James Davison Hunter is Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at University of Virginia, where he also directs the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His books include

culture wars and science and the good. His new book, many other books, one should say a long and

distinguished career, his new book is democracy and solidarity on the cultural roots of America's political crisis. That's our topic

today. Welcome, Professor Hunter. Thanks very much, Mark. Pleasure to be here. You begin with

the full general statement. Democracy in America is in crisis. Do you want to begin with just a broad description of some of the general

symptoms of that crisis? Well, I think the crisis is pretty apparent to everyone, and I think

it mainly manifests itself in the disfunctions of government, the almost impossibility to govern in ways that are coherent,

that are ethically coherent, not just politically coherent, but ethically coherent, and oriented toward

building a society that actually lives up to its own ideals.

But again, I think for most of us, it just manifests itself in the rancor, the contempt,

the animosity that we see on different sides of the political divide.

And that in itself is enough to lay the political divide.

And that in itself is enough to lay the groundwork for dysfunction.

Yeah.

When in your book after laying out where we are, you say that people in charge decision makers, people who run institutions, really try, they do try to address these problems, but the dominant prescriptions come down to, well, if we're only a little smarter at what we do, if we don't try a little harder at what we've been doing to bolster ourselves and our institutions, then we can fix things.

That the remedy, the remedy is just doing better than done before.

And you say, that's sort of tinkering with, you fixing fixing that's not going to do it is it

yeah no i think that the there is this tendency among um certainly the political class but i also

think within the media itself and that percolates into the consciousness of most Americans that the problem

with democracy is is democracy itself. It's somehow not, the mechanics of democracy are just

not working well. So we just need to tinker with the laws surrounding access to voting machines, the voting machines themselves, problems of

gerrymandering and so on. If we can just fix these things, we can fix the crisis itself.

...