 For those of you who don't know, I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter, I'm the President and CEO of New America and it is my great pleasure to introduce Eric Liu. To many of you who are from New America, he was here before I was in the sense that Eric was present at the creation of New America back in 1999. We were just talking that Ted Halstead, who was one of our founders and our first president, was at the Kennedy School while Eric was at law school and they talked about the need for an organization that would create a new generation of public intellectuals and that would work on problems created by the digital revolution. Eric was a public intellectual while he was in law school. He didn't need a lot of our help but he was one of our early fellows and often when I talk to people about whom we had, whom we helped discover, because I can't completely have discovered Eric, he is one of the people I talk about. His early book, The Accidentalation, which really made, I remember even as I was a professor at Harvard Law School then, I remember seeing the book, reading about it, and his work since then has been remarkable on multiple tracks and so many of you know him as the founder and the CEO of Citizen University. Also his work on the Civic Collaboratory, which is a head of a non-profit I've been part of. And then before this most recent book, Eric wrote this spectacular article in Democracy Journal on cultural literacy and what it means in an America that is changing rapidly and I have quoted him many times where he says that to be an American is being slowly inexorably agonizingly being divorced from being white, which is really a fundamental change in American history, not for Native Americans but for everyone else who came to this country and then he raises the question, well, what do we need to know about being an American and invites people to contribute the 10 things they think people should know, which I found to be a wonderful challenge and Eric and I have had the privilege of, or at least privilege for me, of having this conversation first at Aspen two years ago and then at Monticello, I'm from Charlottesville and was home seeing, I take every opportunity to go home and see my family, but we had this extraordinary conversation about what it means to be an American and what are the 10 things you must know there at Monticello with all of the complicated history of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson is the author of the Declaration of Independence but also, you know, as a slave holder and father of many mixed race children with Sally Hemmings, so it was fascinating and I raise it because Eric has consistently managed to raise important questions, complicated questions without shying away from tough issues but raising them in a way that abides conversation. So with all of that, that's not actually why he's here today, he's here because he's written a new book, You're More Powerful Than You Think. Who can resist that title? I mean, you're more powerful than you think and it's a book that I'm going to ask Eric questions and ask him to talk about it but when I read it in draft, it has this, it's a perfectly timed book because it is really about saying to citizens in America but also really anywhere because it's not just Americans, you have the potential to make change, you have greater potential than you think you do, let me show you how. So let me start, Eric, when did you start working on this subject? Did you speed it up in light of recent events or but what got you thinking about putting what you've been thinking about into this book? Well, before I speak directly to that question, let me just start with a long and very heartfelt thank you to you, to New America, to all of you for coming today. I do feel like I've been not just president of the creation but part of the extended family of New America for a good long time and the things that Ann Marie described in brief, the opportunities that you and I have had to play together both in public events and in gatherings like this have been very formative for me and really exciting. I feel like what for those of you who are first timers at New America or newcomers to New America as an institution, I just really want to underscore to you this place is happening. This place is where I think some of the most cutting edge, not just thinking but practice around what it means in a networked age to exercise civic voice, civic power and to expand our civic imagination. There aren't a lot of institutions that are doing it like this and it's really to Ann Marie, to your credit, I'm really grateful to be here. So now that we've established we're a mutual advocate for society, we'll have a conversation. We'll do this for the next 40 minutes and then Q&A will ensue. No but thank you for that framing too for this book. When I was writing this book I certainly could not say I predicted the presidential election outcome but what I was highly attuned to because of our work at Citizen University which is a nonprofit that is all about democratizing understanding of how power works in civic life and so we're engaging with practitioners and activists and educators not just here in D.C. but in every corner of the country on all kinds of civic issues and from Tea Party co-founders to Black Lives Matter co-founders to all points kind of in between and orthogonal and so I already had had over these last few years this just textured sense that we were in the midst of what I call a great push back that we've had not just in the last few years but really the last few decades this tightening concentration of wealth, income, clout, voice and power at precisely the same time we've had this tectonic demographic shift that you alluded to in which Americanness and whiteness are delinking and you put those things together and you get lots and lots of people anxiously, angrily unhappy with the status quo and anxiously, angrily pushing back against concentrated monopolized establishment status quo institutions and power structures. And so I felt that coming and to me though on a policy perspective or ideologically you wouldn't say that there's much that the Tea Party or Dreamers or $15 now or Black Lives Matter have in common to me they're very much same DNA. They are about bottom up civic power right now challenging these kinds of established orthodoxies and so with that sense I both was feeling this but also sensing that though there was this rising primal scream coming out of the chest of the body politic that there was also after that not a whole lot of literacy in what you do after you scream. Like the Woman's March is a great example. The screams are necessary, the kind of mass shows of voice are important but then you've got to figure out what you do with that and to become literate in power and this is a metaphor I'll use lots and lots. I think power in civic life which I define simply as a capacity to ensure that others do as you would like them to do. Power in civic life is a literacy just just like reading and writing are a literacy. You'd be able to read the map and the flow of how money power, ideas power, social norms power all flow through a community or through a country and then be able to actually after you read that map to insert yourself into it and to begin to rewrite that map and rewrite that flow. These are not things that people are born knowing how to do. You have to actually have structures and institutions and spaces and resources to learn your way around that. So Citizen University tries to teach that in different ways but I felt like codifying some of that learning that we've gotten from our work and these experiences that I've been encountering was really necessary in book form. I finished the book and delivered the manuscript before the election. As you know with book publishing you then after you deliver and they go through the editing you get a very short window before they lock it lock it down for publishing and I had a very short window to make changes after the election and you know what? They made relatively few changes. I put the word president in front of Trump a couple of times. I described the ways in which his supporters hadn't just you know surged to a movement but had surged to a movement that had won a presidency but these underlying tectonic shifts you know if Hillary Clinton had won you'd still have these shifts. You'd still have this bottom up force. You'd still have this tension you know in our landscape and so we just see it much more palpably and urgently today with a president Trump. In fact if you put us in comparative perspective you look at us and Britain where Brexit won and Trump won and then you look at the Netherlands and France and probably soon Germany although and you know in those cases the more moderate party won but the landscape is still deeply divided you know Marine Le Pen got more votes than she ever has. Gared Wilders is in Congress so you're right. I mean the election whatever the outcome doesn't alter the map it I mean it does but it doesn't it doesn't erase it. So if we think about this as a curriculum of power or a curriculum to become literate in power and civic power and how to use it. I know you do exactly what all good curricula should do which is you divide it into three but instead of reading writing arithmetic talk about the three laws of power where you would start. And I want to say I mean this book though we have lots of examples from national politics I think we live in an age and again New America is structured to reflect this age as you have increasing numbers of outposts and offices and stations around the geography of the country. We're in an age where of what I call networked localism. We're doing the work on the ground in a locality webbing up with other people doing the work on the ground in another locality is the watchword of civic change and innovation right now. So I described three laws of civic power in this book and each one of these laws yields a certain imperative for action. So law number one is simply that power concentrates that is as obvious and sad a fact is as human history but also a simple statement of complex systems because it's not just human system natural ecosystems where seeds initially land more good stuff will land and more things will grow right I mean and in human systems those rich get richer people who get some clout get more clout people who have some visibility get more visibility in a compound right that's law number one of power in civic life law number two is that power justifies itself. So at every single turn those individuals institutions that are incumbent holders of power will spin narratives about why that ought to be that way right about why it is the just order of the universe that they should have power and you should not and those narratives can take various forms you know in a different age they were story lines of divine right and descent being descended from from God today we