Senator jeff late karl rove along with the moderator. [applause] hello there. I use to be a strategist with political campaigns were actually i made some acquaintance with karl rove let me introduce the panel starting at the other end jim ryder from the atlantic and his wife deborah and then not running for reelection in 2018 karl rove in 2,002,004 with president bush and a fascinating book of the president ial campaign between with the kid me. And 1896. Did i say 1996 . I got up at 530 in the morning. [laughter] linda the new isolationism with the new global disorder which now seems prophetic he gave a remarkable speech so it fits perfectly with the topic. How polarized are we . Looking at the most dire polarization since the civil war. But the lack of Historical Perspective doesnt help her car we polarize compared to when exactly . 1968 are we as polarized as we were and the battle the answer is not particularly. We are a country that is going through it is a difficult phase of a marriage. That doesnt mean we shouldnt take steps to do something about this. But we dont need to use metaphors one thing that greatly worries me in the advent of social media should be called antisocial media. [applause] has succeeding to recreate a form of politics what we thought had been put behind us. And the ability to create mob on social media in a way that is genuinely frightening and above all if you do nothing else today look up an extraordinary speech. To talk about the effect of being a writer in the forties and fifties with the risk of saying anything consequential could be career ending. And on the very fringe of political discourse but thats the way we are as americans be make your former boss george w. Bush listen to the inaugural address of donald trump and famously said something what kind of blank was that. Is he uniquely divisive figure among president s for polarization quick. It was purportedly said Hillary Clinton not barack obama and i can either affirm nor deny. [laughter] that he is not uniquely as far as president ial candidates. Had a very few divisive president s one of them was his model of jackson. And this is routine. And on the nullification process and even with those public pronouncements. But each one of these moments we are not at war. So lets not get carried away. So i want to go into my brilliant talk now. [laughter] each moment seems to be different. To look at other moments of the 18 forties and 18 fifties. Than instantaneous movement. And then to go from new orleans to boston. And in the gilded age. With cheap daily newspapers because the cost has dropped him not dramatically. In the 19 twenties and 1930s with using the new technology, radio. With anti immigrant sentiment around the country. That which tended to bring us together temporarily. We will survive this president just as we have survived previous president s. It will take a concerted effort to deal with social media what has given rise there is a reality behind peoples feelings why they are sanguine as they are. And people on both sides and then if we can figure out how to bridge the divide. And then the United States senate decides not to run again. That you think its worse and when you sit down with historians and then we can get through this. I will repeat this. [laughter] sorry didnt catch that. Say that again. [laughter] but read the soul of america. We have been through worse and we got through it, that was before Nuclear Weapons and twitter. So you wonder if this is a different era. And as the elected official and the incentives right now to get the Work Together or to deliberate and every incentive to stay where you are. Because that is the political safety and i suppose well be there for a while. But elected officials but then you see over the last several weeks the incentives and then until those incentives change then we will be in this. That is the perspective from history. And when you travel around the country how much different is it out there versus the beltway quick. Yes i think so. Confirmed that normal narrative and that which is reflected in the panel i agree with karl rove and senator flake this is part of american disruption of the 18 forties or 18 eighties got technological change and political strife one of the things that we saw of the second gilded age so yes those are what comes from that but second all of us have been involved in National Politics one way or another i work for carter as a speechwriter. The National Politics of our tribal eyes and polarized and the very first in 1974. And markey he was on the judiciary committee. But its hard to find his counterparts. And what devon and i have found is Everything Else is politics and american life. We found practicality and comity. In the places voting for donald trump. One was dodge city kansas. But with the kansas State Government began cutting back School Funding so they had a big school levy to fund the latino school population. This also happened in michigan. And we found things like that all over the place. And then in sioux falls is a girl who worked out walked out in devonport and her mother worked at the pork processing plant. And the Public Schools were arguably the most innovative in the state if you want to see what Public Schools can reinvent themselves and one more point on the press there has been an overcorrection by the National Press that was with enormous consequences one of the primal impulses there was the fear of missing out so people go out to diners in iowa and kentucky and West Virginia and how do they argue really . Talk about National Politics you will hear anything interesting from the second up who is moving thank you see more of the fabric of renewal in china looks less impressive. China looks less impressive the closer you get. [applause] let me follow that up with the decline of local newspapers what is the impact. It has a profound impact one of the most practical but their bond rating deteriorates. That the City Government is not