Transcripts For CSPAN2 Yuval Levin A Time To Build 20240713

Dysfunctions. In one arena after another of our National Life we face the challenge of drawing alienated people back into our institutions. We can point to all kinds of complicated theories about how to build the trust thats required, but the simplest way is for the people who inhabit our institutions, for all of us, to try to be more trustworthy and what each can work at that. We can give her institutional responsibilities more of our time and effort. We can give them more of identity and selfconsciousness. We can understand ourselves as defined by those institutions that matter most in her own lies. We can judge ourselves by their standards, hold ourselves up to their ideals and take seriously the forms of integrity and we can work to reform them where theyre failing to help them work better and be more worthy of trust and confidence. We can yearn not for the foremost autonomy of the event contractor but for the rudeness and responsibility of the member and the partner and the worker in the owner and the citizen. Theres a word for attitudes like that. The word is devotion. Whats required of us now is devotion to the work we do together with other people in the service of a comet aspiration and, therefore, devotion to these institutions we compose and inhabit. That devotion does call for sacrifice and for commitment. He calls on us to pledge ourselves to some institution unabashedly to abandon ironic distance and dispassionate analysis and jump in sometimes. That devotion is not only necessary, its attractive. We want objects of devotion, we want something to commit you but we often dont see what were looking for is right within our reach. Its easy to be fashionable rebels. Tardec remind ourselves why our Court Commitments are worthwhile. Thats the case that institutionalism not when falls why its crucial. Im proposing a modest change in our stance towards our country and towards the social crisis it confronts. Not a social revolution or transmission, not directly. Just a greater awareness of how integrity and trust and confidence belonging and meaning are established in our lives and so greater care about some habits weve gotten into that tend to cut us off from them. These habits have left us feeling like theres no one we can trust except cynics and outsiders and nothing we can do except register our outrage at people and ideas that we disagree with. Thats with a life of our society would look like without functional institutions. Our society has many functional institutions and it could have many more if we devote ourselves to strengthening and reforming those that we are a part of. It will respond to needs and problems i building and rebuilding institutions rather than just expressing frustration from the outside. Thinking and speaking differently about how we live together to make a difference that we might imagine. It can help us see what weve been missing, to do what weve been neglecting, to say what weve only assumed were taken for granted. Small steps like those are what make great change is possible. They are constructed so that build upon each other and turn us all into builders. That in the end is a character of the transformation that we need now. The demolition crews have been allowed for too long to define the spirit of this era in American Life but where were headed is going to be up to the builders and the rebuilders, that is what each of us should seek to be. Thanks very much. [applause] give you an overview of the book. Im happy to take questions and digging a a little deeper. Theres a microphone up here. That was a great talk. Im curious, the extent to which you think this is a specifically an american problem. If you look beyond the u. S. U. A country where this is more or less a problem, what are the lessons we can learn from that . I think its not a uniquely american problem. If they think about the picture of the crisis i start with, similar crises are certainly happening around the west. I politics of populism, a breakdown of trust and confidence, trust in government in particular is lower in europe than in the United States and it has been for a long time. Thats saying something because confidence in government and the United States is quite low. But i do think you are some distinct ways that americans look through institutions and treat them as invisible, or that we identify authenticity with unmediated directness in a different way than many other people in the west. Our culture is rooted in a kind of modest and theism that just doesnt trust mediating institutions that want to direct access. Weve always been attracted to outsiders and to mavericks in our politics and has always done that sort of figure. There was an exception to that in the middle of the 20th century in america where coming out of the Second World War and the depression and decades of mobilization, we had very unusual confidence in institutions, very, very high confidence. That was not the norm. That was an odd moment but it was an odd moment that has kind of defined or sent a default. Living out in america that has a low trust in institutions feels to us much more broken, much more peculiar than otherwise might. We still live with those norms that baby boomers grew up with. Our leader still others baby boomers. We really testing out just how elderly our leaders can get. It turns out pretty elderly. And so i do think that theres something distinct about this american approach to institutions that contributes to this problem that understanding it ought to be part of the solution, that the breakdown of social trust and the rise of populism is certainly not just an american phenomenon. Thank you for your talk. Weve watched two different versions of reality play out in our politics recently. Your points on institutional failures