 Good evening. I think it's evening. It's evening in Davos. My name is Michael Duffy. I'm the deputy managing editor of Time Magazine. And you're docent tonight for what I hope will be a fascinating conversation about whether the United States of America can find a path forward, especially in this moment, perhaps from the vantage point of this night toward unity in the future. Our task is to ponder the prospects for that unity. It's something Americans haven't had that much of, great supply in the last several years, and which is in desperately short supply now. The fault lines are many. And while it would be risky to reduce them to simple terms, it's easily understood and often described as a choice between two visions, two realities, one coastal, one liberal, one secular, one economically mobile, one highly educated, and another less urban, more homogenous racially, less multicultural, more religious, more conservative, and more blue collar. But to reduce them to those terms or those categories would be a mistake also, as you will quickly discover. But our question and our task is, can the two ever be rejoined? To ponder that, we have a spectacular blue ribbon panel of folks from lots of different sectors. And I want to thank you all for coming. And joining us and participating and jumping in and keeping your answers short so we can all participate. Starting here, Lonnie Bunch, who is the head of the new African American History Museum in Washington, you see a ticket for which it is simply impossible to get. And that's a credit to just how great this museum is. And if you've seen it, it's also spectacularly beautiful. To his left, Dove Seidman, he's a writer, a lawyer, and the CEO and founder of LRN, which is an ethics and compliance firm. Lori Andrew Tyson, moving further down, is an economist at Berkeley, and also was the chairman of the council of economic advisors in the Clinton White House. Gemma Morgensen is the global CEO of change.org. And at the end, last but not least, Hamza Yousef Hansen, who's an American Islamic scholar and the co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley. Thank you all for joining us. And I want to start with Dove. But before we do, I invite everyone to follow along, those of you who are perhaps at home are watching this live stream. If you have questions, you can send them via Twitter using the hashtag Davos debates. And keep in mind our framing question for the evening, which is, in the aftermath of a divisive campaign, how can the US make a move toward unity? Dove, you get to start. It's a big topic. What do you see out there in terms of the nature of these divides? And what do you make of them? I would start with a question. Are we, as Americans, divided? Or are we being divided where the tools of division are so ubiquitous, cheap, and easy to use? Think Twitter. I know we're talking about whether we can come together and be united. As a next step, just finding a way to respectfully disagree would be progress in and of itself. So we're being quite ambitious. I actually think most elections are contests between candidates and their platforms and visions. This election, to me, was a protest. 60% of Americans said that they want to disrupt the system. They didn't want to clean up Washington. The system, capitalism, the economy, the whole thing to them was rigged. Also, compounding the problem is an industry, a burgeoning one, of anger. People are making money and raging and whipping people into a frenzy of outrage. So actually, my view is that we're being divided as opposed to we are divided. But here's my diagnosis. Can I take a few minutes to diagnose? A few. The Americans, our fundamental value is liberty. We right now have not just inequality of income. We have inequality of liberty, of freedom. These forces that are technologically reshaping our lives are creating an abundance of freedom from. We are casting off authority, micromanaging bosses, Airbnb, Uber is casting off traditional taxi cab companies. We are casting off the truth. We're casting off decency. It is so easy to take anything that directs us, captures us, and controls us, and cast it off. But the freedom that we cherish and enshrine is the freedom not from, but to pursue a meaningful, happy life. That freedom is scarce right now. Freedom to be yourself, to express yourself, to figure out what bathroom you want to go to. Freedom to pursue the American dream. So we have an inequality of freedom. Compounding that inequality is the fact that I believe that we are morally aroused. The philosopher David Hume said that the moral imagination diminishes with distance. It would follow that as distance decreases, the moral imagination increases. We now live in a no-distance world, so we are morally aroused. That is expressing itself in outrage, and we are skipping conversation, and we are going right to resolution. Fire that guy, where's my apology? Resign, et cetera. So a guy kills a lion, and we treat him like he's a terrorist. Somebody, the president of the University of Virginia, quotes Thomas Jefferson, who Martin Luther Queen quoted, and she gets protested for quoting a former president. You cannot make any moral progress. Morality is the ultimate domain of nuance. Distinctions, equanimity, patience, working through things, having three conversations about it. Anytime you are aroused and outraged, and you go right from that to resolution, you might get somebody fired. You might get a statute or a name taken off a building. You will make no progress. So what that means is we need a new kind of leadership, and I'll be really brief. The same forces that have done all of this to us have disrupted authority. You cannot have a world without authority or power. But formal authority, do this because I'm your dad, do this because I'm your boss, is being disrupted and decaying. It's losing its potency. I know we have a bully for the first time in the bully pulpit, so we will see if formal authority works. The only authority that is true and sustainable is moral authority. The ability to not just shift people left to right, but to elevate them on a journey worthy of their dedication. And that authority is in scarce supply, but it's the only one that will work in this world. The authority to show an example of doing big things together, that one isn't scarce supply, but that's the only authority that will bring us together and that we need to focus on how can we elevate, showcase, those who step forward, however inconvenient and unpopular, and manifest and personify the only authority that can bring us together, which is moral authority. Lonnie, can you pick up on that and maybe also address that question that I hinted at the top, which is, were we ever really united in the first place? I think if you look back historically, one of the things that's clear is that the United States has always been a place where people could find hate, could find partisanship, could find bigotry. And in a way, there have been moments where the country has come together, but those divisions are always present. The key is really whether or not we're able to bring people back to a kind of churchly and vital center, where at least for whether it's because of war or people believe morally that the civil rights movement would change, that people can come together under that. But the reality is that division is more American than unity. I appreciate that thought and I think it's... It powers our politics, game over. So let's just go to the next step. Laura, you are