of existed or were built for you know the mid 20th century america are now sort of creaking and groaning under the pressures of a very different country and social context so that was duvall's last book and in this book he focuses on the failures of american institutions but also a sort of argument for how they can be rebuilt and in particular um i think you've all stressed us the idea that what we're living through in america right now is a failure to believe in institutions as institutions whether it's your college or the united states congress or your church or even your you know large successful daily newspaper um people increasingly see these the institutions that they inhabit as kind of platforms on which to build a public persona um a brand something you know something to you know shouted other people from i feel personally convicted by this this description of which totally applies to what newspaper columnists do um when in fact successful institutions need to be not just a platform but a sort of shaping force in which the people involved in them are committed to institutional ends and committed to sort of educating and integrating the next generation into the service of sometimes obviously the reform of um the institution itself and so as fate would have it we then immediately upon publication of this book got an incredible stress test for american institutions um from you know sort of the fda and the cdc to the white house and the congress all the way down to your local public school district um and so i'm going to start by asking yuval how did how did we do how do how do american institutions look a year after your book came out and how optimistic or pessimistic are you right now about their future well thank you ross i i appreciate uh the opportunity to be part of this conversation to learn from you and chris uh two of the wisest observers of this moment and thanks to the institute for human ecology for bringing us together um first of all i i always resent being called an optimist and so let me say just a word about that because i'm not an optimist i'm a conservative and certainly not an optimist but i am hopeful and i think that the distinction between hope and optimism is actually very useful to understanding our circumstances in this moment in america i think that optimism is just the expectation that good things will happen and that's silly um i don't think there's anything about our situation that encourages that attitude uh but hope is the view that good things could happen that in a sense we're not observers of the future uh we're participants it's up to us uh so where optimism is the opposite of pessimism which is also pretty silly i think of hope is the opposite of despair which is a sin and in any case and you'll correct me if i if i understand the christian sin of despair correctly it only applies really to despair about the church but i think despair in general um is the mistake and that hope is the right way to think about even a very difficult situation and maybe especially a very difficult situation and we are in a pretty difficult situation um you know if i were writing the book now in the wake of 2020 there are certainly elements of it that would have been darker uh more alarmed and more concerned there are also ways in which some of the more alarmed parts of the argument have been borne out by this year so that i've been left wishing that i could have used the examples of 2020 to make some of the points of the book um and among other things could have learned from chris's book about some things that would have made a lot of the arguments sharper but to answer let me maybe emphasize one theme that to me is central to the argument of the book and that i think has been really key to our experience of the past year one thing that we saw repeatedly in 2020 was a kind of collapse of trust in expertise driven by a collapse particularly i would say of self-restraint among experts that's a theme of the book and i think it's crucial to what institutions do for us uh both the people who benefit from them and the people who populate them and this year has really forced us to ask the question why do we actually trust expertise to begin with i think we don't just trust experts because they know things that we don't know sometimes they do sometimes they don't our sense of how much more they know is wane some in the internet era but a lot of times we trust experts because they seem somehow to operate under some set of constraints that means that they don't just say anything they operate under some set of rules that allow us to have some confidence in what they say we trust an accountant not just because he understands the carried interest rule but because there are things an accountant wouldn't do there are things a lawyer wouldn't do there are or ought to be things that a journalist wouldn't say right why do we trust a journalist because there's a process that their work is subject to that imposes some constraints on what they would claim to know and when we lose trust in them it's because they seem to escape that process and as you suggested to use their profession as a platform to elevate themselves rather than as a mold of what they do in the world so that they take a certain form that's easier for us to trust when we trust public health experts it's because we think they'll follow the evidence where it leads and not use the authority of their profession to advance their personal political priorities for example and so you see where that's going and looking at 2020 which was an awful year for expertise because it was a year in which people we wanted and needed to trust not just people we were told to trust but we felt we needed to be able to trust somebody on what's going on here those very people continuously escape the constraints that ought to be imposed on them by their professions by their institutions they're part of and so again and again showed themselves not to be worthy of that trust now that's not an excuse for escaping into conspiracy and fantasy but it is a reason for doing so and i think it helps us see that the revolt against elites in american life is a function in large part of the elite evasion of responsibility and particularly of the responsibility that comes with power and that is a crucial part of what institutions do they impose the responsibility that comes with power so to me that lesson applies to a lot more than