August 7, 2024 • 48 mins
This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, we are opening the archive to share three particularly relevant episodes. The second episode features Timothy P. Carney.
Timothy P. Carney is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on economic competition, cronyism, civil society, localism, and religion in America. He is also the a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner.
Jeremy sits down with Jeremy asks about Timothy’s latest book, “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse,” how social capital patterns predict voting patterns—including fun insights on the midwestern Dutch voter—and why Timothy says the unchurching of culture is at the root of America's economic and social problems.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and recommendations for the podcast! You can shoot Katie Janus, GDT's producer, an email anytime!
Be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube to make sure you never miss an episode!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Today we talk to author TimCarney about why the American
dream is alive and well in somequarters and why it is all but
dead in others, and what theinstitutions of civil society
have to do with it.
Let's go Givers, doers andThinkers introduces listeners to
(00:24):
the fascinating people andimportant ideas at the heart of
American civil society.
We speak with philanthropists,reformers, social entrepreneurs,
nonprofit executives, religiousleaders, scholars, journalists
and anyone else who will help usunderstand contemporary civil
society's achievements andfailure.
My name is Jeremy Beer.
Thank you for joining us.
(00:44):
Achievements and failure.
My name is Jeremy Beer.
Thank you for joining us.
All right, thank you so muchfor joining us for another
episode of Givers, doers andThinkers.
Today, december 8th 2020, mycalendar, we speak with author
Tim Carney, author of lastyear's Alienated America why
Some Places Thrive While OthersCollapse, published by
(01:05):
HarperCollins.
Tim is the author of severalother books, including the Big
Ripoff how Big Business and BigGovernments Steal your Money,
and he is a resident fellow atthe American Enterprise
Institute, where he researchesand writes about economic
competition, cronyism, civilsociety, localism and religion
in America.
He is also the commentaryeditor at the Washington
(01:28):
Examiner, tim how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Doing well?
Thank you for having me.
Where are you speaking to us?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
from today.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I am in Washington DC in the bowels of the American
Enterprise Institute building.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Okay, all right.
Well, I hope that's a decentplace to be on this.
Uh, december 8th 2020.
Um, all right.
Well, I want to get yourthoughts.
Um, we were talking about thisa little bit before we started
recording, uh, at some point inthis conversation.
Uh, I can't think of anybody.
I'd rather talk to you actuallyabout, um, how the pandemic and
(02:01):
our reactions to it areinteracting with the issues you
care about economic competition,education, religion, much else.
But let's talk first aboutAlienated America, which I
thought was an excellent bookwhen I read it last year Really
fantastic.
It's essentially aninvestigation into social
capital who has it, who doesn't,why and why it matters in
(02:26):
today's America.
Can you, can we begin here byyou just giving us sort of a
capsule thumbnail of the thesisof the book before we dive into
some of the specifics?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Absolutely.
I loved writing alienatedAmerica, and I thought it was an
important story to tell becauseI kind of got caught off guard
realizing how many peoplethought the American dream was
dead.
The uniform reason for thepeople who had never voted
(03:09):
before and came out of thewoodworks in 2015 to go to a
Trump rally that he was the guywho said the American dream is
dead.
And so I started by askingthese people.
I said, make America greatagain.
What needs great making?
And I was hoping they would saysomething about we need
factories, or it's got to dowith the immigration or
corruption in politics sort ofpolicy things that I, as a
(03:30):
Washington think tank you know,capital, former Capitol Hill
reporter was very versed in.
But then, months later,re-listening to these interviews
, the answers they gave me werethings like well, when I was a
kid, on Memorial Day, we had aparade and all the Little
Leaguers and Boy Scouts wouldplant flags in our local Heroes
(03:54):
Hill and I would cut these guysoff when I was interviewing them
and say no, no, no, no.
What are you talking about?
Is this about jobs?
Is this about culture?
And I couldn't understand that.
What was lost to them?
I couldn't understand what wasawesome, in part because for me
it was all very accessible.
I belong I belong to a localCatholic parish where I coach
(04:16):
t-ball.
I'm in upper middle classcircles where, you know,
somebody ends up in the hospitaland people are bringing you
meals and and and all of thatstuff.
Where, um, you know, I'mparking in my neighbor's
driveway because somebody'sparked in my driveway and that's
not going to start a fight oranything.
That the social capitaldifference between the people
(04:37):
who thought American Dream wasalive and the people who thought
the American Dream was dead,who thought the American dream
was dead.
And this made me go a littledeeper and say, okay, so if
we've got these opioid problems,if we've got this increasing
persistence in economicinequality, if we've got this
retreat from marriage, all ofthese things, maybe they are
rooted in this problem thatstrong community institutions
(05:02):
are not as available in a lot ofthe country and that this
problem that Robert Putnamcalled bowling alone, this is
concentrated in the workingclass, then that would explain a
lot of what's going on in thiscountry.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, you.
Basically, if I can put it inanother way, despair, anxiety,
isolation, the way the despair,anxiety isolation, drug
overdoses, all these sort ofalarming trends we see in the
middle of America, in particularin the working class, are
symptoms not of, as you say, aretreat of our economic problems
(05:38):
, so much as they are theretreat or decline of social
capital that's at the root ofthese things.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, they're clearly related to.
Do you remember during the whenTrump first started surging
this sort of debate was is thisabout economic anxiety or is
this about cultural resentment?
And both of the that framingwas obviously a bad framing, but
you kind of answered, you know,tweak both of those a little.
And they're right that thecollapse of communities is often
(06:05):
the domino that falls after thefactory closes.
But the factory closes isn'twhat causes people to not get
married, people to not have kids, people to do drugs.
It's that after the publicschools and the public schools
are no longer a great publicschool, people stop owning the
church and the churches closedown and then, without the
(06:30):
churches, people don't have thecivil civic intercourse that is
fundamental to the good life.
And that idea, that sort ofchurch worship together, good
life, and that idea that sort ofchurch worship together, the
donut hour after church, thatthat's crucial to American life,
(06:53):
that's not an idea that's onthe tips of the tongues of a lot
of our policymakers, culturemakers, tastemakers.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
But that's the central thing I try to argue in
alienated America, that itreally is that potluck and that
t-ball league that are the mostessential parts of the american
dream all this stuff is in theinterest, disease, the uh, the
the stuff between uh that wedon't really think about uh very
much, except for a fewsociologists who talk about, uh,
maybe this sort of thing.
(07:17):
Um, as you point out, we thinkthat the american dream is
consisting of wealth, or atleast the opportunity uh to
become wealthy or to at leastmove up uh be socially mobile.
Um, but even social mobility,although you point out in the
book, is related to theavailability, um accessibility
or availability of socialcapital.
Even that isn't what people youtalk to miss, right, it's not
(07:41):
it so much.
It is, um, this stuff that justsort of makes life rich.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Well, it just makes it like happier and better you
can tell it's important when yousee how people try to replace
it right.
So this is the thing that one.
One of the great things goingkind of on tour talking to
people about this book wasmeeting all sorts of people in
these small groups, thesegatherings of nonprofits, and a
(08:08):
lot of times I met people withvery different politics from
mine I'm a Catholic conservative, pro-lifer, etc.
And I would meet people whowere firmly on the left and who,
you know, unfortunately forconservatives, people who give
their lives to serving otherpeople are disproportionately on
the left in this country, andso I'd meet a lot of those
(08:28):
people.
And this one woman said to me.
She said where you're exactlyright, Tim, is that no program.
This woman was a social workerher whole life.
She said no program ever helpedanybody.
I've been working with addicts,single moms, orphans, dropouts.
No program ever helped them.
Relationships is what helpedpeople, and the only effective
(08:49):
programs are ones that getpeople into relationships.
So then we realized that whatwe do my wife and I we have six
kids.
She was raised in the DC area ina family of eight.
I have three older brothers.
We were raised in the New Yorkarea what our parents do to try
to help us succeed isn't likejust we didn't get like SAT
(09:11):
tutors, right, we got.
We were allowed to play littleleague.
Our parents moved to a placewith a strong school.
Our parents got to know friendsthey could connect us with and
we would hang out in thesesocial cliques.
Our parents would you know,whatever they would do, it was
about giving us relationshipsthat allowed us to build virtue.
(09:34):
Their organization parents tryto do is like legislate and
explicitly and intentionallyprovide these virtues through,
you know, training or programs,because they don't realize that
(09:54):
there's a more organic way to doit now.
That said, again, as I referredto earlier, I do think the
upper middle class actually doesa better job at just having the
little leagues and the gardenclubs etc.
But alienation is a problemacross the economic spectrum,
but it is particularly locatedin America's working class.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And why is that?
Why this differential declinein social capital, even if there
isn't even is a decline in theupper middle class?
What's behind that dynamic?
Because, as you point out,formerly there was the working
class, and middle classes had noproblem accumulating and
accessing social capital.
(10:38):
Why?
Why now?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
I think the place I would.
It's tricky because thesentence I found myself writing
again and again was the causalarrow points in both directions,
which is to say it's aboutfamily is a fruit of the
(11:06):
collapse in community.
We can get to that later, butI'll talk about it going the
other way as well, that thecollapse in community is partly
a collapse in family.
