Common Ground with Jane Whitney

(gentle music) - Let's say you wrote to "Dear Abby" and you asked whether you should get a divorce.

She would snap back, would your life be better with or without him?

Today we shift that lens.

We look at whether it would be better for the red and blue states to split up or to stay in a radioactive marriage.

Even better, can we get past our irreconcilable differences?

Joining us are Melody Barnes.

She's executive director of UVA's Karsh Institute of Democracy.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School.

Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute.

And Paola Ramos, author of "Defectors: The Rise Of The Latino Far Right and What It Means For America."

But first, we welcome one of our nation's most trusted voices.

He's a storyteller who's chronicled our history by narrating consequential American lives, from the founding fathers to kings of tech, and he's a history professor at Tulane University.

Walter Isaacson, we're thrilled to have you, there you are, you're here.

Great to have you, thank you.

(crowd clapping) - It's great to be with you.

I wish to be up there.

- I have to ask you, you're a uniter, not a divider.

I mean, your whole life has that theme running through it.

So, when you hear people talk about seceding and a national divorce and they don't want to live with people unless they agree with them.

What does that mean to the zeitgeist of this nation?

- Ever since Benjamin Franklin was a runaway and came to Philadelphia in the early 1700s, it was a diverse place with Anglicans and Protestants and the Quakers and the Jews and the slaves and the freed slaves.

And out of that combination, out of that diversity, we created a great nation.

And it was a unique thing that the United States brought to the world, which is that people of different backgrounds, different ethnic groups, different origins and skin colors could work together and live together.

That's been a source of the creativity of America, it's innovation, and it's been the source of a lot of tension.

We just have to know now how we can harness that back.

People like myself who love living in New Orleans, a place of great diversity, we also have to understand how some people find that unsettling.

They like to live either in gated communities or in small towns where there's not as much diversity.

So, I think we have to be open to how diversity of our country can unite us rather than divide us.

- Okay, well, you're coming to us from New Orleans.

And by your own admission, you grew up, you had a charmed life.

You did, right?

- I think those of us who had such lucky lives, you ought to wake up each morning with that gratitude 'cause it helps you make sure you want others to have that opportunity.

- Sure does.

Basically, the diversity you're talking about can also take the form of tension.

And you think the tension morphs into creativity and things that really vitality that drive the culture.

Now, why is diversity a dirty word at this point?

- I think that there's been a backlash as there's been over this history of our country when sometimes we have trouble digesting too much progress, too much immigration, whatever it may be.

And I think we have to be sensitive and understand that, when I was first a reporter, I was in London for the late Harry Evans, working for The Sunday Times.

And I saw the big influx of immigration from Asia and Africa and how that led to a backlash.

I know, I assume, anybody watching the show or in your audience feels we shouldn't have such a backlash, but I think it's useful for us to try to understand where some of that resentment is coming from.

It's not a big left, right thing, it's not liberal, conservative, democrat, republican.

There's a nativist populism that's on the rise everywhere from Hungary to Germany, to Brexit, to the United States, and we have to understand why people are feeling threatened.

- This last election actually had some good news.

People were less polarized, and 98% of the counties in America shifted to the right.

What's your take on that?

- Yeah, I think that there has been a loss of faith in the establishment, the elite, the experts that have been running things.

And as I say, it's not just a phenomenon in the US.

And part of that is amplified on social media.

I don't want to try to date you, Jane, but I grew up with Walter Cronkite saying, "That's the way it is."

We shared a common pool of information with our neighbors.

Now, we get into echo chambers where we're being fed information by algorithms that are there to enrage or engage us.

And so, we're not sharing a common pool of information.

So, I think that's one of the things that has helped make it a more polarizing these days.

- You actually left CNN because you saw the trend in how MSNBC, Fox, were making, were being I guess, the impact was more division and you didn't want to be part of that, but it's still there, Walter, it's everywhere.

It's social media, it's algorithms, it's one giant algorithm.

So... - Absolutely, I think we have to look at technology.

When Benjamin Franklin came into Philadelphia, like I mentioned, there were like, I think 10 newspapers and he starts an 11th and each had a different faction.

One was for the proprietors, the other were for the Anglicans, and some for the Quakers, and some for the working class people there.

The end of World War II onward, we had a mass media, partly 'cause of technology.

It was harder to start your own newspaper.

Newspapers consolidated, so did television and radio, they consolidated.

Nowadays our media tends to be Balkanized.

There's a hundred different talk radio shows you could be listening to, a hundred podcasts, you could subscribe to, a hundred feeds on social media.

And I think that helps divide us.

I must say, I didn't leave CNN simply because I saw the divisiveness arising, I just didn't understand at that moment how we were going to correct that divisiveness, so I went to the Aspen Institute to try to figure it out.

- Do you understand how we're going to correct it now?