held accountable. Its something i have been very interested in. And with the new models for local journalism with the hedge fund or private equity might all model also the report for america which is the organization everybody should and its experimentation perk i will tell you now. The Business Model is a shared investment a small paper struggling for a new reporter on the new be like healthcare and reservations in wyoming to put up 10000 it has to raise 10000 from local philanthropy so for 40000 a year they get a reporter in their mid or late twenties when they started they had 13 people or they had 61 this year is 250 they are aiming for 1000 so here ends my speech. But what did you mean the dying art of disagreement quick. First of all disagreement is an art done well or very badly and to seriously engage with the person that you disagree to denigrate that person. But because our ability to disagree productively isnt always for the sake of persuading owning them against the arguments of our opponent that seems to be fading anecdotally in my experience at least great physicist once approved a bad student to say youre not even wrong. [laughter] and suggest to elaborate if i ask a young child that is wrong but if she says banana sometimes i make comments on my column you are not even addressing the argument in making than that is genuine the problem problematic because to disagree well you have to understand well. That is fundamental you have to know your opponents argument so well you not only rehearse them you can make the argument better than he could make and then to have a genuine and serious disagreement. And to point out what is important with social media it has two kinds of thinking. But all that technological political progress has been made all the words that begin with i do whether a marriage or an agreement. But democracy rests on the person that says i dont. I dont agree. I dont go along. You want to hear me. Someone we think 50 years from now america prospers are not is whether we remain a country that is not only receptive but went out of its way to give them some space to make their case. If we become a society to treat as heretics we will have a future as grim as those places of the world with a potential capital offense and through the means that appear to be voluntary to be that naysayer carries such social and financial penalties that nobody dares to say i dont agree. [applause] i have to point out was not even a word until coined by harding. But now that has achieved a state of normal. And then to bring us out of bed dynamic one dash gigantic enormous recession. I dont read my social media posts. I have 600,000 twitter followers. Who are these people . I make my curmudgeon chief of staff rita and if its something worth responding to,. But the problem is the anonymity i am posting something on twitter or facebook so i could say the crudest, nastiest and most vicious things so some people Pay Attention so i dont Pay Attention. There are people worth listening to. Because it is depressing to see what social media has done to the brains of our fellow citizens i worry about the New York Times it worries me that it appears to be driven by a town hall meeting it says we have to Pay Attention to what our leaders are telling us. And baking the forgiveness of a 20 yearold digital assistant editor for having had a neutral headline on donald trump. And to lose the sense and to be following their leaders. So i get this. Tucker carlson and to follow their offense. That social media is the corrosive influence the responsibility of the media to tell the gift of facts and not play into their twitter feed with each new innovation real work ourselves out of it. We had a Good Relationship at the white house as the unpaid agent of fidel castro. Hes in favor of a lot of things that i am opposed. But incentives but i see among the senate and the Younger Group of senators democrat and republican they didnt go there for their careers given the right moment republican in New Hampshire and to work it through and get it done so we will see more of that people will say i didnt come here to spend six years or ten years of my life by getting reelected. Went to get something done for our country and it works better if leadership says fine im the president working across party lines but also may work well in the absence so i see it a little bit now but a sense of a lot in conversations. Is the rising art of agreement . I think there is a rising desire to get something done by the founders to require a compromise. Thats why portman and shaheen negotiate this out thats why we see the war resolution and other moments where the congress seemingly comes together republican and democrat but its the desire to get something done in the years ahead. Have you been to the beach the spies swap allowed us to change the policy so i felt that he wanted to get rid of the castro brothers let freedom ring let anybody go for spring break. [laughter] i dont like funding the state apparatus we have had this conversation for many many years for other people who get along and agree yes with criminal Justice Reform a year ago something on a smaller scale light cory booker and for very Different Reasons some of that is happening right now on Climate Change and like chris coons on one side trying to get the Republican Party to acknowledge there is something here and we have to move forward so i do see the efforts of that and the difficulty is to try to explain to your constituents working across the aisle is not something you put in a Campaign Brochure these days. They use to. But not now and then to get blowback for that. And i think they will ultimately because populism is not a governing philosophy to go in and the big problems we need to solve with gun policy that you have to have agreement across party lines both agreed to hold hands and share the Political Risk and incentives will have to show change in a largescale. We use to have a common base of