Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
From the Archive: Timothy P. Carney & whether the American dream is dead
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!
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Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers. Today we talk to author Tim Carney about why the American dream is alive and well in some quarters and why it is all but dead in others, and what the institutions of civil society have to do with it. Let's go Givers, doers and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious leaders, scholars, journalists and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society's achievements and failure. My name is Jeremy Beer. Thank you for joining us. Achievements and failure. My name is Jeremy Beer. Thank you for joining us. All right, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Speaker 1:Today, december 8th 2020, my calendar, we speak with author Tim Carney, author of last year's Alienated America why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, published by HarperCollins. Tim is the author of several other books, including the Big Ripoff how Big Business and Big Governments Steal your Money, and he is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches and writes about economic competition, cronyism, civil society, localism and religion in America. He is also the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, tim how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Doing well? Thank you for having me. Where are you speaking to us?
Speaker 1:from today.
Speaker 2:I am in Washington DC in the bowels of the American Enterprise Institute building.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. Well, I hope that's a decent place to be on this. Uh, december 8th 2020. Um, all right. Well, I want to get your thoughts. Um, we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, uh, at some point in this conversation. Uh, I can't think of anybody. I'd rather talk to you actually about, um, how the pandemic and our reactions to it are interacting with the issues you care about economic competition, education, religion, much else. But let's talk first about Alienated America, which I thought was an excellent book when I read it last year Really fantastic. It's essentially an investigation into social capital who has it, who doesn't, why and why it matters in today's America. Can you, can we begin here by you just giving us sort of a capsule thumbnail of the thesis of the book before we dive into some of the specifics?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I loved writing alienated America, and I thought it was an important story to tell because I kind of got caught off guard realizing how many people thought the American dream was dead. The uniform reason for the people who had never voted before and came out of the woodworks in 2015 to go to a Trump rally that he was the guy who said the American dream is dead. And so I started by asking these people. I said, make America great again. What needs great making? And I was hoping they would say something about we need factories, or it's got to do with the immigration or corruption in politics sort of policy things that I, as a 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 were things like well, when I was a kid, on Memorial Day, we had a parade and all the Little Leaguers and Boy Scouts would plant flags in our local Heroes Hill and I would cut these guys off 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 was awesome, in part because for me it was all very accessible.
Speaker 2:I belong I belong to a local Catholic parish where I coach t-ball. I'm in upper middle class circles where, you know, somebody ends up in the hospital and people are bringing you meals and and and all of that stuff. Where, um, you know, I'm parking in my neighbor's driveway because somebody's parked in my driveway and that's not going to start a fight or anything. That the social capital difference between the people who thought American Dream was alive and the people who thought the American Dream was dead, who thought the American dream was dead. And this made me go a little deeper and say, okay, so if we've got these opioid problems, if we've got this increasing persistence in economic inequality, if we've got this retreat from marriage, all of these things, maybe they are rooted in this problem that strong community institutions are not as available in a lot of the country and that this problem that Robert Putnam called bowling alone, this is concentrated in the working class, then that would explain a lot of what's going on in this country.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you. Basically, if I can put it in another way, despair, anxiety, isolation, the way the despair, anxiety isolation, drug overdoses, all these sort of alarming trends we see in the middle of America, in particular in the working class, are symptoms not of, as you say, a retreat of our economic problems, so much as they are the retreat or decline of social capital that's at the root of these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're clearly related to. Do you remember during the when Trump first started surging this sort of debate was is this about economic anxiety or is this about cultural resentment? And both of the that framing was obviously a bad framing, but you kind of answered, you know, tweak both of those a little. And they're right that the collapse of communities is often the domino that falls after the factory closes. But the factory closes isn't what causes people to not get married, people to not have kids, people to do drugs. It's that after the public schools and the public schools are no longer a great public school, people stop owning the church and the churches close down and then, without the churches, people don't have the civil civic intercourse that is fundamental to the good life. And that idea, that sort of church worship together, good life, and that idea that sort of church worship together, the donut hour after church, that that's crucial to American life, that's not an idea that's on the tips of the tongues of a lot of our policymakers, culture makers, tastemakers.