And something I don't go intoin depth in the book, but we may
as well start here, is youdon't have as many families with
a stay-at-home mom.
I do point to studies that thepercentage of as you pointed to,
(11:30):
like the economic mobility youcould predict, a kid in the
lowest being raised in thelowest quintile and his ability,
his likelihood to rise out ofthat income quintile can be
predicted by the percentage offamilies in his community who
have two married parents.
(11:50):
But I'll go even further thanthat.
Communities benefit from a placewhere, for part of the time or
all of the time, there's a momthere.
Further, the communitiesbenefit when a dad has flexible
work.
Well, guess what?
If you are working as abartender, your boss tells you
(12:14):
your shifts that week.
You can't sign up to coachgirls basketball if you don't
know which nights of the week,you'll be available from 6-8.
You can't necessarily volunteerfor the PTA if you're a single
mom.
(12:35):
The sort of office job, the twomarried parents, that's what
creates the flexibility, themanpower for people to do this
sort of institution.
So that's sort of oneexplanation of it.
There's the Charles Murrayexplanation of it too, though,
is that sort of the PTA momsthat used to be distributed
(12:58):
evenly across the country, nowget evenly across the country.
Now get, if they happen toexist in Fremont County, Iowa,
get plucked out of there, getsent to on a scholarship to the
state university or the you knowthe regional top tier school,
marry somebody else who's comingfrom Des Moines, and so that
(13:20):
sort of mating the collegesorting machine means that you
now have an overflow of PTA moms, which, if you're, if you're
listening to this, you might bethinking wait a second, there's
too many moms on the front porch, or there's too many PTA moms,
or you know, like I wish Ididn't have 10 parents growing
up at every T-ball practice.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
But that's not the case everywhere.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
That that if you're making that because you're in a
part of a certain class or urbanenvironment right, who's
sucking up the the pta moms andt-ball coaches from uh, from the
other parts of the country themeritocracy, in other words,
functions, uh, so efficientlythat talent is less evenly
dispersed.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
well, people whose talents lend themselves to the
formation of social capitals,yeah it's awesome that we now
all talk in this way.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
By the way, we're like these corporate manager
experts, whatever you knowskills, talent or whatever.
But you don't want to say andthis is one of the things
Charles Murray got in troublefor was he talked about virtues,
he wanted to talk in humanterms and he said the virtues
are not evenly distributed.
And then that leaves peoplesaying so.
(14:27):
Now you're saying the poorpeople are poor because they're
vicious and the wealthy peopleare off drugs because they're
virtuous.
But it's not that.
I tried to talk aboutalienation as, in part, an
affliction.
I'm an Aristotelian.
Virtue is a habit.
You develop habits throughpractice.
(14:49):
I think of my son, who is adecent baseball pitcher.
You don't have to be athleticto play baseball, so we focus on
that.
He's a decent pitcher in partbecause I bought him this bounce
back screen.
Now, a lot of you probably hadthis as you pitch the ball and
if it's in the strike zone itbounces back to you and he could
(15:09):
practice that by himself.
I bought him a baseball gloveand I bought it and I get free
baseballs whenever I can.
I have a catch with him.
His younger brother, sadly,isn't much of a baseball player.
We're not blessed with a lot ofbaseball players in our
(15:30):
neighborhood but him having someequipment with which to
practice makes him better.
If he had more kids he'd beeven better.
He's slightly afflicted by thefact that the kids in the
neighborhoods all play videogames instead of coming out to
play baseball, but he benefitsfrom the fact that he has a dad
and a bounce back screen and aglove and a baseball.
That's my little analogy forvirtue that families, student
(15:54):
governments, t-ball leagues,little leagues, a reliable job
all of these are the trainingground for virtue and the degree
to which these things are notthere for a lot of people it
becomes harder to develop.
One of the stories I tell inAlienated America the oldest
(16:15):
story, a lot of it's reported.
It's me in bars and coffeeshops.
But I was in this union officein a strip mall like the
backside of a strip mall, behinda pawn shop in Bloomington,
indiana.
They were closing the GEfactory there and I was talking
to the VP of the union who wasgetting laid off fairly young
(16:39):
guy, probably about my age, wewere both about 26, 27.
And he said when he first gothis job right out of high school
in the factory.
They said do you have factoryexperience?
And he kind of chuckled.
He said it was unskilled labor,like it would bring me in the
morning to screw a coolingbracket onto the coil.
(17:01):
And they said, yeah, but wewant to know if you have
experience with the mundane.
Do you have experience showingup every day on time?
Do you have experience workingto the whistle?
Do you have experience doingwhat you're told and maybe
learning a new sort of unskilledskill if your job has to get
(17:21):
switched?
And he told me that and thatsunk in.
But this was before I, this waswhen I was a single guy.
So only when I was working onAlienated America did I think
back on that conversation andrealize wait a second, doing the
banal every day, being reliable, just kind of doing what you're
(17:42):
told, those are the skills ofbeing a husband and a father,
that the factories are thetraining ground for family life
and that the loss of thefactories can be a loss of the
training in these.
You can call them skills, ifyou want to, or virtues.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Before we get off this and get onto some more of
the substance, I want to justquickly back to the political
stuff, because I think you doreally interesting work in that
book and I wonder if you knowhow it played out in 2020 yet
Probably not how social capitalpatterns predict voting patterns
.
Could you speak to that alittle bit, tim, what you found
when you delved?
Speaker 2 (18:22):
in the correlation that first got me onto this book
was realizing that where youfound people of Dutch descent,
Ted Cruz was dominating DonaldTrump in the primaries.
I didn't even know this was athing I didn't even know.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
we were a thing.
We were measuring Dutch dissenton a regular basis.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Oh and okay.
So I'm from New York, so youwere Irish, italian, Puerto
Rican or other.
Okay, you knew there wereJewish people and Korean people.
And there was one guy whosename you were like what is that?
It was Armenian or whatever.
But they just if you wereArmenian, you're like, okay, so
I'm going to count you as kindof Italian, and I know that this
is a bubble.
Around most of the US, german isthe most common descent, but
(19:11):
you can find a few places in theworld where everybody's Dutch,
everybody's Holly Van dersomething.
The men are all six feet two.
I found out about one of theseplaces, orange City, iowa, on my
like 10th reporting trip toIowa, where this woman, again
like Holly Vandervan, told mehow she used to march in clogs
(19:31):
past Windmill Square for theannual Tulip Festival, not back
in Netherlands, but in SiouxCounty, iowa.
So I go to Sioux County.
I meet all these people,grandma's, bragging that their
name Wilhelmina, after the Queenof the Netherlands, etc.
It was Trump's, it would beTrump's best county in the
general election against Hillary.
It was his worst county in thecaucuses.
Ted Cruz just dominated there.
(19:54):
Trump lost every precinct inthe county, got 11%, totally
Dutch.
So I see this going on.
I look at Western Michigan.
Sure enough, trump wins almostall of Michigan in the primaries
.
There.
Cruz wins Holland, michigan.
And I asked him I say, senator,why are you winning all these
Dutch places?
He goes Tim the Dutch, you'vemet them.
They're nice people.
(20:14):
Donald's not a nice person.
They want to vote for a niceperson.
And I'm thinking like Ted Cruz.
And so I went to Uthberg,wisconsin, which is Dutch for
Westburg or Eastburg, one of thetwo, and I meet all these
people and I got there on aSunday.
(20:35):
So I sort of saw what it wasabout, which was that everybody
was showing up at the diner fromthe four different churches in
the Calvinist Dutch Reformedtradition that, for whatever
reason, when the Dutch Americanswent around the Midwest, they
didn't just plant churches, theyplanted incredibly robust
communities that were incrediblystrong decades over a century
(21:00):
later.
And so the correlation in theRepublican primaries was where
there were very two things.
One, trump did poorly in theprimaries where there were very
strong religious communities,and I don't mean, like you know,
brothers, like monks orwhatever, but these reform
(21:20):
places, the Mormon places, etc.
He also did very poorly.
I go to Chevy Chase, maryland,the wealthiest part of the DC
area, in these wealthy placeswhere everybody has college
degrees, the super zips atCharles Murray Co.
But those two places I arguedwere one place.
These are the places withstrong institutions of civil
society, where kids leave theirbikes on their front lawn, where
(21:42):
parents know the other kids'names, where parents are
volunteering, where parents arefinishing school, getting a job,
getting married, having kids,staying involved in their kids'
lives and staying involved intheir community lives.
The elites and the Dutch, we'llcall them.
Those is where Trump did reallypoorly in the primaries and he
slightly underperformed theaverage Republican in the
(22:04):
general election in 2016.
In those places, that patternbasically held up to some extent
, even more so in 2020.
The numbers are stillpreliminary, etc.
But if you look at Michigan,trump dropped off around Holland
, michigan.
Trump did.
Trump dropped off aroundHolland, michigan, but he gained
(22:26):
in the places where you seemore church closures, that sort
of thing.
I use Fayette County, pa.
So if I don't think we could gointo politics in depth, it
might get boring, but I don'tthink Trump is remaking the
Republican Party, but to thedegree that the Trump Republican
(22:47):
Party on Election Day lookeddifferent than the Romney or
McCain or Bush Republican Partyon Election Day.
