 So I'm going to start with a question for each of our panelists to sort of map out their interest in this topic. And I want to start with you, Jacob, since your book is so on point here, talk about the thesis of the book. What is it that you're contending we forgot and why we forgot it? Yes, so the title of the book is American Amnesia, and the subtitle kind of gives the basic argument, how the war on government led us to forget what made America prosper. And I should say that the original title is how the war on government led us to forget what made America great. So you can wonder why it changed. And when we were, we've been waiting for this book to come out for a while. I don't know if you've heard this saying about the period before a book launches, that it's the calm before the calm. So but there's been a little interest. And the basic argument is that we've forgotten and we've been pressured to forget how important government is to prosperity and advanced complex interdependent societies. And the metaphor that we use in the book that comes from my co-author, Paul Pearson's mentor, Lynn Bloom at Yale, is the idea of a hand, that an economy, a mixed economy is like a hand where the fingers, the nimble fingers or the market and the thumb, the strong thumb is government. And that you need to have both the strong thumb and these nimble fingers to grasp prosperity. And we tell a story that is going to be familiar to those who know our economic history, but which has largely drifted out of our consciousness in part because of these kind of pervasive distrust of and pervasive attacks on government. So the 20th century stands out of this watershed where we went from being very poor, very unhealthy. Average life expectancy was 45 years, one in three kids in some cities died before their first birthday. We went from that to a world in which, of course, life expectancy is nearly 80 years, in which we have unprecedented wealth compared with our forebearers, and in which the human capacities to succeed are both greater and much more broadly distributed than at any point in world history. And really, world history is a flat line on most of these indicators until the 20th century. So what changed? It was this mixed economy. It was this harnessing of government's capacity to clean up our cities, water, milk for kids, which was a dramatic cause of this increased life expectancy. The investment in education, the United States led the world. And in innovation, particularly research and development, we spent more than all other countries, public and private sectors on R&D after World War II. I just want to repeat that again. We spent more than every other government's public sector and private sector in the world on R&D after World War II. And it beget all of these innovations that we see around us today. So I'll talk more about why we've experienced this major backlash, but I really think it's important to understand just how vital this effect of public authority, the strong thumb, is to prosperity. OK. Well, so Diane, I'd like you to talk a little bit about your organization and what it does, but also the reason behind it. Why you would contend that this is something we need to be doing? Well, Indivisible was formed really to remind people that there is a value and potential in government as the way we come together to solve problems, which seems like such a fundamental thing. But there is amnesia about that. And I love the name of your book. What Indivisible decided was that we needed to remind people of ways in which government has operated, the way it's operating today, things that are innovative and interesting, as well as things that are gravely important. But to do it in a sort of non-wonky way, in a way that doesn't make people feel like they need to be an expert. But that really gives them much more of an easy entry into this idea that we do together, do a whole lot of really wonderful things. And some of that has to do with innovation. But it's also not really enough to just lift up what's good, what to remind people of what we've done. Because really, you have to engage people in the idea that they have a role to play, which is very hard right now, because people don't really feel like they do have a role. They don't feel like they have the ability to influence things. But there are lots of examples that I think you can lift up to people and show them action by citizens, and not to reform necessarily, but to engage with government, to make it be the one we need. But reform in itself and innovation in itself doesn't necessarily get us where we want to go. And I have a little, just one image that I want to show about this. If you have children or nieces and nephews, if you have grandchildren, you may have seen this movie, Zootopia. And one of the scenes that you see images of and gifts of everywhere is at the DMV, where everyone is a sloth. And this is despite the fact that there has been, over the last decade, amazing innovation in DMVs. And there are some DMVs. I moved to Illinois recently. I walked in the door. I took the test. I got a new driver's license. I had it in my hand. I got brand new plates for my car. My dad had been 15 minutes. And yet it is still the punchline, not only for adult late night comedy, but for kids. So innovation in itself is not enough. This makes me think of there's a scene in, I think it's the second season of Broad City, where she has to spend, Abby has to go to the DMV, and it's this complete hellscape. And there's this whole comedy of errors of her trying to get to the DMV and get her picture taken, not looking hideous. But it ends with her discovering that you can make an appointment online. And when she does that, she walks into this spa. We're going on a meeting on her hand and foot. And she has this professional photo session. So someone has gotten the message about innovation clearly in the DMV. But that's a very good segue to you, Shayna, because you're on the grassroots organizing end. You are directly involved in this idea of engagement and engaging people around these issues. So do people care about this? Do you find that your members, your users, are passionate about this topic? So I would say our 30 million-ish plus members in the US are users in the US. Do they care about government? No. Do they care about innovation in government? No. Do they care about the things that