Transcripts For CSPAN3 Congress Political Parties Polarization 20240712

Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 thats such a powerful turn in the book when you describe how the decision of northerners to challenge southerners to duels actually decreased the violence and you quote from that remarkably moving letter which you said moved you to tears when representatives wade, chandler and cameron all pledged to challenge future duellers to fight. You write when it became known that some northern senators were ready to fight, for sufficient cause, the tone softened and the abuse went on. We have this really wonderful new exhibit on the civil war and reconstruction, Thaddeus Stevens cane, when i show the cane and tell the story i quote your book how some would run for congress during that period on the grounds that my left hook is better than the other guy. Im going to beat him up because im tougher and you bring that to life. Incredibly powerfully. Norm ornstein, its often said or been said by norbert mccarthy, a scholar at princeton, we are more polarized today than any time since the civil war. Youre an expert of party systems. Can you explain what it was about the Political Parties right before the civil war that led us to be so polarized then . So, you know, you go back through history and you see echos of so many of the divisions that are familiar to people today. If you look at the period leading up to the civil war, the party system, it was very much in flux. We had a wig party that ultimately became or transformed into the modern Republican Party. Along the way we had a no Nothing Party that was antiimmigration. The ire and focus was on catholics and some elements of northern europeans in part. They had a president elected on the no nothing ticket, and ultimately it became the two parties that we know today or at least that we think we know today, democrats and republicans, and of course we had that overarching issue of race and slavery and the parties stood with that. For a while the Democratic Party had a pretty strong antislavery meaning. We had others who were in the party, copperheads, who viewed it in a different way it shook down into a republican with Abraham Lincoln as the president who became the force and the Republican Party the force against slavery. Ed will talk a lot about how things changed in the aftermath of the assassination of lincoln and what changed with the reconstruction period. All of those things which were life and death issues for so many, really created a level of po particularization in the society and broke down obviously along regional lines and those regional divisions continued to persist but not necessarily in the way the parties changed and the Democratic Party, which became a more dominant party, many decades later, had a merger of southern and northern democrats. Those deep divisions that were there, the polarization and the society, the polarization of the parties, Nolan Mccarthy is right that what were seeing now is something far more distinct than what weve seen since any period in 150 years. Thats fascinating. Youre teaching that party system during the civil war period mirrored the polarization in society nicely reinforces joannes point that violence in congress mirrored the violence in society. Yes. Ed, your book the thin line of freedom argues powerfully at every step those who would advance freedom found themselves challenged and sometimes defeated as this history shows, however, black freedom advanced faster and further than its champions dreamed possible precisely because the opponents of freedom proved powerful and aggressive. Tell us about how it was with each victory of the armies of the south that provokes northern support for abolitionism and as norm invite, its a really important story, if you could take us from the post civil war period through reconstruction and how the party system realigned and the country became less polarized as support for reconstruct was ultimately abandoned. As norm was saying the polarization inside the north between the democrats and republicans during the civil war its a fundamental fact that people often tend to forget, you know, people would say well the democrats lost, they only had 47 of the vote. Well, i think weve seen in our own time that half the electorate doesnt go away when they lose, right. So in 1864, 10,000 votes in different districts, see if that number sounds familiar, would have given the election to the democrats in 1864 after all the suffering of the civil war. We forget that had a combatles gone differently, Abraham Lincoln might not have been reelected. That northern difference there is. The northern democrats were as racist as white southerners and they hated everything the republicans were doing. The war ends and the white south says well, okay, weve lost. In the meantime lincolns election, Andrew Johnson becomes president , he seems to cut some slack for the white south and they go great, okay, push for everything that we can get. Lets put those black coats in there to reinstitute as much slavery as possible before the republicans come back into congress. Right now theres kind of a quiet the president is running everything. This sounds familiar too, right. Lets do what we can with this president. So when the republicans come back in after riots in new orleans and memphis and widespread violence against black people across the south, republicans say we cannot have lost 350,000 men for this. We must restore the purpose of the war and because the white south was just running roughshod, so the white south keeps pushing and pushing, the northern republicans say okay, its going to take an amendment to the constitution that you have to support and youre going to have to allow black men to vote and be delegates for those conventions to rewrite the constitutions before you can come back in because youve shown us that youre not sorry at all. You admit that you were defeated but you dont admit that you were wrong. You have congressional commissions that go out and talk to people across the safeouth a say what were looking for is rebelism. The spirit, even