 Good morning. Thank you all for being here and being in your seats and ready to start this day. I'm Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of studies at New America. And we wanted to start the day off with a real discussion of the nature of the democratic populace at the moment. And it's getting to kind of the underlying questions, not so much the surface questions, but really the dynamics of this popular stage and how we can move it to make sure it's constructive, inclusive, and fully pluralist age as well. So to start the conversation, and we'll start it here and then expand it, I'm joined by Yasha Monk. Yasha is a, most importantly, a fellow in our political reform program, which I launched in 2013. He's been a New America fellow. He's an instructor at Harvard. I think he's still a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, or that may have, I think that's a couple of weeks. But Yasha's been really one of the most acute observers of the kind of threats to democracy, decay of democracy, or decay of liberal democracy, not just in the US, but around the world and bringing a global as well as theoretical perspective to it. And Pete Wainer, Pete is a contributor to the New York Times. He's at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and worked in the Bush White House on mostly on domestic issues, and has also been writing about these issues quite a bit. So I'd like to start by really asking the question of, we can look at the political divide, the American democracy across a number of different dimensions. Race and identity is obviously one. Economics is another. The traditional ideological conflict, big government, small government, which is kind of what we thought we were fighting about for a lot of years. And then I want to make sure we really get to the question of engagement and alienation and what enables people to connect to a democratic populace and to make decisions together, as opposed to kind of the reaction that I think we saw a lot of, which I sometimes refer to from there's a book by the poster Stan Greenberg, where he broke out the American electorate into a bunch of different types. And my favorite types were what he called the FU boys and the FU old men. And I feel like that sort of reaction has played a big role in how do we draw that back in. So I'm just going to kind of turn it over to you. And then we'll be joined by some people who are doing a little more work on the ground and kind of make this a little less abstract. Do you want to go, Gasha, first then? Sure, so there is a lot. I mean, I think there's a few things to understand when we're sort of trying to grapple with this political moment. The first is that I'm always sort of surprised by how neatly people want to explain what has happened. So the temptation is to think in binaries that it has to be either one cause or the other. But what's driving this is either a sort of racial attitude or it's sort of about economic stress. Or it's social media, right? Or it was Russia. And there's this sort of reaction where if somebody says the hacking of the Clinton campaign had something to do with it and there's a bunch of people who are saying, oh, you just want to blame it on the Russians and you don't want to admit that there was any problems with the Clinton campaign. And instead, I think we have to think about how any big social political transformation is the result of an interlocking series of causes. The world is not monocausal. And that's most obviously true for the tension between sort of economic and racial causes, right? I think that two of the great challenges that we face, not just in the United States, by the way, but also in Western Europe and many other parts of the world, first of all, the slow transformation of a set of countries that had a pretty mono-ethnic imaginary of themselves, where in a place like Germany where I grew up or France or Italy, there's a deeply mono-ethnic monocultural societies and they slowly have to learn what it means to be a multi-ethnic society, what it means to have a common identity. In a place like the States where obviously you've always had a multi-ethnic society, in fact, but it also always had a very clear racial hierarchy. And in a similar way, people have to learn what it means to rethink what it is to be an American while we are actually pushing against that racial hierarchy and making some progress in overcoming that racial hierarchy, which is something we shouldn't forget. And then on the other side, you have this huge economic transformation, where from 1935 to 1960, the living standard of the average American doubled. From 1906 to 1985, it doubled all through American history. It was true that people could look at the material, that most Americans, a large majority of Americans, could look at the material circumstances of upbringing and say, my God, I have so much more now than when I was growing up. I'm sort of in a transformed world. And since 1985, we haven't seen that improvement in living standards anymore. And people are really angry about that. So what happens when these two things go on at the same time? When on the one side, they are much more afraid of what the economic future holds, when it doesn't seem natural anymore to think, you know what, I'm doing better than my parents were and my kids are gonna do better than me. But they're thinking, you know what, I've worked hard all my life and I'm not doing much better than my parents were and I have good reason to fear that my kids are gonna do worse than me. And then at the same time, you see that larger transformation and what America is, I think that's when you get a lot of this anger. I was talking to a representative who's telling me that in his district, it used to be that you ask people who they are and they said, you know, I'm a foreman in the factory or I'm a member of a union or I'm a coal miner, right? And the jobs they have now, it's not necessarily that they're that much poorer, you know, perhaps they have a job at Walmart that actually allows them to buy as many things as they could have done 30 years ago. But the jobs they now have don't give them the same social identity. They don't