nothing if not Californian. And this I remember. And there's some very interesting things happening in California since the election. Talk to us about how bad this divide could get and to what extent geography matters here sometimes. Okay. So I want to at least start with one thing as an economist before I do the California. I will do California. But I think that you mentioned 60%, I oftentimes hear 60% of voters were concerned about things like the elite letting them down. I think it's important to say that this comes after a decade or more, depending upon the measurement you use, but all measurements would show over the last decade. Essentially household at the 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% of the income distribution saw no increase in their family incomes. So the system actually wasn't delivering for them. And whether that's an economic interest or a value interest, the truth is it was not delivering. So if I compare that and I'm not, I don't really mean to go back to praise the brilliant economics of the Clinton administration, but while we're talking about divisions and the basic problem of divisions in the US, during the period of time of 1992 to 2000, all income groups in the United States grew and unemployment rates around the United States, whether it was in rural communities or urban communities, went to record lows. And you know what? The divisions in the country came down. So basically I think we need to put the broader economic climate around this division question. Now I do think there's a long history of divisions between traditional red states and blue states. And I do think in the last decade, those divisions have become more profound. And I think now you're gonna see even more of that. Because first of all, this got us started with some observations about trust and the decline of trust. In the US, the decline of trust is dramatic at the federal level. But at state and local levels, trust levels are still pretty high. People can still, they know each other still. They can measure accountability. They can see impact. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on at local levels and in some, the progressive state levels, at social innovation, new ways of prison reform, new ways of delivering healthcare, new ways of delivering a early childhood education using social impact bonds, things like that. The Romney Care model became Obamacare. That was a state innovation. The Clinton welfare reform was based on welfare reform legislation that passed in states. States' rights in the California and Wyoming led the women's voting rights, which led to the 19th Amendment. And what did we see during this election? We saw states, 19 states voting for an increase in the minimum wage. We saw states, half the states now have legalized marijuana in some form or another. We saw some states actually adding child care. We don't have that at the federal level. So I think we're just going to see progressive states with progressive values. The problems haven't gone away. The problems to be solved in society have not gone away. They're observed at the state and local level. The progressive actors in the system, in the blue states, are going to innovate. They may be hit with a loss in revenue. I mean, California may be hit hard. And there may be some effort to hit California hard because it was such a Clinton state. But we can, I think, we have the ability to innovate and do a lot. And then finally, let me end with the notion of progressive resistance. Because I would say there's progressive federalism. States can do a lot of new policies and innovation. States can resist. And the example here that I will give you is, of course, immigration. Because in principle, it is the federal government's role to enforce restrictive immigration policies. But you know what? The federal government doesn't have the resources to do that. It doesn't have the personnel to do that. States and localities have to do that. And California has already said, we're not going to do that. The university has already said, we're not going to do that. We are not going to allow the arrests of students on campus because of immigration violations. Can the federal government do anything about it? I'm going to end with a wonderful irony. In a recent Supreme Court decision by the Rogers Supreme Court on Medicaid, they basically said to the federal government, you know what? You cannot withhold funds that are owed to states to coerce them to actions they don't want to take. So I think we have some room for progressive resistance, as well as progressive action in pursuit of progressive values. Thank you for setting the battle lines. By the way, this is funny. Governor Brown, a true visionary on climate change, has said, if the federal government will not send up satellites to collect climate data, we'll do it ourselves and provide the data to the world. Fascinating. I mean, it is going to be a great space to watch. Hamza, you just have Hanson. I want to ask you a question. 2016 is absolutely a tough year for your community. All over. All over, yes. Where do you go looking for allies now in this environment? Well, I think one of the most important things in the United States is we have enshrined in the First Amendment five fundamental rights, the first one being the right to freedom of religion. I think it's important to remind Americans of that fundamental right to call on the best of America, the better angels of our nature. I think we tend to forget that there are good people on both sides. One of the things I'm surprised Jonathan hates not on this panel, but Jonathan Hate wrote a book called The Righteous Mind, which is an extremely important book. And another really important book is Arleigh Haaschild's book from UC Berkeley. It's a brilliant study. She went to the place that fewer people voted for Obama than any other place. Louisiana, 16% of the white people voted for Obama. So she wanted to get into the minds of these people. And she went there. And what she was surprised to find was she actually liked most of the people that she talked to, the Trump supporters. And so I think when we demonize the other, just like Muslims are being demonized, when we demonize the other and we create these Manichean world views, we set up ourselves really for constant conflict. And another aspect, if you look at somebody like Andrew Breitbart, who was a liberal who became a conservative or somebody like David Horowitz, who was an extreme liberal, became even a lot of the neocons were originally Leninists. And then they became extreme conservatives. If you look at somebody like Andrew Breitbart, who founded Breitbart News that had a lot to do with Trump getting elected, Breitbart wrote a book called Righteous Indignation. And one of the things that he points out in that book is that when he went to the university, most of what he heard in the social sciences was what he considered anti-Americanism, how horrible white people are or a genocidal people. Racism is in our DNA. In other words, it can't change. Somebody like Sessions makes a joke 30 years ago that Undenibe was a lousy joke, first of all, but also was a racist joke. But 30 years ago, he's still a racist. So it's not allowing for development, allowing for people to actually change and grow. So I really think that the allies that we're looking for, Mark said workers of the world unite, I would say intelligent people of the world unite, which is a problem, because like Adlai Stevenson said, when somebody