though they lost, they are still the rebels. The patterns we see playing out today were there. Im not giving up my heritage. Im holding on to this identity. As a result, you wouldnt have had the 14th amendment if the republicans hadnt felt if they didnt revise the fundamental law of the land the democrats of the north will join with the white southerners and take away what was won in such loss in the civil war. Thats what i mean. And then the 15th amendment because to really make sure we meant it, you cant take away the vote. Reconstruction begins ending almost as soon as it begins. In virginia its over by 1870. The textbooks put the number 1877 in our head, but reconstruction starts ending in 71 and 72 drenched in violence. The white south brings on the fundamental change in law of recognizing that if youre a native born american you have fundamental rights. Thats a result of white southern recall sa trans. After reconstruction comes to an end the United States settles into a pattern that will follow for a very long time, very closely contested elections with the south, largely democratic, especially after disenfranchisement around the century and the republicans, those are the most closely contested and finally calibrated elections in American History all during the period when people think nothing is happening, that its boring. In fact, votes of a few thousand here or there could change the outcome. Its a fundamental restructuring, but the xhanalty from what joanne and norm and i are saying, polarization seems to find a way to happen. Whatever the situation. Winner take all, two parties, us and them, us and them are shifting, but there seems to be a polarizing impulse in american political culture. So interesting. What an important point that it was the fear of losing the gains of the civil war that led the supporters of the 14th amendment to want to embody in the constitution and we told the story in the civil war exhibit of the debate between Thaddeus Stevens and john bingham, stevens saying dont worry we have the majority for ever and bingham saying no, we might lose it and put it in the constitution and that was the pattern for so many of the gains of reconstruction and that warning that losers may not go away gracefully is also very sobering for today. Joanne, we have a bunch of questions from our friends to you, howard green says when northerners are willing to fight back and southerners stop challenging is that like facing up to a bully . We also have a question about whether any members of congress were trying to reach across the aisle during this time. A question about whether in the prewar era were brawls most often over slavery . Respond to any of those that strike you as provocative. Sure. Well, the first question about the northerners and southerners, i would say that southerners dont stop fighting. Theyre just sort of thrown off their feet in a sense because the northerners who have been caving in all along suddenly ther fighting back. The word bully asked in the question is on target. Thats the word people used at the time for the people who were provoking these fights. Full bully brooks. Preston brooks who attacks charles, that was his nickname and a word applied to people throughout this period. So there was a sense that these people before the second half of the 1850s, that southerners were picking on people who could be bullied because they couldnt fight back in the same way. What then happens is that these northerners come and they the northern congressmen, they were campaigning on the idea that they were going to fight the slave power. Theres a reality to that in congress, that they meant it and some of them came with weapons and literally made it clear and the document that you mentioned, that i will confess did make me kind of teary, the three northerners explained why they will agree to duel from now on and the part that really captured me is at the end, after describing this with all of this emotion, they say, were putting this down on paper so future generations will understand how hard it was to fight slavery on the floor of congress. So they make clear precisely what im trying to describe in the book and it is bullying but what happens when youre being bullied, i suppose a sort of, you know, simple answer, but if you stand up to a bully sometimes thats a useful thing to do. I will also mention briefly the question, whether or not people reaching across the aisle. There were. After a certain amount of time that became very hard to do, and you can see the mere hint at a certain point in the 1850s someone would reach across the aisle to someone else is sometimes met by mockery or even theyll joke, but the joke will be, yeah, you do that. I think theres one congressman that says to another, you do that and you better tell your kids to put their sunday best on because theyre never going to see you again. There were some people trying. Strikingly to me in the handful of years before the civil war, people were reaching across the aisle off the floor, right. They couldnt do it on the floor in the public eye with the press watching and so they removed themselves from congress and tried to do it in a space space but by that point those are not issues that could be compromised. That reminder that compromise is only possible sometimes in private during the constitutional convention, which was secret, you were able to forge those compromises but when everything is tweeted in real time or the press was watching in the civil war that is more difficult. Completely fascinating. Norm, a series of questions, Everyone Wants to you can ta about present and friends, we will, but we have to learn about our history at the same time. Many of them are our friends are asking why isnt Congress Standing up to the president today . Bill asks, how could congress tolerate the refusal of president trumps personnel who received subpoenas to testify before committees . Should this behavior been punished with fines or imprisonment. We have a question from how ralph hendrickson, how can congress regain its oversight of the executive branch and sara cunningham, very first