 Yn dweud yw'r ysgrifennu ddim yn ymddangos cyntaf sydd gennymr y llwyddoedd yn gyfyrddol iawn, fe efallai ar y dyfodol, ac mae'r gwrsau dyma'r ysgrifennu, wedi'i gwneud o'r ddechrau rhai o rhaeddenau, gyda'r lleol o'r drwng. Mae'r gwaith i'r Cynghwil, mae'r gwaith yng Nghymysgwynt, mae'r gwaith lleiwyr i'r lleiwyr o'r gwaith yn olygu'r gwaith ymlaen. Yn amlwg Llywodraeth Cymru, mae'r cynghwyno cyd-synod yw fynd i'r cynghwyno? Fyddai'r ymlaen o'r Llywodraeth yma? Mae'r gweithio bod ydych chi'n gweithwyr? Yn ymlaen i'r cynghwil, ac mae'r cynghwil yn gyflau'r ymlaen. I worked for Jimmy Carter. I was a speech writer during the campaign and the White House and he was the first real southerner in sort of modern times to win a president. You know, Lyndon Johnson wasn't really a southerner and then you have to go back. And Woodrow Wilson was sort of a quasi-southerner. But part of…and Carter carried most of this out as a Democrat is sort of now sort of a famously pious Democrat and the reason was largely regional pride, regional chip on the shoulder. ac mae'n lleidio cyd-dweud yma yn ymwneud yma. Yn ymwneud o'r crinigiad yma, yna'r fal-faseid, ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud yma. Yn ymwneud, yw'r cyd-faseid yw'r fal-faseid 50 o 60 o'r gweithio. Felly mae'r cyd-faseid yn ymwneud ein costal yn ymwyllteb yn ymwneud, Mark Twain yn ymwneud yw'r cyfrannu. Henry James yn ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. Mae yma'r cyfrannu erbyn yn y fwysig, a our travels around the country. Because we often went to places, that were very conscious of being looked down upon. The bottom of that look down upon B betel, is a place where I spent my sort of pre-kender garden years which is Mississippi. They didn't accept me as a local. Mississippi, my dad was a navy doctor there. They've been able to use their sense of being the bottom, you know, they're always number 50 or 51 depending how many states you're counting, yn e-ranking, but when they've succeeded in industrialization or whatever, they're saying, yeah, we're doing it here in Mississippi. Central Valley, California, same thing. West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, the same thing. So yes, this was part of it, but I think in every presidential election you can find some of this cultural tension. So I think the, so that's my answer. It is thus and has ever been this. But it has a deep, there's not a marked deep thing of that division. If you compare it with say the late 1960s when you had, you know, divisions of the Vietnam War and you had construction workers in New York actually taking lead pipes to anti-war protesters, so it is an issue, it has been an issue for much of our history. Correct. Okay. I think there's another element to it also and that is that there's a sense among those that don't live on the coast. You know, I have an interesting history. I grew up in a very wealthy part of the country in New Jersey, probably one of the wealthiest counties in the country and I lived the first time for my life there and the second half of my life in one of the poorest, you know, places. So I sort of have seen both sides. And what the people in, you know, when we say Youngstown by the way, we're not really talking about the city, we're talking about the region. But you know, the people in that region, they have a sense, you know, they would say the elites. And that the game is raked in favor of the elites and against them. And people in Youngstown always think the fix is in. It's a place that has a long organized crime history to it, so that sort of adds to it. It's hard to name a public official who didn't end up getting indicted, including the current mayor, including our former congressman who went to jail for eight years. So the thought was that everything is raked, and it's not what you know, it's who you know. And the elites are connected. They have this network. You know, Peggy Noonan has written about this, sort of, they're the protected. And the people in Youngstown are the unprotected by that. I don't know if you've any read JD Vance's book, The Hillbilly Elegy. And what I took from that book is actually the later chapter, almost the last chapter, was the most fascinating. When he goes down to Harvard or Yale, and he's suddenly part of this elite network, and he talks about the fact that you don't really have to apply for jobs at that point. The networks bring the jobs to you. It's a different world, a different reality, and I think it's resented by those in the heartland, let's say, or those that aren't part of the elite. And just to hop in, yes, and at any stage in American history, you'll find something helpful. I've been reading, again, the works of Theodore Dreiser, I find it honestly fascinating now. And I don't know if any of you have read American tragedy, it's like a thousand pages long, but it's about exactly this tension for Clyde Griffiths, this young aspiring guy from Kansas City who gets this glimpse of the sort of gilded world of New York. So, yes, it's an issue, but I just want to say this is who we are. But was there ever a candidate like Trump? It was George Corly Wallace, who was a, I mean, he was a third party candidate named 68 and then 72. And part of our appeal in the 1976 campaign for the moral Jimmy Carter was, it's a crooked system, we need a government as good as this people. So I am supporting what you're saying, but also saying this is, it's a high wave of a continuing curve. But I think part of Trump's appeal, too, was for these voters. And I don't know what Hillary Clinton said, because I don't think that moved numbers very much, the pluribles comment. But I just