and the reformist nature of some actors are very well taken but you havent properly addressed another contributing factor, and opposition to both expertise and experts. This is a longstanding pattern. For example, the decline trust in major newspapers. I tell my students to read more than a watch and to avoid news as engineered to give him a dopamine hit of righteousness. What would you do to address this problem . Youre right. Your students are lucky to have that advice. I think this is very much connected to what i get at here, and its very much part of the discussion in the book is this loss of trust in expertise. The question is why do we trust experts . That is a lot to do with why we trust institutions which is to say we trust that when we think they are formed in a way that gives them Greater Authority than the average person on some particular subject. The Scientific Method gives the scientists more authority because its clear that before this is something they have gone through a process that helps of the get whats likely to be true and what isnt. We do trust that happens, though even our trust in scientists has declined quite a lot in america in the last few decades. I think journalism, as i mentioned, strikes or Something Like that, to show it as a method that makes it worthy of our trust. Expertise in general works that way, and that the transformation of a lot of the professional institutions that form experts that way into, in some cases, really stages for a political performance, but in any case, the sense that the public as that all the specifications of authority no less than they say has a lot to do with the publix loss of trust. Its connected to the populism in our politics. Its also driven by set of technological advances they gets everybody for misimpression that they know as much as their doctor, right . People shall put all the stuff from the internet. We all now, because of the fragmentation of the media and of culture, we imagine that we have access to all the knowledge in the world and, therefore, we dont need expert but thats not what expert are. Experts dont just have knowledge. They have experienced. They have a certain kind of prudence thats built from the practice of applying knowledge in the world. That is an idea that our culture just doesnt want to hear. You can see in politics, too. That is the lore of the outside. Politics requires some knowledge and experience. You wouldnt think so now. When people run for office they proclaim how little experience they have. They take pride in the fact theyve never done this before. Im not sure thats a great way to prove that you could be president. And so i think this pattern has a great deal to do with what i tried to get at, which is the sense in which our idea that institutions exist to four people, to give them a certain kind of shape in the light of the society is a way to make them trustworthy and to make those individuals trustworthy. We still want expertise at some level. You dont want to hear from your surgeon hes kind of average, right . Thats not great news. You want to hear this is somebody who knows what theyre doing and they can prove it. But in a lot of our public life we dont really admit to ourselves that expertise has value. Thats part of his cultural picture that im trying to draw. Thanks. Thanks very much for the presentation. I enjoyed it a lot. You certainly gave me a lot to think about. Your most recent comments there i think of a lot to do with my question, may be answering my question. One of the things that you said was you wanted to include the professions among institutions, and your comments about doctors and medicine so forth were along those lines. But what im not clear about though is whether, it sounds like the loss of faith in professions as institutions, in your mind, is true for people from outside of those. But i wonder, i dont get the sense that from within, inside the Scientific Community or inside the medical community for that matter or inside the Engineering Community for that matter, that theres a crisis of confidence in their own institution. Its hard to sustain that confidence when the public doesnt trust you. So i would actually say that in a lot of what we think of as of the core professions, there is a sense that the educational institutions and institutions of practice that really give you a place in the profession have lost some of their authority, and that people do look for shortcuts, look for ways to gain prominence, a public profile more than to work their way through the kind of normal steps involved in gaining expertise. I dont think its collapsed and its different from one institution to another. Medicine, at some level you have to know some particular things in order to practice medicine. You cant really just pretend to know them. I do think theres a way in which the larger societies loss of trust in these institutions is connected to a decline in confidence, not just confidence but satisfaction. People in our major professions now are much less happy with their professional lives. You can see why, because if the larger public doesnt value in the way it valued your profession a generation ago, then it does become much harder to justify to yourself the kind of commitment necessary to become an expert and to rise in the field. You see it in some places more than others. Its not the same everywhere, but i think you see in the legal world. You see it certainly in journalism which is a profession that is especially subject to the pressures and forces. I would argue to some extent in medicine, too. American doctors are much less satisfied than they were even a generation ago, let alone a mid century america. Just with the place in society. Okay, thanks. I found myself agreeing with your analysis almost entirely. Thats great to hear. Thank you. I just like to