expertise it cuts to the core of our loss of confidence in institutions in american life and to the core of the populist moment that we live in it gives us a sense that the people with power in our society are not constrained by any obligation to that society so that a recovery would have to involve some kind of recovery of institutional responsibility which you know and maybe this is the hopeful part of me it's easy to say well that's impossible those people would never do it but if it starts with us if it starts with individuals who can say given the role that i have in this institution that i'm part of what should i be doing here then i do think it's imaginable that you could start to see both a greater demand for that kind of responsibility and a a greater expression of that kind of responsibility in various parts of american life whether it's possible or not that's where our that's where my hope lies that's what a recovery would look like and i think in the wake of 2020 it's clearer than ever how big the problem is and so it's clearer than ever that we need a solution on that front and you know in in that sense i'd say the argument of the book should strike all the more uh all the more precisely on the problem points we have but obviously the year has also been proof that the problem is deep and broad and serious and if you're looking for arguments for despair this wasn't a bad year for those either good now just just exactly the balance of hope and cold-eyed realism that i was that i was looking for from you you've all so now for the even colder i take i want to i want to turn to chris um because chris's book was also about sort of structural changes in the american republic between the 1960s and the present um but um chris you made a um in a way i think a more ideological argument than you've all sort of focused on the extent to which in your telling the united states has you know for reasons that began with the logic of the civil rights act and the civil rights movement in the 1960s but have since extended themselves dramatically across a range of groups identities um basically all the cultural forces that we think of making up modern liberalism through this process the us has replaced or partially replaced its older constitution which focused on you know to some significant degree the protection of individual liberties to a new constitution that is focused much more on the balancing of group interests and the protection of group rights um with those groups again being you know racial initially but sort of extending in broader groups to encompass and you're telling just about everybody except perhaps um white males and so and your book ends i think on a you know a more pessimistic note than than yuval's uh not optimistic but hopeful book um in the sense that having told this story you sort of end by saying well look you know the the in certain ways the reasonable answer or the reasonable position that conservatives should take in this moment is to um consider going all the way back to the source and repealing the major legislation that sort of set this process in motion which means the civil rights act some sort of most inviable um part of i would say modern american legislation in certain ways um which seemed to me as a reader kind of like a council of despair um so i'm curious i'm curious that that would be my question to you a year ago you know how despairing are you actually um my question to you now though is how vindicated do you feel by the sort of ideological drama that has played out within liberalism against the backdrop of sort of institutional failure that you've all described because i will say that when i read your book for the first time i thought you placed race too close to the center of sort of you know modern liberalism self-understanding and purposes and obviously we've just gone through a year where against the backdrop of the coronavirus race has sort of rushed to the center of um liberal arguments liberal agitation conflict within liberal institutions themselves um so i guess a two a twofold question are you um are you despairing and are you vindicated and your microphone is off chris just so you know you're muted yes well thank you thank you very much ross and and um thank you and uh and thank the institute for human ecology for for having me it's great to be here with and it's an honor to be here with both you and and yuval um well you know i would say i'm not yeah you i'm not sure i would agree with the characterization of the book as really being about about race or about group rights i don't think that that's necessarily the core of what was done with the civil rights act in in 1964 which i do agree is at the the center of my book i think that the civil rights act of 1964 it didn't have any idea of real group rights in it of the you know as you wouldn't say the indian constitution or something and had the idea of of stopping americans from doing something that i think had become sort of morally intolerable to them and did not fit in institutional racial um uh discrimination and particularly segregation and um although my book is not i believe ideological it does trace the evolution of that type of of that type of government that was set up in the early 1960s over the course of a half century um i don't have the time to go into it in great detail but basically the the argument is that the remit kept expanding that from trying to fix sort of segregation in mississippi and alabama the civil rights act sort of spread its view and this was in the statute this was not this was not so much of a stretch to the whole country it also increased the things that were considered um uh uh discrimination and it it it increased the punishments for those and so it became the civil rights act became a very powerful tool not just for fixing jim crow but also for fixing other problems and so activists who felt themselves poorly treated um in some way or another involving disadvantage or discrimination were no longer patient enough to wait for legislation so to take a couple of familiar examples women who felt that they should be promoted to the executive level of a corporation more quickly or immigrants who felt that that schools were not fair to them you could say to those people well if you're not happy why don't you go out and try and vote a law but increasingly they were not content with that and so the civil rights act and the laws built on it