The Unmaking of Americans: Panel Two - Charles Murray and George Packer

let me introduce our opening panel and I'm really thrilled to have them as I told you when I first conceived this conference there were three people originally that I had in mind they're all going to be speaking at the conference Lawrence Lessig will speak at the end but um have charles Murray and George Packer here is is just an absolute honor and and a privilege and I think it's going to be an exceptional opportunity for all of us um charles murray is a political scientist author and libertarian that's how he describes himself he's been an AE I American Enterprise Scholar since 1990 he's written numerous books I can't list them all three have been I would say disproportionately influential uh losing ground was a book that largely led to um the replacement of welfare with workfare which has had an enormous influence I should say both on conservative and liberal thinking about welfare uh the bell curve which he co-authored with Richard J Herrnstein at Harvard uh which has been quite influential as well as well as very controversial and coming apart uh which is the most recent book the one that I told you I read last year and made it impact on me David Brooks of the New York Times writes that I will be shocked if there's another book this year as important as Charles Murray's coming apart I'll be shocked if there's another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society so it's an absolute pleasure to have here Charles Murray will wayton and Capone at the end George Packer uh is the the author of The New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winner the unwinding and inner history of the new America the New York Times writes about his book that the book is Steinbeck Ian in the best sense of that term packer has written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece and I think those of you who've read it will agree he's a staff writer for The New Yorker he's won three overseas press clubs Awards he's written many other books the assassins gate American Iraq being one of the more important ones he's also written two novels and a play and he's an editor something very dear to me of the complete edition of George Orwell's essays he's been a Guggenheim Fellow Anna Holtz Brooke brink fellow at the American Academy in Berlin they will be our two speakers they'll come up and each speak for about 15 minutes 15 to 20 minutes and then we're going to have a discussion the discussants are from a wide range of backgrounds and political positions um I'll just in alphabetical order introduce them to you briefly Drusilla Cornell is a professor of political theory comparative literature and Women's Studies and Gender Studies at Rutgers she's also professor extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria and South Africa and is the director of the abouttwo project in South Africa her latest book is law and revolution in South Africa Ubuntu dignity and the struggle for constitutional freedom Phillip K Howard is the author of the rule of nobody which came out this year and is a fascinating read I will say that Fareed Zakaria calls it an utterly compelling and persuasive book that if followed could change the way America works you could this TED talk is very popular as well he two of our panelists have actually have the distinction of being on The Daily Show Phillip is one of them the other is Zephyr Teachout who's a constitutional property law professor at Fordham University that's what her bio says but as she would say it I think she teaches about monopolies antitrust her newest book corruption in America from Benjamin Franklin F box to citizens united is just out and you must all read it you may also have heard she ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor [Applause] and despite being outspent but I think one trillion 2522 one took 36% of the vote is that right close what 34 34 point five percent of the vote and the majority I think of counties or districts um and then finally Kendall Thomas who's the Nash professor of law director of the Center for study of law and culture and at Columbia University teaches constitutional law and civil rights he's the co-founder I just said that I apologize he's taught at many different law schools and he was the inaugural recipient recipient of the Berlin prize fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin he's also the co-editor of critical race theory the key writings that formed the movement this should be an exciting panel and so to begin please welcome Charles Murray you want to come up here can I just have just I had a small rebellion here we've decided to sit down during our presentation because a couple of things one is we have so many people on this panel that we want to give time to and also this is supposed to be more of a conversation than a series of speeches and I will try to be no more than 15 minutes max so we can increase the amount of time we can interact George and I are have about the same relationship to this topic as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street's had to I am a libertarian and like the Tea Party I get a lot of my energy from my animus toward big government and a great deal of course from Occupy Wall Street was animus toward big business and finance and so forth but the fact is and I suspect that that gives George some of his energy as well but the fact is that that in both of cases Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party there is a sense that the game has been rigged there has been a sense of separation of the elites from from ordinary people and a sense that something is deeply wrong structurally with what's going on in the United States both of us have both George and I have written about various aspects of this I did both a discussion of the new lower-class and of the new upper class in coming apart I am going to focus on the new upper class in my remarks because George's book is such an evocative statement of some of the same things I would say and I can join in later adding perhaps some numbers to go with the characterizations that George will present ok let's talk about the new upper class new upper class is different from the upper middle class it's a much smaller group it's the people who run the country if you want to think of it that way the broad elites are the people who are the most important physicians and attorneys and college professors and television station owners in in local cities the narrow elite are the people who run the nation's politics and economics and culture they are overwhelmingly located in just a very few centers New York City and a surrounding area Washington DC and surrounding area Hollywood Los Angeles and of course increasingly now in Silicon Valley which is a whole new center of a major effect on both the culture and the economy of the United States the thing I want to do in my few minutes is first to give you a quick sense of where the new upper-class came from because I don't think it's a problem that is been caused by government policy I think it is a function of the way the world works and has worked in over the last half-century and we aren't going to get rid of it by any of the ordinary but we aren't going to get rid of a period and then I will turn very briefly to my problems with the new upper-class how did it come about essentially we had two broad phenomena go on during the 20th century and especially the last half of the 20th century the first of these was that cognitive ability plain simple old brains became worth a whole lot more in the marketplace than it was before I consider the case of somebody who has very high visual spatial skills that translate into such such things as mathematical skills and also by the way programming skills and has absolutely no social grace whatsoever yeah you know you would not trust this guy to go across the street and convince the guy at 7-eleven to sell him a loaf of bread yeah but he's really good at this arcane skill set how could he make a living in 1920 he could be an actuary basically I couldn't even be a teacher of mathematics really if he has so little social skills what can he do in 2015 well he has to start by juggling the offers from Google and from the quantitative hedge funds in New York City because he is worth a fortune to them for that same skill set and they don't care if he has any social skills whatsoever but the same thing has gone on throughout the whole occupational structure it makes a big difference how much money you're worth if you're an attorney if what attorneys do is write wills and and attend to the small ordinary affairs of life and they have individual clients who pay for these and that's basically what lawyers did back in the 1920s and 1930s and corporate lawyers made corporate salaries which are good but you know I didn't make them fabulously wealthy if you have a situation in which you have an international merger of companies that involves billions of dollars and you have the ability to negotiate that incredibly complex job you are worth a commission of a couple of million dollars to do that if you can navigate the labyrinth of Washington bureaucracy you can make a difference to the bottom line of a corporation if you can get a regulation worded correctly that makes you worth four figures an hour same thing goes to is true of all the other ways in which the economy has simply just gotten much bigger and the amounts of money that is worth it to a company to pay of for combination of course of creativity and imagination and perseverance and all these other things which are also important I'm not saying IQ is the only thing I'm saying if you are lucky enough to have that really high IQ you make a lot more money than used to the second thing that went on was a good thing which is that the country got much better at identifying academic talent wherever it was and shipping it off to really good schools it happened in a decade that seldom gets credit for this kind of thing the 1950s and I will give you a specific example of how dramatic it was I will use my alma mater Harvard the incoming class of 1952 had a mean SAT verbal score of around 578 everybody in this room knows exactly what 578 means and verbal it's nothing you write home about and by 1968 years later the MENA by 1960 just eight years later the mean SAT verbal of the incoming Harvard freshman class was in the high six hundreds there had been a full standard deviation change the average incoming Harvard freshman in 1952 would have been in the bottom 10% of the class in 1960 that was a conscious decision and it was a good decision to transfer to translate Harvard from being a place which had a lot of rich kids some of whom were smart to a