Robert Reich On Civility, Trust, And The Rigged Economy

What if our problem isn’t that we disagree—but that we’ve forgotten how? Robert Reich joins us at a 50th reunion event hosted by the Center on Civility and Democratic Engagement to map the terrain of modern incivility and show a clearer path forward. We explore why trust in institutions fell from a broad majority in the 1960s to a small minority today, how geographic tribalism narrows our circles, and why the most honest political conversations often start with work, wages, and family budgets rather than party labels.

We connect the dots between stagnant median wages since the late 1970s, the three coping strategies families used to stay afloat, and the deep disillusionment that followed the financial crisis. That shared frustration fueled both Tea Party and Occupy, and later boosted candidates who promised to “shake up the system” across the spectrum. Reich explains how these economic realities power today’s anger—and how smart policy, from stronger safety nets to public investment and money‑in‑politics reform, can reduce the pressure that polarizes us.

Then we turn the lens on media incentives. Outrage grabs attention, and attention pays. Reich pulls back the curtain on the production choices that amplify conflict and argues for rewarding outlets and leaders who model respect without pulling punches. Throughout, we return to an old idea with fresh urgency: civic virtue as public deliberation. Think eloquent listening—asking better questions, restating opposing views fairly, and staying open to being moved. From family tables to classrooms to city halls, these habits make conflict useful again and rebuild trust one conversation at a time.

If this resonates, share it with someone who sees the world differently, subscribe for more candid conversations, and leave a review with one story that changed your mind.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Introduction
• 4:32 Why Civility Matters
• 13:28 Trust In Government Collapses
• 16:31 Geographic Tribalism And Bubbles
• 23:48 Kitchen Table Conversations
• 27:25 Wages Stagnate And Coping Mechanisms
• 34:40 The Great Recession And Backlash
• 39:59 Anti-Establishment Politics Rise
• 42:57 Media Incentives And Outrage
• 49:52 Choosing Positive Models
• 53:22 Civic Virtue And Eloquent Listening
• 58:48 Q&A: Identity Politics
• 1:01:43 Q&A: Mixing Media And Voices
• 1:03:41 Q&A: Hearings, Institutions, And Reform

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 1:32

Good afternoon. My name is Dan Lindheim. I'm the faculty director on the Center on Civility and Democratic Engagement, and also a member of the class of 68. So, on behalf of both the center and the class, I welcome you to this 50th reunion event. The Center on Civility and Democratic Engagement was created by the class of 68 10 years ago at the 40th reunion. Some classes give benches. Your class gave a center. The center's mission stems from a fundamental tenet that real political participation coupled with meaningful political debate is crucial for democracy. The center focuses on preparing leaders to engage people across the many divides to find solutions for pressing public policy issues. In pursuit of productive and civil debate, we typically have panels involving a large number of people of very disparate views. For this 50th reunion, we asked Robert Reich to speak alone. We did so for at least three reasons. First, he too is a member of the class of 68, albeit from Dartmouth. Second, his work is about getting people to better understand their common interests, regardless of party or whether they supported Trump or Bernie or Hillary or whoever else. Third, he knows more about Democrats and Republicans than most Democrats and Republicans. He just met with Republican Senate leaders to discuss the future with them of the Republican Party. And then he just met with Nancy Pelosi in leadership in the House to discuss the future of the Democratic Party. Robert Reich has worked for Republicans and Democrats. One of his first jobs was with Judge Robert Bork, who came up in many of the recent televised proceedings. He served in the Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations as well as on the Obama transition team. He was Secretary of Labor under President Clinton and was named by Time magazine one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the century. He has written more than a dozen books, actually, it's almost two dozen books, including the most recent Saving Capitalism for the many, not the few, and this year's The Common Good. And with no more ado, I present you Berkeley's Robert Reich.