push you more toward specific policies. Because my concern, i look at this politics and prose audience, and see people from the American Enterprise institute and other think tanks, and those who are so inclined to intentional will hear your message and maybe try, but for the vast majority of americans, this is almost speaking a foreign language. Just wondering what you think about policies such as rankedchoice voting and universal asic income and other reforms that are really designed to bring people together . I appreciate that. Im not sure i agree this doesnt speak to most peoples experience in some ways, righ . That the sense that its harder now to find people to trust his palm for everyone and not just for people in washington or people with a certain level of education. Ways of trying to diagnose that in terms that relate to peoples experience put up what more the net but i agree with you that at some level they also have to take the form of Institutional Reforms. In the institutions that are broken, congress is a great example. Congress is the broken institution in our politics. Whatever you think of donald trump, and i could spend an hour telling you what i think of donald trump, but i think the failure of congress is actually a much bigger problem and that the various complaints we have about the other branches of government are largely functions of various failures of the legislature to take its responsibility seriously. Reforms of the congress that would encourage its members to think of themselves as insiders, not outsiders, and to think of themselves as legislators, not performers. It would have to look like changes to the budget process, the Committee System in ways that invest people more in the actual work of the institution. Weve got to a place where most members will he take one big vote a year on a budget bill. They have nothing to do with creating. It was created in the leadership offices at midnight before the government shuts down, and the structure of the work of congress has a lot to do with that. There are Institutional Reforms that could change it. In some ways its dangerous to say this on cspan, there are ways that transparency is gone too far in congress. There are no quiet spaces for members to talk to one another. The only protected spaces are the leadership offices at midday before the current shuts down and those of the place of all the work gets done. Cspan is a godsend to think there also has to be some places for members to bargain and deal with each other. Theres no such thing as bargaining in public. If you see people bargaining in public, or watching a show. You are not watching the rework of the legislature. I think congress has to be much more selfconscious about the way that it structures its work, and that could be done. Members are very dissatisfied. Their quality of life is pretty low, and they could do something about it. They dont behave like he could but he could. Younger members in particular in both parties now dont even know what they are not doing, right . They didnt see congress function. The last real bipartisan big bipartisan bills, i mean, i would say to happen in the early bush years, which is a long time ago now. Congress hasnt really sort of felt itself functioning in quite a while. I use that as an example because thats an institution that makes its own rules i could change them, and if it understood the problem in these terms it would have some incentives to do that. Part of the reason to write a book like this is to try to surface these problems in these terms because its not how we can to see them. It points in the opposite direction from how we can to see them. Rather than thinking we need to tear these things down, the establishment is too strong, we can understand we need to build these things up. We need functional institutions and right now we just dont have them. I have sort of two questions, but are want to start by saying thank you for your presentation. I think youre making a wonderful contribution to the discussion and the issues. The first part is since you are from a together from presentation is your asking for a new attitude and a change of mindset. What would it take for us culturally for that to really get launched . In addition to, i mean, wasnt just your writing is great book and getting us all to read it, but what really you should all read it. At least bite. Im all for that. The second part is at the other end, which is with the reform part, what kind of structure, it seems to me part of the problem, its, has to do with the way we organize our society, and that we are organized, our institutions have been handed down to us from kind of first and agricultural than an adjuster but nowhere in a digital age. The structures, hierarchies we created at work and then dont work now and we have any sense of the mitel used to be organized by the personal connections in community and the way, the personal relationships. What kind of Structural Reforms can you think of that might help restore personal connections and things that restore a kind of order so that organizations are just different . These are Great Questions and since they are impossible questions. Those are the best questions, but i would say they are related. If one thing you asked is how do we start to change attitude, i honestly think the only entity that is to articulate for ourselves the problems in a particular way that causes us to think about our everyday decisions all of it differently. I dont think we can really do much better than that, but that can be a very powerful way to change. I dont think this could be really a topdown change. Ultimately, the trouble with the need for institutional reform is that has to come from within. The people who are now empowered by the way things work have to want him them to change. Thats a hard to get you. There