Speaker 1:But that's the central thing I try to argue in alienated America, that it really is that potluck and that t-ball league that are the most essential parts of the american dream all this stuff is in the interest, disease, the uh, the the stuff between uh that we don't really think about uh very much, except for a few sociologists who talk about, uh, maybe this sort of thing. Um, as you point out, we think that the american dream is consisting of wealth, or at least the opportunity uh to become wealthy or to at least move up uh be socially mobile. Um, but even social mobility, although you point out in the book, is related to the availability, um accessibility or availability of social capital. Even that isn't what people you talk to miss, right, it's not it so much. It is, um, this stuff that just sort of makes life rich.
Speaker 2:Well, it just makes it like happier and better you can tell it's important when you see how people try to replace it right. So this is the thing that one. One of the great things going kind of on tour talking to people about this book was meeting all sorts of people in these small groups, these gatherings of nonprofits, and a lot of times I met people with very different politics from mine I'm a Catholic conservative, pro-lifer, etc. And I would meet people who were firmly on the left and who, you know, unfortunately for conservatives, people who give their lives to serving other people are disproportionately on the left in this country, and so I'd meet a lot of those people. And this one woman said to me. She said where you're exactly right, Tim, is that no program. This woman was a social worker her whole life. She said no program ever helped anybody. I've been working with addicts, single moms, orphans, dropouts. No program ever helped them. Relationships is what helped people, and the only effective programs are ones that get people into relationships. So then we realized that what we do my wife and I we have six kids.
Speaker 2:She was raised in the DC area in a family of eight. I have three older brothers. We were raised in the New York area what our parents do to try to help us succeed isn't like just we didn't get like SAT tutors, right, we got. We were allowed to play little league. Our parents moved to a place with a strong school. Our parents got to know friends they could connect us with and we would hang out in these social cliques. Our parents would you know, whatever they would do, it was about giving us relationships that allowed us to build virtue. Their organization parents try to do is like legislate and explicitly and intentionally provide these virtues through, you know, training or programs, because they don't realize that there's a more organic way to do it now. That said, again, as I referred to earlier, I do think the upper middle class actually does a better job at just having the little leagues and the garden clubs etc. But alienation is a problem across the economic spectrum, but it is particularly located in America's working class.
Speaker 1:And why is that? Why this differential decline in social capital, even if there isn't even is a decline in the upper middle class? What's behind that dynamic? Because, as you point out, formerly there was the working class, and middle classes had no problem accumulating and accessing social capital. Why? Why now?
Speaker 2:I think the place I would. It's tricky because the sentence I found myself writing again and again was the causal arrow points in both directions, which is to say it's about family is a fruit of the collapse in community. We can get to that later, but I'll talk about it going the other way as well, that the collapse in community is partly a collapse in family. And something I don't go into in depth in the book, but we may as well start here, is you don't have as many families with a stay-at-home mom. I do point to studies that the percentage of as you pointed to, like the economic mobility you could predict, a kid in the lowest being raised in the lowest quintile and his ability, his likelihood to rise out of that income quintile can be predicted by the percentage of families in his community who have two married parents. But I'll go even further than that.
Speaker 2:Communities benefit from a place where, for part of the time or all of the time, there's a mom there. Further, the communities benefit when a dad has flexible work. Well, guess what? If you are working as a bartender, your boss tells you your shifts that week. You can't sign up to coach girls basketball if you don't know which nights of the week, you'll be available from 6-8. You can't necessarily volunteer for the PTA if you're a single mom.
Speaker 2:The sort of office job, the two married parents, that's what creates the flexibility, the manpower for people to do this sort of institution. So that's sort of one explanation of it. There's the Charles Murray explanation of it too, though, is that sort of the PTA moms that used to be distributed evenly across the country, now get evenly across the country. Now get, if they happen to exist in Fremont County, Iowa, get plucked out of there, get sent to on a scholarship to the state university or the you know the regional top tier school, marry somebody else who's coming from Des Moines, and so that sort of mating the college sorting machine means that you now have an overflow of PTA moms, which, if you're, if you're listening to this, you might be thinking 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 I didn't have 10 parents growing up at every T-ball practice.
Speaker 1:But that's not the case everywhere.
Speaker 2:That that if you're making that because you're in a part of a certain class or urban environment right, who's sucking up the the pta moms and t-ball coaches from uh, from the other parts of the country the meritocracy, in other words, functions, uh, so efficiently that talent is less evenly dispersed.
