What I want to do tonight, I've written an article of published in first things under this title, but I'm not going to give you that. I'm not going to rehearse that. Instead, I want to try to give a sense of my thinking about the crisis. I'm not sure it's a crisis, but nonetheless the sort of political upheavals of our moment.

We had a meeting with some friends last night and discussing whether we should call it a crisis or not,

and there was an interesting debate about that.

But there is a

wide sense that the rules or the foundations or what I will describe tonight is the underlying

consensus in our public life is shifting, and the tectonic plates are grinding against each other

in ways that were not the case half a dozen years ago.

So my hope is tonight to give you some historical and then at the end some conceptual tools

with which to think about the political agonies of the moment.

We just had our, we had our agonies a couple weeks ago, last week, and then the week before, in having to do with this Supreme Court appointment.

And it was quite a display of, quite a display.

I don't know what it seemed like over here, but the temperature has definitely been elevated.

And I think what my, I think our job should be, we have roles to play as partisans, and that's perfectly appropriate. But I do think we also need to

think in this time and not just scream. And so my hope is, again, tonight to provide with some tools

for doing some thinking. On the plane over, I was given a copy of the Financial Times.

Though I don't regularly look at the paper, that particular paper nowadays,

there had been a time 10 or so years ago when I subscribed.

In those years, I found the editorial pages useful. I regarded the Financial Times as a reliable voice of neoliberal realism.

Less walkish in tone than sorts of things that one finds in the high-brow American press,

like the Wall Street Journal, and also less ideologically predictable.

Martin Wolf, for example, was particularly good at dispelling the free market clap trap that

prevented so many from facing up to the challenges posed by the 2008 financial crisis.

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