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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Thank you for being here. I'm really excited today to talk to former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. You know him, of course. He's a former naval officer, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, where my aunt and uncle lived, former Secretary of Transportation, but best known now, I think, as one of the best communicators the United States has ever had. And I'm really excited to have him here today because it's really been notable how when many people are paying attention to the really disastrous situation that we're in, he is not only recognizing that, but also explicitly using this moment to call people into a new kind of future. So I'm hoping we'll get into that today as well as into, you know, maybe one or two of the things happening around us. So maybe we could start today, Mr. Secretary, by putting this moment in context. And I'll let you take it anywhere you would like to take it with that introduction.
- [00:55]
B
Well, thanks for the chance to speak. And I think the context, fundamentally, is that we're one of those turning points that comes around in the life of our country. Not that often every generation or two sees a moment like this, and we're in it. And it's an exceptionally difficult and painful and precarious moment. And I think it's a moment where we're discovering that a lot of things we assumed were just rock solid, including constitutional protections, restraint on the part of people in charge, commitments to democracy, just some really, really basic things are, in fact, up for grabs. They are things that will not outlive this generation if we don't make sure of it. And that means anybody who is alive and in a position of responsibility to include the responsibility of citizen in the United States today has an unusually important historic piece of work on our hands.
- [01:58]
A
I'm not gonna argue with that. But I wonder if you want to speak a little bit more specifically about the things that are happening at this very moment around us. Specifically with the last four days of the mobilization of the National Guard, the federalization of the National Guard in California, and the mobilization of Marines, 700 Marines into Los Angeles to protect federal buildings.
- [02:20]
B
And federal officers, what you have right now is the American president asserting the authority to use American troops and turn them on American civilians exercising their First Amendment interest in protests. If there are issues with peaceful demonstration, keeping it peaceful, that's what law enforcement is there to do. Militarizing that process is an extraordinary step and one that I think is part of a bigger agenda that this president has that's not been invited by state or local leadership. I think maybe one of the biggest things to bear in mind here is that this is a test for a lot of people who have expressed principled commitment to freedom in the past. I mean, one of the things I'm thinking about is if you're right, one.
- [03:10]
A
Or the other of us has frozen. I'm going to hope that you. Okay, go ahead.
- [03:14]
B
Okay. You know, I would argue if you're a libertarian, this is your Super Bowl. Like this is where you stand. Because for years we've had all of these fanciful seeming scenarios described where government agents are sent in or a heavy handed government kind of comes in at the expense of free speech rights. Usually those dark pictures were drawn by people on the right, conservatives or libertarians, who perceived any number of policy ideas, from background checks on guns to vigorously enforcing the Clean Air act to be examples of a slippery slope to tyranny. And usually it would be deep down that slippery slope that they would visualize things like troops being mobilized against Americans. And yet here we are. That's what's going on as we speak. And it represents a level of politicization of the military, the military that I served in. Knowing that it was always an ethic of putting the country first and being completely apolitical. Just seeing that thrown out the window by the current leadership, that should give everybody pause. I don't care if you're left, right or center.
- [04:32]
A
Well, thrown out by the leadership. But I've been telling people that the military's history and its firm belief in rules and laws and commitment to the Constitution means that they shouldn't overstate the degree to which they should assume that the military will side with this grasp of power. Do you think that's fair?
- [04:51]
B
I know that in my military training I was taught as an officer that I should obey all and enact all lawful orders. In fact, it's in the very language that you use and that you swear lawful orders of those appointed over you. And the emphasis on lawful is not a small one. I was also taught that if I was ever ordered to do anything unlawful, that my responsibility was to the law and to the Constitution. How that actually plays out, though, is really much more difficult to talk about in practice. What we've generally assumed is it means that an order, if a president were to order something that was blatantly illegal or unconstitutional, that order wouldn't go very far. It wouldn't get anywhere near the soldier, sailor, airman or marine out in the field, because senior military leadership, generals whose job is to be completely non political, would not allow that to happen. Not for nothing, one of the first things this president did was change senior military leadership and maybe even more importantly, change the JAG Corps, the lawyers who advise those generals and admirals on what to do. All of that does create more pressure down the chain of command, more uncertainty down the chain of command for anybody who is worried about whether everything they are being ordered to do is in fact lawful and constitutional.
