AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

BEYOND A POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA: A DISCUSSION WITH YUVAL LEVIN ON MOVING THE COUNTRY FORWARD

INTRODUCTION: MICHAEL R. STRAIN, AEI

REMARKS: YUVAL LEVIN, ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER

DISCUSSION: YUVAL LEVIN, ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER; MICHAEL R. STRAIN, AEI

5:30 PM – 6:45 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2016

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/beyond-a-politics-of-nostalgia-a- discussion-with-yuval-levin-on-moving-the-country-forward/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

MICHAEL STRAIN: Good evening. Good evening. Thank you. I’m Michael Strain, director of economic studies here at AEI. Thank you all for coming. Thanks to all of you who are joining us on the live stream and to all of you who will be watching the video later on. A reminder to everybody in the room that full video of the event will be available tomorrow or the next day so you can spread it around to your friends who weren’t able to make it.

AEI is very happy to welcome Yuval Levin here tonight. Dr. Levin is one of conservatism’s leading public intellectuals. He’s just published an important new book, “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.” All of us at AEI are very pleased that he could join us here tonight to discuss how our politics is dripping in nostalgia, how as a society and an economy we have moved from an age of cohesion and consolidation to an age of fragmentation, and to discuss his vision of how we can move forward in a more constructive way beyond the nostalgia for the past and taking into account the realities of the present and the future.

First, by way of formal introduction, Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays on domestic policy and politics. He is also the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He has been a member of the White House domestic policy staff, executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and a congressional staffer. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and first things, he holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Our program tonight is straightforward. Dr. Levin will speak from this podium about his book after which he and I will have a discussion for 20 minutes or so. We will have questions and answers from the audience following that. And afterwards, we’ll have a recession. (Laughter.) A reception, excuse not, not a recession, though we may have that too. So please join me in welcoming Yuval Levin. (Applause.)

YUVAL LEVIN: Thank you very much. I can’t promise a recession, though one is likely sooner or later. I’ll speak briefly and then see what people think and open things up to questions, as Mike suggests. And I want to begin really where the book begins and walk you through a little bit of the structure, the nature of the argument and see how it strikes you.

American politics, as we find it today, is drowning in frustration, in a kind of anxiety. We’re living through an uneasy time. That’s reflected in the tone of our debates. It’s reflected in the kinds of candidates that are arising and appealing to voters, in the sorts of concerns that you hear expressed and the kinds of ideas that are thrown around. Listening to our political conversations in general, you’d have to conclude that America is deeply frustrated. And that frustration, that sense of anxiety, of unease is where I’d start and where the book begins.

So I want to offer just a few thoughts about the nature, the character of that anxiety, its sources, why it seems to be so powerful in 21st-century America, and then to build on those observations to offer some suggestions about how we might start to overcome that intense anxiety and help our country find its way.

At first glance, our unhappiness in the 21st century might seem pretty easy to explain. Our economy, for one thing, has been sluggish since this century began and not only during the Great Recession. The country’s strongest year of economic growth so far in this century, 2004, saw a level of growth at about 3.8 percent that barely reached the average of any of the prior four decades.

The century also started with the worst terrorist attack in American history, which shattered any hope for a peaceful post-Cold War World, and things haven’t gotten much more stable around the world since then. Our partisan politics has been polarized and divisive this whole time. Our cultural battles about sensitive subjects from stem cells to marriage and sexuality to religious liberty to national identity have been fought at a fever pitch, and all of that has left people on all sides of our politics feeling constantly besieged and offended. And some key indicators that cross economics and culture and politics, like family breakdown or inequality, have been pointing in persistently troubling directions for quite a while and have stood in the way of mobility and of the American dream.

So the opening years of the 21st century have given Americans real reasons to worry, but there’s plainly been more to the frustration of this period than a straightforward response to challenging circumstances. Our problems are real but the way we talk about them often seems disconnected from reality so that the diagnoses that are offered up by politicians or by journalists or academics or analysts have tended only to contribute to an increasingly powerful disorientation in our public life. And when you listen carefully to what’s being said in our politics, you realize it’s disconnected in a particular way, that our way of talking about our problems now is dominated by nostalgia, by a powerful and widely shared sense that our country’s lost ground — that we’ve fallen far and fast from a peak that many Americans believe that we can still remember.

I’ll give you an example that I think will strike you as very familiar, not because you’ve heard this statement in particular but because you hear things like it all the time. How often have you heard a politician in recent years say something like this, I’ll quote, “Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree. Your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed, and for many, that change has been painful,” end quote.

That’s President Obama in a state of the union address a couple of years ago, but it could easily be pretty much any politician in either party now. With a little bit more of an emphasis on the cultural cohesion or the stronger families of that golden age, it might have been Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. With a more explicit emphasis on the low inequality of that time, it could be Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, and it has been frequently. With poorer grammar, less coherence, and a little bit more anger, it could even be Donald Trump calling for rolling back trade and immigration and recovering what we’ve lost.

America just isn’t what it used to be. That’s the theme of contemporary politics. And it speaks to a public anxiety that often comes down to a question people ask in anguish: What has happened to our country? And, you know, it’s not a bad question. Something big and significant certainly has happened to our country. And in its less cartoonish forms, today’s nostalgia is understandable. The America that our exhausted wistful politics misses so much, the nation as it first emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War and gradually evolved from there was exceptionally unified and cohesive. It had at first an extraordinary confidence in large institutions, big government, big labor, big business that would work together to meet the nation’s needs.

That confidence is just stunning when you look at it from our vantage point. America’s cultural life at mid-century was no less consolidated. It was dominated by a broad traditionalist moral consensus, religious attendance was at a peak, families were strong, birth rates were high, divorce rates were low.

And in the wake of a war in which most of its competitors had burned each other’s economies to the ground, America dominated the world economy, offering economic opportunity for a while to workers of all kinds, high skill and mid-skill and low skill. But almost immediately after the war, that consolidated nation began a long process of unwinding and fragmenting. Over the decades that followed, the culture liberalized and diversified as struggled as racism and sexism coincided with a massive increase in immigration. It’s important to recognize just how much things have changed on that particular front, by the way.