- No, I mean, not every solution has an immediate problem, and Barack Obama used to say that at some point the fever will break, there'll be enough people wanting to watch shows like this one and fewer who want to be anonymous on social media and trying to get their postings amplified by saying something outrageous.

I think, eventually, the fever will break because the high value information that's not prejudice, that's not biased actually is important to people.

And once people demand that, maybe the era of AI will provide services where you can get reliable information and people will choose those over the unreliable information.

- Really, you think of yourself as a storyteller, whether it's Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, and you learn that craft at age 13 or 14 from a man, a writer named Walker Percy.

- Hey, look over my shoulder here.

- [Jane] Yeah.

- That's a picture I always carry with me.

It's me and Walker Percy, when I was young, sitting on the banks of the Bogue Falaya.

And I asked him, he was a great novelist, wrote "The Moviegoer," but I was about 13 at the time, couldn't make hide or tail of it.

And I said, "What are you trying to preach to us in that book?"

And he said, "Walter, there are two types of people come out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers."

And he said, "For heaven's sake, be a storyteller, the world has too many preachers."

So when you ask, Jane, what's going to unite us, traditionally, it was around the fire, around the campfire, around the dining room table, around the early morning breakfast in the cafe when people had opened up their shops.

People tell stories, they don't argue necessarily and say, "Let me tell you about that time that I ran into somebody who did something."

And I think if we become less a nation of preachers and go back to being a nation of storytellers, that's part of the healing process.

- Okay, last question, Walter.

(Jane chuckles) Because this is part of it.

There are people sitting out there who have no hope, no optimism, things aren't going to get better.

What story would you tell them?

- Yeah, I'd tell 'em the story of America, which is why I try to do it.

We've gone through enormous adversity, and we've gone through enormous bad times.

My parents were raised during the Great Depression.

My father went off in the Navy in World War II.

I was living in New Orleans at the height of the civil rights movement.

Einstein once told the story where he saw the McCarthyism and the hatred and the economic dislocations of the early '50s.

He said, "I was there when this was happening with the Nazis rising to power."

And then the communist, he said, "This is bad."

And then about two or three years later, after Joe McCarthy had been knocked off the stage by Eisenhower and Edward R. Murrow and other things that right at, he said, "America democracy is like a gyroscope, just when you think it's going to tip over, it rights itself."

The one thing I would say I'd never contradict Einstein is I'm not sure it rights itself, I think we have to be the ones who help right that gyroscope.

And we've been through worse times before, and we'll get through these times of polarization and of economic uncertainty - In your next life, you should be a therapist, Walter.

(panelists and audience laughing) Not a bad idea.

Anyway, we're out of time.

Great pleasure, thank you for kicking us off today.

- As always, Jane, great to see you.

- Okay, take care.

Erwin Chemerinsky, who is, there's Erwin.

I haven't seen you for years, you look great.

When a distinguished law scholar talks about how the US Constitution is damaging democracy, people pay attention.

How is the US constitution threatening democracy, Erwin?

- It's a pleasure to be with you.

I think there is a crisis facing democracy.

The government has lost the faith of the people.

The Pew Research Institute does a survey every year of confidence in government.

They've done it since late 1950s.

The high watermark was in 1964, it's 77%, when it was last done, it was 20%.

The last survey about public confidence in Congress put it at 16%.

The Supreme Court is as lowest approval ratings in history.

And by many measures, our country is more polarized than it's been at any time since reconstruction.

And I think a lot of this can be tied back to choices that were made in drafting the Constitution.

Take two senators per state.

When the Constitution was written, the difference between the most populous state and the least populous state was 12 to one.

Now, it's 68 to one.

In the last session of Congress before the current ones, there were 50 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators.

The 50 Democratic senators represented 42 million more people than the 50 Republican senators.

Twice this century, the electoral college has chosen a president who lost the popular vote.

Partisan gerrymandering for house seats means that democracy isn't working.

Choices made in drafting the Constitution with regard to race, continue to haunt the country.

These are just some examples, Jane, of how the Constitution is contributing to the crisis of democracy.

- But Erwin, you're in the middle of an ideological war zone here.

What are the odds you're going to be able to change the Constitution, rewrite the Constitution?

- I don't think we need to rewrite or change the Constitution to fix most of the things that I've talked about.

Congress could pass a law that requires that every state allocate its electoral votes proportionate to the popular vote, making it much less likely that the candidate who loses the popular vote can win in the electoral college.

Congress can adopt a new voting rights act.

Part of what it can do is make sure that there's independent commissions for house seats and not partisan gerrymandering.

The Senate can change the rules to lessen the filibuster, which creates gridlock.

We can have legislation to create much more quality in society.

These are just a handful of examples of things that can be done without a constitutional change.

- I'm going to turn to Melody, because you've been a champion for democracy your whole life.

And in the 2024 election, issues like inflation, immigration, crime, really eclipsed the battle cry that we should save democracy.