are happening in their lives, in their families, lives, in their community, and the way that, and bearing out ways to change that, absolutely they do. So I had my team pull some numbers in preparation for this and some really remarkable things turned up. So we have thousands of petitions that come in literally every single day. As we're sitting here, probably something like 500 new petitions were started in the US, many of them are around health care issues. Of the 20 largest health care-related petitions from the last three months, 19 of them were around a particular individual. So I need access to this medication, or my son needs access to this kind of doctor, or our health insurance screwed us. We need help, right? Something like that. Of those 19, 14 of those linked that particular ask to a systems change. So something like, it's too late for me. I'm already out of pocket. I already lost my house, but we should change this for other people like me, right? Of those 20, zero, zero, reference Obamacare or health care reform or any of the other, like government words, related to health care. And same is true of immigration, shocking statistic maybe in DC in the bubble, where we think about politics and government in this way. Literally thousands of petitions around immigration and all aspects of immigration from all sides of that. 98% of them, over the time that we could do the search, 98% of them contained none of the words Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, election, elect, vote, right? Like, so the public isn't talking about government in the way that we are talking about government. They're not engaging in government in the way we are, but they absolutely care about the issues that happen in this conversation. And I think this is very true around, innovation isn't enough. What they care about is how that innovation impacts them. So yes and no. Well, so it seems like this is a conversation about providing services to people and using government to help solve people's problems on an individual level as well as a macro level. Mayor Swarajan, I'm interested in what you've learned about this topic over the course of your political career. Maybe your perspective has changed, but also about what are some of the things that you've tried to do in Fresno to connect with your constituents? Well, first I've learned in even just the last few minutes that I am a strong thumb. And I'm actually very encouraged by that. After eight years in local government, I'm used to a different digit. What are you representing? So I feel I've been upgraded. The anti-government rage. I know. It's the local government level. It's everywhere. It's in the milk aisle. It's at your kid's Little League games. You know, I think my perspective, and I wasn't in politics or government before being elected in 2008. I have more of a private sector business background, but I've been doing a lot of community and economic development work for about a decade and then just kind of realized the outcomes that we wanted for our community and the things we aspire to needed the levers of government to move in a certain way. So I concluded, well, so I gotta go over there and pull those levers if I wanna see unemployment change, if I wanna see a concentration of poverty relieved in Fresno, if I wanna see our community be lifted. So I guess I kind of backed into this maybe in a slightly unusual way. But as we started down the path, you know, I don't need for government to be seen as a rock star by any stretch of the imagination. I guess it's kind of okay with me if people at change.org are not thinking about things from a government standpoint. But it does matter that you have community support to do the sorts of things that you need to do to move your city, your region, your state, your nation in the right direction. And so because of that, you know, we faced a real hard pan of cynicism in Fresno, a lot of failures in the local government arena that honestly that are 25 and 30 years old, apparently there was some tortilla factory in the city of Fresno that government money went towards like 40 years ago. You know, people are still talking about that tortilla factory in Fresno today. So when we were moving forward with very common sense, pragmatic, sort of like, yeah, we need to do the following things now. All this then we're talking about tortilla factories. I'm thinking, what in the heck are the, I don't even think I was born when this particular item happened. But anyway, some of the things we've done to try to, you know, really blow up that hard pan, number one, and I have to say, I love the innovation focus here, but if I could just be boring for a moment and say, you know, before we can get to innovation, let's just do some good management. Let's just do some really, like if we can determine and deliver effectiveness in just a very basic way, then people have a lot more confidence in you to maybe do something that's a little bit riskier and seen it to be a little bit more innovative. So for us, really dealing with the city's finances in a way that people could have confidence in was very important. And of course, the Great Recession was underway when I first took office and we were a city that almost went bankrupt in a state that was bankrupt and nobody knew it or talked about it. So really dealing with people's money, I think is so important and being on the kind of the right end of the political spectrum and hearing so many people on my side of the aisle often talk about dealing with finances in a way that really beats government over the head. I think actually the point that we have to make is that whatever we may aspire to as a city, state or nation, the only way to get there is if we have solid, solid financial track record to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. So really just did a lot of public information, education around transparency, around the sorts of budget proposals we were making to get our finances in order was one really major focus for us in the early days. The second thing I'll mention, I'll be quick about this. We just did, we did something called the Citizens Academy. For about five or six years we ran this program free to anybody who wanted to participate. It was an eight week program or one night a week folks came to City Hall or to some other city facility and they got to ask questions and learn