- [06:24]
A
So I do want to not focus solely on what's happening around us in this particular moment, because I think that you have a much larger message for the American people in this moment. I do want, though, to turn somewhat quickly and be a little bit nerdy here in that one of the things that we're seeing, Simon Rosenberg said yesterday that it certainly appears as if the current administration is taking the American military from its work countering China and Russia and turning it on the American people. And you know a lot about foreign affairs and in fact, your undergraduate thesis was about American foreign affairs and its relationship to exceptionalism. And I wonder if you want to talk to us a little bit about this moment and how you see America's shift in support for institutions like NATO and organizations that are that dominated The World Post World War II rules based international order to cozying up to people like Vladimir Putin. Do you want to speak to that at all?
- [07:26]
B
What I'd say is that, you know, one of those things that has been true as long as we've been alive is what we thought was a shared assumption and a shared understanding that American strength is inseparable from American values. And the idea that part of what makes America America is we're not just one more country out there scrapping for advantage. We have a level of moral as well as political authority built on a record and built on our Constitution. As complicated and imperfect as our record in world affairs has been, there's one that sustained that sense that we do and should lead the world. The problem with quote, unquote, America first is that in practice, it means America alone. For America to actually be first, we have to be in a relationship with others, right? That's the America leading is what America first is supposed to be. And if America's completely alone, or worse, beginning to really fight our allies and befriend our adversaries, then we have an upside down set of relationships in the world. I think that's what's happening now. We can see it playing out. Longtime allies with whom we have built trust over the course of decades being shoved away and very Real adversaries, notably including Putin's Russia being welcomed in or cozied up to. I think most Americans get that there's something wrong with that. But what happens next? That's a question of how much Americans really care.
- [09:01]
A
And here I was setting you up for a conversation about the American Puritans because I too studied the Puritans in school and I've had been able to talk about them in my professional life exactly zero times. So I had great hopes that we were going to be able to talk about, you know, the declension narrative. But. Okay, all right, so let's go from that then to the fact that you have said in a number of places that this moment is not unprecedented. And to put it in a larger context, how does this look to you? I know you've compared this moment to the 19th century 60s in the past. What would you say we should look to to make sense of where we are now?
- [09:38]
B
Well, look, I think a lot of people, certainly a lot of people left of center, are horrified by what's happening and feel that it's without precedent. But I do think we need to look no further back than the 60s to find examples of things like political violence on American soil, unlawful and violent behavior by authorities in those cases more likely to be state and local, but still something that was happening. And I think that's a reminder that those kinds of can be overcome, that we can get through that. Yes, we have definitely not seen a president act like this President has no question about that. That doesn't mean we're completely unprepared by experience for this moment. And I think looking at how moral authority won out in those periods and equally important, and I'd love to kind of gather some of your insights on this, but other periods where some of the pathologies we have now are happening, like I don't just mean the pre Civil War period that I think comes to mind for a lot of people looking at the level of polarization we have in the country, but also moments when it was hard to get kind of shared access to a fact base or a shared sense of truth that would let us have more trust in our society and healthier politics. I'm thinking about the fact that we as people sometimes lament, don't have Walter Cronkite saying that's the way it is. We don't all watch the same news broadcast. We're all getting different information from our different feeds. And I'm wondering if maybe that's more precedented than we think. Because if this were the, let's say, late 19th century, and one of us was reading a Whig paper and an abolitionist paper, and somebody else was reading another paper. The whole, I guess that takes us deeper in the 19th century. But, you know, the whole yellow journalism period, there must have been many moments where access to the truth was fragmented, polarized, partisan, and we got through that, right?