think that Trump, I mean, one of the things you see, I spoke to a student who was very involved in the Trump campaign and sort of asking her, you know, why did Trump appeal to you so much? Because she didn't sort of fit the prototype as you thought of as a Trump voter, you know, working full-time, getting two degrees, very, very bright. And she said the rallies that, you know, going to the rallies really moved her. The fact that Trump likes being among these people, or at least he fakes it very well if he doesn't like it. Because when he's there, you know, I went to the rally in July, and he almost feels like he's in his element there. And I think that's a message, an implicit message that he's sending to his supporters, that I like you. You know, I'm with you. I don't look down on you. You know, we're all in this together, sort of this idea. He said it in his Clinton speech, I'm your voice. And that's appealing to them. A 10-second compliment, as opposed to a post-challenge. Yes, and he has a very sort of powerful, the fact that he's both a rich and coarse, I think, sort of appeal that way. But also I think we do see a historically unprecedented combination of public affairs and entertainment. Because it is sort of like a world wrestling foundation rally. Very much, yes. Everybody likes that, and so it's now sort of a more center stage. If Trump had run at the end of the Clinton presidency in 2000, would he have got the nomination over George W. Bush? It's conceivable. So I think the structures of the party were probably more in place than the other Republican party until recently it had. There's a fascinating set of recent polls I saw, which is that if you were doing polls right now for the next presidential election, that is almost three years ahead of time, when you're not talking about an incumbent running for reelection, among Democrats you never predict the actual nominee. The person leading the polls three years ahead of time is never the actual nominee. But Republicans, it usually has been. Because Republicans have usually been the next guy. And so I think that George W. Bush was the next guy at that time, as Mitt Romney was, et cetera. And the next guy now would have been Jett or whoever would have been the next guy in the last race. So I think that the structure of the party probably would have resisted Trump back in 2000. I don't know the answer to this question. It would be interesting. I don't know when the Republicans changed to allowing more sort of proportional representation in their primaries, which really was a benefit to Trump that they weren't doing when it would take off. Because Trump had that core of support. When you're doing proportional, the bottom gets lost off. So 20% that he had all the time became more like a 30% when you go into the primaries. And of course Republicans don't have superdelegates, unlike the Democrats. And I think if Trump had not won this time and had lost badly to Hillary Clinton and the Republicans had a reevaluation of how they did things, I wonder if they would have thought about superdelegates doing sort of what the Democrats had done to give the party more weight. Cork, I know you wanted to commit. Yeah, part of my commitment is you. Listening to Jim Stalin's, it can seem very comforting in some ways. But the other side of it is that Donald Trump is president and Donald Trump can do an awful lot of damage to the American system. In the next three years, not only the American system, but through the world as a whole, he can do an awful lot of damage to relations with Europe, relations with China, relations with Russia. Damage which may not be comparable. So I wonder about not disagreeing with you that we shouldn't see the election of 2016 as establishing a trend which is irreversible. But there is an awful lot wrong with American politics at the federal level. There is, for instance, the almost complete cherrymandering of House elections, for instance. There is the wrong money in American politics. Now you could say that the election of Trump runs counter to that argument, but I don't think it does. So I think what we are worried about is the long-term damage that will be done. That's my first comment. My question is, do you not think that in the 2016 election Hillary Clinton was in fact a very bad candidate for the democratic party? I mean, we all have heard that the margin was very tight even in terms of the electoral college, and if she has, for instance, gone to Wisconsin. And if she had paid attention to this part of what has been the core democratic electorate, the outcome might have been different. What do you think of that teaching? So to take turns answering this, to start with your second point about Hillary Clinton, again, looking back in this election, there are a million things that have gone the other way. I think that if I had to choose the most important, I think the New York Times played a powerful role in this outcome by treating the Hillary email story as if it was of equal importance with everything happening with Trump. And there was a famous front page in the New York Times ten days before the election after Comey's letter, where the entire front page, except for like an ancient at the bottom, was everything about the election in Trump also. So I think that was an important part. Hillary Clinton points out in her book, which actually is interesting. Her book, what happened, I didn't intend to read it, I had to read it for work. It was actually interesting. She points out, you know, Russell Angle, wonderful former senator from Wisconsin. He thought he was going to win. He was like, you know, six points ahead in the polls