have a pseudo economic pseudo scientific economic theories trickle down economics that are essentially a secular version of divine right that the super wealthy job creators need to be treated like a certain kind of royalty and if you treat them well their prosperity will leak down to everybody else and will be better off but even apart from economic theories you know quasi scientific theories about race about gender about national identity we spin these narratives that justify why those who have have and those who have not have not right if all we had were these first two laws would be in a pretty bad way right a few people hoarding and monopolizing power and concentrating and then always those few people telling everybody else stories about why that ought to be that way what breaks us out of that potentially terrible doom loop is law number three which is this power is infinite power is infinite when I say powers infinite you know I've been in Seattle now for 17 years even though I spent lots of time here in DC working in politics I'm not speaking as some new age Seattle you know West Coast dude coming here to sell you a you know a line about the infinitude of power I mean this in a very concrete sense which is that in civic life it is wholly possible to generate brand new power out of thin air right and let me put it sharply in physics we are taught we learn and we understand as a statement of fact that in a closed system in all systems you know on earth or it's a closed system you can't get more heat or energy or power without someone else in the system getting less right it's a zero-sum deal but we're not talking physics we're talking civics and in civics it is wholly possible for you through the magic act of organizing to activate and generate power where it did not exist before and Marie simply asks one other human to engage in some common endeavor around some common goal we have to come up with some common plan you've activated and generated power let me put it this way if you learn how to use an email list to wake up your neighbors if you learn how to create a great killer social media mean if you learn how to give an awesome public speech if you learn how to pressure your legislators you haven't diminished by one bit my ability to do those things right you've just added to the net amount of power circulating in the system and now when I say power is infinite I don't mean either that all of us can be infinitely powerful or any of us can be millionaires or anything like that right politics is full of zero-sum situations moment by moment what I do mean and again the evidence is all around us from the tea party to occupy Wall Street to $15 now to black lives matter to the dreamers to the Trump train to the Sanders movement that people who previously hadn't participated when they start showing up can change things right so each of these three laws gives you three imperatives of action if in the first place power concentrates and it compounds into these winner-take-all monopolistic games imperative number one is change the game be mindful of the way the game is rigged and attack the way that it is rigged re-rigged attack the strategy of those who are playing the game currently if in the second place powers always justifying itself in these drawn out narratives and rationalizations and propagandistic stories about why it is that way then our imperative is to change the story and that sounds so obvious and yet most of the time we accept by default the kind of prevailing dominant explanations of why things are the way they are so challenging and changing the story and then third and finally if power is in fact infinite and yet most people are stuck in this very zero-sum finite mindset where their equation is I can't move I'm stuck you know I'm ground down I don't have any power I'm one of the little guys then we got to change the equation right each one of these imperatives there's evidence for each one of these all around us if you just take the presidential campaign just take the one that I didn't particularly like Donald Trump was masterful at changing the game changing the story and changing the equation he did not play the game of tradition of traditional Republican Party establishment appeasing primary politics he blew it up he bypassed completely did not play the media game of trying to seem like a credible candidate he just went straight to his base of people using today's technologies he changed the story of what it means to be a presidential candidate not only by his completely norm-breaking behaviors and attitudes but by the sense that he was going to you know there were moments in the campaign where I thought this guy is on to something when he started at one of those Republican debates to say yeah I gave money to Democrats because I gave money to everybody because I was buying everybody because that's the game here and there was this candor that had a deep truth to it right and yet was violating every norm of the game of how he's supposed to play politics and pretend politely that it's not so he was telling people yeah I've rigged the game you're screwed right but now I'm gonna rig it for you right and then thirdly he changed the equation fundamentally by activating so many millions of people who had not previously who had been checked out who'd been disillusioned who'd completely felt like politics was stacked against them and he was able you know he didn't have to sell a lot he had something people wanted to buy right now again not just focus overly on presidential politics but any one of the other movements that we might talk about and things that are even outside of electoral politics which we'll get into maybe a little bit more of the conversation goes but thinking about how do you change the game the story and the equation in the book I'd lay out under each of those three three more strategies for how you actually do it so it's just this is why we like each other so much as we think in three yes so I like the way I think about this is to which is exactly the the same phenomenon but I think of it as power over versus power with right that that the kind of power you're talking about the power of mobilizing the power of networks is power with others right so you know alone I can do this much together we can do this much more if we get everybody in this room together we can do that much more and on and on and on so you're exactly right you're creating power by connecting and you're often fighting power that is power over that you know a few people at the top exercising power over everyone else but so I have lots of questions in terms of how you well let me start with one how do you connect lots of little movements so so we you you convinced everybody in this room and we've decided what we want actually maybe not because what we in this room might want probably I might might be asking me to do something at New America but but but let's say we all have a collective goal and we accomplish it but you've also then talked at a number of other places around town and you've activated all of them and they've come together how do you put that together into something bigger that then can can you know counter the powers that be so Trump was running for president and so he had the and he had a billion dollars or some fraction of it was I don't know how much actually but enough you know he had money he had he had national television recognition so he could assemble all those groups and Obama did that before but how do how do ordinary citizens do that so I actually want to slightly differ on that characterization I don't know that Donald Trump assembled anything Donald Trump was a magnet iron finally iron filings came to the magnet from all parts of the room right right his his brand his way of moving I mean as we see in the way he governs he wasn't a particularly effective operation operations guy right what he was was an incredibly compelling brand for a moment that was hungry for a somebody who said not only am I not gonna play the game is it set up here I'm gonna kick over the table I'm not over the chairs you know we're gonna do we're gonna WWF this thing right right and that literally was his way of being so but I think to the heart of your question actually there are two examples which are sort of mirror images of one another one right now that's unfolding which is indivisible right and for those who don't know what that is I'll say a word about that in a moment but the other is its predecessor which was the Tea Party right let's start with the Tea Party when the Tea Party emerged initially in 2010 though it was later co-opted by big money and by lots of large donors and institutions and the Republican Party tried to co-op part of it at its inception it was just what you're talking about a widely aggregated loose collection of individuals smalls who were incredibly frustrated by the shift in the direction in our politics in particular around the bailouts and and the expansive role the federal government post the financial crisis and this group of folks even using the by today's standards relatively primitive technologies of social media used old-fashioned technologies like conference calls right and got multi-thousand person conference calls going organized by complete citizen volunteers where they aggregated that power and amplified it and you know what I call as one of the strategies they acted exponentially right and they webbed up like that and when they webbed up like that they were able to completely change the frame of the possible in our politics right and the Tea Party is a really great reminder that if you web up like that with a common sense of purpose there was nobody in charge of the Tea Party though a few organizations sprouted up and indeed friends of mine were heads of different Tea Party organizations there was no central command there was no supreme allied Tea Party commander right this was a loose aggregation of self-organizing networks that had common DNA had a common message and a common moral perspective on the world right and that common DNA allowed them to kind of self-organize in ways up to the point where they had enough of them that they could change the game right and change the equation let's remember the Tea Party at no point at no point was the Tea Party ever a majority of even the Republican Party much less of the American electorate right but they were an incredibly activated minority who by webbing up in this way thinking and acting exponentially were able to remind us of one of the most basic truths of civic power which is that even though we're a country that runs by majority rule majority rule is always determined by minority will it is always in the end and activated dedicated relentless minority that makes the majority bend to it right and that's what the Tea Party did they made the Republican Party bend to it and then in turn they made the national federal politics bend to it right it's the iron law of political science right