question asked, why is congress, especially the senate, so willing to bow to the executive . Any precedent for this combined partisanship. Do gives us some historical context, during the civil war it seemed, congress was more willing to stand up to the president , for goodness sakes, the Republican Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over the republican president johnsons veto and, indeed, impeached him because of its distaste for his policies. Compare congress willingness to stand up to the president then and now and why . Im going to digress because i want to bring in a little more history too. One thing to set that context theres a book by the historian called the First Congress and the First Congress did not consist of a lot of wonderful towering figures, other than a James Madison here or there. There were a lot of pretty mediocre people. But they all saw that they better establish this as an institution that meant something, that had respect, and they did some quite remarkable things including the bill of rights, of course, because they had institutional loyalty in the sense if the constitution was going to work they better get it going. To step back a little bit, the constitution was set up through those compromises to give an inordinate amount of power to the side. They knew it. It wasnt just the way they set up apportionment, the socalled compromise. The Electoral College, the nature of the house of representatives gave them a lot of clout and because of this determination to maintain slavery and in the aftermath reconstruction to make sure they could recapture their power through Voter Suppression and the use of race and i would remind people of one other thing or something that mo peopst peo dont realize the house started with 65 members and it was capped in 1929 at 435. It actually didnt change in size after the 1910 census. That was because the southerners saw that if they kept responding to the population by adding members, it was going to dilute their power and give more power actually to africanamericans who were emerging. So they figured it out, how to keep the size at 435 and use their power of redistricting and apportionment, use their ability to maintain control, to basically keep black from having any role or significant role in the south and to keep the laws such that there wouldnt be significant civil rights which, of course, we didnt get until the 1960s. There was a lot of history here we have to keep in mind and we have to keep in mind that it was those southern democrats who from the 1930s all the way through really a long period of time, 40 consecutive years of power in the house of representatives for democrats, where they could build a compromised coalition with northern democrats that maintained Voter Suppression and their role in the south while giving democrats power. In the aftermath of that the south changed and as our regions began to change it was the republicans who moved in and took over from southern democrats and began to court voters in a way that also was focused around race and suppressing the power of race. I want to get all of that on the table. Now, what i would say about the questions that were asked directly is, we have moved from polarization to tribalism. That began, i would say, much more with Newt Gingrich and his arrival in congress in 1978 and a change in our politics and in particular a change in the Republican Party that i would believe and i would say bluntly has it more a cult now than a traditional political party. What the framers built in from the beginning a recognition that you could end up with a president who would not behave in a fashion that put the entire country first, who might look out for his own economic interests or his familys economic interests or subboard nate the interest of the country to foreign powers sometimes for economic gain and they built in safeguards. The Electoral College was one, but prime among them was the first branch because it was elected end elected independently, because it was not beholden to a president because of the belief that the members would have what political scientists in decades have called institutional patriotism would provide those checks and balances. If you have a party that subordinates its own institutional interests to that of a corrupt president or a cult, then youre going to lose that fundamental check. If another one of those checks, the independent judiciary is cast to the side with a desire to fill it with people who also will have loyalties that dont match what we believe should be an independent judiciary, you lose many of those checks and balances. Weve lost a large number of them now and the right role of the senate, for example, to use the power of confirmation of judges and executive officials, of congress to use the power of the purse to put some boundaries around the presidency or bad behavior by members of the executive branch, when those begin to shred, you lose control over the system and i believe, frankly, that thats what weve had in the last several years and its not something that i think the framers would have viewed in a positive light. Very interesting. Some powerful statements following up on what you said eileen says, define the difference between polarization and tribalism and i heard norm saying its the difference between a clash of ideas which we saw at the time of the civil war and just a clash of partisanship where people are unwilling to buck their party in a way they werent back in the civil war when the Congress Took its institutional role more seriously even when that meant disagreeing with a president from the same party. Just very quickly, jeff. Please. If you view the other party as worthy people who were all trying to solve problems, they just have misguided ideas, you can agree on what the problems are and then work through compromi compromises and the political process where you can achieve some accomplishments along the way. If you begin to believe the other party is a group of evil people trying to destroy your way of life, preventing them from gaining power, keeping them down becomes a central