place which had a whole lot of really really smart kids some of whom were rich and it happened in the other Ivy's it happened also in the state universities where by this time the honors programs in the big state universities are essentially competitive with the Ivy's in terms of the the skill level of the students there that's good but what it did like so many good things is it had collateral effects and one of those was it brought together as never before academic talent at the same time that the economy was becoming more high-tech in the same time you had many more jobs that called upon these skills and you started to form a new culture in a way that a new culture didn't exist before I'm not going to get through nearly as much as I wanted to but I'll stick with this and and and the result of that was that you had different ways of living that well I'll give you an example of the average TV and the average household in the United States is on 36 hours a week among the new upper-class the television is hardly on at all and some of them will say to you oh actually we don't even have a television and if they do have a television they use it to watch movies or maybe Downton Abbey and Mad Men and that's about it Breaking Bad if they're really kind of at the outer edge of the new upper class that's that's a huge difference it's not to say that everybody should watch 36 hours a week it is to say that the new upper class is completely out of touch with a popular culture that they never even see in in coming apart to try to convey to my readers the extent to which they are isolated from the rest of American life I had a quiz 25 questions you got a maximum of 100 points the higher your score the less you were in a bubble low score meant you're really in a bubble it had it had some good social science questions like have you ever lived for at least a year of your life in a neighborhood where half of your neighbors did not have a college degree half or more but it also had other questions such as well have you or your spouse ever purchased a pickup truck or have a view or your spouse ever purchased a mass-market American year the disdain of the new upper class for beer of Budweiser and Coors and Miller is palpable if their beer has not been brewed by Belgium else they just won't drink it it's and if I were going to say you know what are the most important questions in this test a couple come to mind and one of them is have you ever walked on a factory floor not a few none of you worked in one have you even seen one everything we use every day just about has been made in a factory what does it say if you haven't any idea what a factory floor smells like looks like the noise the rest of it and the other question if I'd say what's the most important question that's asked it is have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day carpal syndrome carpal tunnel syndrome doesn't count in that you have to have at least your feet aching better if something else makes for a great part of the american population having something hurt at the end of the day after work is something that happens every working day of their lives to have never experienced that is an important sense not to be able to empathize with with their lives this kind of cultural isolation is now magnified by the degree to which the new upper class has clustered together these great bubbles in which you have contiguous zip codes that are in the very outer reaches of socioeconomic status has been at remarkable take Washington DC a lot of you know Washington DC of almost everybody who's a mover and shaker in Washington lives in Northwest Washington or McLean Virginia or or des de Chevy Chase or Potomac but that's basically where they all live there are 13 sip codes I ranked all the zip codes in the country and a combination of Education and income and of those 13 zip codes 11 of them are not only in the top 1% of all zip codes in the country they are in the top half of the top set and the others are right behind it and then they are surrounded by zip codes that are in the top 3 4 5 percent overall there are a million people and contiguous zip codes in the Washington DC area contiguous zip codes that are in the top 5 cent Isles of zip codes in the country and similar things happen in New York and Los Angeles and other big cities it B speaks in isolation which is really scary I am NOT going to get at all to my critique of what's wrong the new upper class and and why it's a danger but just let me conclude by saying this in the past we were rescued from a lot of the problems by the fact that people had grown up in a small town they'd grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Boston or Philadelphia they still remember what that's like even after they live in the Upper East Side of New York we now have increasingly coming to power and it will continue to get worse people who have been born into the bubble they've gone to good k-12 schools probably private or else really good public schools they've gone from there seamlessly to selected colleges like Bard in during the summers they have not worked construction they have gotten internships at the New Yorker and at AEI internships being affirmative action for the rich and after that they have gone from there to to law school or to do public policy schools or whatever and then enter their continuing in the bubble they have no idea what the rest of America is like and to summarize what I would have said about why this is airy America is premise on the idea that you don't get too big for your britches that that you are you are you are prouder of being an American and you identify more with being an American than being part of any socio-economic class that is now changing and the catastrophic consequences of that I think can hardly be exaggerated I'll stop there [Applause] first Roger I have to correct you I think three of us have been on The Daily Show and I I only mention it three of us and I only say it cuz it was the high point of my life and you you can't take it away from me um I also want to say that two young women here are daughters of close friends of mine and their mother made me promise that I would leave them with some hope so I'm gonna I'm gonna do my best although given our topic and given what we're talking about it's it's a challenge you know charles murray in earlier years had a reputation in circles i traveled and of being kind of a prince of darkness of the social sciences and so it's it's his title is coming apart but charles murray and i are coming together because there's a tremendous amount of overlap in what his book is about what my book is about what he just said what i believe and what i'll talk about so it's not all atomization here i spent a few years traveling to different parts of the country after the financial crisis and the election of obama feeling that we were in one of those moments of some historic transformation it turned out not to be quite as historic as as it promised among them were Youngstown Ohio a very hard-pressed old dead really not dying dead steel town in Ohio Rockingham County North Carolina tobacco and textile country which have also begun to disappear if not entirely and Tampa Bay which was one of the epicenters of the housing boom and then of the housing busts and rather randomly because I'm not a social scientist I'm a journalist I met people talk to them and kept going back and spinning weeks and months getting to know them and following them to see what was happening in their lives and so a few things that kept coming up in every place in eat all of these places one I kept hearing there's no more middle class here there's just rich and poor and really what they meant is there's just poor because it was hard to identify who the rich people were in some of these places Tampa Bay's a little bit of an exception two people were alone I mean in some ways alone in the sense that they lived alone they didn't have spouses they some of them didn't have children every one of the major characters in my book is pretty much on their own both in terms of family and in their sense of whether there's any support out there for them so you mentioned institutions earlier Roger is there a civic association is there a church is there a union is there a newspaper is there a government agency is there a business a company that they can count on to realize the middle-class aspirations that that that charles's book begins with and that you know these people say have faded away no they were all making it up on their own as they went along without any conviction that if they failed or if they needed support somewhere they could turn to an institution a local I don't mean a global I mean a local institution to to give them guidance to give them information media were also in some ways missing from their lives they had you know all the world's information at their fingertips but they had no reliable source of information let's say no local newspaper that basically cared about the issues that they cared about and that reported on them in the useful way because the media for them was either cable news or websites and both of these had been given over entirely to national issues and to partisanship in a way that was you know inflame them and they had their allegiances but it wasn't useful to them it didn't help them navigate their own lives third thing was corruption which I guess we'll be talking about a lot they felt that business and government were in a collusion together that the game was rigged and that it shut them out that you had to be the right person have the right amount of money know the right people be in the right place in order to make policy work for you and that it wasn't working for them because they were out of it and forth if they did have children they felt that their children would not do as well as they were doing which was saying something because they weren't doing all that well and it also said that you know it there lots and lots of ways to define the American dream but certainly that's one of them and and that was missing and polls showed that something like 75 to 80 percent of Americans now say that their children will not do as well as they're doing which is a I think a pretty dramatic reversal of the polling results of earlier years and so the question really is what our topic is American values and what are what are the values that are threatened by this state of affairs let me just say a little bit more about each of these people one is a woman named Tammy Thomas a black woman in Youngstown who in a way is a Youngstown success story because having had every card dealt against her mother heroin addict father not around brothers in jail for pretty serious drug and gang offenses