said, you have every intelligent American's vote, he said, it's not enough, I need a majority. It's still funny. It's still funny. Can I add something? It's one of the brilliant lines. You just said something that made me think about something happening now that might be different than the divisions we've had in the past. I think of the abortion debates. I felt that each side at least saw the humanity and the morality on the other side. We felt how deeply each felt their positions. They were positions of principle and convictions. And the reason these divides were so vexing is we saw that each had conviction and cared. We're now in this state of moral arousal. We are not seeing the humanity and therefore the morality of the people on the other side. We're mortar blasting each other in echo chambers. And we can't even see that the other side is a real human being. And there's this woman, Mona Hadara, that I followed. And she held up a sign. It just said, ask a Muslim right after San Bernardino. And she started to have conversations. And she gave them free donuts. And then her husband joined her. And then people have been emulating that. So we first have to create the context where you see that there's another human being on the other side to even create the understanding that you so eloquently call for. And maybe we have a different kind of division right now, which is so much more emotionally heightened. Can I get out? I was just going to ask Gemma a question, which is, I mean, as the overseer of one of the most interesting and dynamic platforms for transformational change that there is, change.org. What were you thinking on the morning after the election? And tell us where this leaves agents of progressive change who have grown accustomed to reaching out not just to people they know as Laura's talking about, but to people they've never met and will never meet in finding common ground. Yeah, I mean, first of all, thank you for incidentally promoting me, which I can't need to correct. The total CEO will get in trouble. We promote in literal terms. And figure it out here. So the day after the election, I thought, having been home and experienced Brexit, wow, there is something going on here, which is beyond even the care of many of us who had thought that there was something bigger for it. And how that left me feeling as somebody who'd worked in social change and worked, as you say, currently in the company that runs the largest platform for social change was, actually, this all has to get back right down to the level of the human being, I think, as many of you have already said. And if we look at what the nature of the divide is, has been commented on, it's a physical one. People are not experiencing and actually having human relationships with each other, we are physically divided over geography and in other ways. It's an economic one, Laura, as you said, and it's an ideological one. And there's about to be some research published by an organization called Purpose, which is really interesting in this regard. And what it shows is that in many of the countries in which this trend is happening, there's a spectrum. And you have two polls on this spectrum accounting for 20, 25% of the demographic heat, roughly, it changes in each country. And on one poll you have nationalists, people who are very, very kind of vitriolic nationalists. On the other poll you have people who strongly, strongly identify as cosmopolitan, as kind of globalists. And in the middle, you have a majority, a majority that split their votes between Brexit or non-Brexit in the UK, non-Trump in the US. And that's really, we can think of it as like the anxious middle, a middle that's characterized by fear and anxiety for many of the reasons that you've talked about. And I think the challenge and what we need to step up to is change engines, is how we communicate with that middle. Because the people there are not feeling heard, they feel that the system has let them down, both in terms of not providing benefits, but literally being aggressive in failing to hear. And I think what we need to do is understand how to communicate. And what the research shows, and this is borne out time and time again in what we see on change.org, is that that is a group of people who respond to emotion and stories. And what's happening is that both ends of the spectrum are talking to each other in deep ideological partisan terms, and it is literally going over, the heads are very broad, it's not resonating. On change.org what we see is ordinary people, very ordinary people who aren't professional campaigners, they're soccer mums, they're grandparents who wanna do something for their grandkids. And they choose to make change on something that a lot of the time is local. Over 40% of the petitions that win on change.org have less than 250 signatures, an amazing statistic. And what that does, it enables people to rise above what otherwise might be quite tribal partisan, like identity boundaries. If you care about getting clean water locally, you don't care who you stand alongside to secure that. If you're trying to get medication for your child, you will stand with anyone to secure that. And I think the challenge right now is even though this feels such a macro massive issue, we have to go right back down to the grassroots and we have to look for leadership in the communities that will continue to be vital because it is there that we can find common projects and common endeavor. I wanna take it, go ahead. It means that in some ways we've gotta look at what are the institutions that can allow that, right? And so here's my commercial. I really think cultural institutions, museums are considered one of the most trusted places in the country, right? And that it is also one of the few places where people of difference come together. And so part of what I feel strongly about is that museums have to realize they're in this struggle too. And that in essence, it's not just about looking back. It's crafting an environment that allows people to find safe spaces, not the right word, to find space where people can actually do what you've just said, share their stories. What I find fascinating creating a national museum looking in African-American history is the number of people of all races who don't know each other, who suddenly come together in the museum and share their stories and talk about what this means or what it doesn't mean. So in essence, it really is incumbent upon us to look at what are those structures that allow that kind of conversation to occur. I think that the lack of literally physical common ground in the United States is one of the great, I think, handicaps and problems that the nation faces. And we all know what that's like. I wanna do a quick poll of the room to, and not everyone will wanna play on this poll, I understand, but I wanna just, since you brought out the cultural aspect, Lonnie, we asked Americans at time.com to describe where they think the primary fault lines were. We asked them whether they were economic, so I'm gonna ask you to vote in a minute. Economic, I think there is this question and we have a page on it. Yeah, the fault lines among Americans, mostly economic, cultural, racial, or religious. And so I'd be curious if you have an impression, there should be a, there it is at the top, w-e-f dot c-h, backslash, vote. There should be an all of the above. Okay, then we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this as a show of hands too. So it's a little more dynamic, so