from the people directly responsible for delivering services in that arena whether it was a police chief, a fire chief, a utilities director, a city manager, a budget director, whatever. And then of course we kept in contact with those people and sent them regular updates about what was happening. And what we found, I thought frankly when we started this program, I was trying to raise up an army of people who would then help us push the agenda items that we had for our administration. But what ended up happening is once people interacted with the regular everyday folks who were in the city of Fresno delivering services day in and day out, they were like, you know what? I'm good. You guys are handling, I know what to do if I have a question or a concern, I know who to call. But they just, there was kind of this collective sigh of relief, wow, we're in good hands. Okay, I'll go back to living my life. So that has been an effective approach for us as well. It's not tech knowledge. I mean there's probably ways we could scale that by a factor of 100. But we just did like face to face kind of small group about 30 or 40 people per cohort and just did that three or four times a year to really build up confidence in what we were doing at the local level. Well that issue of scale is a very interesting one to me. I mean I love that we're having this discussion in the Ronald Reagan building which is home to several federal government departments and is named after our most conspicuous recent anti-government crusader. But you know, I do wonder how much of this discussion has to do with the scale of the government and the ability of government to be on a human level versus when you get so big and so centralized that it becomes a sort of a faceless bureaucracy. I mean maybe Diana, maybe Shayna, maybe you want to address this, how can you make systems that are universal but still touch people in a way that feels local to them? Actually we have a major research project in the field right now that is wrapping up this month or really next month and it's been really fascinating. It's started, it's been over two years. We had a phase that was really digging deeply with multidisciplinary teams across the country on the ground into what are people thinking about government and that process, really the bottom line of the results of that first phase of this was to discover and how many ways Americans do not feel like citizens but feel like subjects. They do not believe, at a gut level they don't talk about it this way but they don't believe they live in a democracy and they don't feel like there's anything they can do but vote and that voting, their vote doesn't really count. That kind of sense of things though, the phase that we're in now is to really try to think about this question of does that change only in some kind of a physical interaction at the local level or can that also change in some bigger kind of way? And really one of the things that we're discovering is that it's important for people to imagine that even if they aren't acting even if they're not becoming a campuser or something but even if they aren't that there are people like them or like their neighbors that are in some way engaging in making a difference and coming together to do things through government that work and it's not some, in some ways it's like you're looking for people to just believe that they could even if they don't and that then shifts their thinking about government once you get them into that mindset then they begin thinking a little more optimistically a little more positively about that and it is, and one of the things that makes me realize that something I've kind of thought before and now I feel like we've got a research basis for it is the goal of trust in government is way too low a bar. As impossible as it feels right now it's in some ways having that be the goal that we're shooting for maybe misdirecting us where what we really need to do is to make people feel like they live in a democracy again. Wow, does that mean you're quitting your job? No, because what it also means is they have to they have to visualize what's out there and you have to show them people in action around the country that are making things different and it's not just about technological innovation it's just about somebody who is excited about a new thing that they're doing and it may not be a new way of doing it it just may be something that feels hopeful and positive and that is making a difference in a community or in a state or even nationally. Well and the mayor made this point too that when you talk about innovation people don't need their government to turn into amazon.com they just need, I hear this from voters all the time too they just want it to do the basic things right stop poisoning my water, you know don't make me wait three hours at the TSA just do the basic things right and people don't see that basic competence in a lot of ways. I do wonder though about the ability of technology to either solve some of these problems or to bring people together because Shayna, you know, Change.org is not something that could have existed without the internet. Do people feel empowered by that ability to come together around common problems? Does it help create a democratic feeling or just more angst? So it's actually one of my favorite things about being at Change.org I'm a recovering political hack and also a recovering Washington DC denizen. And so one of my favorite things of being out of both of those bubbles and having been at Change for about a year now is seeing exactly that in action. So we see it in two places one is we have quite a bit of user research and the most compelling and an interesting thing for people what people report as having the best part of their experience and taking action on Change.org is a feeling that they're part of something greater and they're part of a community. And even for petition starters whether their petition is successful or not what they say is moving and powerful for them is the opportunity to build a community of support around the thing that they care about. That's one. And then the other is that we see what technology does enable is to cross borders on that. So one of the things I'm most fascinated with right now that we're working on is there's a community a national community of survivors of sexual assault. And we saw