SPEAKER_05: 4:39

Well, as you can see, uh the state of public debate in the United States right now has worn me down. When I No, it's true. When I came to Berkeley uh 15 years ago, I was six foot two, and so it's been a it's been a hard time. Uh it does make me think, though, that I I first came to Berkeley uh as a sort of a graduate student. I was working for a professor of architecture here uh in the summer of 1968. You remember that summer? Some of you remember that summer. And I have a very, very distinct recollection. I had gone, as Dan said, and thank you, Dan, for that introduction, and thank you for everything you do, by the way. Uh but as Dan said, I I went to, I was I I had the unfortunate or less less fortunate experience of going to Dartmouth College. Uh and uh when I went to Dartmouth College before I came to Berkeley that summer of 68, uh Dartmouth College was all mail, you should understand. Uh and it also, when I went there, it was before the interstate highway system was completely finished. So it was hard to leave. And it is in Hanover, New Hampshire. So it's it was like being in a monastery in Siberia. And I came to Berkeley the summer of 1968, and you know that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Bart Dorothy opens the door and it's suddenly technicolor? That's I remember going up uh University Avenue. You uh I mean for the first time in my my my iconic beat-up Beetle and Volkswagen, and I remember that first that first aroma of Eucalyptus and marijuana and Terias. I I thought I had I had reached nirvana. And then I made a terrible mistake, and I have to confess this to you. I I left Berkeley uh for 35 years, and then I came back. Uh but what I'd like to talk to you about in the brief time we have uh before your questions is what has happened to civic debate and this country in terms of what seems to me to be a crisis of incivility. And although we can come up with many, many potential causes, I want to I want to try out three with you that I think that are not only accurate, but also potentially within our power to do something about. Now, we have as a culture, as a nation, we've always disagreed. I mean, you remember, many of you, class of 1968 for particularly, you remember are the disagreements during the civil rights movement, you remember the disagreements over Vietnam, you remember disagreements on, and some of you younger people, you remember disagreements over women's rights and women's rights to choose, and the fights over abortion and everything else. I mean, we fight all the time. This is not incivility, it is not about not fighting. Civility is not about agreeing, the issue is how we disagree. And for most of my life, most of my memory, and I expect yours, we have had an agreement, although we disagree on the substance, we have had an agreement on how we disagree. And those need to be distinguished. And how we disagree is not only with a certain degree of respect, although sometimes things can get pretty heated, and a certain degree of tolerance and openness, although there too things can get heated, and I'm talking about over the last 50 years, but we also trust or used to trust our institutions of government. In 1964, there was a survey done by Gallup, and it has been repeated that survey since then, every two or three years. And the question is do you trust government to do the right thing all or most of the time? In 1964, 72% of Americans said yes. Today, fewer than 20% say yes. So it's not just that we disagree, and it's not just that we disagree sometimes very angrily, and sometimes with a huge amount of nastiness, but it's also that we no longer trust the institutions of government that we used to trust to handle our disagreements. And that is part of the problem, I believe. We also have much more of what might be called geographic tribalism than ever before in my memory. What do I mean by geographic tribalism? I simply mean that the people around us, our neighbors, our friends, tend to be people who agree with us, and the people who disagree with us and agree with themselves tend to live geographically in different places. Now, sociologists understand that the most important influences on public opinion, on your opinion, on my opinion, on our values, are the people we see every day. The people we talk to. Yes. Even you. And so if the people around us we talk with and we see every day are of the same view that we are, we entrench ourselves in those views. Bless you. The best way, the best way, and this is what I tell my students all the time, the best way of learning anything is to talk to somebody who disagrees with you. If you're only talking to people who agree with you, if everybody around you is mirroring your own values, then you're not going to learn anything. And if you're dug in and you don't want to listen to anybody else who has a different value, then you're never going to learn anything. This is what concerns me a little bit about what's happening in some universities, because some people, some professors, some faculty, some you, some students say we don't want to listen to anything that's going to make us unhappy or provoke us. But my response back is if you're not provoked, you're not going to learn. The essence of learning is to be provoked. And so we need different views. We need different voices. Fifteen years ago, when I came, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was teaching at a an institution there. We will go, shall go unnamed, but I uh and uh and 15 years ago when I came to Berkeley, uh I uh I drove no longer a Beatle, uh no longer a Volkswagen, I had a Mini Cooper. Now, 15 years ago, there were not many Mini Coopers in the middle of America. I drove from Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3,000 miles, to Berkeley. I love driving across this country. I've driven across the country four or five times, and 15 years ago I drove in my little my little Mini Cooper, and I noticed that as I left the East Coast, there were no Mini Coopers. And I and I got to Oklahoma and I was in a gas line. I was waiting for gas and and some truckers came over and they knocked on my window and I lowered the window and I said, Can I help you? They said, What is this? I said, This is a Mini Cooper. They said, How does anybody fit in there? Now at that point, I had a strategic decision to make. I opened the door and I I stood and I said, No problem. And they looked very puzzled and a little bit, well, let's say they were befuddled, and and I and I said, Well, I'm from Massachusetts, and we're all under five feet tall. And they nodded and walked off. And then I got to Berkeley, and I thought Berkeley was 3,000 miles away from Cambridge, and it took me a little bit of time to realize that I had not moved at all. It was the same town, the same city. I had moved from Cambridge to