we can add that, we can add an E. No, it's completely correct. Are there any other additions to the poll question? No, I appreciate that. We'll do A, B, C, E, and E in a second. So we're just gonna do this as a show of hands, because it's a little more dramatic than actually asking you to vote, but those of you who are watching may vote that way also. So, economic, good number. Cultural, racial, religious, and I'm gonna suggest we only all vote once. All of the above. That's right. Yeah. Okay, well, that's interesting. I think economic obviously won the day. Online, I do think we have the results, and you may have thoughts about this while they figure out a person. This was the online survey of almost 1,000 people. Not that different from the room, but some differences. Interesting, religious. And then I'm gonna give you the room vote here. Oh, that is, uh-huh, there we, that's the online. So what I showed was the, if you can go back to the room. There's the room, and now we can do the survey of 1,000 online till we go back to that one if you can. The other one was closer, yeah, the economics. Yeah, there's much, much closer, much more closely divided. There's a confirmation bias here with the economic, this is the world economic forum. Yes, that's true, that's true. But there, I actually think that we might also think about the interplay in reinforcing dynamics. In 2001, American sense of physical security was threatened like never before with 9-11. Then 2008, our economic security and vitality was threatened like never before. These two pillars that hold us up. And then while we were still reeling from that and not yet coming back, the world not just changed rapidly, it was dramatically reshaped by communications technologies that are so powerful that they've reshaped our country, our institutions and ourselves faster than we've yet been able to reshape ourselves. And I think that they've created anxiety and anguish and anger. They've mentally kind of disoriented us and unmoored us. So now I think, you know, anger has a way of taking whatever you feel anxiety and projecting something on somebody else. It could be what's bothering you about yourself is lacking in somebody else. It could be you have to justify your fear by moralizing, by saying an immigrant must be a bad person. So there's a sense to me that they're all kind of reinforcing each other and we're finding ourselves in a place that we're not used to being in. And it's quite a big fix. Can I add something? I just, you know, I think the cultural argument which includes all of them because if you look at Steven Bannon who I think really is the mastermind behind this whole thing. And if you understand what he understood because after Trump got elected I went and watched every documentary he made. I read his speeches. I really want to understand what happened. And he tapped into something so powerful in the United States. And so many people from the beleaguered what are called the nickel and dimed people. There was a book a while ago. It's a great book. Yeah, that these people really feel they're not in their country. That's why Poshiles was called strangers in their own land. And they see it religiously in terms of their culture, their religious culture. So a lot of things like transgenderism suddenly became a really important issue which the vast majority of Americans it's not something they even come into contact with in a place like Louisiana or Mississippi or a lot of these places. And so they really, I think they feel like their culture is under siege. And if you want to see a really interesting documentary which is called Free Speech Apocalypse which is about this man Douglas Wilson who's a Christian apologist went to a major university and tried to give a speech on heterosexual Christianity. He was literally the entire speech was just shouted down by people with liberating what they call liberating intolerance and was not able even to talk because they said it wasn't free speech, it was hate speech. And this is really what the deplorables who have now taken that as a badge of honor, adorable deplorable. I mean, that's what they call themselves. And higher you could go through the state just before the election and see yard signs that said deplorable and proud of it. And that became a very powerful organizing principle. But I wanted, since I was gonna come to you Laura, just a second, you can just ignore my question. But given how powerfully economics pulled in the room which I thought was striking, it made me wanna ask you is either party in the US even beginning ready to play on the question about the job losses that are going to come with greater technology innovation? I mean, I don't really sense they are but tell me what you think and- Yeah, I will answer that question. I do wanna say though on the issue and it's a very interesting thing about listening to seeing the culture up there and listening to this notion of watching ban in speech. I would say that basically you create fertile ground for those kinds of messages by an economy which is pulling apart. So the people who look at income inequality have been horrified at the trend in the United States and they've been horrified at the fact that the inequality at the income level shows up in opportunity. It shows up in the fact that people don't meet each other. They never see each other. They never see each other. And the people who are at the very top don't really feel like they have to invest in public resources because they basically solve all the problems themselves. So we've pulled apart the society. It always had divisions. We pull it apart more. And then we put into that fertile ground these messages. They don't like you, they hate you. One of the amazing things in this book we're basically doing a pitch for Harley-Hockchild's book up here among other things is one of her people that she got to know and like describe the situation as there's a long line and we're in line. And all of a sudden the line doesn't move. It stops moving. It stops moving in terms of our rights, in terms of our values, in terms of our economics. And then you know what happens? People get to jump the line because government policy says we have to do something, I'm responsible for this, partly, about gender. We have to do something about transsexuals. We have to do, so basically it's the combination of the line not moving and then that splits you up because so do I think either party has a solution to? No, I don't think we have, I don't think anyone right now has a solution to the issue and I firmly believe it's the major cause both of job loss in the United States and of income inequality in the United States is the technological displacement which has been ongoing for quite some time of middle income job opportunities and middle income. And we have to therefore think about a society which deals with that in terms of benefits, continuous re-skilling so you can get the new job but the new job isn't gonna last that long and you may have to get re-skilled at age 60. But the point is right now what the Trump vote has done and the Republican Congress will do is go backwards relative to the things we have to do, we will be going backwards. I wanna know, if you ever wanna just take a quick test of the zeitgeist and in this sphere, just go to change.org and see what people are interested, excited, upset about. It's just a great tour d'horizon of the American, like id and psyche and anxiety level. So but I'm curious, what have you seen in the