kind of petitions pop up one in North Carolina, one in Washington state, one in Colorado, one in Florida around kind of the same set of issues. Some targeting local government some start targeting changes in from state legislatures one at the congressional level. And we saw in the comments on those there was thousands and thousands of signatures to change things like a short time period before DNA evidence is disposed of, for example or requirements around what victims are allowed or have to do in order to get the police to move forward on an investigation. You know, things are on anonymity and stuff like that. But so people would sign these and then in the comments it was wrenching you kind of had to sit for an hour with the tissues and like read the comments that people left across these petitions of these women primarily also telling their own personal story about why they were signing this petition and how delighted they were to find this community of people who was fighting for the same thing. And that in itself is powerful but then with technology what we can do is connect them. Say these are all these people who share your story who share a like really what is a fairly basic set of asks at of your local state and federal government and you can work together to prioritize that to support each other as that process moves through to look at what those victories bring and what the next steps are. And that is something that we do get tons of reports and we see lots of evidence in our user research that that is in fact quite powerful in terms of how people feel their agency is real. And Jacob you talked about all of the good that government has done to enable human progress. Do you think that communities like this can get that message out? And who do you think is to blame for all the negativity surrounding this subject? Well I mean so I mean I really think that it's important to understand that you need to have well functioning national authority as well as strong communities and local governments and state governments. And that the weakening of national authority is really at odds with what our founders believed. And we're now having a little renaissance of interest in Hamilton. So we quote the speech that Hamilton gave at the New York Ratifying Convention which he said we fought this revolution but let's not forget we just lived through this article as a confederation and we have realized after this sort of failure of this incredibly decentralized arrangement that we also need to have bigger in government and well functioning government. So I think we're caught basically at the national level in particular in sort of a doom loop of dysfunction where you have bad governance and sort of basic things you mentioned like the basic competence like passing budgets or making sure infrastructure is okay or dealing with Ebola or collecting taxes or not being done very well in part because of the tax on government and part because of gridlock. And then in turn that tends to empower anti-government forces and feed into the cynicism about government. So the real question that we ask at the end of the book that Paul Pearson and I ask at the end of the book is well how do you get out of this doom loop, right? And at a certain basic level it's simple, right? You need to do things, good things through government that are visible to people that change their lives for the better and then you have to get elected on the basis of that and then you repeat, right? But that's a really hard virtuous cycle to launch. And what was striking about the mid-20th century period and even before that when government was actively supporting this dynamic innovative, these nimble fingers of the market was that you had substantial support within the Republican Party and the business community for the mixed economy. And so the movement, the transit of the Republican Party dramatically to the right. Now we're seeing a kind of backlash within the Party itself to its anti-government message and how deep that will go, I don't know. And the transit of the business community which especially its elite organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or the Koch Network toward a much more anti-government stance. I think it's quite problematic for dealing with these challenges but we're kind of hopeful on it and we can come back to our reasons for hope but we actually think that there's an opening and I was happy to say that Ashley is reading the book and enjoying it. So there's some bipartisan support, maybe. We've got one piece of evidence in favor of that idea that I actually think there's a lot of concern on both sides of the aisle about this basic governance problem. So we can talk more about how to get. Can I just play devil's advocate a little bit? Is it really true that government is less great than it once was when you had, you know, the government, it seems to me that governments at all levels were far more corrupt in the past than they are now and that the state was used to oppress a lot of people throughout the 20th century in ways that have gotten better. Yeah, and so of course, one doesn't want to paint too negative of a picture or too positive of a picture of the past but so there are a number of ways in which we're coming up short as a nation because we're not using government effectively. We used to have the best health indicators in the world. Now they're middling. We used to have the best educational performance in the world. Now it's middling. We had the best infrastructure and the most productivity enhancing infrastructure in the world and now, as everyone knows, it's worse than middling. So we're falling behind not just our own past but the experience of other rich democracies that are using government more effectively. And that's, I think, the point. It's not that we have stopped using government at all. And in fact, you mentioned these sort of local issues and I think one that has been really in our minds and the president just gave a speech about is Flint, Michigan. And what the president said that I think has often forgotten is that, so right now in Flint, there is about 5% of kids have lead levels and maybe it's 10% above five micrograms per deciliter which is considered the very highest level that you could possibly want kids to have. If you go back to the 1970s, 90% of kids had blood lead levels twice that high. And