 It is my great privilege to introduce E.J. Dion to you. E.J. is among our most prolific and thoughtful analysts of and commentators on American politics. After his summa from Harvard and a Rhodes scholarship taken at Balliol College, he had a distinguished run at the New York Times with assignments here and abroad including Beirut. He then came to the Washington Post where he produces a column twice a week and where he also blogs. He is a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings and a government professor at Georgetown. Actually, there are many E.J. Dion's. There's only one of them here today. He is the author of many books, most famously, Why Americans Hate Politics, but also several on religious liberty, faith and civil society. The American Political Science Association overlooked the fact that he has a PhD in sociology from Oxford and awarded him its Kerry McWilliams Award to honor journalistic contribution to the understanding of politics. The Sidney Hillman Foundation presented him with a career achievement award in 2011. By now, it must be clear to you that I am leaving an awful lot out. So if you have a spare half hour on your hands, you can find his entire biography online at Brookings or at the Washington Post before turning it over to E.J. Let me mention that I've been lucky enough to get to know E.J. a bit, courtesy of a workshop on religion and religious freedom in American politics that John DeYulio convenes at Penn. And it turns out that he is just as brilliant, optimistic, warm and lucid in person as he is on paper and on air. And with that thought, please welcome E.J. Dion. That was so sweet. Thank you. Whenever I get an introduction, it's kind of sad I'm reminded of one I got in the Midwest once, which ended and now for the latest dope from Washington. Here's E.J. Dion. So thank you. Thank you for that. I am very grateful. I just want you to know, you're watching the Trump administration is a bit like watching lead changes in an NBA game or college games. I just want, you know, an hour ago he has said he might reverse himself on the TPP but stays tuned, there's no guarantee that that position will hold. I hail from Massachusetts, so I understand the ambiguities of the struggle to keep a republic and to keep it democratic. We are, yes, the state of Lexington and Concord and the Tea Party and the Adamses and the Hancocks and the Kennedys, but we are also the state, as many of you most you know, that gave the nation the gerrymander. And we are a place that has not always been above a certain amount of finagling with elections. One of my favorite stories about that is of a man who was preparing his will in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is 70 miles from Boston. And he's talking to his lawyer and lawyer who's going through and he said, everything makes sense here, except why do you want to be buried in this cemetery in South Boston, 70 miles from where you spent your whole life? And turned out the cemetery was in the district of a legendary state senator who was known for producing 120% of the vote, if that was what was required. And the man looks at his lawyer and says, I see no reason why my death should deprive me of my right to participate in the democratic process. Now there is a man committed to democracy. Although whenever I worry about corruption in my own state, I think of Louisiana. It makes me feel better. Anybody here from Louisiana? I love Louisiana politics. One of my favorite figures, and I will get on to the serious business, is Edwin Edwards, who eventually went to the slammer. And Edwards had a lot of self-knowledge and he knew that everybody in the state knew that he was kind of crooked. And he was running in the middle of the recession unemployment had gone up to 11%. And so he went all over the state and said, if you reelect my opponent, there'll be nothing left for me to steal. And he actually kept both promises. The economy came roaring back and he eventually ended up in the slammer. He also said, and use this one very guardedly, if you ever want to use it. He was in a debate with the same opponent and he said, my opponent is so dumb that it takes him two hours to watch 60 minutes. So God bless Louisiana. What would we do without you? I want to pay a particular tribute to, there's so many friends here and I don't want to shout you all out, but God I love you very much. But I want to pay a particular tribute to Suzanne Metler, whose work I so admire. In our recent book One Nation After Trump, book Thaddeus and Fairness to my friends and co-authors Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann, I will be channeling some today in my talk. We quote extensively from Suzanne's extraordinary book on the GI Bill, Soldiers to Citizens, which if you have not read it, you must. Because I think Suzanne perfectly captured the import of one of our most successful efforts to balance and join responsibilities and rights in a democratic society, which is in many ways what we are grappling with here at this conference. She documented a singularly successful effort in our republic's history to conjoin social justice with patriotic and civic commitments. And it was also a program designed to invest in our people for the long term. It is the kind of policy creativity we desperately need again at this point in our nation's history. And so we owe a debt to Suzanne for reminding us that we used to do some pretty big stuff in this country and that it actually could work. So thank you very much to Susan. I wanna begin with a thesis that will run through my talk today that history will see this American era that we are in through two prisms. These years will certainly be seen as times of threat, as a time of crisis decline and a moment of threat to liberal democracy. But I think they will always be seen, especially in the United States, as a period of civic renewal, as the very threats to our democratic values unleash an outpouring of organizing and voting and civic engagement. I do not believe that our political system of constitutionalism and checks and balances is any automatic protection against tyranny and autocracy. The system depends on human actors playing the roles that history assigns them in defending the Republic. This has not always happened in this period. And as I'll be saying, it's particularly lacking in Congress, but other aspects of the system and particularly the use our citizens are making of their First Amendment freedoms to speak out and to publish and to assemble and to dissent are working because citizens are making them work. And the test will be whether these forms of engagement counteract efforts in other parts of the system up to defend the often indefensible. I also should shout out Theta Scotchpole, who's here today, who's been doing enormously good work in a series of eight counties carried by Donald Trump in the election. And she is telling an extraordinary story of citizens acting like citizens and mobilizing each other. And we've already seen some of the first fruits of that work. We published a piece in Democracy Magazine recently that I commend to you. And it is, by the way, a story of women. Theta told me that of the 10 anti-Trump organizations that they have found, all of them are either led or co-led by women. And for those interested in religion, it is partly a product of the mainline Protestant Church. That's where many of them come from. So who says mainline Protestantism is dead? I should say at the outset that I will speak quite directly of my view of President Trump and the ways in which