- [11:32]
A
Yeah. And actually, I talk a lot about how we look a lot like we were in the period of the 1890s, when you had deeply polarized newspapers that were affiliated with the different political parties, but you also had upstart independent media. You had hundreds of black newspapers, you had indigenous newspapers, you had all sorts of independent media taking a look at the positions of the politicians in power and saying, you know, basically, they're just putting money into the pockets of the robber barons. And from that, you got the rise of independent media, you got the rise of muckraking media, and you got the rise of things like McClure's magazine, which a lot of people have heard about, which looked at corruption, for example, and at how the system was being stacked for a very few wealthy people. And they managed to take over the information space because they were dealing in reality, in people's actual lives. They were getting traction. And if you think about the rise of McFlur's magazine, which really takes off, it's around for a while, but it really takes off at the beginning of the 19th century, 1912, every single person running for president, and there were four people on the ticket, but three major people on the ticket. Every single one of those people was running as a progressive. So, you know, we can change things, but it partly is a question of covering the extreme media bias that we have had for the last at least 30 years. And on that, you know, let me ask you about this. I'm going to step back because I want to get back to the media. One of the things that you have talked about and the number of challenges that we face today that we are not looking at, in part because of the immediate political crisis in front of us, and you've mentioned AI, you've mentioned climate change. When you think about constructing a new American democracy, which I think is part of the project you're engaged in, although I'm putting those words in your mouth, what do you think we need to take on?
- [13:25]
B
Well, I think we need democracy that is more responsive, more inclusive, and that means more proportional. I think that's a really important thing, all the way down to things like the Supreme Court, sorry, the Electoral College. And also redistricting, but all of these kind of big picture structural things. But I also think a healthier democracy is a little more democratic than the bottom up, where people are included in processes, more about what's going to happen in their own communities and neighborhoods. I think we got to take a lot of our institutions apart and put them back together. We're going to have to, because the taking apart is happening. It's not happening in a thoughtful way. It's happening in a destructive way. But we are where we are. I mean, you know, you think about something like USAID or, you know, the Department of Education, I'm passionately against the way they're being demolished. I also think there will be a chance to put them together on different terms. And anybody who's been anywhere near those agencies or any number of others could give you a very long list of things that they have very much wanted to change for a very long time. So let's do that work. I think we need institutions that are better aligned with the needs of the moment. I think about some of the basic functions of government, like authentication, ID, proving you are who you say you are, how antique and screwed up our ways of doing that are with paper birth certificates in the drawers of county offices and, you know, the Social Security number. That is both your ID number and your password as far as the federal government is concerned. All kinds of things that are just technical design all the way through to deeply moral questions about what it would mean for the Supreme Court to be more responsive to the American people than the way it is currently set up. And I think all of that should be on the table, given that we are living in a moment where clearly the democracy we inherited was rickety and had huge vulnerabilities, or else we wouldn't be here.
- [15:21]
A
I have to laugh that when you think about this, you look at bureaucracies, and I agree with you. But I look at the political structures that we have, and it's interesting that we come at the same question in very different ways. But tell me what that looks like. Literally, if you are trying to say I want to modernize American systems, or I want to end gerrymandering, or I want to, you know, my big thing is higher taxes on the very wealthy. What does that look like? How do you rebuild an institution like usaid, or maybe not that one, because that of course involves other countries, but an institution that we care deeply about that has been gutted. How literally does one go about saying, hey, we need about 149 people and so we need 40 parking spaces. How does one do that?