the reason they don't now is because we did this adrenormous effort to clean up lead from the water and the soil. And at the same time, we pursued the Cleaner Act and its related policies that made our city air the cleanest in the world. And in fact, it's probably worth about one to two years of additional life for Americans. So we've continued to do good things but we're doing less and less well at I think harnessing the things that government does well and because of the sort of destructive, as I said, kind of interplay between an anti-government ideology between the gridlock of a political system that isn't very good at dealing with polarized parties or anti-system parties and because the sort of way in which that feeds the very cynicism about government that in turn supports the sort of political forces that further undermine it. Mayor Smyrdra, do you see that doom loop in practice? I mean, is there any political upside for you in being a cheerleader for government or would it be easier to just embrace the cynicism and continue to turn people against? It would be much easier to embrace the cynicism, sadly. Yeah, we've actually in Fresno been openly talking about how cynicism really is the easier path and it's really a posture of fear in my view. Being hopeful and I love that hope has come up a couple times today in different ways and then these folks here, literally their life's work is about, to me, the practice of hope and its power and its effectiveness and even saying this right now, I'm probably getting hits on my Twitter account about what an idiot I am to be hopeful or to in any way see that as a tool to advance the interests of my community and the people I represent. So it is, it's a tough political position to maintain right now but I think everybody in this room is self-selected. You're here because you believe in the future of our country or your own community and I think there's a fair number of people who are actually in this space. It's just not, it's just kind of not the cool thing to be right now. So we just have to hunker down or help Ann Marie down this plane. And is that your job too, Diane? Are you making this cool? Hopefully, we have this whole effort that we call ImagineGov and it's sort of geared really toward young people and we've been pretty successful at reaching that audience. In fact, we've got, we've been pretty successful on social media getting 60% of our audience really in the 35 and under group. 56% male, which I'm not quite sure why. But the interesting thing is that if you can get people thinking about imagining something else instead of thinking about how bad the thing we've got is, then that can only help. And that is, it's a way to be hopeful without being just appearing to be Pollyanna-ish. And that's sort of the thing that you have to balance. But I think that once you get people kind of in that mindset, then you are in a different place. Can I just jump on again on this point just to point this out. There is no way to solve the complicated problems that we face in Fresno at the neighborhood level, the city-wide level, the regional level, and I dare say up and down the spectrum to the big national issues we're talking about here today. Unless you start with the mindset that there is a solution out there. We just have to find it. We have to work hard to find it. We have to be persistent and determined and aggressive about it, but we can find the solution. And if that's not a message of hope, I don't know what is. So hope, as Diane was just saying, gets a bad rap for being this attitude of we're in denial and we're ignoring real problems. It's just the opposite. The more in tune you are with the very real problems that our communities face, the more you have to wrap yourself in a mindset of hope if you have any chance of finding the solutions to those problems. So I think it is the most powerful, effective sort of way to go about solving problems. And right now it's absolutely not represented as being the case. So this is not true. Well, the counter argument you would hear is that the solution is to get government out of people's way, to leave them alone, to stop meddling in their lives and trying to solve their problems for them so that people have the space to solve their own problems that rather than a government trying to create jobs, for example, the private sector has to be left to flourish so that those jobs can arise organically. What would you say to that? Well, I guess my earlier comments, I was being the whole hand, not just the thumb. And I'm so grateful that Jacob provided the illustration or referred back to it. I'm really speaking from a broad and cross sector and community sort of approach. And it's not the case that the thumb alone can do it, but just as an example in talking about job creation. I mean, look, if you're not aligning your public infrastructure and support of the private sector to give them max productivity and the opportunity to create jobs, then you're falling down on the job. So I guess I'm speaking more from a community perspective and getting everything to move in the right direction. Jacob, you look like you're abiding your tongue there. Is this about a balance? Is that the point? No, no, I think that's absolutely right. And the most important thing that we wanna change is this assumption that having government play an important role means that the private sector plays less of a role. Many of these things are positive some in the sense that they're creating enormous opportunities. There's a lot of, I mean, crowding in might be the other way to talk about it. You think about the construction of our innovative computer sector, right? It was really built on public investments, but it also has this enormous dynamic, entrepreneurial quality of its own. And so I'm optimistic as well. And that may be seen as a shift. In fact, my own mom was writing me about half with you the book and said I really hope you have some good things to say in the last chapter because I'm feeling pretty down. And we are, I mean, Paul Pearson and I are optimistic. And we're optimistic first because we think there's a lot of money on the table. There are a lot of ways in which we could use government more effectively to promote prosperity. And because in part, perversely, we haven't been doing as well as we should be. And I think of our excess healthcare costs, our