his presidency has surpassed the very worst expectations, I think, of how he would govern, how he would divide Americans from one another, and how he would weaken our standing in the world. This is not intended as a form of partisanship. There are many who are not large D Democrats who view the Trump era similarly. But Candor, I think, demands that we see the rise of Trump in the same light that we see the rise of other autocratic and divisive leaders elsewhere around the world. It's no accident that we're seeing a proliferation of excellent books, and I won't include ours on this list, although I kind of like it, describing real threats to democracy, starting with the most recent and very directly titled book by Madeleine Albright, Fascism, colon, a warning. I ran into her and she said, yes, I have a very subtle title for my new book. Fascism, a warning, or it loses the retreat of Western liberalism, the asha monks, the people versus democracy. Danny Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky's How Democracies Die, Bill Galston's anti-pluralism, and of course, Timothy Snyder's two important books. This proliferation of urgent thinking about the challenges facing liberal democracy and Republican government does not, I think, reflect paranoia, but is rather an accurate perception that to use a big compound phrase, liberal democratic republicanism is facing a crisis of a sort that it has not confronted since the 1930s. We can have long discussions over how this period does and does not resemble the 1930s, I think in some ways it does, in some important ways it doesn't. Nonetheless, I don't think democracy has faced a crisis of this sort since that era. All these books, in their different ways, focus on a combination of factors that have placed democracy under threat, economic change and rising inequality, fear of terrorism and disorder, racism and nativism, a lost sense of national identity, a sense of dislocation in a period when values are changing rapidly, and a growing feeling of human disconnection in an increasingly technologically connected world. In our own book, Norm Tom and I focus on four areas where we believe reforms are required to defend democracy and to answer both the immediate problems created by the Trump interlude, I guess I'm hoping it's an interlude, and the long-term problems, we believe, accounted for the rise of Donald Trump and many other authoritarian and autocratic figures in the first place. To give you a sense of the mix of concerns that we think need to be addressed simultaneously to keep the Republic, we talk about what we've called our series of news. We argue for a new economy, a new civil society, a new patriotism rooted in empathy and a new democracy. We see it as critical to address structural economic problems, rising inequality, declining social mobility, enormous regional disparities, economic disparities not only across the nation but within states, declining share of GDP going to wages. We also see it as critical to address structural problems in our democracy, including gerrymandering, the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, the unrepresentative nature, the electoral college, the many efforts to suppress votes, the distortions in our campaign money system since Citizens United. We actually, by the way, just because this is the one crowd where there may be at least a large plurality that might agree with us, we also call for the Australia system of compulsory voting or as we call it universal voting and as it should be noted, is really compulsory attendance at the polls because you can write any damn thing you want on your ballot when you cast it in Australia. We are interested in it for many different reasons. My reason is that it flips the obligation of local governments where they can no longer suppress the vote. Their job is to make it possible for citizens to do their duty as well as exercise their rights. But beyond the structure of democracy and the structure of the economy, we also speak to the less easily defined problems related to family disconnection community and family breakdown. The weakening of civic culture, the decline in social participation and the crumbling of mutual trust began long before Trump's rise, but all contributed mightily to his success and they would be problems our society needed to grapple with whether he had won the election or not. And we decided we need a new and unifying sense of patriotism as an alternative to a divisive ethno-nationalism. Patriotism should not be confused with chauvinism or with divisiveness. We need to tell a national story that is both more authentic to our history and more inclusive of all of us. If you'll permit me for a moment, I'd like to offer my case for why being a patriot is as progressive as it is conservative and how patriotism might promote not division but a sense of solidarity. We should take pride in the United States as exceptional ability to absorb newcomers and also in their own intense desire to be American. We should take pride in our history of addressing deep problems and of transforming ourselves when necessary. We began as a slave nation and became a free nation. We were a country that was segregated and the civil rights movement liberated us. American culture is made up of many cultures, regional as well as ethnic, but there is also a national culture we all share in and shape. Our culture freely absorbs new ways of thinking, talking, making music, playing sports, cracking jokes, telling stories, but generation after generation, we create and recreate a uniquely American synthesis. When we are living up to our best American selves, the old and the new interact and coexist. To borrow from Walt Whitman, we really do contain multitudes. We honor our democratic tradition and appeal across all our differences to a set of founding documents that we simultaneously revere and argue with. We are raucous, mobile, rebellious, contentious, reverent, but also irreverent, individualistic, but also communal. We can be resolutely local in our loyalties, but also capaciously national. We are strivers who also come to each other's aid. We love our country not only for its ideals, but also for its tensions and contradictions. We believe in the Pluribus, we also believe in the Unum. We are the country that Winston Churchill described when he said Americans always do the right thing after first exhausting all of the other possibilities. We are giving all of the other possibilities a good testing right now. Now perhaps you would tell our story somewhat differently, but I do think preserving our Republican institutions really requires that we think very hard about a shared story that is honest about who we are and that celebrates what we can be, that celebrates our striving for what we can be. I think one of the most interesting aspects of President Obama is that he was something of a historian. If you read all of the great Obama speeches, they are an interpretation of America as a country on the move, as a country constantly in search of self-correction and reform. And I think there is both great utility in that story and I believe it's an accurate story. And it's always worth remembering that the very first word of our constitution is, come on, yeah. I love doing that, forgive me, because I love whole crowds of people saying we, because think about it, we do not say that very much anymore in America. We the people created this constitution and our nation desperately needs to rediscover both the right and the responsibility to say we. Let's return to the