Transcript
WILLIAM GALSTON: Let me just take a minute or so to talk about some of the issues that animate Professor Ringen's book and ought to be, I think, ripe for discussion at this session. In the contemporary United States, there is I think palpable and rising concern about the future of our particular kind of welfare state, and also about the condition of our democratic institutions. Among its many virtues and accomplishments, Professor Ringen's book, What Democracy is For, demonstrates both that the United States is not alone in these worries and that there is an intimate connection between them.
As we work here in the United States over the next generation to renew as best we can our crumbling and increasingly outdated social contract, we will, at the same time, be reshaping in a fundamental way our democratic expectations.
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