Speaker 1: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:By the way, we're like these corporate manager experts, whatever you know skills, talent or whatever. But you don't want to say and this is one of the things Charles Murray got in trouble for was he talked about virtues, he wanted to talk in human terms and he said the virtues are not evenly distributed. And then that leaves people saying so. Now you're saying the poor people are poor because they're vicious and the wealthy people are off drugs because they're virtuous. But it's not that. I tried to talk about alienation as, in part, an affliction. I'm an Aristotelian. Virtue is a habit. You develop habits through practice.
Speaker 2:I think of my son, who is a decent baseball pitcher. You don't have to be athletic to play baseball, so we focus on that. He's a decent pitcher in part because I bought him this bounce back screen. Now, a lot of you probably had this as you pitch the ball and if it's in the strike zone it bounces back to you and he could practice that by himself. I bought him a baseball glove and 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 of baseball players in our neighborhood but him having some equipment with which to practice makes him better. If he had more kids he'd be even better. He's slightly afflicted by the fact that the kids in the neighborhoods all play video games instead of coming out to play baseball, but he benefits from the fact that he has a dad and a bounce back screen and a glove and a baseball. That's my little analogy for virtue that families, student governments, t-ball leagues, little leagues, a reliable job all of these are the training ground for virtue and the degree to which these things are not there for a lot of people it becomes harder to develop.
Speaker 2:One of the stories I tell in Alienated America the oldest story, a lot of it's reported. It's me in bars and coffee shops. But I was in this union office in a strip mall like the backside of a strip mall, behind a pawn shop in Bloomington, indiana. They were closing the GE factory there and I was talking to the VP of the union who was getting laid off fairly young guy, probably about my age, we were both about 26, 27. And he said when he first got his job right out of high school in the factory.
Speaker 2:They said do you have factory experience? And he kind of chuckled. He said it was unskilled labor, like it would bring me in the morning to screw a cooling bracket onto the coil. And they said, yeah, but we want to know if you have experience with the mundane. Do you have experience showing up every day on time? Do you have experience working to the whistle? Do you have experience doing what you're told and maybe learning a new sort of unskilled skill if your job has to get switched? And he told me that and that sunk in. But this was before I, this was when I was a single guy. So only when I was working on Alienated America did I think back on that conversation and realize wait a second, doing the banal every day, being reliable, just kind of doing what you're told, those are the skills of being a husband and a father, that the factories are the training ground for family life and that the loss of the factories can be a loss of the training in these. You can call them skills, if you want to, or virtues.
Speaker 1:Before we get off this and get onto some more of the substance, I want to just quickly back to the political stuff, because I think you do really interesting work in that book and I wonder if you know how it played out in 2020 yet Probably not how social capital patterns predict voting patterns. Could you speak to that a little bit, tim, what you found when you delved?
Speaker 2:in the correlation that first got me onto this book was realizing that where you found people of Dutch descent, Ted Cruz was dominating Donald Trump in the primaries. I didn't even know this was a thing I didn't even know.
Speaker 1:we were a thing. We were measuring Dutch dissent on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Oh and okay. So I'm from New York, so you were Irish, italian, Puerto Rican or other. Okay, you knew there were Jewish people and Korean people. And there was one guy whose name you were like what is that? It was Armenian or whatever. But they just if you were Armenian, you're like, okay, so I'm going to count you as kind of Italian, and I know that this is a bubble.
Speaker 2:Around most of the US, german is the most common descent, but you can find a few places in the world where everybody's Dutch, everybody's Holly Van der something. The men are all six feet two. I found out about one of these places, orange City, iowa, on my like 10th reporting trip to Iowa, where this woman, again like Holly Vandervan, told me how she used to march in clogs past Windmill Square for the annual Tulip Festival, not back in Netherlands, but in Sioux County, iowa. So I go to Sioux County. I meet all these people, grandma's, bragging that their name Wilhelmina, after the Queen of the Netherlands, etc. It was Trump's, it would be Trump's best county in the general election against Hillary. It was his worst county in the caucuses. Ted Cruz just dominated there. Trump lost every precinct in the county, got 11%, totally Dutch. So I see this going on.
Speaker 2:I look at Western Michigan. Sure enough, trump wins almost all 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've met them. They're nice people. Donald's not a nice person. They want to vote for a nice person. And I'm thinking like Ted Cruz.