became a kind of a style of government which gradually i think came to be used to overrule the old style of government what happened in the cove year i think is maybe most obvious um in the aftermath of the george floyd killing and the um and the protests and the riots that resulted from it when you had this enormous uh movement of the society as one to censor and purge pretty much every corporate institution in the country um in order to somehow sort of rectify some racial wrong although it was never really clear what that racial wrong was because when um you know when the new orleans saints made drew brees go out and apologize for saying that he did not approve of kneeling during the national anthem anthem i don't think they felt any particular responsibility for what happened in minneapolis to george floyd and indeed i don't think the new orleans saints as an institution have any real need to feel they owe anyone an apology at all when it comes to race um but there it was so i would say i don't necessarily believe this is a question of race i believe it's a question of a new style of government imposed quite indirectly from above um which has gradually now become the foundation of the way we we live so let me i want to i want to bring you guys sort of effectively into conversation with each other if i can um and but let me let me let me take up that that last point chris right because yeah i guess in my framing i suggested that you've always focused heavily on institutions and by calling your book ideological i meant that it was sort of more focused on the working out of ideas um but i think it's in certain ways your book arguably is more sort of institutionally focused and evolves and the extent to the extent that you know you've always sort of describing a decline a weakening and emptying out of institutions um and part of your point is that we created sort of de novo a set of institutions sort of extra constitutional quasi-constitutional institutions in the 60s um in effect a sort of set of laws and but legal procedures sort of managed through the bureaucracy in the courts that have become much obviously much more institutionally powerful and have set sort of set the tone um for you know how americans argue about talk about think about race sex religion a whole graph of things so in that sense you sort of have more confidence than any of all in in institutions um and i i want to press you on the last point which is that to me what's striking what's striking about the last year is sort of how de-institutionalized the anti-racism is in the sense that when you know the moment arrived for drew brees to you know go out and make a mea culpa or when the moment arrived for you know the editor of bon appetit or you know whichever the leaders of the poetry foundation which you know whichever whichever um whichever um sort of group happened to be in battle when that moment arrived nobody was filing an anti-discrimination claim with the equal employment opportunity commission or anything like that right i mean this was this was a cultural movement that worked itself out you know almost exclusively through sort of demand demands and responses in effect that it's it it sort of transcended the institutional structures on which on which it had built and you're shaking your head good so tell me why you think that's wrong no i think you're right that we created a new set of institutions above but i think we have not yet figured out what those what those institutions are you know the problem with the civil rights institutions is that they were driven largely by litigation right we we we created a lot of new crimes um we uh created we hugely staffed up the um uh the federal government's investigative and and and litigative apparatus um and we encouraged uh sort of uh uh the country to be the eyes and ears of you know civil rights enforcement that's the new institution that we created that's really that's really important i think that when we look at our country constitutionally we tend to look at the basic you know tripartite structure of an executive legislative and judiciary but we forget that this that within the judiciary branch lawsuits have become a way of actually driving social change you know um and one of the results of well let's just say one thing that was implicit in 1964 and one of the things that critics of the civil rights act warned against and it turns out rightly in retrospect was the erosion of the boundary between public and private you know um there's a lot of discussion about whether you know it should be only public discrimination that was um that that that that that was made illegal or whether private discrimination should be to we wound up with a kind of a a way for the government to look into private businesses and that accompanied with our our litigating habits with our our tendency to sue people whom we're not happy with that created a great vulnerability for companies and as judges began to rece began to comment on and actually rework the civil rights litigation companies and other private individuals got more and more and more vulnerable to being destroyed by literally by litigation um and that had sociological or that that had consequences for the corporate sociology of the country yet the building up of large human resources departments which spent much of their time trying to protect their corporations from anti-discrimination lawsuits and you had a build up of doctrines including um uh let's say hostile environment doctrine which meant that that the culture of of a company independent of whether anyone even meant to discriminate in any way could render a company vulnerable and the opinions of the original of the of the members of that company or corporation could count as part of that corporate culture so when activists began knocking at the door of the of new orleans saints they were scared and so you have these pretty much every private organization every private corporation in the country is now running interference for the federal government and that and this this creates a very a very complex dynamic because it doesn't look like the government is doing anything at all um but it is a and and i think it's important to understand that it is it has actually empowered um through civil rights it has empowered corporations to do things like you know in in enforce free speech and that and and that sort of thing i think this is a top down thing