Now, to put it simply, I mean, this is really simple.

- Okay.

- Okay.

People chose the price of eggs over whether to save democracy.

And I guess my question to you is, how dispiriting is that to somebody like you?

- I think that's a wonderful question, and it's certainly a question many of us have asked ourselves.

When I talk to colleagues at work, they often say, does it feel to people like democracy is a luxury that we can't afford?

And I think actually these things come together, and the challenges that people face, the economic challenges, persistent social and economic barriers that people are facing, concerns about the way technology's affecting people's lives, I can run through the list, are all accurate and true.

And people need to feel the "fruit of democracy," I think, to believe in democracy.

But what I think sits underneath that is the question of how we're going to tackle those challenges.

How are we going to solve for those challenges and whether or not we are going to see our laws and our constitution as a referee, as an arbiter that we can all agree upon to work towards solutions.

And right now, one of the fundamental challenge that I think we face is that we have lost the ability to use the tools of our institutions to actually solve problems.

One of the things that Erwin mentioned was the 1964 being the high watermark.

And I've often cited that same statistic for when people believed government worked for them, when people believed government would do the right thing.

And right now, people don't believe that, that's the case because of a number of factors that I'm sure we'll talk about as we go through this hour together.

But unless and until we solve for what's sitting underneath that, one of my colleagues often talks about it as a loss of solidarity, a loss in a belief in our democratic culture, we won't be able to solve for the broader problems, the bigger challenges that people are deeply concerned about.

- Robert, I see you're nodding your head.

- Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

- [Jane] Okay, but we're going to layer something else on.

- Okay.

- It's a lot of people who feel these culture wars, they feel that the shift in demographics and gender norms is scary to them, right?

- Well, I mean, I would like to associate myself with some of the comments of the earlier discussions.

We are a very diverse country.

We are pluralistic, that we're the most diverse country in the world.

And I happen to think that the reason we've been able to survive all these years is because of our written constitution.

And I would double down on the proper role of Congress, and the proper role of the executive branch, and the proper role of the Supreme Court, and federalism properly understood.

And I would just say clearly that I think that's what's allowed us to keep our country together.

I'm with Walter, we've been through a lot worse times than we are now, 1968, 1932, 1862.

And I think that we should have a little more confidence in ourselves.

And I think we've gotten through a contentious election.

I also should say that there were some legitimate feelings about the failure of government and experts to solve problems in their lives that are serious.

President Biden and Vice President Harris were warned that their spending policies would lead to inflation and would erode the spending power of people with low wages when they went to the marketplace, but they did it anyway.

COVID was not a great success for experts.

- Correct.

- The wars in Iraq, not a great success for experts.

I think we've seen actually an expression of the people's discontent and a desire that government be more about of the people, for the people and by the people.

I think that the issue that with regard to these cultural concerns are legitimate because people want to be treated as individuals based on the content of their character, not be told that their views are determined by their ethnicity or their race.

- I'm trying to get at why people are so dug in, why people are divided.

But when you listen to Erwin in terms of, you know, should we look at the Constitution and look at some of these things, you're saying you don't think that's.

- I think, the level of hostility and anger is exacerbated by social media.

President Trump is the first pro-choice Republican president.

He's a man of the center.

It's the fringes that are the loudest voices, but the broad middle is closer together and more united than you're recognizing.

- Yeah, I'm just looking at what polls are saying.

Paola, I had a totally different question, but I see you want to talk.

- Respectfully, I think it is hard to argue that President Trump is pro-choice, just given that he overturned Roe v. Wade.

He pushed to get us to that place.

- He's anti Roe v. Wade, but he said, let the states decide.

I mean, that's how he's viewed by Conservative Republic.

- Okay.

- If I may though.

- Another show, another show.

- Another show.

- Not this one, okay.

- No, but since you bring up social media, I do think that's at the core of this question or that I think we're all talking about, which is, can we avoid a national divorce?

And again, as someone that has not been married yet, I don't know much about marriages, but I do know, I have heard that in order to avoid separation, I think both parties need to be looking at the same reality.

You need to understand what is the common ground.

And I think we're living in a country, I see this all the time, reporting where it feels like we're living in two different realities.

Now you have over 50% of Americans that truly believe that there's an invasion at the southern border.

You have a majority of Republicans that truly never believed that Joe Biden was the legitimate elected president of the United States.

You have then over 50% of Republicans that also fundamentally believe in the great replacement theory, a quarter of Republicans that believe that January 6th was justified.

And so, I think if we understand the way that social media has fueled this division, I, myself, as a journalist, it's a hard time to be answering this question because it truly does feel like we are in two different realities.

One of the interesting thing is that I think most Americans, when they woke up on November 5th, I think everyone was concerned about democracy, right?

