 Welcome to the future of democracy, a show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. To a large extent, a democracy and its institutions, the culture, norms, and structures is its institutions. It's the culture, the norms, and structures that we've built to distribute our goods in our society. Some of these goods are tangible. We rely on private enterprise, charity, and the government to distribute goods and services. Some are intangible. We rely heavily on public institutions at all levels to protect our rights and to meet our justice. Institutions embody both the moral logic of democracy, what we believe is right, and its procedural logic, the fair process for getting to the answer. This is essential in a complex world. We simply don't have the time or knowledge to do this ourselves. And we no longer have the benefit of a purely local, immediate context. We are living in a complex, interconnected world. Institutions help to make our democracy real in that world. Yet Americans have become increasingly disillusioned with our major institutions. Aside from the military and small business, most Americans give poor marks to major social, political, and economic institutions like Congress or business. And the trend over decades has been one of consistent decline. Few have thought as incisively about this decline as Yvonne Levin. Variously a scholar, policymaker, and journalist, Yvonne has been one of the leaders of the cultural and political conversation about the trajectory of American society and politics over recent decades. He recently wrote the book on institutions of time to build. I can't think of anyone better to help us unpack the state of our institutions in today's show. It's my great pleasure to welcome to the show Yvonne Levin. How are you? Doing well, thanks very much, Sam. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming. So Yvonne, let's start with the book, which came out before the present crisis, so to speak. But talk a little bit about what led you to write the book and what the main argument is. Yeah, as you say, it was before COVID, so it feels like it was written on another planet in another time. But it begins really from a sense that well before this public health crisis, we Americans were living through a kind of social crisis, a crisis that was evident in the polarization in our politics and the intensity of kind of cultural animosities in various parts of American life. Evident really in the private lives of a lot of Americans in the form of alienation and isolation, loneliness that expressed itself in a rise in suicide rates and opioid use. And the question that I began with was what really connects these different facets of the crisis, these different sets of symptoms? They're clearly linked and yet they're linked in a way that is often hard for us to see because I think they're linked by a series of failures of institutions. We have a tendency to think of our society as just one big open space full of individuals so that a social crisis would mean we just need to help people connect with each other. So we often talk about building bridges or tearing down walls. These are important things. And in some ways, of course, that is what's gone wrong. But I think it's important for us to see that just direct connectedness among individuals doesn't address the sorts of problems we have. When we do something together as Americans, we do it through the medium of an institution. And if our society is a big open space, it's not just a space filled with individuals, it's a space filled with structures of social life. And those are our institutions. They're how we do things together, the shape, the form of what we do together from institutions that are very organized and corporately defined companies or a hospital or a school to institutions that are less formal than that but no less important. The family is a core institution of any society. You can think of a profession, the rule of laws and institution, the norms and structures, the forms of what we do together. And I think a lot of the problems we have now have to do with failures of these institutions and with a decline in trust in these institutions. And the book tries to think about both of those and dig to their roots and think about where they come from. Why is trust-declining institutions? I mean, it strikes me that, you know, when you, at least sort of the conventional wisdom would be, you know, these institutions aren't all equivalent. And I think some of the frustration you see among a lot of Americans is, you know, that institution, whether it's Congress or a large corporation, it's preventing these other institutions, you know, my city government, my family from thriving. Well, we know what we need to do where we live, but there's other institutions somewhere else that aren't letting us live the way that we need to live. They aren't letting us to succeed. Is that what's going on here? Is there something different that's leading to a decline of trust in these institutions? I think that's some of what's going on. That's the nature of a certain kind of populism in our politics that says that these other forces are standing in the way or that looks at the big institutions in our society and think these are here for other people, not for me. That's a very common view across the full spectrum of American politics and cultural life now. I think that's part of what's gone wrong, but it's not only these very large institutions where our trust has been declining. The really striking thing about the decline in trust is that it is very widespread. You could find specific explanations for why Americans trust corporations less or trust the media less or trust politics less. But trust in all of these has declined very dramatically at the same time. And so there's something a little more fundamental than that going on. Some piece of that is surely about institutional competence. We just have the sense that our big institutions don't work as well as we would like or maybe as