has to be a a demand fort and so thats been since that this is the kind of change of attitude we need. We each should you will begin. If you can write a book may be write a book. But if you work in an institution that could stand this kind of change, i think its important to speak up for it in these terms. And at the same time when you ask what kind of reforms might be plausible, i think the way you put it is valuable, right . To say that in some ways American Life has changed in dramatic ways over the years and weve seen big changes in our culture, in our society before. Some of our institutions have proven very durable in the faces of the change of some of that. Whats troubling about the smoke is we have seen a response to it take it in for a lot of new Institution Building. The argument im making is not just to restore, recover what we have, but to respond to novel problems with new institution. If you think about the last time our country went to a time of such intense dynamic change, at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century were we had similar problems in some ways, dramatic economic change, a growth in the scale and scope of the economy, massive waves of immigration. We responded to those with National Life<\/a> we face the challenge of drawing alienated people back into our institutions. We can point to all kinds of complicated theories about how to build the trust thats required, but the simplest way is for the people who inhabit our institutions, for all of us, to try to be more trustworthy and what each can work at that. We can give her institutional responsibilities more of our time and effort. We can give them more of identity and selfconsciousness. We can understand ourselves as defined by those institutions that matter most in her own lies. We can judge ourselves by their standards, hold ourselves up to their ideals and take seriously the forms of integrity and we can work to reform them where theyre failing to help them work better and be more worthy of trust and confidence. We can yearn not for the foremost autonomy of the event contractor but for the rudeness and responsibility of the member and the partner and the worker in the owner and the citizen. Theres a word for attitudes like that. The word is devotion. Whats required of us now is devotion to the work we do together with other people in the service of a comet aspiration and, therefore, devotion to these institutions we compose and inhabit. That devotion does call for sacrifice and for commitment. He calls on us to pledge ourselves to some institution unabashedly to abandon ironic distance and dispassionate analysis and jump in sometimes. That devotion is not only necessary, its attractive. We want objects of devotion, we want something to commit you but we often dont see what were looking for is right within our reach. Its easy to be fashionable rebels. Tardec remind ourselves why our Court Commitments<\/a> are worthwhile. Thats the case that institutionalism not when falls why its crucial. Im proposing a modest change in our stance towards our country and towards the social crisis it confronts. Not a social revolution or transmission, not directly. Just a greater awareness of how integrity and trust and confidence belonging and meaning are established in our lives and so greater care about some habits weve gotten into that tend to cut us off from them. These habits have left us feeling like theres no one we can trust except cynics and outsiders and nothing we can do except register our outrage at people and ideas that we disagree with. Thats with a life of our society would look like without functional institutions. Our society has many functional institutions and it could have many more if we devote ourselves to strengthening and reforming those that we are a part of. It will respond to needs and problems i building and rebuilding institutions rather than just expressing frustration from the outside. Thinking and speaking differently about how we live together to make a difference that we might imagine. It can help us see what weve been missing, to do what weve been neglecting, to say what weve only assumed were taken for granted. Small steps like those are what make great change is possible. They are constructed so that build upon each other and turn us all into builders. That in the end is a character of the transformation that we need now. The demolition crews have been allowed for too long to define the spirit of this era in American Life<\/a> but where were headed is going to be up to the builders and the rebuilders, that is what each of us should seek to be. Thanks very much. [applause] give you an overview of the book. Im happy to take questions and digging a a little deeper. Theres a microphone up here. That was a great talk. Im curious, the extent to which you think this is a specifically an american problem. If you look beyond the u. S. U. A country where this is more or less a problem, what are the lessons we can learn from that . I think its not a uniquely american problem. If they think about the picture of the crisis i start with, similar crises are certainly happening around the west. I politics of populism, a breakdown of trust and confidence, trust in government in particular is lower in europe than in the United States<\/a> and it has been for a long time. Thats saying something because confidence in government and the United States<\/a> is quite low. But i do think you are some distinct ways that americans look through institutions and treat them as invisible, or that we identify authenticity with unmediated directness in a different way than many other people in the west. Our culture is rooted in a kind of modest and theism that just doesnt trust mediating institutions that want to direct access. Weve always been attracted to outsiders and to mavericks in our