last? But also go to Breitbart nearly. No, I think that you need to see both sides. Yeah, there's a lot of reading. Yeah, there's lots of ways to take the temperature, there's lots, but have you seen something that you didn't expect to see recently in the last, say, 30 days, 40 days, something like that? Who are seeing now? Yeah, I mean, so change.org is an open platform. Anyone is free to start a petition from any part of the political spectrum. And I mean, obviously at moments like that, we saw one of the largest petitions in change.org's history, which was around petitioning the Electoral College not to recognize the election result. We had a number of things which were very much in the moment in the teeth of the election and people channeling their emotion into that moment. And then you see a second wave, which is much more people thinking about how can we engage with what the agenda of the new administration will be, whether that's around climate policy or it starts to become much more practical in particular. And I think we are going to start seeing more and more local stuff. I mean, the things that I find most inspiring and that people report to find most inspiring are things like, I'm not sure if it was in the 30 day time frame exactly, but the Dakota Access Pipeline. It's an amazing campaign recently where you had a group of indigenous youth at Stunning Rock who themselves led this incredible movement that became encompassing of so many different parts of society. You had veterans going up there to mark this sacred land with them. And I think there will just be, as you said, Laura, a reinvigoration across many parts of the political spectrum of people feeling like this is a moment at which there is a lot at stake and they need to come and find their peer group to petition for the things that they care about. And what they report, actually, what people say is that it's important, is winning things, is finding their kin, finding their peer group. Right, a home in their own strange land. Lonnie, the US is becoming and has moved a great distance in the last five to 10 years toward becoming a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multicultural society. Given that, won't this divide shrink over time? Isn't there just kind of a built-in demographic, you know, even if this is a two steps forward, one step back, and that thing everyone said after the Obama era. But is that not inevitable? Inevitable, no. I think the reality is that the divide is shrinking because people were able to get in the window of economic possibility. And then I think that as that window closes, because I think it's closing, that I think the divide will widen it. Because I think, for me, what's so interesting is this era is a transference of fear. As you were talking earlier, the sort of folks that supported Trump were afraid. Now the people that don't support Trump are afraid. The day after the election, about 10 members of my staff came in, and I thought they were going to talk about anger, disappointment, it was fear. I'm terrified that the foundation that they built, that they believed America was, was a foundation that was no longer there. And so I think the challenge now is to find where these people can begin to believe again. And I think if you believe, then you have a chance of shrinking the chasm. So maybe, I just want to say that, again, to go to this local, so 71% of people in the United States trust their local government. Maybe what will happen here, we haven't had enough, particularly the millennials, civic engagement. Civic engagement at the local level. So now, if you have people saying, I am going to become engaged at the level of government where I feel I can actually influence things and I can see the impact. So I'm hoping this actually has the effect of encouraging more civic engagement starting at the local. That's another basis. Some of these moves are just basic human instinct things. We're going to go to questions from the audience in just a minute. W, we're going to say something. One of the things we haven't talked about is, I think President-elect Trump did introduce the topic of greatness. Let's make America great again. And it's always been part of our history that we are great when we do great things and we do great things together. Greatness is defined for us. There's nothing to debate there. It's defined on the $1 bill, e pluribus unum. Being on a journey, we're out of many one. And when we're on that journey, making progress and progress isn't linear, fits and starts, we zig and zag, go up and down. There's no Moore's law for human progress. We are great when we're engaged in the greatest project ever known to mankind, which is the American e pluribus unum project. The last time we were in the grip of, you know, we fight wars and we're doing big things together, we fought poverty that way, we rebuilt ravaged Europe and now Germany and Japan are allies. The last time an American president offered us a bold vision to pull us together. And it was JFK and he said, let's go to the moon because it's hard. But what impresses me about that speech is he said within a decade, that's the last time in my view that an American president offered us a vision that we should come together around. That was at least 10 years out. And that was not just about landing on the moon. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Dupont, one company made 20 out of 21 elements of his space suit. Westinghouse made frozen TVs. IBM created in-time computing. And now there's a movie out, what is it, Hidden Figures, where we're starting to tell new stories of how African-American women who were segregated, in fact, were the ones who helped enable that walk on the moon. I don't think we're going to be unified and do anything great together until we're on a journey of that kind of significance. And if it's not going to come nationally, then we'll have to do it locally and in our companies, et cetera, but we need a project. Any thoughts about what that might be? Climate. I actually think that a lot of what's going to mobilize people. And this is millennial issues and it's local issues. And it's going to be all the states that are already doing cap and trade and that basically are doing the Obama Coal Agreement, which was part of the Paris Agreement, even if the federal government says you don't have to. I actually think that we can mobilize around climate. And I think that that's why I found Jerry Brown's thing so inspiring. That's OK. We can help you. We can help those of us interested in the globe with a state-based solution to collect data for you, because we're going to need the data. So climate would be my possible area of big challenge. And there's already deep seated. I don't know. I would look to you on this. I would say you must get a lot of the change.org proposals around. Well, you talked about resources, climate. Resources broadly defined. Resources broadly defined, definitely. Not necessarily. It's interesting. Not necessarily kind of climate change writ large, but how resources play out more locally. And one of the things which you've really made me think about is what we're starting to see is technology provides, if used right away of humanizing, what are otherwise very process-laden interactions. So you're seeing an increasing number of decision makers who literally record a video of themselves talking to the people who have petitioned them on a particular campaign and explaining why they will or will not do what is being