allow them to have an earned identity where what they define themselves by is their professional accomplishments. And so what do they default to? Well, they default to a scripted identity. They now say, well, I'm white and I don't like those people over there, right? And so we have to really think about how do we do a number of things at the same time? We need to, in the long run, actually improve people's standard of living, make people hopeful for the future, make them feel like they have control over their lives and the state is actually helping them take control over their lives so that they have a sense of the political system is on the side and that they can have a better future. And we need to think very seriously and very carefully and I know that there's some great panels about that today about what it means, what we have in common as Americans. Because I think at the moment we often have obviously a very dangerous and disgusting form of white nationalism in the White House, frankly, at the moment. And then I think sometimes a little bit too much emphasis in what divides us on other sides of political spectrum. Really, I think I have to find a new narrative of what we have in common and what kind of common future we want to aspire to. There's also a few things in the short run. We have to beat Donald Trump. But we have to actually reinvigorate the attachment that people have to democratic norms. So some of my academic work, which I'm not gonna go into, shows that there's been a shocking decline in the importance that people give to living in a democracy and even a shocking increase in the openness to alternatives to democracy, both from the United States and in other countries. And I think part of that, frankly, is our thought. I teach at Harvard, nobody there thinks of their job as transmitting the basic values of our political system and the reason why liberal democracy is better than dictatorship or military rule to the next generation of students. Since the beginning of self-governing republics, people have fought carefully about what it means to transmit political values to the next generation. But today what it means to be an academic, what it means in many ways to be a journalist, sometimes even a think tank fellow is to look at the world and say, here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem. And there's many things wrong with our world. There's many things wrong with our political system and we need to have a good analysis of those in order to be able to move towards fixing those. But I think part of our job as people and everybody in this room, this is true of, who have a voice, who have a platform, who can write, many of you who teach, is to actually explain to people what in the system is worth preserving and building on and how we can reform it and improve it but also why it's worth having an attachment to the basic values of democracy, of a rule of law, but now under threat here in the United States and in other countries as well. Wow, that's great. I love that idea of that as the mission, especially for academia, would change all the incentives for tenure and everything else, but that sounds great. Pete, do you wanna? Sure, I concur with everything that Yash said and he really is, if you're not familiar with his work, you should be. He's really one of the great and articulate voices about not just what's happening in America but really that's afflicting the Western world. I'll just pick up on a couple of points. I do think that it is important, well, let me start by saying, I think this is a perilous moment for the country. I don't wanna overstate it. There's sometimes a habit for people to think that the problems we face are worse than any other time and they're not. This country politically or political culture is sick but it's been sicker, we had a civil war, there was the Great Depression, there was World War II but this is a difficult time and a dangerous time and I think we need to be alert to it and I think that we've got a kind of ugly populism, an ethnic nationalism that is abroad in the land, not just here but really throughout much of the Western world, a distemper in alienation and in anger and I do think it's important as a first step to diagnose it and to understand what is driving that. Some of it is malicious and malignant. I wouldn't deny that at all. Anybody who's on the internet could figure that out for themselves but that isn't, I don't think what's the dominant thing that is going on and if we begin from that proposition we're not gonna get very far. I think that there are several things that are contributing to it. One is this epic economic shift that we've seen globalization, automation and technology which is driving Americans apart and we've gone from a high-skill economy and low-wage workers and low-skill workers are suffering because of it. Just one data point since the end of the Cold War you've had a billion low-wage workers enter the global marketplace as competition to American workers mostly because of China and other Asian countries. Now I think overall that's good but that creates its own challenges so we have to understand that. I think that there's been a political failure that has happened that there is a sense that our political system, our political leaders and our political institutions aren't rising to the moment to the challenges that we face. I think that both parties are responsible for that. And I'll just speak, I'm a lifelong Republican, I'm a conservative but to speak and address my own side I had a sense for the last several years that Republicans woke up and felt like every day was January 20th, 1981 and Ronald Reagan had just been elected and the problems were the same and the solutions were the same. And indeed over the decades that these supporters in the Republican Party became more Reagan than Reagan so I'll take one example. There was a moment in the 2012 debate where they said if you could get $10 in spending cuts for $1 in tax increases of the 12 people or so who were on the stage would you entertain that and no hands went up because a policy which in general one can defend which is lower taxes is better had become a kind of