small concentrated groups defeat large diffuse deities every every single time right but when you add our network technologies today and you add this again this the spirit of our times which is you don't have to be a professional none of these folks who were early tea party organizers were political pros right rancher an organizer a mom or whatever I mean you know a veteran they were just pissed off Americans right and today you have another group of pissed off Americans before you talk about indivisible though let me when you say webbing up yeah that you said act exponentially and web up you mean connect I mean connect and I mean the connecting happens in a way that is not controlled centrally I have it so let's take this moment right now where people are saying gosh you have all these resistance all these movements and activities under the resistance hashtag and label right but what we need is somebody in charge right we need general Eisenhower dr. Martin Luther King to say okay I shall lead the resistance to the promised land and I just think that's a model for a different age I don't think that's I not only do I think that's not going to work I think it's not going to happen right I think the power of what's happening right now is precisely and this I've learned something from my libertarian friends you know with whom I often otherwise disagree but there is a measure of importance in this notion from Frederick Hayek of spontaneous order like if you let organizations self-organize and again if they have enough common DNA of purpose and kind of moral framework things will happen ecosystemically right and so right now nobody's in charge of the resistance and you might say oh well the people who did the women's March like the women's March happened and it was great but then it petered out no that's just like people saying well Occupy Wall Street it was great for a while but then it died well that is that was going to be my next it may look like it died it may look like it died but if you take an ecosystemic view this network view what happened to Occupy Wall Street was to use a northwest metaphor from you know I'm from Seattle well Occupy Wall Street was like a tree that fell in the forest right but that tree wasn't a failure it wasn't a loser tree right that tree was a tree that became what is called a nurse lock out of that fallen tree emerged new movements grew new trees right $15 now grew out of that fallen tree the Elizabeth Warren campaign grew out of that fallen tree the Bernie Sanders campaign grew out of that fallen tree right meaning the people who had connected around that then reconnected people who connected they reconstituted themselves the memes the one versus the 99% those memes like like a gene survived the passing of one post body and hopped over to other bodies right these memes 1% versus 99% power to the people right knock over the game is rigged these memes will hop from body to body right if the memes are strong enough and I think we are in a time right now in this networked age where again I trust that to happen now does leadership matter of course leadership that was okay right but but I think but then we'll get to that but I think in this moment I have a deep I think the more people who trust that kind of networking and again our intentional about how you stitch together and create some common DNA and common sense of purpose across these different parts of the ecosystem the better but so but continue and I do want you to talk about indivisible and the strategies they're following but one way of thinking about this would be okay so the Tea Party starts in this organic you know kind of networked power exactly that you're describing and then it gets taken over right a lot of money a lot of gets poured in and it gets organized and it helps elect a lot of members of Congress and ultimately a president occupy Wall Street and this is often the critique of the left versus the right that the left is more pluralist and less hierarchical and is a nurse log and it generates lots of things but it doesn't elect lots of members of Congress or a president so I mean how do you think about the way those two things of all that's a very I think that's a good diagnosis or assessment of the differences it highlights at least two of the many different sources of civic power that are worth attending to right the Tea Party was very successful because it activated money power in service of controlling state power yeah right the left is better at activating people power in service of trying to activate social norms power right so if you're on the right and you're looking at the left you're saying man the left no matter what like what you say they may not be good at winning elections or controlling Congress or rigging the game of state legislatures but they fundamentally shifted social norms in this country on for instance marriage equality right in a way that was like you know the way that Hemingway described having gone bankrupt gradually then suddenly right like it took many decades for for kind of attitudes to change a little bit a little bit a little bit and then boom they changed right and I think the right lives in somewhat mortal fear that the left will be able to do the same thing on a bunch of other issues like guns for instance right there could come a day where norms you get enough sandy hooks that norms eventually will tip and people like okay enough right and so the left is better at activating people power to mobilize social norms power the right is better at activating money power to mobilize state action state power and I think the truly literate citizen is able to access all parts of that repertoire right to be able to activate all different kinds of power in service of the movement that you're doing the civil rights movement was good at all of those things civil rights movement didn't just change attitudes about you know racial equality or inferiority and norms of segregation and so forth they change laws right they they worked over a president who worked over a congress and they change laws right and I think that you know so you can criticize or suggest opportunities to each side about where they need to work right black lives matter has to and they are making the pivot to think about not only changing culture and attitudes and creating this narrative about how black life must begin to matter as much as non-black life in our institutions in this country because it does not but also then to actually change laws and policy change police chiefs change mayors change legislators right and the right on the other state power and money power help so let's come back to leadership and I'll ask you to talk about in the context of indivisible so another you know when I take your point about spontaneous order and of course I mean this is capitalism the invisible hand and let people pursue their own interests and you know they will find each other and structures will be created but when you're talking about you know again if we mobilize everybody here somebody's probably gonna emerge as a leader if we if we said hey let's get together and figure something out we might have multiple leaders somebody might say you know I'll organize I'll organize the email list and somebody else would say well put up posters but pretty soon you'd have at least a steering committee and and then you'd have a chair of that committee and that person's gonna be a leader how do you how does that but then again if you want to stitch together lots of things well you got lots of steering committees and lots of leaders and how does that work because this is a question I get asked all the time when I think talk about network power it's like it's like with the Twitter revolutions in the Arab Spring but who's the leader and without being able to identify that person or those people can this how does this form of power really take off so even on that last thought I would and your orders of magnitude more expert than I am on the Arab Spring but you know my diagnosis there was that the failure wasn't so much attributable to the absence of a single figure who could step forth and be the you know the capital L leader the failure quite frankly was that that revolution happened on very thin soil yes that's true that is part of the kind of exceptional distinctive lineage history that this country benefits from every subsequent wave of immigration country right I'm not going to do with the Anglo-American tradition I'll talk while you because even even with I mean again this is part of part of Occupy Wall Street remember there was this constant kind of drum beat of who's the leader and and and a very deliberate effort at least in Zuccotti Park not to have a leader and then people got very timing if anybody has ever you know sat around in an organization trying to be run entirely by consensus it's the person who can sit in the chair the longest who ultimately wins who is not necessarily the best person to win but anyway I'll let you continue your thought what I was going to say is I think we have to make some distinctions between movement leadership and process managers right so absolutely we need process and we need people who can run process right and whether your processes dot is designed for consensus or majority rule or supermajority rule you got to have some common prior agreement on here's how we're going to decide stuff and that's got to be somewhat workable right this is part of the genius of the framers of the Constitution wasn't just in the content of what they did it was in the process of what they did right but I think the second thing though which is a deeper thing about how we are beginning to reconceptualize leadership in this age I do not want a big hero capital L leader right now I think part of how we got to the politics that we have today is that lots of folks who with lots of hope capital H hope voted in Barack Obama in 2008 said okay we voted in our hero leader capital H capital L my work here is done right he's got this and the and frankly you know his team made some choices that contributed to that when they demobilize the army of citizen volunteers and activists around the country who gotten lit by his exceptional historical campaign right and so what happened was that people said okay he's got this I'm going to check out and it turns out he didn't have this and no single president can have this right which he now recognizes very fully right which is why we're doing you know which is why the Obama Foundation's focus is going to be on bottom-up citizenship right citizen engagement right but but I think if you if you do an alternate history counterfactual history and you play that rewind to 2009 and start playing it differently and imagine that both President Obama and people around him say no no no it's not me right believe what I said during the campaign which is that we are the change we've been waiting for which now means you are responsible for delivering the change right I will be