#1610 America at 250 With Beau Breslin

You can't understand America unless you understand X. And what is that X? The X might be race. That's certainly, at the moment, one that would be at the top of most people's minds. You can't understand America unless you understand X, race.

You can't understand America unless you understand religion, faith. You can't understand America unless you understand freedom. You can't understand America unless you understand violence. You can't understand America unless you understand the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the Americanization, the Europeanization of the continent. Bo Breslin is a good friend of mine.

We've done a number of programs. You probably know. You've recognized him. He's at Skidmore. And he's written about Thomas Jefferson and constitutional questions, constitutional revision.

He teaches courses in which he asks students to think about how they would change the Constitution. And he said that young people today have a very different idea of what they would want their Constitution to look like. It's more participatory. It's more engaged. It's, of course, less corrupt and corruptible.

This is what I'm doing, you know, and I wish I had a bigger megaphone. And you can help, of course, if you can, if you just have a million dollars sitting around somewhere. I'm going to give the next 10 years of my life to this question of where are we? How do we get here? How can we be more?

How can everyone in America feel that this country works for them? I mean, imagine that. Is that so wild a dream? Is that so wild a thing to want, that every American would feel that this country works for them? That they're not, in some ways, subjected or subordinate, or discriminated against, or marginalized or locked into poverty or whatever situation they're in?

It's not just about government. You know, Henry David Thoreau would say the best way to start is to pull up a metaphoric mirror and take a long, long, long look at your habits. Lack of discipline. How much of your life is random or haphazard, or just sort of unfolding? How deliberately are we living?

So, I don't believe that the answer is to have better leaders, although I think we certainly need better leaders. The answer is to find out who each of us is and what we want, and then to ask ourselves how we can share the country with people who don't want the same things and how we can come to a new working consensus about America and how America can regain a sense of confidence. That's my program. It'd be easier just to talk about Jefferson, because that's historical material that is verifiable. There are documents.

But America is such a vast, vast subject. The word America is one of the most magical words in the world. The whole world gets that, that America is magic. But the whole world is pretty disillusioned with the America that we see today. And I don't like that.

I want us to be that shining nation. Not perfect, but perfecting itself. Working towards greater equality, greater respect, greater diversity, greater dignity, greater belief that other people are not the enemy. How do we get there? So, Beau Breslin was fun.

He sort of surprised me by turning the tables. I hope that you enjoyed this. And let's go to the program for now.

Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Listening to America. I'm talking with my friend Beau Breslin of Skidmore College. The subject is America at 250, and if you've been following along on Facebook or ltamerica.org, you know that I'm traveling the country trying to see what I can see and listen to voices and go to historic sites and museums and halls of fame and ball games and places that Jefferson found important, places that Theodore Roosevelt found important, and much else. The whole purpose of that is to try to prepare to make sense of this extraordinary experiment as we reach our 250th birthday on the 4th of July, 2026.. And I've asked a number of historians, including Beau, to help me think about this.

So first of all, Beau, welcome back.

But you're a professor of political science at Skidmore.

But that would be, I think, in some ways, a fairly standard, conventional and maybe even boring approach. So I've been actually thinking about it. You and I have had an email conversation about this, but I've actually been thinking about crafting a class in which we follow either Steinbeck and travels with Charlie, like you're doing, or the Lewis and Clark adventure. And the students go with us on a section of the Lewis and Clark adventure. And so it becomes a microcosm of America, but an important sort of lens with which to see America today.

Travel with Charlie probably a little bit easier. But when we later on in the show, I'd like to ask you a question about in what ways do you see your travels as your voyage of discovery, right? So, you know, to what extent do you think of when you're traveling around Maine or upstate New York or Niagara Falls or Ohio or North Dakota that you think that of Jefferson and the way in which he wanted Lewis and Clark to discover America? I think if I brought students to discover America, it'd be a much more illuminating and exciting way of talking about America at 250 than any other way.

It's part. It's this experiential learning that I think would be much better than the conventional way that probably you and I learned about American history at 200 or 175..

So I certainly endorse that idea. Logistically, these days, that's not an easy college course to create, but still it would be ideal, especially in a kind of integrated studies program where it would not just be history. It would be politics. It would be environmentalism, conservation, geography, et cetera. I wish everyone in the country who has students had this opportunity now.