It's disaffected, not justpeople without a college degree.
More importantly, people whoreally look around them, like
physically, proximately aroundthem, and say things are not
going well.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Right, right yeah, trump's.
Trump's popularity is an indexof disaffection, and alienation
is a really powerful way to lookat that.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
The marginal Trump voter was from places and the
people who got the analysiswrong said no, the marginal
Trump voter is doing fine, wherepeople sometimes looked at
individual surveys.
When you look at electionresults and you look at it on
the precinct level or the countylevel, you see this correlation
.
Why?
Because people don't just existon like a spreadsheet that
shows their income.
Race and age right People existin places.
(23:40):
Race and age right People existin places and that was the key
thing that so many sociologistsmiss that the places are what
determine your outcomes.
Because the places is means acommunity, physically proximate
community, where actual lifeoccurs.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Well put.
We will be right back with TimCarney, author of alienated
America, to talk about thosecommunities in a little bit more
depth.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Right back, Hi, this is Joe Gurecht, the director of
the Center for Civil Society.
The Center for Civil Society,also known as C4CS, is proud to
produce the Givers, doers andThinkers podcast.
At C4CS, our mission is tostrengthen civil society.
(24:26):
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We offer classes, webinars,conferences and more to help
your organization have a biggerimpact.
(24:46):
If you'd like to learn moreabout the Center for Civil
Society and our programs, pleasevisit us online at
centerforcivilsocietyorg.
Thank you for listening to theGDT podcast.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
All right, we are back with Tim Carney, author of
Alienated America and residentfellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, and youcan follow him on Twitter at TP
Carney.
Tim, two things will come up inpassing in this discussion
about the decline of socialcapital, decline of the
institutions of civil societythat you write about at length
(25:22):
in the book.
One is marriage and one ischurch, and I wonder if you
could take those in order.
I know you talk about thecausal arrow going both ways
when it comes to these thingsand civil society, but you
explain, like you say, you know,the erosion of community is
what killed the norm of marriagein the working class.
(25:42):
Can you, can you elaborate onthat and then sort of your
thesis with regard to marriagein particular?
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, yeah, I write that chapter as sort of a murder
mystery.
The norm of marriage has beenkilled.
What killed it, and a sort ofstandard conservative account,
is that it had to do with justcultural forces.
(26:11):
Tv, uh, you know, birth controlleads to um more availability
of uh you know, consequence freesex, and so then the men have
no intended to get married.
I think all of that to someextent is true.
I don't know about pop culture,um being to blame, um, I tend
(26:33):
try to not blame what you know,what I would call like homilies,
like just messaging um, I lookfor structural reasons and I I
would say that to some extent,the, the sexual revolution, not
to some extent, to a very largeextent the sexual revolution has
caused a decrease in marriage,absolutely.
Um, the liberal response tothat is well, yes, but that's
(26:58):
liberation.
I quote Matt Iglesias basicallyarguing if fewer women are
getting married, it's becausethey're more free to not get
married now than they used to be.
They have more access to thelabor force, they have more
access to the legal system, it'seasier to get divorced, it's
easier to whatever, and sothat's that the, the marriage
(27:21):
norm was bad and that liberationhas set it free.
But that is really underminedby the idea, by the fact that
the retreat from marriage,compared to 1960 levels, has
been twice as large among womenwith no high school degree than
(27:43):
among those with a high schooldegree.
That women are much more likely.
Women in the elite are muchmore likely to get married than
women in the working class.
So the people who are gettingyeah and much less likely to get
divorced the elites are lesslikely to get divorced in the
(28:03):
working class.
So there's a delay in marriageamong college-educated women and
statistically that shows up asa retreat from marriage much
larger than it actually is.
It's a delay in marriage.
But if the death of the, if themurder of the norm of marriage,
(28:24):
was a justified homicide and itwas liberation, then you would
think the most liberated women,the people who can earn a living
, would be the most likely to doit.
So that didn't work for me.
The liberals, who agree thatthe retreat from marriage is a
problem, point to the fact thatit's bigger among the working
class and they say ah, thisshows that people need money to
(28:44):
get married and that risinginequality has caused this
retreat.
But what I try to point out inthe book is that correlation
doesn't always hold up.
It often does.
But I went out to Williston,north Dakota, where it's a
fracking town, and there was astudy by a liberal economist who
(29:07):
was trying to show her name isMelissa Carney, spelled
different than mine, so if we'rerelated way back in county, uh,
ross common or sligo, um.
But she did a study and said ah, here you see, these blue
collar guys don't have collegedegrees.
They all of a sudden go frommaking 28 000 to making 80.
So just that income.
(29:30):
How does that affect their?
There was zero uptick inmarriage in these fracking towns
and the one I went to it wassort of even more obvious
because it was in the middle ofNorth Dakota.
I looked around.
I was like this is kind of whatI wanted to do when I graduated
college.
I just wanted to go somewherewhere I could play foosball and
(29:51):
hang around, and if I wanted tokeep reading Aristotle I could,
but who knows what I would do?
The strip clubs doubled inWilliston, north Dakota.
It was no place to raise a kid,it wasn't a community, it was a
place to go and trade yourlabor for wages, and so money
(30:16):
itself doesn't restore familyformation.
What restores family?
What allows for familyformation is strong, tight-knit
communities.
People who can watch your kidsat the last second, people who
will bring meals when you're inthe hospital, people who will
coach your children in LittleLeague and T-Ball and, most
(30:37):
importantly to segue to yourother question people who will
help you raise your childrenwith a concept of the world that
provides real meaning, with asupernatural view that shows
that this self-sacrifice isworth it, that you're aspiring
to something higher and outsideyourself, that your children are
made in the image of God andare infinitely valuable.
(30:58):
Those are the things that spurpeople to get married and have
kids.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah, you say that the unsearching of America is at
the root of America's economicand social problems.
I mean that's a big claim.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
I mean that's a big claim.
Yeah, so the bowling alone byRobert Putnam what was that?
2000, had one chapter dedicatedto the unchurching of America.
That said almost in passing.
Oh, all this civic activity I'mtalking about volunteering,
youth sports, etc.
(31:30):
Volunteering, youth sports, etc.
Half of that happens inoriginates in churches, and
Putnam actually wrote a follow.
I used to kind of make fun ofhim about this until I found out
that he, together with a guynamed David Campbell, a Mormon
at Notre Dame, wrote a follow upbook twice as long that
(31:50):
basically laid this out.
And it wasn't that religiouspeople are more likely to
volunteer, to donate.
It wasn't that religious peopleare more trustworthy.
They were.
But that really was allexplained by church attendance.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yes, Not belief.
Is the institutionalization ofbelief that matters.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
I'm a Catholic so this might be a self-serving
argument.
I believe that the institutionand the faith are that God made
it really clear that we neededthe institutions to have faith,
that loving your neighbor wasright there behind loving God
and that that has to be takenseriously and that for the
(32:37):
elites A they actually go tochurch more the top quintile.
This is surprising, but not ifyou go down.
I mentioned Chevy Chase earlier.
Brett Kavanaugh's parish inChevy Chase, maryland, or it's
right on the DC line, has morefull pews than if you go down to
Southern Maryland rural parishwhere my friend is a pastor and
(32:58):
he doesn't have a lot ofbaptisms or weddings, while
Blessed Sacrament there in ChevyChase is bustling.
But to the degree that they aresecularizing, they're replacing
with other things.
They have yoga on Sundays, theyhave their Black Lives Matter.
I mean I'm getting a littlesnarky here, but they have lots
of other things to replace it.
The working class doesn'treplace church with stuff like
(33:20):
in those places.
It's replaced with atomism,with TV and and devices and
video games and that sort of andthat sort of thing.
So the fundamental institutionof civil society in America has
always been the church,particularly for the middle
class and the working class andwith secularization of America
(33:43):
means the deinstitutionalizationof America.
It means the loss of community,particularly for that working
class and that middle class.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Does our reluctance, if not a willingness among the
elites in particular, to commendtheir own communitarian
practices, their own sort oflifestyles to others?
Why is that?
Is the rhetoric ofindividualism just too strong
and too powerful in our minds tomake that an embarrassing
proposition, to sort of commendthese really essentially
(34:14):
non-individualistic practices toothers?
Or does it signal that we'rereally not very serious about
civil society and its health,not as serious as we are our
attachment to the rhetoric orlogic of individualism?
What's?
Am I on the right track here?
What's going on?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I think so and I muse about this a little bit in
Alienated America.
But what's?
Am I on the right track here?
What's going on?
When he first wrote aboutpoverty, I remember sort of
bracing myself because I knewthat he kind of came from a
(34:54):
socialist background in SouthAmerica and he hated capitalism
like Jesus turning over thetables in the temple, but it was
the most communitarian thing.
The first section on the poor,was about including the poor.
And then I thought about that.
It wasn't about cutting them acheck, it was about including
(35:14):
the poor.
And then I thought about that.
It wasn't about cutting them acheck, it was about including
the poor.
And then I thought about all thetalk about privilege and that
our elites today are more likely, are fairly likely, to say yes,
I benefit from a privilege andI favor economic redistribution
of wealth.
