The Daily Signal - #416: Tim Carney on How the Loss of Communities Fueled Enthusiasm for Trump

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Why is life so tough in some parts of America? Is the American Dream still possible everywhere in the nation? What's behind the appeal of President Trump -- and socialism? Tim Carney, author of "Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse" , joins us to discuss. We also cover these stories:•Not all House Democrats are on board with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "no impeachment" directive.•Should state employees get gender transition treatments covered? That’s what at stake in a new lawsuit alleging discrimination in North Carolina. •Indiana is now letting people identify as male, female, or neither on driver’s licensesThe Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, March 13th. I'm Kate Trincoe. And I'm Daniel Davis. Well, the 2016 election, like few others, highlighted just how vast some of the differences are within this country. President Trump put himself forward as the voice of forgotten Americans, and he won. Tim Carney has a new book that takes a close look at this forgotten America, what he calls alienated America. Today, I'll sit down with him to discuss. Plus, in an explosive new set of indictments, the FBI has blown the cover.

on a potential bribery scandal, parents bribing top universities to enroll their kids. We'll unpack what that's about. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our news. Don't count on other Democrats joining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her, just say no, approach to impeachment. Pelosi told the Washington Post, I'm not for impeachment, and added, impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan,

I don't think we should go down that path because it divides the country and he's just not worth it. Representative Rashida Talib, Democrat of Michigan, said in response, per the Washington Examiner, I'm going to move forward, obviously. Speaker Pelosi and all members of leadership have always encouraged us to represent our districts. and this was something that was very important to my residence and continues to be. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, also told the examiner about Pelosi's remarks, I happen to disagree with that take.

While more countries are grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 in the wake of Sunday's fatal crash, which took the lives of 157 people in Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, South Korea, and dozens more have grounded the plane, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, once it grounded in the U.S. as well. On Tuesday, she said, quote, continuing to fly an airplane that has been involved in two fatal crashes within just six months presents an unnecessary, potentially life-threatening risk to the traveling public, end quote. That second crash took place last fall in Indonesia. Ethiopian authorities have recovered black boxes from the wreckage in Ethiopia,

which will likely shed light on what exactly happened in those final minutes. Should state employees get gender of transition treatments covered? That's what's at stake in a new lawsuit alleging discrimination in North Carolina. One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the state, Julia McEwen, a professor at North Carolina State University, said in a statement, in 2018, I was finally in a position to move forward with surgical care an important part of my transition. I did not expect I would have to raid my retirement and savings accounts for treatment prescribed by my doctors. when other state employees would be covered for the same procedures. It is demeaning and fundamentally unfair. State Treasurer Dale Falwell said in a statement per Indy Week,

until the court system a legislative body or voters tell us that we have to, when to, and how to spend taxpayers' money on gender reassignment surgery, I will not make a decision that has the potential to discriminate against those who desire other currently uncovered elective procedures. Well, the U.S. is pulling the plug on its embassy in Venezuela. The announcement came Monday night from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He tweeted, quote, The U.S. will withdraw all remaining personnel from U.S. Embassy Venezuela this week. This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy

has become a constraint on U.S. policy, end quote. The Trump administration has called for Venezuelan dictator, Nicholas Maduro to resign amid economic and political upheaval and officially recognized his opponent, Juan Guaido, as president. National Security Advisor John Bolton recently appeared on ABC's this week, where he commented on the prospects of Guido taking over. Look, I think momentum is on Guido's side. Reports in the press that stress the military hasn't shifted missed the point entirely. What's the point?

The point is that they have not sought to arrest Guaido and the National Assembly and the opposition. And I think one reason for that is that Maduro fears if he gave that order, it would not be obeyed. The fact is, and the media don't know it because people don't talk about this, there are countless conversations going on between members of the National Assembly and members of the military in Venezuela, talking about what might come, how they might move to support the opposition. Indiana is now letting people identify as male, female, or neither on driver's licenses,

with the last being identified with an X instead of an M or an F. According to the Indianapolis Star, citing the National Center for Transgender Equality, Indiana is now the sixth state with this option. Colorado, Maine, California, Oregon, Minnesota, and of course, Washington, D.C., all have a gender-neutral option available on licenses now. Well, just a day after audio surfaced of Tucker Carlson making some lewd comments over 10 years ago, Carlson defended himself and refused to apologize. Here's what he said on his Monday night show on Fox News.