it's just at a kind of an indirect it's that one removed russ i wonder if you can get to that i i think there's i i very much agree with the way that chris started to get at this by saying that there's more to the constitution than the three branches of government the familiar picture it's worth our seeing our constitution in almost a classical sense as describing our way of life and providing us with a vocabulary for understanding the relations between uh parts of our society and there there's always been a way in the united states in particular where we use the terminology of our constitution to describe elements and facets of our culture so that when uh you know when the student movement arose in the early 60s it reached for the language of free speech which it had very little really to do with but it needed a way to describe its agenda and its energy and the natural place to go was the the language the vocabulary of the constitution i think there are there is a way that the what chris describes as a kind of new constitution or i would say a new phase of american constitutionalism that was created by those super majorities of the mid 60s and really a lot of what we're living with in american politics now is a function of those super majorities doing things that just regular majorities can't undo whether that's in our entitlement system or whether that's in these civil rights debates they created a new set of terms for describing the the the forces that are at work in american life and you find those forces now at work on their own i i don't think it's quite right to say that they're acting on behalf of the government i i think they they are acting independently on an understanding of what our constitution is broadly understood of what the principles of american life are and some of those are embodied in institutions and you know there's no you can't help but be formed by institutions and if they are deformed then they deform you so that a lot of younger americans now going through the universities and encountering a mode of administration that uses this idea of social justice as a way of using power which is what university administrators do now those students emerge from those institutions understanding that as the way that administration works and then they go and work for the new york times or they go and work for the new orleans saints so they go and work for wall street firms and you know all the people in all those places come out of the same fairly small number of universities they walk out with an idea of what administration looks like that involves this kind of way of applying power to advance a world view and to demand conformity to that view and they then expect other institutions in american life to work that way and i think this is all related to the changes in in legal culture and and and political culture that chris describes but i wouldn't say that it's topped down in the sense that it's responding to government pressure yes it could have been a culture transformed by by political change yuval i think i was i was if i used the word behalf i want to be you know i was i was unclear i don't mean the government is um ordering corporations to carry out its its policy what i mean is that it created um it criminalized certain behaviors in in 1964 and in not in any centralized way but in a way having to do with the with the culture of the judiciary which is an elite well-educated uh culture that that those criminalized activities were kind of elaborated to the point where they they reach into more and more areas of of of private life for institutions that have a lot at stake in a lawsuit that is universities with large endowments corporations with sort of like with heavily invested uh shareholders they have a fiduciary responsibility of not having all their money taken away and so they tend to behave they tend to respond to threats that come from litigation in this larger you know in this large sort of complex of of hard to determine criminalized behaviors they tend to they they tend to respond very seriously when i say this is top down i don't mean that they're being commanded to behave in a certain way i mean they are responding to incentives that were created by the government i wonder christoph and sort of kind of take over us but i i wonder one thought i had in reading your argument reading your book is that ironically the judiciary is the one institution in our system that is in better shape today than it was in 1970 because of a transformation basically wrought by the federalist society and others the the debates within the judiciary today are basically a yes or no question about originalism which is an idea that didn't even exist in 1970 and if if the power that you're describing was ultimately rooted in judicial overaction is there some hope in the transformation of the judiciary that we're living through part of which we've seen more of which we'll see i think in in the in the years to come i defer to you on matters of hope i'm i i think that your definition of hope is a good one of course there's hope but you've well you've all actually though let me let me press you on that last point right because let's suppose let's suppose that we take the claim seriously that um what chris describes as beginning in administration and sort of you know lawsuits and bureaucracy and so on has become a culture that a sort of constitutional culture as you describe it that isn't necessarily dependent on those mechanisms then it seems like the court itself exists within that constitutional culture and so for instance when it comes time for a conservative supreme court you know selected with federalist society input to rule on whether the civil rights act covers on gay and transgender americans for instance right it rules the enough conservative judges justices rule in accordance with the new constitutional understanding at least in that case that that i know obviously there were sort of you know texturalist claims and so on but that seems to me to be what happened in that ruling that the power of the new constitution was such that um at least two conservative justices felt you know impelled to sort of conform their analysis to it do you think that's right yeah i think that's largely right i it's i guess my own quest my own answer to my own question would be that real hope would require a an analogous process in the legislature to what we've seen in the courts