Cambridge, from Berkeley to Berkeley. Uh, but it was the a lot of the territory that I covered in between the non-Mini Cooper land, that was of a different, let's say, tribe. Have you ever seen those maps of America where you can actually find out where Starbucks are located? Do you know that there are such maps? Uh and uh my my children and I, oh, not that many years ago, we took a road trip around middle America and we stopped in places where there were Starbucks, not because we wanted Starbucks, but because Starbucks was and is a genius company in terms of finding geographically tribal oases in Red America where you, if you are a blue America kind of person, can feel at home. Usually college campuses. Now, how do we get out of our bubbles? How do we actually start talking to people who disagree with with us? I think it's not all that hard. We start with our own families. I dare say there are people in your families who you disagree with politically. In fact, I dare say there are set there are many of you who have people in your families who you don't even like to talk politics with. Am I right? They're usually named Uncle Bob. Now, here's what I what I urge you to do. This is a little bit of a an advance in our current incivility. Instead of avoiding conflict, and I completely understand conflict avoidance, particularly inside families. What I urge you to do is seek out Uncle Bob at the next, well, maybe this Thanksgiving. And sit down with Uncle Bob and don't start with labels. Don't start with Republican, Democrat, Donald Trump, don't mention Trump. Don't start with any labels at all. Conservative, liberal, forget them, labels. Just start talking and asking your Uncle Bob about his work, what he's you know, how is the job? How are the benefits? Do you see where I'm going? In other words, have your Uncle Bob tell you his story about kitchen table economics, if you want to use that term. Sort of, you know, how is how's the how's the company, how's it dealing with health care, health insurance, uh, pensions, all the things that most people talk about, at least with family, over the kitchen table, and are worried about. And you can tell your story. And before long, you may discover that you have a lot in common, and he has a lot in common with you. And then you might talk about solutions, but you see, you never are getting up to labels. You're talking about the common kitchen table economic issues that you and your Uncle Bob are dealing with, and that story or those stories are the foundation stones for the kind of stories that most Americans are actually telling each other. But it's in those stories and in the commonality in those stories that you begin to understand something much larger. That it's not about Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals, Donald Trump, or people who don't like Donald Trump. It really is about what's happening to average people. Which gets me to the second reason I think we have engaged in or found ourselves in the incivility pickle we are in. The first one is geographic tribalism. The second has to do with what has happened to incomes over the last 40 years. Now, if I had a chart behind me or a slide behind me, I would show you that from 1946, how many of you were born in, I don't want to ask you. I know classic 1968, most of you were born in 1946. I was born in 1946. Bill Clinton was born in 1946, George W. Bush was born in 1946, Donald Trump was born in 1946, Cher was born in 1940. I mean, anybody who's anybody was born in 1946. Demographers, demographers, they they scratch their heads. They want to know, well, why, why, why the why so many people were born in 1946? It's not rocket science. And there was my mother. This is not complicated. But since 19, if I had a chart behind me, you'd see that for starting in 1946 and extending up to about 1978, 79, 80, the economy grew, and the median wage, not the average, the median wage, that is half above, half below, median wage grew exactly in tandem with economic growth. Everybody, no matter whether they were in the top 10%, top 5%, top 1%, bottom 20%, bottom 10%, everybody grew together. In fact, interestingly, if you were in the bottom fifth, the bottom 20%, you, your income grew faster than if you were in the top 10% or top 20% in those years. Three decades from 1946 up until 1976, 1977, 78, 79, what happens starting in the late 70s is that median wage begins to flatten. Now the economy keeps on growing. Now, granted, there are recessions and recoveries, there's the business cycle, but behind the business cycle, you can see the economy continues to grow at, you know, two or three or four percent a year on average, and yet the median wage begins to flatten, and something is going on. Because the median wage flattens for the next forty years. I mean the economy is kill continues to grow, and it's not that people are not getting benefits from that economy, the gains from the economy are going someplace, it's just that they're not going to the middle class. I feel that way too about all of this. So th so then the question becomes what do you as a typical family do? As a typical family beginning in the late 70s, we now can see this in hindsight. We didn't know it then because we were in the middle of it. It's like a fish in water. The typical family starting in the late 70s, the first coping mechanism, I'm using the term coping mechanism advisively to mean this is how people cope with the fact that their wages are under a huge amount of stress. Well, the first coping mechanism is women, middle class women, and many working class women going into paid work. Now, middle class women and working class women were already working, obviously, but they went into paid work in large, large numbers beginning in the late 1970s. And I wish I could tell you it was because of all the wonderful opportunities open to women. No, that was part of it. But the major reason women went into paid work starting in the late 70s was to prop up family incomes that were starting to drop. Now that worked for a while. That coping mechanism kept family incomes going up until the mid-90s, and then there's a limit to how many hours families can put in and women can work. And what I remember seeing when I was Secretary of Labor, I'd look at the data and I'd be amazed at the number of hours both men and women were putting in. I mean, it was almost as if we had about a third of the country, husbands and wives were working on shifts. They were taking care of the kids, but they were while the other one was working, and then the other one would come back, and the other one would go take care of the kids. Or it was amazing what I was seeing in the data, and I was hearing when I'd go out into the country, we had an expression, an acronym for these families. I don't know if you remember them. Double income, no sex. Because