Speaker 2:And so I went to Uthberg, wisconsin, which is Dutch for Westburg or Eastburg, one of the two, and I meet all these people and I got there on a Sunday. So I sort of saw what it was about, which was that everybody was showing up at the diner from the four different churches in the Calvinist Dutch Reformed tradition that, for whatever reason, when the Dutch Americans went around the Midwest, they didn't just plant churches, they planted incredibly robust communities that were incredibly strong decades over a century later. And so the correlation in the Republican primaries was where there were very two things. One, trump did poorly in the primaries where there were very strong religious communities, and I don't mean, like you know, brothers, like monks or whatever, but these reform places, the Mormon places, etc. He also did very poorly.
Speaker 2:I go to Chevy Chase, maryland, the wealthiest part of the DC area, in these wealthy places where everybody has college degrees, the super zips at Charles Murray Co. But those two places I argued were one place. These are the places with strong institutions of civil society, where kids leave their bikes on their front lawn, where parents know the other kids' names, where parents are volunteering, where parents are finishing school, getting a job, getting married, having kids, staying involved in their kids' lives and staying involved in their community lives. The elites and the Dutch, we'll call them. Those is where Trump did really poorly in the primaries and he slightly underperformed the average Republican in the general election in 2016. In those places, that pattern basically held up to some extent, even more so in 2020. The numbers are still preliminary, etc.
Speaker 2:But if you look at Michigan, trump dropped off around Holland, michigan. Trump did. Trump dropped off around Holland, michigan, but he gained in the places where you see more church closures, that sort of thing. I use Fayette County, pa. So if I don't think we could go into politics in depth, it might get boring, but I don't think Trump is remaking the Republican Party, but to the degree that the Trump Republican Party on Election Day looked different than the Romney or McCain or Bush Republican Party on Election Day. It's disaffected, not just people without a college degree. More importantly, people who really look around them, like physically, proximately around them, and say things are not going well.
Speaker 1:Right, right yeah, trump's. Trump's popularity is an index of disaffection, and alienation is a really powerful way to look at that.
Speaker 2:The marginal Trump voter was from places and the people who got the analysis wrong said no, the marginal Trump voter is doing fine, where people sometimes looked at individual surveys. When you look at election results and you look at it on the precinct level or the county level, you see this correlation. Why? Because people don't just exist on like a spreadsheet that shows their income. Race and age right People exist in places. Race and age right People exist in places and that was the key thing that so many sociologists miss that the places are what determine your outcomes. Because the places is means a community, physically proximate community, where actual life occurs.
Speaker 1:Well put. We will be right back with Tim Carney, author of alienated America, to talk about those communities in a little bit more depth.
Speaker 3: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 and Thinkers podcast. At C4CS, our mission is to strengthen civil society. We do this by conducting programs and activities that increase the knowledge and efficacy of America's nonprofit organizations, charitable foundations and individual donors. We offer classes, webinars, conferences and more to help your organization have a bigger impact. If you'd like to learn more about the Center for Civil Society and our programs, please visit us online at centerforcivilsocietyorg. Thank you for listening to the GDT podcast.
Speaker 1:All right, we are back with Tim Carney, author of Alienated America and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and you can follow him on Twitter at TP Carney. Tim, two things will come up in passing in this discussion about the decline of social capital, decline of the institutions of civil society that you write about at length in the book. One is marriage and one is church, and I wonder if you could take those in order. I know you talk about the causal arrow going both ways when it comes to these things and civil society, but you explain, like you say, you know, the erosion of community is what killed the norm of marriage in the working class. Can you, can you elaborate on that and then sort of your thesis with regard to marriage in particular?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I write that chapter as sort of a murder mystery. The norm of marriage has been killed. What killed it, and a sort of standard conservative account, is that it had to do with just cultural forces. Tv, uh, you know, birth control leads to um more availability of uh you know, consequence free sex, and so then the men have no intended to get married. I think all of that to some extent is true. I don't know about pop culture, um being to blame, um, I tend try to not blame what you know, what I would call like homilies, like just messaging um, I look for structural reasons and I I would say that to some extent, the, the sexual revolution, not to some extent, to a very large extent the sexual revolution has caused a decrease in marriage, absolutely. Um, the liberal response to that is well, yes, but that's liberation.