and he was lost by seven points or something. And he spent all his time in Wisconsin. So she was saying that I was there pretty much, but I wasn't the only one who was surprised with the thing. So yes, she was a bad candidate. She got more votes than any candidate ever except Barack Obama. You know, she won by three million votes. So she was not as charming as her husband or as Barack Obama, but she, a lot of things had to go that way for her to lose it. So that would be a point on that. Are things wrong at the national level? Yes, I think they are to disclose my interests. The Atlantic was founded in 1857 as issue three endorsements in this history. Number one for Abraham Lincoln. Number two for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater. And number three last fall against Donald Trump. Now we thought this was a person uniquely unprepared for the office. And so what I've written since then is essentially on the vector diagram between things he is doing and all the other forces in national and international life. And yesterday, last night in London, I was interviewing the Baroness Kathy Ashton about the ways in which both the Iran deal and the Paris deal were the ways in which all the other parties are trying to fight back. And so I think we see an important and not now determined struggle between the things he wants to do and the ways the other parts of the system are resisting. One other point, Arnold Schwarzenegger is my new hero. And this is not simply because I sat next to him at breakfast a couple of months ago in Santa Monica. That is a way to feel really horrible. I sit next to Arnold and he's like, oh my wife sets me in my room. But anyhow, his role is now to end gerrymandering in the U.S. He got a sort of honest district thing done and it got him in California and that's the message he's trying to bring to the rest of the country, especially the three states to make our Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina where you have disproportionate effect on the house. Arnie's always been my hero. Is he a hero of yours? I think the gerrymandering. The Supreme Court might at least begin to take care of that. There's a case this term and I think a lot of people suspect that they're going to roll against what went on in Wisconsin. I think it's a much larger effect at the state level than it is at the national level. Simply because if you're going to get cities together, I don't know that it's going to change the makeup of Congress that much. You're always going to have sort of a Republican advantage because Democrats tend to cluster in urban areas and there's not much you can do about that unless you're going to start breaking up cities a lot. But it would be different and it would be less disadvantageous to the Democrats if this were the case. What worries me more and actually you're making me feel a little better about things. So thank you. I read talking about the electoral college because it's something I'm really interested in. And Senator Moynihan gave a speech sort of against changing the electoral college many years ago into a wonderful speech. I can find it online and encourage you to read it not just because of what he says about the electoral college but what he said about American politics at the time. He was talking about his time as UN ambassador and he said someone from a developing country came to him one day, he's on the floor of the UN and said, you know, you Americans, you're always trying to get us to fix our political systems. You're always giving us all sorts of advice. He said, but you never tell us the one thing we need to know and that is how do you trust each other because that's what you have in the United States and that's what's fundamental for democracy to work, that we have a basic trust for each other. And you know Moynihan was sort of talking about that's what we have now and he had actually tied it to his argument for the electoral college but that's what I worry we don't have anymore which is so corrosive is that we don't trust each other anymore and that makes it very hard to run a democracy and I don't know how we bring that back. I can see a lot of things that will make it worse. I don't see a lot of things that will make it better and that's what concerns me more about our political system than any of the other things you talked about. And just for its point about the United States road in the world is a repropel doubt. Obviously that assumes that Trump is not doing a good job perhaps somebody disagrees with that and that America first is the way to go but your view on the United States place in the world and whether it's being damaged. I'll let him go first. Again stipulating that I did not support Donald Trump in the last election and have written a lot about sort of resisting his impulses and values. I think that there's... Ireland is an interesting example so there's not an ambassador here for one of the countries with which the U.S. has among the closest of relations with any countries on earth and that is obviously the relationship suffers from that. There are countless other ways in which the U.S. and Ireland are and will be long term connected. I think it is a... the question is the ratchet effect of how many decisions made in the next couple of years will have an irreversible effect. I think that in the list I would put I would start with North Korea that that is a quite volatile and dangerous situation. Interestingly I feel as if the Japanese, Chinese and South Korean otherwise often in each other's throats on this issue feels as if they have some combined balance interest given the current U.S. role. Certainly