goal and you will swallow hard and accept a number of things that otherwise would be unacceptable to you. Thats where we are now and the fundamental difference. Thats amazing. I have to ask whether you take from norms comment people were actually less willing to recognize members of the opposite people as people of good faith today than they were at the time of the civil war which is an amazing statement and then im going to ask you to tell our friends who are watching about the really powerful website that youve helped to establish electing the house of representatives where you seek to recapture the role of congress as an equal branch of governing studying side by side with the presidency and you have really granular data about how landslide president ial wins often fail to produce policy victories and you need congressional and president ial majorities to get sweeping legislative reforms. Yeah. The fact is that Political Science in some ways are better than historians looking over long periods of time. Were good at looking at moments and seeing how things could have turned out different because they always could have. If you pull the camera back you can see the broad patterns. Norm mentioned that the democrats maintained control of the house from 1954 through 1994. Think about alls the things that were happening in america in those years and yet the apparent the stability of partisanship. We dont want to glorify that because in many ways that control, as norm said, was based on the solid south and its own kind of tribalism. When you have just white men disagreeing with other white men, if theyre not dueling each other they can feel a kind of solidarity. Part of the part were seeing now is a political system that encompasses more americans which is obviously the way things should be, but if you think about the stability in the house of representatives for decade after decade after decade we want to point out that was in many ways a kind of deal in which the white south would get what it wanted being left alone with segregation for as long as possible at the same time it would work before fdr. You would have elaborate deals in which different constituencies were served. I agree with what norm is saying all the norms have fallen apart so to speak in recent times, but the fact is that we dont want to forget that all of american politics has been built on tribal identity. It was racial for most of American History and it was made invisible by disfranchisement and suppression of voting so were seeing that. The ma that you referred to l s allows us to see how every congression Congressional District in the United States has voted from 1840 to the present and you can see which ones flip. I come from a strange one in there, i come from the only Congressional District in the south that has voted republican since the civil war, so when people look at this later, not now, you will see in the corner of tennessee, theres one little red arrow and thats where Andrew Johnson Elementary School there and we had the identity of being this republican identity. In my lifetime to go from being republican in the 1950s meant in the south and what being republican today means, are entirely different things. Another thing thats confusing that this map helps understand, the labels youll see people today attacking democrats who want to support getting rid of moderates because all those guys were democrats back if the day and being hypocrites. Being a democrat in the 1850s meant and what being a democrat today means are entirely different things. I think being able to see the broad shifts and the great stabilities in voting, i dont know that it gives us any confidence theres going to be stabilization. I think in some ways it allows us to see after the great transition of the south from democrat to republican, the system has with Newt Gingrich coming in, theres a kind of disequilibrium that i think is feeding through the political system that has many origins in the social system. Fascinating. We will talk about some of those causes and donna asks, where is the website. Weve just posted it. Please explore the link, not now, friends, because you have to listen closely to the discussion, no surfing during class, but afterwards its an amazing website and illuminating to dig into a particular Election Year and learn about it. Joanne, one important thing you raised in the civil war era and is now relevant today to polarization is technology and some attribute our polarization to a world where argued in a recent book, people are more eager to play to their base on twitter than serve the institutional interests of the white house or presidency or even of the media. Talk about the role of technology and polarization throughout history, especially beginning in the civil war period and what can we learn from it . Sure. Well, the moment that i find myself thinking about very often these days is the telegraph, the rise of the telegraph as a form of technology. Before the telegraph, there was a certain amount of wiggle room in congress if you said something you were sorry, you said or did something, you could rush over to the Newspaper Office or go to the reporter and change what you said a little bit. There was wiggle room and you it was easier i think to keep things away from the public eye because there was a more limited number of reporters in washington. The telegraph fundamentally changes everything, that it takes away the wiggle room. Theres, you know, 45 minutes and Everybody Knows about something. All of a sudden there are all of these reporters in washington from all over the nation who can travel that far distance, stay there and telegraph back home what it is theyre seeing. So congress, congressmen lose control of the spin and if you think about congress ideally speaking is supposed to be an ongoing conversation between the public and their representatives in one way or another. Public says what they want. Representatives respond in some way. Theres an election and it gets readjusted. Technology changes the conversation and there are moments i think and right now were in the social media pseudo