Because of immigration restrictions that had been enacted in the ’20s, mid- century America had an astonishingly low degree of cultural diversity until those restrictions were lifted in the late 1960s. In the 1970 census, the percentage of people living in America who had been born abroad was at an all-time low, 4.5 percent. Today it’s back near an all-time high of almost 20 percent. That’s certainly part of what has happened to our country. Meanwhile, some key parts of the economy were deregulated to keep up with rising competitors and our labor market was forced by globalizing pressures to specialize more in higher skill work that’s diminished opportunities for some Americans with lowers levels of education.

And in politics, an extraordinary mid-century elite consensus on some important issues gave way by the ’70s to renewed divisions that got sharper and sharper since. In one area after another, America in the immediate postwar years was a model of consolidation and consensus, but through the following decades that consensus fractured. By the end of the 20th century, this fracturing of consensus grew from diffusion into polarization of political views, of economic opportunities, of incomes, of family patterns, of ways of life. We’ve grown less conformist but more fragmented, more diverse and so less unified, more dynamic but less secure.

All of this has meant a lot of gains for America and we shouldn’t forget those, gains in national prosperity, in personal liberty and cultural diversity and technological progress and generally in options and choices in every realm of life. But over time, it’s also meant a loss of faith in institutions, a loss of social order and structure, a loss of national cohesion, of security and stability for many workers, a loss of cultural and political consensus. And those losses have piled up in ways that now often seem to overwhelm the gains. This made our 21st-century politics distinctly backward looking and morose.

Conservatives and liberals have emphasized different facets of these changes. Liberals tend to treasure the social liberation, the growing cultural diversity of the past half century, but to lament the economic dislocation, the loss of social solidarity, the rise in inequality. Conservatives tend to celebrate the economic liberalization and the dynamism but lament the social instability, the moral disorder, the breakdown of the family and of other fundamental institutions and traditions. The trouble is these changes are all tied together. The liberalization that the left celebrates is the fragmentation that the right laments and vice versa. That set of forces, liberalizing, fragmenting, diversifying, fracturing, are all functions of the essential driving force of American life since the end of the Second World War, individualism.

In very broad terms, the first half of the 20th century up through the Second World War was an age of growing consolidation and cohesion in American life as our economy industrialized, government grew more centralized, the culture became more aggregated through mass media and national identity and cohesion often were valued above individuality and diversity. In those years, a lot of the most powerful forces in American life were pushing each American to become more like everyone else and the nation that emerged from World War Two was, therefore, highly exceptionally cohesive.

The second half of the 20th century and these opening decades of the 21st century, too, then marked an age of growing deconsolidation. As the culture became increasingly variegated and diverse, the economy gradually diversified and in some respects deregulated and individualism and personal identity came to be held up above conformity and national unity. In these years, a lot of the most powerful forces in American life have been pushing each American not to become more like everyone else, but to become more like himself or herself.

Mid-20th century America, especially the 1950s and ’60s stood between these two distinguishable periods and for a time were able to keep one foot in each, combining dynamism with cohesion to an extraordinary degree. That kind of straddling of cohesion and diffusion or unity and diversity was a wonder to behold. It’s not surprising that we idolize that time, we miss it. It offered us a stable backdrop for different forms of liberalization, be it toward cultural liberation or toward market economics.

But that liberalization has now done its work and our society is its result. We are a highly individualistic, diverse, fragmented society, economically, politically and culturally. And none of that is about to be undone. So we will have to solve our problems as such a society. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are functions of these path that we’ve traveled together and we will now have to draw on those strengths to address those weaknesses. This in broad and general terms is one way to answer the question of what’s happened to our country. It’s the essential challenge of the politics of 21st century America — how to use the advantages of a diverse dynamic society to address the disadvantages of a fractured, insecure society.

But if that doesn’t sound like the question that our politics is asking itself, that’s because it isn’t. Our political culture has not been very good at grasping either the challenges we face or the strengths we possess in facing them. It’s instead been overwhelmed by nostalgia, by a desire to reverse the process of liberalization and diffusion that so transformed our society and so whether in economic terms for the left or in cultural terms for the right, to recreate a consolidated centralized consensus that defined us not all that long ago.

The first step toward a constructive 21st century politics has to be to see that that kind of reversal is ultimately not an option and that we probably wouldn’t really want it anyway. Instead, we have to think about how to address the challenges of dissolution and diffusion, challenges like the breakdown of the family, the loss of worker security, the growing polarization and inequality of American life by making the most of strengths like diversity and dynamism and specialization. That question could help point the way toward the next set of constructive political and policy debates — not this year apparently, but when our politics is finally ready to face reality.

How do we use our very fragmentation at a strength? That’s the question. For all of our troubles in this election year, it seems to me that conservatives are actually uniquely well positioned to offer a plausible answer to that question. Using our diversity and fragmentation as a tool of problem solving will require an approach to governing that empowers problem solvers throughout our society rather than hoping that just one in Washington will get things right. It means bringing to public policy the kind of dispersed, incremental bottom-up approach to progress that increasingly pervades every other part of American life, an approach that solves problems by giving people lots of options and letting their choices drive the process.

That vision of problem solving is not what the social democratic ideal of the left generally looks like. That idea looks more like the old industrial economy but this more distributed decentralized vision of problem solving is what conservatives frequently offer. It’s how the modern post-industrial economy works, but it’s also the logic of federalism embodied in our constitutional order and a logic of subsidiarity articulated by the best traditions of our civilization. It’s how a revitalized conservatism could be a tool of modernization and of revival.

That kind of approach, after all, is what conservatives have proposed in some of the policy arenas where we’ve been most active. That’s what school choice looks like, for example, as opposed to the centralized model of the public school system. It’s what conservative approaches to health care look like. It’s what conservative ideas on welfare or on higher education tend to involve.

Now, as these examples suggest, this kind of bottom-up approach has been championed by conservatives in some arenas for a long time, though certainly with limited success against an entrenched progressive welfare state. But as the old progressive model plainly exhausts itself and as our politics of mid-century nostalgia proves inadequate, I think the time is growing ripe for a new conservative approach to make its care more boldly, both in familiar arenas and in new ones.

That kind of modernized conservatism would also have a lot to offer our troubled cultural debates. The fragmentation of our society is an enormous challenge for social conservatives who over the past half century have frequently been able to imagine that they represented a kind of moral consensus, that they were a moral majority defending commonly held views. That consensus was always shakier than it seemed and dependent upon the support of only loosely affiliated moral and religious traditionalists.