Youngstown itself steel industry disappeared almost literally overnight in five years 50,000 jobs a rather small area were gone in the late 70s and early 80s so and this was when Tammy Thomas was just leaving high school you would think you know this is a death sentence and and in fact Youngstown became you know murder City and arson capital of America she got one of the last good jobs which for jobs it by then were mainly going to women they were not jobs at the men from the mills who had done the really hard industrial work we're getting it was going to single mothers like her because she had three children she actually she dealt three cards against herself by having three children without much means to support them she then went to work on an assembly line at an autoparts factory just outside Youngstown and that for 20 years allowed her to raise her kids and get them educated in she had to keep moving because the blight kept following her so he went from the east side of Youngstown to the south side she went from the south side to the north side one step ahead of catastrophe and her kids all graduated from high school they all went to college they did not join the gangs they did not get pregnant in high school and they're all now doing really well not in Youngstown they're in North Carolina in Florida because Youngstown didn't seem to have a future for them in the middle of her life Tammy's the the Florida Neath her disappeared the job disappeared the thing that he allowed her to along with her own character which is really something to talk about as she would put I would ask her over and over how did you do this and she said I just did what I was supposed to do as if it was the simplest most obvious thing in the world whereas I wanted to say no one does what they're supposed to do the job became part of a strategic bankruptcy on the part of Delphi auto parts which shut down its North American operations Canada the u.s. tore up its contracts and moved all the remaining jobs because many of them were already gone to Mexico and and other low-wage destinations that was it that was were the last jobs in Youngstown and she got back up on her feet and went to school to get a degree and became a community organizer and that gave her a whole new more I would say analytical perspective on Youngstown it's interesting she said to me that throughout her life she had simply blamed other people for their own problems and she felt rightly so you screwed up you didn't do what you were supposed to do very you know willing to cast moral judgment and inaccurately but being a community organizer also showed her that there were these larger forces such as a company simply leaving because it could get a better deal in Mexico that in some ways drove people into bad decisions that that worsened a situation that was already difficult so she's a remarkable woman and in a way hopeful because I would say her story is about not giving up it's about being rooted to a place even a place that was dying around her and about in the middle of her life reinventing herself which is something Americans I think are pretty good at because we expect to have to and becoming an activist becoming someone who actually took agency of the problem she saw rather than simply trying to fend them off Dean price is the second major character he's a small businessman in rural North Carolina and he too had a reckoning in midlife the book kind of comes to a head right around two thousand six seven eight when lots of things are collapsing and his was that hit this chain of truck stops that he owned on Route 220 between North Carolina and Virginia began to go under with the financial with housing prices dropping financial crisis and with competition from Walmart Exxon sheets oil multinational competitors who could undercut him and so he decided to go into biodiesel and this meant making the fuel he sold out of canola oil and and cooking oil which is sort of an obvious thing in parts of the country where people wave the word bio as a flag of honor of the new upper class in his part of the country it was revolutionary and took a lot of convincing of others to sign on to and he did not do well for he was bankrupt he his partnership ended this is a story of a guy who was flat on his back several times and kept getting up but it's not I don't want to make it an optimistic story because it's really a story of someone who came very close to defeat he's still at it so there is something about persistence in these stories that I hope is is a lifeline to think about and its persistence where they are it's very much about fixing things right where they stand Tammy and Dean have lots of ideas about the world and the federal government and America but they're not acting as if they have to solve all the world's problems at once they're really focused on vacant housing in Youngstown or on the collapse of the tobacco economy in North Carolina and what they can do to try to raise their community out of it and I think that's something that might be happening in a lot of places that we're not even hearing about yet where people have given up on the big power centers they don't expect Washington to come up with solutions they don't expect even Silicon Valley which promises you know shiny new things to all of us to him up with solutions or the media or big business they it's very much about their the place where they live in their own rootedness to it and just to finish the third main character is a Washington insider former Biden Joe Biden Senate aide who became disenchanted with Joe Biden when he turned out not to be a particularly nurturing boss and and also with with government and he did what everybody in Washington does he went through the revolving door and became a multi-millionaire lobbyist and as he said to me because he's incredibly brutally candid about this there are lots of people like me around Washington who you've never heard of who were making millions of dollars simply because they once served in government in fact a lot of them serve in government in order to go through the revolving door and in fact I think some people run for office in order to serve out their respectable three terms and then go into the private sector and make millions of dollars so that's Jeff Carlton's story except that like the other two he has a moment of reckoning and I I want to suggest that these are good moments they may seem like crises 2008 was a crisis year but I think it also like a crisis in one's own life has beneficial possibilities you see yourself as you are the illusions start to fall away I think the past few years looks like Charles's illusions are dropping people are being forced to look in the mirror of America and to see what we are now and all three of these people did that in their own lives Jeff Connaughton became sort of disgusted with lobbying I have to say it was partly because he lost a lot of his net wealth in the financial crisis so there was an element of self-interest he went back into government thinking that what he was gonna do he took he became chief of staff to this senator who took Biden's seat wouldn't Biden became vice president he said he thought he he and Ted Kaufman and others in the Senate would enact really sweeping Wall Street reform and in his view it didn't happen and essentially he retired he I don't think we've heard the last of him but he's living in Savannah Georgia and wrote a memoir and burned every Bridge which is a wonderful thing because people in Washington never do that they always keep themselves viable they write an op-ed that's scathing but they don't name any names he named every name and he allowed me to name the name so it's a picture of what's happened to Washington as a place that's just become about sustaining itself and and about the the revolving door but he's the most cynical of the three and that I think it's partly because he tried to take it all on he tried to change Washington and to change the country through big national legislation and it that doesn't work these days so I'm most hopeful when I'm thinking about Tammy and and Dean who've kind of had the hardest time of it the book also has a Silicon Valley element it Peter teal the founder of PayPal is in it and I guess all I would say about that is out there you feel as if you're living in a completely different America because everything is working and money just seems to appear overnight and those socially graceless 24 year olds you know sell their company to Facebook and become billionaires and it's it's a kind of magical place it's utterly I mean if you think they're bubbles in New York Washington Seattle Denver whatever Silicon Valley is the ultimate bubble a question I ask people out there was why is the age of the information revolution coincided almost exactly with the age of ever growing economic inequality just a question like do you think there's a relation as it you know contributed has it failed to stop it but it's not that they had an answer they've never thought of that question because and I think it's because it just doesn't impinge on them Peter Thiel's a bit different he's a hardcore libertarian who actually who's quite aware that Silicon Valley has failed to solve our problems and I guess one reason is we have two problems one is bigness Walmart which comes in to Rockingham County three Walmart's in this tiny little rural county in North Carolina the Dean prices in Rockland County cannot go and cannot make a business work and the other is atomization and you know the electronic town hall meeting and everyone having their own reality from their own collection of favorite websites and I think Silicon Valley has contributed something to the latter so neither of those really creates a space for the kind of engagement that Roger talked about in his introduction so I'll stop so so thank you both Charles and and George you know you have to update your bio because it doesn't have the Daily Show on your bio uh-uh everyone else puts it on their bio um so we have about an hour for questions uh these these the four panelists are gonna ask the questions if you I will take questions from the audience you can also tweet questions to the iron Center at with the hashtag RN con-com con uh this is the new world i if you prefer and it will also take some questions but i'm first gonna ask are for a wonderful discussants to each pose one or two questions to to George and Charles and and we'll get going do you want to to lead off your solo yes thank you I'm Roger I'm very honored to to be here like you George I never expected to be on a panel with charles murray and that i oftentimes think of you as a specter i trot targeted groups and the SATs determined to show you wrong and succeeded i