equivalent of the technology age, when no one quite understands the absolute give and take of that form of technology and everyone is trying to master it and manipulate it and take advantage of it and then every now and again something happens and you can tell that no one expected that to happen. You know, if the telegraph removed wiggle room, imagine now, someone says something goofy at a private dinner and someone has their phone and tapes it and then tweets it or puts it on facebook and the entire world hears it, thats, again, a generation of politicians that lose control of the conversation to a certain degree and now theyre doing that at hyper speed. Were at this moment where the conversation has changed fundamentally at a time when its highly polarized and everyone is othering everyone else. I am american and i represent america and you, as norm put it, evil others who cannot be dealt with, thats a dangerous time to be in this moment of hyper speed and then, of course, its made worse by the fact that we have the first president who is a tweeting president , right. If you think back just to a couple years ago, people kind of try to figure out what that meant and if something is on a tweet how do you take it and is it formal or not formal. Its kind of mind boggling and i think we take it for granted the degree to which technology can fundamentally scramble the workings of democracy and i think thats some of what were feeling our way through right now. Technology can sort of scramble the works of democracy is a good way to put it. We are feeling our way through it in a dramatic way. Norm, how did we obviate some of the polarizations the last time around . We saw similar pressures from technology and from a fraying party system but nevertheless we evolved to the relative stability of the postwar period, and what can the lessons of that reconstruction of the deliberative model tell us how we might get out of our Current Situation . Well, its not going to be easy to get out of it. I will say, listening to joanne, which was just wonderful, theres a little book called the victor yan internet which is just a wonderful description of how the telegraph transformed the world and many people thought it would be just wonderful, that we would be able to communicate face to face and wars would end and lots of things would change for the better. What we see now, of course, is things can change for the better, but they can also change very much for the worse and you can enhance tribalism and division t division through that medium. I would say when we had parties that were, as it were, broader tense which is what we had in the periods from the 1930s on to some degree it was there before as well, when you had in the Republican Party we used to call them when i got to washington in 1969, we called the southern democrats bull wee vales or that insect that infects cotton in the south, but we had moderate republicans from the northeast, new england region, some from the midwest, a lot of them anchoring the coast, which was a republican region, washington, oregon and california, and we called them gypsies for the bug that infects hardwood trees in new england and the northeast. When we had the grand sorting and our party did polarize ideologically, it created a real dilemma. We had leaders in an era that did not have the kind of populace surges, much of it until the late 1980s, early 1990s where media and new media and cspan, for example, would exacerbate some of those divisions, but we had leaders who understood larger obligations here. One of the things i would say as we begin to talk about or as we have been talking about race as a dividing issue, we would not have had those dramatic civil rights bills in 1957, 1964, 1965 without northern republicans being decisive factors. It was dirksen in the senate, it was mcauliffe from ohio in the house, who helped to make sure that you could overcome the southern democratic opposition to those things. But as we began to see these changes that polarized us further, the opportunity was there, exacerbated by technological change. Tribal media emerging, talk radio as well as cable news, with leaders who found they could gain power and advancement by adding to this tribalism and the Business Models that worked that have had us careen out of control. Without major changes in media, thats going to be very hard to bring about. Without this sense of a jolt and what i believe has happened now is we have a Republican Party that i think is going to have to go through at least three elections in a row with losses, to begin to give traction back to what will be quite conservative people but problem solving oriented and not willing to use some of these divisive things like race and immigration in the way theyve been used in the past, to begin to right the ship and move us back in a different direction, but its not going to come easily and its not going to come quickly im afraid. We have to brace ourselves for whats going to be an extended period of real challenges trying to solve the major problems that we have economic, racial and otherwise. Thank you for that sobering but important thought. Have a nice night. Exactly. Come up with another book title is that right . Im sure it will be. Ed, were at the part of the discussion, several of our friends in the audience are asking, how big a crisis is this . Do you see a path to fix the problems with congress, the Electoral College, gerrymandering districts, Voter Suppression . Norm just suggested you need a total reconception in the way that parties relate to the media to get them to be able to begin deliberating again. Your thoughts on solutions and then i have to ask because its such a great shout out to your teaching abilities, william friend says, ed ayers was my favorite professor at the university of virginia so you have to ask my question, okay i will, hasnt Congress Given up its authority and created the imperial presidency theyre complaining about . Thanks for the nice plug. I feel its important to think about whats happening right now outside the political system thats going to have profound effects on