asked. That's a very, very different relationship than a kind of clinical e-petition website on a government domain. That feels like somebody is taking time to reach out to you where you are. We saw on, it's not in the US, but it speaks to the kind of experimentation that I think there is the potential to do in Delhi where there's been very, very bad pollution. Yes. And the cabinet minister actually used the platform and just sent an email to the list of Ginger Org and said, what do you think we should do? And there were dozens and dozens, hundreds of suggestions from the citizens of Delhi of how to fix climate change, how to fix the pollution there. And for the minister, it was brilliant. It was like crowdsourcing ideas for local democracy and for those citizens to see what they suggested not only being heard by the cabinet minister, he wrote to say thank you back and acted. That's a great one. Basic civic engagement, too. Civic engagement through crowdsourcing, coming up with ideas. He engaged the population into he, I don't know. She engaged the population, fantastic. And they became civically engaged. That's fantastic. I think there is a real moment here where people in positions, the system needs to change. It's a moment at which there needs to be radical innovation in democracy itself. Like the fact that that has not happened yet now is the moment. And I think there's a moment for a lot more investment in that as well, so it happens. Great idea. OK, I've asked enough questions for a bit. So I'm going to throw it open to the audience. And we'll take as many as we can in the time allotted to us in the front row right here. Yes, sir. And just identify yourself and make sure it's a question. Hi, my name is Aleem. I'm a global shaper from Perth, Australia. My question is to Lonnie. And it's specifically around the results that we just saw that. Or just in general, that Trump supporters as commentators usually put it have voted for him for economic reasons. And it doesn't really seem to show up when you look at the stats that show that Trump supporters across many states, that their median income is usually higher than Bernie Sanders supporters as well as Hillary Clinton supporters. And so I wonder whether privilege in some ways plays a role in that vote, given that if it was economic, why aren't we seeing, for example, low income African-Americans voting for it in the same way? We've had the system rigged against them since day one. I mean, I think that it's a great question because the issue in many ways is, as we've said before, it's a combination of things. I'm very concerned about the sort of backlash against Obama, the backlash against issues of race. I'm always surprised when the numbers are so low when it comes to race. Because I think that no one could really make an argument that a lot of this isn't about race. It's the race who is the person of color who's jumped in front of the line, at least in the way you perceive it. It's the person of color who seems to be fighting the police and basically saying, see, once again, that community is out of control. I think the challenge for us is to recognize how central race has always been and continues to be. And we can't find that middle ground without grappling with questions of race. And I really think that in some ways, in the communities I talked, not just African-American, but people of color, really feel strongly that this is a referendum against them, rather than a referendum about a greater America. That was the quote from Van Jones, who on the evening of the election described the entire vote as a white lash, which was, I think, cut. Just about the multiethnic, you mentioned, were more multi. America has always been a multiethnic society. And every group that has come outside of the Anglo-Saxons, every group that has come has had, in a sense, to duke it out on the street. And the Irish-Americans, when the Irish became white, is a very interesting book about how difficult it was for Irish-Americans. Daniel O'Connell argued to the Irish-American leadership that they should ally with the African-Americans in the United States, because they were fighting a common enemy, which was the Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxon leadership began to integrate the Irish and make them police, to start policing the African-American community. So divine and conquer has always been a strategy amongst leadership in the United States. But the millennials, and I think we should be very hopeful about this, the millennials are far less absorbed in the race issue. And I think that as the dinosaurs and the supremacists die off, and I think they will die off, I think we're going to see a very different world. It's going to celebrate diversity more than denigrate it. I would argue, though, please talk to millennials of color. They don't talk about the fact that, yes, the world is different, but race still matters. There are the people that come and say, how come there are only six black students in medical school at the University of Illinois? They're the ones that basically feel strongly that race needs to be maybe redefined, but race is still central to who they are. So I really don't like the notion that all millennials basically have said kumbaya that we are the world, but the reality is race matters a great deal to millennia as well. It sounds like, though, I don't want to start a debate, too much of one, but it sounds like you might actually think this will age out faster than Lonnie does. Well, I'm going to be hopeful about it, just from my own experience teaching young people for over 30 years of many, many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, I worked as a prison emomb with entirely African-American. So I'm very familiar with the struggles. This has been a very, very long road, and we're far from where we should be. I totally agree. And the reasons for it are extremely complex and cannot be simply reduced to race. There are many, many variables in the issue, and it's a very complex issue, and it's difficult even for people outside of that to speak about it. But I am hopeful from what I'm seeing. I mean, I'm in California, Pat Buchanan said, it's the Quebec of America. So in some ways, we're the weirdest people in the world, but I think California is a place really where, I mean, Berkeley's a good example, but Berkeley is probably the most progressive university in the United States, and yet still about 80% of the professors there are white. So it's undeniable that we do have a problem. Can I try to connect these dots, maybe? Sure. I think that there is something that millennials do have in common, research shows, and it's a search for meaning. If you, the number one thing if you ask millennials, I don't want a job, I want a meaningful job. Now they did not invent man's search for meaning. What they've invented is the insistence on getting meaning at work and working at companies that create meaning. And in that way, millennials are not just a demographic and age group, they're also a psychographic. There are others who want to join millennials in saying we need to build an economy where there's meaningful work. And the other thing that unites millennials is ethics. Over 60% would take a pay cut if they could fire their current boss. So over 40% would rather work for a robot. So millennials, and because- I forgot that's ethics. Well, that's just- Well, that's because they don't like the kind of ethics they're getting, but- A robot. Good or bad. But in many ways, what