catechism. And so this happened and I actually think that Donald Trump was in some respects a response to that were sort of categories were shattered but I think both parties I would say for a lot of Democrats they wake up and think every day is January 20th, 1965 and the new deal. So I do think that our political leadership and our political institutions just have not put forward solutions to the problems but I do wanna underscore that these are complicated problems. I mean these people who are in the political class are not stupid and when you have these epic changes and how you deal with globalization that's not a simple issue. I think we have an unraveling of the social fabric and I think that we're seeing the dark side of individualism which is social isolation and I think that that's driving a lot of it and for some people a sense of lost cultural change a lot of people feel like they're being left behind in the modern economy and in the modern culture. In terms of what we do about it the first thing I'd say is this is not beyond our capacity to address. These are not forces that we can't deal with and we're not being attacked from without. A lot of what's going on is within it's within our capacity to address it. I'd say one thing that's just required is political leadership. I don't think that's all that's required but I think it's essential and when I say political leadership I mean it in two ways. I mean one is to come up with a modern reform agenda to address these problems and challenges that are facing people but I also mean political leadership in the sense of our civic culture. Because of this alienation that exists you can go in two ways if you're a political leader. You can either try and channel that anger and that alienation in a constructive way or you can do the other way. You can take advantage of it and turn up the temperature and throw logs on the fire. And we have not had political leaders enough certainly who are willing to do the former and far too many that are doing the latter. That is the kindling is out there and we've now got political leaders who are putting that lighting matches to it and we have to recognize that and we have to confront it and ultimately we have to change it. There's two other quick things. Civic education I completely agree with Yash on that. We have to be able to transmit a respect and reverence even for democratic norms and traditions and a kind of civic comedy. There's a lovely line in the prelude, a Wordsworth poem where it says what we have loved others will love and we will teach them how. And that is in some respects one of the tasks of education which is to transmit to others what we love and revere and that's not going on. And if that doesn't happen then you're gonna raise a generation of people who don't have respect. And the last thing is as individual citizens we have to engage with other people who don't think like us. And in the abstract I think most people would agree with it but when you get down to particular cases it actually doesn't happen very often. And people need to learn to listen well to one another and we just have to and we can go into this more during Q and A but people have to bring into their orbit, into their life people who don't see the world exactly like they do and they have to be able to listen well because one of the problems we have in politics today is this extraordinary dehumanization and when you get to talk to people and get to know them and if they begin to have a place in your own life it's just a lot harder to dehumanize them. You may disagree with them but you'll at least understand where they're coming from and that can be the beginning hopefully of coming together rather than apart. Okay, I think this is great. I think we both laid out a lot of the issues and we'll continue this in a broader discussion. I felt like both of you reached to a language of transmitting and the idea that elites whether it's political elites or the kind of people we are in this room can play a positive role in kind of bringing values downward. I wanna make sure what I wanna get into is make sure that we can look at the question of like is there a possibility for a kind of bottom up populism that's not ugly populism. You know, populism has two faces in the American tradition. So we're gonna bring out three other people and I'll introduce them who have either from their research or their other work have some perspectives on how people are actually bringing this up. So other people. One day we'll have the people will just magically appear but we're not there, we're not quite there yet. Hello other people. All right, I'll introduce the rest of this group. Actually, although these are folks who are all doing a lot of significant engagement with citizens, they all happen to be political scientists which is okay, they're the best kind of political scientists. To my left, Dorian Warren is at the Center of Community Change and Center of Community Change Action Fund. He's been a professor at Columbia, he's been a host on MSNBC and a colleague of mine at the Roosevelt Institute. Lydia Bean runs an organization called Faith in Texas. She's also a Harvard educated political scientist who's taught at Baylor and Vanessa Williamson is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and has a wonderful new book called Read My Lips which is about how Americans actually view taxation and paying taxes as a kind of civic good which I think has been a really revelatory and important book. So you heard some of the conversation here and I'd love for you to, I mean you can challenge, you can pick fights, that's all encouraged but if you can talk a little bit about how you see some of this kind of education in democratic practice and the sort of healthier kind of populism if you wanna use that term in your own work and you're nodding Lydia so you can kind of go. So I come at this problem from the context of Texas in large, second largest state in the country, a majority minority state. It's a state in which I am the last age cohort in which white people are the largest ethnic group. And so it's a shift where we're economically growing. We have a very low unemployment