over the last half century which is the revival of an understanding of the purpose of the institution that ultimately amounts to a kind of recovery of of american constitutionalism i think the real the what what conservatives brought about in the courts is the instantiation of a set of ideas that leads to a restrained judiciary which would have been useful in 1975 to avoid some of the things that chris is describing but which now of course ends up being weak in the face of all that has transpired as a result of what chris is describing and yet i think that that's the right role for the judge and so the the challenge we face is that right now the failure in our system and this gets back to the argument of my book too the the failure in our system is a failure of congress the problems we have in our constitutional system now whether that be problems with the courts or the executive branch the administrative state are almost all functions of a willfully under active congress and we're in a situation that to me seems analogous to the early 1970s where what's required is a is first and foremost kind of intellectual project a return to the roots that help us understand the purpose of congress which i would venture to say that if you ask members of congress today what the purpose of the institution is the answers would not be sources of hope for the likes of me um and ultimately the purpose of congress is to enable accommodation and compromise and bargaining in a divided society and there is no other institution in our society that has that purpose and we've basically lost sight of that being the purpose of congress even people want to reform congress now don't think that's what they're trying to achieve so that we're at a point now that to me again seems analogous to where scalia and bork and others were in relation to the courts in 1972 but in relation to congress we require a recovery of the fundamental purpose of the institution and the the way to answer the kinds of changes that chris describes by by the the through the the mold of of constitutional change would have to be focused on some recovery of the idea of congress i think that's the that's the focus for conservative constitutionalists but that's a generation-long project and in the meantime there are fights to be had in the culture and within all of our institutions that look like a recovery of institutional integrity in a way that is binding on elites and that fight has to be had within the environment the context that chris describes and so it's no small challenge but you know my my hope is ultimately rooted in my sense that things have gotten very bad um i don't think there are a lot of americans who are happy with the status quo and even though we disagree about what that means and in what direction that should point it seems to me this is a moment that can argue for some change and that can begin from a sense that people feel like things have gotten off track and the question for those of us who want to begin from hope and let it drive us towards some action is what can be made of that dissatisfaction and how do we help transform it from just sheer uh unhappiness and despair into some project into some way of acting on the the constitution broadly understood of our society in such a way that actually speaks to these problems i i do think our politics is struggling for such ways but it hasn't found them let then let me pose a provocation to you and and this this is chris you can answer this as well what if what we saw in elite institutions over the last year the sort of zealous anti-racism to distill it to a couple words is in fact that quest for integrity yeah taking the taking the only shape that it possibly can right because i mean my experience of elite institutions over you know 20 to 25 years of adult life is that they existed with some of chris's characteristics right a sort of you know a cautious litigation averse management of multiculturalism um joined to you know tons of you know extremely cynical careerism and and empty meritocratic self-interest of the kind that i think you describe as you know part of what's gone wrong with institutions and so a lot of what's happened with activism on the left it seems to me is you know an attempt to take institutions that really have no conservative constitutive character anymore at all that sort of exists in between these sort of you know sort of anti-racist piety and meritocratic self-interest and try to make them sort of coherent and idealistic and say look instead of you know having these institutions that only act you know against racial discrimination because they fear the you know lawsuits and bureaucracy and the way chris describes we want them to be anti-racist in full we want them to be you know passionate gospel believers in the truths of intersectionality um that seems to me to be part of what's happening and i'm curious what you both think of that scenario that this is the this is the renewal just not the ones right that's what you're hoping for i think you're right or at least i would say i think that this is this is evidence of a hunger for renewal but whether it actually is the renewal uh you know depends on whether this enables those institutions to function and serve their purposes in society which i don't think it will so to me this suggests an opportunity listening to college students talk the way college students talk now i just can't help think and you'll forgive this jewish american saying it i just can't help think these people are just begging to be converted to christianity and somebody needs to step up and do that and there is plainly a desire for justice and for some idea that will guide our society towards a deeper understanding of the good i give them that credit i think they mean it but what they're being offered isn't going to achieve that and so it seems to me that that actually is an opening for something like renewal and that even sees itself as being that renewal but i don't think it can succeed because it misunderstands the purposes of these institutions sorry chris i jumped in yeah no i'd say i i i think that's a good characterization if i were um if i were a pessimist you we were talking earlier about sort of like our institutions sort of like taking new forms you could say that maybe we do have our 21st century uh institutions it's just that they do not contain much free speech and they do not contain much of a role