the vessel in the vehicle who signs the bills at the end of the process but it's you who are going to make this change and you've got to stay organized and activated this way right that would have been a very different that's a different kind of leadership right it is a facilitating leadership it is a catalytic leadership but it is not about charismatic hero worship leadership right and you mentioned at the outset in the introduction something that may have passed over some folks years one of the programs that we run at Citizen University is called the Civic Collaboratory and the what this is is you could call it a network but we really think of it as a mutual aid society of civic innovators from all around the United States from different sectors of civic work whether it's civic tech civic education veterans national service immigration reform voting reform all these people who do civic work but don't usually actually intersect with one another right so number one we bring them together so they actually do play together but number two we've designed formats when we get together so it's not just professional it's changing of business cards and kind of tactical advantage it's actually every time we meet a few members actually take turns presenting on a thing that they're working on a project they need help on and everybody else in the group has to make hard commitments of help not just commentary critique but here's how I'm going to invest capital in you ideas capital people capital relationship capital maybe some money capital whatever right and in the best sense what goes around comes around I am the quote-unquote leader of the Civic Collaboratory in the sense that like a conductor of an orchestra I called it to order I curated it I invited people in I set the tempo I kind of facilitate the flow of this but I'm not the leader in the sense that I'm telling anybody what to do I'm not telling you Annemarie you know to collaborate with this person over at Aspen or this person you know over in the Tea Party to collaborate with that person over you know at the Heritage Foundation whatever right it's happening because people are finding their own mutual interest and suddenly realizing oh it would be to my advantage to collaborate and connect with them and we can make one plus one equal three if we get folks from the voting world to connect with people in the civic tech world and so on so forth and make these things happen that's a kind of leadership that I think is I don't want to undersell it I'm not being falsely humble and say oh I'm not really leading this I am leading this right but it's a different style of leadership that I think our times are gonna call for more and and maybe even different from the conductor metaphor there's a great conductor named Ben Zander who some of you may have heard of who along with his wife Rah Zander has written a bunch of books kind of taking the metaphor of conducting to extend it to different forms of leadership right and even though Ben himself is sort of the epitome of the classically charismatic you know conductor with Brio he teaches a really important thing in every symphony orchestra he ever leads which is a principle of lead from any chair so if you're sitting at the back of the second violin section or you're the third horn player or you're in the very back of the double bass section and nobody's looking to you in the audience as there's the leader of the orchestra right you're just kind of way in the back you're far from the conductor right he's saying to you from where you are you can hear around you when something's getting off the rails you hear it before I the conductor here because you're sitting next to the oboist you suddenly realizing here the oboist is just a kind of an eighth of a beat behind in tempo or you're hearing that the violinist next to you is a little bit off tune it's up to you to start playing with a little bit more kind of gusto right so that you lead the people around you right and that you as again as an ecosystem start working together right that kind of leisure leadership to is what this moment is for right so indivisible is that the four so does everybody know does anybody not know what indivisible is okay well for our viewers I'll let me do okay and someone else here in the back indivisible is a movement that started with a document that four ex congressional staffers wrote a Google document like 26 page document a citizen's guide to how to apply pressure on your member of Congress how not to let them escape town meetings how not to let them off the hook you know not just to call your member of Congress but who to call at what time you know where to corner them at meetings right it was this great insiders guide they publish this document right after the Trump inauguration and the document went super viral on Facebook and social media that was their intention that this document spread what was not their intention was what happened next which is that now 6800 self-organizing chapters in localities around the United States form spontaneously not at their direction people saying in different communities and neighborhoods hey we've got this document let's meet up at the library at the pub at our church whatever and let's talk about number one how we're gonna use this document when our member of Congress is back at recess but number two beyond our member of Congress now that we've gotten together let's talk about how we're gonna apply pressure on the city council to protect immigrants and refugees let's talk about how we're going to do X or Y or Z right and so this document sparked this incredible boom of self-organizing right and again it took their leadership to catalyze it it took them to inject a certain amount of DNA and and this is part of the resistance broadly speaking but they are not leading it they're not controlling it now they have an organization and they've gotten some funding to help support right like a good conductor right help support what's getting played all around the country right and to share what's what House Indivisible San Francisco came up with something really cool that ought to be shared with Indivisible Kansas City and then Indivisible Akron and whatever right but they're stitching in a way that at the Civic Collaboratory we're all learning to stitch that way right that's leadership of a different kind that's funny as you were talking about the orchestra and I love the the image of an orchestra I used to think about teaching that way too that you would kind of you throw themes out you'd help them get developed you'd bring together in a grand crescendo you'd bring it back down but the way you're talking about it and and you described it it's sort of lead from any chair but it's also you know in your orchestra the flutes and the cellos are fine if they go off and collaborate with each other and you know play a different tune so it's kind of a deconstructed orchestra but the the the invisible example and others that you give are what I call a replication network and the examples are things like AA or TEDx where there's a template right so that what the leaders and they don't even necessarily mean to be leaders what they put out there is a template in a set of circumstances that are primed to have it go viral and so AA went viral before we had social media right but you had plenty of people who needed help to not drink or to not use substances and they use the old-fashioned way of bringing people together but there's this kind of network or kind of way of organizing this power that if you have a template and you have the right conditions it can just take off and that's they there were you know for political reasons etc they found that but I think it's helpful to understand not everything can be done in a sort of something that replicates but the things that can you just tap into that underlying energy again that that middle imperative that I described change the game change the story change the equation the story one is central in every sense it's super important right what we're what I'm broadly calling story or narrative is that template yeah right so TED or TEDx have a template Al Qaeda has a template for what it means to go start off your own Al Qaeda chapter right and so forth again rewind to well before the internet age the gingrich revolution yeah had a template right new gingrich wrote and created a template and even before the contract with America he was again talk about analog technologies he was recording audio tapes that's right with messages of how to talk about the role of government and the role of citizen and he would replicate these audio tapes and distribute them among Republican local candidates all around the United States and people during their drive time driving from one county to another with running for office in Minnesota or wherever would listen to these audio tapes and internalize that message right thinking about the narrative that you're going to use as that spreadable vehicle again is something that is not available that is available not only to the new gingriches or the asama bin laden it's available to every one of us it is why every one of us is more powerful than we think right we are capable of generating stories that with trial and error and practice and fallen trees and new nurse you know you can finally find and land on stories that stick right and I think that's I have a certain measure of faith in movements that you know movements will stories will stick in a movement if the underlying conditions make it so that that story wants to stick right yeah now we're in a moment right now we're two very different kinds of stories can stick you know a progressive inclusive Bernie Sanders style populism or a more authoritarian you know Le Pen style Trumpian kind of populism right either way we're in a populist moment but populism isn't all bad necessarily there are versions of populism if a story can be framed sold and stuck that can actually attract a lot of people who are so who feel so much like the game is rigged and want some alternative so at five o'clock I'm gonna open it up to all of you to ask questions and there is also a bar in the back we might take a two minute break and let people get a drink and keep going it being five o'clock but let's talk a little bit about education we've got folks here from our education program but just in general so you can do this everybody can buy your book everybody can read your book it's happening spontaneously but what would you do to enable American citizens to reclaim their power more systematically so I think this has to happen in sort of a stacked way every stage and phase of education right I'll start actually with people who are well out of school right most of us here in this room our work at Citizen University is designed to do just this to create all kinds of content experiences templates for learning whether they take the form of books and writing they can take the form of videos that we've been