well as they used to, which I think is sometimes just a kind of pure nostalgia, but sometimes there's something to that. But I also think that there's one more factor that's especially distinct in 21st century America, which is that when we look at our institutions now, we see them less as formative of the people inside them, as shaping those people, their character, their souls, their way of behaving, and more as performative, as stages for them to stand on and perform and particularly perform a kind of part in the culture war or in politics. So that over and over, what you find in our large institutions is not people being shaped in a certain way so that you might say a profession shapes people, right? There's such a thing as a physician. There's such a thing as an accountant. And you can look at somebody behaving and say, well, that's not how a teacher should behave in this situation. That kind of formative force is a big part of why we trust institutions, why we take them seriously. But when instead we see them as just providing a platform for individuals within them to build their own audience, to build their own following, to build their own brand, then it becomes much harder to trust the institution. And in one American institution after another, I think you find people who should be working within that institution and formed by it, now instead standing on top of that institution and yelling at each other about various kinds of political and culture war issues and just using the institution as a platform so that all our institutions come to play the same role. They're all a kind of performative and commentary role and it feels like nobody's doing the work they're supposed to be doing, whether that's in Congress, whether that's in universities, whether that's in American religious life, in large corporations. And that adds to our sense that these institutions are not here for us. They're here for somebody else. And that inevitably drives the kind of alienation that we see in our society. In large part, what you described is sort of the project of the Enlightenment, which is to say that there's actually, there's a method that separates and a set of practices that separates information from real truth. And it actually takes work to apply that method. And it's actually in our interest as individuals to have institutions we can trust so that we don't have to have that knowledge and that method in every facet of life that we see as being significant for the outcomes that we care about. So are we sort of waving goodbye to that kind of, that sort of millennial achievement or are we rethinking what it will take to instantiate that spirit in a new era? How do you wrestle with that? Yeah, I think that logic is very important to the strengths of our institutions, especially professional ones. You know, you're describing in a sense the power of the scientific method or journalistic ethics or professional ethics in general, where you tell the difference between somebody who deserves your respect as an expert and somebody who's just talking based on whether they followed a reliable process that allows for some distinction between truth and falsehood. That's what a lot of our institutions enable us to do. And through that process, we come to trust the people within those institutions. I think without question, we are seeing now a kind of dereliction of that responsibility in various institutions. Some of that is politicization. So, you know, you can look at some of what's going on in the media, even in corporate America, as people just trying to play political roles instead of playing their professional roles or in American religious life, institutions that are clearly intended to shape souls and form people are instead being used as platforms for political expression to say this is where I stand, this is the team I'm on. We need platforms for political expression, but we also need these other institutions and they can't all just become that. And so I do worry, part of what that drives is a loss of confidence precisely in expertise and the idea that there actually are people who know something more than everyone else about some particular slice of reality. And through this set of institutions, we can trust them in that arena. I think we're seeing now in the course of this pandemic what happens when the country loses confidence in professionalism and in expertise. Some of it is deserved and some of it isn't. Some of it is cynicism directed against these institutions. Some of these is a failure of responsibility within the institution. But what it adds up to is in a time when we really need to know what's true and what's not, we find it very hard to know where to look. And that creates enormous problems. Well, I wanna talk a bit about the present moment because it strikes me, we're seeing in very kind of crystalline form two potent critiques of institutions. One, I'll call one from the right, this is reductionist, but kind of one from the right and one from the left. And I think the one from the right is I think the distrust of science and authority that you're seeing around, go more populist one that you're seeing around COVID. That it's about my right to wear a mask versus sort of what keeps the public healthy. I think the sort of partisan splits you're seeing and what people think of as the severity of the disease. And then on the left, I particularly kind of in the after the killing of George Floyd and the moment of racial reckoning, I think you're seeing this extreme distrust around institutions that says, yeah, they used to work better for some people. And now we are seeing unmasked the ways in which our institution and the logic of institutions was used to protect one group of people, to enable support one group of people, sometimes at the cost of others by omission, but it seems to me both have some features, both critiques have some features in common. One of them is that it strikes me that in every element of the discussion, the stakes feel ultimate. It feels