Our speaker todd are today is you val levin. Its a privilege to introduce yuval today. He is a mentor to younger scholarships and all you need to know about yuval is that he has the wisdom not to use twitter. I should say more than the doesnt tweet, but more relevant today, yuval is better than anyone in america at defining what conservatism means, showing its relevant to modern society, and applying its principles to the challenges of today. Now he has written a book doing just that the fractured republic renewing americas social contract in the age of individualism. I think this book is an extraordinary accomplishment just as a diagnosis of our societys economic, cultural, and political maladies. Not since myron have we had such a thoughtle account of changes in society and the ultimate consequences of. The. But even more notably he didnt stop there. And for me the most important and maybe overlooked message of the book is the importance of presenting a positive vision for americas future. It brought me back to my former career as management consultant, and i you forgive me of consult tenant speak id like to quote something written by my form el colleagues. People get excited by imagining themselves on the beach or ski slope, not by reading the travel itinerary. Effective change requires leaders who can inspire people and provide them with the internal compass to align their scent behaviors, decisions and actions. This vision often works more through metaphors and stories than facts and emphasizes the destination as well as the journey. Successful change begins by asking, what is our beach . So maybe that sounds obvious but i have found it is universally ignored in business and politics. We have no shortage of writers telling us what is wrong, how great things used to be, why things used to work. Fewer but some focus on legislative reforms that might help going forward. I like to count myself in that last group and i think that work is important, but even for me, you yuvalys message was wakeup cal. And yuval forces everyone to think about the beach and provide a compelling one of his own. Many people will disagree with his particular vision, but i really believe he will force more of the debate to occur on those terms, and and that america will be better for it. So here to tell you more, you val levin. J yuval levin. [applause] thank you very much for that. I appreciate it enormously. The thought i would be a mentor to you is both scary and wonderful so i appreciate it. And thank you especially to the Manhattan Institute for inviting me to talk to you, for bringing you together and for offering you do. Aim a grateful consumer of so much of what m. I. Does, both in publishing anyone you let me publish in National Affairs and read youth publish and learning from it. Ive never before thought of what im doing is describing a beach, and from now on i will. Thank you. That said im going to start with something a little belt more depressing than a beach, alas. Will speak and give you an everview what the book is, and what it has to say, and then hear what youre interested in and what youre think can about and what you and what you take away from what im trying to offer. Ill start where the book starts, which is with the simple fact that american politics today, and in some respects american society, is drowning in a kind of frustration or at least anxiety. Were living through what seems to be a very uneasy time. Thats reflected in the tone and the tenor of our debate, in the kinds of candidates that are arising and appealing to voters and the sorts of concerns you hear people expressing. If you listen to our political conversations at this point you have to conclude that america is deeply frustrated. At first glance its not particularly hard to say why we should be frustrated. Its not that hard to explain the attitude. For one thing our economy has been very sluggish since the 21st century began and not only during the Great Recession or after it. The strongest year of Economic Performance in this century was 12 years ago, your, 2004, and that year we saw growth barely reach the average of the prior four decades, and the sluggishness of the economy leaves people feeling like theyre running in place, which i certainly part of the frustration that people are feeling. At the same time the century began with the worst terrorist attack in our countrys history and has left us with a sense, which has not changed or vetted, that the hope we midnight have had for a somewhat peaceful post cold war order in the 90s has been shattered out. Partisan politics has been very polarized and intensely divisive. Our cultural battle about very sensitive subjects, from stem cells to marriage and sexuality to religious liberty to National Identity have been fought at other fevered pitch that leaves everyone feel lying theyre bee sieged and offended at the same time and key indicators that cross the lines between politics and economics and cultural, family breakdown and inequality hayes pointed in the wrong direction for a long time and stood in the way of mobility and of the american dream. So the opening years of the 1st century have given americans a lot of reason to worry. But theres also plainly been more to the frustration of this time than just the straightforward response to circumstances. Our problems are very real but the way that we talk about them is such disconnected from often disconnected from reality so the kinds of doeses and prescriptions people offer us seem only to contribute to the kind of disorientation that so defines our public life. And when you listen carefully to what is being said in politics you realize its disconnected in a particular way. Our way of talking about our problems now is dominated by nostalgia, by powerful and widely shared sense that our country has lost ground, that we have fallen far and fast from a peak that a lot of americans can still remember. Ill give you an example that i think will strike you as very