politics and has always done that sort of figure. There was an exception to that in the middle of the 20th century in america where coming out of the Second World War<\/a> and the depression and decades of mobilization, we had very unusual confidence in institutions, very, very high confidence. That was not the norm. That was an odd moment but it was an odd moment that has kind of defined or sent a default. Living out in america that has a low trust in institutions feels to us much more broken, much more peculiar than otherwise might. We still live with those norms that baby boomers grew up with. Our leader still others baby boomers. We really testing out just how elderly our leaders can get. It turns out pretty elderly. And so i do think that theres something distinct about this american approach to institutions that contributes to this problem that understanding it ought to be part of the solution, that the breakdown of social trust and the rise of populism is certainly not just an american phenomenon. Thank you for your talk. Weve watched two different versions of reality play out in our politics recently. Your points on institutional failures and the reformist nature of some actors are very well taken but you havent properly addressed another contributing factor, and opposition to both expertise and experts. This is a longstanding pattern. For example, the decline trust in major newspapers. I tell my students to read more than a watch and to avoid news as engineered to give him a dopamine hit of righteousness. What would you do to address this problem . Youre right. Your students are lucky to have that advice. I think this is very much connected to what i get at here, and its very much part of the discussion in the book is this loss of trust in expertise. The question is why do we trust experts . That is a lot to do with why we trust institutions which is to say we trust that when we think they are formed in a way that gives them Greater Authority<\/a> than the average person on some particular subject. The Scientific Method<\/a> gives the scientists more authority because its clear that before this is something they have gone through a process that helps of the get whats likely to be true and what isnt. We do trust that happens, though even our trust in scientists has declined quite a lot in america in the last few decades. I think journalism, as i mentioned, strikes or Something Like<\/a> that, to show it as a method that makes it worthy of our trust. Expertise in general works that way, and that the transformation of a lot of the professional institutions that form experts that way into, in some cases, really stages for a political performance, but in any case, the sense that the public as that all the specifications of authority no less than they say has a lot to do with the publix loss of trust. Its connected to the populism in our politics. Its also driven by set of technological advances they gets everybody for misimpression that they know as much as their doctor, right . People shall put all the stuff from the internet. We all now, because of the fragmentation of the media and of culture, we imagine that we have access to all the knowledge in the world and, therefore, we dont need expert but thats not what expert are. Experts dont just have knowledge. They have experienced. They have a certain kind of prudence thats built from the practice of applying knowledge in the world. That is an idea that our culture just doesnt want to hear. You can see in politics, too. That is the lore of the outside. Politics requires some knowledge and experience. You wouldnt think so now. When people run for office they proclaim how little experience they have. They take pride in the fact theyve never done this before. Im not sure thats a great way to prove that you could be president. And so i think this pattern has a great deal to do with what i tried to get at, which is the sense in which our idea that institutions exist to four people, to give them a certain kind of shape in the light of the society is a way to make them trustworthy and to make those individuals trustworthy. We still want expertise at some level. You dont want to hear from your surgeon hes kind of average, right . Thats not great news. You want to hear this is somebody who knows what theyre doing and they can prove it. But in a lot of our public life we dont really admit to ourselves that expertise has value. Thats part of his cultural picture that im trying to draw. Thanks. Thanks very much for the presentation. I enjoyed it a lot. You certainly gave me a lot to think about. Your most recent comments there i think of a lot to do with my question, may be answering my question. One of the things that you said was you wanted to include the professions among institutions, and your comments about doctors and medicine so forth were along those lines. But what im not clear about though is whether, it sounds like the loss of faith in professions as institutions, in your mind, is true for people from outside of those. But i wonder, i dont get the sense that from within, inside the Scientific Community<\/a> or inside the medical community for that matter or inside the Engineering Community<\/a> for that matter, that theres a crisis of confidence in their own institution. Its hard to sustain that confidence when the public doesnt trust you. So i would actually say that in a lot of what we think of as of the core professions, there is a sense that the educational institutions and institutions of practice that really give you a place in the profession have lost some of their authority, and that people do look for shortcuts, look for ways to gain prominence, a public profile more than to work their way through the kind of normal steps involved in gaining expertise. I dont think its collapsed and its different from one institution