I'm grateful to Teresa for that lovely introduction and I'd like to thank the St. Anselm Institute, the Thomistic Institute, and the Center for Christian Studies for this invitation to come to this wonderful university and to speak to you today about Christianity and our responsibilities in the public square.

To Lisa mentioned in her introductory remarks a metaphysical consensus that seems to have eroded

or maybe even disintegrated in the last couple generations.

Father Thomas Joseph White or other outstanding Dominicans would far better address you

in that mode with respect to that need.

My vocation as a Christian thinker

is to be in the borderline between public affairs

and practical, almost, should we say, partisan politics

and reflection.

And so what I want to do today is to speak about populism, our political moment,

and try to frame it, put it in a larger frame of reference, so that we can think about it more responsibly and more intelligently,

and then respond to it in a way that is fitting given the realities that we face.

So that's the framework for this talk.

When Teresa invited me, I negotiated for the broadest possible title

for my talk because I was working on a book and on this question of what I've, it's a book

it's a book on the post-war era. And whenever I say post-war and I look around and I see young people, I have to tell them

that means post-World War II, which is a sign that an era is coming to an end when

post-war does not automatically mean post-World War II.

So it's my conviction that we're at the end of an era that a lot of our

political distempers flow from the dominance of a certain way of thinking, a certain consensus

that emerged after 1945. And so my purpose today is to say I worked on a book, I finished the draft

of the book, and what I'm going to try to give you is a sort of distillation of some of the observations that I want to, that I conclude the book with.

...