• Alienated America

Mary Imparato
Welcome to Conversation. The Belmont Abbey College Podcast. This podcast aims to form and transform our community so that each of us can reflect God’s image. I’m Mary Imparato, chair and assistant professor of politics at Belmont Abbey College. Today, I’m joined by Tim Carney, a senior political columnist for The Washington Examiner and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mary Imparato
We’re excited to talk to him about his latest work. But before we get started, I’ll let Tim introduce himself.

Tim Carney
Thanks for having me, Mary. It’s great to be here. I’m Tim Carney. I’m from the Washington, D.C. area. I am a father of six and a Catholic convert or revert. I guess I was baptized and became a Catholic and my latest book, which I think we’ll be talking about, is called Alienated America. It’s about the collapse of community.

Tim Carney
I’m also working on a book about parenting, about why it seems harder why millennials don’t seem up, up to it. And obviously it’s connected the same themes as Alienate America, which is community church. And to some extent, anthropology, what the human individual is and should be.

Mary Imparato
Oh, great. I’m looking forward to that. That sounds awesome. So we are so excited to have Tim here visiting us. At The Abbey. Later on, he’s going to be giving us a talk on Alienage in America. And it’s entitled Community, Faith and Family and Economic Crisis. So for now, I think we can maybe explore a bit of a preview about, you know, what we’re going to hear there for our audience in the podcast.

Mary Imparato
And then also kind of get into some theoretical background, you know, underlies some of your work there. So if you could tell us a little bit more about, you know, Alienated America, which you wrote in 2019, and I think in part you were trying to explain what, you know, the triumph of Trumpism and how it was a port in the storm for the alienated working class.

Mary Imparato
They suffer for this lack of community, a lack of a safety net and Trump came along and something to cling to. You know, fast forward four years. Is this still something that’s the case today? Is it more so the case Have they found a new refuge? It’s not it’s not Trump, you know, so you could just kind of get into that.

Tim Carney
Mean, so again, you mentioned I’m a I’m a journalist and I’m more I’m better at identifying problems and trying to articulate them than solutions. And I think in some ways, that’s why this story of alienation and Trump was a fitting one to tell. It basically started when Trump said the American dream is dead. And his very first thing when he came down the escalator gave his speech before the way he set up the first time.

Tim Carney
He said, Make America Great Again. He set it up by saying the American dream is dead. And when I sort of going to Trump rallies, including right here, basically Rock hill, South Carolina, the one I found resonated. I asked people, I said, what’s not great about America? And I wanted as a DC guy for them to like get into policy.

Tim Carney
Like, well, it’s our immigration policy or our trade policy. It’s our wars, it’s our corporate welfare, the sort of stuff that I spend day in and day out or I spent day in, day out writing about. But the answers were all at first. They seemed to me sort of airy. One guy said, No, we still walk down Main Street in our hometown on Memorial Day, and we would the Boy Scouts and the Little League teams would plant flags on the old in the cemetery.

Tim Carney
And I say, what does this have to do with a presidential race? And then bit by bit, I realized that there’s this view that the American Dream was dead did not have a it was definitely tied up with economics, but it did not simply have an economic explanation that we had to understand culture that we had to understand we had to think about things in a way that the political class and frankly, a lot of the voters themselves were not used to thinking about things, which was not the government, not the individual, but the intermediate institutions, what we belong to.

Tim Carney
And that’s I called on Robert Putnam Bowling Alone. I called on Charles Murray Coming Apart. Hillbilly Elegy came out in this same time by J.D. Vance and all of those things made me realize, OK, the story it wasn’t the story that Trump was telling was the collapse of community, but that was a phenomenon he was tapping into. With his stories about the American dream being dead, that people didn’t belong to stuff.

Tim Carney
They didn’t feel connection. They didn’t have the human level safety net. Mm hmm.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. And I would I would venture to guess that, you know, to this class of people, the American dream is still dead and maybe even more with rising inflation and. Yeah, yeah, here we are in Gaston County and just kind of going around people complaining constantly about you can’t be on the grocery store line without people saying to the cashier, oh, my goodness, that used to be like half the price inflation and the situation with wages not really keeping up.

 

Mary Imparato
So is it more so the case people are feeling more the American dream? Is that like are they than is Trump still the standard bearer?

Tim Carney
Well, so the part of the complication is that, again, I’m you know, Washington, DC, we look for actual policy solutions to problems. And there were things Trump did that helped. There were things he didn’t try. There were things he tried and were thwarted. And the fact is that, you know, a tariff is going to, you know, bring some manufacturing back here.

Tim Carney
But to what degree is that manufacturing being done by robots instead of people? And how long will it take for new after new jobs come back for to really build what is the scaffolding of the good life? And that’s part of the argument that I make in alienating American, why I put an input a shuttered factory in the front.

Tim Carney
I put a shuttered church, which is to say that when the domino of the factory falls, what really leads to the human suffering is the collapse of civil society restoring the factory even if it came with jobs. It takes a long time for that to rebuild into a community. Communities require predictability. They require, Oh, I’m going to have this job if I’m going to buy a house here.

Tim Carney
This job is going to be here for a long time. So I think that some of Trump’s rhetoric of this is easy. We’re going to fix it. A tariff is going to bring back the jobs left. This implication that he was going to be able to quickly bring back the conditions that made life good in 1968 outside of Pittsburgh or you know in Hickory North Carolina when there was all the good factory jobs there and so no I don’t think working class life is better today than it was in 2015.

Tim Carney
I don’t think anyone president is going to be able to help. I certainly think that inflation is sort of a particular dagger for the working class for all sorts of reasons and I’m not an economist but you know, we all sort of know that it’s easier to adjust to these things if you’re in a white collar job. If there’s not that, it’s easy for me, my family to afford eggs for six people.