It'd be great if the National Endowment for the Humanities made grants available to anybody who wanted to do this and then had a reporting mechanism so that what people perceived, what they sensed about this country, would then find some sort of a public forum.

But when you're flying the kids to Montana to do canoeing and so on, as Lewis and Clark did, it starts to get expensive. But if you can get over that, and Skidmore is great, because when we do some of these study, short-term, study abroad programs, the financial aid carries with the student. So the college will pay for the student to go out and do these experiential classes. And America is so, it's so fruitful for this kind of learning, right? You can, interdisciplinary learning, environmental studies, sociology, history, political science, even biology and so on, evolutionary biology.

These are all ripe subject matter to teach a class like I'm thinking about.

in some sense, maybe. In some sense, it's their country now, right? And I notice, I don't have a lot of contact with people in their 20s now in an academic sense, but they see the world quite differently from the way you and I were brought up.

as baby boomers. They think so differently that it's a fascinating experiment. And at the end of the semester, I have them write their own constitution in groups of four. And it's just. it's radically different.

But in some ways, it's. it gives me hope for the future.

I always remind them it's funny. You and I have talked about this before. We're not a democracy. We're a republic. If you want to radically throw that out the window, if you want to throw that out in the garbage and become a democracy, it's a totally different thing, right?

It's the Greek city state or the New England town hall meeting, as opposed to Washington, D.C. That said, they want more tangible connection to politics, sort of an anti-federalist. I'll finish here. Sort of an anti-federalist approach where the anti-federalists thought the states would represent their interests better. My students don't think the states will represent their interests better, but they want Congress to be more representative.

They want Congress to be more accountable. They want Congress to be more meaningful in their lives.

The Founding Fathers did not intend that. They intended majoritarianism in both houses, except for certain things like impeachment or foreign treaties and so on. The question, of course, is can we get there from here, right? So one of Jefferson's greatest insights was that systems don't reform themselves from within. It takes an outside lever, and that's why he proposed to James Madison that we tear up the Constitution once per generation and start fresh, because you're not going to get an end to the Great Compromise from within the system.

It has to come like a meteor from the outside. And so if you don't mandate constitutional revision, you're probably not going to get it. And, as you know, the amendment procedure is so difficult that it's impossible to imagine that any amendment could now be ratified in the United States. So you know, the thing about Jefferson is that he's a radical, but he's right. And here we are stuck.

You know, we are clearly paralyzed, not just because of the vicious politics of our time, but we're paralyzed because of the structure of the United States Constitution that maybe was useful in the age of Andrew Jackson, a time of slavery, a time when dispossessing Native peoples was regarded as the right thing to do. Today, that Constitution is holding us back. And I don't think the American people yet understand how grave a crisis that presents.

Can we turn the tide a little bit or turn it around a little bit? And maybe I ask you about America at 250.. Someone who has spent an entire career thinking about, talking about, reading and writing about America as a nation. Let me interview you. Whoa.

Welcome back to Listening to America. Beau Breslin at Skidmore, my dear friend. I've been saying in the podcast introduction to these programs that the pandemic was a real disruption, but it also created enormous new opportunities. The pandemic forced us to hunker down in our sheltered places and suddenly zoomed in on, and Riverside and all the others became a household technology that knits us together in ways that you couldn't have expected. And if I had said to you, Beau, I'd like to have this conversation with you on a Tuesday in June, you know, you need to get yourself to such and such a studio, I'll rent it.

You probably would have said, you know, I'm kind of, I'm just too busy. But this makes it possible for you to be in your home or be in your office. And I can see you as clearly as if we were across the desk from each other. And it's created real possibilities. And almost everybody that I have asked to be a guest has agreed to do so.

And that's made a huge difference. And I'm just amazed at how many great conversations I can now have with people that I may never meet.

So it's. it's not that long ago. And in the first 12 pages of the book, you say twice, I love America. I want to read you a passage and ask you, in 2020, you felt that way, whether you feel that way today. So you write your words.

I love America. I believe most Americans are idealists, even if they are disillusioned idealists. Most of the people I meet want more from their lives. But they are a little unsure of themselves because of the corrosive energies of conformity, consumerism and philistinism are swirling around them and sometimes eating them up. In a sense, I hope this book is for every reader, a kind of personal declaration of independence from the complacent civilization collapse we see around us.

Do you still feel that way after having spent almost 50 days on the road?