taught in the affirmative action program at newark determined to take people didn't even have high school degrees get to my lays in law school i mean i believe everybody can do continue to toot of women students in law school how to knock those exams right out of the ballpark succeeded that so are we she were on my mind but my question today and oh and I worked as a dye sweater in Silicon Valley I worked in the auto factories and I was a great a welder and that led to a problem which was a major misunderstanding with men men would ask me will you give me a and I thought they wanted me to mail metal and my teenage driver said they didn't want you to go get your glow torch mom and I thought oh no richness obviously Kindles riding on Andres has been so influential in my life I was fighting racism every step in the way but my question to Charles Mary it's about marriage because here we're on the same page 1963 my father tries to convince me that a condom is a balloon and that he and his friends were having a balloon party while we were vacationing now hi and I grew up in a world of philandering men and women accepting it betty Friedan 1963 and everyone lies she meant the men but she also meant the women because they said that there was nothing you could do about philandering so you denied it now I like John Adams worried about infidelity I went on a moral path to find out if I could salvage marriage get men back to fidelity and I found Hegel now once I'd found hegel hegel argues the chapter of reciprocal symmetry between men and women that meant equality that meant feminism and then I found Mary Wollstonecraft you have to educate men but only women of true equality with you can ever be your equals and can never be the ones you stay with and therefore you won't sexually objectifying them because that will be that I on the other side and so my solution when I dated and you know what it's like I don't think they still call it first-base you're at a movie some guys trying to slide in right and you're trying to watch the movie you can't even eat your popcorn then he's trying to go for second you know it's like ridiculous your baseball good so I thought for my godmother the answer is I'm going to she was the first woman president of a printing company very much along your lines George about always teaching me working class lessons tip one tip three times the going rate etc etc so I said to my grandmother I think the solution to men infidelity dating and marriage is Hegel she said well that's a possibility so let's let's print out some Hegel xar so every day when the man started sliding around I said you know I'm going home then my grandmother also said never get in the car but the man unfortunately gave me my own car so I didn't have to and so I would leave the dime and then leave his Hegel excerpts and then he had to take a test if he wanted a second date now my question to you is a tea party man but all this is about feminism to me because until man seen women is truly equal and given fully equal rights I don't think we're ever gonna get back to having anything like meaningful marriage so my question on let's have you become a feminist and then what really be on the same side in the name of marriage I'm now George I found her book deeply moving and my question to you was twofold do you you have two wonderful excerpts I mean they're both it's very fascinating to me some of the tragedies some of the persistence some of the attempts to hold on to values against all out but you have a short vignette on Oprah a short vignette on Oprah Winfrey where as you say she takes away all the excuses right in her magical thinking so my first question is to you is how much is that magical thinking a way of justifying neoliberal capitalism avenues to where capitalism yet I think it needs to be out there because somehow another Bennett really is your fault and then my second question is is what I would call fabulous takes storytelling you have another wonderful favor by Elizabeth Warren a five-minute and I'm not saying that she didn't tell you this I'm sure she did has nothing to do with the truth of Elizabeth Warren's life because Elizabeth Warren was a relentless opportunist to get into the new elite and became a Democrat when she was at Harvard everybody was a Democrat campaigned against income security as part of the curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania law school campaigned against workers rights as part of the curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania law school was anti anti ACLU was in bankruptcy this she admits to to show the scammers for what they are militant right-wing Republican determined to turn Penn law school into a hundred percent serving the corporate corporate law firms in the city and then all of a sudden one day she went she got to Harvard she made it and then one day she became a Democrat cuz everybody was a Democrat I thought I must have them Elizabeth Warren Ron but my question to you is since there's no accountability that institutions like say you're in a union I was a union member Oh uric you're accountable you're accountable to unions you're accountable to your union members you're accountable for your life when elizabeth warren's asked question she says she can't remember so related to the two the first question is how is fatalistic thinking the ability to just make up a story about yourself part of the collapse of institutions okay um Charles do you want to start with talking about you need a mic you need a mic I can't give you any social science data on philandering but but I think it's interesting to look at the different state of marriage in the upper-middle class and in the working class basically marriage is alive and well on the upper middle class if you take whites ages 30 to 50 you have at this point about eighty four percent of them are married an increasing number of these are first marriages and I would also submit to you that that an awful lot of more good marriages now now this I can't yeah I guess I will ask the audience I will tell you what my life looks like and you think about your acquaintances as I look around at our friends including friends of a fairly wide age range now I've been divorced in the past but I've been married for 31 years subsequently and and a lot of our friends have ever been divorced there in marriages and an outsider never can be absolutely sure but they looked like really good marriages and if you and the audience are thinking about your friends is saying well actually most of the people I know are married and in pretty good marriages I think that's that would be a positive thing and I will also say I think my wife will back me up on this that I was good to say we're equal she's actually smarter than I am by that I know a whole lot about IQ and psychometrics I am not being a pleasant husband I know for a fact she's smarter than me so so so it's at least equality I think in the upper middle class in this country you've seen better and better marriages working-class hold for story can you say a little bit more about the working class well of 25 to 50 years old in the whites in the working class 48% of married compared to 84% in the upper middle class and non that's down from 84% in 1960 from eighty four percent to forty eight percent percentage married that's a huge change and what it the reason it's so important is that the nature of the family has so many reverberating effects it has reverberating effects on the way communities are organized as reverberating effects on these local institutions that you're talking about you know a school in which you have a whole lot of married parents that's a completely different situation with parents and PTAs and all the rest of it than a school where you have single mothers trying to to to make Tommy do things it's lots of reverberating effects of that collapse of marriage right George could you talk to maybe the fable istic thinking of Oprah Oprah yeah it's not just Oprah it really pervades mm-hmm a lot of society especially celebrity society it's I mean jay-z is a fabulous t'k thing or two and in in my book Dean price has a his absolute hero is a guy named Napoleon Hill who very few people have heard of anymore but he was sort of the how to succeed in business the original business writer who went around you know supported by Andrew Carnegie and asked every successful person in America how they did it and then wrote a book about it and he said famously if I wrote if the mind can conceive it and the heart can believe it then you can achieve it which Oprah had on her mirror in her dressing room at her first job in Baltimore but it was attributed to Jesse Jackson so it just shows how it's it's common I mean it's a it's a sort of American philosophy the mind cure is what it was called back in the late 19th early 20th century I think it I think it comes to the surface and becomes most powerful when people feel that the normal ordinary channels of upward mobility are blocked so holding a job educating your kids watching them get a better job doesn't work anymore I'm gonna do what jay-z did I'm gonna sell crack I'm gonna put out my first CD and I'm gonna become you know of a member of the Forbes 400 Oprah says and that's why I had that as the last line of the Oprah chapter you know if black people look at Oprah they realize there's no more excuses cuz I did it and she did do it and she did it through a tremendous talent and energy but to what it does is it denies the force of circumstances and of society and just as one case study in my book there's a family called the heart souls and whether it's neoliberal capitalism or or something else what happens in their life is they are a family of four in Tampa who do things essentially most of the right things the family stays together they raise their children with tremendous love the children are respectful there's no drugs there's no drinking there's no beating there's no philandering so in some ways they're more power in other ways you know they've made huge mistakes dropped out of high school he supported the family as welder for years and then went to work in a packaging plant and when those blue-collar jobs disappeared from Tampa there was basically Walmart and Target he took those jobs they paid 825 850 an hour they were part-time of course no benefits the hours kept changing he could never predict from week to week and then they started getting reduced until they were like 20 or 25 and imagined trying to raise a family of four on 825 an hour 2025 hours a week and he would quit those jobs or he'd walk off them or he'd he would say something he'd mouthed off to his boss and get fired and those were catastrophic mistakes because the family fell into homelessness and they