Weak Institutions Make a Sad Country
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2021
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yuval Levin thinks our sclerotic government and alienated culture trace back to anemic, declining institutions. As Congress, the press, and think tanks all lose esprit de corps, and turn into platforms for individual self promotion, gridlock and disgust ensue. He's the author of "A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream." He joins the show to discuss.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. |
| 0:13.2 | I'm your host, Andrew Heaton. |
| 0:16.2 | We're still piecing together last week's riot at the Capitol, |
| 0:20.4 | and a lot of media attention goes one of two ways. |
| 0:23.0 | Okay, that was bad, but Antifa and Black Lives Matter, |
| 0:28.5 | they were really bad and you guys totally ignored their antics or |
| 0:34.0 | Hey, how come the cops didn't pepper spray the Viking dude or shoot more of the protesters? |
| 0:39.0 | Cops were way harder on Black Lives Matter |
| 0:42.0 | hypocrisy. |
| 0:43.6 | And then both sides go back to this very familiar, well-worn territory of arguing about |
| 0:48.6 | which of the two teams is good and which of the two teams is bad because a significant |
| 0:52.2 | amount of people in our country can literally only understand things through the prism of red team versus blue team. |
| 0:59.0 | Well I want to go deeper than that. The question we should be asking ourselves is how did this happen? How do we |
| 1:07.1 | address the underlying problems in our culture and government which are leading to violence |
| 1:12.1 | and riots. |
| 1:13.0 | And I don't think the answer to that is one team just has to defeat the other team in every election, |
| 1:18.0 | local, state, and national for all time and forever. |
| 1:20.0 | I don't think that's the answer. |
| 1:22.0 | We have to be smarter than that, which is why this year |
| 1:25.0 | I'm going to bring on several big thinkers to ponder just that. What are the deep |
| 1:29.7 | underlying causes of our political dysfunction. |
| 1:33.4 | And how do we address that? |
... |
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