And I travel a lot. I've been in all 50 states, some of them many times. But essentially, you get on an airplane and you fly to Dallas or you fly to San Diego or you fly to Seattle. It's quite a different thing, Beau, to pound it out on the road and to see just the unbelievable landscapes of this country. And it's been an especially, as you know, a green, wet spring.

And so I've seen more green than I could have imagined and more forest than I could have imagined. So, yes. But also, you know, I want to say I love America, because I think that people that are regarded as left of center are often stereotyped as critics of America. or they hate America or they want to apologize for America. I don't feel that.

I'm a patriot. I want us to reclaim the word patriot from the political distortions of it in our time. You know, the right really wants to call itself the Patriot Party. And they want to say that anyone who's not with them is not a true American or not a true patriot. And I actually deeply resent that.

That said, I need to be really candid here for a moment. At the current time, I'm ashamed of America. I'm ashamed that we're considering pulling back from NATO, the liberal world settlement after World War II, the world order that the United States helped to create, essentially serving as the protector of boundaries and the protector of liberty around the world. with many terrible mistakes. That liberal world order has been astonishingly successful, expensive, sometimes annoying, but astonishingly successful.

To think that we would pull back from that and let Ukraine be gobbled up by an autocrat in a war that really has more resemblances to World War I and World War II than in anything that we know today, that deeply troubles me. And I'm ashamed that the United States would even consider not preventing that from happening, if it can be prevented. So that's one thing. Secondly, we have a pandemic, an epidemic, a cataclysm of gun violence in the United States, including mass shootings. Now the mass shootings are so frequent that they don't even appear on the front pages, in most instances because they've been routinized by their numbing repetition.

The Second Amendment is not a suicide pact. And the fact that a very substantial majority of the American people want common sense, gun restrictions, by which I mean something like rigorous background checks, red flags, the discouragement of automatic or semi-automatic weapons, and this doesn't get done, these reforms don't come, is shameful. And I know people in Europe who, when they're thinking of coming to the United States, have to think, well, is it safe? Do I dare? Because they see that gun mayhem, including, you know, it's one thing for someone to kill their brother in a fit of anger, but these public shootings of complete strangers, that's deeply troubling to me.

The paralysis of Congress, the demonization of the other, the refusal to compromise, the refusal to have a commonwealth idea of what this country is and what it needs, and on and on and on. We're in a very difficult and bad moment. People sometimes say a cold civil war. There's talk of a hot civil war. We saw an insurrection on January 6th.

More is probably coming, irrespective of the results of the 2024 presidential election. I never thought I would reach the point in my life when I would think that the United States is in decline, not only at home but abroad, that the rest of the world is losing faith in the United States and believing that we can't be counted on. I mean, look at the way we left Afghanistan. Look at the way we abandoned the Kurds when we left Iraq. What country could really believe that the United States has the discipline and the commitment and the staying power to fulfill its mission in the world?

I want renewal. That's why I wrote that book. And I believe we can renew, but I can't see it coming. I don't see us. I don't see the mechanism by which we turn this around.

And so I don't want to feel this way, of course. I never thought that towards the end of my life, I'm in the seventh inning, certainly, that I would be disillusioned about the country that I think is the world's exemplar of best practices. And I don't think we are anymore. And I want us to realize this. And then I want us to discipline ourselves and recommit ourselves to the ideals of America.

And I don't know that it's coming. How do you feel?

How is that any different than what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine? We got help from France. How about we give help to Ukraine in the same way? It's the same sort of thing.

now. As we approach the 250th anniversary, we are living in an individualistic, sort of isolated, leave-me-alone society. And he said that's problematic. Putnam said that's problematic, of course, because not only do you lose the skills about how to live communally and collectively, but you also lose exposure to the person who's different, the other, right? For me, as a privileged white male, I don't get to bowl with my South Asian friend who sees the world differently than I do, right?

So Putnam lamented that. For you, you are engaging in, as you travel across the country, you are engaging in an exercise of community building, right? You're trying to figure out what it means to be American in 2024, as you get close to the 250th anniversary. But you're doing it independently and individually and isolatedly, right? I think you recently wrote that you are not lonely, but just the same.

It's a lonely enterprise to be out there on your own. Can you reflect on what it means, the notion of individualism in the 250th anniversary of our birth, and what it means for the country moving forward if we continue to deteriorate the social capital that Putnam talked about?