how could there be any procreation? I think that the well, there was a third coping mechanism when you couldn't put in any more hours. The third coping mechanism for American families faced with stagnant wages was to use their homes as piggy banks and get home equity loans or refinance their mortgages. And this worked. It worked pretty well because everybody thought, as you remember, home prices were going to continue to rise. And then, of course, we had the housing bubble, the debt bubble exploded, and then something very important happened. At the time, all of us, particularly those of us who were in government or around government or doing economic policy, all we were thinking about was how to get out of this spiral, this downward spiral, how to save Wall Street, how to make sure that the economy didn't go down the tube like it did in 1929 and in the 1930s. But in hindsight, something very important also happened. During the ensuing Great Recession, millions of Americans lost their savings. Some lost their jobs, millions did, millions also lost their homes, and the banks got bailed out. Homeowners did not. Not a single Wall Street executive went to jail. And a different story began to be told. Whether you were a Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, didn't matter. In fact, interestingly, remember you remember the Tea Party movement emerged from those years, and the Tea Party movement was basically a response, an angry response to both Wall Street and government, more of an angry response to government, but it emerged from that era, that financial crisis, that set of what seemed to be scandals. And then you also had a very brief movement called the Occupy movement, emerging almost at the same time, almost around the same issues, although the blame was shifted to Wall Street and to the big corporations, but it was the same set of problems. And then what happened? We began to hear from candidates that the game is rigged against average working people. And the reason we began to hear that is because the people who were advising the candidates, the pollsters and also other consultants, were picking that up all around the country. And the reason they were picking that up around the country is because that's the way people felt. The game was rigged. There was something fundamentally wrong about an economy that continued to grow, but everybody's wages were flat. And now everybody knew everybody's wages were flat, or at least the median wage was flat, because there were no longer any coping mechanisms left. And Wall Street got bailed out, nobody went to jail, and the rest of us seemed to be left holding the bag somehow. Even Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election started out her campaign saying the deck is stacked in favor of those at the top. But even before Hillary started, in 2015, I was doing research for the book The Common Good. And I was out in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan, and I went down to Arkansas and in southern Ohio, wherever I went, I heard the same things. Regardless of whether people describe themselves as conservatives or liberals or Republicans or Democrats, they all were saying the same thing. The game is rigged. It's rigged. And I would ask people in the middle of 2015, I'd ask them, well, tell me who you are supporting for president. And most people in this kind of free-floating focus group that I held in 2015 told me they weren't sure, but they were most attracted to two candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. And I remember when I first heard that, I said, What? I mean, I can understand one or the other, but how can you use their two names in the same sentence? They're on different planets, give different galaxies. And what people in Michigan or Wisconsin or wherever I was would say to me back is that, well, they're both, they will both shake up the system. They're not politics as usual. They're not even typical politicians. They'll unrig the system, they'll make it work for me. I don't want a politician. I don't trust politicians. Well, that was the first indication to me that what had started really in the late 70s in terms of stagnant median wages, and then three coping mechanisms that were eventually exhausted, and then a big bailout, and everybody else feeling that they were shafted somehow was resulting in politics, in political reality of a sort that I hadn't come across before. Now, of course, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were and are very different. But to the typical person out there angry about what's happened, they were not all that different. And by the way, that anger, that sense of being manipulated, cheated, being shafted by the system, that's still there. And in your questions, if you have them, I could talk about Donald Trump. I don't want to, particularly right now. But I would just want to bring your attention to the fact that there are now politicians out there on both sides, including Trump, who are using that anger and living off of that anger, and building their political base off that anger. And the vitriol and anger in our system is a direct result in response to all of that. Now I said that there were three, in my view, three core reasons for the kind of lack of civility and disrespect and everything else that we're seeing right now in politics. The third I want to suggest to you, and it can't be avoided, is the media. But instead of just simply doing what a lot of people do and saying, oh, I'm gonna bemoan social media, it's awful, people can attack other people anonymously, it's just all social media. It's not, it's not just social media, and it's not just Fox News. I want to remind you that Leslie Moonvis, who was the CEO until recently of CBS, was delighted by the politics of 2016. He said, Bring it on, we've never done this well before. You see, what we have in the media, in communications right now, is extraordinary competition for people's ears and eyes. Attention spans are short because attention is being pulled in every possible direction. And when you have to get attention, one of the ways of getting attention is to be mean, to be angry. Not too long ago, I was on a television program and I was debating somebody uh who is of a different political party, and uh we actually had a very good discussion. It turned out we agreed more than we disagreed. It was quite extraordinary. And it got to the station break, and I said to the producer, the producer, you know, when you're when you're on television, you're you're hooked up through your ear to a producer. And I said to the producer, pretty good. I was really impressed with uh with how well that discussion went, don't you think? And she said, No. I said, What's wrong? She said, You've got to be angrier. When when we get back on the air, I want you to be angry. I