- [16:13]
B
Well, look, part of why we're stuck is that a lot of the machinery we have for doing that is a Congress that has become just maladapted to its job. That's why I do think it's a little easier to do closer to home, because it requires coalitions that cut across the regular boundaries and are not locked in by the disproportionate party structure we have. So in local government, this happened all the time. When I was mayor, my closest ally on one vote on our council could be my biggest adversary or speed bump the next week, and so on and so on. It was much more dynamic in that way. You had friends, you had foes, but it wasn't predetermined or dictated. There have been times, as you know and understand better than I, where that was true in federal politics as well. I'm thinking about how it mattered as much whether you were a Northern Democrat versus a Southern Democrat as whether you were a Democrat or whether you were Republican. Right. There were regional identities that overlapped on partisan identities, and so on and so forth. I think we need to find some way to create the conditions for that to happen again. I think it's the only way we can get to things that are. There's such a long list. Your point about taxes is a good example, where there's an agenda item that's got 60%, maybe 70% support among the American people, a fair tax code, marriage equality, a woman's right to choose. We could go down the list of 10 things, nine of which most Republicans are for, against, and most Democrats are for. And yet 60, 70% of Americans are for. And we're just. We're stuck, right. That our federal government or our federal political system cannot deliver those outcomes. That tells me that for the long term, we need structural reform, as in constitutional amendments, but in the near term, ironically, you can't get to those for the same reasons we're stuck. So in the near term, we need different kinds of coalitions, and you see them bubble up sometimes. I actually think in some ways, the simultaneous, deep, lockstep cohesion of the Republican Party, simultaneous with the agenda incoherence of the Trump coalition is an example, not one I want to emulate, but it's an example that we might learn from on my side of the aisle. And what I mean by that is, because the only thing that matters on the Republican Party is whether you are for or against the president right now, you can actually be for or against anything else. And it would matter less. You can be pro Medicaid or anti Medicaid and be okay as long as you're pro Trump. That's the Republican equation. On our side, I think we need to be really renegotiating the relationship between this or that policy we've gotten attached to and our or most important values which do go to things like making sure the wealthy pay their fair share, making sure everybody can get access to healthcare, making sure that there is family leave in this country like every other country developed and not and on down the list.
- [19:15]
A
So you said a couple of important things there. One is rebuilding coalitions based on values. The other that which I'd like to get to. But the other thing you said that is, I think, significant about this moment is that the world that you described was in fact the world that James Madison described in federalist number 10. The idea that the country was so big that you would have all these different factions who would align differently according to whichever issues. And in fact, until the 1970s, it certainly appeared as if Republicans put country above party when, for example, they told Richard Nixon that they would in fact convict him of the charges that he was going to be impeached for. That's gone. And I know that you have talked in the past about how the government that we've had in place for the last 40 years has not served a number of people and therefore it has developed a sort of populist economics and populist anger that we're seeing now in the MAGA movement. But can't we make an argument. I would make an argument anyway that the reason we're at this place is because a certain group of a radical right faction weaponized language and rhetoric to convince a that the very policies that they were putting in place were deliberately being put in place by Democrats. I mean, to me, in many ways it's a rhetorical argument that we are now seeing has created a false reality for a number of people who cannot seem to get out of it.
- [20:46]
B
There's no question that bad faith and lying is part of how we got here. And perversely, I think the fact that on both parties watch income inequality, for example, and wealth inequality continued to rise to really frightening levels in the U.S. perversely, it created fertile ground for politicians like those now in charge who are actively making it worse. At the same time, I don't think that absolves my side of the need to have done more to not let it come to that, not let the ground be that fertile. So yes, of course I think most of the problems that I would castigate our country and in some cases, my own party for not solving, obviously, I wouldn't have the political perspective I did if I didn't believe that our answers were better and that the other side's answers are making it worse. And often they make it worse on purpose. Having said all of that, ultimately what matters, especially for the purpose of building social and political trust, is results. And if the results weren't there, and they're definitely not there, on things like inequality in this country, we really do have to go, I think, deeper and deeper, back to basics.
- [22:01]
A
I'm not going to argue with you because obviously that's what I do, but I will push back on you on that. The Biden administration did deliver results. I watched them every single night. You invested in transportation, you invested in infrastructure. You managed to make the wealth inequality in America significant, significantly less than it had been before 2021. I mean, I could go down this whole list. Insulin, cheaper, the best economy in the world, and so on. And the payment for that was to be turned out of office.
- [22:30]
B
As you know, I can imagine, I'm pretty passionate about that. Look, yeah, we, for example, at the department where I serve, we delivered about 20,000 transportation projects and set into motion tens of thousands more. So all that my successor has to do to match my record of the most projects done by a DOT is to follow through the ones that were funded the day that President Biden signed that infrastructure deal into law. I believe. I know this might sound naive to some. I believe that had there been more time to show the results of the work that was already well underway, to make things more affordable and to build more, the politics might have played out a little differently. But this brings me to the second. I think the second half of what needs to happen, the results need to happen, and you don't necessarily get credit for those within one year or three years or five years. Take the Affordable Care act, which was politically toxic for the first few years that it was around and only now is appreciated and widely defended. But the other part is we need to work through some truly novel problems in our information ecosystem that make it very hard for people to see and feel that. So there are people who were left out of the economic improvement that happened in the first part of this decade and had every reason to be frustrated and to maybe make their number one voting issue being just who's going to shake things up more. There are others who were economically okay, but also believed that America had its highest unemployment rate. In decades, about half of America believed that around election day. That points to a different set of problems, an information problem. And I think in many ways, the challenge for anybody practicing politics and policy right now is how to cut through the noise and cut through those information silos.