knowledge but we observe most of the time everybody is entitled to their own opinion but nobodys entitled to their own fact that we live in a different factual universe. On this point over time people are uninformed. And the history professor before becoming a writer and said most people didnt know anything about history or whatever. So to a parallel or slightly different answer to me the two great pieces of writing on this question of how we come together and transform these are the two that are always on my mind when i think of as the modern American History by William James in 1910 the most catastrophic episode in American History all of these sacrifice and idealism so how do you have the moral equivalent cracks how do you do the great things that i think american leaders have found ways to do that also looking backward to imagine the United States in the future that solved the problems in the point i will make to close this is a lot of the big shift of american awareness come from that president ial personality that when i was working for jimmy carter nobody would have become president if not for nixon or watergate people thought we needed Something Different they thought that was those representatives and i think the sense that we are better than our government will lead to a different personality. I want to point out something we deal in a culture about the facts generally we have had a sense of a common vision of where the country was and what it represented but we disagree about the fundamental facts all the time. Obviously we have a difference of opinion with the ability to block people to function in society we have had disagreements about what constitutes the facts and that is what the big policy battles of 200 years of existence have been fought over, the truth is this, facts are this and we need to respond in this manner and it has been when people were able to galvanize Public Opinion by convincing people this is the reality we face in this is the answer we must take that is the resolution of these issues. Im not sure we are country where we always agreed on the facts. We have had deep disagreements about what the, quote, facts are. We now have major media universes that portray two completely different pictures of the country and one of your examples, the apologetic for discrimination and the way blacks were treated was completely wrong. It was wrong on the merits and wrong on the morals. We have disagreed before but we havent lost the argument. There was a disagreement. Im reading a book nobody in this room will ever read called reconstruction in texas 18661880. The stories of what is happening in four texas counties over the last 40 years of the Nineteenth Century is unbelievable. The amount of violence that took place on a routine basis because we had a disagreement whether or not fellow americans were worthy of being treated as equals. With Great Respect for moynahan it is a slightly stupid quote. What we are really disagreeing on at a certain level, i am not talking about a common level but in a certain level questions we face are what are the significant facts. I gave a speech the other day in palm springs on the subject of how not to predict. I dont know how to predict but i can think of ways in which predictions almost always go wrong. We have had views about what are the significant facts on the trajectory of japan in the 1980s or china today for that matter and if the significant facts to you in 1985 was japanese tvs were better than american tvs you would think that will tell you something about the future and japan will become a great power and the United States is going to be eclipsed if the significant fact was japan had lousy demographics and real estate is 10, 000 a square foot and that is unsustainable that would lead to a different set of conclusions. Those were all facts. For the most part, what serious people disagree on is the subject of what is the significance of one fact, is one fact simply a point of data or is it an interesting signal tomorrow famous phrase amidst all the noise. I would like to make a quick additional point which is there is a view that there is a thing called highbrow bespectacled media which is upholding truth and standards and accuracy and values of objectivity versus garbage media that is subverting democracy and i come i worked for the wall street journal for many years. Im a great believer in elite media but one problem we have in the United States is institutions that should hold themselves to particularly scrupulous standards when it comes to avoiding contentiousness in their reporting and analysis have not always met those standards as well as they should so they have provided an opening for unscrupulous people to say, you see . It is all fake, it is all fraudulent. The way in which demagoguery succeeds is not by telling lies, by telling halftruths. Halftruths are far more effective because people seize on that part of the story that appears to have some validity and core institutions in the United States, not just the military but academia in particular as well have fallen down on the job of being genuine disseminators of a critical epistemology that you need to have a rational civilized democracy. That is on us. That is a serious issue we have to confront before we simply say sean hannity is so off lennys characters are subjects which they are but that is another story. Let me get to the question of whether or not we can make this better and come down here and conclude. I run in institute at the university of Southern California called the institute for political future where we try to model in advance of politics where people are not enemies, if you lose the game you dont burn down the stadium, where we respect each other and respect the truth. Is there any way we can get back to that . My observation based on smaller towns across the United States, where local level american democracy is happening most places. Of the claim seems implausible to you i invite