moment for a moment to the two prisms that I was talking about through which I think we can see our moment. All that has happened since Trump took office, has only reinforced the sense that many of us have that he puts basic American and democratic values at risk. Tom Norm and I summarize the thread he poses with three words, autocracy, kleptocracy and my favorite cacostocracy. Norm actually taught me cacostocracy which is a really old word that refers to government by the worst and most unscrupulous among us. And this is not just a phenomenon confined to Trump. We know that democracy particularly in its liberal form is embattled around the world. It is facing threats within nation that have long been proud of their democratic traditions as we are and it also faces competition from authoritarian and autocratic systems that taught themselves as better able to deliver many of life's good things. Democracy is and always has been imperfect in practice. Vaklav Havel, the Czech dissident who became his country's president, told Congress in 1990, as long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always remain an ideal. One may approach democracy as one would a horizon in ways that may be better or worse but which can never be fully attained. In this sense you too, he said, to those of us who are American are merely approaching democracy. In embracing democracy as the historian Jim Clappenburg has written, we are standing up for three contested principles, popular sovereignty, autonomy and equality. And we are also embracing three premises, deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity. We know that in its liberal form democracy must at times resist popular sovereignty. A majority of the people cannot vote away their own rights or anyone else's. We know that our own quest for autonomy can conflict with our obligations to the communities to which we owe debts. We know that many democracies including our own are a long way from true equality. Yet in the face of these tensions and imperfections which values would we place above popular sovereignty, autonomy and equality? Which would we place above deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity? If we would uphold these commitments we should be prepared with Hubble to defend the democratic ideal. And we are in many ways and that is the second prism through which we can view the first year and a few months of the Trump presidency. It really has been a time of democratic renewal. Not the one he had in mind but one that is coming from below. The movement against Trump has gained strength at every level as measured by numbers of volunteers, activists, donors and voters and the growth of both new and repurposed organizations. I will briefly outline the depth of the backlash against Trump by way of showing that of all our various checks on the power of an administration, none has been more vibrant as the most basic of Republican institutions of the old fashioned electoral process as flawed though it might be. In state congressional and even local elections held since 2016 in red and blue and purple states alike, these have all been marked by double digit swings to the Democrats fueled by a striking mobilization of voters opposed to Trump. In November 2017, Republicans were rebuked in elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington state, Georgia, Connecticut and virtually anywhere else where there were party names on a ballot. There was December's astounding victory of Doug Jones in the Alabama special election or Conor Lam's victory in Pennsylvania in a district where that Donald Trump had won by more than 20 points. You can see this lower down the ballot where more, I think at this point 39 legislative seats have shifted to the Democrats with only four shifting to the Republicans. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker called the Democrats victory in his state a wake up call. It was a district that Trump had carried by 17 points. He had a peculiar way of responding to that wake up call by trying to postpone future special elections but a court and courts are part of this story told him no, he couldn't do that. The response to Trump from the movement that took root since he became president pointed to the real power of democratic antibodies in American life. Many Americans avail themselves of the openings that our constitutional arrangements provide and our Republican tradition lifts up. A Washington Post Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last Friday found that an astonishing one in five Americans, one in five of us reported joining protests and rallies since the beginning of 2016 and 70% of them disapproved of Trump. So you know where most of that energy is coming from now. The mobilization against Trump is thus creating new opportunities for alternative politics. And this is the democracy journal piece I referenced by Theta, Scotch, Paul and her co-author Laura Putnam. The grassroots are leaning in they wrote and their little D democratic commitments are as important as their capital D democratic commitments. Yes, there is a renaissance in small D democratic thinking as well and a renewed focus on the most basic democratic obligations to organize to run for office and to vote. And when it comes to democratic antibodies few movements are more remarkable than the mobilization against gun violence organized by the students of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School which suffered such a great tragedy. For several hours on a March Saturday cynicism was banned from the streets of this city which can sometimes seem to be the most cynical city in the world. Throngs gathered because a group of determined, organized, eloquent and extremely shrewd high school students asked them to come and became, and because too many Americans had been killed by gun violence. Suddenly hope mongers were stalking the nation's capital. Imagine that and we can take hope from them. If we are seeing exceptional new activism within the political sphere there is also a renewed vitality in the institutions of civil society. And I just wanna mention one of them that I happen to be part of and there were good reasons to criticize the media for its handling of the 2016 election. I recall in the fall of 2015 when Donald Trump was all over the television we were in, I was in our kitchen and had one of the cable networks on and it was a live Trump speech and I didn't wanna watch a live Trump speech. So I changed channels and it was the same live Trump speech on the competing cable news, a competing cable news channel. And I turned to my wife and I said what is this Trump state television? And so that was a real problem I think in that period. And I think no one should actually be angry about that than Republicans. Empty Trump podiums got more coverage than Jeff Bush or Marco Rubio in that period. But there's been a resiliency in the media. It's been very good. I'm happy to say for subscriptions to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But I think that's happened for a reason which is that the media are taking very seriously his efforts to undermine truth and seriously also potential attacks on democracy itself. I think that those who would preserve the mainstream media's traditional positive role as providers of facts, as fair mediators of policy and political debates and as investigators who hold power accountable do not need to accept the right wing's insistence that they are biased political actors and enemies of conservatism. On the contrary, preserving ground for the neutral