- [24:17]
A
And I was hoping you would go there because, of course, that is a project a number of people have underway. How do you see that playing out? Do you feel like we're doing a decent job of it now, or we are so far behind now with the rise of right wing podcasts and so on, that we're simply never going to regain a foothold in that information space?
- [24:38]
B
I think nothing in that space is permanent. So it's true that some on the right gained an edge, I think, and got a few years ahead. Think any of that is necessarily locked in. But I think my side can do a better job in terms of tone, approach, and the messengers going into those spaces. But I also think no matter how good we get at that, we also need to pay attention to how money is moving through the system. Amplifying some voices, suppressing others, or at least downshifting the level of attention that goes to others. And that's a tougher thing to deal with, especially with the level of money in our politics and a Supreme Court that said that it can stay that way.
- [25:21]
A
All right, I want to transition with that into looking forward. Because as I say, there are a lot of people who are complaining in the United States these days about everything that's wrong. And one of the things that has been a shining light over what you have been doing is that you're talking about using that as propellant, if you will, to envision something new. But one of the things that I think that maybe we can make that transition with is AI, because, of course, one of the things that many people are approaching as a real threat to the future is AI. Other people look at it and say, you guys are crazy to worry about this because nobody wants to use it. It has to be forced on us, and so far it's not making any money. And then there's a third group that says it's a tool. Where do you stand on that? And how do you think we're going to have to worry about or enjoy AI in the next few years? Not 20, but 10?
- [26:14]
B
Well, I think, first of all, we are underreacting. Even now, with all of the attention and excitement around AI, I don't think there's a widespread appreciation of how much is changing as we speak. And every time I look at the timelines, they grow shorter. It's kind of the opposite of my first experience with this stuff, which is 10 years ago. I chaired a group of mayors dealing with automation, mostly in the context of automated vehicles. Everybody confidently predicted that they'd be in widespread use within seven years. And seven years later I was in federal policy working on dealing with these vehicles and they were still saying they were seven years away. So we were humbled by that. But what's happening now seems to be the reverse. Every time I see a timeline adjusted, it's adjusted in the direction of things happening faster. And my fear is that this AI conversation is being treated mostly as a tech discussion. That should be interesting to people who think of themselves as interested in tech. I think it's fundamentally got to be a policy and political and moral and economic conversation. In your framing, I guess I would come down on the side of those, maybe this is the tool category, who see this as something that, that could benefit and could harm us. And which way that goes is mostly a question of what we do with it. I don't think of it as something you can be sort of for or against any more than you could be for or against the weather. It is happening, it is happening quickly. And I would prefer that it happen in a way that is led by American norms and values versus some of the other countries that are developing it.
- [27:55]
A
I mean. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [27:59]
B
Just to say it can bring so much benefit on everything from vehicle safety to cancer research and also enormous disruption and enormous harm. I don't just mean the extinction level events that some people write about and fantasize about. I just mean what happens when a huge percentage of jobs, by the way, largely white collar jobs, are being done capably by these AI programs, not even in 10 years, but maybe in five. Then it's tectonic. We haven't dealt with that kind of disruption economically probably since the Industrial Revolution. I was going to say, again, I.
- [28:33]
A
Was going to say the railroad.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah, at least it's absolutely massive. And in theory, mathematically, it's possible that that could mean shorter work weeks and more money in everybody's pocket, whether it actually does or whether it just means more concentration of wealth and power in a few pockets. That's not a technology question, that's a policy question. And that's up to us.