rate. We're an urban state. So in Texas, this issue of answering this rancid form of populism, it's impossible to talk about that without also talking about race and ethnicity. And Faith in Texas is part of the Pico National Network which is the largest faith-based organizing network in the country. We're predominantly made up of the largest religious communities in Texas which include black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, white evangelicals, white mainlanders, and we also have a large growing Muslim population in Texas. And what we've found working with John Powell is that really it's impossible to address the economic anxiety and pain that people are feeling across working class communities, including white working class communities without also talking about two other dimensions of this anxiety and uncertainty. And John Powell talks a lot about the belonging, this crisis of belonging, and as well as political powerlessness. So you have belonging, economic anxiety and pain, and political powerlessness. And what made Trump so effective in a value-neutral sense is that he addressed all three of those forms of anxiety and pain at the same time and blended them together and said, we're gonna make America great again. And what has been missing is a really vibrant answer that addresses all three of those axes in an inclusive way. So in a Texas context, what we're practically talking about is creating a new people, a new Texas, since we're nationalists and we have our own Texas nationalism, creating and forging a new people that really brings together African-Americans, Hispanics and working class white people, as well as white professionals. But those folks always find their way to the table eventually. So let's just talk about African-Americans, Hispanics and working class whites, which sounds crazy, but it can be done in Texas is being done and so there's no excuses anywhere else in the country. If we can organize working class white people in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, you can do it where you live. And what we've found is that some people think you can just sort of substitute identity politics for economic populism, that's not the case. Practically speaking, what we've found is that you can organize economically struggling white communities, but you have to address this crisis of belonging that white Americans are feeling right now. And in some circles, that can be a hard pill to swallow. It doesn't mean coddling fragile white people, but world's tiniest violin playing. It's not, you know, we're not saying that working class white people or white people in general are suffering that they're true victims. That would be very, very silly indeed. But what we found is that until you name that, that sense of cultural dislocation and crisis of belonging, until you offer a really strong, vibrant sense of new community that's forged, that decenters whiteness, but includes white people, that is really sort of a new America, no pun intended. And you offer a really clear vision until you address that people aren't open. And when you do address it, people are open to lean into those hard conversations about race, about the economy in a way that they aren't, if you don't address that first. A great example of this, faith in Texas has been leading a statewide fight to a limit payday lending, which is a practice that really targets disproportionately blue collar community. So folks who have a little something to steal, right? And it preys on people across race and class lines. And when we started organizing around this issue in a variety of working class communities, including white communities, a lot of working class whites were genuinely surprised that this was a political issue. They just thought it was their own private shame. And so economic pain is also, sense of isolation is also a sense of shame and isolation and political powerlessness. And so what we were offering these communities was not just sort of an economic agenda, but also a new community. That the idea, join us, join this movement where your private shame is actually a public problem. There are people who made decisions to steal from blue collar communities. And there are public officials who made a decision to take basically bribes to make this to change laws, to allow this theft to become legal. And this is a multiracial, multi-faith movement that has your back. And that's a very powerful recipe for organizing in economically struggling white communities. And when you don't address it, it's always wrangling beneath the surface because Texas is really just an extreme example of what's going on in the rest of the country. But there's no way when you have a group of people who have been in a majority and who have had the culture, the shared identity of Texas to find around them, when you change that, what you're gonna have is a bunch of sad white people next to a Confederate monument being torn down, chanting, we will not be replaced. And as a white person, that's just embarrassing. We can't have that. You have to address that sense of displacement. But when you do address it, we find people are willing to lean into the work much more quickly than you would otherwise expect. One more thing. This is gonna be really important in Texas as we respond to the passage of SB4, which is kind of an Arizona law on steroids. And it's gonna be nothing short of apocalyptic for Texas because it basically deputizes every single agent of the state from the local on up as an agent of ICE. And our response, we can't stop this law from being implemented, right? There's not a policy fix. So our response is collective suffering basically. That's our strategy, collective suffering. And so with everything we do within faith in Texas, our answer to the current crisis we find ourselves in is just forging a new people. So in our case, it's so that we suffer the consequences of SB4 together. And we're making sure we're involving as many white Anglos, African-Americans, and citizen Hispanic people in the suffering of our immigrant communities so that together we're forged as the new people. One final thing, when you lean into this, the sense