for uh the common man so why don't we it's 243 so why don't we pivot from that to questions um and i think let me just see um yeah so here's here's a question that i think picks up a little bit where where chris was leaving off um it's from derek webb and he asks so our problems with the our institutions whether the courts the universities or the administrative state ultimately downstream from american culture and if so i'm not the ultimate focus for those interested in rebuilding the republic beyond cultural issues the people themselves and their civic education habits and mores what do you guys think of that no i my answer is no i don't i don't disagree with the uh i don't agree with the the view most commonly expressed by steve bannon i believe that politics is downstream of culture i think it is uncertain uh it is in certain societies and and at certain times but i think that in this um in this particular issue where we're talking about the um uh the abuses of of of litigation political and political correctness um uh i i i think that the culture is downstream of politics i would i would have one qualifier though i think that it it's useful to think what the role of television is in all of this in having conditioned this revolution and made it all possible in its effect on attention spans i think that that has done a lot um as you've all realized is to to to to to create this transformation of our institutions into platforms well you know i guess i would i would say that i am closer to agreeing with the the original form of that expression which comes from daniel patrick moynihan which bannon left half out of moynihan said politics is downstream of culture but politics practically practiced properly can shape the culture and i think there's truth to that and for me it returns to that broader sense of constitution i return to it forgive me because it's the next book i'm writing but i think that there's a there's a way of understanding our politics and culture as existing in in a kind of interaction with each other in which they unavoidably shape one another so that it matters to the culture what happens in our politics how we understand where legitimacy comes from the shape and function of our institutions politics shapes culture to a tremendous degree and i think this is especially true in the united states americans have always understood our identity as connected to our constitution and what is a very bizarre way and i think we actually take a lot of our national identity from our political institutions and so it matters a great deal what's happening in those institutions but with i mean i think it's simply obviously true that those institutions also exist within an environment that is tremendously shaped by the currents of the culture it would be impossible to deny that what's happened in our politics in the past decade has been a kind of mode of cultural expression at least as much as it has been actually a practice of politics in any traditional sense this question's from an anonymous attendee how would you both define civil society would you consider an institution and what's the role of civil society vis-a-vis formal institutions in the united states and for that matter what is the current state of civil society it's kind of a trick question actually i think because those who invoke civil society tend to um represent the organized part of civil civil society that is foundations and and that sort of thing and um this is a very interesting question that takes us into the shape of whether we have a a new modern constitution because if we do then foundations are very important in it uh uh you know i mean in in in the the the let's say the non-profit sector more generally you mean universities uh because foundations and the nonprofit sector are to say something is tax exempt is to say it's basically subsidized so it does have a sort of a it's a half it's a half official role in in society so that is there i don't think that there's any such organic thing as civil society i think there's society which means the people just going about their business but i think generally when we talk about about civil society we're talking about the non-profit sector well i i largely agree with that i i think i would say that civil society describes the the space between the individual and the state and also what fills that space and so that for the most part it's a way of talking about that arena in which a variety of institutions that are not the government operate um and that they're institutions means they're more than just individuals and that they're not the government means they describe in our kind of society a very very broad array of institutions um you know i think some of those can be formal corporate organizations some of those are much less formalized kinds of social structures from the family on up um and i would say that americans have always cared to an unusual degree about the uh or have always sought to understand our society in terms of civil society and have thought about the government and its role as existing to sustain that space in which civil society happens rather than as filling that space as actually being the action society takes and that's changed over time we're less that way than we used to be but i think it's still the case that there's a distinctly american view that says that civil society is what government exists to protect and sustain and it's ultimately how we actually function how we interact with each other and we're most of our institutions are um you know the government has crowded some of that out i think that an increasingly radical kind of individualism through the second half of the 20th century also acted to crowd that out some and these things work in tandem centralization of political power and individualism in the culture are two sides of one coin um and i think the alternative to those is something like a communitarianism that puts civil society at the center i would say that's the view that i try to advance and that i think is essential to the flourishing of the american way of life um but you know it it's too broad and large to describe it as a single institution i think it's more than that maybe it's an arena in which most of our institutions operate let me let me zero in i think this question i'll adapt it to make it particularly for yuval um it's from hobby k and it's a practical question what practical everyday