- [28:59]
A
So tell me more about that. I like that framing of how one uses the technology because I would argue the same, that it is the humanities really that look at how we use the technologies to benefit Everybody. But what does that look like when you think about how one puts together a group of people who regulate AI, who, you know, what is the word I'm looking for there? What does that look like when you say it needs to be a policy, cultural, social, political problem?
- [29:29]
B
Well, one way to think about it is how are the gains from these technologies distributed? You can talk about redistribution, you can talk about pre distribution. One of the models I think is attractive is one where there's sort of a share or dividend, the value being created from this technology that goes out to the American people. After all, it trained on data that all of us put out into the world via the Internet. It relies on the Internet, which was itself created by the American taxpayer through federal research. It's reasonable to imagine that while enterprises make a profit off of these technologies, the American people should get a share of that too. If we wire that up in the right way, that could be responsive partly to the issue of some of the labor upheaval that's going to happen. But it's not the whole answer. I think another part of it is who gets to use this AI technology? And is there a way to deal Americans in on that without it all being monetized and brought to the highest bidder, those who already have a lot of power and can use it to get even more? So some of this is related to checks and regulations on AI, but again, to me, it's less about how you regulate the technology. Then what decisions are we making about our economy if the assumptions that we've depended on in this economy have just changed profoundly and very, very swiftly.
- [30:53]
A
Are you concerned at all about the potential for AI to manipulate our politics or surveil our citizens?
- [30:59]
B
Sure, in some ways I think there are versions of that that are already happening. And it continues. I mean, it's funny. Just today Chasten showed me something he spotted on YouTube, which is an AI generated semi real, semi fake lifestyle tour of our house. It's bizarre. Some of it uses like publicly available footage or pictures that are from us around the house, and then it's interspliced with images that seem to just be from Zillow of other people's houses. I don't know exactly what's going on, but after one minute I was very weirded out. Does that have immediate political danger implications? Probably not. But the fact that that capability is there is just one reminder of the more impactful and nefarious stuff that's out there. We've seen indications from Brazil to Romania of all kinds of Election interference, getting more and more technologically sophisticated. And given that we're pretty soft targets for these kinds of things, it's a major, major concern.
- [32:01]
A
It is. I'm with you. It's a major concern of mine as well. So in the few minutes we have left, let's look forward to what kind of changes that you would like to see in a reimagined democracy. And where I'm really going with that is one of the things that jumps out about your writing and your speaking is you do talk about the importance of parenting and what that means in terms of the way you interact with people, but also in terms of the way you think about governance. And to my mind, this is something that we have way under emphasized when we have looked at the development of the American government really since about 1935, when Francis Perkins insisted on the Social Security Act. That idea of using the government to protect a community as equals, rather than simply protecting the idea of labor, capital and access to resources, seems to me to have been the most profound change we've had in our government. But the idea of adding parents who are making decisions based on their children seems to me to be a pretty profound one. And I'm wondering, first of all, if that's something that you think about when you think about a governance, but also how do you think about some of the changes that you would like to see in a revitalized American democracy that can really do the things that we want it to do and that it has done in our past, but just not in our recent past?
- [33:28]
B
Well, I think every parent says at a personal level that the world looks different the moment you become a parent. And that was certainly the experience that Chast and I had from the first moment that we held our story, our twins, in our arms now three, almost four years ago. But I think the same is also true for your policy and politics. At least if you think about it the right way, if you oriented around them, things look a little different. You are more prepared to invest in education. You take questions of sustainability and climate change more seriously. In short, I think it makes you more long termist because instead of thinking about how this or that decision will play out next year, you start thinking about, okay, I hope and expect that they will experience the turn of the century into the 2100s. So what has to be in place now during our lifetimes to make that work? Well, and that does include things like being more serious about what's happening in our climate or economic sustainability. I would argue it mostly means pointing to Things that, that liberals tend to care about more. But I think it also makes you take a harder look at some things like the debt that have historically been more of a conservative theme, but that I think the left and the center left should pay more attention to and have our own more serious answers on. And then there's just family policy itself. What is the everyday experience of being a parent like? And it screams out now that it's one thing to think in, in theory, sympathetically for parents. It's another to experience the work, the labor that is parenting and to realize how messed up it is that it is treated somehow as not work or as less important work for all kinds of reasons, many of which have to do with gender historically in this country. But how can we still be the only country or one of the only countries that isn't providing a national system for leave? How can we have made it this expensive just to raise a kid, just to feed a house and school children? And if you look at over the decades, the inflation or the change in the cost of durable goods like dishwashers, which would become less expensive, or an airline ticket, which has become less expensive compared to the changes in the cost of all the things you need to raise a kid, a house, education, we've seen that explode in ways that mean if you're just looking at an average across the economy, you're not seeing the whole story. And worse, you're seeing the story in a way that's specifically to the disadvantage of anybody trying to have their concerns weighed. As a parent.