lived in their car for months this year so what does that say to you it says given certain circumstances you make a few mistakes and there's no bottom the fall will not be broken and so that's a story of one family that is probably repeated you know many many times across the country and Charles could I ask you to reflect a little bit on what George were just saying about the heart souls I mean a lot of his book is about institutions and about the social circumstance and and one of the interesting conversations I think between you that we not yet having but could be had is you you have a more of I think a more individualist view more that if you believe it and you do it and you take the job you'll find meaning in your life and even if you're only making a $25 an hour you know you still have a job and that's what you do I wonder if you could just reflect on his story with the mic you know and what your response could you pick up your mic I know you need a mic buy my response is what they call conflicted there's another story in in the book which which I which I lid on where this the couple I'm not sure is the same one had lost all their teeth same one that's the same one and somehow they get new teeth I mean they got a complete set of Medicaid Medicaid okay and they're fitted with teeth and which is a big deal and put in but their mouths words so they take him out and never put him in again now that's a mistake and you ought to you ought to be live in a society where there are other people not government officials and not yeah there ought to be friends and family and the rest of it where they go home is that oh they hurt so I took him out and somebody says are you crazy put those back in and you know it's you know in terms of getting a job and the rest do this and some of the other things they did there was nobody around them as far as I could tell who was providing the kind of feedback which is a real safety net I am NOT an individualist in the sense that I think everybody is on their own and should be inventing themselves de novo all the time without anybody's help I am a great believer in the importance of little platoons as being the best possible way to deal with human needs and it's the vanishing of the little platoons that I obsess about okay we're gonna go in alphabetical order and if I and try and keep our questions short Phillip can you go next I grew up in Eastern Kentucky and the best job you could get in the summers of the highest-paying job was to work in the tobacco fields which I did it was $1.00 in hours in the mid late 60s and I determined when working the fields that when I grew up I had an ambition which was to have an office job and I have succeeded in that I got a 29 on your score in your book by the way which means I haven't lived that hard of life but but harder than sound the the title of this panel is do we have a an idea of America that can inspire people to sacrifice for the common good and so values related and and I kind of hear some of that in the in both of your books which I which I loved and read long before this panel occurred but but I do think there is an idea of America and I think it's part of the part of it which is partially a myth of the individual empowerment and the Oprah's mirror and all of that a lot of it though is is a real empowerment that they can get together in platoons or in communities and have a sense of ownership that when they wake up in the morning there's something they can do not only support their family but to make a difference and and I think that's I think we're losing that value the Robert Bellah conclusion and habits of the heart that freedom people are redefining freedom in America is the freedom to be left alone rather than the freedom to do is a really significant problem it's something that Hannah Arendt talked about a lot and and I think I hope at least at some point I'm going to throw this the question is that we should go there which is when Roger talked about the the kind of devolution of authority to hire bodies I think that's true to an extent but not nearly as true as the devolution of all authority including by hire bodies to bureaucracy which is the errant says the last stage of the nation-state just as one man rule was the first stage of the nation's say and and I argue in my books and and increasingly believe that that while corruption and money is all there and they preserve the status quo everybody's feeding on it there is a blob and the blob is really not owned by anybody it's not owned by Joe Biden it's not nobody it's just there it prevents the president from rebuilding infrastructure it prevents people from the teacher from running the classroom from being spontaneous it prevents citizens from getting together providing social services it prevents people from doing what Americans the little towns I grew up in and you grew up in always did because we comply with the rules so my question to you and the DC but both of you've written about it what is your what is your take on the kind of formal structure of society and how that affects the the tammy's and the deans and and the sense of community or lack thereof and when you're talking about this these polarizations which I also agree with well I just finished yesterday sending in the final chapter of my new book to my editor and the new book contains so much quotation from your stuff that I think I violated copyright laws yeah your book will sell better can I just have a cut and and the the thing you are alluding to the blob is the main topic here so I'm kind of straight to go on with the answer because I get into a rant yes I think that we have and I think what in terms of the regulatory state combined with all the ways in which the law has become such a complex monster that you that you write about that there are all sorts of ways in which people could ordinarily cope in life and they keep getting squashed down because they have run afoul of some rule they have thought violated some regulation the feds come out or the state people come out say oh no you can't do that and there's the fine you have to pay well this is one thing if it's done to a corporation and how they have money that's it's a problem but they have people can deal with that when you have a guy who owns a little plant nursery or he's a plumber or something like that it's real easy to squash that guy it's real easy to make life so difficult that that he is not able to do a whole bunch of the things whether it's in his own livelihood or in the community that 50 years ago he could have done I'll stop there I've you've pushed a button just very briefly I mean in a way the we all seem to be against big things and maybe the breakdown between left and right the stays is whether the big thing you put most of your energy into opposing his government or corporations because certainly people's daily lives are also hugely affected by and in some ways limited by giant corporations that they they don't even know the address of and and that don't have any loyalty or responsibility for the country let alone that little community because of of globalization but I'm gonna leave it at that and just say what I really want to do is hear from some people in the audience especially people say under the age of 24 I would love to know what this means to you whether we're talking about something that just is a isn't the country you're living in because you're in school or you have been focused on getting into college or because you know institutions are barred and barred seems like a good institution or whatever just I want to hear from young people especially we want to do that yeah we're gonna just have time for questions from the audience you're next and we'll try and keep them moving so try and be brief first let me say that I'm very glad to be here and honored to be on this panel but drusilla I certainly would would not have imagined when I got into this business that I would be on a stage in a conversation with mr. Murray it's it has an air of unreality about it and it forces me to rethink and reimagine in fact in some fundamental existential way who I think I am because panels like this of course are also constitutive right we're talking about ideas but we're making ourselves up together and so it is it is in in many ways a measure of both the and the possibilities on one hand and the deep structural contradictions that characterize intellectual life in the era of neoliberal capitalist democracy if democracy is a word we want to use I have a question for mr. Murray and I have a question for mr. packer and you will forgive me because in order to ask the question I have to set the question up I was born in East Chicago Indiana which is home of the inland steel company most of the men in my family worked for inland steel when I was 4 I was taken to California by my grandfather who did not work for inland steel because he was a Baptist preacher and thus insulated from some of the pressures of the black working class that was his congregation in 1974 I went to Yale College and after you know College to Yale Law School and I graduated from high school the year that my mother a single mother graduated from college she started out in the community college for two years and then went to California State University in Chico I I'm trying to this is my question for mr. Murray because I think it's very important to complexify the picture of this so-called new middle class of which I suppose I am two apart and yet I could not hear myself in the narrative of who that middle class is in mr. Murray's description because I thought of the letter I last read last night from my uncle Paul who in 1994 was arrested for attempting to rob the 7-eleven in Oregon California where my family lived in the the very grip of the crack epidemic he went to Folsom Prison and found out that he not only had HIV but CDC to find aids um I'm a gay man who lived who had lived through the worst years of the AIDS epidemic I feel a connection to my uncle Paul notwithstanding the fact that I'm a member of the so-called new upper class I think of my sister Yvonne who was one of the many many thousands of African Americans who managed to claw their way into the middle the American Dream by buying a house she lost her house and the she lost it before there was any possibility of holding on to it around the same time that I sold my first apartment in New York for 1.6 million dollars I feel a connection nonetheless to my sister although in classic terms we couldn't be more different I think of the members of the congregation of the church to which my layout belonged in st. Louis this church about this church was the church in which the funeral of Michael Brown was held I didn't know Michael Brown or his