And as every national consensus has weakened, this moral-majority approach has become increasingly unsustainable and loosely affiliated traditionalists have become unaffiliated and social conservatives need to get used to being a minority in a fractured society. In such a society, moral traditionalists would be wise to emphasize building cohesive and attractive subcultures rather than struggling for dominance of the increasingly weakened institutions of the mainstream culture.

While some national political battles, especially about religious liberty, will have to be fought and will remain essential to preserve the space for moral traditionalism, social conservatives will increasingly need to focus on how best to fill that space in their own communities. That is how a traditionalist moral minority can thrive in a diverse America by offering itself not as a path back to an old consensus that no longer exists, but as an attractive, vibrant alternative to the demoralizing chaos of a permissive society.

In this sense and in general, the revival of the mediating institutions of community life would be an essential feature of this kind of modernizing conservatism. These institutions, from families to churches to civic and fraternal associations and labor and business groups and local government too can help us balance dynamism with cohesion and so to live out our freedom in practice. They can keep our diversity from devolving into atomism or into dangerous balkanization and they can help us use our multiplicity to address our modern challenges.

That is ultimately what the path out of the overpowering frustration that now dominates our politics can look like: a more decentralized, diverse bottom-up politics that lowers the stakes of our national debates and uses our society’s diversity as a means of solving its problems.

And that kind of politics can help us do more than that, I think. By revitalizing the mediating layers of our society, it could help to draw us back into the vital space between the individual and the state and so to counteract both the isolating individualism that increasingly characterizes our culture and the overbearing centralization that naturally accompanies it and increasingly characterizes our politics. In the process, it could help us to reunite our fractured republic, helping us to build in our communities the virtues essential to American citizenship. We’re awfully lacking in those virtues now and in that sense of common purpose.

This election year has shown us that and has been leaving us increasingly concerned for the fate of our country. The frustration on display this year and the crude and angry populism working to channel it forces to ask what has happened to our country, but they do not define what will happen next. This sorry election year marks not the beginning of a new phase in American politics but the end of an old one, the exhaustion of a mid-20th century baby-boomer model of national politics that can no longer meet America’s needs. I’m afraid that the exhaustion of that baby-boomer order is what will be on display this fall as two 70-year-old presidential candidates yell at each other about the best way to go backward.

To see the way forward, we need to open our eyes to America’s 21st-century circumstances, to grasp both the challenges and the opportunities they represent and to see how again applying our enduring American principles to novel circumstances can be the recipe for an American revival. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. STRAIN: All right. First of all, I’m glad we could get some chairs in the back. I’m sorry that some people had to stand for the remarks. I’d like to ask two kinds of questions. The first few questions will be questions about the process of writing the book, which people won’t be able to glean from reading the book. And then I’d like to ask some questions about some of the things in the book that I thought were — that really kind of caught my eye and that left me with some questions and that I thought, you know, I would personally like to know more, which I think means that you would all also like to personally know more about them as well. (Laughs.)

So let’s start off with a very basic question. Why did you write this book? There are lots of books that you could have written and I imagine, you thought of several. Why this one? Why now?

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. Well, thank you. One way of answering that question is very simple. This is a book about the problems the country confronts now. It’s a book about the frustration that defines our political life now. And so it’s a natural subject to write about now. It takes on the questions that everybody seems to be stuck with of, as I say, what’s happened to our country and what can we do about it. The first half of the book tries to take on the first of those questions and the second half the second, literally.

So in that sense, it’s easier to answer why you’d write a book like this now, but actually the way I came to write this book didn’t make nearly that much sense. I got to it because after writing my previous book, which was a different kind of book, more historical, philosophical book about Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, “The Origins of the Left-Right Divide,” one of the most interesting reader responses to that book was a question that I realized I was stuck with too, which was really what’s happened to what I describe in that book as a fairly coherent kind of shape and structure to our political debates. There is a meaningful left and right in our kind of society and it makes sense for them to have certain kinds of arguments at different times in the life of our kind of republic, and yet now, in the 21st century, our politics seems to have cratered, seems to have reached a point where neither party is its best self by far and where the debates are not about the right questions. What’s happened? How can you get from there to here?

In thinking about a next book to write, that’s actually what I started with. And, ultimately, I came to the view — and in a sense, this had been my view before and the work that we’ve done together, Mike, the kind of things that have been called reform conservatism are about this too, my sense was that the core of the problem was that neither of our political parties was thinking about the 21st century in its own terms and that our political debates were stuck in a place where one party wanted to always be 1965 and the other always 1981. And they decided to just pretend that that was the case and to make every election a choice between 1965 and 1981.

From there, I worked to think about why that might be and how that might be overcome and, in a sense, that’s the book. So it was really just an extension of a question left open the last time I tried to write a book.

MR. STRAIN: So you describe the book as an essay in the literal sense of the word, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. What do you mean by that?

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. Well, you know, an essay — first of all, an essay is an attempt. That’s what the word means. And an essay as a form of writing really since Montagne created it as a form of writing has been a kind of experiment in thinking, a form of thinking out loud. And my point in describing the book that way in the introduction is that this shouldn’t be understood as a manifesto, as an authoritative, confident assertion of reality. It should be understood as an attempt to understand a complicated situation and as a kind of suggestion about what might be going on.

You don’t want in writing a book to constantly say maybe, perhaps, you know, always be clearing your throat. You have to do that sometimes to be absolutely clear that you’re not pretending to know the answers to all these complicated questions but I thought it also made sense at the outset to tell the reader what they were getting into, which is just an attempt to feel our way toward some better understanding or our circumstances.

MR. STRAIN: My next question is about reading, which, as anybody who does writing knows, is a really integral part of writing. Several times in the book, you summarize debates that are happening, that I was completely unaware of. And you used a phrase, for example. You talked about ideas, quote, “in some tiny corners of progressivism.” And I have a hard enough time keeping up with the ideas that are, you know, in the big corners of progressivism and conservatism. It made me want to ask — you know, I’m sure that you all feel the same way I do. There’s so much to read on any given day, there’s so many books, there’s so many websites, there’s so many periodicals. It’s just — you could read every minute of the day and you wouldn’t read enough. How do you read?

MR. LEVIN: Well, it’s a great question. I would say I try consciously to look for those tiny corners and to overlook as much as I can what’s happening at the forefront of both progressivism and conservatism because often it isn’t actually all that representative of what’s influencing our political life or what ultimately will prove to be important. You know, people on the left look at what happens on the right and they say, just watch Fox News for five minutes, they’re all nuts. And if you watch Fox News for five minutes, you would conclude that we are all nuts. So don’t.