doing with with the folks at Ted and Ted Ed animated videos we have we run a TV show that just got nominated for an Emmy called Citizen University TV oh great that kind of takes elements and case studies local and national to illuminate some of these strategies and we convene people in all different kinds of settings around the country right in gatherings like this but also going to where people are where they live that's one layer then I think there's another layer even apart from organizations nonprofits like ours that are dedicated to civic empowerment pretty much every organization you can imagine being part of kids sports teams your neighborhood association you know Rotary you know chamber of commerce whatever you and granted that ecosystem has been thinning over decades but it still exists right and every one of those organizations is a potential vessel for saying hey let's talk about how we in our gardening club or whatever it is can actually act and work and convene and gather and spend time in fellowship with each other with a little bit more intentionality about exercising our clout and power citizens to make kind of change we want to see happen before gardening club we want before you know we want less fewer food deserts and more community gardens in the community right well who do we have to talk to who decides on that who in the city government makes those kinds of decisions what funders support that kind of work what companies could you get to underwrite this right you read that map of power just in the context of your local gardening club we have several folks here who are who have been great who after the election created a salon talk about race and these kind of questions of American identity and how we sustain an inclusive spirit of identity in this country right now right that kind of group which may seem like a book club in some ways isn't just a book club right now you think about okay how do we bring this to bear in DC how do we bring it to bear in applying pressure on DC City government but also how do we bring it to bear in connecting southeast with Northwest DC how do we bring that to bear and connecting people across different lines of self-segregation or in for segregation here in this town right so that's that second layer and then you come of course foundationally when you talk about education to actual institutions of education right and here both in K-12 and in higher ed our approach at Citizen University has been to really amplify this movement that's emerging called action civics civics in general has sort of withered away in our school system for a lot of reasons which we can get into later but and in and higher education has frankly drifted also from an explicit intentional mission of cultivating people who are engaged members of civic life right but we are working with organizations both at the K-12 level and the higher ed level to implement this notion of action civics so let me describe what this means it means basically you learn civics by doing right and the epitome of this is an organization start in Chicago now it's here in DC and in LA called the mikva challenge and you'll know the name mikva because it's named after a guy named ab abner mikva who lived a life in service of his country where he was I believe he's a veteran but beyond that he was a member of Congress first from Illinois then a federal judge and then White House counsel later over the arc of his career and when he quote-unquote retired he said I want to create a nonprofit an organization that teaches young people particularly in schools where they're not getting exposure to the idea that you're more powerful than you think I want to teach them this stuff about civics I want to teach them what I know by having them do it and so what mikva does is it in a in a you know classroom in Chicago it says if you want better bus service or more cops on the beat in your community here in Chicago okay that's your assignment go get better bus service go get more cops on the beat well I don't know how to do that now go figure out how to do that right who do you have to talk to who decide again that the central question of all civic powers who decides right reading that map of who decides how you then put the pieces together right and mobilize different forms and sources of power action civics I think is the watch word for our time right now we have partnerships with colleges the university that run the gamut from Miami-Dade College the biggest most diverse beautiful community college in the country Arizona Arizona State University one most innovative four-year institutions in the country right now to Ivy League institutions like Yale College Harvard other places similarly trying to embed the spirit of you learn civics by doing right and I think that's a mindset that is true up and down that stack right even if we are adults in our lives with families and work and whatever we learn by doing this is a time where the doing look there's one thing I'll actually give Donald Trump credit for he alone he likes to say he alone is responsible for the greatest surge in civic engagement civic participation in civic empowerment that we've seen in this country in half a century right he doesn't want to take credit for that he wants to downplay it but people are awake now because the way that he has conducted himself thus far in office has made people realize the fruit and again not just people on the left reform conservatives libertarians who are concerned about executive overreach who are frightened about what happens when you undermine the rule of law and respect for tradition and institutions people across the spectrum are waking up and realizing whoa whoa whoa this thing is much more fragile than we realized and we got to get off the sidelines right so people from women's marches to over it on the right people the Federalist Society and their article one project reminding folks that Congress is article one and Congress needs to be more engaged in pushing back against an overreaching president if people left and right saying it's time to show up again and exercise that citizen muscle and I think that's what's to me exciting about this I'm gonna open it up to questions but let me just say before before I do but I see two people so I just want to comment on your point about the different ways we can come together and how important that is I mean of course that's the talkbills original observation about Americans that we join things constantly of course we didn't have a state in the sense of a European state he's a Frenchman he's thinking of what had been an absolute monarchy and he comments that Americans come together for all sorts of different purposes and it's interesting when when Bob Putnam did his work on the origins of democracy and went and looked at Italy he said you know the strongest governments were the places that had the most organizations and he talked about choirs right singing groups people who got together for all sorts of volunteer projects and one of the things we've seen has been a thinning of those associations and you know Bob Putnam attributes it to television that's right in part I think he didn't want to attribute this but I think that women going to work is a huge part of it also and even though that had other advantages who were the people who maintained a lot of those civic organizations and then of course just what it takes to support a family right so two people working one person working three jobs that when we think about how to really bring back this civic engagement and you're right Donald Trump is as energized many people but you also see the lack of time the inability of the fact that people are so engaged simply in supporting their families that it's hard to make this time on the other hand of course we have tools that make it easier so so it may balance out but I think it it is a core piece of what are made our democracy successful you know I agree fundamentally and you're I think that's just such a great description of both what we've had what we've lost and what we could have again but the challenges are real right the challenges of time and that crush that first crushing tectonic force that we described the outset of unprecedented inequality yeah makes everything we're talking about here so much harder and yet you know I opened my book with a story of these tomato pickers from Immaculate Florida who were essentially in for decades ground down to his condition of not just indentured servitude it was essentially quasi slavery was right and yet after a certain point they discovered that by organizing in twos and threes after hours that they could actually exercise power and push back against both initially the growers who were oppressing them but then they understood the system in a bigger way not just the growers but the buyers the fast food companies the supermarkets that were pressuring the growers to drive their wages down to zero right and they began to mobilize and activate but put aside that that's a very dramatic story where I live in Seattle you know one of things we're proud of in Seattle is that we're the first country first city in the country to go to $15 minimum wage and I had something to do with that I was on the body the panel that struck the deal in our city to get us to $15 and the pathway to basing that in but I don't take too much credit because what preceded us in Seattle most people don't realize is a little town next door called C-TAC which is where the Seattle Tacoma International Airport is right and C-TAC was where a sort of a trial run of a $15 campaign happened and this trial run campaign was to get a measure to pass a measure on the ballot to raise the wage to $15 for everybody who worked in the airport or in the hospitality industry surrounding the airport and that was a campaign of by and for the people who it was going to benefit low-income mainly immigrant mainly women workers who had never participated in civic life in a formal way right and I'll never forget going to some of these gatherings and meetings and campaign events for that C-TAC $15 campaign where I met a woman who was a baggage handler you know by day whose husband worked two jobs one as a you know as a janitor at a hotel the other working at the rental car place in the hotel people for whom it could really be said they have no time for civic engagement right I mean middle-class professionals say I don't have time I got my kids soccer league I got this I got these folks really had no time right and they had no means but they organized they mobilize and why this goes to the heart of what you're saying can be revived in that Tocquevillean ecosystem here what can be revived and what these C-TAC workers found was that there was a spirit of purpose that got activated in the fellowship of others when you began to organize like that right not only that they began to find that they had voice and agency when they gave their first public speech ever when they for the