Tim Carney
But you know, we can argue and lobby for a raise in a way that a guy in a working class shop doesn’t have that that clout.

Mary Imparato
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, I want to think about sort of the response to this a little bit. I think we’ve seen conservatives in the past sort of double down on libertarian solutions like, you know, self-reliance, individualism, small government, and big government. The problem and it seems like you’re advocating something that’s almost sound like a Hillary Clinton. It takes a village approach, right?

Tim Carney
Are you like that’s one of the challenges. Yeah.

Mary Imparato
I mean.

Tim Carney
Chapter titles is it takes a village.

Mary Imparato
But yeah. So, you know, individualism seems to be part of the problem. And so you’re breaking away from something that on the right has been to go to, you know, for many years that we have to be rugged individualists.

Tim Carney
So it’s really interesting. And I like to write or read a great history of individualism since 1945 because the Cold War was framed in a lot of ways as communism versus individualism. I think ISI brought me here. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute used to be the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. You should double check that for that’s, that’s a story I was told by ISI people that conservatism libertarianism, free markets, the poor individualism, we’re all kind of put together in a pile.

Tim Carney
And I ran famously said that the distinction was between collectivism and individualism. And that’s something that’s a distinction I totally reject and that the way I put it I think would become very evidence that the enemy of the state, if you’re against socialism, the answer is not the individual. It’s civil society. And so that’s where we’re I’m coming down and saying that and, you know, individualism is already you can define a hundred different ways.

Tim Carney
But if you think that what we need more have is people paving their own path, setting their own way rugged individualism, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, you’re missing the real story. So I actually.

Tim Carney
Almost approvingly quote Barack Obama’s famous you didn’t build that. Yeah. Talk. And what was funny was I was thinking about Adam Smith because when Obama said you didn’t build that he I was in the middle of building a dining room table for my family. We had a small dining room. Again, we have six kids. There’s eight of us.

Tim Carney
I also had to build benches, not enough room for chairs. And when I finally built it, my friends were like, you did build it. Then I just thought I did not, per Adam Smith, make the nails or the screws. I certainly did not make the power tools the wall made. Those are the YouTube videos, the hours and hours I watch, et cetera.

Tim Carney
I didn’t plane the wood into the workable things, and that just got me thinking of, all right. We do really rely on this broader system in which a family can thrive. And far as raising kids, it takes a village. Hillary was talking about raising kids. Who knows what she meant by that? What I mean by that is I know we absolutely depend on our neighbors or in-laws, our Catholic schools, our parishes, our little leagues, et cetera.

Tim Carney
And so definitely it was part of the purpose of alienated America to try to drag conservatives away from individualist thinking, because if the left is going to say the state is the answer and the only response is no, the individual is the answer. Well, the left’s going to win that battle because the individual is not self-sufficient and even the nuclear family is not a self-sufficient unit.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. And I think like in a way, both solutions, either collectivism or individualism, both rely on the atomized individual. Right, because the socialist solution is the state in relationship to the animals individual and with no intermediaries, right. Like sort of totalitarian society and neither of those. Right.

Tim Carney
And that’s Tocqueville. Tocqueville laid that out so clearly. I mean, my favorite negative review of my book was somebody saying, if you’ve read Tocqueville, and if you’ve read Charles Murray and if you’ve read Bowling Alone, then all that carny really adds is some Irish pubs and some churches. I was like, you know what? I’ll take that. No, but that and my colleague at AEI at American Enterprise Institute, Yuval Levin, he says that the hyper individualism and over centralization are two sides of the same coin.

Tim Carney
And so the late chapters, when I’m describing the causes it took, I was partway through writing it before I realized I’m going to divide up the causes of alienation into over centralization and hyper individualism and then lay out exactly what you were just saying there, which is that those two things go together. One image I sometimes have is that the central state dissolves our horizontal connections and makes it so that our only connection is towards the central state.

Tim Carney
Tocqueville put it in, in much better words 200 years ago.

Mary Imparato
Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, you’re not going to go wrong citing Tocqueville here on this campus for sure. So I want to think about, you know, despite the rhetoric of both the right and left, that seems to emphasize hyper individualism. You talk about the way that when you look at the way educated elites actually live, they are not hyper individualists in the way they choose to live in practice.

Mary Imparato
Right. They seem to band together in tight communities centered on church, school, and civic organizations. And so is this an elite that is saying, you know, community for me and not for thee? To what extent are the elites to blame, you know, for their lack of solidarity? And just kind of keeping in mind that people have been saying this for a bit, Christopher Lash with the revolt of the elites and so forth, that maybe part of this problem is the elites not doing what they ought by their neighbor, as it were.

Tim Carney
Yeah. Well, and so there’s a couple of ways to look at it. So, one, again, Charles Murray wrote Coming Apart, which showed that we had increasing class segregation, that elites were more likely to live with elites, that you had super zips where 95% of the people there have college degrees. And then you have parts of the country where, again, anybody who’s going to go to college leaves and never comes back.

Tim Carney
One way of looking at is the PTA moms from every single small town and that would be PTA presidents from every small town in Iowa got up and left. And now they live in just one county in Iowa, or they’re in Chicago or they’re in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. So now you have too many PTA presidents and one PTA and nobody else back in the other.

Tim Carney
And that’s unfortunate outcome of sort of increased mobility, what Murray calls the college sorting machine. But the other part of it is saying a lot of conservatives who study culture say that the wealthy elites in this country are living in the conservative life and refusing to preach what they practice. You talk about one term a lot of my colleagues like to use as a success sequence, finish high school, get a job, get married, and have kids in that order.

Mary Imparato
Mm hmm.

Tim Carney
Where I used to live when I lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, and I was more in a middle class place. But the alienated America deals with Chevy Chase. Very wealthy, very educated, very Democrat. Hillary country. Mm hmm. Everybody there basically is married with kids. And, you know, then they go ahead and they coach little league. They they’re living the life that we’re there, practicing what we’re preaching.