There are other places to look. And because I’m sure that I make the same mistake in looking at the left, I do think it makes sense to try to see who’s influential and where ideas seem to come from, and it’s not always the obvious places. It’s also a good idea to try to read quarterly journals, and I say that not only because I edit one, though you should certainly read National Affairs, but I actually think that on the left too, there are a few of them where there’s an unusual kind of thinking happening. And especially in the age of the Internet where people can say whatever they want instantly and briefly, it makes sense to look at what people are saying at some length and slowly. And I have the prejudice that that actually ends up being more influential. And so if you look at the Democracy Journal on the left, I think you’ll learn more than you would by following the Twitter feed of the Center for American Progress.

MR. STRAIN: I agree. So those are all the questions I had about the process of writing the book. We can certainly return to similar questions in the question-and-answer portion if you all would like to know more about those. I’d like to turn now to the substance of the book and just some things that I thought were really interesting.

You write that collectivism and atomism are not opposite ends of the political spectrum but rather two sides of one coin. And, you know, I interpret that as meaning that both collectivism and atomism really elevate personal liberty above other goods and subordinate other goods to those. Collectivism seeks to make people free by freeing them from any sort of needs that they have and by centralizing authority to take care of people and leave them free to do what they need. Atomism frees people by allowing them to focus on themselves and by removing barriers to them in terms of their being able to do things they want.

I guess my first question is do you agree with that? And my second question is do you think that liberty is overrated?

MR. LEVIN: Well, the second is a wonderfully leading question so let me be led to it. I think liberty is misunderstood and in a profound way in our national life now in a way that’s very much related to this question of the individual and the sort of collective. What I mean in saying that individualism and collectivism or a kind of centralization are two sides of the same coin is really an argument that you would find best expressed at the end of Alexis De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” This book, my book for me is a very Tocquevillian book. It’s a way of trying to translate some of Tocqueville’s insights into the contemporary American situation.

And that insight that ultimately radical individualism leads to political centralization strikes me as a very important insight for us. And I also think that in an almost explicit way, the combination of those two is what progressivism presents itself as now; that is, moral individualism and economic collectivism I think is roughly a description of the progressive vision. And it’s motivated by a desire to liberate people. It’s not ill will by any means. And you can see how moral individualism and economic collectivism can seem like freedom because in both cases, they liberate people from responsibility and obligation.

But it seems to me that freedom is not possible without responsibility and obligation and that actually freedom is what happens in the middle space between the isolated individual and the national state and that freedom doesn’t just mean being liberated from constraints or from obligations. Freedom is a way of life and it requires a kind of person who’s capable of making responsible choices freely.

That’s always been the challenge for free societies, for our kind of liberal society is how do you have a citizen who can handle that freedom, who can live in such a way so that coercion is not necessary, right? This is the essence of the challenge that Adam Smith poses for himself. It’s more implicitly the challenge that Locke poses for himself much more explicitly the one that Burke poses for himself and Tocqueville. And the question can be understood in this way: The free society requires a kind of citizen that it doesn’t produce. It requires a free man or woman, but it doesn’t by itself, by being free create that person. That person is the product of pre-liberal kinds of institutions, of families, of schools, of churches, of communities that form us to make responsible choices. And the challenge for our kind of society is how can those institutions exist in a society that’s also free, that also lets us be and do what we choose?

I think the answer to that question is found in that middle space, in that middle space between the individual and the state. Again, it’s an argument you find in Tocqueville, it’s an argument you find in a lot of the best 20th century sociology. It’s an argument that was made wonderfully here at AEI in the 1970s looking to those mediating structures, those mediating institutions to form human beings to be capable of freedom.

And it seems to me that that middle space is also where we thrive, is where we live so that a vision of political life that sees only isolated individuals and a national government to meet their needs and that says all the things we do together are government, as Barney Frank said to the Democratic convention in 2012, I think is a vision that misses the essence, the core of what’s required to be a free society. And it’s why for me, the solutions to the kinds of problems that we face now, as I suggested in laying out the argument of the book a little, is to be found by re-empowering those institutions, by bringing power and authority back to that space between the individual and the state. I think that’s just where solutions live.

MR. STRAIN: So is it too much to say that public policy and government should be explicitly and consciously concerned with cultivating virtue among individuals and with the moral character of families and of society, but that the way that government should enact – should act on that concern is through mediating structures?

MR. LEVIN: Well, I think all of us as citizens should be concerned with virtue. All of us as human beings had better be concerned with it. Whether public policy at the national level can be concerned with it in an explicit way I think is a more difficult question because it’s very difficult for it to express that concern in ways that aren’t counterproductive. So I would say in the abstract, sure. It’s important for people who make policy to recognize that you can’t really have a functional society if people don’t try to live good lives, sure.

But does that mean that we should pass laws with that explicitly in mind? It seems to me that in a society as vast as ours, at the national level it means that we should do everything we can to keep the space open for the institutions that are closer to the ground, including government. Local government, to an extent state government do need to be concerned with these questions but that at the federal level, it makes more sense to think about sustaining the space for those kinds of institutions.

There are maybe times when it’s necessary for federal public policy to be a little more assertive, a little more paternalistic about that kind of thing. I’m inclined to want to see those minimized because it seems to me that the potential to cause trouble that way is just much greater than the potential to do good. But, you know, certainly, anyone thinking about government in a free society has to think about virtue, otherwise you’re asking the wrong questions.

MR. STRAIN: You criticize radical individualism a lot. And it occurs to me that implicit in that criticism is that we shouldn’t think of the individual as the kind of atom of society and perhaps instead, we should consider the family to be the base unit of society. Do you agree with that? And if so, why the family more than the individual?

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. No, you haven’t fully converted me to Catholicism, Mike. I don’t — I actually don’t agree with that. And on this particular question, I would say that I am a kind of classical liberal. I think that it’s right to see the individual as the atom, yes. But it’s also important to see the limits of atomism as a way of governing ourselves.

So the individual matters and the freedom of the individual matters, but the individual cannot thrive and cannot be free and cannot remain free except in the context of structures and institutions — beginning with the family — that enable that person to be a responsible free citizen. And so I don’t think that means that the individual doesn’t matter. The individual matters enormously. And we have to think about what these institutions do as a kind of interpersonalism (sp) which does look at individuals as individuals.