- [36:23]
A
I'm not going to argue with you. I have three children of my own and the difficulty of actually managing to afford to rear three children is. It was mind boggling when I did it and it's even worse now. But I wonder what that means for rethinking government. So you've talked, and I want to do some summarizing here. You've talked about focusing on consensus, and you're right. On issues that are not explicitly polarized, Americans agree overwhelmingly, I believe you're 2/3 of people for things like higher taxes on the wealthy or common sense gun safety legislation and so on. Might even be a little bit low. So you've talked about building consensus. You've talked about working at the local level on issues that people can't really look at and get a different perspective on whether or not there are potholes in the street. You've talked about getting out of information silos. You know, what does it look like when you talk about using our past to create A new future. I know in the past you've talked about the importance of Studebaker to your town, but you've also talked about American principles of freedom and so on. If you were talking to people, as you are actually right now, who are trying to. To create a new world, trying to bring a new America into existence, what kind of things do you think they should emphasize when they talk to people and what they should do to make that happen?
- [37:57]
B
Well, I think we can emphasize experiences and values that are rooted in the American experience in our history and draw on both sides of history. History is warning of what can go wrong, but also just as importantly as being full of examples of how we can do better. And maybe the biggest thing of all is that you can't have one without the other. You can't understand the courage of the leaders of the civil rights movement without understanding the darkness of what they were up against. All of the most inspiring and greatest moments in America have been moments in which we were facing down some of our darkest demons as a country. And I think we're facing down some pretty dark demons as a country right now. Now, in terms of principles, I'm a big believer in continuing to think in terms of freedom, not just negative conceptions of freedom from where, although there's a lot to be said on that, especially as we're trying to really assert what it means to not have a king in this country, but also freedom, too. What your government needs to look like to give you the freedom to raise a child and do so affordably. The freedom to live a life of your choosing and marry who you want to marry and have the kind of education that you could get to do any number of things that you want to do with your life, whether you want to be a politician or a historian or an artist or an engineer or an astronaut, whatever. It's going to be those kind of thicker forms of freedom versus just the way it's been talked about most of my life, where freedom is just about avoiding a rule or a regulation, I think are a really important way to build consensus or at least appeal to shared values, but also entails some very specific policies which some people are against. And we should have that debate in that argument. And it's in the unfolding of that argument that America gets better and stronger. The biggest thing I would like for people to feel is that it's the very difficulty, unpleasantness, to put it mildly. Pain might be a better word of this moment that signals how important it is. And all of the moments in history that we study, admire, romanticize were pretty brutal to be in the middle of. That's what makes them so interesting. For better, for worse, we're in one of those now. And that should propel us to think more originally, as so many things get burned down around us about what we would build instead of.
- [40:36]
A
I just want to add your concept there of freedom to which involves government actually doing things as opposed to freedom from is crucially important. And while I wanted to give you that last word, I do want to make sure people heard that, because it's a really important reconception in the present of what freedom means. But it's not new to American history. In fact, we've talked about that a lot in our past. So I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for taking the time to be here. And the door is always open. I love that you are looking so forward to what we can create out of this mess, because we need that kind of hope and we need that kind of enthusiasm. And I'll be fascinated to see what you come up with. Thank you for being here.
- [41:20]
B
Well, likewise. Thanks so much for the conversation. I'll look forward to the next one and hopefully I can keep my promise and we can talk about Puritans a little more.
- [41:27]
A
I'll look forward to it. Thanks a lot.
- [41:29]
B
Take care.