People are turning away from civic engagements of all sorts because they're disillusioned. And I think if there's one descriptor of our time, it's massive national and individual disillusionment and a loss of confidence. There's a loss of confidence in the idea of America. But look what we're doing. The gerrymandering, we're still permitting, creates safe districts.

And so the representatives don't have to reach beyond their own ideology. If they do, in fact, they'll be punished under our system of being primaried from the left or being primaried from the right. So gerrymandering is one issue, and it's a solvable one. There are computer algorithms that could fix that in a hurry if we really wanted it. People also have been alarmed.

People are moving to their preferred political zip codes. So people from California are moving to Texas and disaffected Texans are moving to New Mexico. And there's a migration going on where people want to live with their own tribe and not with anyone who annoys them. If you add to that, the home theaters, you know, when I was growing up and I don't want to date myself too much, but there were two television channels, or up to three, maybe, and they were grainy and you could barely, it was ghostly, and you're always banging around on the top of the TV and trying to put tinfoil on the antenna. Today, people don't just have televisions.

They have many televisions. And just as a side note, I saw so many RVs on my trip where people have two, three, four, five TVs in an RV, including one that deploys outside, so you can watch Wheel of Fortune in the campground outside, which is nuts. I mean, I think so you never have to leave home anymore. So people don't go to the theater and they don't go to concerts the way they used to. They don't go to movies the way they used to.

We're creating this society where, within your own little castle, you have access to almost everything. You don't need to go to a bookstore. Buy from Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. So we've created technologies of atomization and we've created political structures of atomization. And then we have a media, I'm just thinking sort of a Fox on one side and MSNBC on the other, that make no effort to incorporate views not their own.

That's only going to exacerbate this problem. And so how do you fix it? It's not clear how you fix it, because when I was growing up, television was on from 6am until 9pm and then you got a test pattern and your parents said, go out and play. And you did. You played softball or baseball on a sandlot and you rode your bikes around, or did what people do.

And adults used to be in bowling leagues and softball leagues, and they are to a considerable extent, but it's less than ever. And this can't be good. This can't be good. On my trip, I saw men golfing alone. I'm sure people were bowling alone.

There's just a sense in which we have kind of cocooned ourselves within a very safe little environment, and we don't really want our predilections or our opinions or our lifestyle to be challenged in any way. Again, these are trends that are beyond politics. These are really interesting technological and social dynamics that it's easier to observe than to find an answer to. But the only way this works, I'll go back to Jefferson. For Jefferson, the only way this works is if you and I disagree and say, I want Chinese food tonight and you want Korean, I say, okay, how about if we do Korean tonight and then next week we'll do Chinese.

But if you say, I'm only doing Korean and you're a bad person because you want Chinese, that loss of the spirit of accommodation that you don't always get what you want, that compromise is essential. There's no perfect bill in Congress. There's no perfect decision by the Supreme Court. We have to come to terms with the fact that living in a collective, living as a community means that there's give and take, and you have to not only accept the fact that you don't always get your way, but you have to really prize that as part of the essential mix of what it means to live in a society. And I think Americans are now pretty fed up with living in society and they really just want to entertain themselves at home.

He grew up in Selma, Alabama, and he saw the world very differently than I did. And so it was not always easy for us to be able to talk about and have the spirit of accommodation you're talking about, not just in terms of politics. I remember the days when we got into a serious debate about the value of Robert Mapplethorpe's photo. Are those photos art? And my answer was yes, and his answer was no.

But my father and I always bowled, right? Not literally. We weren't going to the bowling, but we always fought through our predilections to be able to talk to each other in a way that I think is kind of lost nowadays, where it's seen as some sort of failure or some sort of weakness if you're willing to converse across. And I'm not great at it, but at the end of the day, I think we've lost that quite a lot. And I think that would be part of Putnam's 2025 story rather than 2000..

The loss of conversation, the loss of dialogue, the loss of exactly the type of things you're doing on your trip.

I remember those debates. We know that art is transgressive, as is comedy, and that these are important elements of it. The old cliche that, at the end of the day, Tip O'Neill and somebody on the other side would have been fighting all day on the floor of Congress, and then they'd go out for drinks and they were pals. I think we hear that cliche more often, probably, than is really useful. But I do think the fact that most people in Congress are there for really two and a quarter days.