But, you know, one of the things that it means to be to be a conservative is to have a low opinion of what individuals are on their own. They are made in a divine image, yes, but they are fallen and they are driven to — I should say we are driven to vice and excess and always in need of being civilized and being cultured and being formed into people who are worthy of living in a society like this, and that requires families and foremost. It requires a lot of other institutions. But that doesn’t mean that we look past the individual and that the family is the unit. I really don’t think so.

MR. STRAIN: Speaking of Catholicism, the dichotomy you lay out really resonated with me. And, you know, Barney Frank, government is the name that we give the things that we do together, on the one hand, and radical individualism on the other hand, which oftentimes seems to manifest itself simply as license, not as liberty properly understood, our features of public life that grated on me personally for many years now. And while that’s been happening, my own personal religious identity and affinity have I think asserted themselves more strongly in response to that. And I also think, you know, perhaps my connections to schools and neighborhoods and these sorts of mediating institutions that you champion have also increased in intensity.

Your argument is that collectivism and radical individualism are destroying those mediating institutions. Why is it the opposite happening? Why aren’t more people gravitating toward them?

MR. LEVIN: Well, I’m happy to hear it, first of all, and I think that that is a kind of healthy reaction to some of what’s going on. But it’s not the most common reaction. And I would say an important part of the reason is that what our kind of moral individualism combined with administrative centralization do is take power and meaning out of those institutions. They make what happens in those mediating layers less significant. And so they tend to drive people away from them and to empty out those middle spaces.

Now, it is true that what that can often mean in the lives of individuals is a sort of emptiness that people who, say, went to Catholic school for 12 years will see as a reason to turn to their parish. But as you may know, many Americans did not go to Catholic school for 12 years. And in a sense where — we live in a culture that encourages us not to think that way about how to respond to really the kind of loneliness and isolation that I think is the defining problem of our moment.

You know, I don’t think we come to terms with that enough in our politics and in our cultural conversations that really what it means to live in a society that’s this committed to individualism but also that’s this fragmented and fractured is that people live with an enormous amount of loneliness. And that is an enormous problem and it makes it difficult to solve other problems.

And I do think those institutions that speak to you at eye level, that bring people together with one another as individuals are potential solutions to that kind of isolation and that kind of loneliness. But you have to work to show people that. I don’t think it’s everybody’s natural instinct to see it that way.

MR. STRAIN: So I can definitely see how — first of all, how loneliness is a very serious problem and how it’s pervasive in our society today. And I can see how reinvigorated civil society could help to assuage that. The problems that you outline are really what you said earlier, you know, all of what’s wrong with society, the challenges that we face in our economic realm, the challenges we face in our social realm, the challenges we face in our political realm.

If a reinvigorated civil society is a solution to loneliness, do you think that it’s adequate to the task of meeting all the challenges that you outline in our book?

MR. LEVIN: Well, not simply all, of course not. I’m not suggesting there’s a panacea and I don’t think that there’s an easy way to just kind of flip a switch and say now we’re going to solve these problems at the local level or at some mediating level. I think it can only be an incremental, gradual improvement. I think that’s just true in general. When you look at a problem, the question you should ask is how can we improve the situation. It’s unlikely that you will find an all-encompassing solution of any kind, especially through public policy.

And so the question is, how do you make things better? And it seems to me that given the nature of the kinds of problems we face, you make things better by allowing what happens in those mediating layers to matter more. And there is an enormous role for public policy in doing that because public policy now prevents what happens in those institutions for mattering as much as it might. That means a change in how we think about welfare. It means a change in how we think about education. It means a change in how we think about solving concrete problems in general in our public life.

And, you know, it seems to me that that is a way of drawing people into those institutions. It’s also a way of getting people more accustomed to thinking about problems in ways that draw out a diverse array of incremental solutions. That’s how we solve problems, right? I think there is a model in our public life that says you try things small and if they work reasonably well, then you scale them up and a little thing is a pilot for a big thing. That seem to me to be the wrong way to think about life in a very diverse and complicated society like ours. I think we should think about how to solve problems at the level at which they present themselves because the problems we have are incredibly diverse when it comes down to the practical level. It’s just not likely that we’re going to have a lot of national solutions, and so the role the national government can play has more to do with empowering local solutions than with looking for one-size-fits-all solutions.

Again, I think that’s one reason why conservatives could have a lot to offer contemporary America if we realize that what we actually do is think this way rather than just thinking about how to finish those last few planks in the Reagan agenda from 1978, which were fine but there are different kinds of problems now, and our way of thinking about problems, the way of thinking that allowed the Reagan revolution to reach the solutions it reached applied to contemporary problems would lead to a different agenda, and that’s the challenge we have now.

MR. STRAIN: So in response to that, let me ask you to look into your crystal ball. You’ve outlined —

MR. LEVIN: It hasn’t been working all that well this year for what it’s worth.

MR. STRAIN: Yes. You’ve outlined a process and you’ve outlined a vision for how we could pull out of our current malaise. Do you think it’s likely that your process will be enacted or pursued, your vision will be realized?

MR. LEVIN: Well, I think the key to that is to have low expectations.

MR. STRAIN: Another lesson we’ve all learned.

MR. LEVIN: Yes. Very, very low expectations. So what I’m suggesting is a change in emphasis about how we solve problems in America. And is offering the public a way of thinking about solving problems that can improve things incrementally. I certainly think that can happen and I think that a lot of what’s needed for presenting that case already exists. And, frankly, some of it’s been done in reverse by people like us, Mike. That is to say, we’ve thought about policy at a concrete level before offering a kind of argument about why this way of thinking about policy might be the right way. This book tries to do some of that.

I think it would take, frankly, political leaders who want to speak to the public in these terms, people who are comfortable living in the 21st century who don’t just see what’s wrong but who can also see what’s right with contemporary America. They’re likely to be younger than 70. I’m sorry, but it’s true. And there are some such people. I think that there is promise for them to be the next wave of — at least on the conservative side. I’m sure something similar will in time happen on the left, too — to be the next wave, the next face of the American right.

And I think if that happens, you can begin to take steps in this direction but I’m not suggesting that this can lead to a revolution that solves all our problems all at once. In part, you know, I don’t think things are as dire as you would conclude from just listening to our politics for a minute this year.