Kathy Eshinw was saying last night that she thought that was happening with the Iran deal that everybody else except the United States was sort of saying how can we collectively find ways to make sure the Iran deal stays on course with the Paris climate accords. The mayors in the U.S. have essentially said we have enough leverage to make sure the U.S. still meets its targets and what the national government is saying but obviously there was lost time etc etc so the ways in which I personally would have fear effects are very hard to reverse would be military commitments or military accidents. They would be damaged to U.S. scientific and educational establishment by elbowing people out and diverting them to Canada or Ireland or wherever else they would be. And jeopardizing the assumption many people have had about the United States which is too big, it's a bully, they're loud, we're tired of them but they're not going to do anything really crazy. And I think that the Iraq war in my view was one pressure against that obviously that Vietnam was very controversial but there's been I think a, we lived in China during the Obama election and the Chinese were genuinely stunned by that Obama could succeed but then impressed that the United States could elect somebody like this. So we'll see what the next months and years hold for America. I'll read it back. I agree with everything you said but the only thing I'm going to add to it is that you'll always remember how complex our system is and presidents aren't always as powerful as you think they are. I'm going to use the NAFTA example. There's a real question about for example in trade agreements what President Trump can do unilaterally because when you have a trade deal for example like NAFTA there's legislation that goes along with it and presidents cannot unilaterally repeal legislation. They have a lot of power, they have a lot of effect but they're also not limited but on the words from side everything affects everything else and whenever the United States acts it teaches a lesson and creates opportunities or closes down opportunities for future actions. So in that way it is worse. Do you think the checks on balance system has worked? Broadly? Marks out of 10? Yeah. Actually we've added additional non-Madisonian checks. Madison did political parties we'll join them pretty quickly and political parties have added a check within the government disputes within political parties have added a check within the government and one of the things you see right now is that Republicans because they're busy fighting with each other because they're made up actually of multiple coalitions have a very hard time going along with a Republican president. We don't know if any of these things that President Trump wants or says he wants are actually going to happen because of this division. Yeah. You talked a lot about divisions and tensions within the country between coastal and central elites and others but one thing I was surprised about was what was the racial division and tension in America as a time easy goes through in Europe magazine very very persuasively the biggest indicator of how somebody voted in the selection was not their age, their gender or their income and was their race so you might not agree with his conclusion on what this means but would you like to hear your thoughts on that? So, you know, race and the heritage of slavery is the central sin the central challenge, the central issue in American history. My magazine The Atlantic is called The Atlantic because it was American and English anti-slavery activists who founded in 1857 to across the Atlantic to work on this issue and we were having dinner at Tana Hasi in Paris two days ago talking about all these at this big lab conference so number one I subscribe to the view that sort of racial animus as opposed to economic anxiety is a stronger predictor of Trump support and there's a whole sort of literature on each side of that but I come down basically on Tana Hasi's side of that one way I differ from him again is that it was a chance maybe not in a million but a chance in a hundred that Trump actually ended up winning there's so many things that would have led to him losing and would that have given Tana Hasi a different view so yes that racial tension which to me I would define as black and non-black rather than white and non-white is the ongoing axis in administration of justice and in police power and education and equality and all the rest I say it that way black versus non-black as opposed to white versus non-white in that there's a huge discussion about whether all other immigrants eventually quote become white where Asians and 100 years ago Jewish immigrants were thought to be a whole sort of separate category and now essentially everybody becomes white as opposed to black so yes this is the issue of American life and American politics and continues the one thing that's always kind of very interesting is these white voters in a place like Youngstown were very comfortable giving their votes overwhelmingly to the first African American president and then voting to re-elect that president so you can't really see a sort of simple racism I think one way or the other that's not fair to them but I think this also goes back to sort of the increasing distrust among Americans and people are falling into their groups because that's where they feel their trust is and another project that I'm working on is sort of looking at a Supreme Court decision from way back in the 1950s that I'm reading a lot of oral histories from skill workers that were taken about 20 years ago for people who were sort of working in