The left's main goal, in case you haven't noticed, is controlling what you think. In order to do that, they have to control the information that you receive. Google and Facebook and Twitter are fully on board with that. They're happy to ban unapproved thoughts, and they don't apologize for it. They often do. So do the other cable channels and virtually every major news outlet in this country. One of the only places left in the United States where independent thoughts are allowed is right here, the opinion hours on this network. Just a few hours in a sea of television programming.

It's not much, relatively speaking. For the left, it's unacceptable. They demand total conformity. Since the day we went on the air, they've been working hard to kill this show. We haven't said much about it in public. it seemed too self-referential. The point of the show has never been us. But now it's obvious to everybody.

There's no pretending that it's not happening. It is happening. And so going forward, we'll be covering their efforts to make us be quiet. For now, though, just two points to leave you with. First, Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day. Toughness is a rare quality of a TV network, and we are grateful for that. Second, we've always apologized when we're wrong, and we'll continue to do that. That's what decent people do.

They apologize. But we will never bow to the mob, ever, no matter what. Next up, we'll have Daniels interview with Tim Carney about communities or lack thereof in America today. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? Then subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a podcast breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Well, I'm joined now in studio by Tim Carney. He is the commentary editor of the Washington Examiner and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's also author of the new book, Alienated America, Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.

Tim, thanks for being on. Thanks for having me. So, Tim, your book follows a theme that has become prominent after Trump's election in 2016. It paints a picture of really two Americas. And it's a picture that we've seen more and more. Get into some of what causes the division between the America that you describe in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a kind of, you know, upper class, upper middle class, America, and, you know, some of the other Western Pennsylvania types of America.

What is at the root of the division? At the root of the division is the institutions of civil society, which is to say the strength of community as determined by how many little platoons are there, to use Edmund Burke's term. And so this can be churches. It can be little leagues. Bowling leagues was the image. that Robert Putnam used when he wrote about this problem in bowling alone.

And the strong public schools also count. But in addition to the elites having it together, which is something Charles Murray touches on and coming apart and others, I also talk about the strong religious communities that are a lot more middle class that have the same sort of good outcomes. As far as fewer out of wedlock births, less drug addiction, less high school dropouts, all of those things happen not only in the elite communities, but also in western Michigan where there's a strong Dutch reform churches, Salt Lake City with the Mormon Church. So these two very different types of places, liberal elite and socially conservative built around a strong church, both have those intensely strong community institutions that produce good outcomes and sort of are the stepping stones to the good life. Yeah, and you acknowledge up front that the book is largely about President Trump's core supporters.

And you say that the 2016 election was really a referendum on whether the American dream is still alive. Yeah. So to be very precise, talking about the early primaries here. So not Hillary versus Trump, or it's a referendum on a million things. Right, right, right. I have people who voted on both sides for countless reasons. But early on, when there were 17 Republicans on that stage, you had people choosing Trump over the other 16. You had people who had never been active in politics going to a caucus in Iowa, which takes all night, going to a rally.

outside of Milwaukee, which takes all day to stand in line there. Or people had been Democrats then becoming active in Republican primary. So this was a sign of this extraordinary motivation early on to Trump in a way that wasn't just sort of a conservatism or Republican Party loyalty. And yes, that alienation was a big part of what motivated them. You saw the least of these extraordinary early Trump supporters in the places like Utah, like Western, Michigan. And you saw the most of them in places that had sort of crumbling civil society, that it was people who looked around and said, I have neighbors getting on drugs. I have

neighbors not getting married while the same people like them a generation ago would have gotten married. My community is crumbling and Washington doesn't have any solutions. And so I need somebody totally different. And a lot of them turn to Trump. So it's interesting that during that primary season, a lot of the critiques of the establishment were in terms of policy coming out of Washington, trade policy, the solution is tariffs, all sorts of economic policies. The account that you give in the book is a bit different. You can see it in retrospect, looking back on the campaign, but why is it not received as much attention as some of these other policy items? Well, again, it certainly isn't the way Donald Trump talks. He didn't walk around

saying you guys have lost your Boy Scout troops and your little leagues and that's why your lives are crumbling, even though a much more complex version of that phenomenon is at the root of it. It's a very standard thing. Alienation, one definition of it that I use throughout the book is from Robert Nisbet, and it's not only a disconnection from society, but a failure to see a point in that society. So when people end up in these stages where they're not connected to their neighbors to other people very well. They don't necessarily long for more of that connection as much as they think there's got to be some bigger solution. And Trump was a guy who in the early primaries really was

promising that, that trade policy was going to put us back in 1962. But he was skipping over the step of the thing in 1962 that these middle class places that had lots of employment, what they did with that money and with that employment was build really strong communities. We're raising a family or living your life was much easier. Yeah. Well, speaking of family in those communities, I want to read just a paragraph from the preface, actually, which really kind of sets the tone for the book. It's a very personal angle. You write about when one of your children just had a health issue, and you write Katie, I believe your wife, Katie. You say Katie had gone to a late morning mass at our parish with our oldest daughter.