This is true.
A lot of people on the leftthink the college educated
wealthy people are all greedy.
(35:35):
No, they know they benefit froma privilege and they hope that
they can make up for that bycutting a check and voting for
Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
But they can't.
Your privilege is that LittleLeague, it is that potluck, it
(35:55):
is that village hall with 10different volunteer-run
committees in your town of 2,000people, where 1 good thing.
And conservatives have aproblem with this too.
They like to think liberalelites are, all you know, either
(36:17):
pot smoking swingers or youknow, or just hate their
neighbors.
But they are as you knowthey're.
They're practicing what we'repreaching.
And why aren't they preachingit?
Individualism could be part ofit.
I think my explanation thatunwillingness to come face to
face with their privilege,because then they would realize
that they're hoarding theirprivilege, which is not their
(36:38):
money, their connection, thatthere's zoning laws and all of
that would have to change ifthey're going to, if they're
really going to share theirprivilege.
But a lot of times it's ataking for granted.
When I lecture at colleges, Itry to tell people the fact that
you're here indicates thatstatistically, you probably have
(37:03):
two parents who went to collegeand who sent, who put you in a
band and put you on a footballteam and put you in a bowling
league, and you had a goodpublic library where there were
programs and you took all thatfor granted.
This is why I thought JDVance's Hillbilly Elegy was
great, because he didn't have it.
He didn't realize that thechaos in his life was a lack of
belonging, and then the militaryshowed it to him and then he
(37:30):
would talk that the sort of airthat was breathed by these elite
kids he ended up with in lawschool was exactly that
belonging.
But that's two differentexplanations, I do think.
I mean, I do think the talk ofindividualism.
So I listened to you and PatrickDineen talk and it was
interesting because there is away that this sort of I don't
(37:51):
agree with everything he says,but the absolutely true thing he
said is that sort of there's aliberal structure to the United
States that's individualistic.
(38:12):
Individualistic that would beand is disastrous if it's not
countermanded by the somewhatilliberal structure of all the
things I'm talking about here.
That you don't get a vote inwhat I do in my T-ball league, I
don't get a vote on whathappens in half of my Catholic
parish because my priest gets todetermine it, that's about
localism.
That you don't get to belong tothe Knights of Columbus if they
(38:33):
don't want you to belong, canmake it that you're almost
ashamed if you fully buy intothat mindset.
Oh yeah, I belong to this clubwhere I find lots of meaning and
I do lots of volunteering andyou could not belong because you
don't live in my neighborhoodand I don't know you're not a
lawyer, you're not this, you'renot that that there's something
(38:59):
slightly illiberal about theseinstitutions and that could be
part of the reason that peopledon't like it Right, right, well
.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
And to take a more structural approach though and
here's a little bit darkerpossibility, there mean amazon's
almost too on the nose, butjust you know or video game
(39:29):
manufacturer, but to pick onethat's sort of less acute, just
somebody who's into marketingand says I will fulfill your
needs.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
you can fulfill your needs by spending money.
The atomized individual is theperfect target.
I mean, I almost think of it aslike a militaristic thing.
The more that you divide upyour potential targets, the
easier it is to pick them offone at a time.
And we talk about TV and yourphones and the internet, the
(40:01):
technology being clearly afactor in drawing us away from
our neighbors.
So the more time you're staringat that screen, the more time
you're looking at advertising.
But I think there's somethingdeeper.
We are more impressionable theless robust our social and civic
(40:21):
life, and it's towardconspiracy theories and
radicalism and that sort ofthing Ross Douthat touched on in
his recent column.
But we are more credulous.
The less time we're talking toothers we're more likely to
believe something that soundskind of nice, the less we sort
of either run it by other peopleor come into contact with
(40:45):
people.
I know that I'm sure there'slots of authors who have written
about this much better than Ihave.
I'm still wrestling with it.
But that impressionabilitycaused by atomization is so
clear from the way we see theInternet is affecting people.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
This is one of the concerns I have about the
current pandemic I mean pastcatastrophes.
At least one of the savinggraces is that people come
together.
You know, you sort of maybeeven have a rebirth of community
in some ways, because peoplehave to come together to help
one another.
And we talk about having tocome together to help one
(41:23):
another in this currentcatastrophe, but in fact we're
prevented from doing so by thevery nature of the problem and
in some cases by the nature ofthe reaction to the problem.
I can't imagine that the lasteight or nine months have been
anything but terrible forAmerican social capital and
civil society.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
No, exactly right, and that you have.
You know, just think of theschool kids who have barely seen
their friends, who think of theparents who have had to expend
so much more parental capital bynot just saying brush your
teeth but also finish your math,homework and show your work and
(42:01):
dot your eyes your work and dotyour eyes.
The families, the communities,the virtues and skills we were
talking about earlier, all ofthose are so eroded.
And two things I think you seeit show up in One.
I mean one woman said it to me,protesting outside the White
House after George Floyd waskilled.
(42:21):
She said they think we're goingto disappear, but we're in the
middle of an effing pandemic.
We don't have anywhere else tobe.
But the other side of thatexplanation was more true.
People needed an outlet andthere was this interesting
artist.
So at the same time, tom Cottonpublishes an op-ed in the New
York Times.
The young staffers hate it.
(42:43):
They stage this rebellion andthey end up getting the op-ed in
the New York Times.
The young staffers hate it.
They stage this rebellion andthey end up getting the op-ed
page editor fired.
And this one piece praising thewhole thing said this is the
liberating aspect of everybodyworking from home is that these
young writers were able tofollow their conscience and
stand up for what they believedin, because they didn't have the
tyranny of some boss standingover their shoulder or some boss
(43:06):
talking them down from theirideas.
And I was thinking that tyrannyis what I call mentorship or
friendship, collegiality, thathyper individualist mindset that
is not by any stretchconcentrated on the right very,
very prevalent in the identitypolitics lefties, that that gets
(43:29):
exacerbated by this isolation.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I'd be very interested to know if there are
any studies yet maybe they'll bedone showing that those people
living in places with lowersocial capital, their increases
in anxiety, despair, depression,et cetera, during the last nine
months, are those higherincreases than those living in
places with higher levels ofsocial capital.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, and there's tons of confounding variables
there.
I mean, there are neighborhoodsaround me where the street has
been shut down through trafficby the county.
Now you go by and you see like30 kids riding on tricycles and
(44:14):
riding in chalk and kids are allon top of each other.
The parents are all sociallydistanced but chatting, and I'm
thinking this is like when wewould have the power outages and
people would come together more.
But guess what, to get yourstreets shut down you needed
like two or three parents tofill out a petition to the
county government.
So there's going to be a strongcorrelation between college
(44:37):
education and these safe streets.
So in some ways it's just avery typical thing of uh, crises
are exacerbating inequalities.
Uh, in our country I want to golike if I hope the weather
warms up a little bit and goback and sort of do more of a
study on these safe streets inMontgomery County.
(44:59):
Um, I think there's a lot, um alot to be told from how and why
and what these people cometogether, whether they feel the
neighborhood's closer, in partbecause you're not doing travel
lacrosse, that doesn't exist.
But you can get to know yournext-door neighbor.
I've talked over the fence myover-the-fence neighbors more in
the last eight months than Idid in the first five years.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
And we're coming to the end of our time.
Let me ask you, let's just endwith this.
You do put forward severalsolutions in the book and you'll
need to go through all of that,but let me ask you to focus on
this.
You're a philanthropist, agiver in this world.
You're concerned about thedecline of social capital.
You think it's the root of mostof the issues that are tearing
(45:41):
America apart today.
Where would you be looking tomake a social investment?
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, the overall principle has to be what I said
before Programs don't help you,relationships don't.
So what can you do to helppeople build relationships?
My pastor or a priest in myparish asked me.
He said our parishes used to doa lot of different things
feeding the poor Now thegovernment does it.
Running youth sports Nowthere's tons of others.
What is the unmet need of themiddle class families in Silver
(46:09):
Spring, maryland?
And I said we need a place tobring our kids and ignore them
while they're safe and we hangout with other parents.
That's even more so for singlemom, right?
They not only need to get workdone, but they need to socialize
and that sort of thing.
So I would think what can youdo to help get people together?
(46:34):
One of those is make it easierfor moms to have a place to go
with their kids and ignore them.
I don't exactly know how to dothat, but I would do that During
pandemic time.
I would say let's make you knowhow they have pavilions near a
lot of playgrounds with picnictables.
(46:54):
Wire those with electricity andWi-Fi so that the parents who
have to work from home can gothere and then their kids can
show up there afterwards and dotheir homework and then play on
the playground, of coursewearing masks and not touching
each other.
Obviously Get people together.
Get people together in a waythat, physically, that they're
(47:16):
not able to get together rightnow.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
It's a good answer.
It's a really good answer.
Tim Carney, thanks for beingwith us.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Absolutely my pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Tim is the author of Alienated America.
He came out from HarperCollinslast year, available anywhere
you want to buy your bookshopefully not Amazon and
resident fellow at the AmericanEnterprise Institute, and is on
Twitter at at TPCarney.
Thanks again, Tim, and thanksfor being with us.
Thank you for joining us fortoday's episode.