Speaker 2:I quote Matt Iglesias basically arguing if fewer women are getting married, it's because they're more free to not get married now than they used to be. They have more access to the labor force, they have more access to the legal system, it's easier to get divorced, it's easier to whatever, and so that's that the, the marriage norm was bad and that liberation has set it free. But that is really undermined by the idea, by the fact that the retreat from marriage, compared to 1960 levels, has been twice as large among women with no high school degree than among those with a high school degree. That women are much more likely. Women in the elite are much more likely to get married than women in the working class. So the people who are getting yeah and much less likely to get divorced the elites are less likely to get divorced in the working class. So there's a delay in marriage among college-educated women and statistically that shows up as a retreat from marriage much larger than it actually is. It's a delay in marriage. But if the death of the, if the murder of the norm of marriage, was a justified homicide and it was liberation, then you would think the most liberated women, the people who can earn a living, would be the most likely to do it. So that didn't work for me. The liberals, who agree that the retreat from marriage is a problem, point to the fact that it's bigger among the working class and they say ah, this shows that people need money to get married and that rising inequality has caused this retreat. But what I try to point out in the book is that correlation doesn't always hold up. It often does.
Speaker 2:But I went out to Williston, north Dakota, where it's a fracking town, and there was a study by a liberal economist who was trying to show her name is Melissa Carney, spelled different than mine, so if we're related 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 college degrees. They all of a sudden go from making 28 000 to making 80. So just that income. How does that affect their? There was zero uptick in marriage in these fracking towns and the one I went to it was sort of even more obvious because it was in the middle of North Dakota.
Speaker 2:I looked around. I was like this is kind of what I wanted to do when I graduated college. I just wanted to go somewhere where I could play foosball and hang around, and if I wanted to keep reading Aristotle I could, but who knows what I would do? The strip clubs doubled in Williston, north Dakota. It was no place to raise a kid, it wasn't a community, it was a place to go and trade your labor for wages, and so money itself doesn't restore family formation.
Speaker 2:What restores family? What allows for family formation is strong, tight-knit communities. People who can watch your kids at the last second, people who will bring meals when you're in the hospital, people who will coach your children in Little League and T-Ball and, most importantly to segue to your other question people who will help you raise your children with a concept of the world that provides real meaning, with a supernatural view that shows that this self-sacrifice is worth it, that you're aspiring to something higher and outside yourself, that your children are made in the image of God and are infinitely valuable. Those are the things that spur people to get married and have kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you say that the unsearching of America is at the root of America's economic and social problems. I mean that's a big claim.
Speaker 2:I mean that's a big claim. Yeah, so the bowling alone by Robert Putnam what was that? 2000, had one chapter dedicated to the unchurching of America. That said almost in passing. Oh, all this civic activity I'm talking about volunteering, youth sports, etc. Volunteering, youth sports, etc. Half of that happens in originates in churches, and Putnam actually wrote a follow. I used to kind of make fun of him about this until I found out that he, together with a guy named David Campbell, a Mormon at Notre Dame, wrote a follow up book twice as long that basically laid this out. And it wasn't that religious people are more likely to volunteer, to donate. It wasn't that religious people are more trustworthy. They were. But that really was all explained by church attendance.
Speaker 1:Yes, Not belief. Is the institutionalization of belief that matters.
Speaker 2:I'm a Catholic so this might be a self-serving argument. I believe that the institution and the faith are that God made it really clear that we needed the institutions to have faith, that loving your neighbor was right there behind loving God and that that has to be taken seriously and that for the elites A they actually go to church more the top quintile. This is surprising, but not if you go down. I mentioned Chevy Chase earlier. Brett Kavanaugh's parish in Chevy Chase, maryland, or it's right on the DC line, has more full pews than if you go down to Southern Maryland rural parish where my friend is a pastor and he doesn't have a lot of baptisms or weddings, while Blessed Sacrament there in Chevy Chase is bustling.
Speaker 2:But to the degree that they are secularizing, they're replacing with other things. They have yoga on Sundays, they have their Black Lives Matter. I mean I'm getting a little snarky here, but they have lots of other things to replace it. The working class doesn't replace church with stuff like in those places. It's replaced with atomism, with TV and and devices and video games and that sort of and that sort of thing. So the fundamental institution of civil society in America has always been the church, particularly for the middle class and the working class and with secularization of America means the deinstitutionalization of America. It means the loss of community, particularly for that working class and that middle class.
Speaker 1:Does our reluctance, if not a willingness among the elites in particular, to commend their own communitarian practices, their own sort of lifestyles to others? Why is that? Is the rhetoric of individualism just too strong and too powerful in our minds to make that an embarrassing proposition, to sort of commend these really essentially non-individualistic practices to others? Or does it signal that we're really not very serious about civil society and its health, not as serious as we are our attachment to the rhetoric or logic of individualism? What's? Am I on the right track here? What's going on?