Tim Carney
They’re just not preaching it. The interesting thing since I wrote Alienate America is as more millennials are coming of age and you look at what shows up on the opened pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, you do see the people who probably were raised. You know, they belong to a choir and a volleyball team.

Tim Carney
And now they’re writing columns where they really are preaching a kind of a left wing individualism. There are columns in praise of divorce every month in The New York Times. Yes. There’s pieces about how you know you know, woman writing about her kids never, ever mentions that she has a husband lamenting that she’s, quote, mooching childcare from her mother in law.

Tim Carney
It’s like you’re not mooching childcare. You’re extended family is now part of your life. But the idea that either the state or the market have to provide all goods that’s obviously an atomized mindset. So I do think that in my age of Gen-X and the older generation of the baby boomers, you really did see the elites living that community connected life.

Tim Carney
Probably most of them still are. It’s just the majority of them that have a column in The Washington Post or The New York Times are really trying to hold on to that. I will live a life where I’m totally autonomous, never dependent on anybody else. And that, of course, is totally of our community to faith and to family.

Mary Imparato
Yeah, I, I just, I love that the example of like, I’m mooching off my mother in law and reminds me of something that I’ve heard you bring up before. Which is that this mindset of we have to rely on either the state or the market, you know, to provide for us. It brings in this very transactional mindset, right?

Mary Imparato
Yeah. And you talk about the contrast between a transactional mindset and relational mindset. Could you kind of expand on that and what’s kind of infected all of us that every relationship, even marriages and in-laws, it’s transactional. Like, what do you do this for me? I do that for you. And that’s not how we’re built.

Tim Carney
But you see how it does reflect like everything should be transactional does reflect sort of a modern mindset that rests on autonomy, because autonomy means no sticky relationships that at any point you have the right to exit. And there are parts of our life that is probably prudent to have that relationship. But if you keep going back to your drycleaner after they’ve ruined your clothes a few times, it’s not there’s not a lot of sense of that.

Tim Carney
So there should be its rightly there are parts of our life that are going to be more transactional but on the other hand, the most meaningful parts of our life are going to be relational where they’re nobody’s actually keeping a ledger. If you wanted to, you could think I know that in the long run what I put in is going to be equal to what I get out.

Tim Carney
And I just think of moving. We just moved from Maryland to Virginia. We moved within Maryland a couple times so starting with my brothers in law and then just a bunch of other dads my age, we basically all call on 20 friends every time we move and nowadays we’re getting there. There, you know, high school or college age sons who are coming in.

Tim Carney
And it’s just I have no idea how many people I helped move. I could probably count how many people helped me move. And I don’t I nobody’s counting. Oh, have I gotten more out of this? Like, unstated? You’re going to, you know, carrying pianos into the back of a moving van pack that we have. But it’s totally relational and the modern mind.

Tim Carney
I think if you really believe in the unencumbered self, the autonomous individual, you’re going to be transactional and you’re ultimately going to be unhappy. If you’re always keeping a ledger, it’s not going to work. And so family requires a more relational outlook on life. And I even think a good job requires that. I mean, we’re lucky if you’re in academia, but for me, the employers I’ve had the examiners a I it’s been a relationship.

Tim Carney
It hasn’t simply been I give you labor, you give me money. Yeah. But some libertarians and some of sort of what last would talk about as sort of the hyper individualistic left, they do have that attitude towards employment, towards community. And I’ve talked to a lot of young to millennial women who have that attitude that keeps them from ever getting married.

Tim Carney
I’d like to be married, I’d like to have kids, but guess what? Then I’d be dependent on my husband so. Yeah, we’re all dependent.

Mary Imparato
Yes, exactly. I mean, it seems to me what’s missing is any account of love. Yeah. Charity Paradise. You know, and it’s like my, my son once said to me, he’s 13 and he’s like, Mom, you do so much for us. How can I ever pay you back? And I’m like, Well, I like the sentiment, but it’s not like it’s not transactional.

Mary Imparato
You’re never going to pay me back. And it doesn’t matter. I don’t count the cost, right? I love you, and I give freely. And even if it’s even if it hurts, you know, and you never even think of it that way. But I guess in his mindset, he’s got this little individualism thing going on now. Oh, yeah.

Tim Carney
That’s when you’re supposed to be over individualistic as a 13 year old thing. Yeah.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. But there’s just no there’s no accounting for love, right. And gift of self and all this sort of impoverished, I think but you know, where do we get that from? And I think you have the dilapidated church on the building, but.

Tim Carney
Well, so I mean, I’m arguing that I think there is something natural to the accounting mindset, to the transactional mindset and a Christian view of the world makes it easier to accept the relational mindset. Now, I don’t know if this is right. I’m not an anthropologist, but I do think that the idea of I mean, just when you started saying, how can you pay me back well, you can’t like immediately you think of Christ sacrifice for us.

Tim Carney
And it’s like, OK, we can’t earn this. We simply cannot earn this. And so the idea of doing a transaction goes out the window. And so that’s one possibility is that we naturally want to do some sort of fairness, which is inborn, makes us want to do an accounting. And then at some point some wisdom comes to us or some revelation comes to us and says, oh, no, that’s not going to work out.

Mary Imparato
Yeah, that’s not how the world works. I guess for those who are transactional minded, can you make the case for a community and by that I mean when you’re speaking, you know, on the ledger, it seems like globalization, the market economy gives you higher profit margins for your investors, greater efficiency. It seems like it’s good for the overall economy.

Mary Imparato
A rising tide lifts all boats. But in the face of that, you’re saying, well, it’s not so great, right? Like community matters. What is the value in dollars and cents? Community and building community seems like these benefits are kind of intangible. What are the costs of not having it?