said, I don't want to be angry. We had a we were having a good discussion. We're modeling for the public at a time when the public needs models of people from different different ideas, different political persuasions. We were modeling actually the possibility of agreement. She said, it doesn't matter, be angrier. I said, I don't want to. She said, we're going to be back on in 10 seconds, be angrier. And at that point, I lost my temper. Now the press has always been, at least to some extent, even the so-called elite press has always been looking for stories that will capture attention. I remember in the in the 2008 presidential election, I got a call from the New York Times from a political reporter who said, We've gone through, we found a whole cache of Hillary Clinton's letters from college, and she mentions in those letters that she went out on a date with you. And I said, Really? I didn't remember it. But I didn't want to say I didn't remember it. That would itself make a headline. I said, uh, well, what can I do? What can I help you with? And he said, Well, I'd like you to tell me, is there anything from that date you had with Hilary Rodham at that time? Hilary Rodham, that might that might give us and our readers some sense of how she would perform as president. Well, I I I with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I said, uh, well, we went to a movie and she wanted an inordinate amount of butter on her popcorn. And then there was silence. I thought he had hung up. I said, Are you still there? He said, I'm just writing all this down. And then it appeared next week in the New York Times. But we've got to the point where the competition for attention is so intense that those competitive forces are now generating and helping generate a nastiness that we have not heard and experienced before. Even reporting on the nastiness is itself exciting for some people. But I dare say that here too, we all and everybody else in this country can register our dismay with negativism. That is, we can reward media that are giving us information and also doing it in a way that is not nasty. There is no reason we have got to watch or listen to or read nothing but angry, brutal kinds of exchanges. We have it in our power, in other words, to change the discourse in this country. And I think we will, because I keep on coming across people in my free-floating focus group who are so turned off by the negativism right now and are beginning to reward politicians who are actually coming up with positive agendas and not being brutal to their opponents. I heard it the other day. I was in Texas and I was in an airport. You know, I'm I'm so conspicuous. I guess it's because I'm conspicuous. People come up to me, I have no idea who they are, and they say things like, What are we gonna do? I say, I don't know. But this person, uh she came up to me and she said, uh, you know, I am so imbr after she said, What are we gonna do? And I said, I don't know, she said, I am so impressed with Beto O'Rourke. And well, it's interesting that I mean, here we are in Berkeley, California, and uh some of you reacted positively. I don't know that much about him. I I I was I've been researching him, but the what they said about him was that it wasn't just his values they liked, they liked the way he presented them. They liked his personality, they liked him, and they liked the way he treated, if you can believe it, Ted Cruz. Well, you see, that's what I'm getting at. So we are not entirely powerless. I mean, even here at the University of California, Berkeley, I have tried, and I think you in your own ways can try, to make sure that this is not a sanctuary for just one kind of view, and that people are invited here as professors and as speakers who have different views and that are provocative and provoke. Even if people don't like to be provoked, they should be provoked. In other words, we can all do our parts in all sorts of ways to change the dialogue, to change the temperature, to change the quality of discourse in America. The Founding Fathers talked about civic virtue a great deal. If you read The Federalist, you see again and again their mentions, Hamilton and Madison especially, they talk about civic virtue. What this country has got to rely on is civic virtue. It can't simply rely on the Constitution. We need people who evince and practice civic virtue. What do they mean by civic virtue? They did not mean simply being nice to each other. No. They meant people who were willing, as part of their sense of citizenship, to engage with others in public deliberation. And they used the term deliberation in public deliberation around the events of the day, around the future of the country. Deliberation was so critical to democracy, it wasn't just free speech, it was not simply a matter of people voting. Deliberation meant actually talking with other people, understanding and listening. And part of deliberation, in my view, I call eloquent listening. And eloquent listening is when your Uncle Bob says something, you don't just stop him or cut him off. You ask him what he means, you repeat what he says, you try to understand what he is getting at. Eloquent listening means being willing to open your mind to the possibility that your Uncle Bob might be right or might be even persuasive. Can you imagine how different this country could be if we engaged in that kind of civic virtue? Thank you. And now we we have some time. I hope we have some time for your questions. Professor Rice, you failed to address identity politics. Surely that's another thing that's poisoning the discord today. Could you comment on that? I fail to, I fail to address identity politics, and surely that's something that is poisoning the discourse today. Well, I I don't know that it's spoiling the discourse. I mean, we are not just people, but we're also black people or white people or men or women or we're people. I mean, we can't ignore the fact that we have in this country, for example, a history of racial discrimination, and we have in this country a history of sexual harassment and brutality, and we do. Does somebody want to disagree with that? Uh, but that doesn't mean that everybody else becomes an enemy. In other words, identity politics doesn't have to be a politics of negativity, it can simply be a politics in which we acknowledge and respect the different perspectives and histories that people have given who they are. I mean, I am, if you haven't noticed, very short. And that shortness is part of my identity. And if I didn't share it with you, in fact, the first thing I said to you, the first thing when I came out was I made a joke about my height because I knew that you were aware of it and I was aware of it. I wanted you to know that I knew that you knew that I knew. Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 47:39