arbitration of what's true is essential and so is restoring some consensus on what facts actually are and how they are to be determined. For the mainstream media to give up on these aspirations, the legendary columnist Walter Lippmann said journalists should seek to emulate quotes the patient and fearless men of science who have labored to see what the world really is. I love that Lippmann quote because it's the last time anyone ever compared journalists to scientists. But his principle is right. The method he recommends is right and that if we lost that, we would lose something very important to democratic deliberation. So defending the work of those engaged in establishing verifiable truths is another part of keeping our democratic republic. And that's true not only of journalists but also of specialists in government agencies who collect and disseminate accurate information. Yes, we need to keep our eyes on the 2020 census and we need to defend the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We want to defend scientists and others in the academy who subject their work to critical scrutiny and yes, the practitioners of all fashion journalism. All of this is essential to carrying out all of the other tasks of republican democracy. Disorienting the public by blurring the line between fact and falsehood was something Alexander Hamilton warned about when he noted that the trick of the despot has the object quotes to throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the world with. I think we should remember that confusion is almost always the ally of autocracy, especially when it is intentionally wrought confusion. It should also now be clear that false balance in journalism does not serve the truth, defensiveness does not preserve journalism's values and trying to appease critics who have no interest in the truth at all only compromises journalism's purposes. But if our system of elections and civil society and up to now at least the courts and even some key parts of the Justice Department have lived up to their promise to be guardians against abuses of republican democracy, the same cannot be said of what is arguably the most important check on presidential power and that is the US Congress. I will not belabor the point except to say that congressional republicans have largely abdicated their institutional responsibilities perhaps with the exception of the Senate Intelligence Committee. They've opted instead to protect themselves from primary challenges and to advance their own policy aspirations particularly around tax cuts. And I think it's important at this moment and in thinking about this problem in a larger frame to remember that we have a bit of a romantic view of Watergate. We tend to remember the end of the story when republicans finally decided that Richard Nixon had to go and there were republicans including Barry Goldwater and you Scott from very different wings of the party who basically told him he had to go or face impeachment. The part we prefer to forget is the early part of the story when Nixon's fate really was a deeply partisan question and when many republicans in Congress were trying to protect the president. This is not an anti-republican point I believe in mixed comparable circumstance Democrats defend their own. Although I've always tried to compare the Clinton mess with what we face now. And most Democrats began by saying Clinton's behavior was reprehensible. That was the sort of party position and we just don't want to impeach him which I think is a little different from defending the behavior altogether. Nonetheless, but I think Watergate is the really relevant example that we need to look at and we need to remember that Congress was in the hands of the Democratic opposition which shaped the nature of public hearings and they did so in a way both that swayed public opinion but also pushed forward further investigations and we are now testing at least until November a very different model when the presidency and Congress are controlled by the same party and up to this point it has not been a very reassuring experience for those who want to believe in checks and balances. I think as a matter of academic study and long-term consideration I think it really is important to take a look at the role of party which was not envisioned by the founders but is now essential to our system. I want to close by talking about the values I think we need in order to foster a climate where the preservation of our Democratic Republic becomes a high priority. I think one of the paradoxes is that we need to combine restraints with militancy. Now when I think of restraint with militancy the person, the movement I think of most is the civil rights movement the figure I think of most is Martin Luther King. We forget on the one hand how militant King was we kind of paper over who King was we try to make him almost seem like Billy Graham or some at times we forget how angry he could get at injustice we forget the letter from Birmingham jail where he was deeply critical of moderates who told him to slow down and cool off it's a really powerful, powerful document nonetheless there was a powerful restraint within that movement it was the use of non-violence and non-violent tactics that made the opposition look so brutal and that created television pictures that changed the minds of millions of Americans. The case for restraint in general in a democracy is made powerfully by Levitsky and Ziblatt in how democracies died. They argue that democracy requires mutual toleration which is the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals we don't have a lot of that going on right now and also forbearance which means that politicians exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives and we could have a whole series of seminars on forbearance and restraint we are sure not seeing very much restraint these days. Yet we also need militancy Dr. King's fierce urgency of now to accept our responsibilities to push back against threats to freedom when they arise and against prejudice and against racism and sexism and homophobia and nativism. There are many issues on which one hand on the other handism is very useful in reminding us that legitimate differences are central to democracy. For example, given my own social democratic leanings I would assert that equal opportunity including the opportunity to participate fully in self-government demands a far greater degree of economic security and equality than we currently enjoy. This is particularly true I would insist when it comes to access to healthcare education, family time away from paid labor housing and the chance to accumulate wealth. Now a conservative friend might push back and say that my proposals toward these ends impinge more than they should on individual freedom and require higher levels of taxation than he or others might be willing to put up with or my opponent might insist that I'm focusing too much on economics and that promoting better personal value society wide is more conducive to the nation's well-being than any of my programs for greater equity. Now this is a sort of argument that happens all the time in a healthy republic, but this sort of honest openness should not be confused with equivocation about actual threats to democracy or republican government. It should not be applied to the exclusion of large groups of our fellow citizens from power in the public square. We must always remember what George Washington wrote to members of the Jewish community in Newport Rhode Island that ours is a government