A lot of times, when you hear people debating a political question and they’re talking past one another, one useful way to think about the difference between them is to ask whether they think that the question we face is about survival or is about improvement. Are we at the edge of the abyss and if we don’t turn things around right now we will die, or are we failing to make the most of the resources we have for improving things?

I’m in the second school. I think that this country is not at the end of its life and that a lot of what’s been happening over the last half century has been good and provides us with resources while a lot of what’s been happening has also been bad and created problems for us that we’re having a very hard time solving. I think we need to think about what’s working and trying to think about how to fix what isn’t working. And we just don’t do nearly enough of that. And that kind of hopefulness, I wouldn’t call it optimism. Optimism is a slur, but hopefulness, a belief that the resources do exist it seems to me is essential if you’re going to try to solve problems and there’s just not nearly enough of it in our politics now. And this ultimately is a hopeful book.

MR. STRAIN: It is a hopeful book. You all should buy it. You all should — you all should read it. I think we’re selling it out in the —

MR. LEVIN: At least buy it.

MR. STRAIN: At least buy it. And the book just came out and you’re hitting the road tonight and you’re, you know, out there trying to push the book. So this may be an unfair question. What are you thinking about for your next book?

MR. LEVIN: Well, that is an unfair question. Thank you. No, it’s not unfair. As I said at the beginning, I got to this book by thinking about what the open question was at the end of the last book I wrote. There is an obvious open question at the end of this book which is what about national unity? What about America, not just as a diverse society but as a society. I think that the next book I want to write is a book about how we ought to think about national unity in 21st-century America. And it seems to me that national unity is not the opposite of this kind of vision of diversity and fragmentation – that one of the types of virtues we build in our communities is the sort of virtue that you need to have a unified country and national purpose, but that also has to be combined with a vision of what America is. So I think my next book is a book about the American founding in particular and how it might shape our understanding of what American unity can mean in an age of extraordinary diversity and division. But it’s a ways off.

MR. STRAIN: We’ll look forward to it. I think we’ll open it up for questions now. We have two rules. Your question needs to end in a question mark and needs to be at the most three sentences in length. And please wait for a microphone so that the people who are watching the video later on can hear you. And identify yourself please when you get the microphone. Yes, sir. Go ahead.

Q: Hi. Thank you. I’m interested in finding out if you could fast forward the book that you’re about to write because I’m more —

MR. STRAIN: I told you it was an unfair question.

Q: Because I’d like to hear more of an answer. I think we’re all aware that there’s some issues that we’re dealing with and it’s going to be interesting for the news media for the next couple of months, but what kind of solutions can you come up with? And if you could come up with solutions, I might be willing to put you into the middle battle – the middle ballot, so maybe you could run at the last minute.

MR. STRAIN: Do you accept the nomination?

MR. LEVIN: Certainly not. No, thank you. Yeah. Well, I don’t have the personality to run for anything, believe me. The question you ask points in a couple of different directions. First of all, I think that this book is about solutions. It does try to suggest how the kinds of problems we face might be better addressed than they are now if we understand some of the virtues that come with being a diverse and fragmented society.

And part of the reason for starting with the question of nostalgia in the book, as I did in talking about it here is that one of the very peculiar things about the moment that our politics is nostalgic for, that moment in the middle of 20th century is that it was a moment of unusually intense cohesion. If you had looked in on America really at any point in the 19th century, putting aside the 1860s, which were a very different time, you would have found the country a little bit more like ours than like the middle of the 20th- century America — a divided country with very little faith in its national institutions and trying to figure out what holds it together and how to address its problems.

Now, that’s not to say that the situation we’re in now is a kind of return to that moment because we are a country that’s been changed by what’s happened in the interim — changed by that much more cohesive society, changed by progressivism, changed by industrialism, changed by modern life. But I think that there is a way of thinking about how American life can work that is well suited to the kind of diverse, fragmented society we are now, but the challenge that that society will face even if it does things right is the challenge of national unity, the challenge of holding together.

And it seems to me that there is a lot to work with in the American founding, in the ideas that define our country, but also in the institutions and the practices that were put in place to allow this very diverse society to function that we can learn from now but we tend not to learn from now because we have these kind of — we have these kind of caricatures of what the ideas of the founding are that don’t serve us very well. They’re shorthand and they don’t allow us to go deep enough to understand ourselves well enough to see what we could learn from our own history that would allow our country to be the best version of itself.

So, you know, I’ll learn the answer to your question in trying to write this book, I hope, but it seems to me that that’s the question that we’re forced to ask now, not only in the abstract. I think the question of nationalism in American life is not an abstract question and not a future question. It’s got everything to do with what’s going on in our political life this year, the failure of our elites to think seriously about America as a particular country for its particular people has a lot to do with why people are frustrated. And I do think that it has been a failure that in part is a function of habits of thought that do need to be changed on both the left and the right.

MR. STRAIN: Yes.

Q: Thanks very much, Yuval. I’m Michael Hendrix from the Chamber of Commerce. I was struck by your reflections in the book on the shift from large communities to narrower, more homogenous networks. And I was struck thinking about the notion of networks and how it shapes institutions today, how it may have shaped the web rather than the web shaping the networks. And I’m curious about your reflections on the role of network-based affinity politics. So in other words, how does politics get done today? Some people are calling for a return to machine-based politics so that’s a form of nostalgia and that that was a way that things could get done before and we understand how that works. But today parties are changing. Outside organizations have more power. So in assuming the world of network-based affinity politics, what does that look like? How do you get stuff done in that sort of a world?

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. Well, thank you for the question. It gets at a lot of what people in Washington, especially people who think about Congress, are asking themselves now. The move from large institutions, the kinds of big institutions that might have characterized mid-century America to smaller networks is really something you see everywhere. I mean, it’s hard for us to talk about what without within half a sentence getting to the Internet. And so we almost implicitly assume that the Internet is what’s driven that but the Internet’s very recent. And that process is actually a good bit older than that. I think the Internet took the shape that it took in response to that more than giving it that shape, as you suggested. And I try to get at some of that in the book.