I've joked with people that I was a member of a basketball team with you and I was the center. But uh what I wanted to say was uh, eloquent listening, I'm gonna go hear Tucker Carlson, who's someone I don't agree with, at the Commonwealth Club on Wednesday. What question would you ask him?

SPEAKER_05: 48:00

Um well, if I were in the audience talking uh to Tucker Carlson, I said uh I'd say, why don't you have Robert Reich on your show more often? I mean, just I I think that uh again, uh we have CNBC people, Rachel Maddow people, and we have Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity people, but why don't we mix it up a little bit? How are we ever gonna talk to each other when we don't? Uh yes, on this side, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_06: 48:33

How do you feel the uh sentiments that you're talking about fit in with the recent Kavanaugh hearing?

SPEAKER_05: 48:42

Well, I I'll tell you, uh I was my first job in government was working for Robert Bork. And I liked Robert Bork. I mean, I was assistant to the Solicitor General. When he was solicitor general, he had just fired Archibald Cox. Uh he was not terribly popular. I didn't like what he was doing, but I had him as a law professor, uh, and I I liked him personally. We disagreed on the second, fourth, fifth, eighth, and ninth amendments to the Constitution, but I but I liked him personally. And when he went through what he went through in his Supreme Court hearing, and some of you remember, may remember the Robert Bork hearings. In fact, there was even an expression called to Bork, which meant to be somebody who had been character assassinated. I was very upset by that. I predicted at the time that that would undermine civility in Supreme Court nominations. And I unfortunately was proven right. I think that we've got to be aware in politics and every other institution and position of leadership we're in, or even non-position of leadership, we've got to be aware of the effect of what we are having, the effects of what we are doing to the institutions in which we are at that we are inhabiting. It's not just a matter of winning, it's a matter of winning and strengthening an institution. The Supreme Court is now weaker, substantially weaker as an institution than it was before Bork and Thomas and certainly the Kavanaugh hearings.