like whether it's about how, defund the police or wearing a mask, somehow everything about the debate is at stake in this one decision. And it makes it hard to imagine how to rebuild trust in the face of, in the face of the public. How to rebuild trust in the face of that kind of sentiment, the really associating, attributing animus to the other side in those moments. How do you think about that? I think these two tendencies have a lot in common. They're both forms of the general sense that institutions exist for the benefit of insiders, for the benefit of the people within them and therefore can't be trusted with playing a role that benefits the larger society. The politicization of various kinds of plainly empirical scientific questions around COVID-19 is a very powerful example of that. Some of that has been on the right and some of that has been on the left, where in both cases you see people attaching their identity in a very intense way to what is inherently an answer to an empirical question that is subject to revision over time, right? We're dealing with something that is new in the world. We're learning about it. And yet people insist that the answer they're on to now is right. And if you say that it's not, then you're playing a political game. If you say this drug doesn't work, then that's just politics. If you insist on wearing a mask or on not wearing a mask, this suddenly becomes a question of identity, a question of what team you belong to rather than a question of how we understand reality, the objective reality that we're all confronting. And in this case, a virus that just doesn't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. And we have to be able to not care either when we deal with it. And we're finding it extremely difficult to do that. And similarly, when you look at the responses to the horrible murder of George Floyd and what has followed in its wake, people fall into teams fairly quickly rather than trying to deal with what is inherently a complicated reality. Again, a situation where there are different pressures to consider and where it would make much more sense to try to think about how to balance goods. We instead choose teams, pair off, and it's yes or no, it's all or nothing. And I think that then contributes to, as you say, the kind of apocalyptic sense that accompanies all these debates that if this doesn't go our way, then it's all over. And I think in the absence of functional institutions, which in our democracy are particularly institutions that work to channel disagreements in an ongoing way. In the absence of that, it can feel like every question is the ultimate question. And our politics now constantly feels that way. As if not only if we lose this election, though that too, but if we lose this debate, then we've gone over the abyss and it's all over. What we're missing there are institutions that allow disagreements to endure and to gradually be channeled. I think the core institution of that sort in our system is Congress. And the dysfunction of Congress is at the center of a lot of the dysfunction of our political culture more generally, not only our explicit constitutional system, but the culture of politics in general suffers terribly from the absence of an institution that takes differences and compels accommodation. And so as Congress has transformed also into basically a platform for political commentary, that's what most members seem to think their job is supposed to be. We're left with nowhere to resolve these differences and that shows. But it strikes me too. I mean, we're getting a lot of questions in the chat about the role of political parties and leaders. I mean, it strikes me that nuance matters. These two cases are really good examples where nuance really matters. In the example of COVID, we need to reinvigorate public health institutions. The answer is to reinvigorate them. In the case of police violence, the answer may be complex, but we clearly need to challenge the integrity of the status quo. And COVID may not discriminate on the basis of your identity, but police violence does discriminate on the basis of your identity. And it strikes me leadership is important there for a couple of reasons. One is helping us to sort out moral warrants, to actually help us to say, your freedom is not at stake in being asked to wear a mask. Some things may be at stake in choices that we are making about, does the economy stay open or closed or to what extent that we really need to debate about. And you also need, and similarly on the question of police accountability, you need leaders to help you figure out where is the real moral question here versus the substantive question then of what do we do next, which may not be defunding the police, may not be changing anything about the structure of the police it may have to do with qualified immunity reform or any number of areas where we could have a reasonable policy debate about this. The other thing that strikes me that leaders need to do is to help you weigh evidence and to help you, again, going back to the standards of professions to adopt and embody a professional standard that helps you to determine what evidence you should be focusing on in both of these cases because that's likely to help you figure out what solution will be effective. How do you, what kind of grades do you give our political leaders today and how are they contributing to the problem and what could they be doing to solve it? Well, I think leadership interacts with this idea of institutions in a very particular way. So institutional roles give leaders a particular job to do, not a general job of just being another person that offers commentary about politics which is what our president now mostly does which is what a lot of members of Congress do but a particular job with specific responsibilities. And that enables leaders to be trusted more because they operate with a sense of what the limit of their responsibility is but also of what the extent of it is and it enables the public