first time canvassed and knocked on neighbors doors or collected signatures they'd never done that before and that made them feel kind of powerful right but they the thing was that they weren't doing that in isolation they were doing that community when you have a community that's essentially a civic analog to church like that that makes you feel like you've got friends and family in a way that is purposeful it doesn't feel like work to go do this after your second shift on the job it feels like a thing that feeds you and rejuvenates you right and I think for any one of us who either I want to start a club or join a club in this moment of civic renewal you got to be thinking not just about the functional piece of what's our agenda what the subject matter what's the policy goal but you got to be thinking about what's going to feed the spirit here what's going to make this a thing that people want to feel like they're that they're part of something bigger than themselves right and I think that was one of the greatest lessons that I got out of that $15 experience that tells us that even in circumstances that are crushingly evident crushing evidence of inequality right and crushing evidence of how the deck is stacked against people who are marginalized in their society they were able to do it when they felt the motivation to do it together. Cheyenne. Hi my name is Cheyenne and I work with our political reform program here at annual America Marchman and Lee Drummond and Holly so I've been doing a lot of thinking about civic engagement and what that looks like today what I what I struggle with with is the idea of sure there there was a buildup of insanely high levels of inequality a political system that no longer worked for people so eventually there was a tipping point right and this would have happened had Hillary been elected or you know with with Trump but my question is sure of course you have this sort of explosion of civic spirit because it's it's the sort of reaction this immediate five month long reaction to to a president that people are scared of and terrified of what he can do and and and his show that he's willing to sort of really push back on a lot of progress that's been made but what do you do when sort of fatigue sets in when you've been in this process for like two three four eight years how do you address that but also how do you address the fact that in terms of civic engagement you could say that people live in a spectrum right so there are people that you think the the most you're gonna be able to get them to do is vote and that's and that's great but there are those people who are like your super citizens who are yeah they're gonna call their congressman they're gonna do whatever it is that you tell them yes you're more powerful than you think you can do that so how do you think about those different types of citizens and how they see their power and how do you think about sustainability and how do you deal with fatigue and and and moving things when it seems like you're not really as powerful as you might think you are yeah that's a great that's a great great what happens when you're not you're not yeah and every day people get evidence also that seems like they're not right it's a great question I think you know there are two parts to your question but also there was a third part that I thought you were gonna ask that I want to speak to given that you work in what is one of the country's best political reform shops period on questions of the rules of democracy really so on the spectrum point a friend and a researcher who's an ethnographer named Kate criteria so you may know her run into her work did this wonderful body of work that I referred to a little bit in the book initially for Google as they were trying to understand the civic landscape better and she's since published it for everybody in which she describes it exactly the spectrum you're depicting that ranges on the one end from people who are completely checked out to the super citizens that you might describe and her research basically says that there is a the largest segment and the band that needs to be most attended to which calls interested bystanders right so not people who are actively engaged like I am already certainly not people like you who are super citizens already right but people who are somewhat aware but haven't but are kind of observers and spectators right I think what's sick what's what's special about this moment is that a lot of those interested bystanders are no longer bystanders right they are upstanders they are getting on the field they are they're engaging right so that then gets to the question of sustainability because if you've been on the sidelines for a long time and then it's like okay I'm getting on the field you start running around like if you're out of shape you know within a few minutes you're gonna start throwing up right you can't you can't sustain that level of activity and I think this is where there's a personal version to the response and I think there's a collective version to my response the personal version is to pace yourself I mean you know to it does no good for you or the movement that you want to engage in if you completely fry yourself right but I think the collective answer is recognizing that again in this sort of visual that I have my mind it's sort of the orchestra but it's also like the ocean like you know some will some will ebb while others flow some will recede while others search right and if you're in a web with others where you're like you know what I got it like next two weeks I got a kind of downshift a little bit right and someone's like well okay you know last two weeks I was downshifting like I'll step it up here you know but the key is that you're you're already situated in a network right in a collective of others where those kinds of understandings can either be made explicit or are implicitly understood as in a great orchestra right or theater company or whatever it is right but I think situating yourself again the watchword is that I use it's not a toke billion but it's it's Franklin s guy what one of my big watchwords is be like Ben right Benjamin Franklin was an inveterate club maker inveterate club joiner right and always stuff and you think gosh you know how did he not burn out how did he you know and he knew when to really engage and pour it all on and starting the fire department or the first library or this tradesman's club or whatever and he knew when to kind of pull back and let the thing kind of go on its own right and you've got to kind of regulate that yourself but the third thing that I want to say just because you're from the political reform group here I think it's also you know one of the great examples of what it means when I say change the game is literally change the game of democracy is literally change the rules of voting and participation and elections right and I think a lot of the energy that is getting expressed right now I want to I want a lot of these indivisible folks to now start thinking about okay how do we channel siphon some of this energy to be thinking about ranked choice voting different forms of voting than the ones that we have right now how do we get others of these folks to start following the experiment that we just launched in Seattle called democracy vouchers right where every citizen gets a 25 gets for $25 vouchers to spend on a citywide candidate so it's a kind of public financing but it's a kind that changes the incentives for candidates right so the candidate instead of calling up the person who can max out now just says you know I don't know that many rich people who can max out but I know a lot of people who can give me their democracy vouchers right and that changes the equation right that there are experiments like these happening around the country and if we can get more of these interested bystanders not just to go to marches and not just to write congress but to get some of them diverted to your program that's what we need in the country right now right so I'm really glad you're doing what you're doing so there I'll just say also that yeah right there yeah but I'll this is also where the stories matter right telling the stories of the civil rights movement or other stories that took years decades even but look at where it finally came as you said you know gradually and then suddenly that's important too that people understand that they can be part of something that takes a long time yes hi my name is Richard Skinner I'm with NYU Washington most of the groups you've been talking about have been fairly benign or at least in the mainstream of American politics but what worries me sometimes is that you see these techniques being used by groups that are far more extreme that were traditionally kept out of the political life the political world by gatekeepers whether they mean media or in politics or wherever but now we're able to use technology are able to use all these networking techniques to enter the mainstream even if they don't win they're at least seen as part of the game now and this could be anything from ISIS to the various extremist groups that are labeled as the alt-right as you mentioned you know Donald Trump was there of a magnet and these they were some of the files some of these groups really had no particular endorsement from Trump but they could grab on to him as a way to gain attention and and in the case of both ISIS and the alt-right you have behind all this decentralization you have fairly centralized sources of power such as in Moscow sort of driving this out under the guise of a decentralized movement so what can we do about groups like white nationalists who are now not quite in the mainstream but certainly a lot more visible because of last year's campaign and because of their ability to use the internet and networking to gain attention it's another great question and one that highlights for me I mean I I I somewhat take the view that though today's media technologies are in many ways affecting a shift in kind and not just in degree in our politics that nonetheless certain things are you know are the same at any phase under the Sun and and here's the reality like yes the internet makes it easier for ISIS and for the alt-right to be to get I think the keyword you use that I jot down to get attention right and to build their power by harvesting attention but if you rewind to a period when radio first came on the scene in politics the very same you know fears were there and the very same facts were indeed on the ground it is true that you know father Coughlin and Adolf Hitler used radio to great effect right and I say this mainly to say that the underlying issue is how much faith you have in a democratic system to heal itself right the media technologies are always of any of a given age are going to give voice to people who had previously not had as easy access to voice and attention right but I think the you know the other a word that I would note