They come in on Monday. They spend Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, they're rushing to the airport so they can go home and raise money. They don't live in Washington anymore. Not even during the week, really.

And so I think that this is a significant problem. I also want to say that I think that the death of the fairness doctrine on television is a serious thing. This ended during the Reagan administration. But before that, because the airwaves were regarded as public commons, there was a fairness doctrine. So if you had Newt Gingrich on, then you had to have Nancy Pelosi on, too.

You had to give something like equal time. If that were the case, if there were that code for CNN and MSNBC and Newsmax and News Nation and Fox, we'd have a very different kind of country. And so we have to take a break. But here's what I'm concerned about, Bo, is that, yes, we agree. You and I agree.

I think most listeners will agree, generally speaking, with what we're saying. Now, what? How do you turn this Titanic around, to use mixed metaphors, as it approaches the cliff? How do we restore? Of course, my book is about that.

I regard Jefferson as the answer. But I don't see a movement. I don't see a burbling up from the people of a desire to reinvigorate American ideals. We need to take a break when we come back. I hope you'll have the answer to that.

I'll give you a full minute to devise the solution to all of our problems. This is Bo Breslin, and we will continue this conversation in just a moment. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Listening to America with Bo Breslin today of Skidmore. You know, we've probably done three or four programs together. I hope we will do more. I want to emphasize one thing really strongly here. I believe that we have lost our confidence as a nation.

I'm not quite sure why. You know, there's some things we could look at. We went into Iraq on false premises, and it turned out to be a debacle. We left Afghanistan in a way that's absolutely reminiscent of Saigon in 1975. We had the crash of 2008, and the people on Wall Street were rewarded, and millions of Americans lost their pensions, and there was no accountability for the people.

that really turned us into the ditch. We've racked up a gazillion dollars worth of national debt, and both parties say they're going to address it, particularly the Republicans, but it never really gets done. Everyone knows that we have a problematic border, but we don't seem to be able to really address it in some very common sense ways that would work if we wanted to. We don't really have evidence-based national debates. You know, if there were a little collar, like a dog collar that you wore, every time you told a deliberate untruth, you got a little shock.

There would be a lot of shocks because there's a lot of just absolute, pointless, baseless, demagogic, talking point rhetoric in the country, and people who know better say really not only irresponsible things, but now dangerous things about this great nation. And so I want a renaissance, Bo. I want us to recover, and I'm writing an essay. I want your help. I'm writing an essay called The Lost Periclean Promise of America.

You know Pericle's funeral oration in the history of the Peloponnesian War, and he says instead of just talking about the war dead, as I'm sort of expected to do on this occasion, I want to talk about Athens. He's the dictator of Athens. He says Athens has the most beautiful architecture in the world, the most sophisticated philosophy. We stand for beauty and truth and justice. Maybe we're not the most powerful nation in the world, but we're the exemplar.

Everyone says we should be more like Athens. Wouldn't it be great if we were Athens? When I think of America, and this comes back to your original statement in the first section of the program, when I think of America, Bo, I think of American ideals that we'll have a situation in which nobody is above the law, and that money doesn't speak in our judicial system. That we will have public servants who are not engaged in insider trading, or taking real or metaphoric bribes from powerful people. For goodness sakes, that we would have a Supreme Court that's not flying flags upside down, or taking millions of dollars of emoluments for people who have business before the Supreme Court of the United States.

That yes, we're not perfect and we've never been, but that we're moving towards greater adherence and resonance with our national ideals. that everyone in America would feel. There's lots that's not right about America, but we are working towards a more perfect union, both politically and individually and socially. That was my idea of America. Is that so crazy?

So for me, constitutional reform is always my first instinct, but let me offer a different lens with which to think about the greatness of America. Oh, good. So in your books, including the Jefferson book I mentioned, you call yourself an optimist. I too am an optimist, and nothing's going to be linear. It's not going to be, we're not going to take three steps forward, and then three more steps forward.

It's going to be three steps forward and two back, but the environmental movement that changes in our lifetime when it comes to the way in which we think about and preserve the environment is a model for which we might have a renaissance in the United States. No, not everybody thinks there's a climate crisis out there, and that's something that is an existential crisis for us, but at the end of the day, the ways in which we're taking three steps forward with various technologies, green technologies, and so on, and then we take a step back is still something to admire. So I actually think there's some optimism if we think about moving forward towards a more perfect union. If we think about some of the movements in our lifetime that have been successful, and do we have a long way to go? Yes, we do in the environment, but I actually think that movement has been successful in our lifetime, and it keeps moving forward.