of belonging as well as powerlessness and economic pain, we're often surprised at how quickly people can be transformed. So transformation is possible, but it's a human need to have to feel hurt. So just one example, I was leading a training at an African-American megachurch in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and we were joined by a young white Republican operative who was a friendly guy, really nice, scouting us out for a local Republican candidate. Just wanted to figure out what we were about and make a pitch for his candidate at the end, which he didn't get to do. And in passing, it was a mostly black audience. I kind of felt bad for this one white guy sticking out. And so I just mentioned in passing that one of the things we have to address as a state is the sense of dislocation that white people are feeling and how a lot of white class parents are afraid to send their kids to the public schools because their kids will be in a minority and they don't know how to do that. They don't have the cultural tools about how to send your kid to school and to be one of a few white kids in their class. And this guy basically almost jumped out of his seat. He was like, yes, yes, that's what we're feeling. That's it, that's it. And the black leaders were kind of looking at him like, what, really? And one older gentleman says, welcome to my world, buddy. Welcome to my world. Really, this is new to you? You're freaking out about this? But we were able to have a real conversation about that. And once you're able to name that, the problem that has no name, that Trump has now given a name, people are suddenly very open to what you have to say next. So sometimes after the Trump election, there's this fear in the world of, my world of grassroots organizing that if we're talking about white pain, that's gonna come at the cost of silencing people of color. But what we've found is that it's actually possible to do both very well at the same time and to build a movement that has a white working class base, a white middle class base, but also in our organization, it's predominantly black and Hispanic millennials. And you can lean into topics like police violence, like immigration, if you're willing to also take the crisis of belonging seriously in white communities. Great, that's fascinating Lydia, thank you. It's a good sign that there is outreach actually to a black community. I mean, that's I think a very hopeful promise because if you just have a politics that's our group and the other group without any attempt at that kind of outreach, we're stuck. Dorian, I think Lydia covered a bunch of issues. I wanna make sure we have time for Q and A, but you work with a lot of groups that are organizing around immigration as well. What's your perspective as a scholar and as a doer on how we bring those, the kind of connections that Lydia's talking about or that Yasha and Pete were talking about? Thanks for the easy question, Mark. I really appreciate that. It's a really difficult issue, especially if you see the Washington Post this morning. There's an article about the increased number of deportations under this administration, which is literally tearing families apart and communities apart and in some ways erasing the history of this country in terms of this nation being partly an immigrant nation. So it's hard because we hear stories every single day of people in fear of agents trailing kids from schools to get to their parents because they suspect that they're undocumented. So there's one question around how do you, and I think the big theme here is how do we link people's fates together so that they do see themselves as belonging to the same community or nation? And so how do we link the fates of immigrant families and people with non-immigrants, with native-born citizens? And it's a challenge, and we've seen some signs of hope. If you remember after the executive order with the Muslim ban, the protests at the airports, those are mostly American citizens who are showing up to say, no, this is, we're gonna create a circle of protection around our immigrant and Muslim brothers and sisters. So there are lots of signs of hope. I wanted to pivot to a few things Lydia said on this theme actually that the both of you talked about as well. And it is this theme around how do we create linked fate among people that, whether they have a different descriptive identities, Yasha, as you described it, or just don't see each other as part of the same community. So I just got back from Cleveland, Ohio where I took some very rich friends of mine from San Francisco and New York to get outside the blue bubble and actually meet some people that are not like them. So we went to Warren, Ohio in Trumbull County. That county voted twice for Obama and then flipped the Trump. It hadn't voted Republicans since 1928. And we made them, I and my friends made them, made the folks I took, we made them doorknock to actually talk to people which was scary for folks. And it was fascinating because you got, and we did the same in East Cleveland, which is a predominantly black community. Warren is much more working class, poor white, but it's somewhat integrated. And the stories we heard from the people in East Cleveland and the people in Warren are very, very similar. Deindustrialization wasn't like an abstract concept. It was a lived experience. And it was a very, very common theme of how when jobs literally left, the fabric of the community fell apart. Two things on this, and then I'll shut up. One of the things I learned is, and this creates the opportunity for linking fates. So everybody on the doors talked about heroin and opioid. And it's fascinating because I grew up in the 80s. I remember what happened when jobs left my community and black people were unemployed and turned to drugs as a way to soothe the harm. And we locked those folks up. And we're much more tender and caring now and I'm all appreciative of that. But it is fascinating because one of the things they said and I learned in Ohio is, one of the highest rates of incarceration are white rural women because of the drug epidemic. So how do we think about creating some linked fates between the