I think to your specific question of what politics looks like, it’s an enormous challenge and it’s a challenge that is well embodied by the difficulty that we now have in thinking about how Congress is supposed to function, right? There is an understanding of how Congress works that’s rooted in certain kinds of mid-20th century assumptions that came to be ultimately embodied in the structure of Congress really only in the mid-70s, especially in the ’74 Budget Act that created a system where Congress works basically by allowing the committees and the leaders to drive the process. And, ultimately, backbench members can hope to have influence by rising to be committee chairs and party leaders in Congress.

Like almost every institution that works that way, Congress has changed a lot and that process just doesn’t work well anymore. It doesn’t work well in part because it’s not possible to centralize authority that way anymore, especially because you can’t centralize knowledge anymore at all. And so outside institutions, outside groups can have enormous sway over how Congress works. And the members are not nearly as dependent as they used to be on their leaders, on the parties, not for money, not for information, not for getting ahead, not for almost anything — on the party, on the committee, on all of that. And the question is how does a networked Congress function?

I think we’ve seen some members in Congress try to figure that out in practice, to sort of grope their way in that direction. By far the most impressive of these is Mike Lee. I mean, I think in almost every way you would try to look for impressive members of Congress, you’d probably have to start with Mike Lee at this point but, you know, he came into the Senate only in 2010 and he’s set out to figure out how to make this work. And it seems to me that he has tried to form networks outside the committee system for the most part.

So, for example, he’s proposed an important tax reform that one of the Republican presidential candidates picked up. He’s not on the Finance Committee. He’s proposed transportation reforms, higher ed reforms. Almost none of those has worked its way through the committees, but now a lot of those are working their way backwards into the committees. He’s proposed reforms of the structure of Congress, the kinds of things that he calls the Article One project, where, again, he puts out an idea and then the Judiciary Committee and the Senate picks it up after that. And he tries to work with other members, to the extent possible with members of the opposite party. That’s almost not possible today.

And to use these outside networks as resources in the way that the leadership- driven process might have used Congress’ own institutions as resources. I think that’s probably the direction that things are going to take, for good or bad, and it’s not all good. But it does seem to me that policy innovation in Congress in the years to come is going to look a lot like that and it’s going to use outside groups in a different way. And there will need to be some structural changes to make that possible.

I think the way that the Congressional Budget Office works is just simply designed for the old system and is now actively counterproductive and really should be opened up and should become a kind of open-source model that anybody can use. There’s no reason why that shouldn’t be the case. And there are a lot of reasons and more and more every day why it should be the case.

That kind of change is going to happen gradually. I don’t think that that sort of innovative institutional thinking is going to happen in Congress first. It’s just unlikely. But I do think that members gradually will learn from the rest of our society how to make this kind of thing work. But, you know, in the meantime, Congress isn’t working well. I mean, the last time the process worked really was in 2003 with the Medicare bill. That’s a long time ago. And most members weren’t there. So most members of Congress today have actually never seen the institution function. That’s unsustainable and I think they’re going to find a different way to make that institution function.

MR. STRAIN: Yes, sir. Yes.

Q: I’m Jeff Burnam. I teach politics at Georgetown, but I spent most of my career working as a professional staffer especially in the Senate. And so my question may be a little bit narrow for this audience, but let’s follow up on what you said about Mike Lee. I think that’s great but how is Mike Lee going to get these things done? He’s going to have to get it done the old way. He’s going to have to — you know, Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell are going to have to sit down and figure out a process for a bipartisan compromise. Paul Ryan may need to talk to Nancy Pelosi if he can’t get his own caucus united, which is a problem as much as I love Paul Ryan. And so I’m just wondering to what — you’re very critical of the old legislative process more than I would be I think, but it’s going to be needed. It’s still there. And if these — don’t you think if these networks that Mike Lee is talking about emerge that the final result is going to be performed by the old legislative process?

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. No, I do agree with you. I think the question is how do things start. And that’s really been the challenge for well over a decade now is, how do you get things moving and force the system to do its job? I don’t think you ultimately can get a large piece of legislation enacted by having a small network of members write it up and then get it passed. That’s just not going to be how Congress works. There is a committee process. There is leadership.

But how do things start moving in Congress? And I think part of what’s happened because the old system has not worked well for a while is that we’ve gotten to a place where things start moving in Congress when the president proposes something. Now, there’s always been some of that, obviously. But there’s way too much of that now. And Congress has ceded its authority to the president to a degree that’s just absolutely unacceptable.

And when you look at the two major party candidates for president this time and think about who the next president’s going to be, Congress just has to reassert itself. It has to reassert itself to put some constraints on presidential power because both of these people will need constraints on their power, whichever one of them is president. And Congress is going to have to reassert itself to allow new ideas to rise to the surface. I think that there is an interest in that. Especially on the House side, Paul Ryan really does want that to happen and there are other members who do too.

On the Senate side, there aren’t a lot. And, again, when you — when I look for good things happening in the Senate, I really would start again with Mike Lee on that point but Ben Sasse talks about this, other members do. The leaders do it less for now. But it seems to me the difficult question has been how to get things moving, how to get things started. And I do think the old process, especially because it’s built around the budget process, the basic 1974 budget process is not working at all. It is now an active detriment to the process of legislation. And it really needs to be done away with. And a Congress without earmarks, I think the whole concept of that process, the whole idea of having appropriators doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. What are they supposed to do in fact?

And so it seems to me that it’s time, as happens every half century or so, for Congress to really rethink its fundamental practices. And, you know, the institution is not in great shape for doing that now so there’s going to need to be some kind of outside pressure.

MR. STRAIN: Why don’t we go with someone in the back, that gentleman.

Q: Thank you. So I guess my — to start with my question, if the politics of today are dominated by nostalgia, why do the forces promoting disaggregation consistently win? And the examples I’d use for that are trade, where every president since Hoover has lowered tariffs, both import and export tariffs, or unions where president since Truman has seen unionization rates drop, or school choice where every election cycle since 1988 has seen the traditional aggregated education approach decline? And it seems like if both parties were united against that, then it would stop, but instead it seems like America’s choosing, not in Trump and not in Sanders, but in almost all its gubernatorial candidates this cycle, almost all its congressional candidates this cycle and in the Democratic nominee to sort of continue on the path of change in the direction it’s been going before.

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. Thank you. It’s an interesting question. I would say the path of disaggregation is really the kind of generative fact of post-World War II America. I mean, that is the direction we’ve had. And it’s certainly the case, it seems to me that there’s an awful lot of nostalgia for the beginning of that path, not exactly for what came before it.