(47:48):
If you enjoyed it, we inviteyou to subscribe and or rate and
review this discussion on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen
to our podcasts and have aguest you'd like to hear from.
Send your requests to ourproducer, Katie Janice, at K
Janiceatamphilcom.
That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.
Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Today we talk to author TimCarney about why the American
dream is alive and well in somequarters and why it is all but
dead in others, and what theinstitutions of civil society
have to do with it.
Let's go Givers, doers andThinkers introduces listeners to
(00:24):
the fascinating people andimportant ideas at the heart of
American civil society.
We speak with philanthropists,reformers, social entrepreneurs,
nonprofit executives, religiousleaders, scholars, journalists
and anyone else who will help usunderstand contemporary civil
society's achievements andfailure.
My name is Jeremy Beer.
Thank you for joining us.
(00:44):
Achievements and failure.
My name is Jeremy Beer.
Thank you for joining us.
All right, thank you so muchfor joining us for another
episode of Givers, doers andThinkers.
Today, december 8th 2020, mycalendar, we speak with author
Tim Carney, author of lastyear's Alienated America why
Some Places Thrive While OthersCollapse, published by
(01:05):
HarperCollins.
Tim is the author of severalother books, including the Big
Ripoff how Big Business and BigGovernments Steal your Money,
and he is a resident fellow atthe American Enterprise
Institute, where he researchesand writes about economic
competition, cronyism, civilsociety, localism and religion
in America.
He is also the commentaryeditor at the Washington
(01:28):
Examiner, tim how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Doing well?
Thank you for having me.
Where are you speaking to us?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
from today.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I am in Washington DC in the bowels of the American
Enterprise Institute building.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Okay, all right.
Well, I hope that's a decentplace to be on this.
Uh, december 8th 2020.
Um, all right.
Well, I want to get yourthoughts.
Um, we were talking about thisa little bit before we started
recording, uh, at some point inthis conversation.
Uh, I can't think of anybody.
I'd rather talk to you actuallyabout, um, how the pandemic and
(02:01):
our reactions to it areinteracting with the issues you
care about economic competition,education, religion, much else.
But let's talk first aboutAlienated America, which I
thought was an excellent bookwhen I read it last year Really
fantastic.
It's essentially aninvestigation into social
capital who has it, who doesn't,why and why it matters in
(02:26):
today's America.
Can you, can we begin here byyou just giving us sort of a
capsule thumbnail of the thesisof the book before we dive into
some of the specifics?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Absolutely.
I loved writing alienatedAmerica, and I thought it was an
important story to tell becauseI kind of got caught off guard
realizing how many peoplethought the American dream was
dead.
The uniform reason for thepeople who had never voted
(03:09):
before and came out of thewoodworks in 2015 to go to a
Trump rally that he was the guywho said the American dream is
dead.
And so I started by askingthese people.
I said, make America greatagain.
What needs great making?
And I was hoping they would saysomething about we need
factories, or it's got to dowith the immigration or
corruption in politics sort ofpolicy things that I, as a
(03:30):
Washington think tank you know,capital, former Capitol Hill
reporter was very versed in.
But then, months later,re-listening to these interviews
, the answers they gave me werethings like well, when I was a
kid, on Memorial Day, we had aparade and all the Little
Leaguers and Boy Scouts wouldplant flags in our local Heroes
(03:54):
Hill and I would cut these guysoff when I was interviewing them
and say no, no, no, no.
What are you talking about?
Is this about jobs?
Is this about culture?
And I couldn't understand that.
What was lost to them?
I couldn't understand what wasawesome, in part because for me
it was all very accessible.
I belong I belong to a localCatholic parish where I coach
(04:16):
t-ball.
I'm in upper middle classcircles where, you know,
somebody ends up in the hospitaland people are bringing you
meals and and and all of thatstuff.
Where, um, you know, I'mparking in my neighbor's
driveway because somebody'sparked in my driveway and that's
not going to start a fight oranything.
That the social capitaldifference between the people
(04:37):
who thought American Dream wasalive and the people who thought
the American Dream was dead,who thought the American dream
was dead.
And this made me go a littledeeper and say, okay, so if
we've got these opioid problems,if we've got this increasing
persistence in economicinequality, if we've got this
retreat from marriage, all ofthese things, maybe they are
rooted in this problem thatstrong community institutions
(05:02):
are not as available in a lot ofthe country and that this
problem that Robert Putnamcalled bowling alone, this is
concentrated in the workingclass, then that would explain a
lot of what's going on in thiscountry.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, you.
Basically, if I can put it inanother way, despair, anxiety,
isolation, the way the despair,anxiety isolation, drug
overdoses, all these sort ofalarming trends we see in the
middle of America, in particularin the working class, are
symptoms not of, as you say, aretreat of our economic problems
(05:38):
, so much as they are theretreat or decline of social
capital that's at the root ofthese things.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, they're clearly related to.
Do you remember during the whenTrump first started surging
this sort of debate was is thisabout economic anxiety or is
this about cultural resentment?
And both of the that framingwas obviously a bad framing, but
you kind of answered, you know,tweak both of those a little.
And they're right that thecollapse of communities is often
(06:05):
the domino that falls after thefactory closes.
But the factory closes isn'twhat causes people to not get
married, people to not have kids, people to do drugs.
It's that after the publicschools and the public schools
are no longer a great publicschool, people stop owning the
church and the churches closedown and then, without the
(06:30):
churches, people don't have thecivil civic intercourse that is
fundamental to the good life.
And that idea, that sort ofchurch worship together, good
life, and that idea that sort ofchurch worship together, the
donut hour after church, thatthat's crucial to American life,
(06:53):
that's not an idea that's onthe tips of the tongues of a lot
of our policymakers, culturemakers, tastemakers.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
But that's the central thing I try to argue in
alienated America, that itreally is that potluck and that
t-ball league that are the mostessential parts of the american
dream all this stuff is in theinterest, disease, the uh, the
the stuff between uh that wedon't really think about uh very
much, except for a fewsociologists who talk about, uh,
maybe this sort of thing.
(07:17):
Um, as you point out, we thinkthat the american dream is
consisting of wealth, or atleast the opportunity uh to
become wealthy or to at leastmove up uh be socially mobile.
Um, but even social mobility,although you point out in the
book, is related to theavailability, um accessibility
or availability of socialcapital.
Even that isn't what people youtalk to miss, right, it's not
(07:41):
it so much.
It is, um, this stuff that justsort of makes life rich.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Well, it just makes it like happier and better you
can tell it's important when yousee how people try to replace
it right.
So this is the thing that one.
One of the great things goingkind of on tour talking to
people about this book wasmeeting all sorts of people in
these small groups, thesegatherings of nonprofits, and a
(08:08):
lot of times I met people withvery different politics from
mine I'm a Catholic conservative, pro-lifer, etc.
And I would meet people whowere firmly on the left and who,
you know, unfortunately forconservatives, people who give
their lives to serving otherpeople are disproportionately on
the left in this country, andso I'd meet a lot of those
(08:28):
people.
And this one woman said to me.
She said where you're exactlyright, Tim, is that no program.
This woman was a social workerher whole life.
She said no program ever helpedanybody.
I've been working with addicts,single moms, orphans, dropouts.
No program ever helped them.
Relationships is what helpedpeople, and the only effective
(08:49):
programs are ones that getpeople into relationships.
So then we realized that whatwe do my wife and I we have six
kids.
She was raised in the DC area ina family of eight.
I have three older brothers.
We were raised in the New Yorkarea what our parents do to try
to help us succeed isn't likejust we didn't get like SAT
(09:11):
tutors, right, we got.
We were allowed to play littleleague.
Our parents moved to a placewith a strong school.
Our parents got to know friendsthey could connect us with and
we would hang out in thesesocial cliques.
Our parents would you know,whatever they would do, it was
about giving us relationshipsthat allowed us to build virtue.
(09:34):
Their organization parents tryto do is like legislate and
explicitly and intentionallyprovide these virtues through,
you know, training or programs,because they don't realize that
(09:54):
there's a more organic way to doit now.
That said, again, as I referredto earlier, I do think the
upper middle class actually doesa better job at just having the
little leagues and the gardenclubs etc.
But alienation is a problemacross the economic spectrum,
but it is particularly locatedin America's working class.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And why is that?
Why this differential declinein social capital, even if there
isn't even is a decline in theupper middle class?
What's behind that dynamic?
Because, as you point out,formerly there was the working
class, and middle classes had noproblem accumulating and
accessing social capital.
(10:38):
Why?
Why now?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
I think the place I would.
It's tricky because thesentence I found myself writing
again and again was the causalarrow points in both directions,
which is to say it's aboutfamily is a fruit of the
(11:06):
collapse in community.
We can get to that later, butI'll talk about it going the
other way as well, that thecollapse in community is partly
a collapse in family.
And something I don't go intoin depth in the book, but we may
as well start here, is youdon't have as many families with
a stay-at-home mom.
I do point to studies that thepercentage of as you pointed to,
(11:30):
like the economic mobility youcould predict, a kid in the
lowest being raised in thelowest quintile and his ability,
his likelihood to rise out ofthat income quintile can be
predicted by the percentage offamilies in his community who
have two married parents.
