Robert Reich: Why the Common Good Disappeared and How We Get It Back

[Music] good afternoon my name is Dan Lind I'm 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 ten 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 rice 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 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 meant with Nancy Pelosi and leadership in the house to discuss the future of the Democratic Party robbery she has worked for Republicans and Democrats one of his first Jobs was was with Judge Robert Bork who came up in many of the recent televised proceedings he served in the Ford Carter and Clinton administration's 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 Berkley's robert rice well as you can see 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 15 years ago I was 6 foot 2 and so it's been a it's been a hard time it does make me think though that I first came to Berkeley as a sort of a graduate student I was working for a professor of architecture here 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 but as Dan said I went to I was I had the unfortunate or less less fortunate experience of going to Dartmouth College and when I went to Dartmouth College before I came to Berkeley that summer of 68 I Dartmouth College was all-male you should understand 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 as what 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 the BART Dorothy opens the door and it's suddenly Technicolor that's I remember going up University Avenue I've been for the first time in my my iconic beat-up Beetle and Volkswagen and I remember that first that first aroma of of eucalyptus and marijuana and Cheerios 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 for 35 years and then I came back but what I'd like to talk to you about in the brief time we have before your questions is what has happened to civic debates and this country in terms of what seems to be 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 or 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 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 they're two things can get heated and I'm talking about over the last 50 years 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 2 or 3 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 European 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 disagree 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 gonna 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 view 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 gonna learn the essence of learning is to be provoked and so we need different views we need different voices 15 years ago when I came I was in Cambridge Massachusetts I was teaching at a an institution there we will go she'll go unnamed but I and and 15 years ago when I came to Berkeley I I drove no longer a Beatle 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 loved 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 you understand what I'm saying and I decided what the I 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 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 but they've never seen those maps of America where you can actually find out where Starbucks are located do you know that there are such maps and 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 owaisi's 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 it 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 is there many of you who are people in your families who you don't even like to talk politics with am i right they 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 there's 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 but 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 that how's the company how's it dealing with health care health insurance 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 or liberals Donald Trump or people that 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 and I don't want to ask you I know with class of 1968 most of you born in 46 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 scratch their heads they want to know why why white why so many people were born in 1946 it's not rocket science my father was in the Second World War and he came home and there was my mother this is not complicated but since 1940 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% 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 Enron 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 2 or 3 or 4 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 40 years I mean the economy's kill it 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 so then the question becomes what do you as a typical family do as a typical family beginning in 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 advisedly 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 that 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 mazen 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 the while the other one was 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 dins di NS 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 we're gonna 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 said 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 where 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 in 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 described 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 it well they're both they were both shake up the system they're not politics as usual they're not even typical politicians they'll unwritten 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 and 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 we're 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 Moonves 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 who is of a different political party and 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 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 gonna be back on in 10 seconds be angrier and at that point I lost my temper [Applause] 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 that in the 2008 presidential election I got a call from the New York Times for a political reporter who said we've gone through we found a a whole 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 well what can I do what can I help you wish and he said well I'd like you to tell me is there anything from that date you had with Hillary Rodham at that time Hillary 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 well we went to a movie and she wanted an in ordinance amount of butter on her popcorn and then there was silence I thought he'd hung up I said he was 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 focused 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 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 she came up to me and she said you know I am so in bed 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 some of you reacted positively I don't know that much about him i-i-i was i've been researching him but that what they said about him was that it wasn't just his values they liked the like 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 there mentions Hamilton and Madison especially they talk about civic virtue what this country has got to rely on is civic virtue we can't simply rely on the Constitution we need people who events 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 eloquence listening an 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 all thank you thank you thank you and now we we have some time I hope we have some time for your questions professor rice you fail to address identity politics surely that's another thing that's poisoning the discord today could you comment on that I fail do 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 are white people or men or women or were 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 because somebody want to disagree with that 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 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 I 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 [Applause] I've joked with people that I was a member of a basketball team with you and I was the center but what I wanted to say was eloquent listening I'm gonna go here Tucker Carlson who's someone I don't agree with at the Commonwealth Club on Wednesday what question would you ask him well if I were in the audience talking to Tucker Carlson I said I'd say why don't you have Robert rice on your show more often I mean just I think that again we have CNBC people Rachel Maddow people 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 yes on this side I'm sorry how do you feel the sentiments that you're talking about fit in with the recent Cavanaugh hearing well I'll tell you 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 he was not terribly popular I didn't like what he was doing but I had had him as a law professor 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 - 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 what 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 Cavanaugh hearings you talked a lot about using 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 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'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 a 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 pimples we could we could have families who we are family and their 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 very senior Republican senator from Wyoming Alan Simpson is about 6 foot 8 feet tall he and I see eye to eye on nothing literally or physically but I love the guy and I disagree with him a lot of things but I spend when I can you know time out and Cody Wyoming with them and we we laugh I want to emphasize to you humor is one of the greatest disinfectants always use humor yes professor rush 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 do reintroduce fairness across the planet might be through the kind of democratic socialism which the Europeans adopted after World War 2 I'd like to hear you comment on that well let me just repeat the that 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 in almost that is was the rest of the competitors of the world had been devastated by World War two 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 people forget that during the Depression there was also uh there's a period of extraordinary growth that started right after 2009 I mean we've been in a huge growth spurts 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 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 R&D so everybody has more of a chance to get ahead and I would say yes [Applause] but you say my point is that if that is labeled democratic socialism it has all the baggage associated with communism socialism everybody get starts talking about socialism they don't talk about what's really at issue yes the question is 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 well here's what here's here's the thing 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% now why only 16% well you were young once and some of you voted but I remember being 16 to 29 and you have your starting families and your starting businesses and your 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 grandchildren find them I'm I'm just gonna cut - my second question 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 do I still believe the American creed that more unites us than divides us absolutely absolutely I think once you get under the level of the talking heads and the politicians and the crazy you know the the kind of yelling people and get out in the country people agree more much more than they disagree for example one thing that I asked in my kind of free-floating focus group I the last time I did this was just this week in Texas earlier this week near a San Antonio and I was up in Dallas and I just find people and I'd say I'm just curious I'm just curious do you think that we should have a country in which if everybody who works full-time should be out of poverty and 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 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 P 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 questions yes I've been laughed out of several rooms for asking this question baby will not be laughed out of this room Oh wait'll you hear the question okay what would you think about random seating in the houses of Congress to mix it up as you say and alleviate geographical tribalism 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 no aisles to cross I like that I I can just uh and maybe this will be my last comment 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 [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 124,000

Rating: 4.8464975 out of 5

Keywords: robert reich, common good, UC Berkeley, politics

Id: iNLOdRMgaDY

Length: 57min 42sec (3462 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2018