folks in East Cleveland who have been subject to the war on drugs, which apparently the Attorney General has restarted for decades with folks that have experiencing the same kind of harm and pain a few decades later and are being caught in the criminal justice system? So how do we create those bonds of linked fate to try to transform and change it? So that's the first thing. And then second, I do think we need to figure out what is the new economic vision for the future and how are we gonna create economic security for people when there is just sheer hopelessness? Because I was curious, why did this twice people voted for Obama and then split the Trump? And actually it wasn't a national story about Clinton or anything else. It was actually a reminder that all politics is local because for decades they're local democratic politicians have been telling them that they're gonna make things better and things have only gotten worse. So you do that for 30 years, you live like that for 30 years and then you get this guy who resonates emotionally he's speaking your pain. Of course they flipped the Trump. But it's actually not that hard to figure out, why? Because the democratic local politicians have been promising things for decades and decades and decades and not being honest about saying maybe I have no agency about the factory that left. Maybe I can't bring that back. Maybe we gotta figure out something else. So it was just a reminder that in some ways all politics is also very local as we're having a national level of conversation about political transformation and this administration and what could be next in 2018 or 2020 if we're not building and developing people at the local level to solve their own problems and to run for office and to build leadership then I'll say it this way, I'll say it this way. The route to national power and transformation is through local places and states. And unless we refocus on those local problems what happens at the national level we're gonna always be stuck. That's fascinating, thank you Doriana. I think it's interesting to think that people would instead of realizing maybe politicians don't have this agency over the economy they would turn to somebody who's actually promising a different level of agency at a totally different and totally different zone. Vanessa I feel like you've kind of uncovered some undercurrents of civic capacity in your work and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you see that capacity and how to draw it out in service of a positive populism. Yeah I'll try and add the positive note a little bit. So I think that my previous book was on the Tea Party so I spent a lot of time thinking about older white conservatives primarily who were very involved in the early years of the Obama administration of posing the agenda coming from the Obama administration of posing the person of Barack Obama. And frankly motivated by things that are very much things that motivated Trump supporters a lot of concern about immigration and about cultural change. And then I kind of took my eye off the ball because I did this work on the Tea Party and then went on and did some other things and then it seemed like the aspects of the Tea Party that were so interesting, first of all the motivations of white people who work were very conservative but at the same time the sort of media world in which they lived, right? It was a very unique media world and very much a media world that Donald Trump was good at operating in. And so I went to do this other work and the work I did was actually driven by an experience I had at a Tea Party event where I noticed that these people who were very angry about what they thought government was doing very, very angry, very angry about ACA, very angry about the sort of idea that they had lost control of their government. Nonetheless, describe themselves as taxpayers and that seemed funny to me, right? Because at the end of the day you're mandated to pay taxes and how could that be something you're proud of even when you're so very unhappy with where you think the money's going? And so I looked into this in more detail and one of the, a really interesting sort of thread in American history, both on the left and the right is to talk about for citizens and non-citizens to describe themselves as taxpayers as evidence of contributing to their community and as evidence that they have a right to be represented by their government, right? And so this can be a very exclusive language, right? And I think you see this sometimes on the Tea Party side of things that I'm a taxpayer and someone out there is not. Someone else is not paying taxes which requires you to ignore sales taxes, payroll taxes, property, all the kinds of taxes that low income people actually pay a lot of. But it can also be a very inclusive language and you see this sort of more on the left over the course of our history. I mean, from the founding of course, the idea that if I am taxed I deserve representation. Well, that same language was adopted by the women's rights movement. It was adopted by the civil rights movement and it has recently been adopted by undocumented immigrant groups talking about the fact that they're chipping in their share, right? So they contribute to this country too. They want to be part of America. And so I think that, you know, and what shocked me was the strength of this sentiment across the political spectrum. I mean, something like 95% of Americans see tax pay as a civic duty and they feel that quite strongly. And what shocked me about this was how that civic sentiment had survived what must be what, four decades now of really profound anti-tax rhetoric, right? So it's interesting to me and Trump is in some ways an exception at the very end of this time period where he actually, it is common for Republicans to oppose high taxes, right? To say taxes should be lower. It is not common for them to say they don't pay taxes. So we're really at an unusual moment where there has been a profoundly strong civic tradition of tax paying and a sort of use of the symbolism as evidence that one is a contributing American, one's doing one's part, right? And then now it's