Tim Carney
Yeah, so I do I mean, I wrote the book with lots of sociological data, a lot of economic data, and so David Autor was the economists who looked at the trade shocks of what happened for a place that was part of America. That was really dependent on manufacturing. And then when China entered the WTO, how did that affect certain places and the sort of classical explanation of what’s going to happen is if the jobs that were in manufacturing, when they’re exposed to trade with China, are going to slide over into slightly lower equilibrium of service sector jobs and that the offsetting gain from the consumer will be greater than the loss from these individuals.

Tim Carney
And then you go into these parts of the country and you see that they didn’t slide into slightly lower wage equilibrium, say they collapsed and these were the depths of despair. And so this was an economist, again, David Autor, who sort of pointed to if you were in when China entered the WTO, if your factories were competing with them, you have more deaths of despair and more drug overdoses, more suicides, more alcohol related deaths.

Tim Carney
And so that was a story that to me was like, OK, here’s a way to it’s not just me. Telling some sad story from a bar outside of a shuttered factory. It is that. But it’s saying this sad story from a bar is actually statistically measurable. So a good part of what I try to do is find the way to tell these human stories that are easily ignored by economists and say, actually, no, you can you can point out that this is that this is a real phenomenon.

Tim Carney
So we could say, yeah, that this is what you estimated the cost to you know, Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was going to be from this competition with Europe or China and the costs were greater than that. So please, let’s learn a lesson from that. And to me, the lesson, because I’m a conservative, is that dramatic, rapid change to complex systems is going to have lots of unforeseen consequence and on net, those are going to be bad.

Tim Carney
I think that’s what makes me a conservative. This is why I don’t like the new rules in Major League Baseball, all sorts of things and that and that. That’s a lesson that I think increasingly economists and some sociological studies are able to start to put a finger on. If I was to try to make a case to somebody who is just a just a bean counter about the value of community, I would just say what community?

Tim Carney
By providing stability for families increases human capital and helps people, you know, keep their stuff together and preserve their human capital and to help them be make better contributions down the line and that the economy cannot replace family and community as far as that preservation and preservation that cultivation of human capital.

Mary Imparato
To play devil’s advocate here and offer a little pushback here for the being the being on behalf of the bean counters, and I think this is voiced by Williamson in National Review. Right. The idea that well, the problem here is and the reason the collapse happened is that you’re dealing with a bunch of people who are like said tax, like they don’t want to help themselves.

Mary Imparato
What’s wrong with these people? A, they could pack up a U-Haul and get out of town right so why are they just petty? Why are they mired in the muck? Or they could learn to code. Right. And that’s sort of I mean. Right. But you get a different job. Why didn’t you just learn another skill? You know, we’re going to have more like technological based industry now.

Mary Imparato
So get with it. And so we’re dealing with individuals who are sort of intransigent.

Tim Carney
I think there’s always a tension when you talk about the American dream. There’s two ideas that come up. One is like the first couple of books of the Little House on the Prairie, like Go West, young man, start out, do something new. That’s the Kevin Williamson heart conservatism. Then there’s a Norman Rockwell and you know, imagine, oh, yeah, this is I owned the same Main Street general store that my grandfather own those two are obviously in tension, but they both really resonate.

Tim Carney
If you were to like somebody, say, write a musical about the American Dream, you might pick one of those or both of those somehow, but they contradict one another. Again, if you so changes. I was kind of hinting earlier, you know, the simplified way change is bad. The other way I put out is change is inevitable. And so that we need to think how we can shouldn’t try to go out of our way to introduce rapid change because we think its progress.

Tim Carney
And that’s what I think WTO sort of was this is going to be rapid change and we can predict where it’s going to go. That was hubris. On the other hand, the attempts to try to prevent change are always going to fail. This is I think one of the oldest stories for me. If we were to get into economic policy, it’s an argument against what some of the people who see themselves as intellectual policymakers of Trumpism are trying to push.

Tim Carney
Now they want, oh, let’s make a company be the sort of national champion or let’s return to the days of the Big Three in Detroit, because that did provide a sort of stability, I believe, that provides a sort of fragile stability, I think will provide some more lasting stability, is going to be a more organic kind of ecosystem of really strong network of community.

Tim Carney
And it’s going to be churches, it’s going to be civic associations in little leagues and families. And that that’s going to provide a better last sensibility with some evolution as opposed to, you know, the state of Detroit, the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit should prop up these automakers because then you can get a job there and work for 30 years.

Tim Carney
I think the fragility in car. But New York that Williamson wrote about was partly because of a fatal conceit, an idea by governments that they could prop up one central massive employer. And I think that nowadays, you do see some national conservative trend saying, well, maybe we should just be propping up a company. I think that’s a recipe for, again, more fragility and.

Mary Imparato
I wonder what you think and if you’ve looked into this at all, sometimes the new model looks something like, well, in the learn to code is not going to work, but.

Tim Carney
Especially because that’s the one thing that artificial intelligence is going to replace quick is the coders.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. I mean, but what about things that are irreplaceable? And so I’m thinking of like the programs that foster apprenticeships and craftsmanship and, you know, a finely crafted table and so forth is not something that you can get shipped from overseas that, you know, it lasts for five years and falls apart. Like, is there a way, an organic way that we can help people transition if we can’t prop up the big factories?

Mary Imparato
Yeah. Well, what can people do if they’re not going to go to college?

Tim Carney
Right. I mean, again, I think this is a great question and it’s one that I struggle with because I’m both a believer and in a liberal arts education. I think if an if a high school senior says, oh, I’m thinking of college X over Y because I really want to major in chemistry, I think I don’t think you should put that much weight on what you really want to major in because you’re 18.