that gives to bigotry no sanction, not a little sanction, no sanction and to persecution no assistance. And that Washington was a slave holder reminds us that we must always have the imagination to see when we are failing to apply our own noble sentiments to groups whose rights and humanity we have failed to acknowledge. Lastly, I believe that republican government and democratic practice demand empathy. One of my favorite personal experiences during the 2016 campaign came when I was giving a sort of dueling talk, I was on a panel with David Brooks, Brooks by the way, my dear friend, issued the worst insult against me that I have ever gotten. David said I was the only person in the world whose eyes light up at the words panel discussion. That's mean, although he's right. But we were talking to this crowd in St. Louis. And in the middle of it, I just said, if I made a hat for this campaign, my hat would say, make America empathetic again. And this very nice man afterward came up to me and said, I love that, and you're going to hear from me. And about three weeks later in the mail showed up my make America empathetic again hat, which was an absolutely perfect replica of the Trump hat. And my son, who happened to be visiting, then said, dad, that's an awesome hat. But you cannot wear it because from a distance everyone is going to think you are for Donald Trump. But I do believe empathy is actually critical to the survival of Democratic and Republican institutions. Empathy should not be mistaken for sympathy, which is defined as feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune. Empathy cannot flow just one way, from the elite to the less privileged, from the rich to the poor. Rather, empathy in a Democratic or public is a mutual and universal obligation to try to understand the situations in which others find themselves and the complexity of their thoughts and feelings. Empathy means that in fighting bigotry, we should not stereotype all who disagree with us as bigots because they disagree with us on other questions. It also means that we do not want to assert the superiority of any race over any other race of any class over any other class. In principle, it ought to be possible for every American, regardless of color, to empathize with the African-American parent who is petrified that his or her unarmed child might be shot by the police. And it ought to be possible for any of us of any race or class to empathize with the steel or auto worker who suddenly finds himself on the wrong side of the American economy and unable to support his family to save for his future and perhaps faces losing his house in a foreclosure. And empathy requires us, I think, to give up these arguments about whether it is more important to focus on Latinos and African-Americans or whether it is more important to focus on the white working class. There are two problems to this. Problem one is class crosses racial lines and large numbers of people in the working class are African-American and Latino. Secondly, forcing us to choose between one or the other is a way of saying do not worry about injustice done against this group of Americans, worry about injustice done against that group of Americans. The road to the politics we have now is a road that held one group's pain against another group's pain. And that cannot happen if we want to preserve democracy and Republicanism. And lastly, on the class point, we need to remember that the great sociologist William J. Wilson wrote a book called When Work Disappears, way back in the 1980s. And he was talking about what had happened to the inner city because of the forces of deindustrialization. What happened in those neighborhoods is now happening in Reading and Erie, Pennsylvania and hometowns like my own in Fall River, Massachusetts. We ought to have the imagination to understand that action is as required for the inner city as it is for Erie and Reading and that those struggles can be conjoined. The slogan of the 1963 March on Washington was jobs and freedom. And they went together and there was a wonderful book by a scholar at the University of Michigan that tells the economic story of that march conjoined with the story of racial justice. Now we should be honest about how difficult empathy can be. It's far easier for people to feel empathy toward those who are like us, who agree with us, who live in our own neighborhoods. As Bill Bishop shows in The Big Sword, we don't even live with people who disagree with us anymore the way we used to. In my neighborhood, it's so democratic that I always tell my kids I admire the courage of anyone who puts up a Republican campaign sign even if I might not be supporting that particular candidate. But empathy is hard. And this challenge is to feel empathy for those who are very different from us and who disagree with us on many things. The great philosopher Michael Walzer, one of my heroes, wrote that criticism is most effective when it gives voice to the common complaints of the people or elucidates the values that underlie those complaints. I think the embedded critic can be the most effective critic in our society. I think that's true. And in his recent book on democracy, Jim Kloppmanberg channels St. Paul in taking what I think of as a thoroughly wallsarian view of the obligations of democratic citizens, Jim writes that we should learn to see through one another's eyes to think with one another's minds and to treat each other with charity. Again, charity, not a virtue much on display in our current political life. And as I say, empathy does mean an end to a politics that holds one group's pain against another's. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the courageous German churchman who was killed by the Nazis before the end of World War II for his participation in the plot against Hitler, taught us that nothing we despise and other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do and don't do, and more in light of what they suffer. I wanna close with a story from our son's experience. Our son wanted to do some anti-Trump work, although this isn't, the effect of his action was partisan, but the story does not have a partisan purpose. He wanted to do some anti-Trump work, and it was a campaign in Connecticut trying to turn anti-Trump feeling into local democratic activism. The upshot is they flipped 19 towns in Connecticut from Republican to Democratic in last November's election. But the reason I tell this story, and my son said, every doorknock he did throughout that campaign was worth it for this single doorknock. I think it was in a place called Manchester, Connecticut, and I wish I could find the name of the man because I would send him royalties because it's become one of my favorite stories about American politics. My son knocks on the door, the gentleman answers it. It's an African-American gentleman, which I think is relevant because I think African-Americans have an appreciation for the ballot that's even greater than the rest of us because getting it in so many parts of our country involved real struggle. And so my son is talking to him, and he was trying to inform voters that their precinct had moved, and he looked at the man and said, you know, are you gonna be going out to vote on Tuesday? And the man sort of looked at my son with complete seriousness and said, it's our job. And I wanna put that man on a speaking tour around our great nation because preserving a republic, preserving especially a democratic republic reminds us that we should, it's our job to talk to fellow citizens, it's our