very interesting to see whether we're at the moment where that, like other civic norms might break. But the fact that it has survived so long I think is actually a sign of hope. That's good. I know we want to really open it up to Q&A. If anybody, if anything you, anybody heard that you want to challenge question, ask a question about, otherwise we'll go to Q&A. All right, let's open it up. Please wait for somebody to bring, raise your hand if you want to ask a question and wait for somebody to bring the microphone to you and say who you are. Nobody wants to be the first question of an American conference. Yes, over in the, like by that exit sign over there. Is somebody taking the microphone? Over there. Thank you and just say who you are please. Hi, my name is Benjamin Lee from the Carney Endowment for International Peace and my question is about the urban rural divide within the United States. How do you think that has shaped the political culture and the civic culture within the U.S. and are there any possible solutions to address this problem? Thank you. Or maybe anybody, all of you can start with that. But maybe you may deal with it more often Lydia, more directly. Yeah, yeah. Now it's a common misconception that Texas is a rural state about 75% of Texans live in just basically three urban areas. So you can talk to a vast majority of Texans without driving off into the boonies. But I think that the urban rural divide is huge and there are solutions. But first I want to say it's not really an urban rural divide. It's like five cities where Democrats sort of hold themselves up and then the rest of America. So that's a different problem if you're like we have the cities, our people have the cities and you people can have like the little town. That's a very condescending and somewhat delusional view of doing the problem, to be quite honest. When you lose the suburbs, which are cities in their own right of 400,000 people, you have a problem, right? It wouldn't, even. Well let's not do it so much in partisan terms as in kind of culture and engagement. Yeah, yeah, you have a problem. It's kind of bigger issues that we've been talking about. So I will say that they are possible to solve. I think if you're talking specifically about rural, I was talking with Dee Davis and one of the things that's really clear if you spend time in cities under say 25,000 is that there's a complete collapse of civic infrastructure and a lot of what's left behind is Christian radio and talk radio, low tech. You don't need civic tech, it's very low tech and extremely polarized and these are spaces where there's not contestation, there's not dialogue. And if you have a sort of civic infrastructure that's basically just in five very big cities, right? And again, this is not just a partisan problem, this is a civic infrastructure. If you're part of a sort of civic community that wants to engage most Americans but you're just in five major metropolitan areas, you're having a problem with suburbs as well but you're also not reaching these very small towns. And one of the things that happened, and Dorian, you really alluded to this earlier is this slow atrophy of small town papers and then democratic institutions, the precinct chairs who remember the New Deal are starting to die. They're basically a whole generation are just gone. There's no one to replace them. Many of the churches are in a full state of collapse. People forget that the most rapidly secularizing population in America today is working class and rural white people. Not because they're deciding they want to be atheists but because churches are unraveling as institutions outside of wealthy areas. And that is a very dangerous place and that was happening long before Trump came and no one can say that we couldn't have seen it coming because you totally could have seen it coming because we've been telling you for 15 years, you could have seen it coming. So I think fixing that is about, it's not just about who you're talking to but also where you're talking. So it's about being outside of these major five cities and having presence and speaking to that audience and recognize they're an audience that a lot of folks haven't talked to in a very, very long time. Yeah, there is, I think, if you look at some of the things that Jim Fallows has written about communities like Erie, Pennsylvania or whatever, there are other than those five cities, there are a lot of smaller cities and communities where there is a little bit more civic capacity. Yasha, you want to- So as we have so many political scientists here on the stage, so I think all of us will agree that the way to try and understand the phenomenon of comparative, you have to look at other countries as well because if you just look at the United States, you might think that a story that seems really prominent here explains the rise of populism. When in other countries where that story isn't happening, you still have the same outcome. And so I struggle with that because I'm trying to, I just finished a draft of a book that does try to explain the rise of populism, not just in the States but in other countries as well. But most of the factors that seem to be present in nearly every country, there's a good count example too. So we very complacently in the United States want to think, you know, Trump, that's a problem of old people, right? Like only old people voted for Trump and young people didn't. And like, A, that's not true. Young people in the United States, white young people in the United States voted for Trump 48% or 43%. The most shocking fact about the 2016 election- Just put an exclamation point on that. An exclamation point. But also it's not true in other countries. So you look at France and actually 20% of people 65 or older voted for Marine Le Pen in the second round of a presidential election, 44% of people below the age of 25 did. So it's not true that only young people voted for it, right? One explanation- Well, the Brexit was much further in there. Right, so Brexit and Trump where it was true that old people mostly voted for it. But France, Poland, India, it's not true that young people don't vote for the populists, right? So it's