poor outcomes on health as one of those areas where there are many others infrastructure in another key area. The second reason that we're optimistic is that we just don't think that if you look at this history that there was just this one like big moment of reform. There is no magic bullet today, but there wasn't in the past as well. And what is really important is that we can get out of what I consider to be this kind of really negative destructive cycle into a more positive place, but that's not gonna happen overnight. It's not gonna happen just because we, what, repeal Citizens United or we create a jobs program or something. It's gonna require sustained reform over time. The key things are that, you know, we've got to create some more capacity in government, which we've been hollowing out in various ways so that our legislators, for example, are really beholden to private interests because they don't have the capacity to formulate their own positions. We've got to get overcome some of this gridlock which is gonna require further reform of the filibuster, for example. And then we're gonna have to create a lot more pressure from voters and from organized groups on government to defend the public interest for one of a better term. So the really bad thing about what's happening in my view is it isn't just about us not doing things that we need to do, but also there's just a ton of giveaways to powerful private interests because government doesn't have the capacity to resist that. So basically, I mean, people talk about the war on coal. It's been getting a lot of play lately because of what Clinton said. You know, coal's waging a war on us. We're a lot poorer because of the way the coal industry has pushed for a set of policies that externalize an enormous amount of the cost of its business model. And now coal's no longer there, but there's a lot of other industries, fossil fuel industries that are doing that as well as the Wall Street and aspects of healthcare. And those are all areas where we are poorer because we're using, we're not, government isn't strong enough basically to resist these private rent seeking efforts. Shannon? I think one of the things that is intrinsic in this conversation that's a little bit kind of harder to conceptualize is that innovation has allowed some switches and directionality of the conversation that we have not fully figured out how to embrace. So at change we have a tool called decision makers. So if you are the target of a petition, and I wanna pause for a second and note that that is the language, right? You are the target of a petition. You can respond. There's an official tool. You will get a notification that someone has launched a petition asking you to do something. And you can respond officially and start a conversation with the person who started that petition and with everyone who is supporting it. And that level of kind of directionality, if we could figure out how to better leverage that, how to better make that be part of the process, then I do think that there's quite a bit of opportunity to find those solutions and also to really kind of humanize government a bit more because again, the language and how we talk about all of this, right? Like having public and voter pressure on government. Well, if you unpack that a little bit, like that looks like a lot of very like unidirectional sorts of things. And we are in a moment technologically in terms of data and all kinds of ways where we don't have to have that kind of unidirectional conversation and just like imagine how much power there would be if there weren't the targeted targets, right? But if we actually were able to kind of think about that as a shared responsibility. So you could be hopeful because your constituents were hopeful in talking to you about what the solutions might be. And I think that's a really important nuance. Well, I mean for a lot of politicians it's not fun to be targeted all the time. And there is this feeling that, some of the weakening of traditional institutions that we're seeing right now is the result of this sort of disintermediation of the internet and of technology that it's too easy for people to get together and form angry mobs. And we have maybe too much democracy right now because people can connect with each other even if they're unreasonable people, right? And so from everything from the presidential nomination on down you have people forming communities around ideas that might have been shut out of the discourse in an earlier time when we had more filters on the conversation. Do you buy that at all? No, and I'm not sure it's relevant. So on the not relevant, maybe that could be true but it also there's no putting that genie back in the bottom. We're not going to go back from here. So it almost doesn't matter if it's problematic because it is. So our challenge is to figure out a way to operate in this environment in a way that is hopeful and solutions oriented and all of that. And then the other thing is I don't agree that it's a problem of too much democracy or of like shutting those conversations out. It's not that they weren't happening. It's not that like that community went away because their point of view wasn't reflected in a national conversation that had filtered it out. If anything, it probably got like a bit more pernicious and a bit more nefarious and also sort of reinforced a lot of what gave it an edge, right? Because it was shut out and that was legit. If there is more democracy, if we do have more of these spaces for these conversations and for in some ways competing and it's actually shocking how often it looks competing but it's not as competing as it looks if folks could just talk to each other a bit and we can really focus on how to make that happen. I actually don't think it's a problem of too much democracy. When Michael, my friend did an op-ed in the New York Times a week or so ago about is there too much democracy? And what I loved about what he said was that really the problem is that there are not opportunities for people to make a difference that we've squeezed out the opportunity for people locally to really make a difference through government and so in that sense there needs to be more democracy. And I also think that that is something where I think it's important that we not channel all of our civic energy into things that are external to