to another. Medicine, at some level you have to know some particular things in order to practice medicine. You cant really just pretend to know them. I do think theres a way in which the larger societies loss of trust in these institutions is connected to a decline in confidence, not just confidence but satisfaction. People in our major professions now are much less happy with their professional lives. You can see why, because if the larger public doesnt value in the way it valued your profession a generation ago, then it does become much harder to justify to yourself the kind of commitment necessary to become an expert and to rise in the field. You see it in some places more than others. Its not the same everywhere, but i think you see in the legal world. You see it certainly in journalism which is a profession that is especially subject to the pressures and forces. I would argue to some extent in medicine, too. American doctors are much less satisfied than they were even a generation ago, let alone a mid century america. Just with the place in society. Okay, thanks. I found myself agreeing with your analysis almost entirely. Thats great to hear. Thank you. I just like to push you more toward specific policies. Because my concern, i look at this politics and prose audience, and see people from the American Enterprise<\/a> institute and other think tanks, and those who are so inclined to intentional will hear your message and maybe try, but for the vast majority of americans, this is almost speaking a foreign language. Just wondering what you think about policies such as rankedchoice voting and universal asic income and other reforms that are really designed to bring people together . I appreciate that. Im not sure i agree this doesnt speak to most peoples experience in some ways, righ . That the sense that its harder now to find people to trust his palm for everyone and not just for people in washington or people with a certain level of education. Ways of trying to diagnose that in terms that relate to peoples experience put up what more the net but i agree with you that at some level they also have to take the form of Institutional Reforms<\/a>. In the institutions that are broken, congress is a great example. Congress is the broken institution in our politics. Whatever you think of donald trump, and i could spend an hour telling you what i think of donald trump, but i think the failure of congress is actually a much bigger problem and that the various complaints we have about the other branches of government are largely functions of various failures of the legislature to take its responsibility seriously. Reforms of the congress that would encourage its members to think of themselves as insiders, not outsiders, and to think of themselves as legislators, not performers. It would have to look like changes to the budget process, the Committee System<\/a> in ways that invest people more in the actual work of the institution. Weve got to a place where most members will he take one big vote a year on a budget bill. They have nothing to do with creating. It was created in the leadership offices at midnight before the government shuts down, and the structure of the work of congress has a lot to do with that. There are Institutional Reforms<\/a> that could change it. In some ways its dangerous to say this on cspan, there are ways that transparency is gone too far in congress. There are no quiet spaces for members to talk to one another. The only protected spaces are the leadership offices at midday before the current shuts down and those of the place of all the work gets done. Cspan is a godsend to think there also has to be some places for members to bargain and deal with each other. Theres no such thing as bargaining in public. If you see people bargaining in public, or watching a show. You are not watching the rework of the legislature. I think congress has to be much more selfconscious about the way that it structures its work, and that could be done. Members are very dissatisfied. Their quality of life is pretty low, and they could do something about it. They dont behave like he could but he could. Younger members in particular in both parties now dont even know what they are not doing, right . They didnt see congress function. The last real bipartisan big bipartisan bills, i mean, i would say to happen in the early bush years, which is a long time ago now. Congress hasnt really sort of felt itself functioning in quite a while. I use that as an example because thats an institution that makes its own rules i could change them, and if it understood the problem in these terms it would have some incentives to do that. Part of the reason to write a book like this is to try to surface these problems in these terms because its not how we can to see them. It points in the opposite direction from how we can to see them. Rather than thinking we need to tear these things down, the establishment is too strong, we can understand we need to build these things up. We need functional institutions and right now we just dont have them. I have sort of two questions, but are want to start by saying thank you for your presentation. I think youre making a wonderful contribution to the discussion and the issues. The first part is since you are from a together from presentation is your asking for a new attitude and a change of mindset. What would it take for us culturally for that to really get launched . In addition to, i mean, wasnt just your writing is great book and getting us all to read it, but what really you should all read it. At least bite. Im all for that. The second part is at the other end, which is with the reform part, what kind of structure, it seems to me part of the problem, its, has to do with the way we organize our society, and that we are organized, our institutions have been handed