Speaker 2: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 about poverty, I remember sort of bracing myself because I knew that he kind of came from a socialist background in South America and he hated capitalism like Jesus turning over the tables 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 a check, it was about including the poor. And then I thought about that. It wasn't about cutting them a check, it was about including the poor.
Speaker 2:And then I thought about all the talk about privilege and that our elites today are more likely, are fairly likely, to say yes, I benefit from a privilege and I favor economic redistribution of wealth. This is true. A lot of people on the left think the college educated wealthy people are all greedy. No, they know they benefit from a privilege and they hope that they can make up for that by cutting a check and voting for Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. But they can't. Your privilege is that Little League, it is that potluck, it is that village hall with 10 different volunteer-run committees in your town of 2,000 people, where 1 good thing. And conservatives have a problem with this too. They like to think liberal elites are, all you know, either pot smoking swingers or you know, or just hate their neighbors. But they are as you know they're. They're practicing what we're preaching. And why aren't they preaching it? Individualism could be part of it.
Speaker 2:I think my explanation that unwillingness to come face to face with their privilege, because then they would realize that they're hoarding their privilege, which is not their money, their connection, that there's zoning laws and all of that would have to change if they're going to, if they're really going to share their privilege. But a lot of times it's a taking for granted. When I lecture at colleges, I try to tell people the fact that you're here indicates that statistically, you probably have two parents who went to college and who sent, who put you in a band and put you on a football team and put you in a bowling league, and you had a good public library where there were programs and you took all that for granted. This is why I thought JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was great, because he didn't have it. He didn't realize that the chaos in his life was a lack of belonging, and then the military showed it to him and then he would talk that the sort of air that was breathed by these elite kids he ended up with in law school was exactly that belonging. But that's two different explanations, I do think.
Speaker 2:I mean, I do think the talk of individualism.
Speaker 2:So I listened to you and Patrick Dineen talk and it was interesting because there is a way that this sort of I don't agree with everything he says, but the absolutely true thing he said is that sort of there's a liberal structure to the United States that's individualistic.
Speaker 2:Individualistic that would be and is disastrous if it's not countermanded by the somewhat illiberal structure of all the things I'm talking about here. That you don't get a vote in what I do in my T-ball league, I don't get a vote on what happens in half of my Catholic parish because my priest gets to determine it, that's about localism. That you don't get to belong to the Knights of Columbus if they don't want you to belong, can make it that you're almost ashamed if you fully buy into that mindset. Oh yeah, I belong to this club where I find lots of meaning and I do lots of volunteering and you could not belong because you don't live in my neighborhood and I don't know you're not a lawyer, you're not this, you're not that that there's something slightly illiberal about these institutions and that could be part of the reason that people don't like it Right, right, well.
Speaker 1:And to take a more structural approach though and here's a little bit darker possibility, there mean amazon's almost too on the nose, but just you know or video game manufacturer, but to pick one that's sort of less acute, just somebody who's into marketing and says I will fulfill your needs.
Speaker 2:you can fulfill your needs by spending money. The atomized individual is the perfect target. I mean, I almost think of it as like a militaristic thing. The more that you divide up your potential targets, the easier it is to pick them off one at a time. And we talk about TV and your phones and the internet, the technology being clearly a factor in drawing us away from our neighbors. So the more time you're staring at that screen, the more time you're looking at advertising.
Speaker 2:But I think there's something deeper. We are more impressionable the less robust our social and civic life, and it's toward conspiracy theories and radicalism and that sort of thing Ross Douthat touched on in his recent column. But we are more credulous. The less time we're talking to others we're more likely to believe something that sounds kind of nice, the less we sort of either run it by other people or come into contact with people. I know that I'm sure there's lots of authors who have written about this much better than I have. I'm still wrestling with it. But that impressionability caused by atomization is so clear from the way we see the Internet is affecting people.
Speaker 1:This is one of the concerns I have about the current pandemic I mean past catastrophes. At least one of the saving graces is that people come together. You know, you sort of maybe even have a rebirth of community in some ways, because people have to come together to help one another. And we talk about having to come together to help one another in this current catastrophe, but in fact we're prevented from doing so by the very nature of the problem and in some cases by the nature of the reaction to the problem. I can't imagine that the last eight or nine months have been anything but terrible for American social capital and civil society.