in my response to this apart from attention which is what media is all about antibodies these things are these things are viruses ISIS is about the kind of radical hateful fundamentalism radical hateful fundamentalism that is obsessed with the kind of purity that cannot be found on this earth is what connects ISIS to the alt-right too many other movements to you know to other folks to white supremacists of all stripes right that is a virus and that is a virus that is always in the body politic there are always people like that the question is how strong is the immune system right and we are the immune system right and so when an ISIS or an alt-right starts using the internet to this fact you know the question is how do we swarm to to surround it how do we swarm to provide countervailing voice how do we swarm to provide a compelling alternative to the story that an ISIS or an alt-right is telling right the people who are alienated and frustrated with either modernity or the changes in our society who are drawn to either one of those movements are drawn to them because there hasn't been a they are drawn to them in the absence of a compelling alternative affirmative alternative and I know and actually and Maria would ask you I mean when you were your life not here in New America but at the State Department you know when you had to be thinking about from a policy planning standpoint what kinds of innovations in outreaching communication and organizing you would do to create these affirmative compelling alternatives to lots of folks some of it I'm sure is about not paying attention when someone on the fringe starts yelling to try to get your attention but some of it also has to be about reminding folks look what just happened horribly horrifically in Portland where that I don't know fully whether he was whether it's merely a matter of mental illness or mental illness coupled with ideology but the person who was threatening the two Muslim women and then ended up killing the two and wounding the one bystanders who decided not to be bystanders right what's heartening to me is that the way that that story is now spreading in our society on social media and elsewhere is not the lesson in the moral of the story is if you see something bad happen turn away and keep to yourself because you might get your throat cut what's going around the internet right now and what people are literally opening their hearts to are the last words of one of those people who had his throat cut which was I want you to tell her but on this train that I love them right those were literally his last words before he was taking the hospital you know taking the ambulance and then blood to death right he had stood in the way of this crazy knife-wielding man who was trying to harm these hijab wearing muslim you know on the train and the fact that this is the narrative that's going around says to me something in the immune system is kicking in right people are recognizing that the message right now this moment is if you turn away right then you just give permission to more right and we've got now we've got to be prepared and ask ourselves what are we willing to risk right but I think you do that both in media messaging but we do that in our own social circles in our faith circles in our family circles in our neighborhood circles asking the question what are we what are we willing to do to be like antibodies to swarm to the virus right it happens spontaneously when the muslim band came down and people swarmed to airports and railroad stations to protect refugees and immigrants in that moment right nobody had to tell them nobody had to issue a directive or a message from Command Central but that was a very dramatic visible moment in these smaller everyday choices in moments what are we willing to do we've got to start nurturing sustaining that that courage and in each other now so that when those moments arise whether they are in the form of a knife-wielding fanatic or in the form of nasty but kind of irresistible tweets from an alt-right or an ISIS that we know how to contain them but I don't know if you wanted to add anything just from your no at least when you were in the US State Department you were thinking about how to answer ISIS the question really should have been wasn't always who needs to be delivering these messages I mean we out over years we've come out that really most effective are other Muslims in countries in the United States too but certainly in many of these countries who themselves have a different vision of what Islam means or a separation of church and state but that you know for the United States to counter message often was productive so a lot and really that that goes to your point in a different way that the United States in that sense thinks oh here's a bad message we will respond as opposed to no actually the people in that country have more power than they think maybe we can help catalyze that but even then we we needed to do it not through the US government so yes lots of lots of there's a question there on the off and then in the front row hi thank you so much it's been absolutely excellent giving me a lot to think about I'm wondering your thoughts on the role of I'll use the word allies or supporters to promote the needs of those who are directly impacted by certain societal causes or ills so to speak a lot of my work in DC outside of my policy work professionally my personal work has been around community organizing and it started with hosting political education classes in DC and then it became work around occupied DC and the people of color caucus and today it is around the needs of women of color self-care and well-being specifically and early on we thought to ourselves we need to bring people in southeast to these political education classes never happened very well despite our well intentions then it became we need to lift up the voices of those who are directly impacted around police brutality community disinvestment food deserts etc never happened very well looking back and now it's more for me an existential question of should that have been our work at all organizing across class lines can be so complicated and I see that even today with groups like Black Lives Matter and certain chapters BYP 100 and others and I'm most familiar with in the in the movement for black lives and that we are organizing among our cohort so what are your thoughts on that as a movement building strategy do we need to be organizing as I said across class lines do we need to trust kind of the spontaneity of movement building in Amakali I think the tomato workers is a great example so yeah I'll leave it there wow great question what a great question you know I think I want to speak to the existential part of your question first which is I don't think you were wrong in intention but it's actually sort of an analog to what Anne Marie was just saying about you know who should be the messengers who should be the catalysts you know I think I don't if spontaneous order and spontaneous organization were the solution to things then we wouldn't need this book that you know things would people would just figure out oh we need to organize for more power and it would just happen right the reality is that people get stuck the reality is that people get stuck in narratives of why things are the way they are and the reality is that people also you know of all different kinds learn a certain measure of helplessness right and I know one of the books that you all were reading in your salon prior to this one was what was hillbilly elegy right and the author of that book you know it talks a lot about cultures within Appalachia of learned helplessness right in the sense that after a while when things have been going bad you internalize a sense that things are always going to go bad and that certain to a certain measure becomes self-fulfilling right and at a minimum it prevents you from imagining other ways that you could organize right so let's take that example so you know it does someone from the outside need to come to Appalachia and say wake up wake up you can actually organize right just the way that you were trying to go to Southeast and say wake up you need to organize sometimes that can help sometimes it can be the catalytic but I think it only sticks if you have the allies and the messengers who have the credibility and the standing on the ground there right whether it's in South Southeast or Appalachia and and I think you know I don't know if you actually know a colleague of mine in Southeast a guy named Tom Brown who started an organization called Training Grounds which you know has been a community catalyst and active citizen has run unsuccessfully for city office has just tried to show up in all these different ways right and he can he can span a pretty wide spectrum he can deal with power brokers in DC can kind of you know work with people in you know elite institutions and he has total credibility in the hardest hit communities that he's trying to actually Training Grounds is actually about providing pathways to civic and economic empowerment through literally teaching people about the art of art of being a barista kind of in the coffee business right but I also think about other folks who actually come from the other side of political spectrum from me but who are doing really interesting work and whose view I think has to be attended to and that's a guy named Bob Woodson here in DC who runs something called the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise Bob Woodson African-American was a in the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s was a liberal but either you know he says the society shifted he stayed put but others say he shifted he now is you know well known for being one of the leading African-American counselors to folks like Paul Ryan and other you know Republican conservative leaders on issues of urban poverty urban violence and particularly within the African-American community right his approach right about in the book I pair Bob Woodson and a guy clear across the country named Mauricio Lynn Miller who in Oakland found it something called the family independence initiative Mauricio kind of had the other journey he started well Mauricio is a liberal is a progressive he worked for Jerry Brown running the state of California's welfare department and at a certain point he realized working in the welfare department is being a class ally from a bureaucratic position helping people in a way that is not helping them and he realized I'm making it worse right I'm institutionalizing a cycle of making it worse and they're starting to resent me across these lines and they're resenting my help right and so he quit that welfare department and he created something that is quite like what Bob Woodson did what they both do is they take they don't organize they invite they invite people from these communities low income low political power literacy folks here in DC Milwaukee Gary Indiana