job to knock on doors, it's our job to organize, it's our job because we're Americans. Thank you very much. Sure. Challenging questions. Friendly or okay. Sorry, head in the back. That's King. Lee Droppin will ask a challenging question, I'm sure. Very quickly, which country at the moment has this democratic debate going on that you admire? I'm sorry, what's your, what is the? Well, Britain doesn't have it, Italy doesn't have it, Germany doesn't have it, Hungary doesn't have it, France doesn't have it. So I'm just wondering, where is it at the moment? Well, so my degree is in sociology and Max Weber taught me about ideal types. I think that was an ideal type. But I have, I think there have been moments in our history, I remember the story where John Kennedy was hoping his opponent, before he was assassinated, was hoping his opponent would be Barry Goldwater. I think it was for two reasons, one he thought he could clobber Goldwater the way Johnson ended up clobbering Goldwater, but also because he welcomed the debate about fundamentals with Goldwater. I think we have had elections, I've seen elections in my lifetime where we had debates over the fundamentals. I think Britain has seen those debates between labor and the Tories at many moments in its history. At this moment, things are vexed, but that's why I quoted all those books. I completely agree that this crisis is by no means an American crisis. That's why I quoted Josh's book and the Levitsky and De Ziblatt book. No, look at the election over the weekend in Hungary, look at what's happening in Poland, look what's happening in Turkey, look at the results in Italy, which were of a different kind, I think. I don't equate five-star with Orban yet. And so I see this happening. Fascinating thing about Britain, by the way. Am I correct from your accent? You're originally British? I like that. See, I should listen to myself about stereotyping people. What was fascinating about the last British election is despite all the discontent, as you know, the share for the two major parties rose to levels that had not been seen in a long time. That may not necessarily be a sign of civic health. But no, I am implicit in the whole argument I made, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I do think this is a crisis that is facing virtually every democracy. I think Portugal is probably doing better than most. I would say if you actually look around, Norway is not doing too badly. And there are a few other places we could point to, but this is a problem in a lot of countries. Lee, by the way, pre-sell your book. What is the title of the book you're working on? The book that I'm working on now is the working title is The Fault in Our Politics, which I'm hoping some people will think is a YA novel, and then find it accidentally by a book of political science. Appreciate your optimism about this new civic engagement. So it's a response to Trump, just like the Tea Party movement was a response to Obama, just like a lot of the pro-Obama movement was a response to Bush. So everything is, all these rising up of citizens on the left and the right, then the left is in opposition to a president. Then that side wins, and then there's all, the world has been promised, and then it's disappointments because it's hard to get majorities to enact any policies, and any broad majorities are diverse and hard to cohere around anything. So it just feels to me like maybe all this energy on the left will get Trump out of office and elect to Democrat Congress in 2020 and a Democratic president, and then we'll have disappointment on the left that they weren't able to do all that. There'll be a lot of states that are still Republican that will put up opposition, and then Democrats will be upset, and then there'll be a new energy on the right, and we'll just keep going back and forth until what? Is that, am I being too pessimistic? I think so. I do think so. I mean, it's not a crazy pessimism because the pattern you described, the Tea Party mobilization and now the anti-Trump mobilization, there's certainly something to that. I think a couple of things. I think, as you know from conversations with Tom Norm and me, we are all deep believers in asymmetric, and think of themselves as conservative, even though liberals are a bigger share of the Democratic Party because of young people, it's still only at 43%. If you look at most of the polling on who is for compromise and who is not, people on the left tend to be pro-compromised, people on the right tend not. So to me, there is that old Obama line, which obviously one should hesitate to quote because he was wrong. He said famously that the 2012 election, if he won again, would break the fever. Well, it didn't break the fever. In fact, the fever in 2016 spiked to about 106. Nonetheless, I think we are approaching, I still believe, for reasons of demography, particularly the attitude of young people, we are approaching the end of the useful life of that style of right-wing politics. I just don't think it can work anymore. I think Paul Ryan leaving office is an indication that a certain kind of politics isn't working. And secondly, I think that it will be, because the left cannot win without the center and the center can't win without the left. And I think that what we will need, assuming this transition that you described in 2018 and 2020 happens, is both more of a sense of adventure, but more of a sense of realism about what a center-left government can accomplish over a period of time. I think it should be determined to do actually more things than the Congress of 2008, 2010 took on, although it was doing it in very difficult economic circumstances. But I think there should also be a realism about what can be accomplished. I think after this long period, that kind of, what should I call it, aggressive realism, adventurous realism is possible. But we'll see. And if this title, if this turmoil goes on and on, as you predict, I'll buy you lunch at highly inflated dollars, which we'll probably face if we continue like this. Or maybe I won't have the incomes up buy you lunch, but thank you, please. Thank you so much for a wonderful talk for this ode to empathetic patriotism for calling on us to kind of recall and commit ourselves to an aspirational vision that is forward-looking and optimistic. It's incredibly seductive, intemping. At the same time- So go for it. I won't do, I really do. Doesn't the seducer always say that? At the same time, I think I wanna recall your friend and your interlocutor, David Brooks here, who in his most recent column, The New York Times, was so deeply pessimistic, who talked about how all the sort of principled Republicans had failed utterly and many were abandoning ship, how the 40% that were committed to Trump was as deeply committed as ever, and nothing that's happening seems to matter if anything it only solidifies support. And I guess I wanna wonder what are the pragmatic steps to taking the beginning of path back to a we in these circumstances? Well, thank you for asking that. The Richard Nixon always used to say, I'm glad you asked that question when he didn't want somebody to ask a question, but I actually like that question because it's funny, David and I had dueling columns on Monday and Tuesday and mine was quite different than his. And I think David's wrong, but would be right if he had said what he was really talking about that in that column, which is he was talking about the Republican Party. He wasn't talking about the country. And if he wants to make an argument that the Republican