Jonathan Rauch, Yuval Levin, and I will be speaking at the AEI Thursday morning, December 12. The topic is “healing our political culture.”
Usually I am pretty modest about these things, but in this case I am going to guarantee that this event will be worth your attention. Make a note to watch it, or at least to check out the archive video.
For some background, you can read recent essays by me and by Jonathan. But the discussion will build from there.
With this crew, I would like to hear the answers:
1) In a competitive global economy, how do get local citizens to build and organize local institutions more? This has declined and I think specialization and competitive economy has made people less locally focused.
2) Do we exaggerate how trusting and local minded citizens were in the 1950s? If this were true why did union power hit its highpoint late 1950s? Or was it just the population was happy to survive the Great Depression and World War2.
3) If you want people pursue more solutions with charity than government, then how do you improve charities?
4) How do you convert average High School graduates to full adulthood, meaning career, marriage, and parenthood, quicker? One fundamental issue of political identity is young people are not stating their identity to career, marriage, religion and parenthood. (Remember how the Clintons moved from working on the McGovern campaign in 1972 into the Moderate political Clintons.)
Latest “Civility Poll” from Georgetown: http://politics.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Civility-Questionnaire-.pdf
97% say they are very or extremely likely to vote in 2020, which we know doesn’t come close to actual voter turnout.
77% agree somewhat or strongly that divisions are getting worse and our national dialogue is breaking down.
Questions 45 and 46 are tragi-comic when read sequentially.
From Crooked Timber – always a great source for keeping up cutting edge elite intellectual progressivism – new feats in uncharitable interpretation and justification for dismissiveness, demonization, and non-engagement: maintream right-wing positions and political ideologies as merely evolutionarily adaptive marketable cover stories for bigotryLet’s be blunt: you are a racist neo-Confederate. You can’t sell that, as such. But you can emphasize parts of it that sound kinda sorta more libertarian.
http://crookedtimber.org/2019/12/03/vavilovian-philosophical-mimicry/