down to us from kind of first and agricultural than an adjuster but nowhere in a digital age. The structures, hierarchies we created at work and then dont work now and we have any sense of the mitel used to be organized by the personal connections in community and the way, the personal relationships. What kind of Structural Reforms<\/a> can you think of that might help restore personal connections and things that restore a kind of order so that organizations are just different . These are Great Questions<\/a> and since they are impossible questions. Those are the best questions, but i would say they are related. If one thing you asked is how do we start to change attitude, i honestly think the only entity that is to articulate for ourselves the problems in a particular way that causes us to think about our everyday decisions all of it differently. I dont think we can really do much better than that, but that can be a very powerful way to change. I dont think this could be really a topdown change. Ultimately, the trouble with the need for institutional reform is that has to come from within. The people who are now empowered by the way things work have to want him them to change. Thats a hard to get you. There has to be a a demand fort and so thats been since that this is the kind of change of attitude we need. We each should you will begin. If you can write a book may be write a book. But if you work in an institution that could stand this kind of change, i think its important to speak up for it in these terms. And at the same time when you ask what kind of reforms might be plausible, i think the way you put it is valuable, right . To say that in some ways American Life<\/a> has changed in dramatic ways over the years and weve seen big changes in our culture, in our society before. Some of our institutions have proven very durable in the faces of the change of some of that. Whats troubling about the smoke is we have seen a response to it take it in for a lot of new Institution Building<\/a>. The argument im making is not just to restore, recover what we have, but to respond to novel problems with new institution. If you think about the last time our country went to a time of such intense dynamic change, at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century were we had similar problems in some ways, dramatic economic change, a growth in the scale and scope of the economy, massive waves of immigration. We responded to those with Institution Building<\/a>, with a lot of institutional building. What we think of now, on the one hand, is a progressive movement, but you can think of it also as the emergence of a set of both bottomup and topdown institutions in American Society<\/a> to deal with really new problems. That spoke to a kind of tendency and American Life<\/a> to respond to problems by building institutions. It is an american thing. Alexis de tocqueville wrote about his father which he said if you get four americans together they will elect a treasurer. That is one way to understand our National Character<\/a> but i think weve lost a little bit of that tendency now, to see see a problem and respond by organizing around it. We have all these ways now to just express our dissatisfaction, and we incline to expressive forms of response rather than to structural organizational forms. We think by signaling on facebook that we agree with that guy can we done something about the problem. But saying on facebook or on the right side of something, thats not doing anything at all. Very often its a way of avoiding doing something. In some ways its even worse than that because the forms of reaction, that twitter and other forms of social media and courage lead us to respond to problems in a kind of confrontational way rather than think about how to build around them. I would say part of what we need is a recovery of a a kind of Institution Building<\/a> instinct. And again the only contribution i can make of that is try to articulate that as need and try to help people see that when you face a problem, maybe thats one way to think about it. Thank you for your talk. I have good news, given the context of this evening. I work at georgetown. I lead a Research Program<\/a> on modernizing congress. Theres a whole committee that was created a year ago this month to update and modernize the institution. Its got six democrats and six republicans. Its run in an egalitarian participatory way. I go to all the hearings. I worked very closely with them. They all ask questions. Ill contribute. Its call the unified staff, meaning the staff Work Together<\/a> all the time. Just three weeks ago the introduce a bill that was based on a set of i think 29 recommendations over the last year that came out of committees, thats legislation to reform the institution. Its huge because it takes into account Building Digital<\/a> infrastructure, bringing back the deliberative process, all of the things we hear about like devolving power back out to the committees and allowing members more chances to lead in the process. Relating to the other comments this evening, congress is down to 3050 of its hearings. We see the show pony hearings like benghazi and the impeachment that its really not, it stopped doing the deliberative process. Its now funding itself that 1980 levels, inhouse expertise. The thing i really noticed a lot, and i would love your comments on this, is this a possibility, is that the problem with data and digital is that it is weaponized transparency. Every public place you can imagine has been weaponized. Our hearings, if people want to watch them, you can watch all of them. They are two minutes and the bring in a lot of people working on this. Is that congress doesnt have ways to curate the incoming, we love cspan by the way that we need Something Like<\/a> a cspan channel four which doesnt exist