Party has been Trumpified that the kind of Republicanism he would like to see, God bless him. David, by the way, is the last surviving American wig. He really is. And I mean this as a compliment. He really is a Clay Lincoln kind of guy. But that he is entirely right that the Republican Party for now is gone. And indeed, it's more Trumpified because a lot of Republicans who don't like Trump don't think in themselves as Republicans anymore. They're kind of pulling away. So his narrative is right about that. It's not at all right about the country. In the column I wrote the day before, I noted some, this is one poll, but what I'm about to describe is replicated across a lot of polls where approval disapproval was 54, disapprove 41 approved. But when you looked inside the approved disapprove, three quarters of the disapprovers of Trump felt very strongly about this, which meant that 41% of Americans strongly disapproved. Less than half of the Trump approvers felt strongly about this, which means I think looking forward to the 2018 election, that the energy is on the disapproving side and that Trump really has lost ground because about half the people who are still willing to acknowledge that they like him or really do like him, half of them, more than half of them do not feel any enthusiasm about it. So I think Trump's behavior has had an effect on the public and that arguments against him have had an effect. I also note this fascinating post by Eric Erickson, the right wing blogger of a Republican congressman off the record saying some truly remarkable things about Trump and reflecting, I think, a feeling on the part of a lot of Republicans that they know that there is something deeply irrational and troubling here. And so I don't believe that given the first opportunity Republicans are gonna change their party, I think it's gonna take a while. I think even if they lose in 2018, they're not all going to suddenly say, well, we gotta get rid of Trump, partly because the ones left are going to be in the most pro-Trump conservative districts. On the other hand, I think in the long run, Lake Daniel-Patrick Moynihan loved the idea of social learning and I think that in the long run there will be some change in the Republican Party or some other party is gonna be formed. A last quick point, I take some solace in the anti-Trump conservatives for the following reason. None of them has political power. They're almost all writers. We know writers don't have political power or academics, a few of them gain political power. But the people they resemble to me are the neocons of 1965. Remember that the neoconservatives were liberals who were disillusioned. Over time, they didn't matter in direct political terms. The Public Interest Magazine was read by probably 10,000 people. I love the public interest, but it was not a big seller. In fact, I always say in college, I discovered the public interest and dissent. Woody Allen said that if you merged commentary and dissent, it would be called dissentary. And I always thought if you merged the public interest and dissent, it would be called disinterest, which could work on one level, but not on another. But anyway, but the neocons proved to be very important, I think, to the rise of the right over the long-term intellectually. And they ended up going in different paths. Some stayed liberal and democratic. Some, like Moynihan, got elected to the Senate. Daniel Bell stayed broadly progressive. But others, like Irving Crystal, became Republican. I'm very interested to see where this movement goes because I think intellectuals and writers and those types of folks can influence the debate sometimes in the longer run. I'm just very curious what influence they're gonna have. I'm sure some are gonna go right back to being fairly straightforward, the old-fashioned conservative ideologues, but not all of them. I just sponsored a talk with two of them and they actually were in different, they agreed wholeheartedly on how much they disliked Trump, but actually had a very different view of the long run. So I think there's an interesting ferment on the right right now. Theda. That's your job. Oh, well, that's why I wanna, I'll give up my time for, I'll concede my time. Let's get all three of them if I get my, this is purely, what's the word? It's corrupt insider politics. Theda's my old friend, so I wanna hear from her too. Yes, I, as you know, I believe that passionately and in fact I think, yeah, I think that's important. No dissent here. I'll take them all at once, I'll, I've got a pen, so thank you. Punctuate Gretchen's question about overcoming division and taking it in a slightly different direction than you did and that is to bring back in the question of race. So much of the Trump phenomenon seems to be built on racial antagonism and racism. How do you see this kind of mobilization and is there an optimistic story about how to sort of tamp down that kind of division and cross that divide in some kind of future state of either the Democratic Party or the Republic? Thank you. Thank you, thanks very much for your talk. I wanna ask a quick question about your own industry. You talked about the Washington Post and New York Times thriving recently and I guess that's great and all, but then we also saw that Manchurian candidate video of Sinclair stations around the country and I was wondering how you square your overall optimism with the ownership structure of the media and what the future of state and local media are. Those are, thank you for all those questions on voting. Obviously, you know I'm with you all across the board. I am very worried about voter suppression efforts all over the country. A couple of optimistic stories are Alabama and Wisconsin. You know that when you look at the Doug Jones race, there was an awful lot of mobilization within the African American community. My understanding is that the Democrats spent quite a bit of money with both African American consultants and a rather rich old grassroots network in Alabama that went back in some cases, some of the organizations went back to the voting rights years, but there is going to have to be a lot of that organization. Similarly, Wisconsin, you can argue voter suppression lost Hillary, Wisconsin. I mean, if I raise that close, you can say it was the Ukrainian vote and it might have been, but with all due, with great respect for Ukrainians. But in this recent special election, Democratic turnout was much higher and the Democratic endorsed, can it was theoretically nonpartisan, first one to win an open judge seat since 1995 and outperformed Obama in a lot of cases, not just Clinton, but I think there's going to be a lot of work done on this both in the courts, you can't do it legislatively in those states, but also in finding ways to sort of get, to create IDs for people. I mean, it requires a degree of organization that goes beyond normal voter turnout efforts. Like that canvassing, my son was doing about moving a voting place. I mean, that was just a canvas done solely to sort of low frequency Democratic voters to say, hey, the polling place isn't where you think it is. On young people, I don't know if you've seen the new Institute of Politics poll, but it was very interesting that it's still the numbers are lower than those of us who would like every person under 30 to vote this November. Nonetheless, there was a big bump up compared to 2010 and 2014. And I think there is some evidence of that. I think there is this view that electoral politics doesn't matter, but I think there was a result like 2016 does