The nostalgia is for a stable backdrop for liberalization. And so, you know, ironically, it’s a — we’ve gone through 60 years where we’ve blown up the old way. And now we want to bring it back so we can blow it up again. And, again, this is how the left tends to think about the culture and how the right tends to think about the economy. And so that hasn’t meant a big public consensus for rolling back trade, for example, that’s true, or certainly not an elite consensus for doing that at all.

But it doesn’t seem to be that the circumstances created by those trends have left us with this kind of nostalgic politics that, again, yearns for the beginning of the process. And that’s why it strikes me as just so impractical. And it’s not even a way of thinking about how to solve the problems created by globalization. Or if you think free trade is at fault for economic problems, it’s not really a way of thinking about how to address those problems. It’s a way of thinking about how to get back to a place where you seem to remember those problems didn’t exist. I think we have to start from where we are and think about what that means.

And so to me, that doesn’t point to an agenda of re-aggregation. I just don’t think that’s an option in the kind of society we are. It points toward an agenda of trying to use our diversity and our fracture to address particular practical problems.

MR. STRAIN: Robert.

Q: Hi. Robert Doar, AEI. I’m wondering whether in your conversation about diversity and nostalgia you’re missing the demographic issue. Are you worried that the nostalgia on the right is for a world that was not as diverse demographically as we are and that’s really the problem?

MR. LEVIN: Well, I think that’s certainly part of the problem. As I said in sort of laying out the argument, one of the most dramatic ways that America’s changed since the middle of the 20th century is that we are much more culturally diverse. And people who are younger, you people my age — I’m 39 — don’t understand how much that has changed, just how much people whose understanding of what America is was forged in 1970, say, really have seen their country transformed utterly from a society in which about under 5 percent of the population was born abroad to a society in which almost 20 percent of the population was born abroad. That is really very different.

And so I have no doubt that some of the nostalgia, some of the most problematic kinds of nostalgia that we’re seeing present themselves in our politics now — largely on the right this year, but I think they exist in general — do have to do with the sense of that one of the ways our country’s changed is that it’s become more culturally diverse in ways that many people don’t like. I don’t think that’s changing. I personally don’t think that changing it is a solution to any problem that we have, and so it doesn’t seem to me to be a key to what we need to do going forward.

I do think that slowing the pace of immigration is not crazy at all — that that pace has been extremely rapid since the 1965 immigration reform in a way that was not intended and that was not expected when that reform passed. And that it’s not a bad thing to say we need to be a little more selective so that immigration serves our economic interests a little better and just we need to slow it down some. That’s not unreasonable for a society that’s under the kinds of pressures that our society is to say to itself. I don’t think it should take the form that it did in the 1920s, which was just an abjectly racialist immigration policy. That’s not what we need.

But, you know, it seems to me that some of the concerns that people have could be mitigated some by slowing the pace of immigration for reasons that it seems to me can easily be justified. But it’s also why the people who are going to be in a better position to address the kinds of problems we actually do have are just more likely to be younger politicians than older ones because they are at home in 21st-century America. And their first instinct when looking at this country is not to say that they don’t recognize it. They do recognize it and they think in a particular way that’s different from the way that liberals think about how to solve its problems, I think those people have a lot of promise.

Now, obviously, there are also people in an older generation that are capable of thinking that way. But as a general matter, it seems to me that an enormous part of the problem we have is that our politics is dominated by a kind of baby-boomer understanding of American life that’s not crazy or stupid. It just doesn’t take into account enough of what has changed in America or look at it as a reality to be contended with for good and bad rather than to be rolled back.

MR. STRAIN: OK. I think we have time for one last question. Does anybody have an exceptionally good question? We haven’t had anybody from the side there. Yes, sir.

Q: Thank you. Brian Diffle (ph). Good to see you all. Let me start off by saying I haven’t read your book, but I intend to. So if some of this is covered in there, that’s great. We touched a little bit on technology and I would love to kind of get back to that briefly at the end here because I think a lot of the mediating institutions you referenced in at least your talk were very physical sort of proximity-based institutions. And I think increasingly, especially younger Americans view their communities as being very virtual. I guess, you know, the question I have is, is it practical or desirable to return to a model where mediating institutions are very physically sort of proximate to one another? And I guess the other question is, whether that’s the case or not, what kinds of roles can these sort of virtual communities play in your view of how mediating institutions should work?

MR. LEVIN: Yeah. Well, thank you. It’s a great question, a very important question. I do think that it’s important, where it’s possible, to emphasize institutions that are in fact mid-level, interpersonal institutions and not just virtual meeting places because the kinds of virtual communities we have tend to disaggregate more than they tend to aggregate. They tend to act as narrow grooves, as filters, and they allow people to be in touch with people at kind of two ends of the social spectrum, either with their closest friends and family and to be in touch with them all the time or with people with whom they have just a few, maybe one really intense interest in common.

And a lot of what is actually social life happens in the middle with the kinds of people who are in your community, with whom you have some interests in common, but who are neither your closest friends, nor people who only share exactly your most intense interests. And that kind of community can serve a lot of functions, can open your mind to things you didn’t know and weren’t expecting, can allow you to understand people of different kinds and can force you out of your box a little bit.

I also think as a practical to solve problems, it makes a lot more sense to think about how people live together than to understand people as individuals apart in front of screens by themselves and to see that as a kind of community. Now, in trying to think about how to make those kinds of communities work, we have to think about how to use modern technology to better empower them.

And also you have to meet people where they are, and where people are now, especially younger people, does tend to be those virtual communities more than real communities. So people have to be creative about how that can work. I think you do see that in a lot of institutions. We obviously need more of it, especially in the kinds of community institutions, schools and churches and civic groups that can easily come to be sort of replaced by these virtual networks.

You know, again, it’s all a matter of degree and of emphasis. I’m not suggesting that you’re going to just cause people to put down the cell phone and the computer and go to a PTA meeting. I hope you do. I think you should. And I’m sure that many people here do and I know that many people in America do. But in a practical, realistic way, I think as a matter of emphasis and incremental improvement, we should prefer actual, real human interaction to virtual communities.

MR. STRAIN: Well, in the world of public policy, I like to think of AEI as the preeminent mediating institution. So thank you all for joining us here and adding to the vibrancy of our life. And please join me in thanking Yuval Levin for being with us. (Applause.) And please join us for a glass of wine.

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