Tim Carney
You don’t know what you want to be. Do liberal arts pick best school on other ground? On the other hand, I think that our education economic system is trying to sort of make everybody an elite and is downplaying the fact that, you know, making a nice table, as I learned by making a not so nice stable is an amazingly valuable thing.

Tim Carney
Is it going to be trade resilient? Is it going to be artificial, intelligent, and resilient? Those are questions that are over my pay grade. But I certainly think that. So one of the problems with our culture is that there’s always been this middle class and working class aspiration to emulate the upper classes, which sometimes is really good. If I want to be a Little League coach and get married and raise my kids with my wife, that’s great.

Tim Carney
But sometimes it’s this idea of I’m going to be an entrepreneur, I’m going to start a small business, I’m going to launch an app and it’s I don’t want my kids to be doing manual labor. Is another one of those ideas? Yeah. Oh, well, my kids are going to be like that guy who wears a tie and graduated from college and works in an office that I think that could really end up being an error is where naturally our middle class in our working class sometimes look to the elites and aspire to it.

Tim Carney
And that could be a mistake. That’s dry dragging a lot of people away from the sort of jobs you’re describing. There are lots of colleges, there are lots of nonprofits, there are lots of high schools who are trying to point themselves towards you’re going to use your brain together with your hands. It’s going to be a job that’s, you know, not going to get you on CNN or anything like that, but it’s going to be honest work and people are going to pay for it.

Tim Carney
And I don’t know which of those are going to work. We want as many of those to bloom. I hope they do work. Yeah.

Mary Imparato
I’m really like enthralled, excited about those different ways of thinking about things because it seemed like the solution was always like, OK, three, two year college for everyone and maybe college isn’t for everyone. You know, it doesn’t have to be like, that’s not the definition of the American dream necessarily. Right? Yeah. So kind of broadening opportunities for people in that way.

Mary Imparato
OK, so I want to kind of push back here in from you mentioned that national conservatives and the line from the new right. They would say that material and economic conditions do matter and material economic conditions are stacked against the working class. And if we’re asking them to form families, to get it together, to participate in communities, to join organizations, especially in the climate where their wages are low and inflation is high, we need to help them out in some way and incentivize the things we want them to do.

Mary Imparato
So we need more pro-family policy where we incentivize family formation, encourage stay at home moms and things like, you know, relief from crushing student debt isn’t a bad idea or really you know, overpriced housing, all of those problems that people face in forming a family. So is this a part of the puzzle? Right. Like, do we need to kind of get the economic substrata right before we can tell people start forming communities?

Tim Carney
I don’t want to say before the causal the arrows point in both directions. And all of these things come in with social conservatives. And I’m one of them. But I would find myself trying to if somebody said, well, a strong community needs strong families, I would say yes and vice versa. Strong families need strong families. Strong economies are strong.

Tim Carney
Communities need strong economies. Yes. And actually that I think is true. Vice versa, too. I after Alienate America, I wrote a piece called the Tale of two Michigans, and I compare Western Michigan, Grand Rapids, Holland, Michigan, which show up in the book as these places where these Dutch Christian reformed communities become extremely strong, extremely tight knit versus the Detroit area both of these places just utterly collapsed when the Big Three went down.

Tim Carney
And in both of these places, there were a lot of unemployed men and beards later and businesses wanted to come into Michigan. Hey, look, a lot of unemployed men, let’s hire them up. What did they find in Detroit? They found broken families, and that’s of despair. What did they find in western Michigan? They found people kind of have their lives together, even if they were down on their luck.

Tim Carney
So Western Michigan was largely built around churches and tight knit communities in the smaller city and Grand Rapids and even smaller one in Holland, Michigan. And so I think that showed how great civil society, to use the economist term, preserved human capital. I would say, you know, people kept their stuff together more if they had, you know, strong churches, strong communities.

Tim Carney
And so the economics, the way I would put it, is the ability to weather economic downturns is greatly aided by strong communities. So then the question you’re asking is related to slightly different, OK, if you’re starting from a really low wage, how do you from a really low rate, high unemployment, lack of reliable employment, which really matters how do you induce that?

Tim Carney
And then the related question, do you subsidize families more and that kind of thing?

Tim Carney
What I would say is if you do, we can agree on all the problems. I think that central government solutions often undermine themselves. So talking earlier about making a fragile economy by propping up one big employer, I think that large with a lot of the data that I’m looking into for my next book, I like a child tax credit, the size we have probably a little bit better by folding in other the money that’s going to other benefit programs.

Tim Carney
After it gets past a certain point, it really starts promoting unwed parenthood which is not going to build resilient societies. I like a little bit of discouraging work if your money too many conservatives are like, oh, well, this is going to discourage work. Well, if discourage work means dad is going to now only work 40 hours a week, that’s good.

Tim Carney
If it means mom is now going to quit her full time job or dad’s going to quit his full time job and be home with the kids more, that’s really good. But at a certain point and nobody’s going to know where ahead of time you go too far in in that sort of thing. So where I absolutely agree with the national conservatives is that promoting strong families should be something that our benefit programs are aimed at, not just helping the individual not starve, but promoting strong families and strong communities.

Tim Carney
And what I would also agree is the economy is not a good in itself. It’s a tool for that should be used for human advancement. I think that’s just Catholic teaching. I just always come out much more skeptical than a lot of other people that a central government program can accomplish its stated ends without backfiring.

Mary Imparato
Yeah, I had this conversation actually with a student of mine. I’m teaching research methods and politics, and we’re looking at a lot of empirical data, and his project is on why people have to choose to have the number of kids they have. And he’s finding that it’s not really correlated with income, really. Right. And there’s other things that influence people’s decision to have children.

Tim Carney
How close Grandma Lives is, right?