the political system. Weve been referring, including myself, to southerners as if they were white. Black southerners had moved american politics and its most progressive ways all the time from reconstruction. Theres no 14th amendment if africanamerican people are not making it clear that theyre willing to risk their lives to vote, right. Unless the testimony from the south on these telegraphs is that these people held in slavery for almost 200 years cannot wait to get into schools and learn to read and right and exercise their incredible speakers, so reconstruction is not just republicans in the north. Its black people in the south who are putting their lives on the line to show what they would do with american freedom. Then, you take the people with the least power in american society, poor africanamerican southerners, after 100 years of disenfranchisement and segregation, theyre the ones that lead the great moral revolution of the United States in the Civil Rights Movement and Voting Rights act that followed. Thats not going to happen if they are not in the streets. Today black lives matter is also showing look, you have a gridlock, you are tied up in worrying about each others tweets, meantime were dying. Things are going to have to change. I think a more optimistic through line through these stories is that the people who have been the most victimized are the people most elle gant in american ideals and fighting for them. Who would have thought, think about all of this history as the constant surprise, who would have thought two are three years ago that most americans would have supported weeks long protests against the police . And its the way that it was done and the voice people are using. The only thing ive been able to discover in 40 years of history, nobody has any idea whats going to happen. Its one surprise after another. So here weve gone through this, you know, terrible period of dismay. We may be seeing the sprouts of a new era coming up. Thats before the nice words of my friend, thats what i was going to say, we dont want to forget that along with every effort to disempower people they have taken it upon themselves to find power in whatever way they can and right now its taken to remove the symbols of the order that had held them down for so long. Theres reasons to believe that there are regenerative powers in american democracy at work even now. Can you remind me of what the question was . That was a great answer to it. He was asking, my questions to norm were, why doesnt Congress Stand up for itself and i think youve given good reasons for that. I think when people know that voters have their backs, they will. So what youre seeing is that people are developing more courage when they know that they are speaking for a majority of people who want justice. I think youre going to see a new progressive era thats going to be coming soon and sustained for a long time by young people for whom the events of the last decade have been the formative political experiences of their lives. I think looking at cycles, theres reasons to believe that some of the things weve been worrying about may have a chance to heal themselves. Well see. Thank you for all that. Joanne had her hand up. Can i just set it up, because i have so many questions and i know you want to respond. We cant predict history as ed says, but we can, as youve argued so powerfully and all of you have, learned from it, i have to ask you, things seem less violent today than they were during the time of the civil war to put it mildly. The protests have been by and large peaceful and were not seeing people beat each up in congress. Why is it that things are less violent now than they were then . If that is, indeed, true in your view. I will put on the table this big theme that Susan Coleman raises in which you introduced, the drive to transparency, televising committee hearings, political conventions seems to get in the way of deal making that might allow compromise. Is there a thing such as too much transparency and if thats true might the First Amendment prohibit any regulation of Media Technologies that would allow the kind of moderation and compromise that madison expected . Okay. Ill start there is a lot there. I split to ask you to remind me. The beginning one, its less violent and why is it less slen violent now . Part in a sense is a clear answer, that is the United States in 2020 is not the United States in 1855 when during elections you routinely had People Killed at polling places and, you know, theres an incident in washington in which a cannon was shot off at immigrants at a polling place. I mean there was a level of routine violence that was very different. In part, were in a different moment and we are seeing i think more violence and more threatening behavior than typically we might expect to see. I mean i think thats part of what people are responding to. I think some of it is being encouraged and thats why its there, but in one way or another, i think yes, we are less violent, but yeah, were also seeing a lot of extreme language and behavior that goes beyond where i think we will be comfortable with under normal circumstances. As far as transparency goes, you know, thats the eternal problem, is transparency seemingly on the surface is good. We all know whats happening and we can see whats happening, but just as you suggested and just as my book discuss, when things happen in front of the public eye that complicates them enormously. How do you balance the need to, in essence, work behind the scenes to maneuver things and then bring it forward to present it in a way that the public is still responsible . I dont have a simple answer for that. I just think that that is one of the fundamental questions of balance in politics generally, but particularly in congress which is so bound up with public opinion. You asked a second question in there which i have now forgotten. Do you remember it or if not im going to go back to what i wanted to say before because i want to pull together what norm and ed said. Pull away. I think this is the last round. Closing thoughts for our friends as well. Okay. So