SPEAKER_00: 50:35

or improving dialogue. How do we use that dialogue to improve the condition of our of our country? So moving from just talking about it to doing it outside of leaving it to the politicians and the people in charge.

SPEAKER_05: 50:47

Well, one of the themes I was trying to push was that we don't leave it to the politicians. We also do it personally. We seek out people who are different and who might disagree with us. And we're not intimidated and we don't avoid conflict. It's not the conflict we should avoid. It's a certain form of conflict that is pretty undermining of our civility, but we've got to personally try to overcome that. Now, it's hard. Easy to say, hard to do. And I provided you, I hope, some ideas of how to do that, but we've got to try to do it in our personal life. I I've also suggested, now, this may be a little bit hokey, but I think it's maybe a way to do it, that we go back to the old idea of sister cities. Remember where we used to have sister cities? But the sister cities really should be across the red-blue political divide. So, for example, what would happen if Berkeley had Oklahoma City as its sister city? I mean, can you imagine? You probably can't imagine. That's the problem. It's so hard to imagine. But you, I mean, I mean, taken to its logical, and and I don't want to, I don't want to overstate something like this, but but but we could actually have pen pals. We could we could have families who we are family, and they are family of different political persuasions got together with. One of my best friends in the world is a man named Alan Simpson. Alan K. Simpson, former Republican, uh very senior Republican senator from Wyoming. Alan Simpson is about six foot eight feet tall. He and I see eye to eye on nothing, literally or physically. Uh but I love the guy and uh I disagree with him a lot of things. But I I I spend when I can uh uh you know time out in Cody, Wyoming with him. Uh and we s we laugh. I want to emphasize to you, humor is one of the greatest disinfectants. Always use humor. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 53:01

Professor Raish, um, some economists and historians would argue that the growth of the American economy between 1940 and 1980 is an historic anomaly that cannot be duplicated, and that even with free markets around the world, the only way to reintroduce fairness across the planet might be through the kind of democratic socialism which the Europeans adopted after World War II. I'd like to hear you comment on that.

SPEAKER_05: 53:26

Well, uh, let me just repeat. The question is, was the growth of the American economy between the end of the Second World War and the late 70s a historic anomaly and that can't be repeated? And to some extent, there is evidence that it was anomalous. That is, most of the rest of the competitors of the world had been devastated by World War II. But it's not a zero-sum contest. That is, we rebuilt Europe. We rebuilt Japan at huge expense. And why did we do that? Not just to contain the Soviets, but we also did it because we understood that a rich and prosperous Europe, and a rich and prosperous Japan, would buy our goods and services, and we could buy their goods and services, and we could do better, all of us together. This is kind of a non-zero sum attitude that the current administration seems to have forgotten. My point being that we've had in history some periods of extraordinary growth. Actually, from 1929 to 1938 was a period of extraordinary growth. Uh people forget that during the Depression. Uh there was also uh there there's a started right after 2009. I mean, we've been in a huge growth spurt in a way. So the issue is not growth or non-growth. I think the issue is you put your finger on it, how do the fruits of the that growth, how are they managed? How do we organize the economy so that more people get the benefits of that growth? And you mentioned democratic socialism, and I, in the spirit of trying to avoid labels, I'm going to translate that is thicker social safety nets and more public investment in education and healthcare and infrastructure and basic RD, so everybody has more of a chance to get ahead. And I would say yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_07: 55:44

The question is Um, how do you organize and convince the Democratic Party that people have to get out there and talk to groups and tell people what the issues are? Because most people I've found in talking to them don't know the issues. They don't even know the policies. They don't know that this is gonna get cut and that's gonna get cut.