(11:50):
But I'll go even further thanthat.
Communities benefit from a placewhere, for part of the time or
all of the time, there's a momthere.
Further, the communitiesbenefit when a dad has flexible
work.
Well, guess what?
If you are working as abartender, your boss tells you
(12:14):
your shifts that week.
You can't sign up to coachgirls basketball if you don't
know which nights of the week,you'll be available from 6-8.
You can't necessarily volunteerfor the PTA if you're a single
mom.
(12:35):
The sort of office job, the twomarried parents, that's what
creates the flexibility, themanpower for people to do this
sort of institution.
So that's sort of oneexplanation of it.
There's the Charles Murrayexplanation of it too, though,
is that sort of the PTA momsthat used to be distributed
(12:58):
evenly across the country, nowget evenly across the country.
Now get, if they happen toexist in Fremont County, Iowa,
get plucked out of there, getsent to on a scholarship to the
state university or the you knowthe regional top tier school,
marry somebody else who's comingfrom Des Moines, and so that
(13:20):
sort of mating the collegesorting machine means that you
now have an overflow of PTA moms, which, if you're, if you're
listening to this, you might bethinking wait a second, there's
too many moms on the front porch, or there's too many PTA moms,
or you know, like I wish Ididn't have 10 parents growing
up at every T-ball practice.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
But that's not the case everywhere.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
That that if you're making that because you're in a
part of a certain class or urbanenvironment right, who's
sucking up the the pta moms andt-ball coaches from uh, from the
other parts of the country themeritocracy, in other words,
functions, uh, so efficientlythat talent is less evenly
dispersed.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
well, people whose talents lend themselves to the
formation of social capitals,yeah it's awesome that we now
all talk in this way.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
By the way, we're like these corporate manager
experts, whatever you knowskills, talent or whatever.
But you don't want to say andthis is one of the things
Charles Murray got in troublefor was he talked about virtues,
he wanted to talk in humanterms and he said the virtues
are not evenly distributed.
And then that leaves peoplesaying so.
(14:27):
Now you're saying the poorpeople are poor because they're
vicious and the wealthy peopleare off drugs because they're
virtuous.
But it's not that.
I tried to talk aboutalienation as, in part, an
affliction.
I'm an Aristotelian.
Virtue is a habit.
You develop habits throughpractice.
(14:49):
I think of my son, who is adecent baseball pitcher.
You don't have to be athleticto play baseball, so we focus on
that.
He's a decent pitcher in partbecause I bought him this bounce
back screen.
Now, a lot of you probably hadthis as you pitch the ball and
if it's in the strike zone itbounces back to you and he could
(15:09):
practice that by himself.
I bought him a baseball gloveand I bought it and I get free
baseballs whenever I can.
I have a catch with him.
His younger brother, sadly,isn't much of a baseball player.
We're not blessed with a lot ofbaseball players in our
(15:30):
neighborhood but him having someequipment with which to
practice makes him better.
If he had more kids he'd beeven better.
He's slightly afflicted by thefact that the kids in the
neighborhoods all play videogames instead of coming out to
play baseball, but he benefitsfrom the fact that he has a dad
and a bounce back screen and aglove and a baseball.
That's my little analogy forvirtue that families, student
(15:54):
governments, t-ball leagues,little leagues, a reliable job
all of these are the trainingground for virtue and the degree
to which these things are notthere for a lot of people it
becomes harder to develop.
One of the stories I tell inAlienated America the oldest
(16:15):
story, a lot of it's reported.
It's me in bars and coffeeshops.
But I was in this union officein a strip mall like the
backside of a strip mall, behinda pawn shop in Bloomington,
indiana.
They were closing the GEfactory there and I was talking
to the VP of the union who wasgetting laid off fairly young
(16:39):
guy, probably about my age, wewere both about 26, 27.
And he said when he first gothis job right out of high school
in the factory.
They said do you have factoryexperience?
And he kind of chuckled.
He said it was unskilled labor,like it would bring me in the
morning to screw a coolingbracket onto the coil.
(17:01):
And they said, yeah, but wewant to know if you have
experience with the mundane.
Do you have experience showingup every day on time?
Do you have experience workingto the whistle?
Do you have experience doingwhat you're told and maybe
learning a new sort of unskilledskill if your job has to get
(17:21):
switched?
And he told me that and thatsunk in.
But this was before I, this waswhen I was a single guy.
So only when I was working onAlienated America did I think
back on that conversation andrealize wait a second, doing the
banal every day, being reliable, just kind of doing what you're
(17:42):
told, those are the skills ofbeing a husband and a father,
that the factories are thetraining ground for family life
and that the loss of thefactories can be a loss of the
training in these.
You can call them skills, ifyou want to, or virtues.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Before we get off this and get onto some more of
the substance, I want to justquickly back to the political
stuff, because I think you doreally interesting work in that
book and I wonder if you knowhow it played out in 2020 yet
Probably not how social capitalpatterns predict voting patterns
.
Could you speak to that alittle bit, tim, what you found
when you delved?
Speaker 2 (18:22):
in the correlation that first got me onto this book
was realizing that where youfound people of Dutch descent,
Ted Cruz was dominating DonaldTrump in the primaries.
I didn't even know this was athing I didn't even know.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
we were a thing.
We were measuring Dutch dissenton a regular basis.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Oh and okay.
So I'm from New York, so youwere Irish, italian, Puerto
Rican or other.
Okay, you knew there wereJewish people and Korean people.
And there was one guy whosename you were like what is that?
It was Armenian or whatever.
But they just if you wereArmenian, you're like, okay, so
I'm going to count you as kindof Italian, and I know that this
is a bubble.
Around most of the US, german isthe most common descent, but
(19:11):
you can find a few places in theworld where everybody's Dutch,
everybody's Holly Van dersomething.
The men are all six feet two.
I found out about one of theseplaces, orange City, iowa, on my
like 10th reporting trip toIowa, where this woman, again
like Holly Vandervan, told mehow she used to march in clogs
(19:31):
past Windmill Square for theannual Tulip Festival, not back
in Netherlands, but in SiouxCounty, iowa.
So I go to Sioux County.
I meet all these people,grandma's, bragging that their
name Wilhelmina, after the Queenof the Netherlands, etc.
It was Trump's, it would beTrump's best county in the
general election against Hillary.
It was his worst county in thecaucuses.
Ted Cruz just dominated there.
(19:54):
Trump lost every precinct inthe county, got 11%, totally
Dutch.
So I see this going on.
I look at Western Michigan.
Sure enough, trump wins almostall of Michigan in the primaries
.
There.
Cruz wins Holland, michigan.
And I asked him I say, senator,why are you winning all these
Dutch places?
He goes Tim the Dutch, you'vemet them.
They're nice people.
(20:14):
Donald's not a nice person.
They want to vote for a niceperson.
And I'm thinking like Ted Cruz.
And so I went to Uthberg,wisconsin, which is Dutch for
Westburg or Eastburg, one of thetwo, and I meet all these
people and I got there on aSunday.
(20:35):
So I sort of saw what it wasabout, which was that everybody
was showing up at the diner fromthe four different churches in
the Calvinist Dutch Reformedtradition that, for whatever
reason, when the Dutch Americanswent around the Midwest, they
didn't just plant churches, theyplanted incredibly robust
communities that were incrediblystrong decades over a century
(21:00):
later.
And so the correlation in theRepublican primaries was where
there were very two things.
One, trump did poorly in theprimaries where there were very
strong religious communities,and I don't mean, like you know,
brothers, like monks orwhatever, but these reform
(21:20):
places, the Mormon places, etc.
He also did very poorly.
I go to Chevy Chase, maryland,the wealthiest part of the DC
area, in these wealthy placeswhere everybody has college
degrees, the super zips atCharles Murray Co.
But those two places I arguedwere one place.
These are the places withstrong institutions of civil
society, where kids leave theirbikes on their front lawn, where
(21:42):
parents know the other kids'names, where parents are
volunteering, where parents arefinishing school, getting a job,
getting married, having kids,staying involved in their kids'
lives and staying involved intheir community lives.
The elites and the Dutch, we'llcall them.
Those is where Trump did reallypoorly in the primaries and he
slightly underperformed theaverage Republican in the
(22:04):
general election in 2016.
In those places, that patternbasically held up to some extent
, even more so in 2020.
The numbers are stillpreliminary, etc.
But if you look at Michigan,trump dropped off around Holland
, michigan.
Trump did.
Trump dropped off aroundHolland, michigan, but he gained
(22:26):
in the places where you seemore church closures, that sort
of thing.
I use Fayette County, pa.
So if I don't think we could gointo politics in depth, it
might get boring, but I don'tthink Trump is remaking the
Republican Party, but to thedegree that the Trump Republican
(22:47):
Party on Election Day lookeddifferent than the Romney or
McCain or Bush Republican Partyon Election Day.
It's disaffected, not justpeople without a college degree.
More importantly, people whoreally look around them, like
physically, proximately aroundthem, and say things are not
going well.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Right, right yeah, trump's.