the mills in the 1950s and the 1960s and one of the things that most surprised me when I read them is how much they talked about things that we would now call racial justice within the mills and in part it's because they considered themselves old brothers they were all part of the union and a lot of these people that I'm reading were union leaders and sort of the racial animosity sort of broke down because they had something else that linked them together beyond race and of course now we've lost that we've sort of lost the unions and things like that but I think with this increasing distrust now we don't feel a sense of commonness connecting into their individual groups and the racial problem is a part of that Can I volunteer a 10-second edition so about 30 years ago I did a piece for The Atlantic which may sound preposterous but I would defend its premise we were living then in Japan with our then little kids and I was writing a piece saying essentially I wished that every white American especially every educated white American could have to live in Japan for a year or two because it's the only way to understand what it must be like even when we're to have your race be the most important thing about you every second of the day as a white American as Stephen Colbert would say you don't have to think about race my racial identity is something I don't have to think about in Japan it was the central part of my being and I think that that is again a point on how significant others have made that there is simply it is almost impossible to imagine what it's like to have your skin color be the main thing about you at all times I worked in Japan for a year too it's the life of me thank you Oliver Bowman former department of foreign affairs on the potential of Trump to disappoint he's working to ask the voters Professor Stratwick suggested or came close to suggesting that these jobs were not going to return and that it would become a part and presumably this would lead to disappointment but are there not other things that could also disappoint working vast voters for example lots of health insurance cover for example a perception that this tax reform shouldn't be successful is perceived as benefiting primarily the richness maybe there are other things but I'm just wondering if this disappointment is going to set in is it going to set in before the next election and if so how could that manifest itself in a more individual life good we've only got a couple of minutes left so we'll take the remaining questions or points would you like to? So Lawrence Davis University College Cork I have a comment and the question to comment is just in response to the debate I suppose a small debate about the yes pot about the tension between elitism and populism in American politics and I would agree that this is something that goes back to the constitutional convention debates between the federalists and the anti-federalists it's always been there what I would say on that point as well yes pot is that I think it's important and political scientists have pointed this out that there's been a particular breakdown in trust and a particular fragmentation what political scientists call a crisis of democracy in the wake of politics of austerity the ascendancy of neoliberalism over such a long period of time statistically declining trust in political parties in politicians in government itself and so I think it's it's important to to be cognizant of the fact that although this has always existed this tension between elitism and popular democracy in the United States that there may be something maybe something particularly significant about the present time that Trump tapped into I'm going to leave the prediction question to you of whether the voters will be disappointed who's he running against candidates are important one of the questions that Hillary Clinton came up earlier what's going to be the alternative and we're really limited for time I don't think for example democratic candidate for congress from my district from young town has any fear of losing the election in 2018 I mean the interesting thing is he went overwhelmingly next at the same time that Donald Trump does and he's a democrat in fact being talked about as a possible candidate for president so in 2020 if the democrats field somebody who can speak to these working class voters maybe is from that area if they go against I think their instinct to go harder left and instead go a little bit more to the middle somebody who can speak to sort of these working class voters to bridge the divisions within the democratic party then I think they have a real opportunity to take back the White House but we'll have to see closing I axiomatically make no predictions whatsoever on anything involving Donald Trump having predicted he could not become president I retire that was two and a half years ago on the yes I take the point and the way I would try to harmonize our views is I do think there is a band of these tensions over time the United States and we're at a point of high tension now there is the reassuring thing it's not as bad as a civil war but I think that many of I think that this is comparable in lots of ways to levels of mistrust in the late late 19th century and I think it's not that's just the harvest of the past 10 or 20 years of NAFTA etc. I've been watching the Ken Burns Renovate Vietnam War series which is really worth watching and you see the seeds of many tensions of mistrust then you have 50 years worth of industrial change so yes I agree it is a high point of a historically existing tension thank you we could all thank the speakers unusual way thank you