government. I think it's in some ways it's an easy path especially with the kind of disdain that there is for government now. There's a sense that well, there's just no point. So let's go over here and start a community garden not to be trivial about it but let's take that energy that we have civic desire to make things better and let's do this in some extra governmental way. And that then just deprives government of all of our civic thinking and all of our passion about making our communities a better place when this is really the place you can do this in a way that has democracy built into it, the ability to be universal, the ability to not be dependent on some charismatic leader in this particular community being able to get a donor to put money in. I mean, those are all wonderful things but we then forfeit these tools that the constitution gave us and that we've used in good purpose as the book says and many other people will attest to. And we just, I think it's wonderful to have these kinds of associations but sad if we let those deprive us of all of our civic energy. Mayor, I wanna get your take on this and then after that I wanna go to Q and A if people have any questions, if everybody's not still on their food commas. So start thinking about smart questions to ask and Mike will come to you but Mayor, I wanted to get your take on that question. I joked that I actually agreed with your point but I have to tell you, so I went online last night to see if I was the focus of any petitions on change.org, so I knew I was gonna meet Shayna today and just because I'm not, doesn't mean that I'm not in a matter of seconds but you know, I- Just text someone real quick. Yeah, I know, exactly. Easy as that. I think, I actually really appreciate Shayna's point and Diane's as well and we're definitely in this period of rapid acceleration and really increasing access to petitioning and the sort of advocacy and so the pendulum is swinging that way and it's, you're right, it's never going back in the bottle. I think what will happen over time is that right now it's, there's a lot of energy around the fact that we can get a lot of energy around something, right? And there's motivation and inspiration in that. It's going to have to mature into and we keep it focused and channeled all the way to and through outcome delivered problem solved. And so what I experience in my own community and more of a, not so much through technology but just through, you know, advocacy groups and in-person sorts of things that people are championing. You know, there's a real distinction in my mind between people who are advocating and they actually want to solve the problem versus they're advocating and in some way tied to the identity of being an advocate and in some cases it's quite literally tied to they get a grant to show up and do things and that's all perfectly good but I just kind of feel like, you know, those of us who are in that community steward space we have to challenge folks to absolutely avail yourself of every resource to mobilize and draw people in and care about the thing that you're caring about but just kind of get to that next point too. And I think that's going to be a natural evolution and, you know, we'll see how it goes but it does make things pretty challenging in the governance world. I don't want your job. I don't end it at all. Who has a smart question? All right, let's go over here. Only smart ones, yes. Tell us who you are and who you're asking questions. Hi, thanks. My name's Travis Moore. I run a program called Tech Congress here at New America. We're placing technologists to work directly for members of Congress and committees on policymaking and I want to piggyback on Jacob's point about capacity and Diane's point about building things, not building things external to government. Lauren Ellen McCann over here has this wonderful mantra about build with not for. And it seems like a lot of the work that advocates and thought leaders do is build things to pressure legislators or policy makers into X, Y and Z and it seems like, so for example, I worked for Representative Waxman. We had 120,000 letters the last year and people just can't keep up. We used a Lockheed Martin built tool that wouldn't let you A.B. test a subject line or embed an image in an email. So the capacity in Congress is absolutely decimated in terms of technical tools. So how do we build with our policy makers? What are some concrete steps we can take as thought leaders, as advocates, to build with essentially our end users, do some user-centered design on reinvented government? Jacob, do you want to take that? I just want to commend you guys and Lee Drutman over here as the person who's written most I think persuasively about how the erosion of congressional capacity has empowered lobbyists. And it's true at the state level too. So there's some great research by Alex Hirtle-Fernandez of political scientists that shows the states where they just adopt Alec legislation verbatim. Literally he's just looking at whether or not they pass laws that are Alec model bills. And so something like 1% of state legislative output is simply verbatim Alec American Legislative Exchange Council bills. Where are the states where that's most prevalent? The ones with the least capacity. And so we've seen this massive stepping up of the capacity of outside interest, particularly moneyed interest, not citizen interest, to pressure legislators, but we've seen very weakened capacity. And the same is true in the executive branch. As powerful as the executive branch is in some respects, particularly on the foreign stage, the parts of our executive authority that rely on civil service that's large enough and capable enough to regulate these very concentrated and powerful industries is very weak. And the IRS as well has been deeply eroded. And most citizens recognize that because they can barely get a phone call answered. So that's actually I think a huge area of potential reform. The challenge is that, you know, we saying we wanna hire more bureaucrats and give members of Congress more money and staff is just not very popular. What I've been heartened by is at least, you know, and your efforts have reached some Republicans. There are actually, you know, now there's some bipartisan recognition that this dumbing down of Congress is a real problem on a bunch of fronts. So more broadly, and