Oakland Philly New Orleans you know in all these communities and they invite them to they asked them a few prompts and questions basically to take inventory of the power and resources they already have right to take inventory of the economic power they already have the buying power they have to take inventory of the social power they have one of Mauricio's favorite lines is there's no such thing as a single mother right a single mother gets by with a whole network of friends family faith groups everybody else extended network that makes it work right but society doesn't see it that way the government doesn't see it that society sees a single mother right and what Mauricio and Bob are saying is both take inventory of all these sources of power you have and now activate them in new ways right and both from the left and the right they're kind of saying it doesn't start with government and it doesn't start with educated elite outsiders coming to save us or solve our problems it starts with us in being invited yes catalyzed to reflect on what we've got here and then taking ownership of addressing some of our problems whether it is gun violence or economic empowerment right not a magic wand not a silver bullet right but I think it touches on this notion of invitation rather than I'm here to educate or I'm here to mobilize you or to even to organize right I want to invite you sort of Socratic like you were talking about your Socratic method with the way you teach classes like I want to draw stuff out of you so just by asking questions I'm not going to tell you a single thing I'm just going to ask you question after question why do you think you're able to make stuff happen that people don't recognize why how is it that you actually manage to survive that incredibly traumatic experience when it looks like you're all alone how do you think that this block has managed you know who on this block has held it together through all kinds of trauma and gun violence and whatever else right you draw that out people start saying it and they start seeing it when they start saying right just like a great Socratic professor that's that's different from a friend of ours in Seattle who liman knows perhaps a woman named Vivian Phillips is a great activist in the arts and the intersection of civics in the arts uses this line that I always quote she you know in the arts world and work that you've been doing people always talk about the underserved underserved communities right and she hate I hate that word right and her line is this the underserved are the uninvited invite invite to share what you already know what you have right and that's the start of a different kind of then at a certain point your alliance may be needed right because once they start taking that inventory they realize well we sure could use a connection to council council person X from Ward whatever right and you could say oh we know those folks but we sure could use a handy curriculum on you know DC government 101 oh the ACLU has that curriculum they'll get it to you right then you start connecting dots that way right but it starts with that spirit of invitation I think that's two questions right in front I'm just thrilled that I'm meeting you because I've been following you for quite a while Silicon Valley so when you even before you did this when you would post comments on Facebook they were always thought through and very encompassing and pioneer and holistic health and that's what you're really using that platform to say you know come in the attractor you know self-organize around the attractor the physics and that's what social media is the social physics and Facebook has more people on it than the largest country China so we have shifted which you know so to come out we know this you know living I've been doing it since the 80s we're a planetary society and we need a question well the question is what you know everybody's talking in their hamsters on the wheel and you've got a fantastic program how come we I want to see everybody come around the table and really interconnect ARP Joanne Jenkins CEO I'm sure you both know I mean she has a database there that is humongous to drive this out are you thinking of anything like that to bring you know connect the people you know one would take the other question yeah let's take those questions thank you it was you really is how do you move into the political sphere from the I want to call it the ideological sphere we spent a lot of time developing community ideas and models of an improved society and creating little blossoms of change and being locked out of the political structure yes okay and this and I always thought the liberal versus lefty controversy yet we won a lot of the ideological battles but they're still running things so this is a actually your question was perfect because it was going to speak to a bit of what I was going to say in response to your observations you know I think as far as your question of you know how do we take these ideas to scale again our whole mode of thinking at Citizen University and why we play so well with New America is networked so we're not trying to be massive headquarters you know broadcasting this out to the world we're trying to infect other networks right and we infect hopefully we infect New America a bit we've infected the Aspen Institute where I run a separate little program we've infected institutions of all different kinds with this way of thing this is the positive kind of viral that you know notion that I'm talking about but but the thing that I was going to say even as you were praising the holistic health way of thinking about this stuff the kind of body politic way of thinking about this stuff was a bit of a voice of criticism back at me which I think your question sir actually touches on we're not criticism but a thing for us to all be reminded of and I want to make sure to be explicit about and again something that New America is great great at getting people to understand better and that is the structural dimension of this stuff you're more powerful than you think can be taken as individual self-help an individual like if you just try harder if you just believe harder or if you just change your imagination right and yeah a lot of that you know the kind of reductio ad absurdum is Ben Carson saying poverty is just a state of mind right poverty is not just a state of mind right state of mind influences poverty but poverty is a material a structural reality that is inherited from generation to generation and and the disadvantages compound in the way that I said law number one means power and and lack of power compound so I think even as we understand our ability to influence each other in this networked way when I say change the game change the equation I mean really understand how the rules are currently rigged to yield the structure of power we currently have right what we call the power structure by the way that phrase which is so colloquial I break it down further in this book to you the power structure is two things combined it's the sources of power plus the conduits of power right sources whether it's money people ideas social norms state action and the conduits whether it's organizations networks narratives institutions so forth right and so you've got to take a look at if you're concerned as Democratic Party politics or if your concern is gentrification in your neighborhood or your concern is the quality of schools where your kids or grandkids might go to you've got to be able to read what's the map of the power structure here right what kinds of power are flowing through what kinds of institutions and who's deciding in those institutions and when I talk about power literacy I'm not talking just about imagine yourself powerful right I'm talking about yeah imagine yourself powerful and reconceptualize yourself so you get unstuck but then learn how to read and rewrite a map of power and that means challenging institutions that means challenging incumbent holders of power and it means being again this is the part where I again partially tip my hat to Donald Trump it means being willing to disrupt everything that was previously given and everything that was understood as an inherited norm right he's doing it recklessly and dangerously but there's a part of what he's doing if we can salvage the the good of what he's doing or find someone else to carry the good of what he's doing our country's political system is in need of disruption the game is in fact rigged when 95% of the gains of the recovery since 29 2009 have gone to the wealthiest 1% when study after study in political science shows that it is only the preferences of the wealthy that drive what Congress does and it only if only by chance if the middle class or the poor happen to want the same thing that the rich want to the middle class and the poor get what they want the game is rigged right but the final thing I'll say here and again this is in the spirit of what I hope those of you who are new to new America will continue to check out here you mentioned AARP and yeah this is a scaled organization that is influencing the way a generation is thinking about its identity and its role in American life but actually one of our partners in the Civic Collaboratory and someone who I write about here is a partner with AARP which I think of as actually a real model for what we're doing this guy named Mark Friedman who launched an organization called Encore.org and Encore is trying to popularize a notion that what people used to think of as retirement and just if you can if you can afford it go off to a golf course if you can't you just got to keep on grinding it out at work and just you know be grim about it he's trying to get people to reconceptualize this phase of life as a chance to take everything you have known all the experience that you had and start applying it to the greater good to create an Encore career for yourself that is for the social good right and so he's working with AARP he's working with big media companies he's working with the prudentials and the fidelities and the people who manage people's retirements to get them thinking you know he's working with media outlets like the New York Times to popularize even the word Encore as a as applied to this right this isn't about power in an election sense but it sure is about power in that ideological kind of social normative sense about what it means to be a useful contributor to our social life you know at a certain age of life right and our work at Citizen University and all this work about citizen power is at the end of the day about how can you be useful not only to yourself but to others and I just so grateful and Marie for this conversation because it's been really useful learning for me and so grateful to all of you for joining us and it looks like we've got food and drink here and we can hang out a bit longer but thank you Eric you are superbly useful thank you high praise from Anne-Marie Slaughter