millennials are saying, because they have mortgages, they're getting married, they're in that great age group. They're participating in the economy, but they're saying we want to work for good companies. We want to work for institutions that make a difference. And right behind the millennials are the teenagers. I've been tracking them. There's Julie Bohm who got Coca-Cola to remove carcinogens. There's Sarah Kavanaugh that got DC comics to have more pictures of female heroines. You're seeing teenagers, one after another, lean into the world as social activists and become self-made leaders overnight. And to me, they're a source of hope. There's a generation that is changing the world through values. So I think that's a- I think what I would say here is we're left with a key question. I think we- I would agree with your views of millennials and I think probably the panel might, but I do think we have to listen to Lani, which is we don't- Those statistics may not pick up the way that African-American millennials feel. How it feels to them to be in our society. So I really think that's a very important thing we have to think about. And you're saying that in order to get ultimately to address these divisions, even with this millennial generation coming up, and they'll be the dominant generation, all right? They are it. They're moving. They are the families and the workforce and the investors, the whole thing. Can they resolve this racial tension? That is the key question. Another question from the audience. Yes, sir. Over here, can we find the mic? A question on the economic side. Now, zero interest rate world that we live in now, it seems like the rich know how to make money when central banks are handing out money for free. And it seems like if you're a saver, or if you're relying on pensions that now are underfunded or underperforming, it seems like that's a structural divide as well that could be playing to the perception. I'm just curious to get your response to that. And if we are looking forward at another decade or so of low interest rates, how do you see that gap closing? So I think that the reason we've had this, of course, is because the fiscal policy options for dealing with what was close to another great depression were limited by politics. The Obama administration would have gone for a much more dramatic fiscal stimulus. When you now look back at those eight years, what you would say is the austerity, the move to fiscal austerity quickly actually probably took a percentage point off the growth rate for a couple years. That's a lot. That's a lot of growth and a lot of potential jobs. So meanwhile, the Fed is basically trying with the only instrument it has to basically stimulate the economy indirectly by low rates, get people to borrow. That didn't really happen. Get people to invest in equities, which were then supposed to drive more investment by the business sector. That was the theory. But if the economy, if the households' incomes are in growing, demand is weak, why is the business community going to invest a lot? They're not. They're gonna buy share buybacks and they're gonna do other things with their equity. So I think that, yes, the low interest rate policy did have the effect of exacerbating the income inequality. It was not the intended effect and it was not, I think, the dominant effect because you really got to look at income inequality trends in the US really starting in about the late 1979 and you can just see continuation of the top 1% and even within the top 1%, the top 0.1% pulling away from the rest at stagnation, relative stagnation and so it's a long-term trend. I think the interest rate phenomena did exacerbate it to some extent. By the way, the last two years, the people who do these statistics the best are actually Emmanuel Saiz at Berkeley. Berkeley is a bastion of, so the best income inequality statistics in the US are generated out of the University of California, Berkeley. In 2015 and 2016, actually we had strong per capita income growth relative to, it was really two of the strongest years since the Great Depression, a Great Recession, excuse me, but family incomes didn't recover at the average level to 1999. So basically this is a problem which has been brewing for a long time and I do feel that technology and the erosion of middle-class opportunities is the long-term challenge. We're nearly at the end of our hour and I wanna ask all of the panelists who've been fabulous to sort of sum up at the end here perhaps a reason for hope and if you wanna mention a reason for concern, I'd welcome that too, but to sort of try to synthesize some of what we've heard, this is an obviously a hot pot, the country is now a hot pot or a cauldron of unhappiness and whatever feelings of alienation you might have noted before the election, they're more now, which is kind of just the double whammy. Lots of it is fear, I think. Lots of it is a feeling of being unrepresented, unheard, unheard that was deeper than a lot of people who thought they were hearing everything would have imagined. I somewhat had mentioned the deep alienation from business, media, government, political elites. That's not small and the fixes on those from my perspective are very difficult. But I'd be grateful to hear anything, any of you wanna do in a brief summation as we begin to close. I guess for me the worry is how do we as Americans help people embrace ambiguity? Far too often we come looking for simple answers to complex questions. What are the, where are the places? What are the mechanisms? What are the challenges? Tell people find that the greatest learning comes from ambiguity, that the nuance, the subtlety, the complexity helps you better understand where you are and where you wanna be. Where I'm hopeful is as a historian, America has changed dramatically. There is no doubt that this is a country that though built on limiting people's aspirations and hopes that people have helped America or forced America to live up to its stated ideals. And I have great confidence in millennial and others who will continue to say this is not the America we think America should be. So I'm very hopeful in that regard. So quick answer, do you want me to go next? Yes. Quick answer, I mean one way to deal with ambiguity is there's all this talk in Davos, quick answer there in my sense of hope. There's all this talk about artificial intelligence and machines. If you hit a pause button on a machine it stops. When we pause we start. That's when we start to navigate ambiguity. When we pause we can reflect. We can reconsider our assumptions. We can reconnect with others and we can reimagine a better conversation or a better future. Emerson said that in the pause I hear the call. So I actually think we just need to pause more and create this pause because it's a deeply human capacity. I would, in terms of hope, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the obligation and imperative of moral leadership. Especially at a time where people are starved for navigation and you need trust and moral authority to navigate people. To not put this whole time we're in in larger historical perspective because leadership is not about headlines, it's about trend lines. Where's the world going and how do we go on a journey? I actually think we're at a phenomenal historical moment and this happens every 500 years. When the scientific revolution happened it made us rethink after pausing all of our assumptions about how the world works. Does the sun revolve around the earth