Marish Ronsagger here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

My favorite philosopher Roberto Anger has this line,

are ideals are nailed to the cross of our institutions,

by which he means that any ideal you have in culture,

like America should be this way, or community or culture should be this way,

is inextricably linked with the actual designs of our concrete institutions,

our policies, our laws, the way we structure organizations.

There's no such thing as a free-floating cultural phenomenon,

or a free-floating institutional phenomenon.

The institutions flow into culture, the culture flows into institutions,

long-winded, heavy way of saying, the bowling alone phenomenon of people declining in community

is connected to the phenomenon of, you know, our institutions deciding a tundered

invest in a community, and then it flows back and forth.

Oh, it looks like people don't want to go to the outstuffs anymore,

let's stop funding the outstuffs. Oh, now there's no outstuffs,

so when I look to start joining something, I have nowhere to join,

so I don't do community, and then they're like, oh, self-fulfilling prophecy,

we don't need the outstuffs anymore, let's just extract some checks and votes

to have our people in Washington and New York do things.

And I think it's just kind of circles the drain like that.

We are taking a complete and total switch from our foreign policy coverage

on Tuesday, episode of Robert Draper on the origins of the Iraq War,

...