So I'm optimistic that there are ways in which we can improve America. We can become the more perfect union. We can be more free, more equal, and so on. I'm thinking that we're getting fairly close to what I call the bottoming out of America, right? And I think that the bottoming out of America is going to result in us throwing up our hands and figuring out ways to do it.

I'll cite one of the things that you keep mentioning in your travels. The people you talk to are tired, right? They're frustrated, they're angry, but they're mostly tired about the current state of the American ideal. If as many people are tired as I think they are, and you are encountering, we will have a moment where we turn the tide and start heading forward. My hope would be that the 250th birthday of the United States would reinforce the ideals of America.

It may be the 250th anniversary of the Constitution. Ultimately, I think between sometime in the next generation, we're going to have that resurrection, that renaissance. I'm hopeful it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

And what would it take? And I agree with you, it's going to have to be a people's movement, but the people are going to have to, A, wake up, and B, stand up, because it's easy to sit and wring your hands. It's much harder to figure out where, you know, along the lines of Archimedes, where do I put the lever to really affect change? I wish I had a bigger megaphone. And I know that I'm just one person, and a highly imperfect one at that, but I'm dedicating this decade of my life to the idea of a new constitutional convention or its sort of metaphoric equivalent, a national conversation about this, and to American renewal.

And so we'll see, right? I mean, obviously I don't have a power base, but I hope that other people like me, as they think about the 250th birthday of the country, think, you know, wow, we should feel better about ourselves. We should be feeling better about ourselves right now. And so I don't know how that happens. And I don't expect that we'll take three steps forward and then another three steps forward.

I'm okay with three steps forward and one step back. And I think the reaction that's going on now, Bo, is partly because there's been so much breathtaking change over the last 20 years that people don't know how to process it. And so you remember when both Joe Biden and Barack Obama said they weren't ready for the idea of same-sex marriage. Suddenly that door swings open, and that's amazing. I mean, shocking change in a very small amount of time.

The transgender revolution that's going on, I think a lot of people are very uneasy about it. I'm uneasy with some parts of it. I think everyone is. The technological revolutions that have been going on. You know, so many things are changing so fast that I don't think that the human processor, our brains and our hearts, are really able to keep up with it.

And so when that happens, people get frightened and their fear turns into a projection of anger or rage. or how did this happen? Or why isn't it working for me? And then the demagogues come along on both sides, but particularly in this period, from the right saying, the reason that you're not prosperous or the reason you're not happy, or the reason that you feel disquiet is because of the feminists, or because of the environmentalists, or because of the communists, or because of the Democrats, or, for that matter, because of the fascists and because of the authoritarians. And so we're not being well served by leaders because they're demagogic.

A lot of them are. So that really deeply troubles me, and there's not much to do about that. The only way we can cure this is to diselect them. On every possible issue, we divide on strictly partisan lines, and one party says, if this happens, it's the death of America. And then, when there's a reversal of who's in power, the other side says, if this happens, it's the death of America.

Who is the FDR? who's like, you know, on the one hand, demagogic, on the other hand, visionary, in a way that is not small politics, right? Let's get out of the Great Depression through policy and implement it. Like it was visionary. And yeah, FDR and the Roosevelt's have their own faults.

And you know this way better than I do. But at the end of the day, you need that leadership. You need that vision. You need that people coming behind you and willing to get behind you. And I don't mean to put too much responsibility on leaders, because you're right.

I think lots of this will have to be grassroots movements. But as long as, for example, the political parties are run by organizations and money, then they're going to follow the dollars in a way that makes it hard for you and me to vote them out of office. And I've written lots of places in the fulcrum and other places. Elections matter, right? If you care about Sam Alito being on the Supreme Court, you don't like the Dobbs decision and you don't like his wife putting flags up the flagpole.