I mean, obviously, inflation was a top concern, but I think everyone, Republicans and Democrats, everyone was worried about this existential threat to democracy, whether you supported Trump or Vice President Harris.

But I think then when people voted, people had completely different ideas of what that threat meant.

And to me, that just speaks to this idea of these two realities that is very hard to wrap my head around.

- And can I just jump in for a second.

- Sure.

- First of all, when I use the term culture, I'm talking about something deeper.

I'm talking about something that sits at the root of our constitutional, our democratic culture, kind of the ideas, the values, the narrative, our conception of who we are as a country and what our democracy is.

And I think to the point that Paola is just making, and I am married, and if my husband's watching, I hope he is.

(Jane and panelists laughing) We're good.

- Enlighten me.

- We're good.

But I think there's a fundamental set of questions.

First, do you want to be in the relationship?

And are you willing to do the work to be in the relationship?

So 165 years ago, Jefferson Davis walks on the floor of the Senate as a senator from Mississippi, and he says, "We're out.

My people and I believe that our constitutional rights have been violated, we are seceding from this union."

There is a binary question in front of the nation, then slave free.

I don't think that's where we are, but I do think that there are a set of questions.

One, do we see the Constitution in a way and believe in the Constitution and the institution of the Constitution and its institutions in a common way.

And Erwin talks about important changes that we may want to make to the Constitution.

And secondly, do we have a conception of ourselves that brings together some kind of solidarity in a positive way that isn't one of negativism, that isn't one of resentment, but one that says, even though we've got disagreements, we've got a way forward and we can productively disagree to get through this.

And those are the questions I think that we have to ask and answer.

And that's deeper and undergirds and certainly affects issues that we've been talking about.

- I would urge all Americans to find the common ground and come together and not be talking about, well, this just proves that I can't get along with the other.

- But I want to go to something which is a magical thinking, Erwin, that when you came across this, you were really dismayed when you started looking into this whole question of the Constitution, and what it's doing to democracy.

You were worried about were there solutions.

But this whole notion that people take democracy for granted, it's like the air we breathe, it's always going to be there.

And how does that hurt us?

- No democracy, no form of government lasts forever.

We can look at countries around the world that were democracies and no longer are democracies.

I worry whether or not our democracy really can survive if the government has so lost the faith of the people.

I worry whether our democracy can survive when the country is so polarized.

Donald Trump won by a very close margin, and those who support him largely share little in values with those who oppose him.

I hope there will never be secession, but I think there's a point at which the country may ask is what unites us greater than what divides us?

- I just would like to say that the similarities in the people that voted for Trump by class, for instance, much more diverse than your typical Republican.

Big swaths of working class Americans voted for Trump.

Much more diverse than your typical Republican on race and ethnicity.

Even more diverse with regard to the draw between urban and rural.

So, I'm not so sure the big division was actually, the really remarkable one was very affluent communities in America with high percentages of college educated people voted for Harris.

And that's really the only place where it moved more for Harris.

And I don't, to have us break up because college educated, affluent Americans are mad about what happened in the election is just preposterous.

- Okay, I get to Paola, because the insecurity you talk about in your book, "Defectors," is that Latinos, because of tribalism, traditionalism, trauma, the three Ts, will basically be afraid for their place in society.

I mean, they're afraid for losing their place in American society.

So, it doesn't matter if they're demonized or vilified, they will rise above that.

- Absolutely.

I think that's one of the stories from 2024.

And I think for months, there's this question in the face of someone like Trump, now, regardless of politics, in the face of someone that was promising mass deportations, I think the thinking went, according to the polls and democratic pollsters, the thinking was that Latinos would show up in unprecedented numbers in the face of someone like him.

And that's incorrect.

I think one of the things that you find in this election is that, that anti-immigrant sentiment, the xenophobia is real.

And just because you're Latino, just because you're the descendant of immigrants, that does not make you immune to that.

And I think one of the things that Trump and his campaign was able to do extremely well is understand that, tap into that anger and the resentment and the nativism that many Latinos were also feeling.

And then I think that brings me to the second point, I think within that, I think they also understood really well that there were a number of Latinos that were so assimilated to this point.

I'm talking about three, 4th generation Latinos, that they could also play very well into this us versus them game.

And I think Trump and his campaign very eloquently and brilliantly were able to tap into that feeling that I think a lot of Latinos are yearning for, right?

At the end, we're talking about feeling like you belong, feeling like you're secure, feeling like you're part of a safe space, and Trump was able to tap into that.

- Okay, we have a really quick clip from your reporting.

You have fabulous, terrific volumes of reporting that illustrates this point, which is that they felt, as you said, secure enough, assimilated enough to feel they were part of white society.

So, let's take a look at that clip right now.

- What's happening in Texas is part of a larger legal trend of vigilante laws that are slowly making their way across the country.

When you look at your tweets, you've mentioned the word invasion at least 10 times.

Do you see any danger in using a word like invasion?

