This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 8th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

In his new book, Alienated America, Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.

Author Tim Carney takes a look at some of America's contemporary challenges and comes away

with a case for decentralization of state authority and a strong focus on the lesser

appreciated benefits of the institutions of family, faith, and

community.

We spoke this week.

What did the 2016 election reveal?

I mean, what did it tell us in a fundamental way that we may have thought was there, but not really a serious issue?

And what did, how did the 2016 election refocus a lot of priorities in America?

The main thing that it drove home, it brought everybody's attention to the struggles of the white working class in a lot of middle America.

That this was in 2012 if you remember the postelection analysis some of the sharper ones

found it than they what they called the missing white vote people who didn't turn up and

vote who kind of were thought to be either you know were old Democrats or should be Republicans because they're

conservatives sometimes got lumped into the religious rights so that was the

most important thing I saw was that this the rural white Republican vote

wasn't a religious right vote a lot. It was often a

populist vote expressing a real frustration, a real fear, and a real anxiety.

And that that was deep and that the alliance with conservatism

to the degree it existed was pretty thin.

These weren't people who were reading our white papers from Cato and

AI. These weren't Paul Ryan aficionados. These were people who saw that

...