advice do you have for younger people about rebuilding institutions when seemingly their peers around them are focused on tearing them down and i want to make it a question about congress because you you like to bring up you already brought up you know the potential revival and renewal of congress what advice do you give to congressmen and congresswomen who want congress to function again who are not in leadership and who share their institution i think it's definitely fair to say with peers who are interested in tearing what you consider important about congress down yeah thank you i appreciate the modification since it also makes the question much easier uh and less impossible to answer i i think um what's important and and this in a way does apply more broadly to being institutionalists i think you have to you have to come in with an understanding of the purpose of the institution that you're part of its role it's its goal it's its ideal of integrity its kind of purpose rather than see it as a place to elevate yourself as a place to build your own brand as a place to get a bigger following think about what it is you can do through the institution as an insider and i think that the advice that i that i press to members of congress the few who are interested in such advice um is to see yourself as an insider which is now the hardest thing to do in american life there is enormous pressure and a very powerful and understandable desire to understand yourself as an outsider as a critic of power as standing outside the establishment and telling it to be better but a member of congress is not an outsider a member of congress is an insider with enormous power and it's important to think about how that power can be used inside the institution and so to ask yourself what you can do for your district what you can do to help the congress be stronger in relation to the other parts of the government what you can do to advance the ideas that brought you into politics to begin with using the power that you have as a member of congress there's actually a lot of room to do that because there is not a lot of competition right now for being an active legislator in our legislature a republican member of congress who wants to be the policy star of the party can just go walk right in and take it because that title is lying on the floor uh there's there's simply not a lot of interest in being an institutionalist within congress and i think there's both a niche for that so he can speak to people's ambition and politicians are ambitious people uh but there's also a very great need for it because ultimately the system can't function and the the kinds of criticisms of it made by outsiders can't be answered unless insiders take seriously the responsibility they have and see it as defined by the shape of the institution so a member of congress should want to be a legislator which means should want to advance his idea of what is good for the country through the mode of bargaining and deal-making and negotiating with people who have a different idea of what's good for the country that in essence is what you should try to do if you have the misfortune of finding yourself a member of congress but do everything in your power to avoid avoid ending up in that well look it's good no no it's a good thing that there are people who want such things exactly i don't understand them but i'm glad they exist um so here's a question from margaret emerson that i'm going to reframe for chris she asks what do the speakers think are the causes of the events of january 6 2021 um the riot at the u.s capitol and i want to put this to you chris because i think it's fair to say that um you've been at least somewhat more sympathetic to the trump presidency or were somewhat more sympathetic to the trump presidency than you've all annoyed throughout um and your book while he does not mention trump by name i think or it just it sort of ends at the point that he begins his run for president certainly offers you know a pretty powerful explanation for the kind of discontents that led to his ascent um so i'm wondering what you think about the end game of the trump presidency both the riot but also sort of the general the general way that the trump went out um and how it shapes your thinking about the prospects for populism going forward for politics animated by resistance to the new constitution that you describe whatever well i mean that's a that's a um that's you have thirty-six large set of a set of questions um first of all to dispense with um with populism i think these are because of the structural issues we've been discussing there's a there's a rich banquet of issues on which populism can thrive still throughout the world here and elsewhere you know now whether trump has certainly been damaged by the by the end of his presidency whether he will play a part in that i don't know you know um i don't know exactly what you mean by being more sympathetic to his um presidency but i certainly i i think i see the the reasons why he was elected and um [Music] and i think the rationale uh for which he was elected is still present the events since the election are really really confusing because trump was the subject to an almost constant vilification uh as a as a corrupt and illegitimate president he was he was sort of um attacked pretty much throughout his presidency by people who attempted to show him guilty of serious high crimes and misdemeanors and i would say mostly without effect i mean i think i don't think they succeeded in improving their case but then in the very last 60 days of his presidency he went out and tried to steal an election and um and wound up proving their case beyond any shadow of a of a doubt beyond their wildest dreams now here i think we need to distinguish between three stages of that process it was not illegitimate to you know say i would like a second look at the election and how the votes were counted and that kind of thing all this is a complicated thing where trump really went provably culpably convictibly wrong was in doing things like the phone call he made to the georgia secretary of state that's that was trying to steal an election trump's role in the um in january 6th is unfortunate um it's kind of ambiguous it would be hard to prove actual culpability in a court of law but i would say that when it comes to january 6 that this is the the the the burden of the of of of of the questioner's