You got to vote presidents in and out of office. Elections matter. And I think we've lost sight of the fact that the ballot boxes are vehicle for the renaissance we're talking about. But we need leadership that understands the importance of vision and can galvanize people.

they lost a lot of their base. I remember when 2016 election occurred and Chris Matthews was still on MSNBC, and that night he said, why is it that when you do a word search in the leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee, the word Martha's Vineyard appears more often than almost anything else? The Democrats shamed people of the heartland for not using the right words, not speaking in the right locutions, not having the same level of grammatical sophistication and the same vocabulary. There is, I think, a belief in your profession, places like Columbia, which is a great university, and Harvard and Yale and many, many others, that you are the super enlightened ones and the people out in the country are yokels and rubes and that you have to govern on their behalf. I think that my mother is a great example.

She was a liberal in some sense of the term, and when my daughter, who's the light of my life, would say, grandma, you can't say that anymore. My mother would, you could just see her. seize up, like it, just upset her to be shamed. Now, my daughter wasn't trying to shame her, she was trying to warn her. The shaming of the heartland people, that they've basically been ignored as their actual spending power has dropped.

I think that the left bears some very significant responsibility for all of this, and the left seems to have forgotten that half a loaf is so much better than none. By going for a full loaf every time and dumping into some of these omnibus bills a lot of pet projects that appeal only to the very far left, that they give the right reason to react. and some of that reaction, I think, is right, and some of it, I think, is absolutely unavoidable if you're going to pursue the politics of extremism or of righteousness. Both sides have a lot to answer for here. I do think that the Republicans at the moment are in much worse shape, that they have been descended into this, whatever this situation is, where there's a cult of a very, very, very powerful and charismatic, very troubling sort of demagogic leader.

But I don't think that this is just the right, and I think that many people on the left assume it's just the right, and that only makes things worse. We all have to bring the temperature down. We have to open our minds to avoid and eschew the talking points, not let ourselves be told what the truth is or what the enlightened path is. People are going to have to do more reading. They're going to have to do more reflection.

They're going to have to shut off their televisions. They're going to have to have more conversations and they're going to have to realize that the other is not un-American, that the other is this different American. That's something I'm really learning. So, out on this journey, I've had these conversations and because I've been in kind of the heartland, even in some ways, the upper tiers of the Bible belt, I've heard a lot of kind of MAGA talk. I had this really interesting conversation with a man in Ohio or Pennsylvania and he trotted out all the usual things about Biden is a decrepit and that Obama's really the president and the election was really stolen.

I didn't take the bait. I didn't argue. I just listened. And then, when he'd gotten a little of that out of his system and realized that he couldn't make me react, calmed down and he told me his story. and his story was a really interesting story.

His wife died a couple of years ago. He can't get over it. His economic life didn't work out. He's living in a fifth wheel, shares groceries with his daughter who lives nearby. He has health issues.

If you get over the crust of the talking points, beneath that are real human beings who have pain, who have dreams, who have sorrows, who are bewildered, as I am deeply bewildered by what's going on in the world and who believe that, no matter who you send to Congress, it just continues to spiral in the way that it does. And I think, if we can, if we could stop being so reactive, all of us left, right and center and really start to listen again with respect, granting everybody agency and, believe me, it is so hard to do. But if we do it, I believe that we would cheer up and I believe that we would realize that we share dramatically more than what divides us. I would ask everybody who's listening to step back after you've heard this program and say, what is my idea of America? What's the America I most want to be a part of?

Am I living in that America? And if not, what are the things that I think are really wrong or not right, have gotten out of control? And what would I do if I were in charge of the universe to restore America? Keeping in mind that it has to work for all 340 million people, not just for people of my own stamp or my own outlook. And what more importantly, perhaps, what can I do myself to be a better American citizen?

And I'm not going to quote John Kennedy here, ask not what your country can do for you. That horse left the barn. But I do think that he's right. Ask what it means to be a citizen of a great nation that's in trouble. What am I called upon to do?

And, and to say, to put up a sign saying F Biden or Nancy Pelosi is a communist. We all know that can't make things any better ever, that you have to share this country. And you're going to have to share it with people who don't have your taste. You know, you might be opera. They might be NASCAR.

You might be pickleball. I would hope higher for you, Bo.

I think if you improve just by 10 percent, I think we would be in a better situation. And that's Pollyannish. Don't get me wrong, right? I think we need structural change. I think there are systemic problems.

But the idea is to listen. The idea, that is that we can be better at understanding and have empathy and have compassion for others. And I think if we improve just by 10 percent, we'd be in a better place.