- No.

No, we got to call things where they are.

- "We got to call things where they are."

So, what does that say?

- Well, it depends, right?

Call things like they are, I mean, I think by US law, every human being has a legal right to seek asylum.

But I think if you have a president elect that is constantly distorting the image of immigrants, right?

Saying that they poison the blood of the country, saying that they're threatening you, saying that they're dangerous to society.

- Right.

- Then, of course, I think no one is immune to that type of misinformation.

And so, there you heard a Latina that does feel those threats, but I think our job is to distinguish between reality and misinformation.

- We have a scholar at AEI, Ruy Teixeira, who has covered this issue very well as well, just like other guests.

And he found that if you ask Latino Americans, is the United States the greatest country in the face of the earth?

75% of them say yes.

- Right.

- If you ask people that are self-identified progressive Democrats, only 25% of them say yes.

And I think to some respect, Latino Americans are saying, why do I want to be associated with a party that sees my country so differently, the leaders of my party than the way I see it?

And I love being here with Melody because President Obama was a two-term president.

He reached out across the country, he didn't overreach.

He got a lot of flack for it, I don't think he deserved it.

President Biden, I think overcompensated by overreaching.

And the key challenge going ahead for the new crowd is that they don't over interpret the election to be a mandate to do their most extreme things, that will divide us.

- I know you're a big fan of humility.

Humility's a key theme in your life.

- Yes.

- Okay.

But I want to ask you something else.

- [Robert] Uh-huh.

- So, why is it that a lot of people think or call America a second rate country?

I hear you exalting our free markets and our strong, wait a minute.

- Yeah.

- Strong economy, and we have all these terrific things going on, and half the country's saying, we're like a third world country.

- Well, I think there is a, first of all, our economy is the envy of the world.

There isn't any question about that.

I just read something in The Economist that said, in our poorest state of Mississippi, average wages are higher than they are in the UK, Germany, and Canada.

So, we do have a very strong economy, and I believe the grievance that's out in America is not as much about the economic strength of our country, but about a disconnect between elites and their attitudes towards things like patriotism, faith, illegal immigration, crime, the biological boys playing in girls sports.

Those divide Americans and make them angry at the people in power.

I also think that government itself has not been as effective at executing on government's activities.

And I think that's disenchanted them with government.

But I don't think it's about economic grievance, I think it's about the effectiveness of government and a disconnect on cultural values that are more than just whether their wages are going up.

- Dean Chemerinsky is shaking his head.

Erwin, what?

- I disagree.

We have a larger wealth gap in this country than we've had before, and it's growing.

And I think a lot of what the election reflected was people who aren't doing well and don't see a path for doing well anymore.

And I think what people wanted was change, those who voted for Trump, and Trump was the candidate for change, whatever it was, and Harris was the candidate of the status quo.

Look around the world and how many incumbents are losing.

Why do people want change?

I think it's because they think government is failing them.

And unless we can address the value of government, I then think democracy is in real danger.

- Go ahead, Melody.

- Just to build on that and what was being discussed.

I also think that part of our challenge, and I will keep returning to this because I do think it is important, that these deeper rooted cultural issues and the tension that exists there occurs in part because there is a lack of proximity, one, that allows us to actually listen and to hear one another.

And two, because when you get a few levels up to our politics that these phrases have been used.

And I'm not saying you're doing this, but to other and to differentiate us from one another.

This is just a personal example.

We're doing some programming at work recently, and someone sent me an email and he leaned into me about patriotism and about a belief in the military, et cetera, et cetera.

And I was like, every man in my family has been in the United States military.

You walk in my house and the flags of my father, my grandfather, my father-in-law were on their caskets, all in my home.

I understand it also as a policy matter, why are you making this assumption about me?

And I just use that as an example because I think that we have gotten to a point where we use these phrases and whether it's justice or wokeism or patriotism, the list can go on, and it's now become almost a caricature as opposed to backing up and saying, okay, what is it that this person is really saying?

If they're saying, I am troubled by America, what sits underneath that?

And how do we engage with one another so that we understand it and so that we can address it to hopefully start to move towards some way or some sort of common understanding for ourselves and our country.

- But then, again, we have another variable, which is the post-truth era, which Erwin, is just devastating in terms of not being able to agree on a collective set of facts.

I mean, how much do you see that as a factor?

- It is a factor.

The reality is that the internet and social media are terrific in terms of expression, but they make speech very cheap.

And the speech can be good or it can be false.

And we don't have a way of dealing with the false speech.

And so, I think that the question is, in a social media world, how does truth survive?

How does democracy survive?

- Melody, you talk about that, that disinformation travels six times as fast as a fact.

- Right, right.

I was fortunate about a year and a half ago to be in conversation with Maria Ressa, Nobel Prize winner, journalist from the Philippines, who talked about or talks about what this meant in her home country and what this means globally for us.