familiar, not because you have heard this particular line before, but because you hear it all the time. How often have you heard a politician in last few years Say Something like this. I will wrote a brief paragraph. Many peep watch canning tonight can remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up a nearby factory or business. You didnt always need a degree. Your competition was limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you would have a job for life with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasionol promotion. Maybe even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed and for many the change has been painful. End quote. That happens to be president obama in the state of the Union Address a couple years ago but could be any politician in either party. With a little bit more emphasis on the cultural cohesion of that time that everyone so misses, it might have been a republican. Might have been mitt romney in the last election, any one of the candidate in this election, with more explicit emphasis on low inequality could have been hillary clinton, could have been elizabeth warren, often is, if with poorer grammar and more anger could have been donald trump. Calling back globalization and trade and recovering what we lost. America isnt what it used to. We thats the theme of contemporary american politics and its speaks to a pock action site that often comes down too a question that is asked in anguish. What has happened to our country . And you know, its not a bad question. Something big and significant certainly has happened to our country. And its less cartoonish forms the nostalgia we see in politic is understandable. The america that our existed and wistful politics m mys, the nation as it remerged from the second world war, great depression, and evolved, what exception sigh unified and cohesive. It hatted first amazing confidence in big institutions, Big Government and big labor and big business, managing the nation together in and meeting its needs. That confidence is just stunning when you look at what people were saying and thinking thinkin midCentury America from our vantage point. Americas cultural life in midcenter was not much less consolidated. Was dominate bade broad traditionalist moral consensus, religious attendance was at a peak. Families strongbirth rights hey, divorce rates low, and in the wake of a war in which most of its competitors literally burned each others economies to at the ground the United States dominated the World Economy which for a while allowed it to offer Economic Opportunities to all kinds of workers with all kinds of skill levels. But almost immediately after the war, that consolidated nation started a long process of unwinding. Of fragmenting. Over the subsequent decade the cultural labellized and diversified as struggles against racism coincided with a massive increase in immigration, its important to recognize the lat cher we dont think about the scale of it quite enough. Because of immigration restrictions that have been enacted in the 1920s, midCentury America had incredibly low level of Cultural Diversity until those restrictions were lifted in the mid1960s. In the 1970 census the percentage of People Living in america who had been born abroad was at an alltime low of 4. 5 . Today its back near an alltime high of almost 20 . That is certainly part of what happened to tower country. Meanwhile, some key parts of the economy, some were deregulated, to keep up with rising competitors and 0 our labor market was forced by the pressures of globalization to specialize in higher skill work that dim mingered opportunities for some americans with lower levels of education, and in politics, a very unusual midcentury elite consensus on some important issues gave way we the 70s to new divisions that have only been getting sharper since in one area after another, america in the immediate post war years was a mod of consolidation and consensus, but through the following decade that consensus fractured. By the end of the 20th 20th century, the fracturing of consensus grew from diffusion into polarization, of political views, of Economic Opportunities, of incomes of family pattern, ways of life. We have grown less conformist but more fragmented. More diverse but less unified. More dynamic but less secure. And all of this has minute gains for america which we shouldnt overlook in prosperity, personal liberty and Cultural Diversity and Technological Progress and just in options and choices in every part of life. But over time its also meant a loss of faith in institutions. A loss of social order and structure. A loss of National Cohesion or lot of security and stability for a lot of workers. A lot of cultural and political consensus. And those losses have piled up in ways that now often seem to overwhelm the gains and that have made our 21st century politics distinctly backward looking and unhappy. Consecutives and liberals emphasize different facets of these changes. Liberals treasure the social liberation, the greg well tyler do is very to but to lament the economic dislocation, the loss of social solidarity, the rise in inequality, conservatives celebrate the economic liberalization, but lament the moral disorder, the breakdown of families and other institutions. The trouble is these changes are all tied together. The liberalization that the left celebrates is the fragmentation that the right laments and vice versa. That set of forces liberalizing and fragmenting, diversifying and fracturing, are all functions to the driving force of American Police officer since the end of the second world war, individualism in very broad terms the first hall of the 20th century through the soaked world would was an age of growing consolidation and cohesion in american life, as our economy industrialized, the government grew more centralized, the culture became aggregated through truly mass media, and National Identity and cohesion often were valued above individuality and diversity