mother or anybody his family but I feel a deep connection to them mr. Murray said that America's premise on being prouder on on us being proud of being American than being part of a socio-economic class but like CBM fierson I think America is premise on the idea that we are country of inequalities but alongside those inequalities their fundamental equality's the story of the civil rights movement is a story in which that idea became true for people of color in the United States the moment of kneel cap neoliberal capitalism in which we live today is one in which that is less and less true notwithstanding the fact that we have painted the white house black in the words of a recent book so my question to mr. Murray is how does the question of race complexify the story of the new upper class my question for mr. Packer is related and it was suggested to me by here observation that three of us have been on The Daily Show I think the fact that that matters to us collectively it signifies is a measure of the society in which we live a society in which celebrity and celebrities ation is paramount in which a figure like Kim Kardashian who so far as I can tell has never actually done anything could be a celebrity right and which and in which an Oprah Winfrey could delude herself into believing that the fact that the system chose her right to be an incarnation of the Horatio Alger myth means that everyone can see but the President himself said before the n-double-a-cp that black kids who do not make their way upward are have no excuses I think that's a phrase he used he has for black Americans been our scholar in chief so my question for mr. Packer I suppose has to do with the force of neoliberal capitalism not as an economic factor but as a factor which constitutes what Drusilla has called our imaginary domain right we used to imagine ourselves in relation to one another in very different ways than we imagined ourselves under consumer capitalism where our primary identity is either as consumers or as entrepreneurs right um what is that shift in the way that people imagine themselves in our symbolic politics to use the idea of Jacqueline Rose following Stuart Hall what is that idea that shift that's a paradigm shift that neoliberalism has brought about mean for the possibilities of this kind of reimagining of oneself remaking of oneself of a kind of persistence and resilience that you talked about in in the people gray um who you profiled in your book Thank You Charles do you want to begin well I guess the first part of the answer is that you're not one of the members of the new upper class that I'm worried about because you still remember what it was like in in another America a very different America from the one you live in right now in the same way that somebody who now owns a chain of auto repair shops and is worth 30 million bucks but he did it you know because he grew up as a mechanic he remembers what it was like and the person who went to Yale Law School in 1974 in your same class who was white but who grew up in a working-class home he is also like you and what I am worried about is are the members of who are rising to positions of great authority in this country who don't remember any other America except the America in the bubble so I am NOT being dismissive of race as a distinctive feature of your experience but the aspect of your experience which is a strength is that you have lived in all sorts of different Americas and you still remember so race is important it's still more important that you've had that multi-dimensional experience Jorge if I understand your question the the way the people I spent time with identify themselves cuts all sorts of ways yeah consumerism is is a big one and you could point to some foolish expenditures by people who didn't have the money to buy what they bought because they felt they had to in order to be minimal members of our society as as one cost of of consumer capital [Music] Dean price thinks of entrepreneurship is the highest good and he he Revere's Steve Steve Jobs and if he knew who Peter Thiel was he would revere Peter Thiel who is in the book and out of Silicon Valley that is the religion the religion is entrepreneurship although it has a way of quickly leading to fairly top-down corporate hierarchies once they succeed because it turns out that Facebook is in some ways a more opaque and hierarchical company than IBM even though the the spirit of it the ethos is we're all hackers here you know we're all just guys in jeans and it is guys and jeans you know staying up all night coding so I guess in some ways you you know the imagination is of in many parts of the country and in many people the lonely individual who is going to either make it or not and the celebrity culture reinforces that a hundred times so that Steve Jobs represents business success and it's you know it's a galvanizing force I think it has a good side to it which is that it it fuels aspiration and in Dean price it fuels resilience without that dream the Napoleon Hill dream Dean might be dead now by his own hand but at the same time I think it yeah it distorts it distorts the the true picture because although Dean has identified Walmart as evil and Steve Jobs as good Sam Walton with Steve Jobs I mean I he's another of the celebrities I profiled in the book Sam Walton was a kind of a self-made American hero who became the face of this corporation and until his death Walmart was actually thought of as a great American story it was after that folksy small-town face was gone and very quickly like within months that all the negative stories about Walmart started to come out so in a way the the self-made entrepreneur has a has a disguising effect on you know what a Walmart or an apple or any number of other entities in the private sector are actually doing in the lives of someone like Dean price so we're gonna move on have one question from zephyr teach and then we are gonna take we're gonna have time for questions from the audience so zephyr keep it brief this weekend can you hear me I'm talking tomorrow so you're gonna get more than enough for me George being on The Daily Show is also one of the highlights of my life I studied it before I went on I'm serious so it seems to me that one of our potential Charles you know these are just beautiful and important stories because if we're gonna come together and decide what we want to do we have to decide who we are so this is constitutive they're saying but one of the sort of deep disagreements that we may have is about the nature of what a human is and about how differently abled people are and my own understanding of the meritocracy or of the sort of the elite the current bubble which is a very powerful vision you tell of the this elite bubble is that one of the psychological I would think flaws is its own belief in meritocracy as a functioning system do you believe that outside the Academy but actually in those who hold power right now in American society there is a meritocracy to select the true holders of power and then for George I have a quick question it's an impossible question I have a friend who made me ask me real questions so I'm asking a question I don't know the answer to at all but do with it what you will I don't know what it means to have an idea of America at any snapshot in time and but if there if you can say something about what is different now between now and 1986 or 1996 that where you know you this this portrait of the political nature of isolation is so important so I want you to stay away from that mechanical part but move to the idea part the idea of America that price might have had twenty years ago and how that has changed I'd love to hear some thoughts on that I I don't use the word meritocracy for a reason I I avoid it because I like to believe that human beings can affect their own perseverance and their their resilience and their industriousness and and all sorts of things and you've had lots of psychologists say no that's that's all driven by genetics and childhood experiences but I'd like to think that you and beings really can suck it up and and do things like that when it comes to this peculiar thing called cognitive ability that I referred to earlier that's a pure gift none of us earns our IQ and and so in that and one of the things that bothers me the most about the new upper class that is increasingly the ones who have the super high scores on all these tests is they don't seem to understand that it's a gift that they should be humble about as opposed to being proud of and so it's if you it is the meritocracy in quotes working well one way of saying is it working with regard to governance is do we have the right set of people making decisions you know and these in these positions and my answer is no and they're getting worse and worse because as I put it in the book you know it doesn't make any difference if a truck driver can't empathize with the priorities of a cabinet pterri it makes a whole big difference in the cabinet secretary cannot empathize with the priorities of truck driver and I think we are increasingly ruled by people I will put it real pejoratively and I understand that I'm making a generalization for which there are many exceptions there are a whole lot of people who think that they are smarter than ordinary Americans and that ordinary Americans need their help in making the right decisions and so it's it's okay to have the experts who make all these rules and send and and stage-managed people's lives because you can't really trust ordinary people to know what's best for them I see that attitude more and more commonly I see it among active missions I see it among graduate students in elite colleges I see it among bureaucrats and elected officials and this is me off I guess that's the best way to put it so I graduated from high school in 1978 and that's a year my my book begins and I'd say since then to be very very broad brush about it our country has become more free and less fair it's become more tolerant and inclusive and also more stratified and exclusive maybe more socially equal and economically unequal and less organized around those mid-level maybe platoon or maybe company sized or even battalion-sized entities because I think there's a place for battalion-sized entities to and more and more the the lonely individual and the gigantic distant corporation or government but there's something else that may be a good transition to questions which is that I think I see more idealism when I graduated from high school people kids I knew and I myself were so cynical you know our culture heroes were Richard Pryor Saturday Night Live The Ramones it was a it was a time of like utter disbelief in anyone who claimed to be doing things