norm was talking about run for your lives, that were at this moment where many bad things have happened and might happen and to find our way out of them is going to take a lot of time and work. Ed was talking about the possible blooming of new kinds of progressive change, and i suppose the way i think about this is, during moments of extreme, intense change and unstable behavior as ed said, we have no idea whats going to happen. We dont know if its all going to go down if were circling the drain. We dont know if its going to be okay. I dont think we can assume yet either one. What that means is as unstable as things feel now, theres room for change and so what matters now is what we do with this moment, right. How we respond to whats going on now, how we realize the fact that whats happening now, things are changing and we dont know whats going to happen but theres room for growth in addition to collapse and i suppose the way i join them together is just to encourage people to realize that its vitally important that people think about this moment and its importance, let their thoughts be known. Some of what were seeing now is a great sign of that, but its important for people to realize they can help bring change and that things arent absolutely over with. I think thats a wonderfully important note. People can influence as you just said so powerfully and thank you for bringing things together so well. Norm, your closing thoughts . I wouldnt presume to shape them. What would you like our friends to leave from this discussion . So a couple things, jeff. One is, we can do some things structurally, difficult as they may be. I was just a part of an American Academy of arts and Sciences Commission on the common good, and we had a whole list of things that we could do that include enlarging the house of representatives, altering the Electoral College, bringing us if weeke could a form akin to t australian system of mandatory attendance at the polls and other changes in the institutions. There are things that can be done that would improve the process and improve elections and improve the institutions, but i also leave you with another challenge that we have. I agree with ed we have so many positive things happening now, including i think a wider awakening among many white americans that have been ignored for so long, that many have set out that black lives matter is a meaningful phrase, not something to just push to the side or ignore, and i think the immigration struggles have taken us back to understanding what it means to have a larger and better society. The institutions that were built by the framers are going to be more distorted as time passes and it has nothing to do with donald trump. By 2040, 70 of americans will live in 15 over 50 states. 50 of americans in eight states. That means the Electoral College is going to have more instances if we keep it where the winner of the popular vote loses the presidency and it means that 30 of americans who do not reflect the diversity and economic dynamism of the country will elect 70 of the 100 senators. And we know that natural residential patterns as well as the way in which we do districts and the Supreme Court that basically brushed aside doing anything about partisan gerrymandering will dissort the house even further. What voters want wont be reflected there and the courts will take us further away from popular will, whatever it is, with those elections. Were going to have some work to do to prevent a real crisis of legitimacy in the system that goes beyond some of these issues that weve talked about and even transcend some of the deeper divisions along racial and ethnic and regional lines. Thank you very much for that and for sobering us in such a powerful way. Ed, the last word is to you. The era of American Civil War and emancipation remind us things far worse than we can imagine can happen and things far better than we can imagine can happen. The largest most powerful system of slavery in the modern world coming to an end was something that people could not plan for. The other thing i would say as i read this wonderful report that norm referred to the american academies put out the final part of that after all these impressive structural changes is the civic culture of the country. Its what youring e doing righ now. It matters what we are thinking and saying and talking to each other and weve got to keep that alive too. Whatever the election cycle brings us, we have to keep the civic culture of democracy alive. Thats what i think. Thank you so much for that. It is such an important reminder, it does matter what we say and talk and do and, friends, the fact that all of you are taking an hour in the middle of your busy evening, hundreds coming to ask such Great Questions and hanging on our every word as i can see in the chat box is a remainor that when we come together to learn with reason, we can indeed appeal to the better angels of our nature and Grow Together in wisdom. Thats what the Constitution Center is going to continue to do, bring you Brilliant Minds like the ones you heard. Im grateful to all of them for having spread so much historical and constitutional light. Joanne, norm, ed, on norm, ed, e national Constitution Center thank you so much for a wonderful discussion. And friends thank you for joining for the battle of the constitution and the future of policing. Thanks to all. Have a good night. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Youre watching American History tv every weekend on cspan 3 explore our nations past. Cspan 3 created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight a look at programs from the Kansas City Public Library in kansas city, missouri. We begin with the talk of the life of hollywood artist millicent patrick. Discussing her book the lady from the black lagoon, hollywood monster and the lost legacy of millicent patrick. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Enjoy American History tv this weekend and every weekend on cspan 3. Be part of the National Conversation through cspans daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feeds. Cspan, creat