complicated. Stagnation of living standards. I think that's a really big cause, right? I always talk about it. But look, you look at Poland, the GDP increased six-fold between 1990 and now and they have a huge problem in their hands. So there's a counter example there, right? You look at the difficulties of transitioning a mono-ethnic society into an equal multi-ethnic one, right? While you look at Eastern Europe, we have a populist problem in the huge space and there's very, very few immigrants. So there's a different form of it. They have demographic fears about it. They see what's happening in Western Europe. They don't like it, but it's not straightforward. The one story that's actually straightforward everywhere and this is how it relates to the question is the urban-rural divide. I have not seen a single electoral map in the United States, in Britain and France and Poland and Turkey and India and Russia where it's not the case that a lot of this populist anger comes from rural or ex-urban areas and where the sort of liberal-democratic candidates do much better in the cities. So there's something really universal going on here and it makes me a little skeptical about how much we can do about it actually. I think it really is driven by some very deep technological drivers that are difficult to confront, but yes, the urban-rural question I think is crucial and it's the one thing that really is universal so far. There's also, I mean, for the entire scope of American history, rural has been overrepresented from one way or another. I mean, one person, one vote, which was kind of a miraculous ruling, began to break that but didn't really do that at all. There's a sign that says stop, so. You know, anybody have any, I don't think we'll do another question. Anybody have any last comment? Because I'm gonna slightly ignore the sign, screw up the whole, yeah, any last thoughts? Because it kind of came up suddenly. Oh, I know, I just think that this point about the rural-urban divide is critically important, one aspect of which we might have some control is what visions of one another we receive, right? Because one of the big challenges I think is that the image of the cities in rural America and the image of rural America in the cities is a nasty stereotype, right? That's what we're seeing a lot of the time and a lot of that comes from the fact that when you were talking about corporate, like talk radio and these sorts of, the vision you get of people you don't see is so toxic in this country right now and I think that that's probably something that crosses national boundaries. Yeah, I just wanted to say, I think much of what has driven this is economic. I think a lot of the data supports that and we talk some about it, but what's happened is this sort of economic divide has transmuted into this tremendous cultural divide and I think a lot of this election, a lot of what's happening today is this kind of cultural alienation from each other and apropos what Vanessa was saying, I spoke with Arleigh Haaschild who's a sociologist at Berkeley and she wrote a lovely book called Strangers in Our Own Land and she went actually to Louisiana, the bio country to understand the Tea Party, she's a liberal and she came to really like the people there. They were very kind to her and she was struck by that but she said that what was driving so much of what they felt was a sense of dishonor and humiliation and when people feel humiliated, that leads to anger and anger leads to bad things in a self governing country and I can't underscore enough how important and some of the people spoke eloquently about it. It is that people feel heard. They have to feel like you don't and this goes on both sides that you don't look at them as subhuman or driven by maliciousness and that's just not going on right now. We have these to the extent that I've never experienced in my life and I probably is rare in American history because of technology and all the rest is we're living in political silos, we're living in cultural silos, we're living in theological silos and as long as that continues to happen this kind of fierce anger and alienation is going to be with us and there's not a magic wand that's going to solve this and it's not going to be a leader coming in. We are a self governing country and in the end, this has done a person at a time and a community at a time and some of the people here are doing something about it but that has to happen and we don't have any time to go into how that can but I really do believe this notion of hearing and even of friendship, which is friendship not just people who see the world the same way but see the world in a different way and appreciate each other for that because it helps widen the aperture. None of us has a perfect angle on the truth and the whole idea of democracy is that there is such a thing as a collective wisdom that we're a fallen people that none of us can fully ascertain the truth and the reality of things and we have to model, including political leaders, this idea that we have something to teach each other. Thank you Pete, I think we're literally going to get the hook. Do you want to, you had some? Just really quickly, I think one thing besides comparative analysis, it's also helpful to do historical analysis so I've been rereading, Sabil will know this, I've been rereading the great book by W.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America written in 1935 which is about the same distance from the Civil War that Anne-Marie Slaughter mentioned earlier that we are now from the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s so it was very freshly written and so there's some lessons there about what happens when your community and economy is destroyed and what are some experiments to rebuild those political bonds and what happens when they fall apart, especially around race. So there's some lessons historically as well as comparatively that we might learn about how to rebuild our democracy. Reading assignments are good. Okay, well hopefully the rest of the day we'll build on some of the questions raised by this panel and I would please give everybody here a big round of applause.