or the other way around? And think of what we invented after the scientific revolution. We invented capitalism. We invented ideas like Thomas Paine's Man's Bills of Rights. We organized society, labor forces, but Descartes crested that entire age of enlightenment, the age of reason with a definition of mankind. I think therefore I am. And when we shared the planet with just other animals we felt unique, special, worthy and wonderful because we're the most intelligent. Now technology is telling us we don't have a monopoly on intelligence. I think therefore I am no longer applies just to us. The technological revolution is in fact making us answer the most important question we've had to answer. What does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines? What does it mean for a community? What does it mean for a country, a company to put a human heart at its center? And I think I'm hopeful that the United States is gonna actually tackle that question because if we organize the future based on the one thing that machines don't have and human beings have, which is a heart, which is morality, as we realize we're going from the industrial economy where we hired hands to the knowledge economy where we hired heads to the more human economy where we hired hearts. And we really started to create an economy where the ability to care and have empathy and connect and build deep relationships and behave in an elevated way becomes the source of economic and life value creation. I think the United States can lead the way if moral leaders really understand where we are in history. I bet on America. Thank you, Laura. So I'm not sure that I know what to say after that. I'm not sure that in the U.S., if you look at the U.S. historical tradition, I do agree that we come together about big challenges. I think otherwise we basically let, we believe very much as the private sector, we believe very much that the government shouldn't have a big role. We, therefore, where is this going to come from? I mean, so I actually think we might get it, but writ small. And that is at the level of more local engagement. And I think that the population, so my good news here is that there is more civic engagement because people recognize that the problems are there, but they can see the problems. They're right there in their community. They see that the federal government is pulling back. They didn't trust the federal government to do anything anyway. I mean, another amazing thing about the book was basically people said, yeah, the federal government is trying to save the environment, but they're doing a lousy job. And so I don't really trust them. I don't trust them. It's not working. It has no impact. So I would say this value-driven leadership, I would not put it at the broad level. I would say, again, it's gonna be around, do we have a grand cause we might come around? And then I could see moral leadership at lots of different levels. Or does it come about because people see there isn't any leadership to solve the kinds of problems they need to solve in their community. And so they do civic action. So President Obama started out as a community leader. That's what he was. And by the way, on this race issue, I think it's really important to point out that on the eve of the election, he was at a very high level of popularity. He was personally popular. This was not an anti-President Obama vote. And therefore, I think we have to be careful to interpret it because there's a very long period of declining trust in the federal government. Very long period. We were at a low, okay? He was actually at a personal high. The two candidates were not. The two candidates were very weak candidates in terms of popular appeal. So I just wanna throw that in. I think my optimism is civic engagement, local solutions. And of course, although I talked about technology destroying jobs, technology has the wonderful ability, starting with change.org, to actually come up with solutions. And so you can mobilize the technology for social innovation. There's students at all these campuses now, what they wanna be is social entrepreneurs. They wanna be social innovators. They wanna find a way with a small amount of money, not a big goal to be the next apple of the world, a small amount of money, solve a social problem using technology. That's what they wanna do. That's great. Very quickly, Yema, and we're going to finish with... Yeah, I think this is about agency. I think people want a feeling of their own agency. Not just nominally, but they want to see that it works. And that is partly by, as you say, giving them simple, effective tools to take action and to change things that they care about. And I think one of the things that makes me hopeful is that the research does suggest that when people do experience things that are other than them, it transforms their view of difference. And so if we can find ways in which people come together around common causes and common interests, people will evolve. I'm a fundamental believer in the fact that the vast majority of people are good. And I think that there will be, if used in the right way, a wellspring, actually, of people recognizing that there's a danger here in claiming my own agency at this moment. I deny that of someone else. And this cannot be a zero-sum game. It has to be about finding the narratives and the opportunity that give me agency alongside you agency, alongside you agency. And that's our challenge. That's what we must do. Last word, Hamza. Just, I think, as a believer, I'm always supposed to see light at the end of the tunnel. I'm just a little worried in the next few days it might actually turn out to be an oncoming train for, certainly, for Muslims. But I would say it's going to test the institutions in our country like they've never been tested. I'm hoping that they're as strong as they have been maybe in the past, not always doing the best things. But it's going to be a time of immense courage. And courage is the most fundamental of the moral virtues. It's what all the other ones are seated upon. And the daughters of courage are very interesting. So righteous indignation is one of the daughters of courage to be righteously indignant. And I think that history always remembers the courageous. It does not remember the cowards. Thaddeus Stevens during the Civil War is one of the great Americans. And he's remembered not only for his stance against the banks, but most importantly, for his position on the African American question. And the same is true for somebody, I think if you appeal to the highest nature of people, people surprise you. Henry Sweet was a black man in Detroit who was accused of murdering, there's a white mob that was going to attack his family. He happened to have the best defense lawyer at the time defend him. And an all white jury declared him not guilty because he challenged them to be empathic to put themselves in the other. And in conclusion, one of the linguistic coincidences that I've found very interesting is that in English, we have other in brother. You know, it's important to see the other in brother. In Arabic, you have the ahar is the word for other. And ah is the word for brother. So in Arabic, you see the brother in other. And in English, you see the other in brother. And I think we need to do both. Brotherhood, agency, civic engagement, more leadership. Please join me in thanking Hamza Yousef, Hanson, Gemma Morgansson, Laura Tyson, Jeff Seidman, and Lonnie Bunch. And thank you for coming this evening.