to have a little better sense of how to hold them accountable. I think we find it very difficult now to hold our political leaders accountable when it seems like they are leaders of a political movement and not leaders of governing institutions. And so I think there's an enormously important constraining role that institutional responsibility plays on what leaders do. And look, how would I grade them? There's no getting around the fact that our leaders have not fared well in 2020 by any of the measures we're talking about. And I think some of the reason for that has to do with this transformation of the sense of their role to a very performative idea of what politics is for. Members of Congress have basically come to think or at least watching them, it would seem so that their job is to observe the president and offer comment on how he's doing his job. And both parties function this way. When in fact, their job is to create the frameworks for government to function in a situation like this, to look forward, think about problems to be faced and think about what resources are needed, what kinds of arrangements need to be created. There's very little of that going on, too little. Congress has responded, I think in some effective ways when it comes to the specific kind of relief legislation that we saw enacted earlier in the spring, but we've already seen it now fall back into its partisan molds and there's clearly additional relief needed and it's not coming I think for a lot of reasons that have to do exactly with these kinds of failures. The president, I mean, I used to work for a president and the job is really hard. It is very difficult to be president of the United States in a crisis like this, but the president is failing to a much greater degree than that difficulty would justify because I think he doesn't have a clear picture of exactly what his job is supposed to be. In a situation like this, his job is to allocate resources, his job is to set priorities, his job is to communicate to the public the difficulty of the challenge and the steps that are being taken to address it. None of that has happened and living in the news cycle moment to moment trying to fight with the voices he hears on cable news is just not a way to lead. And I think part of the reason that's happening is this lack of the sense of where in the interlocking set of institutions of our politics the president is supposed to fall. President Trump has just never had a clear idea of that and that in a crisis becomes a very real problem. Do you, you know, one of the questions we have in the chat is about the role of regular people of individuals. And it strikes me, another interesting feature of these crises, these kind of twin crises is they certainly have their structural features but unlike say the kind of like pure coordination challenges like climate change, you can take symbolic action but this is really a coordination problem. You know, people certainly feel like I have a responsibility. I have a responsibility around my behavior when it comes to COVID, do I wear a mask? Do I send my kid to school? Do I go to work? If I'm allowed to go to work, do I have to go to work? You know, I think people in employment situation, you know, anyone who's in management right now is having a lot of discussions about what's the right thing to do for our staff and then certainly around racial reckoning. I mean, I think a lot of organizations, I think this has been a feature of a lot of organizations right now is to have kind of a revolution from below with a lot of employees in those organizations asking what does it mean for us as an institution but what do I need to do as an individual who has a job and a family and participates in these institutions? What's my responsibility? What's my role? What would you, what do you think about in the context of how regular people respond to this malaise? I think it's an enormously important question in this context and you know, the book, a book like this can easily end with a kind of policy agenda where it just happens to turn out that the solutions to the problems or whatever the author has always thought should happen in our politics. This book doesn't end that way but rather ends with a call for a kind of change of attitude that I think certainly needs to encompass some of our leaders but needs to start with each of us where the first step is really asking the great unasked question in American life now which is exactly given my role here, how should I behave? Whether that is as a president or a member of Congress or whether it is as an employee or an employer or as a pastor or a congregant or a teacher or a parent or a neighbor, what's my role? Not just what do I want? Not just what would I like to see but what is my role and responsibility? I think in some ways this crisis has forced us to ask that and that's been constructive. I do think a lot more of us are finding ourselves asking that kind of question. What's the responsible thing to do here? Whether that's just as individuals or in the institutions that we're part of, what do we owe our employees? What do we owe on another? What's the best way to act responsibly here? And similarly in response to the tensions that have arisen after the George Floyd murder, I think some of those have been performative. Some people have asked themselves, how do I show that I'm on the right side? But a lot of people have asked, what do I do? What should I be doing here? And within a lot of institutions, people have asked not only how do we display our solidarity, but how do we do things differently? What responsibility do we have? That I think is the right question and the essential question. I would bet that the people who most drive you crazy in American life now are people who seem to just fail to ask that question when they obviously should. And that the people who we most respect today are people who seem to ask that question constantly. What's my responsibility in this situation given the role that I have in relation