Mary Imparato
Yeah. And so I was mentioning, you know, some of these pro-family policies that have been touted as being so effective in Hungary. And he says yeah, you know, people maybe are having more kids and the birth rate is that an uptick? But he says people are also this programs are incentivizing people to enter into families and form relationships in a hasty sort of way such that their divorce rate has skyrocketed.

Tim Carney
Oh, really?

Mary Imparato
Now, so he was saying and I was like, huh? And thought about that. But, you know, it seems like your point then is it’s not just a matter of economically incentivizing people, but also what does family mean? What does marriage mean to people? Right. And like, where do they get the idea that marriage is indissoluble? Well, from the churches, right.

Mary Imparato
Where they, you know, and like it’s almost like they have to have these values too underlying it to go along with the pro-family policy that you want.

Tim Carney
The person who says, I really want to marry this girl, I want to have kids. And right now I can’t afford it because my job is not stable enough. We want to help that person. Yeah, but is there a policy solution that helps that person without then creating other unintended consequences? And that’s where I’m skeptical. Again, what I’m what I’m arguing in my next book is we need a child tax credit folding.

Tim Carney
A lot of the other benefits increase the child tax benefit. Anything that’s currently a daycare subsidy should, you know, be just turned into cash. And if you want to pay for daycare, do that. If you want to quit your job, do that. If you want to, you know, build in-law suite so grandma can move in, do that to stop sort of there’s a big push now to say the only right model is to full time incomes and full time daycare.

Tim Carney
And that I think is harmful and stupid because a lot of people don’t want that. The vast majority of parents say at least one parent dialing down probably two parents dialing down the number of hours they work is the optimal way to care for kids. And so some cash would do that with too much cash, create bad incentives.

Tim Carney
I think our history with welfare shows that it can do that.

Mary Imparato
Mm hmm. That’s really interesting because like when you think about the daycare situation, and the subsidies for daycare, so often, you know, I’ve talked to women who say that, well, you know, both myself and my husband work and we’re going to take the hit in terms of paying for childcare and food and all the rest of it, because the combined income is just enough more, right.

Mary Imparato
That it makes sense for us to be paying full time daycare. And it’s like well, how do we get them to cover that, the gap that they’re, you know, that they need to make? And actually, it makes much sense to stay home and take care of kids as it does if.

Tim Carney
You’re working, if your net income is only going up $5,000 for that second job minus a daycare, if we could close out 5000, which would be a great benefit to society.

Mary Imparato
Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting thing you’re looking into there so here’s another thing. So you’re saying and I think we both agree on this, it’s, it’s about churches. It’s about especially said church attendance, not just. Yeah, religion is important to me, but yes, this matters and you’ll get better outcomes in families when people attend church regularly, you know, whether they’re getting married before they have children or finishing high school and so forth.

Mary Imparato
But here’s a question I have for you. Will any church religion do well, any church solve the problem and provide the community you need? You know, presumably the Church of Satan doesn’t fit the bill, right? Are there some religions his beliefs are better at inculcating some of their.

Tim Carney
Well, yeah. I think there’s one religion whose beliefs is better overall. That is why I’m a Catholic and I’m not a Unitarian Universalist but what I saw in Alienate America was baffling. And I saw there was a course here that was called, what it, the theology of Culture was. And I thought the most interesting questions on learned in America that I didn’t know the answer to kind of the culture of theology.

Tim Carney
It was why do the Dutch reform have such good sociological outcomes and why do the Mormons have such good sociological outcomes? And I always thought why can’t Catholic parishes be as strong on average as these? So, you know, this is a Christian reformed church. We’re not Dutch like Mennonites or whatever. These are people whose great, great, great grandparents came over from the Netherlands.

Tim Carney
And so there’s a Christian Reformed Church, a Reformed Church of America that’s western Michigan, Louisburg, Wisconsin, in my book, Sioux County, Iowa, and then the Church of Latter Day Saints. Again, these are the places that have the best outcomes there theology on sort of good deeds could not be more different, like LDS. Teaching is your good deed help you get into heaven and the Calvinist roots of these Christian reformed churches?

Tim Carney
Or you know that obviously there’s nothing you can that they really downplay the importance of works yet both of them really do the work, so to speak. They really build strong communities. I think that there are and then the Orthodox Jews that I write about in my book, either from my neighborhood in Maryland or my next book from Israel, they do an excellent job of building this communities.

Tim Carney
I could easily point to some of the more the Hasidic Jews on being isolated from society in a way that I think the average Catholic teaching or LDS teaching would not do. I could point to problems, I think, in LDS, which is that they think everybody is called to marriage and parenthood, which we definitely don’t think because we have priests.

Tim Carney
My wife’s family is involved with Opus Day. They have numerous lots of people are called to lives of celibacy. And I think that’s important to building a strong family, strong community, not being not it and not being the sort of thing that can be oppressive. So I’m dodging your question, and I don’t know enough about this, but I will say that looking at modern Orthodox Jews, Dutch reform in America and Latter-Day Saints, in America, those are the three that have succeeded in building strong communities that support families and produce sort of can produce elites that can that are pro-education, that are turning out the kind of people who can come out and, you know, be

Tim Carney
Your next college professors, your next public intellectuals who are coming out of these strong communities.

Mary Imparato
Interesting. Yeah. You know, I just wonder, like, there’s somehow, it seems to me able to buck the tide, as it were. Right.

Mary Imparato
Let’s say certain structural elements of our society, such as individualism, is a universal solvent. They managed to whatever their belief system is, they manage to whether that to have an antidote to it. And then I wonder why, you know, you say you’re a Catholic, right? We’re a Catholic institution here. Of course. Why don’t Catholics have it if we have the true right?

Mary Imparato
We’ve got the truth. And why are Catholic communities comparatively pretty weak on average?