question i don't i don't blame the people gathered for for for january 6th i think people are are are are free are constitutionally free to assemble and speak about whatever they like there were certainly bad actors in the crowd um i would blame the individual bad actors uh there was there was unfortunately there were some policing problems but i would not blame the crowd as a whole or leap to the conclusion that there was anything illegitimate about the gathering of the crowd so it's two it's 259 um but let me just quickly take the prerogative of going going one last one last step further and try and lift up from that with it with a question for both of you right because um you know you've both written books from a conservative perspective about the institutions of the united states in a time when um conservatism in those institutions you know i think up to and including institutions like the us military we got one question about the us military right sort of the paradigm that conservative institution in some sense currently engaging in some kind of weird twitter war with tucker carlson right over his his criticisms in in all of these institutions conservatism seems incredibly marginal you know not not everywhere but in many many institutions and i'm wondering as just a place to finish for both of you um what does that mean for conservatives and maybe it's a version of the question posed to eval about um you know what the individual member of congress should do um but what do what should conservatives who are trying to rebuild or think seriously about american institutions make of their marginal position within those institutions and how should they act in that context either one of you well i i think that you know of course that is the question and it's it's surely true that conservatives are uh more marginalized in more institutions now than we're used to being and have been some time there are some institutions where we feel especially marginalized we've probably always been marginalized the university is never well maybe not never but certainly not in my lifetime belong to the right in any way and yet to be marginalized and to be almost forcibly excluded are different things um and i think that in in in situations like that we face the question of whether to fight for a foothold in elite institutions or whether to fight to create alternative institutions and i'm inclined to say yes we should do both of those things that it is actually very important to have a foothold even if it will be only that in mainstream institutions in elite institutions call them whatever you want that it is very important that some of those students whose parents send them to princeton to get a degree actually end up being transformed by robbie george i think that's enormously important in our elite institutions even if it is even uh even if they have less of a presence than ever and it is also worthwhile to think about what kinds of institutions need to be built in a time when in fact a large swath of of american society is excluded from self-described and self-understood elite institutions so that it is both an opportunity and a need to create some alternatives and we have had with periods of alternative institution building even in higher education institutions like the university of chicago stanford johns hopkins duke came about at the end of the 19th century out of dissatisfaction basically among a few wealthy people uh dissatisfaction in harvard yale where they sent their kids and they weren't happy with what happened that that kind of moment does happen it can happen and we need to think about what alternative institutions look like but there's also a cost to building alternatives and the cost can look like living in echo chambers where we only talk to ourselves and that has its own risks it comes with real dangers and so i think conservatives cannot give up on the mainstream culture on the elite culture on institutions that are dominated by the left but where it is essential that there be some other voices even as we also have to ask ourselves where can we raise our kids where can we live our lives where can we not always be at war but can actually uh can actually live both those questions demand answers in the situation we're in now yes i think that's the key the the inability to withdraw from this um ideological project that that our government institutions are now engaged in is the most um is the most dangerous thing because it does um it does delegitimize those institutions the idea that a um a branch of the military that members of a branch of a military in their official capacities would attack a journalist um ad hominem is not a silly thing it's it's a grave it's a it's a very serious breach of of um uh of of of institutional uh ethics and so look you know the you know you know the less we have of this the better because the at a certain point this type of exclusionary conduct becomes delegitimizing in it itself i mean um so i'll leave it at that all right a suitably you know wildly optimistic place to end um so just a couple of things first i just want to thank chris and you've all um we only sadly scratched the surface of the sort of discussion and arguments applaud implied by their their two terrific books um again chris's is the age of entitlement yuval's is a time to build you can purchase them both either from the great monopolist amazon.com or maybe better your local independent bookseller which is definitely part of civil society however we define the term um i also just want to thank the institute for human ecology at catholic u for sponsoring this event um i should note that i think the next ihe event is in a couple days at 6 30 p.m it's entitled more work fewer babies what does workism have to do with falling fertility and you can find that on ihe's website and you know it's another subject that i think connects to some of the issues that we've talked about today so thanks to ihe um for hosting this and thanks to all of you for joining it um of course we can't see any of you because you know this is the age of zoom but we'd feel pretty silly if you weren't here with us today so again you've all and chris thanks so much thank you and um everyone else enjoy your afternoon

Channel: Institute for Human Ecology

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Id: 5j8_h2mKLCQ

Length: 65min 41sec (3941 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021