And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

Welcome back to Conversations,

and I'm joined again by my colleague at the Late Lamented Weekly Standard.

Andrew Ferguson, author of so many excellent articles, which

you can still read, luckily in the archives, weekly standard.com, some of which were collected,

including articles you did earlier in your fine book,

Fool's names, Fool's Faces.

That's right.

And then the great book on Lincoln, Land of Lincoln,

and Crazy You, your tribute to our excellent institutions.

A love letter to higher education. Yeah, so many of your pieces

are love letters to your subjects, you know. Anyway, you should certainly all read Angie's work,

but here we're going to talk about the state of our culture.

It's probably a combination of it's crazier and worse saner or it's dumber and we're wiser.

Although I doubt that very much actually at least I'm that much wiser. Although I doubt that very much, actually, at least I'm that much wiser.

To use the word, I hate the parameters of everything has changed and what's permissible, what's understood as commonplace,

what's considered extraordinary, what's out of bounds, what's mandatory,

obligatory, mandatory, so many things are simply a matter of etiquette now that never would have been before

and a lot of matters of etiquette from 30 years ago are now considered offensive to one degree or another.

The great change has been what was in train by the time we came here in Washington

is the rise of identity politics which has filled a bunch of lots of different kinds of vacuums intellectually, I think,

and sort of substituted for a politics that was grounded more in, let's say,

...