Tim Carney
They certainly are. Comparatively pretty weak. And some of it is do we worry more about the homilies in the ministries? Sometimes what I think about that, in the LDS, they have a welfare system run by the church and how formative that is that’s going to form you more than any sermon is going to form you is when you realize you give up a meal once a week, the whole family fast for one meal and the money they would spend on that, they then donate to support this welfare system.

Tim Carney
And so then when you’re down on your luck and you need some help, they’re going to say, hey, maybe you should sell the fishing boat first. I talked to a guy who went through this. He’s like, this isn’t like a speedboat. I go fishing with my kids and my nephews and they said, Yeah, that’s great. Are you going to ask them family to not eat dinner tonight?

Tim Carney
So that you can keep your fishing boat now, sell your fishing boat, and then you can come call on the welfare system. So it says they use the word self-reliance a lot. We can sound like we can sound like the hyper individualism, but it’s definitely tied in with the communitarianism. And so a lot of the Catholic corporal works of mercy found themselves displaced by a growing state after the chapter of the Great Society.

Tim Carney
And maybe that’s part of it. Again, I think that would be a great bulk of like, why doesn’t why don’t Catholic parishes on average have the same sort of community cohesion as the Mormons?

Mary Imparato
Mm hmm. Yeah. And from all accounts, when I hear they used to serve small ethnic neighborhoods, so kind of along the lines of that question, like what, you know, what kind of religious truths should be underlying this? I tell my students that behind every political philosophy, there has to be an anthropological view viewpoint, right? So you always ask, what is this author’s view of human nature?

Mary Imparato
Right.

Tim Carney
And so I think it’s great that you ask that and nobody asked me that. So, yeah.

Mary Imparato
And so I’m asking it of you as, you know, an alienated America with, you know, the question of philosophical anthropology you can’t escape it. What is the underlying anthropology of your work? What is the human person?

Tim Carney
So to make it personal for a second, again, I was raised non-practicing Catholic, and I was a I was reading my Ayn Rand up until about age 19, very individualistic, came into the church as an adult, met my wife, raising a big family tied in with the community she grew up with in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, with her big family.

Tim Carney
She’s one of eight kids. And while writing Alienated America, it was the first time I’d done lots of reporting. We’d go out to a bar in western Pennsylvania, to a shuttered factory in Indiana and written the stories as like, here’s how policy affects normal people, but never really tried to dive in to it on the personal level. And it was wild working on this book that I really realized how I saw myself and other people as just fundamentally interconnected and made for sacrifice for I used to say we’re made for work in love, but that was imprecise.

Tim Carney
It was trying to be the seed that falls to the ground and dies. And that that’s sort of my view of what we do here is we go and we sacrifice and we surrender for others in a way that tries to emulate in a minuscule way Christ sacrifice for us. And so that idea means that our autonomy is pretty limited and that you know, we are encumbered, we are connected.

Tim Carney
We do depend on others. And that the more that we foster that dependence and that dependability, the more that we’re living life according to human nature. Aristotle also really formed my view of the human person, just how shaped we are by habit. And that virtue really is a life where you have good habits and that it’s an exercise in that you require other people to exercise.

Tim Carney
You know, my wife sometimes say that I’m just writing a book for extroverts and that maybe we don’t need as much interaction. But that really is my view of the human persons, that we are completed by sacrificing ourselves for others. Mm hmm.

Mary Imparato
Yeah, I, I think I heard you say this maybe in a talk you gave, but you said something like Tribalism is natural.

Tim Carney
Oh, yeah.

Mary Imparato
And Aristotle says, you know, man is political animal, right? Kinases, men is political and social animal. Right. But the unencumbered self is a fiction, essentially.

Tim Carney
Yeah.

Mary Imparato
But if that’s the case, then, you know, we associate. And where does this happen? Since we are embodied souls, we’re also in a place, right? Yeah. And so I think, you know, you do a good job in sort of highlighting the importance of place and community.

Tim Carney
Because it’s an easy one to forget. It’s easy to think of people as rows and columns in a spreadsheet. I realize no, people actually live in guessing county or in Wheaton, Maryland, yeah.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. I mean, I really appreciate sort of putting a face on economics, you know, and, you know, you’re talking to people. Having said that, though, and here’s where I have to kind of launch a couple of critiques and ask you to respond to some of the critiques of local ism. So on the one hand, one critique is that you may lose sort of universal standards for judgment by focusing so much on the particular and the values of this particular community.

Mary Imparato
They have their own standards, which in a sense you’re like, OK, well, LDS, it works. It’s fine, you know, to, to an extreme, you know, cannibalism is OK for cannibals, you know. Do you we don’t really want to say as conservatives, do you, community X, do what you like. And so it seems like how do you integrate sort of the universal the big picture if we’re talking about sort of localism?

Tim Carney
So one argument for localism is not that everybody’s going to settle on the best way of life. I’m originally from Greenwich Village, New York. I joked a couple of years ago that my parents never brought me to any story hours because every story I was a drag Queens story hour in Greenwich Village, New York. And so just because like that’s the way they do it doesn’t mean it’s fine with it.

Tim Carney
The one of the prudential argument for localism to some extent would be we’re bound to mess up if we try to meddle with somebody else doing something in a way that we think is wrong. Either there’s a chance that we’re wrong and they’re doing it right. I wouldn’t say that about drag Queens Story Hour, but you know, if as far as some local custom or that kind of thing, I think part of the argument in Plato’s Republic is that there’s a large range of local customs that all can point towards a happy human nature as long as they’re adhere to it.

Tim Carney
Certainly Catholics who you watch the way the Polish Catholic churches in Pittsburgh behave, you actually, you know, these immigrant heavy Salvadoran parishes behave. There’s actually a lot of variety. Is one better than the other maybe but trying to make them uniform would actually do more harm than good. So that’s kind of a prudential argument that fall within bounds saying you do you is that trying to stop somebody from doing it as they would create more harm than good.