When she finally looked at her phone and ran out of Mass to meet me at the urgent care center, she turned to Lucy and said, go sit with Dory, pointing to the mother of an old school friend. She'll give you a ride home after Mass. If not, somebody else will. Katie simply knew that we could count on our parish on the people in that community to help. That knowledge, the certainty that someone can help you when you need it was always there, but we hadn't noticed it until we needed it. like, this is the key part, like the health insurance that paid most of the bill, the insurance of the social networks had provided great peace of mind without ever rising to the front of our consciousness.

I want to ask you about that parallel there between kind of insurance and this kind of social, you know, social capital that you talk about throughout the rest of the book. How big of a factor really are networks, social capital compared to all the other considerations? It's everything. I mean, it's, it is your safety net. It is what makes life convenient, not having to, I mean, when you have little kids, you can't just leave your two-year-old and your four-year-old running around the house. But if you have to do something simple, say, pick up your six-year-old or run to the store or make a meeting, having to go through the process of either bringing the kids or finding a babysitter or something like that is actually a lot of work.

Even in our, you know, information technology debt, if you can just say to your neighbors, hey, I'm stepping out. Can I drop the kids off at your house? Or can you just come over and watch them for a minute? That little thing is incredibly valuable. The things we get from being enmeshed in these tight networks are things that we would pay tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for. But then on top of those things that we know we need, there is the sense of purpose,

the fact that we are needed. So much of the problem of the working class today is not just necessarily unemployment. A lot of them have jobs, but they can seem like a client. hog in a machine, and then men are increasingly not getting married, including not getting married to the mothers of their children. And so they're feeling almost unnecessary in all these aspects of our life. One thing that makes us feel very needed is belonging to something where, you know, somebody's going to walk up to and you know they're going to ask you to man the cotton candy

table at the fair or whatever it is. You're needed the more that you're in a community. And that is, it sounds cheesy, but I think that's indispensable. to people living good lives. Yeah, I mean, that kind of sense of belonging. That explains lots of people joining gangs and that sort of thing. Yeah, drugs, gangs, white nationalism, all that stuff, ISIS even. I mean, there was an interview with an ISIS bride and she said,

well, when we first showed up, we're like, wow, we're important here. And it sounds almost perverse, but that's certainly when you look at the man who killed the woman in Charlottesville, white nationalist. his life's story was a bunch of sort of nothing and nowhere that he grew up without a father. He was kind of from Kentucky, kind of from Ohio, from these sort of faceless, nameless suburbs. He no religion didn't belong to anything, but he knew he was white. He knew he was an American and somebody came by with an ideology that could explain why things weren't going better.

And boom, he joins it. People are going to join something. I hate it when people use the word tribalism as a bad word because we all need to belong to tribes. Some of these tribes are bad tribes. And some of these tribes is, you know, rooting for Ohio State or belonging to your local synagogue or just belonging to your local swim club. So a lot of these problems that you talk about run so deep to the fabric of our social life. It's hard to imagine how Washington could even bear upon that. So how does this change the policy conversation?

When we look to politicians and people running for office, how does this change what we should ask for? So the first thing is to realize exactly what you said at first. There's not big federal solutions because centralized government often crowds out these local institutions where people get meaning where they get real human level support. And so that should be rule number one. Rule number two is the government now is actually actively pushing a lot of these institutions out of the public. square, particularly religion. It was part of the Obama administration's legal arguments in Hobby Lobby that you lose your free exercise rights when you enter into commerce, at least. And then the next step would be a nonprofit as well. And so this is, and they would use the term

freedom of worship, as if our free exercise of religion was confined to observing the Sabbath and our private prayer is behind closed doors, not acknowledging that our free exercise of our religion is involvement in the public square. So we need to start. start by the government not crowding out and not chasing out the core institutions of civil society. And then I think on the state and local level, there's got to be a lot of creative policies that do make sure that local institutions are protected, at times promoted, and certainly not chased away. And that's just what I would look for. if you care about the struggling working class, you have to care about how do we get them to be surrounded more by these strong institutions. Very few policies, subsidies, anything like that is going to

help, but there will be some policy changes that will do that. And once you start surrounding them in sort of building this ecosystem around them, good outcomes will follow. You know, we've heard a lot even in recent days about increasing approval of socialism, at least the idea of it, is do you think that may stem from a misplaced desire for this kind of social solidarity? I think it does. I think a lot of people think of socialism as us all being in something together. That's not the way it manifests itself in the real world. That's elites telling the rest of us how to live and taking all our money to do it. But also there's real material needs and services and goods that a lot of us can count on our neighbors for. and a lot of young people don't have that connection.