remind people that voting matters. And the turnout in these state elections has really been fantastic. I mean, Ralph Northam, God bless him, a really perfectly good man, not the most exciting figure. He got more votes than any Democrat in the history of Virginia. It was not his charisma. Something was happening in terms of participation. So I think there's a lot of work to do. And as soon as a new legislature comes in, they got to throw out these laws. And I'm really glad that Reverend Barber has gone national because I think no one is better at persuading people of the importance of small d-democracy and voting than the Reverend Barber. So I'm hoping he gets a wide audience. Second, on overcoming race and division in the white working class. The white working class is not a monolith any more than any other group is. One of the best pieces I have read is by a Democratic pollster called Guy Malano who wrote a piece for the American prospect called Mapping the White Working Class. And to sort of summarize, and perhaps a bit oversimplify, although I don't think too much, what he found, is he found that the white working class was about 50% conservative and very reliably Republican. That's because a lot of the white working class is Southern, which votes along racial lines, not traditional party lines. That 15% of us is liberal and votes reliably Democratic, but that 35% is moderate. And that moderation is a complicated moderation. The way from Guy's look at the data, there are many people in that middle group who are sympathetic to progressive promises in a broad sense, but don't actually believe that government can succeed in carrying them out are skeptical of government's capacity to do this. The second point, and so I think that there is real possible movement in the white working class. And you saw that between 2012 and 2016. The exit poll in Wisconsin, which mirrors more or less what happened in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan happens to be the one I remember. Barack Obama got 45% of the white non-college vote. Hillary Clinton got 34%. The difference between a majority coalition and a non-majority coalition is 11 points. You know, in Wisconsin, it wouldn't have even taken 11 points for that swing. And I think there is real persuadability. You saw it in the Conor Lamb race, which was a particularly good example. And Conor Lamb was not a conservative, no matter how much the Republicans tried to paint him that way. He was very pro-labor, labor was very important. It was said he was pro, he was anti-abortion. His position was that he was personally opposed to abortion, but didn't want to make it illegal. That used to be sharply criticized by the pro-life community, that particular position. So I think there is some real persuasion there, but as I say, I am also taken by ways in which we can try to talk about the shared injustices confronted by people of color and white working people. And the march on Washington, which, by the way, was financed heavily by the United Auto Workers Union and the decline of unions is, I think, a problem here, despite some of their complicated racial history. So I think there's room for persuasion. My hometown of Fall River, we're so democratic that Hillary carried it by 7,000 votes, but Obama carried it by 10,000, by 12,000, in other words, there was a net swing to Trump of 3,000 in a place like that. A lot of those voters can go the other way. Last point on racism, when we did our book, one of the most interesting things we found is we went through lots of studies about what happened in the election. If you look at studies that focus on polling, it tend, those tend to highlight race, nativism, culture, particularly race, and there's no question there was a huge racial component, you know, an important racial component to the Trump vote. But if you look at studies based on geography, all of those pointed to economics, because the places where Trump was gaining, in other words, Trump's vote was core Republican conservative. We can't forget that. But once you move outside the core Republican conservative vote, there are a lot of studies that suggest that places, not the poorest places in the country, but places that seemed at risk in the new economy, stuff like that, high foreclosure rates, those were Trumpian. So it's a complicated calculus and I just think that if you ignore race and racism, you're lying to yourself, but if you ignore that there was also an economic component and that economics may have conditioned some of the racial reaction, I think that's lying to yourself too. I am really worried about Sinclair and local media and I was actually grateful to Sinclair for being so obvious about what they were doing. I actually thought they'd be cleverer than that. I thought that the messages would be a little different so that you couldn't sink all of those talks together and this should have been, the FCC should in fact step in to prevent massive takeovers of large, there should be limits. We should go back to some of the older limits on who can own things. I'd like to see, personally I'd like to see some kind of equal time provision back. Although that would be very difficult because now you have cable which wouldn't be subject to it and you got broadcast, but nonetheless, I think this is very troublesome. On the other hand, the pushback, both outside and inside is very heartening. Again, this organization we're talking about, there are a lot of boycott movements. There are some Sinclair people inside Sinclair who actually were good local journalists, broadcasters who actually came out and said, this is terrible, we don't wanna do this and it'll be interesting to see what will happen. The other thing I am very worried about is the decline of local papers. I mean I can be happy because I work at the Washington Post and the Post and the Times are making these national gains. Local papers are getting eviscerated and this is really dangerous for democracy. I mean eviscerated economically where the number of people covering city halls are way down, the number of people covering state capitals is way down and local papers really matter both to local democracy, to participation and I don't see any easy way around that. The Joyce Foundation did something interesting a few years ago where they were looking at the decline of coverage of state governments in the Midwest and gave some grants to NPR stations to set up capital bureaus. I think there are things like that that can happen. There have been some innovative online outfits in Texas, in Minnesota who have tried to do really good coverage of politics, Wyoming, either a bunch of others, those are the ones that are in my head and so there's more of that but the danger you talk about is real and it's something that everybody in this room might give some thought to about how we fight back against it and I just wanna thank all of you for the work that you do. I have shouted out very particular people and I think sometimes, maybe because I've always had feet in academia and feet outside, I guess that's too many feet, I'm not a centipede, in each, we all need an editor. I don't think you should ever underestimate the influence of what you do on the larger conversation. It penetrates, sometimes penetrates in ways that completely annoy you, it sometimes is reported inadequately but what you do really does eventually penetrate the larger conversation so I think that you are as implicated in this fight for our democracy as anyone else and so to you too, I'd say it's our job. Thank you very, very much.