Tim Carney
And so certainly I’m privileged with being a journalist and a guy who goes on podcast, gets to speak on campuses. And so I can say, you know, these things are right and these things are wrong. Without having to go ahead and try to mess with somebody else. All right. And I think is doing something wrong. And so what I argue at the end of Alienate America about the localism that sort of Tocqueville laid out in that kind of thing is that we what makes us strong is that we belong to lots of different things that have different rules of the road.

Tim Carney
And it creates a sort of social piece that, you know, back in Maryland, I had the stained glass part, which, despite the Catholic name, was not the most Catholic place in the world. And I have St Andrews, my parish. And what was OK in the same glass pub was not OK in St Andrews. And what was normal?

Tim Carney
St Andrews was not normal in the same last pub. And so to have these different sets of norms allowed for a social piece and that would be one of my main arguments for it was that trying to keep everybody living the right way through some central power is going to undermine a social piece. And I think it’s a huge problem that we see today where I don’t think the average American thinks that way.

Tim Carney
I think everybody thinks there’s basically a one way to do things. And so once gay marriage became like legal everywhere, the idea that a baker should be allowed to say, oh, well, I’m not going to make your wedding cake. Mm hmm. I think the American public actually is on the side of the left going after the baker. And they say, no, no, no.

Tim Carney
We just decided as a whole that gay marriage is it. I, I think I’m going to be a pretty strong defender of localism, but not alongside of relativism. Not saying however you do, it is fine by saying this is the right way to do it. And if you’re going to do a different way, I’ll leave you alone. Which is different than saying any way you do it is fine.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a super important distinction to be drawn there, right? Like a client that talks about the first principles of the natural law are immutable and they’re universal and they apply everywhere. But in secondary precepts, we can differ, right? So like, you know, the goods of, of life and health and preserving life and procreation and educating young and seeking the truth about God, living in community, these are standard for everybody.

Mary Imparato
Right? And so if what you’re doing is violating the natural law, well, then that goes, you know, that’s not just your community, do you? Yes. But if you have, you know, a more specific way of, you know, redistributing wealth or something like that, it’s not necessarily the case that that’s part of the natural. Well, you have to do it the same way.

Mary Imparato
Yeah. Everywhere. Yeah. So the other part about localism, though, that I want to get to is that it seems like the local is limited in its capacities to change larger structural problems. That maybe are baked in the cake in political order and which actually serve to undermine community. And so, you know, if we like the idea of solidarity and community and focusing on the common good, it seems that the liberal political order and this has been the argument of people like Patrick in the liberal political order sort of dissolves the very thing that it relies upon.

Mary Imparato
Right. That we say relies upon, which is these sort of small platoons that are like, you know, building community and helping us all thrive and to think about, you know, the thriving localities. They really exist at the behest of the liberal political order. And if they want to crush them and destroy them, they can. So the local is sort of limited in scope.

Mary Imparato
And, you know, what do you think they’re about? Do we have sort of a liberal political order that’s undermining, you know, this quest for community?

Tim Carney
And this is exactly this is the most important part of democracy in America. Was Tocqueville writing how the strength of America was our little platoons and our local you know, you could say variety and that baked into the nature of this egalitarian democracy was exactly what I was describing earlier when I was mentioning the wedding cakes was sort of an aversion to like this other you know, what the people that you say about the Puritan stayed up all night worrying that somebody somewhere was having fun.

Tim Carney
I think a lot of Americans have that set up, that start worrying that someone somewhere is, you know, doing something in a in a different way. It’s a lot of the aversion to, you know, school choice. And some of the recent Supreme Court decisions is a fear that some teacher somewhere is teaching the Apostles Creed. And so I absolutely agree.

Tim Carney
And I am glad that, you know, Patrick Dinneen has done a good job of bringing a lot of what all of us are doing right is like illustrating Tocqueville in the modern era. Right. And he’s showing how specifically for Christianity and modern liberalism are intentioned. But what you’re pointing out here, too, is that modern liberalism and the foundation it needs to actually work are intention and that it’s very easy.

Tim Carney
And too many people think that just liberalism and pluralism in and of themselves are good and will bring about good outcomes. But it’s really there’s this horrible saying that a lot of my more neo conservative friends like to say, which is, well, America is an idea. John McCain originally said, and I always hated it, but I kind of came up with a peace with it, which was to say like so 330 million people sea to shining sea kind of is an idea.

 

Tim Carney
And the actual foundation what America is, is you know, 50,000 small towns and that what you need is them all having organic community, having connection, having a human level safety net. But there is something about the idea of America that undermines that and wants to create a uniformity and so that tension is always there. I early in this podcast I said I was better at pointing out problems and then solutions and so, I mean, I’m not going to say what he said at one point and I put this in alienated America.

Tim Carney
I made a tweet about like, we really need to pay attention to what’s going on in our own backyards rather than national politics. And this is during the Obama era. One of my friends said, it’s not my town council that’s trying to force me to, you know, pay for abortions and my health insurance plan. It’s the federal government.

Mary Imparato
That’s trying to do that.

Tim Carney
And so at some point, your ability to just sort of stick to your knitting and pay attention to your backyard becomes impossible. If it’s Leviathan in Washington who’s trying to get you to violate your conscience. So I’m granting that all the horrible tensions you have exist.

Mary Imparato
And I appreciate that that you’re seeing the complexity of it. But I definitely think that your perspective of and sort of identifying the problem is putting a human face on them is really important. So we’re coming up on an hour now, I think. And so as we conclude, I want to thank our audience for joining us. And thank you, Tim, of course, for your time and for your brilliant insights.

Mary Imparato
And if you enjoy conversation, please subscribe and tell your friends about us conversation. Is available on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts. Until next time. God bless.