at this point but it will be far more curated, far more local and create a voice that talks to congress on its calendar like its committees of jurisdiction, not all members can care about everything all the time. It seems there has to also be some kind of real fundamental come to terms with the monetization of data. Its not serving deliberative democracy right now. That has to do with everything being in the sort of freemarket fundamentalist model. Unless we come to terms with like unregulated capitalism as its going, thats another massive institutional set of changes that we need. I do love for you to talk about that since youre from aei. Ive received a lot of your memos on the other side as until staff. Thanks for the question in the work youre doing. Ive been involved with the committee because theres a kind of twin committee of the American Political Science Association<\/a> that ive been a member of. Im a recovering political scientist myself, and weve offered some recommendations to the House Reform Committee<\/a> and that taken some of those. I think the work that they doing is enormously important. I would say at the core of it, theres a question that needs to be asked anymore explicit way, which is really what is the purpose of congress. There are two answers to the question that cut in opposite directions and that we are going in both directions at the same time we try to reform congress. On the one hand, you could see the purpose of congress is like the purpose of a European Parliament<\/a>, which is to empower majorities to govern while their majorities into the public takes away their power. On the other jew could see the purpose of congress is to compel accommodation among different groups and factions in American Life<\/a>, to force compromise. Thats the original purpose of congress, the madisonian purpose. I think its essential and that the American National<\/a> legislature is decidedly not a European Parliament<\/a>. It is intended to force people with differences to come to some agreement. Congress has become very, very bad at this because, implicitly a lease, both parties now want you to function European Parliament<\/a> so when they had the majority they want to save that weve got it, we should do everything we want to do, did everything we can push through. The trouble is when you lose it and the other party takes everything we did, and we live now since the 1990s through a time where we havent had a stable Majority Party<\/a> in congress which itself is pretty unusual. Both parties always think next time are going to win everything, so dont compromise now. Just wait until our people get in and then we will be able to do everything we want. It never works that way. Congress basically always sit around waiting for the next election when we will really be able to finally do our work. Accepting the fact that ultimately the people you dont like are not going away is the beginning of a Civil Democratic<\/a> politics. Our politics now is premised on the idea that maybe next time the people we dont like well just go away. Thats how we approach every election cycle, and both parties do this. Its just bonkers. Its completely disconnected from any understanding of what American Life<\/a> looks like right now which is a very divided society that needs help come together. I think a set of congressional reforms that try to address itself to that need would try to force a less majoritarian and more accommodative congress. I would not get rid of the filibuster. I would buy threat have filibuster in the house and get rid of the one in the senate because it really does force you to have more than narrow majorities to get anything significant done. Those kinds of changes that break down the big two were just have these two parties that each hopes next time it will win everything, and instead try to create some dynamic coalitions that change over time that reflect a little more of the actual quite complicated Political Society<\/a> that we live in, that might require some electoral reforms. It would require some Structural Reforms<\/a> of congress, reempowering the committees. I think the power is much too centralized in the leadership now. All these things were done for a reason but we have to see that this is a moment when the institution is not functioning, and as happened in the the 194, as happened in the 1970s Congress Needs<\/a> to take itself by the arms and make a change. Members are not there. Those 12 members of that committee, those are basically the only 12 people in the house who want to do anything right now. There are maybe ten senators between the two parties who are really interested in structural reform. Getting more of them interested is absolutely essential to anything happening that helps it worked out. Well, i think thats it. Thank you very much. [applause] we are going of the signing appeared this table and the books are available at the registers. If you could fold up your chairs and bring them against something solid, that would be fantastic. Thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] okay. Hello, everyone. We are about to get started so if you could please take a seat. All right. Thank you. Good evening and welcome to greenlight bookstore. Were excited to host and nights event with charlotte alter present her new book the ones weve been waiting for how a new generation of leaders will transform america. She will be talking with jazmine hughes. Please turn off or start your cell phone. Books are present at the regist","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia802907.us.archive.org\/24\/items\/CSPAN2_20200315_103100_Yuval_Levin_A_Time_to_Build\/CSPAN2_20200315_103100_Yuval_Levin_A_Time_to_Build.thumbs\/CSPAN2_20200315_103100_Yuval_Levin_A_Time_to_Build_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240716T12:35:10+00:00"}