to other people? That's what elevating the idea of institutions can help us to see about the problem we have today. And I think it's where you would begin. It's not an alternative to institutional reform, but I do think that it's a prerequisite to institutional reform because for any meaningful reform to happen, the people within our institutions have to see that we're part of the problem and the change is gonna have to start with us. Who do we turn to? You know, given that so many of our leaders, their qualification is that they're very effective at the performative aspects of institutional participation. Who do I mean, you know, I don't even trust my own instincts. I would, you know, you could make a case that some of the lionization of Anthony Fauci is what you're describing, you know, that there is a real concerted effort to talk about the whole arc of his career, you know, ways he's changed. I mean, there's a lot of discussion about his role around AIDS and the way his mind changed over time and he changed the role of the government. There's a lot of discussion about his willingness to quote unquote tell the truth, but I think there's also a lot of fetishism around his sort of oppositional role and which he may or may not be seeking, but that's part of what's alluring. I mean, I'm not asking you to comment today at the Fauci, but I'm just trying to think who's being appropriately pointed to that we can learn from that we should learn from. Yeah, it's an enormous challenge because the people who are most prominent in our political culture are the people who are the best performers and so it is hard to find models. I do think Fauci is one. I got to know him pretty well in the Bush years and I think he's an enormously impressive and deeply respectable guy who really does think of himself as having a professional obligation and he's not fundamentally a performer even though he's been drawn into some of that culture of performance around Trump and the rest of it. I think we need to look for people like that within our various institutions and try to elevate them and try to reward them and try to offer reward for taking your job seriously. That's hard to do, but it's not impossible and in our political system we as voters need to look for ways to both reward and demand that kind of seriousness but it's easier to do where we are than it is to change these large, broad national institutions and we have to think about ourselves and the people around us and whether what we're doing is ultimately trying to communicate and send a message or is what we're doing playing the role we are assigned within the institution that we find ourselves in. I really do think it has to begin with ourselves if change is gonna happen because to stand around with our arms folded and say we need more people to behave properly that's just not gonna get you very far and even just to express disapproval you know, we're very good at that. I mean, that is the performative virtue that we've honed, right? So everybody can get on Twitter and Facebook and tell the world what they don't like. The fact is you haven't really achieved anything when you've done that. It might feel good for a second but it's really by changing the institutions you're part of person by person starting with yourself that you can change this overall dynamic, I think. Well, I mean, I do think there's, I wanna talk about the internet before we go we're getting questions about it, you've raised it. But I guess I can't sort of leave this point. I mean, I do think picking up on some strands of thought I think there is something about the act of critique that can be more productive than the way that it's being deployed today, right? So I mean, I think for example, just the case I would make, you know, around something like Green New Deal or Defund the Polices, these are what these are really meant to be, I would argue, are forms of critique in the technical sense. They are meant to enable us to question the contours of the current paradigm to contemplate radical possibilities not necessarily as a road only to revolution but rather to open up roads of negotiation within institutions. If you can't even imagine a carbon neutral economy by 2030 or you can't imagine radically rethinking the role of the police, it's very hard to do any kind of rethinking any kind of really deep thinking about how many responsibilities have we layered onto the police that they're not qualified to take on that exacerbate exactly the things that we're restraining. And now, I don't think these tools are being deployed this way, probably for some of the reasons that you're describing, but there is a version of critique that I think could be part of what our responsibility is, right? I think precisely it has to be attached to a sense of what comes then, what happens after that. And that requires you to think in more practical, pragmatic, institutional terms about if you get people's attention and get them to see that something's wrong, what do you then get them to do? And we don't think that through quite enough. Well, all of us have turned ourselves into dogs chasing cars. And what are we gonna do when we catch the car? The dogs got no plan, I assure you that. And we find over and over that as some of these movements succeed, when they actually find themselves in a position of power over what they've been critiquing, they don't have enough to say or do. I think there's some promise on the police reform front that people have actually thought for decades about how to reform the police. And if we're now creating a situation where there'll be an opportunity for that, then there are ideas there that could be practical, that could actually be done. And not just in the broad kind of defund sense, but how do you actually change things in ways that might truly happen? There's not enough of that happening in our political life where we offer critiques as if they will never matter. And all there is to ever do is just talk and talk and talk. But the fact is you have to offer an alternative. And the alternative has to itself be practical, be capable of being implemented. And that does require us to think in more institutional terms. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot because there's been a lot of in the sort of very appropriate commemoration of John Lewis and his career, there's been a lot of fixation in part because of the documentary on the kind of, the get into good trouble exhortation. I've been thinking a lot about what is good trouble? And we interpret it, I think, to sort of mean to agitate, to stand up for what we believe in. He must mean that too. But I think he's also saying something really powerful about the movements that he's been a part of that he's led, which is so much of the mainline civil rights movement was about aligning authority with legitimacy and unmasking illegitimate authority, not abandoning authority altogether. And I sort of, I take the exhortation in the way that I take the exhortation of your book, which is look for the failure of the institution and get into trouble there. Or get into trouble around making the institution work and if the institution can't work, then get into trouble around what the reimagined or different institution ought to be. And we can have disagreement about that, but at least that's a form of common commitment. That's right. There's so much of the power of the civil rights movement was in its critique, of course, but it was also connected to an alternative, to a vision of what would be better. That was pretty practical, that involved legislative changes, that involved judicial changes, that involved cultural changes, where people had a sense of what they were trying to do if they succeeded in getting the country to see the justice of their cause, what would they do? And I think that's missing from a lot of our political and social movements now. Right. And also the exhortation, right. I mean, there was a reason we still read letter from a Birmingham jail. It's because it's an articulation of the responsibility, largely of a clerical set of institutional roles around creating crisis in furtherance of actually institutional integrity. So we have talked about the internet. I mean, the easy question is, so is the internet to blame for all this or a lot of it? And you get to just give a percent. But how do you think about the role of technology? You mentioned it. It's easy to be kind of an empty critic, to get empty calories. How do you think about this? Well, I would start from the premise that our technologies do what we want them to do. So the problem isn't fundamentally technological. These tools are here because they enable us to do something we want to do. And the problem is that that's what we want to do. And yet these tools certainly also exacerbate the problem because they make it so much easier for us to think of our lives in performative terms. If you think about what happens on social media, it really is a kind of miniature celebrity where we each become our own paparazzi hounding ourselves for photographs. And we live our lives thinking, what would this look like if I posted it? That does encourage a certain kind of mindset that takes you out of the practical and into the performative. And I think there's no question that at least at this point, the internet and social media have done that. Now I say at this point because I think we're early in this age and there is enormous potential in the internet and the social media to allow us to engage, to allow us to connect, to allow us to work together to serve as supplements to our social lives rather than as substitutes. And I would say it even seems to me that in some ways we're getting better at using these tools. I run a little policy magazine called National Affairs and we hire somebody out of college every year as an assistant editor. And I would say even in the 10 years that I've been doing that, I've found that students are much better now at thinking about what they're putting out on the internet than they used to be. When I look at somebody's social media profiles now, who I'm thinking of hiring, the things I find are much less terrible than they were 10 years ago. And it's not because people have become better. It's because people have learned that these are tools and you've got to think carefully about how to use them constructively rather than destructively. And I do have some hope that over time we'll find ways to use the good and free ourselves from the bad. But look, at this point, Twitter is absolutely destructive of our political culture and of a lot of our professional culture in America. I think there are a lot of ways that social media is undermining our capacity to be responsible people. And we've got to take that seriously. I mean, I'll go with you part way on that. I mean, I think we pull young people about their media habits and we pull them about their views on free speech. And so we've included in both of those recurring studies questions about the internet and young people are kind of more likely than older people to be skeptical of the ability to find truth on the internet. They're more likely to talk about the internet as an uncivil place is a place where people are too quick to attack or shame each other. And I sort of feel like that's pretty perspicacious. Like they know what's going on and they don't want technology to go away but they recognize the perils of this new institutional landscape. I guess the challenge though that someone might pose the more structural challenge someone might pose is yeah, technology is a tool that is neutral intrinsically but the economic structure of these companies incentivizes them to in turn incentivize the kinds of behaviors that we're worried about that the way that they collect rents demands this kind of behavior and they've become so large that it's not it's the internet isn't the place you go. It's sort of coterminous with the whole of your existence. How do you respond to that? I agree with that. I think the