And without, Some sense, and there are debates, there will always debates and politicians will always, as my mother has to say, "put a little yeast in" some of the things that they have to say.

But we have to operate in some realm of truth and the ability for people to believe that there are a set of facts so that we can have debates and so that we can solve our problems based on some kind of foundation of truth.

Without that, we end up in a place where we are almost ungovernable, and every and anything goes.

- All right, Robert.

- I think the free speech people are going to win for the immediate future.

I mean, there isn't any question that the resentment against elites at technology companies or in the government deciding what is truth and what isn't truth.

It's pretty intense, and that's going to be opened up and we're going to have a very boisterous, sometimes lots of misinformation is going to be out there, it's going to happen.

And I think we are going to err on the side of allowing more speech, even when it's not right than airing on controlling speech.

That's the thing you got to be careful about.

What's the alternative?

That we're going to control speech?

And we can't have that in the United States.

- The free speech position will and should win.

No one is talking about giving anyone the power to control speech.

But I think you also miss the point, the huge amount of false speech that's out there is itself a threat to democracy.

And we don't have a solution to it.

- It's true speech.

It's debate, pushing back, that's always been the answer.

Bad ideas are countered by better ideas.

- But there's no reason to believe that the better ideas will triumph, especially in the social media world.

We can think of so many instances where the false speech is out there and the countering doesn't work.

So, you are right that we shouldn't censor speech, but I think you're absolutely wrong to minimize the harms of false speech that exist in society.

And we can't put faith in just, well, more speech will solve it.

- [Jane] Paola?

- No, I think we, I agree with that.

I think getting to a point where we're debating what is truth and what's not, what's a fact and what's not is dangerous.

And I think if we cannot at least see eye to eye on what is a fact and what is a lie, and at least not agree in the importance of controlling that, to understand the threat that misinformation has already played.

From being on the ground, I have had countless conversations, again, with people that are living in very different realities.

And interviews are hard, and I think at least seeing eye to eye on the importance of not getting into a debate around what is a truth and what's false is important.

I don't know if we can even agree on that.

- Because isn't there a difference between debating an idea.

- Right.

- And debating a fact.

Like, people aren't eating their pets.

It's another thing to, if you want to debate, asylum and refugee policy.

- My view on that is that, that was completely discredited, and the Trump campaign and Vice President Vance looked terrible over that.

But the people looked at a whole array of other issues, like, for instance, the president of the United States told us and his people for a long time that he was ready and prepared to run for reelection and was fine.

And when you have experts and the government and the president of the United States saying that, and then people get a sense, "Well, actually that's not true."

That will make people be a little bit resentful at elites telling them what to think.

- I hear you on that.

I think what we're speaking to is the challenge because disinformation, misinformation travels so quickly and happens now with scale, which means that this is a different moment than when we were running and had just invented the printing press, that we have a problem when people hear disinformation and misinformation, they're living in two different worlds.

So, the corrective nature of that information doesn't get to people.

And so then, you can't have the debate.

- Right, and I completely agree that the practice of all of us retreating to our corners and only listening to the voices we want to hear, and those voices only telling us the messages they know we want to hear, and this happens at the New York Times and at Fox News, is a big problem.

I don't know how to solve it except with allowing for as much speech as possible.

- Could you work on that, please?

- I think it's important for people to expose themselves to multiple viewpoints all the time.

- It's true.

My husband and I do that all the time, believe me, we listen to a whole lot.

There are things I listened to and I was like, "Wow, if I had really done that, I would think I'm crazy too."

- [Robert] Right.

(panelists chuckling) - Okay.

So, let me go back to Erwin in a Chatham House, study that shows that 54% of Republicans think that a civil war could happen in the next 10 years, and I think it's 40%, a lower number of Democrats.

If we don't do anything, Erwin, what happens?

- I don't think we know, we may just continue on this path, we may drift towards authoritarian as many countries have.

It may be that there'll be an increasing number of people who say we should think about a national divorce.

I think one of the things we haven't talked about is what might help to unify the country.

In the past, it's been a crisis.

The last time the country was truly unified was after 9/11.

George W. Bush approval ratings were over 90%.

COVID might have unified the country if then a different president would've brought us together.

I hope that somehow Donald Trump can be persuaded that given that he's been elected, given what he perceives a mandate, he should use it to unify and not divide the country.

If he divides us further than the answer to your question is we'll drift either further to authoritarianism or further to divorce.

- And I agree with that 100%, a lot rides on the way the president governs.

And there's a lot of potential for very serious recklessness that could be very problematic, I acknowledge that.

But if he governs in a way that doesn't overreach, that moves toward the aspects of him that are really more center than your typical conservative Republican, I think we'll get through this.

- I actually think the real test for me is less about Donald Trump and government and parties, and more about the American people.

How will people's backbones be tested in this moment?

Will people feel a collective moral outrage or will they not?