And so they think only in terms of the individual and the state. And if they say, I as the individual can't take care of that, or even us as a family unit can't handle this, then their next step is to say the state should be providing this rather than the way, what's sort of the American tradition of saying, well, this is where we're part of a community, we put into the community, and we pull out what we need. you know, a lot of people in America, many who might consider themselves conservatives, would say, hey, look at this, look at the arc of history, things have gotten so much better, even for those who might now be considered on the lower end economically. You know, things aren't so bad. If you look at kind of numbers and economics, what would you have to say to that argument?

Life expectancy among Americans has been going down for the last few years. And that's while it's still going up among the elites. So that means that among the working class in America, there is a dramatic turn towards bad outcomes, even death. So white men in their 50s are dying at a higher rate now than any time in recent decades. That on the most material level, without me getting into questions about spirituality, I think people should go to church. I think it's really bad that they don't. You might say that's a value judgment on my part. Without getting into anything that could be called a value judgment,

there are pockets of America where life is getting nastier, more brutish, and shorter. And so that means that there's something that's off and that to just point at some aggregate good trend is inhuman. And it's ignoring the suffering that exists in real parts of America. Yeah. Your book gets into a discussion of something that I think is often missing from the, from the political conversation, which is this question of the good life, it's often assumed that we know what good is. It's prosperity. It's all of these things that we've come to appreciate because of modernity.

It seems like you're pushing back on that a little bit. Yeah, I argue that maybe the American dream and the good life is actually a parish potluck. It is actually a community Memorial Day parade. that it is actually a family supported by its neighbors. These are the things that make us happy and help us fulfill our destiny, and as well as our destiny as helping to shape the world around us. We can't just look at GDP. We can't just look at the provision of material needs.

I look at a lot of those in the book because the fact is that the more that we move away from human nature, the more we are actually going to see bad outcomes. But a lot of the way that we get to that problem where we're setting up community, setting up an economy in the wrong way is because we're just focused on things that are measurable at the top line, like a GDP and that sort of thing. But in the long run, even those measures will start to see the decay. But I'm saying we should go before those measures, go to things that are more closely related to happiness.

And I think this is not something new. This is something sort of old. going to be community, faith, family, and work that feels satisfying. Those things are the fundamental parts of the good life, and you can't pull them away and replace them either with just a booming economy or a robust social safety net. Well, the book is called Alienated America, why some places thrive while others collapse. Tim Carney, thanks for being in studio. Thank you. Do you own an Alexa? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily flash briefing. It's easy to do. Just open up your Alexa app, go to settings, and select

flash briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your flash briefing so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. So apparently not everyone got into top colleges because of their actual skills. The Justice Department is charging dozens of people over bribing and other trickery to get certain children into top universities. The Washington Post reported, quote, the alleged crimes included cheating on entrance exams, as well as bribing college officials to say certain students were coming to compete on athletic teams when those students were not, in fact, athletes, officials said. End quote. And Full House and Hallmark actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, quote, were accused of paying $500,000.

That's $500,000. In bribes, so their two daughters would be designated as recruits for the University of Southern California. crew team, even though they were not part of the team. That helped the pair get into USC, according to the complaint, end quote. Another TV actress, Felicity Huffman, was also charged. So, Daniel, do you think this speaks well of our elites? You know, the elites are going to do what they do, and of course it doesn't speak well of them. I think it speaks worse of the colleges because it's kind of their own integrity being

eroded by corruption, basically. but I can't say I'm surprised by it. I think I don't know how I, I mean, I think most people assume that these kind of elite people get their kids into colleges somehow, like there's some secure way that they do it. So I guess this is how they did it. Wow, that's very cynical. No, but like you know of these families who, you know, old money families who send their kids to Yale and that kind of stuff. And somehow their grandkids and their grandkids' children all get it. in because it's this family tradition.