SPEAKER_05: 56:05

Well, here's what here here's here's the thing. Uh you're very, very right. In the last midterm election in 2014, only 16% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 bothered to vote. Only 16 percent. Now, why only 16 percent? Well, you were young once. And some of you voted, but I remember being 16 to 29, and you have you're starting families and you're starting businesses, and you're starting work, and you're out in the world, and you don't even know where to register, and you don't even know where your home is, and it's complicated, and it's not always your highest priority. But here's the thing I have been teaching now for 35 years. The current generation of students, not just at Berkeley, but all over the country, because I do occasional guest lecturing, is the most committed, dedicated, involved, engaged generation of young people I have ever experienced. Now they are cynical about politics, there's no question about it, but I understand why they're cynical about politics. But they want to improve the country, they want to improve their communities, and what I say to them is you can't even begin to improve your communities or the country unless you have people in positions of power who you trust to do the right thing. And you have an obligation, it's a citizenship obligation. And I think all of us have to say that to our children and our grandchildren. Everybody in this room has to repeat that over and over to our children and grandchildren. And if you don't have children and grandchildren, find them.

SPEAKER_08: 58:12

I'm I'm just gonna cut to my second question. Um many of us grew up with this idea of an American creed and that more unites us than divides us. Do you still believe that?

SPEAKER_05: 58:24

Uh do I still believe the American creed that more unites us than divides us? Uh absolutely. Absolutely. I think once you get under the level of the talking heads and the politicians and the crazy, you know, the kind of yelling people, uh, and get out in the country, people agree more much more than they disagree. Uh, for example, one thing that I ask in my kind of free-floating focus group, uh, I the last time I did this was just this week in Texas, earlier this week, uh, near San Antonio, and I was up in Dallas, and I just find people and I say, I'm just curious, I'm just curious, uh, do you think that uh we should have a country in which uh if everybody who works full-time should be out of poverty? And do you know 95% of the people I ask that question to say yes. If you work full-time, you should not be in poverty. And there are many other principles that we all agree on. We don't want an aristocracy, we don't want a permanent group of people who have so much wealth and power that they can overwhelm our government with their money. We want big money out of politics. Actually, most people on both sides of the aisle, in terms of average people, want big money out of politics. And I could go on. But we don't have time. How about one more question? Yes.

SPEAKER_09: 59:52

I've been laughed out of several rooms for asking this question.

SPEAKER_05: 59:56

You will not be laughed out of this room.

SPEAKER_09: 59:57

Oh, wait till you hear the question.

SPEAKER_05: 59:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_09: 1:00:01

What would you think about random seating in the houses of Congress to mix it up, as you say, and alleviate geographical tribalism?

SPEAKER_05: 1:00:17

Well, I think you just heard there was no laughter. You're talking about random seating, not with random citizens, but random seating in terms of Democrats and Republicans.

unknown: 1:00:28

No aisles to cross.

SPEAKER_05: 1:00:29

No aisles to cross. Uh I I like that. I I I can just uh, and maybe this will be my neck last comment. Uh the first State of the Union address that I actually attended officially when Bill Clinton was president, I remember sitting there, and the cabinet is in the front row, and I looked at both sides of the aisle. And as you know, in the State of the Union, you've got the Senate and the House together in the House well. And I said to myself, why exactly what you're asking, why is it that we take these sort of radical, radical sides? And one thing that was very clear to me, and I don't mean to sound in any way partisan, this is a reflection of what actually was the case and is the case. When I looked over to the Republican side, almost every single person was white and male. When I went over to the Democratic side, there were at least some who weren't. And I think that your idea is a good idea, but we also have got to make sure that all of us keep fighting for a Congress and for an administration and for courts that look and not just look but reflect the values of most of us. Thank you all.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:15

So that was Professor Robert B. Reich, and that was a discussion of good or the good we have in common, and what happened to it, and what might we do to restore it. His goal in that was somewhat to say that we not we don't all agree on the common good, or that we uh all do agree on common good. It was that we get into the habit of thinking about it, listening to each other's uh views, uh, and providing means for people with opposing views to debate these questions with civility. Now this was presented by Cal's class of nineteen sixty-eight and the Goldman School of Public Policy Center on Civility and Economic and Democratic Engagement founded by the class of nineteen sixty-eight. This Black and Intellectual Pass was recorded on ten twelfth of two thousand and eighteen. I hope you enjoyed it.