I think of January 6th, for a split second that morning, everyone, regardless of party, understood, and we all saw the same image in the same story.

There was a threat, there was a collective moral outrage that then disappeared, but we felt that collectively as a nation.

I think of 2018 in family separations at the border, collectively Republicans and dependents and Democrats saw those images of families being separated and they felt a collective moral outrage, and so I'm really paying attention to this question of how will people act in the face of perhaps scenarios that threaten democratic institutions or not, we'll see.

- Yeah.

- But that to me is is sort of- - Melody, can I ask you about these bridging organizations that are popping up and trying to bring people together, the Kumbaya Industrial Complex, to fight the outrage in industrial complex.

I mean, do they have possibilities?

- Well, I think they represent an effort across the country where there are serious pockets, people who think we have a real problem of the type that we've been describing here.

How do we go about solving it?

And that is one way to go about doing that.

I think that, again, we have to dig deep and get down to the roots.

- But what about this?

I mean, you're out on the street all the time.

I don't mean that, you know what I meant, right?

- Not that way.

- You did.

- I'm kidding.

(panelists chuckling) - I am.

- Okay, never mind.

(all chuckling) I say that with respect to a journalist.

- Oh, I know.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- And you're talking to people.

Nobody's talking to each other anymore.

- I think my job now, or my takeaway from 2024 is that I have to be a better listener.

I have to hear more.

And I think oftentimes, as journalists, you go into these stories and these states with a thesis in mind or an idea of how the story will evolve.

And oftentimes, if you just sit there and you listen, the story takes you somewhere else.

And I think part of my obsession this election cycle was understanding and listening to the way that some Hispanics were simply signaling something that maybe was uncomfortable for Democrats to hear, which is that they were not necessarily loyal democratic voters.

That perhaps they were feeling a type of pain or were carrying a lot of racial baggage that we weren't really seeing clearly.

And so, my takeaway now is that we have to listen more.

And to your point, I think that curiosity to me is the most important thing.

If you are not curious enough to understand what is dividing us, then I see a very hard path forward.

But to me, curiosity is the essence of it all.

If you're not curious and you're not willing to try, then I'm not optimistic.

- Erwin, I want to ask, I haven't asked you about your level, I'll ask you too, but let me ask Erwin first, about your level of optimism about all this.

- It's truly, I don't know.

On the one hand, I take optimism from, we've gone through many crises in American history as Walter Isaacson said, and we've gotten past them.

I take optimism because I think Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr's right when he said the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice.

There's been such advancements of liberty and equality over the course of history.

On the other hand, it's hard to be optimistic when I see the American people lost faith in government.

It's hard to be optimistic when I see how divided the country is.

And I'm not optimistic that Donald Trump can be a unifying president.

There's nothing that he did in his first term, nothing he did as a candidate that means he will be other than further divisive, and that divisiveness can really further endanger democracy.

- I have to, because you're nodding, Robert, and I have to.

- Well, we've been taught by Yuval to say, we're not optimistic, we're hopeful.

- Okay, what's the difference?

- And distinction is optimism is little gooey, hope indicates that you got to work for it, you got to make it happen.

- Ah, you have to earn it.

- I am always optimistic about the United States.

I think we will get through this whether President Trump is excessively divisive or not, 'cause I think the country is strong and solid.

- Even now?

- Yeah.

Again, compare us to the rest of the world in so many ways.

We are leading the way in freedom, in free speech, in technology.

There are lots of problems in the United States, don't get me wrong, but we shouldn't sell ourselves short.

Compared to Europe or China, I wouldn't want to be in either of those places.

- All right, I'm going to ask one last question of all of you, except yours is different.

(Paola chuckles) No, yours is about optimism.

All right, let me go.

You worked with Ted Kennedy.

- Mm-hmm.

- The late senator.

And he taught you optimism.

You said.

- Oh, oh, I thought, I was waiting for the rest of the question.

- Yes.

- Okay.

(chuckles) - You said he talked your optimist, not hopefulness, but how optimistic are you?

- Well, I think his language around optimism, I think in many ways is aligned with what Robert was talking about.

I wake up every day and believe that this work can make a difference.

I believe, and I listen to the kinds of things that Erwin is talking about, and I think they're very, very important.

But I also, or not but, connected to that, I believe that it requires this deeper work around culture that I mentioned.

Post-Civil War, we passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, absolutely essential amendments to the Constitution.

But for a hundred years, we had to wait to get to a point where we could make progress on those amendments.

It was at the tip of the spear, law, constitutional changes don't answer the problem fully, they are absolutely necessary, but they are not sufficient.

We have to get to something deeper to support that work so that we can move forward.

And I believe that if we do that work, we can move forward.

And there are people who are committed to doing it.

There are people who are not, but there are people who are committed to doing that work.

- And Robert, if you had one prescriptive, the magic wand.