economics of the internet at this point means that we have both the downside of fragmentation and the downside of concentration. We've got these very large media companies that are very concentrated and powerful and yet they fragment our media environment in ways that make it very hard for us to know what to trust and what to take seriously and what's true and what's not. And so in some ways we need more concentration. We need a more reliable media environment. In other ways we need to break the concentration of power and money at the center of the new media environment. So that is a huge challenge. And look it's a challenge that our political system is only starting to get its arms around. You see these questions arising now both on the left and the right in different ways. I think it's very important that they do arise and that they are taken seriously. But I'd be lying if I said I knew the way forward on their front. I think it is an enormous challenge for our society and it's one of the big questions we've got to wrestle with over the coming decades. I haven't heard it framed that way. I mean, I think that's an interesting point that usually the argument for consolidated power is stability. That you get a lot of stability in exchange and we're really getting a raw deal on both fronts. And it's also an interesting argument because I think it throws the onus back at them as institutions kind of back to your question. What is your role if you're going to be an institution? Yeah, I think there's a lot of running away from responsibility there where they'll say, well, we're just creating the platform. It's not our responsibility what people do here. And yet at the same time, when it's convenient to exercise some control over that platform, they're happy to do that. And so at some level, I think over time they've got to come to terms with the fact that they play a huge role in the life of our society and that that kind of role, that kind of power comes with real responsibility, which they need to be willing to exercise or else they need to be willing to have that power broken up and taken away from them. So last question to get you out of here, kind of taking a step back. So you put out a book at the beginning of the year literally saying it's a time to build our institutions. America's response was, hang on, we're not ready yet. Would you say or write or exhort anything different now that we're, it's August 13th and we're dealing with a crisis, one crisis that we didn't expect and another one that was predictable but has overtaken us in ways that maybe we didn't expect would come now. It's a great question. I mean, I think that it's a little more obvious now than it was at the beginning of this very eventful year that we need functional institutions that people don't really have to be persuaded that these things are necessary and then we pay a huge price for there not being here. I would also say there are some institutions that have held up better than I would have imagined. In some ways, even Congress has done its job better than I would have expected at the beginning of the year having risen up to this moment of crisis and taken some actions. I think American federalism on the whole has held up better than I would have imagined. And there are a lot of ways in which people have stepped up to take some responsibility but I think ultimately the underlying sense of crisis, the sense that we are at a moment of breakdown, we're on a path that we need some off ramp from is the reason why I thought it would be valuable to surface these concepts, this idea of institutions as just a way to think about what we might do differently. And generally speaking, I think the last few months have let us see that the problem is more profound and fundamental than we might have feared. And so I think the argument is more necessary, not less, but obviously, as I said at the beginning, a book written before all this can easily feel like it was written on a different planet for a different people. Well, a provocative thought to end on. You've all mentioned it is a little magazine but anyone who wants to follow national affairs you can follow them on Twitter at national affairs or if you don't want to contribute to the decline of democracy, you can just go to the website and read the articles but it's a tremendous journal and an important contribution. I would also encourage everyone to read a time to build from family and community to Congress and the campus, how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream. It's available on Amazon, but if you think your role is to stand up to Amazon, it's available at other booksellers as well. As always, we'll send all this to you after the show, you've all, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Sam, I appreciate it. Everybody, we've got some exciting shows coming up on August 20th, Wade Henderson, the former president of the Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights is going to be joining us to talk about the Civil Rights Movement past and present, and then on September 3rd, we'll have Olivier Sylvain, a professor of law at Fordham University, talk to us about the very topics that we ended on, what the role of the internet is in our democracy and how to ensure that it supports and enables our democracy. As a reminder, this episode will be up on the website later, you can see this episode in any episode on demand at kf.org backslash fdshow. You can also subscribe to the Future of Democracy podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you go for your podcast, so you can listen to these episodes as many times as you like, no matter where you are and what you're doing, email us at fdshow at kf.org, or if you have questions for me, just send me a note on Twitter at thesamgill. Please stay for 30 seconds to take a two-question survey, and as always, we'll end the show to the sounds of Miami songwriter Nick County. You can find his music on Spotify. Until next week, thanks for joining us and stay safe.