Trump's popularity is an indexof disaffection, and alienation
is a really powerful way to lookat that.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
The marginal Trump voter was from places and the
people who got the analysiswrong said no, the marginal
Trump voter is doing fine, wherepeople sometimes looked at
individual surveys.
When you look at electionresults and you look at it on
the precinct level or the countylevel, you see this correlation
.
Why?
Because people don't just existon like a spreadsheet that
shows their income.
Race and age right People existin places.
(23:40):
Race and age right People existin places and that was the key
thing that so many sociologistsmiss that the places are what
determine your outcomes.
Because the places is means acommunity, physically proximate
community, where actual lifeoccurs.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Well put.
We will be right back with TimCarney, author of alienated
America, to talk about thosecommunities in a little bit more
depth.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Right back, Hi, this is Joe Gurecht, the director of
the Center for Civil Society.
The Center for Civil Society,also known as C4CS, is proud to
produce the Givers, doers andThinkers podcast.
At C4CS, our mission is tostrengthen civil society.
(24:26):
We do this by conductingprograms and activities that
increase the knowledge andefficacy of America's nonprofit
organizations, charitablefoundations and individual
donors.
We offer classes, webinars,conferences and more to help
your organization have a biggerimpact.
(24:46):
If you'd like to learn moreabout the Center for Civil
Society and our programs, pleasevisit us online at
centerforcivilsocietyorg.
Thank you for listening to theGDT podcast.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
All right, we are back with Tim Carney, author of
Alienated America and residentfellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, and youcan follow him on Twitter at TP
Carney.
Tim, two things will come up inpassing in this discussion
about the decline of socialcapital, decline of the
institutions of civil societythat you write about at length
(25:22):
in the book.
One is marriage and one ischurch, and I wonder if you
could take those in order.
I know you talk about thecausal arrow going both ways
when it comes to these thingsand civil society, but you
explain, like you say, you know,the erosion of community is
what killed the norm of marriagein the working class.
(25:42):
Can you, can you elaborate onthat and then sort of your
thesis with regard to marriagein particular?
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, yeah, I write that chapter as sort of a murder
mystery.
The norm of marriage has beenkilled.
What killed it, and a sort ofstandard conservative account,
is that it had to do with justcultural forces.
(26:11):
Tv, uh, you know, birth controlleads to um more availability
of uh you know, consequence freesex, and so then the men have
no intended to get married.
I think all of that to someextent is true.
I don't know about pop culture,um being to blame, um, I tend
(26:33):
try to not blame what you know,what I would call like homilies,
like just messaging um, I lookfor structural reasons and I I
would say that to some extent,the, the sexual revolution, not
to some extent, to a very largeextent the sexual revolution has
caused a decrease in marriage,absolutely.
Um, the liberal response tothat is well, yes, but that's
(26:58):
liberation.
I quote Matt Iglesias basicallyarguing if fewer women are
getting married, it's becausethey're more free to not get
married now than they used to be.
They have more access to thelabor force, they have more
access to the legal system, it'seasier to get divorced, it's
easier to whatever, and sothat's that the, the marriage
(27:21):
norm was bad and that liberationhas set it free.
But that is really underminedby the idea, by the fact that
the retreat from marriage,compared to 1960 levels, has
been twice as large among womenwith no high school degree than
(27:43):
among those with a high schooldegree.
That women are much more likely.
Women in the elite are muchmore likely to get married than
women in the working class.
So the people who are gettingyeah and much less likely to get
divorced the elites are lesslikely to get divorced in the
(28:03):
working class.
So there's a delay in marriageamong college-educated women and
statistically that shows up asa retreat from marriage much
larger than it actually is.
It's a delay in marriage.
But if the death of the, if themurder of the norm of marriage,
(28:24):
was a justified homicide and itwas liberation, then you would
think the most liberated women,the people who can earn a living
, would be the most likely to doit.
So that didn't work for me.
The liberals, who agree thatthe retreat from marriage is a
problem, point to the fact thatit's bigger among the working
class and they say ah, thisshows that people need money to
(28:44):
get married and that risinginequality has caused this
retreat.
But what I try to point out inthe book is that correlation
doesn't always hold up.
It often does.
But I went out to Williston,north Dakota, where it's a
fracking town, and there was astudy by a liberal economist who
(29:07):
was trying to show her name isMelissa Carney, spelled
different than mine, so if we'rerelated way back in county, uh,
ross common or sligo, um.
But she did a study and said ah, here you see, these blue
collar guys don't have collegedegrees.
They all of a sudden go frommaking 28 000 to making 80.
So just that income.
(29:30):
How does that affect their?
There was zero uptick inmarriage in these fracking towns
and the one I went to it wassort of even more obvious
because it was in the middle ofNorth Dakota.
I looked around.
I was like this is kind of whatI wanted to do when I graduated
college.
I just wanted to go somewherewhere I could play foosball and
(29:51):
hang around, and if I wanted tokeep reading Aristotle I could,
but who knows what I would do?
The strip clubs doubled inWilliston, north Dakota.
It was no place to raise a kid,it wasn't a community, it was a
place to go and trade yourlabor for wages, and so money
(30:16):
itself doesn't restore familyformation.
What restores family?
What allows for familyformation is strong, tight-knit
communities.
People who can watch your kidsat the last second, people who
will bring meals when you're inthe hospital, people who will
coach your children in LittleLeague and T-Ball and, most
(30:37):
importantly to segue to yourother question people who will
help you raise your childrenwith a concept of the world that
provides real meaning, with asupernatural view that shows
that this self-sacrifice isworth it, that you're aspiring
to something higher and outsideyourself, that your children are
made in the image of God andare infinitely valuable.
(30:58):
Those are the things that spurpeople to get married and have
kids.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah, you say that the unsearching of America is at
the root of America's economicand social problems.
I mean that's a big claim.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
I mean that's a big claim.
Yeah, so the bowling alone byRobert Putnam what was that?
2000, had one chapter dedicatedto the unchurching of America.
That said almost in passing.
Oh, all this civic activity I'mtalking about volunteering,
youth sports, etc.
(31:30):
Volunteering, youth sports, etc.
Half of that happens inoriginates in churches, and
Putnam actually wrote a follow.
I used to kind of make fun ofhim about this until I found out
that he, together with a guynamed David Campbell, a Mormon
at Notre Dame, wrote a follow upbook twice as long that
(31:50):
basically laid this out.
And it wasn't that religiouspeople are more likely to
volunteer, to donate.
It wasn't that religious peopleare more trustworthy.
They were.
But that really was allexplained by church attendance.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yes, Not belief.
Is the institutionalization ofbelief that matters.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
I'm a Catholic so this might be a self-serving
argument.
I believe that the institutionand the faith are that God made
it really clear that we neededthe institutions to have faith,
that loving your neighbor wasright there behind loving God
and that that has to be takenseriously and that for the
(32:37):
elites A they actually go tochurch more the top quintile.
This is surprising, but not ifyou go down.
I mentioned Chevy Chase earlier.
Brett Kavanaugh's parish inChevy Chase, maryland, or it's
right on the DC line, has morefull pews than if you go down to
Southern Maryland rural parishwhere my friend is a pastor and
(32:58):
he doesn't have a lot ofbaptisms or weddings, while
Blessed Sacrament there in ChevyChase is bustling.
But to the degree that they aresecularizing, they're replacing
with other things.
They have yoga on Sundays, theyhave their Black Lives Matter.
I mean I'm getting a littlesnarky here, but they have lots
of other things to replace it.
The working class doesn'treplace church with stuff like
(33:20):
in those places.
It's replaced with atomism,with TV and and devices and
video games and that sort of andthat sort of thing.
So the fundamental institutionof civil society in America has
always been the church,particularly for the middle
class and the working class andwith secularization of America
(33:43):
means the deinstitutionalizationof America.
It means the loss of community,particularly for that working
class and that middle class.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Does our reluctance, if not a willingness among the
elites in particular, to commendtheir own communitarian
practices, their own sort oflifestyles to others?
Why is that?
Is the rhetoric ofindividualism just too strong
and too powerful in our minds tomake that an embarrassing
proposition, to sort of commendthese really essentially
(34:14):
non-individualistic practices toothers?
Or does it signal that we'rereally not very serious about
civil society and its health,not as serious as we are our
attachment to the rhetoric orlogic of individualism?
What's?
Am I on the right track here?
What's going on?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I think so and I muse about this a little bit in
Alienated America.
But what's?
Am I on the right track here?
What's going on?
When he first wrote aboutpoverty, I remember sort of
bracing myself because I knewthat he kind of came from a
(34:54):
socialist background in SouthAmerica and he hated capitalism
like Jesus turning over thetables in the temple, but it was
the most communitarian thing.
The first section on the poor,was about including the poor.
And then I thought about that.
It wasn't about cutting them acheck, it was about including
(35:14):
the poor.
And then I thought about that.
It wasn't about cutting them acheck, it was about including
the poor.
And then I thought about all thetalk about privilege and that
our elites today are more likely, are fairly likely, to say yes,
I benefit from a privilege andI favor economic redistribution
of wealth.
This is true.
A lot of people on the leftthink the college educated
wealthy people are all greedy.
(35:35):
No, they know they benefit froma privilege and they hope that
they can make up for that bycutting a check and voting for
Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
But they can't.