- Well, as I'm listening to Melody, I'm thinking of Barbara Jordan's famous line at the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President Nixon.

When she said, "My faith in the Constitution is whole.

It is complete, it is total."

And that was a Black congressman from Texas who had grown up in the United States that needed to change a lot to reach the aspirations that she had for her country.

So, I do believe that a better and more firmer grasp of the brilliance of the Constitution, the role of Congress, the proper role of the executive, and the place the court places, and federalism properly understood is the key to our success.

- Erwin, the magic wand, it's yours, what are you going to do?

- I think the magic wand is to confront the deep problems that face American government and to deal with them constructively.

One thing we haven't talked about when we alluded to other countries is there's a trend towards authoritarianism around the world.

In the 1930s, many countries moved towards fascism at the same time.

In the early 1990s, many countries around the world moved towards liberal democracy.

Now, we're seeing many other countries moving towards authoritarianism.

And I'm very afraid that the instincts of Trump and Vance are authoritarian, which will just exacerbate the problems, make it all much worse.

- Okay.

So.

(all chuckling) Not optimism.

Magic wand didn't work.

I don't know what to say.

No, there clearly is a trend across the globe just to authoritarianism.

But, I mean, do you see any hope for the future?

- Sure, I see hope for the future, and I want to agree with what Robert said.

I think it's essential that Congress become far more effective and assert its prerogatives under the Constitution.

I think it's crucial that the Supreme Court enforce checks and balances and advance individual liberties.

- That's what's going to happen.

- It's supposed to.

- You think so?

- Absolutely.

He's right about the attractiveness of authoritarianism in this crowd in the White House.

They need to be constrained.

They need to be constrained by Congress, and they need to be constrained by the Supreme Court and by public opinion, and by the states.

And I think they will be.

- Last question to Paola.

This stuck with me.

You talked to the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was very insecure when he was starting out, and then he came into all this power, and you talked to him and you were surprised, there were actually things you agreed with him on.

- Yeah, I think when, em, so Enrique Tarrio, of course, was the former leader of the Proud Boys.

What was surprising to me about him is that on paper, here he is with his glasses.

He looks like a macho, no?

But I think if you put the politics aside, you understand that this is someone that, growing up in Miami, not just as a Cuban, but as a Black Cuban.

- Right.

- Was someone that never really fit into that Cuban privileged Miami world that I was privileged enough to grow up in.

And so, people like Enrique Tarrio never belonged there.

People like Enrique Tarrio were too Black to be considered Republican, they were too independent to be considered a Democrat.

And I think what the Proud Boys gave him, what Trump gave him, and that's what he told me, is the sense of power and a sense of solidarity.

I don't agree with anything that he stands for.

But when the cameras, you're right, when the cameras were off, when we weren't talking about Trump, he was someone else.

Him and I were able to be cordial, we were able to have a conversation.

And now, when the cameras turned on, he believed that power.

- But.

You had a connection, I mean, what I'm getting at.

- You're going to try and get me to say that I agree with Enrique.

- No, no, no, no.

(panelists laughing) No, no, no, no.

I'm not going that far.

- But I will say I do think- - [Jane] Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

- No, I'm kidding.

- You know what I'm saying.

- Absolutely.

I think my job, and not a lot of journalists agree.

I am obsessed with finding the humanity in people.

That's it.

And I fundamentally disagree with everything he stands for.

He's someone that is a queer person, and also fundamentally disavows of my being.

And I will never, ever see eye to eye on that, but I do have enough in me to understand that this is someone that carries a lot of pain and that is deeply troubled.

And I understand what power has driven him to do.

And I think that's important.

- Okay, let it go.

- Okay.

- All right.

We're now out of time officially, and we have a silver lining, which is kind of about this whole point.

- Yeah.

- Which is starting one conversation at a time, as corny as that sounds.

And basically, it's a personal story because, oh, there we are.

My cousin and I grew up, joined at the hip, spent every summer together on the beach.

My birthday was her birthday, hers was mine.

She was the pretty one, I was the smart one, that was okay.

She was my best friend.

When I was bullied, she was my only friend.

I was a bridesmaid at her wedding, she came to mine.

But just before the 2016 election, she came to visit.

We had a shockingly nasty fight about politics.

We canceled each other out of our lives.

Eight years, didn't talk, didn't write.

It was if our shared childhoods had vanished.

Then, just before Christmas, she texted me saying she wanted to talk, so we did.

Now we're back in each other's lives.

We didn't talk about what had driven us apart, maybe someday we'll get to that.

But for now, sticking to family and shared values has brought us back to common ground.

And that's a very good start.

Robert likes that.

- Yes, yes.

- We're grateful to our extraordinary guests for their insights and inspiration, and to you for joining us today.

Until we see you back here next time, from the Frederick Gunn School and the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut.

I'm Jane Whitney, take care.

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