out of hire motives and today I don't see that I mean I teaching and being around people in their teens and 20s I sense a true spirit of volunteerism of wanting to make the world a better place of you know believing in you know in joining a cause and so the question is how that fits with all this decline we're talking about and whether maybe the next generation is going to be able to atone for our sins yeah we got a little hope in although their comedy seems to be the our new the place where we go to have serious conversations so we'll see if that the irony of the company I'm gonna take questions from the audience I'd like to have some students from who are as we said younger so there's some mics they're gonna be passed around if you also want to tweet your question to our end con hashtag you can um why don't we first start a question right down here nope it is on all right um I consider to news myself my name is Julianna Brizzy I'm a student at Bard high school to college Manhattan I've first off to go off your point of C cha nice job yeah about your point about wanting to make the world a better place and the Klein I think what you said about 24 years and send I am a high school what oh yeah my bad it's when I've ranted okay uh anyway to like it's almost like the atone tour sins makes sense because optimism almost come to a point that almost out of desperation because there is we out there we're handed we as generations go by we noticed that since we have such a change in our society that we noticed like okay fine the 1950s were very not in correct time that kind of weird to say but it's a very um almost have a word for this but it's not a time that it's not as socially advances our time is today let's go into my point for you Charles Murray in your book you have we I read your book I read I should say I read the prologue in chapter 17 because that's really given passage my teacher came yeah my teacher gave us a handout for I professor Cho I know you're out there my from I read your book and I've one of the biggest problems I had with your book is that you only focus on one group which is white upper-class Americans I understand what did that and I grew to the part about the blob and I my question to you is what we talked about earlier Jeter with um which idea of like super zips and now certain neighborhoods have up like upper middle classes in certain neighborhood and low class of non love neighborhoods and stuff like that along that kind of line I'm kind of curious in the fact that why I didn't take the youth into a fast and how education plays a role in how it's like it's sort of like there's like it's sort of like let's keep the question and yeah how do you keep the youth into a fact I want yeah my question is why don't you take into consideration the youth and how school growing up in a different schooling district affects how you see the world and if they're only growing up where all their friends are white rich kids then how do they see the world suppose someone who's gone to a more like diverse and open school okay Mike [Applause] having read the prologue in chapter 17 gives you two more chapters that you read than many reviewers have read of my folks when they some of some of what you're asking about I do deal with elsewhere point number one is education has has a huge effect on the composition of the the new upper-class okay and it's this sorting process particularly in higher education but that is increasingly going on in k-12 that is very powerful there if you if your question though is well to what extent if you had better educational opportunities would some of you would have more mobility is that is that what you were getting at to the question thank you understanding better with before he has the mic let's go ahead I know this might kinda has like a weird echo to my voice but okay one thing I've noticed cuz I've gone to schools in three different boroughs which is pretty rare for students is that by certain by the time students get to high school most of their friends are kids from the neighborhood who have the same belief system and and that's kind of a product of the fact that from kata-kata say eighth grade you go to like the zone school in your neighborhood where all your friends are from your neighborhood be all the same like they all live down the block from you how would that be different if say you got kids from the Upper East Side going to kindergarten elementary school with kids from like the Bronx God okay great I live in a small town in Maryland I have been fascinated to watch as my children went through that school system my daughter went off to Middlebury to go to college alright because she came from a family where you know I'd gone to Harvard my wife been at Yale and so she was used to the idea of going off and doing something different in her high school you had lots of really really smart kids who could have gone to any of those schools could have gotten and gotten a minute if they'd applied never crossed their minds to apply I think for one of the reasons are just saying you're hanging out with in a certain circle it never comes into your into your radar that you have these options open to you and I think that's it's partly a problem and partly not it's a problem insofar as I would like to see a lot more of the freshmen classes at the elite schools consist of people from high schools like the ones that near near me and one where my kids went it's not a problem in this other sense going to Harvard or Yale or Bard in the grand scheme of things is not that big a deal you know this isn't is this is not the keys to the kingdom it doesn't make you wiser or more virtuous and I want to tell you something I think the networking advantages are also overstated and to some extent città to to have these really smart able kids go to colleges the University of Maryland or go to local colleges and stay in the area and stay in their towns I love that I love the idea that these resources are there that you that you have the possibility to local institutions being sustained so I'm conflicted again about that okay you're right there in the fourth row can we get a mic Seth red sure I hadn't I had an epiphany of while you were talking know that path and it came down to the question was in the age of economic inequality coincides with how does it coincide with internet social media how that's how I wrote it because social disconnect on the local level and is my answer and what that means is people when they text and talk to each other on the phone whether it's two friends or married people or whatever it is I see in New York hundreds of them and also in my small town they are connecting on their own levels they're not connecting to the community they're not connecting to the local needs so there's no need to join a local community because they are connecting okay great that destroys the local support groups so how does the internet and texting both institutionally but also locally in families and communities affects what it means to be live in America today doesn't even hear them I have not had nearly the experience you had and I'd like to hear about it well I mean I'm kind of a you know they celibate talking about sex here because I don't tweet I don't I'm out on Facebook I'm I've deliberately stayed out of the world of social media not out of a sense of superiority but because I'm afraid it would enslave me because I see my friends tweeting every 37 minutes and it you know those minutes are gone you can't get them back so and it also cuts you off from the physical world I think that that to me is in New York one of the truly alarming things about the iPhone I've got it right here which is people crossing the street with their face in their phone how many times if I had to put on the brakes in order not to kill them and want it to kill them so I don't I'm not gonna scold you know the 20-somethings for you know texting 10,000 times a month but I I would say that you know in Silicon Valley there is an idea among some of the profits out there that this is the new way of organizing society it's called peer-to-peer networks it's called you know electronic civic engagement is a group called coding for America which is you know trying to fix basic problems in government through coding for municipalities but which also thinks that you know you can fix politics through coding that it's an engineering problem and I think it's it's not an engineering problem and and I don't think peer-to-peer networks have enhanced democracy I think they've created cliques so I'm I'm skeptical of internet social media as a way toward democratic renewal I see them as tools and I use them all the time I the internet part at least and all too often too much but they're just tools they're not substitutes for or new forms for democratic engagement I don't mean we have a nice segue a Twitter question that's been passed to me which is how his racial inequality resulted in corruption of opportunity and success oh I thought baby both both of you might want to yes how has racial inequality resulted in the corruption of opportunity and success in America well if you're if we're talking about trend lines over the last 50 years which is what I'm talking about then insofar as it has been it's a problem that problem has been getting smaller there is no way to say that you can remotely compare the degree of racial inequality in 1960 and the degree of racial inequality in 2014 so I think it would be incorrect to say that we've seen these problems growing that I'm talking about but George is talking about because of race of racial inequality and I will I will by the way take a chance to respond why did I talk just about whites in in coming apart it was partly so that I could take away a whole lot of these ancillary issues and put them on the side and say even after you take away the possible confines of race and ethnicity you have these very very disturbing trends that have gone on in the United States that cannot be blamed on that I was thinking maybe Kendall might want to say something he's thought I know I I did not come here to shoulder the burden of racial representation everyone in this room is implicated in the politics of race even in this putative lis post-racial moment but I would simply say that it is a fact that most black and most Latino kids of whatever class go to schools where most of the other students belong to the same race or ethnicity right we live in an age of legal equality but I think for all these pockets of social inequality that do exist in our society these socially qualities persist in public education the radical defunding at every level which has occurred with the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism as a form of