I'll just say one more thing here, I think that this really links up to this idea so what's the right role for outside pressure because, you know, politicians find it uncomfortable to operate environments where they have to compromise with other actors. But that's what politics is about. And the folks who, the business leaders and political leaders who worked to help construct the mixed economy were under significant constraint, particularly from organized labor. But for business leaders, they had to deal with moderate Republicans that moderated them in a lot of ways. So how do you create that kind of constructive constraint in our era? And I think it's gonna come through some marriage of traditional kinds of organizing and building up organizations that can play the kind of role that labor and other civic groups played and these new digital technologies. It's not gonna be one or the other. And the sort of set of groups that figure out how to do that are gonna be the ones that I think really transform America's democracy. Does anybody else wanna weigh in on that? We have more questions? Let's go right here. My name's Eddie Eiches and I'm a government union president. But you never mentioned the growth of interest in democratic socialism. You never mentioned Bernie Sanders and how, you know, from the Sanders perspective, how growth in government is a positive thing. And this whole movement is really related to how we can use government better and just response to that. Well, I think that's an interesting, I think you can see the Sanders movement both ways because there was also an allusion to this idea of revolutionary change poisoning people against the importance of incrementalism and the importance of gradual progress. So does the Sanders movement, is that about an idealistic generation that wants a bigger government? Is it about an anti-establishment fervor that wants to tear everything down? Is it all of the above? How do you see this? Who wants to take that? As a political scientist, I'll just say yes, right? It is both. And I say there's the pressure, the outside pressure the Sanders campaign has brought for some of these very important reforms is quite valuable. At the same time, I do think there's a sense in which the Sanders critique of government is so corrupt and compromised and rigged that it is feeding into some of the cynicism that people have. I also think, and this isn't really a critique of Sanders, it's a critique of all of us. And that is that we tend to think about government in terms of redistribution, right? That's sort of the way we're primed to think about it. The government takes from some people and gives to the other to others. And if we're on one side of the political spectrum, we like it and the other side of the spectrum, we don't. But I think it's worth remembering how much of government is not about redistribution. It's about positive sum measures that make really almost everyone, if not everyone, better off. And George W. Bush had a good phrase on this. He said, we need to make the pie higher. And so a lot of good government is about making the pie higher. And we tend to forget that when we focus too much on inequality or too much on, and here's a guy who wrote a book about inequality saying this, but in too much on redistribution and not enough on the ways which government makes positive sum differences in our lives. I think that this question of revolution versus incrementalism is really interesting when it gets down to the individual level of people who are not professional activists or don't have their identity and their political work or even just in voting. So what we see at change and we kind of had this conversation on one of our early calls, I'm thinking about it quite a bit, is that when you look at, even when you look at the people who have signed, which is a small percentage, people who have signed the expressly political petitions, it's like one of the things that we're seeing a lot of in this cycle is after every single primary, we see a spate of petitions from both sides decrying whatever just happened. So it's particularly fierce between the Bernie and Hillary people on the side. And before it was with the Trump folks. If you look at the people who signed those petitions and then you look at what else they signed, right? Those same people are not signing change everything petitions. Like those never go anywhere actually. Those same people aren't even signing petitions to like wholly reform the primary system. They're signing petitions that are like very specific, incremental, fix something particular about the way my life works or the way our community works kinds of petitions. So I think that one of the things that's interesting here is there's just like huge disconnect particularly at the national level between how we talk about what people want and how we talk about how you make change. How we talk about how we make a better world. And what that actually looks like to the individuals who will have to contribute to it and who will experience it and who will benefit or cost in it. So I actually think it's as much a rhetorical problem and as it is anything else for us to resolve. I would say that there's a little different twist on the question and it's not directly related to the question but it is related to revolution. Because on the one hand there is the talk of revolution from Bernie Sanders on the other hand there's a lot of the Trump talk is really about just disruption. It's about and both are sort of in their own different way sort of revolutionary kind of rhetoric. But I think you could also look at it as part of that problem we were talking about earlier that both are different kinds of responses to that feeling that I don't have a say. That this is not a democracy and that the status quo and the way things have been going no matter who's in office have disempowered me. And that giving people a sense that yes one things can be better and yes two we can be a part of making that better. In some ways hits both kinds of things at once. And it's an important thing to listen to. Well there's a much longer conversation we could have about all the messages this presidential election is sending about the role of government and all kinds of other things but that seems like a good note to end on. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Thank you.