you to go someplace you havent been before, and do not ask people about donald trump or nancy pelosi or Hillary Clinton or anybody else but ask them what is happening here and our experience was greenville, south carolina, very conservative city and burlington, vermont, progressive city which are mapped on the opposite extremes actually work the same way. If you didnt know they were opposites you would think they were the same city the way the City Government worked together. There is a still healthy fabric, a matter of finding if that can percolate to the National Level great. If it cant, it is more important that it be maintained. Going out and seeing how people are engaging. When you look out there the most recent example, the president signed an executive order, local officials sign off states and localities and virtually nobody, very few cases have taken the president up on that. Most have affirmatively said no. We want to receive more refugees, please send them here. It was at the National Level, social media makes it. One year ago after the midterms, a democrat was elected, had a Campaign Event filmed where she you screwed vulgar language saying the president should be impeached. The use of vulgar language, and no place in politics, the president speaks this way should not excuse the rest of us. We should be better. Within two days, there were 30,000 comments on that post. Not like or dislike. What the kids called ratio did. The overwhelming majority, if the president speaks this way, so must we. If that site is doing that, so must we. That points up the need for leadership, they do that daily. Most elections are on a partisan basis, that is what you do. If you ask about National Politics, i hope at the National Level we have people who model better behavior. I was struck by the record jim made. At the local level, they seem to find practical ways to resolve it. Politics is always going to be politics. There will always be disagreements, good moments and bad moments but you may not know this. The Texas Legislature is not organized on a partisan basis. When jim was a Young Journalist i was a young staffer for one of the 16 republicans out of 150 in the texas house of representatives, my boss had been a Committee Chairman. Even today with republican majorities in the house and senate the longestserving Committee Chairman of the senate is a democrat, chairman of, justice, chairman of major committees in the house like transportation are democrats. We only meet for 140 days every two years and we are trying to get to two days everyone hundred 40 years. The fact it is not organized on a partisan basis means we accept redistricting and a few high profile issues, things tends to get solved in practical matters. When we had the financial crisis in 20089, the legislature had to cut the absolute level of State Government spending by 10 , not future growth but literally cut from where we were by 10 of the bill passed the house of representatives 143 1473 because people were forced in practical ways in our local towns or counties and so forth to find a way to get it done in a way to keep forward progress and minimizes politics. It is not transferable to other states but it is one of the great things we have in texas, well worth protecting. With friday night football and politics, two blood sports but when we come together for 140 days every other year to a great degree politics is set aside and both parties are forced to Work Together. Have a quick take on this . What is the problem with Politics Today . It is too often the center been stored the fringe where a healthy democracy the fringe should be ending toward the center. The center is bending toward the fringe needlessly which is the gravity of american politics still is epicenter. Most people are not on twitter or reading comments and they havent been driven crazy and thinking about politics is and what they do 24 seven. Even if you take the total cable viewership in the United States today whether it is msnbc or fox news, it is a small fraction of the country. What i do think has to happen is we have to recover not just the institutions but the selfconfidence of the center to express itself may be a little more forcefully about what kind of country we want to be and what kind of country we most emphatically dont want to be and i suspect that is eventually going to happen as things tends to in the United States was the worst in the world for the past 240 years has been the bet against the United States was every few years someone bets against the United States, because china has ascended or the fascists are ascending and somehow they are always wrong and they are wrong because what is unique about this country, the strength of this country, the visible evidence of disarray and imperfection, it is the invisible side, what jim saw, that will rescue and redeem us. I want to first thank all of you, thanks jim, jeff, carl and brad and make clear for the record that actually i think Warren Harding used to be the second worst president in america. James buchanan who almost lost the civil war at the beginning used to be the worst president in American History. Thank you very much. On trace a conversation on humanitarian response to the conflict in syria hosted by the middle east institute live at 10 00 eastern. The focus shifts to the Indo Pacific Region in strategy toward china 12 00 live from the Hudson Institute also on trace . Online, cspan. Org and on the free cspan radio apps. This weekend on book tv african American History the likelihood of succession and challenges for the working class. Saturday at 6 20 eastern, kevin meredith, editorinchief of espns the undefeated on africanAmerican History, the fierce 44. We say this is the greatest black achievers ever. The 44 we looked at that fit the sensibility of the first africanamerican president in the sense that they did something pioneering. In some cases noisy geniuses quiet innovators. At 9 00 Pm George Mason University p