governance not just as way of organizing our economy but as a form of political governance I'm sure many of you in the audience read the series in The New York Times recently about all of these young people who bought into I use that phrase advisedly bought into the notion that if they could get an education they would be able to achieve class mobility and now they're paying off astronomical loans why because we as a society have decided that it's just not important to invest in the education of our young people so there and you know the largest population of prisons prison prisoners increasing population of prisoners are young women of color so I mean if you look at education if you look at incarceration if you look at employment unemployment in 1963 our black unemployment in 1963 August of 1963 when the march on Washington occurred was 10% when the march on Washington occurred if it was a March I think of it as a neoliberal spectacle in 2013 black unemployment in United States was 13% right so we're not living the story that we need to tell is not a story of inevitable and singular and continuing progress it is a story of uneven development and given the multiple insecurities that characterize the lives of people of color in the United States who have disproportionately suffered from the Great Recession I think it is important in comparing to hold on to both ends of the chain yes things on the whole are better than they were in 1960 but things for many people of color in the United States are as bad and indeed in some places we could even say given the level of a miseration worse that's just a fact I love it and I also have a train to catch you know we have about 10 minutes and then you have to code you have to run sooner it only takes 10 minutes 10 10 or 12 minutes Charles just two quick points these statements that there are a whole variety of indicators on which African Americans are worse now than they were in 1960s absolutely correct alongside that truth is that if you look only at non-hispanic whites the problems that George and I are talking about at grown enormously so if you want to say they're even worse when you add in everybody else there is some truth to that but if all of the racial aspects of the problem go away you've got a big problem anyway that has nothing to do with race okay we have time for we're gonna get George to his trains we have time for two questions one right up there and we'll keep need you to keep your questions short no hear you Claire I heard it set up here that the problem is that the rich don't understand the poor anymore I think it's that um the rich don't have empathy for the poor anymore you you pinned the lack of understanding partially on this like cultural bubble and I see that to mean that like there's an issue with the way that the upper middle class is constructing an approaching reality and this seems to me to be tied to our American conceptions of individualism and success which encourage the upper middle class to blame the poor's economic standing on personal failures at character flaws which to me encourages a lack of empathy what you call a lot and its detriment detrimental to the building of community in this country would see one of the other things that I think everyone was talking about the fact that like community in America is falling apart so I guess my question is how do you think these conceptions of success the way that we think of individualism in this country and I guess the whole host of old American values that are still in our cultural imagination um playing a role today and kind of being detrimental in some aspect you know I used the word empathy to I was you know it's important for the cabinet secretary to be able to empathize with with a truck driver and you do that by having kind of certain kinds of experiences with them I guess that the the I don't I don't see the Millennials sitting around saying oh it's their own fault that they're poor they aren't working hard enough they've done this on the contrary what I see in in the I shouldn't say Millennials of twenty thirty year olds forty year olds the the politically correct way to look at this is to not blame the victim and to downgrade completely the idea that personal love behavior has anything to do that's what when I go in college campuses I don't know of any audience I've ever talked to where college students thought anything and except that it is wrong to blame the victim for their problems instead you've got you've got 30-somethings who are rising to positions of authority who are running the country and so they have these all these nice sweet compassionate thoughts about the poor I just don't know any poor people they've never had any personal contact with them they don't know what life is like in in in middle America they have lived in these bubbles we've actually got the worst of both worlds we've got a new upper class that thinks it has all the right ways of thinking about poverty and sympathetic wanting to help and all that and they know they're absolutely clueless about the real nature the problem I would think one last question on in the back in the middle there yeah stand up and we'll get a mic to you please keep it short we have to get George to his train yes I'm sorry hi okay so my question is about how do you rationalize the contrast between freedom and this idea of responsibility toward community the panel is about or to abide by the moral American ideals that mr. Murray was talking about which to me seemed inherently binding or you know not free like constricting I'm curious about this because the way I understand freedom in its purest form is that it's not part of any larger structure or organization because then you're not acting freely but within a framework with a constant goal or motivation that you're very much bound to rather than free from and so that's kind of a you know for an analogy with the principle of altruism in biology where you know in order for the population to succeed the individual must sacrifice their own freedom to contribute to the whole and so I'm just wondering how you see these two existing together in America and cohesively I could answer I've been hanging out with anti-surveillance activists writing about them and their definition of freedom is privacy essentially and that's not my definition of and that may be what you're kind of getting and like let me make the decisions free agency my definition of freedom in the context we're talking about today is self-government and that carries just as many obligations as it does rights and just as much responsibility as as Liberty I think that's maybe Hannah Arendt's theme in on revolution so I would just suggest that it depends on what you mean by freedom but that's what I mean by freedom Charles I was wondering what you you know how you would answer that I mean is is libertarianism as you understand it about privacy is it about being left alone or is it about self coming could you could you speak about because I think that's how some people today think about libertarianism yeah I know they do I call myself a libertarian because if I say I'm a classical liberal nobody's what knows what I'm talking about I am a devotee of Adam Smith not just of the wealth of nations but also Theory of Moral Sentiments we're and basically I'm saying something very similar to George self-governments starting with government of the self is absolutely central to freedom and in in in in Theory of Moral Sentiments of what Adam Smith talks about constantly is that the way in which people are interconnected so to be a to believe in freedom isn't to say that we're all going to live on our mountaintop alone it is to say that we are free to live our lives as we see fit as individuals as families and as communities so that's the way that's my I define libertarianism exactly the way I want to be fine libertarianism I think we have time for one more is that all right yeah let's let's do it right right here in the front can you keep it very short what what no very short very short right here what quick quick question stand up come on question no comment just question I'm just wondering if you think that there ever has time or will be a time in which these sort of American ideals that we talked about in such a grandiose manner will be available to everyone because we talked about the 50s and that's a great question thank you I think that the trajectory of American history was that we were making progress that we started out with the the almost Shakespearean tragic flaw of slavery which compromised the moral authority of the Constitution but that over a long time we made progress we were constantly moving in the right directions and I also it's amazing how much I agree with George when he characterized and somebody I'm not a libertarian I know it's only a matter of time that that since the 1960's there have been certain dimensions especially involving minorities and women where there has been great progress but there have been a variety of other ways in which a lot of those ideals have have degenerated what would be nice is if we could make progress on all of those and I I'm afraid that's not going to happen I think we've moved off onto another path okay to leave with the little note of hope last night Zephyr and Roger and I were talking about a hundred years ago and I think there are many analogies to the themes we've been discussing today to America at the turn of the 20th century into the Progressive Era and back then there was tremendous despair about corruption about big corporations about corrupt governments about the decline of virtue and this was the theme of the politics of the Progressive Era and there was no single you know top-down national solution it happened all over the country in a newspaper here in a settlement house movement there in a muckraker over here in a crusading candidate for office in a populist idea you know for reforming the way senators were elected and didn't happen quickly either took a long time but there were many reforms many reforms that ended up creating what I think was a great period in American history the period essentially from Roosevelt to Reagan and since then I I think things have taken some bad turns but there's a sign that history you know can can provide answers if you know where to look for them so great thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

Views: 2,993

Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, The Unmaking of Americans: Are T, Roger Berkowitz, Drucilla Cornell, Philip K. Howard, Zephyr Teachout, Kendall Thomas, George Packer, Charles Murray, idea, America, sacrifice, common good

Id: Frd4av_Yj2o

Length: 107min 15sec (6435 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019