I just, I think there's got to be something more to it than just the pure, you know, merit. Well, it's interesting. I mean, I'm certainly not an expert on Ivy League admissions, but from what I know it tracks with what you said that children of alumni get accepted at disproportionately high numbers. But I think it's, I think it's concerning in the sense of, oh, and I should also say, I think it's unclear what role the colleges played, like certain individuals at the colleges played roles, but it's not clear that the universities as a whole are compromised. Right.

And, of course, the case is not even happened yet. No one's defended themselves yet. We don't know what things are going to be turned up in court. The thing that bothers me about it is I think on the Supreme Court right now, I'm pretty sure all nine went to either law school or undergrad that was an Ivy League, at least before Kavanaugh, that was the case. And I forget where he went. He went to Yale.

Yeah. Both undergrad and law. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yale. And you know, you see stuff like that in finance on Wall Street. You see that in other industries. And there's definitely, you know, this preference for Ivy League students. And I think the thing that's concerning about that is basically it's not clear. If intellect doesn't get you into the IVs, if it's other things, then it shouldn't be that an Ivy League degree is to be all and end all.

Exactly. And I think that gets to the point of, it sort of highlights the role that these elite colleges play. these days, which is not simply to turn out, you know, Einstein's, although you could probably point to a lot. It's also a pretty sizable social role. Like they exist to create, to foster the elite class. Yeah. And that's why these parents prize these schools to want to send their kids to them, because they want to make sure their kids end up, you know, in the right class and the right social circles, the right jobs, that kind of thing. And, you know, we've had, We're going to have an op-ed in the next couple of days come out on this. It's definitely something that I think needs more attention because colleges look to these days by everyone as, you know, you need to go to college in order to succeed in life.

And I think more and more people are seeing that, you know what, it's kind of just like sometimes it's kind of artificial. It doesn't always reflect merit. Right. And I think what's interesting is, you know, I've heard some conservatives and I have mixed feelings about this. but they've advocated that it should be legal for employers to ask employee or prospective employees to ask applicants to take IQ tests. And that's not currently legal. But because of that not being okay, a lot of employers kind of use what college you went to in your GPA as a way to determine intelligence.

And that is flawed. I mean, you know, the other thing that I think upsets me about it is, you know, a lot of, if you don't have parents, went to an Ivy League at 17? Are you really thinking that way? And there's also a total lack of economic diversity at these schools. And that's something that's fairly underreported. But they, I think, of course I can't remember which ones. Some of them offer full rides if your parents make less than 60K a year. But there's sort of a huge gap. People, you know, whose parents make more than 60K a year, but are not millionaires. And there is not, I believe, a lot of financial aid available for them. So it essentially is a sense.

means that these Ivy Leagues are schools of the rich and a handful of, you know, low-income or lower-middle-class people who get in. They're kind of missing the big hunk of middle of America. Right. Which, you know, might explain the narrow thinking. But then also to go back to your point about the culture, you know, David Brooks made fun of this, I don't know, decades ago, about how, you know, the New York Times wedding page was mergers and acquisitions. Well, a lot of these Ivy League kids do go on to marry each other. That's fine. It's a free country.

but you see how more and more you have this class that isn't mixing with the rest and how in some ways, you know, they keep certain jobs and et cetera for themselves. You know, and it's something that's not, it's sort of out of sync with America's history because if you look at a lot of our leaders going back to the founding, a lot of our leaders rose to the top from an average family, like Abraham Lincoln, people like him, obviously Andrew Jackson, a big populist. And of course, you had other leaders like FDR and Jefferson that were kind of the landed gentry types. I was going to say FDR did not rise from nothing.

Right, right. But I just think that it's not really the traditional American mindset of a kind of permanent class that is just a ruling class. Like we've always believed that you can break into that based on your own merit and your hard work. And I just think this kind of cuts against that. Yeah. And I mean, I think the thing here is really not to get upset at the Ivy League themselves necessarily. And then also, you know, we should note that there are Asian students suing right now, alleging discrimination, racial discrimination from Harvard.

Harvard, of course, denies that, I believe. But, you know, the thing here is to me, it really comes back to employers. Like, if you are an employer who is favoring Ivy League kids, I mean, you're building up the system. So, I mean, I think it's worth thinking about. you know, are you looking at other people and are there ways that our society can encourage people to look at more people for jobs? Yeah, for sure. Well, and that's where we're going to leave it today. Thanks for much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud. And please leave us a review and a five-star rating on iTunes unless you went to an Ivy League and are not, you know, maybe a little annoyed at us right now. We'll see you again tomorrow.

You've been listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.