Can a Crisis Make People Bounce Back?

Michael Lewis says the part of the book about living together is not only about Trump. Trump is both a cause and a symptom. People, he says, are going to have to think hard about how they live together and take care of each other. Sam Fragoso asks whether people even want to. Lewis repeats the question and agrees it is the real one. Fragoso says he does not know if people do. Lewis says he does think politics has gotten way out of touch with the culture, and he does not think politics looks like how people really are.

The nastiness, the cruelty, and the tribalism are not, he says, how people live their lives. Lewis says we are famously philanthropic and capable of building communities, that we have been misled, and that the situation is weak leaders. The hope, he says, is that things get so bad that we bounce. A bounce takes a crisis, and he says the crisis at hand might be the one.