Your privilege is that LittleLeague, it is that potluck, it
(35:55):
is that village hall with 10different volunteer-run
committees in your town of 2,000people, where 1 good thing.
And conservatives have aproblem with this too.
They like to think liberalelites are, all you know, either
(36:17):
pot smoking swingers or youknow, or just hate their
neighbors.
But they are as you knowthey're.
They're practicing what we'repreaching.
And why aren't they preachingit?
Individualism could be part ofit.
I think my explanation thatunwillingness to come face to
face with their privilege,because then they would realize
that they're hoarding theirprivilege, which is not their
(36:38):
money, their connection, thatthere's zoning laws and all of
that would have to change ifthey're going to, if they're
really going to share theirprivilege.
But a lot of times it's ataking for granted.
When I lecture at colleges, Itry to tell people the fact that
you're here indicates thatstatistically, you probably have
(37:03):
two parents who went to collegeand who sent, who put you in a
band and put you on a footballteam and put you in a bowling
league, and you had a goodpublic library where there were
programs and you took all thatfor granted.
This is why I thought JDVance's Hillbilly Elegy was
great, because he didn't have it.
He didn't realize that thechaos in his life was a lack of
belonging, and then the militaryshowed it to him and then he
(37:30):
would talk that the sort of airthat was breathed by these elite
kids he ended up with in lawschool was exactly that
belonging.
But that's two differentexplanations, I do think.
I mean, I do think the talk ofindividualism.
So I listened to you and PatrickDineen talk and it was
interesting because there is away that this sort of I don't
(37:51):
agree with everything he says,but the absolutely true thing he
said is that sort of there's aliberal structure to the United
States that's individualistic.
(38:12):
Individualistic that would beand is disastrous if it's not
countermanded by the somewhatilliberal structure of all the
things I'm talking about here.
That you don't get a vote inwhat I do in my T-ball league, I
don't get a vote on whathappens in half of my Catholic
parish because my priest gets todetermine it, that's about
localism.
That you don't get to belong tothe Knights of Columbus if they
(38:33):
don't want you to belong, canmake it that you're almost
ashamed if you fully buy intothat mindset.
Oh yeah, I belong to this clubwhere I find lots of meaning and
I do lots of volunteering andyou could not belong because you
don't live in my neighborhoodand I don't know you're not a
lawyer, you're not this, you'renot that that there's something
(38:59):
slightly illiberal about theseinstitutions and that could be
part of the reason that peopledon't like it Right, right, well
.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
And to take a more structural approach though and
here's a little bit darkerpossibility, there mean amazon's
almost too on the nose, butjust you know or video game
(39:29):
manufacturer, but to pick onethat's sort of less acute, just
somebody who's into marketingand says I will fulfill your
needs.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
you can fulfill your needs by spending money.
The atomized individual is theperfect target.
I mean, I almost think of it aslike a militaristic thing.
The more that you divide upyour potential targets, the
easier it is to pick them offone at a time.
And we talk about TV and yourphones and the internet, the
(40:01):
technology being clearly afactor in drawing us away from
our neighbors.
So the more time you're staringat that screen, the more time
you're looking at advertising.
But I think there's somethingdeeper.
We are more impressionable theless robust our social and civic
(40:21):
life, and it's towardconspiracy theories and
radicalism and that sort ofthing Ross Douthat touched on in
his recent column.
But we are more credulous.
The less time we're talking toothers we're more likely to
believe something that soundskind of nice, the less we sort
of either run it by other peopleor come into contact with
(40:45):
people.
I know that I'm sure there'slots of authors who have written
about this much better than Ihave.
I'm still wrestling with it.
But that impressionabilitycaused by atomization is so
clear from the way we see theInternet is affecting people.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
This is one of the concerns I have about the
current pandemic I mean pastcatastrophes.
At least one of the savinggraces is that people come
together.
You know, you sort of maybeeven have a rebirth of community
in some ways, because peoplehave to come together to help
one another.
And we talk about having tocome together to help one
(41:23):
another in this currentcatastrophe, but in fact we're
prevented from doing so by thevery nature of the problem and
in some cases by the nature ofthe reaction to the problem.
I can't imagine that the lasteight or nine months have been
anything but terrible forAmerican social capital and
civil society.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
No, exactly right, and that you have.
You know, just think of theschool kids who have barely seen
their friends, who think of theparents who have had to expend
so much more parental capital bynot just saying brush your
teeth but also finish your math,homework and show your work and
(42:01):
dot your eyes your work and dotyour eyes.
The families, the communities,the virtues and skills we were
talking about earlier, all ofthose are so eroded.
And two things I think you seeit show up in One.
I mean one woman said it to me,protesting outside the White
House after George Floyd waskilled.
(42:21):
She said they think we're goingto disappear, but we're in the
middle of an effing pandemic.
We don't have anywhere else tobe.
But the other side of thatexplanation was more true.
People needed an outlet andthere was this interesting
artist.
So at the same time, tom Cottonpublishes an op-ed in the New
York Times.
The young staffers hate it.
(42:43):
They stage this rebellion andthey end up getting the op-ed in
the New York Times.
The young staffers hate it.
They stage this rebellion andthey end up getting the op-ed
page editor fired.
And this one piece praising thewhole thing said this is the
liberating aspect of everybodyworking from home is that these
young writers were able tofollow their conscience and
stand up for what they believedin, because they didn't have the
tyranny of some boss standingover their shoulder or some boss
(43:06):
talking them down from theirideas.
And I was thinking that tyrannyis what I call mentorship or
friendship, collegiality, thathyper individualist mindset that
is not by any stretchconcentrated on the right very,
very prevalent in the identitypolitics lefties, that that gets
(43:29):
exacerbated by this isolation.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I'd be very interested to know if there are
any studies yet maybe they'll bedone showing that those people
living in places with lowersocial capital, their increases
in anxiety, despair, depression,et cetera, during the last nine
months, are those higherincreases than those living in
places with higher levels ofsocial capital.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, and there's tons of confounding variables
there.
I mean, there are neighborhoodsaround me where the street has
been shut down through trafficby the county.
Now you go by and you see like30 kids riding on tricycles and
(44:14):
riding in chalk and kids are allon top of each other.
The parents are all sociallydistanced but chatting, and I'm
thinking this is like when wewould have the power outages and
people would come together more.
But guess what, to get yourstreets shut down you needed
like two or three parents tofill out a petition to the
county government.
So there's going to be a strongcorrelation between college
(44:37):
education and these safe streets.
So in some ways it's just avery typical thing of uh, crises
are exacerbating inequalities.
Uh, in our country I want to golike if I hope the weather
warms up a little bit and goback and sort of do more of a
study on these safe streets inMontgomery County.
(44:59):
Um, I think there's a lot, um alot to be told from how and why
and what these people cometogether, whether they feel the
neighborhood's closer, in partbecause you're not doing travel
lacrosse, that doesn't exist.
But you can get to know yournext-door neighbor.
I've talked over the fence myover-the-fence neighbors more in
the last eight months than Idid in the first five years.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
And we're coming to the end of our time.
Let me ask you, let's just endwith this.
You do put forward severalsolutions in the book and you'll
need to go through all of that,but let me ask you to focus on
this.
You're a philanthropist, agiver in this world.
You're concerned about thedecline of social capital.
You think it's the root of mostof the issues that are tearing
(45:41):
America apart today.
Where would you be looking tomake a social investment?
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, the overall principle has to be what I said
before Programs don't help you,relationships don't.
So what can you do to helppeople build relationships?
My pastor or a priest in myparish asked me.
He said our parishes used to doa lot of different things
feeding the poor Now thegovernment does it.
Running youth sports Nowthere's tons of others.
What is the unmet need of themiddle class families in Silver
(46:09):
Spring, maryland?
And I said we need a place tobring our kids and ignore them
while they're safe and we hangout with other parents.
That's even more so for singlemom, right?
They not only need to get workdone, but they need to socialize
and that sort of thing.
So I would think what can youdo to help get people together?
(46:34):
One of those is make it easierfor moms to have a place to go
with their kids and ignore them.
I don't exactly know how to dothat, but I would do that During
pandemic time.
I would say let's make you knowhow they have pavilions near a
lot of playgrounds with picnictables.
(46:54):
Wire those with electricity andWi-Fi so that the parents who
have to work from home can gothere and then their kids can
show up there afterwards and dotheir homework and then play on
the playground, of coursewearing masks and not touching
each other.
Obviously Get people together.
Get people together in a waythat, physically, that they're
(47:16):
not able to get together rightnow.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
It's a good answer.
It's a really good answer.
Tim Carney, thanks for beingwith us.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Absolutely my pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Tim is the author of Alienated America.
He came out from HarperCollinslast year, available anywhere
you want to buy your bookshopefully not Amazon and
resident fellow at the AmericanEnterprise Institute, and is on
Twitter at at TPCarney.
Thanks again, Tim, and thanksfor being with us.
Thank you for joining us fortoday's episode.
(47:48):
If you enjoyed it, we inviteyou to subscribe and or rate and
review this discussion on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen
to our podcasts and have aguest you'd like to hear from.
Send your requests to ourproducer, Katie Janice, at K
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That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.
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