in those years a great many of the most powerful forces in our country were pushing every american to become more like everyone else. And the country that emerged from world war ii was therefore highly incredibly exceptionally cohesive. The second half of the 240th 240th century, and these early decade of the 21st century have marked on age of agreeing deconsolidation as the culture became diverse, the economy gradually diversified and some respects deregulated and individualism and personal identity have tom to be held up bon cop formity or national unity. And these years lot of the most powerful forces in our country have driven people not to be more like everyone else but have driven each of to us be more like himself or herself. Mid20th Century America, especially. The 1950s and 60s stood between the two dish distinguishable periods and for a time they were able to keep one foot in each, combining dinism with cohesion, to an extraordinary degree. That kind of straddling of cohesion and diffusion, unity and diversity, was a wonder to behold. Its not surprising we miss that time. It offered us a stable backdrop for different kind of libballization, be it cultural liberation or freer economics but that liberalization now has done itself work and our country, our society, is its result. Were a highly individualistic, diverse, fragmented country, economic clerks politically, and culturally, and none of that is about to be undone. So were going to have to solve the problems we have as that kind of society. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are functionses 0 the path we have traveled together and will now have to draw on the strengths to address the weaknesses. This in one important sense is what has happened to our country. Its the essential challenge of the politics of 21st Century America, how to use the advantages of a diverse Dynamic Society to address the disadvantages of a fractured and insecure society. But if that doesnt sound like the question that our politics is asking itself now, its because it isnt. Our political culture has not been very good at grasping either the challenges we face or the strength we have in facing them. Its instead been overwhelmedded by nose stall. By design to reverse the process of liberalization and diffusion that has transportation forward our society, and whether in economic terms for the left or in cultural terms for the right to recrate a consolidated centralized consensusdriven society that we were not all that long ago. The first step toward a constructive 21st Center Politics would have to be to see that the that kind of reversal is not an option and we wouldnt want to do it anyway. Instead we have to think about how to address the alcohol of dissolution and diffusion, challenges look the breakdown of the family, the loss of worker security, growing polarization, by making the most of strengths like diversity, like dynamism, like specializeddation, that question could help to point the way towards the next set of constructive political and policy debates. Not this. Apparently, but when are politics is ready to face reality. How do we use our fragmentation as a strength . For all of our troubles in this Election Year, conservatives ultimately are actually uniquely well positioned to offer a plausible sit of answers. Using that diversification would require approach to government that empowers problem solvers throughout our society rather than hope that just one in washington could get things right. It means bringing to Public Policy the kind of disperse e burrs evidence imkennedyam approach to progress that you increasing he see in every other part over american life, an approach that solves problems by giving people options and letting their choices drive the process. That vision of problem solving is not what the social democratic ideal of the left looks like. That idea looks more like the Old Industrial economy but this more distributed decentralized is problem solving what what the conservatives have to off. How logic of federal recallism elm bo i bodied in our constitutional order, the lodge skiff offsub saidairity. Its how a revitalized controversy tim could be a tool of moored concernization and revival. That kind of approach is what conservatives hey propose inside some policy arenas where we or you or the Manhattan Institute have been most active. Thats what School Choice looks like as opposed to centralized mod of Public School stilled. The what the conservative approach to health care looks like what conservative ideas on welfare or higher outside caution look like. Now, as those kinds of examples would suggest this bottom, up approach has been championed by conservatives in some areas to a long time. Though with limited success against a very entrenched progressive welfare state. But as the old progressive model plain live exhausts itself and our politics of midcentury not stall gentleman is inadequate the time is ripe for gnaw conservative approach to make its case more boltly, both in familiar arenas and in new ones. That kind of modernized conservatism would also have a lot to offer our troubled cultural debate. The fragmentation of our society is an enormous challenge for social conservatives who over the past half century have frequently been able to imagine that they represented a kind of moral consensus that they were a moral majority, defending commonly held views from a tiny but very aggressive liberal minority. That consensus was always shakier than it seemed and depended on the support of loosely affiliated moral and religious traditionalist and as every National Consensus ick weakened this moral ma j. Is unsustainable. The lucilia physicalitied traditional lists have become unaffiliated and social conservatives need to get used to being a minority in a fractured country in that kind of society, moral extra differencal lists would be wise to emphasis building cohesive and attract tub subculture rather than struggle for dominance of the weakened inst