Speaker 2:No, exactly right, and that you have. You know, just think of the school kids who have barely seen their friends, who think of the parents who have had to expend so much more parental capital by not just saying brush your teeth but also finish your math, homework and show your work and dot your eyes your work and dot your eyes. The families, the communities, the virtues and skills we were talking about earlier, all of those are so eroded. And two things I think you see it show up in One. I mean one woman said it to me, protesting outside the White House after George Floyd was killed. She said they think we're going to disappear, but we're in the middle of an effing pandemic. We don't have anywhere else to be.
Speaker 2:But the other side of that explanation was more true. People needed an outlet and there was this interesting artist. So at the same time, tom Cotton publishes an op-ed in the New York Times. The young staffers hate it. They stage this rebellion and they end up getting the op-ed in the New York Times. The young staffers hate it. They stage this rebellion and they end up getting the op-ed page editor fired. And this one piece praising the whole thing said this is the liberating aspect of everybody working from home is that these young writers were able to follow their conscience and stand up for what they believed in, because they didn't have the tyranny of some boss standing over their shoulder or some boss talking them down from their ideas. And I was thinking that tyranny is what I call mentorship or friendship, collegiality, that hyper individualist mindset that is not by any stretch concentrated on the right very, very prevalent in the identity politics lefties, that that gets exacerbated by this isolation.
Speaker 1:I'd be very interested to know if there are any studies yet maybe they'll be done showing that those people living in places with lower social capital, their increases in anxiety, despair, depression, et cetera, during the last nine months, are those higher increases than those living in places with higher levels of social capital.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's tons of confounding variables there. I mean, there are neighborhoods around me where the street has been shut down through traffic by the county. Now you go by and you see like 30 kids riding on tricycles and riding in chalk and kids are all on top of each other. The parents are all socially distanced but chatting, and I'm thinking this is like when we would have the power outages and people would come together more. But guess what, to get your streets shut down you needed like two or three parents to fill out a petition to the county government.
Speaker 2:So there's going to be a strong correlation between college education and these safe streets. So in some ways it's just a very typical thing of uh, crises are exacerbating inequalities. Uh, in our country I want to go like if I hope the weather warms up a little bit and go back and sort of do more of a study on these safe streets in Montgomery County. Um, I think there's a lot, um a lot to be told from how and why and what these people come together, whether they feel the neighborhood's closer, in part because you're not doing travel lacrosse, that doesn't exist. But you can get to know your next-door neighbor. I've talked over the fence my over-the-fence neighbors more in the last eight months than I did in the first five years.
Speaker 1:And we're coming to the end of our time. Let me ask you, let's just end with this. You do put forward several solutions 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, a giver in this world. You're concerned about the decline of social capital. You think it's the root of most of the issues that are tearing America apart today. Where would you be looking to make a social investment?
Speaker 2: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 help people build relationships? My pastor or a priest in my parish asked me. He said our parishes used to do a lot of different things feeding the poor Now the government does it. Running youth sports Now there's tons of others.
Speaker 2:What is the unmet need of the middle class families in Silver Spring, maryland? And I said we need a place to bring our kids and ignore them while they're safe and we hang out with other parents. That's even more so for single mom, right? They not only need to get work done, but they need to socialize and that sort of thing. So I would think what can you do to help get people together? One of those is make it easier for moms to have a place to go with their kids and ignore them.
Speaker 2:I don't exactly know how to do that, but I would do that During pandemic time. I would say let's make you know how they have pavilions near a lot of playgrounds with picnic tables. Wire those with electricity and Wi-Fi so that the parents who have to work from home can go there and then their kids can show up there afterwards and do their homework and then play on the playground, of course wearing masks and not touching each other. Obviously Get people together. Get people together in a way that, physically, that they're not able to get together right now.
Speaker 1:It's a good answer. It's a really good answer. Tim Carney, thanks for being with us.
Speaker 2:Absolutely my pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1:Tim is the author of Alienated America. He came out from HarperCollins last year, available anywhere you want to buy your books hopefully not Amazon and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and is on Twitter at at TPCarney. Thanks again, Tim, and thanks for being with us. Thank you for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, we invite you to subscribe and or rate and review this discussion on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts and have a guest you'd like to hear from. Send your requests to our producer, Katie Janice, at K Janiceatamphilcom. That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.