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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Wiener Conference Call series. These one-hour, on-the-record phone calls feature leading experts from Harvard Kennedy School who answer your questions on public policy and current events. Wiener Conference Calls recognize Malcolm Wiener's role in proposing and supporting this series, as well as the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Mari Megias:

Good day, everyone. I am Mari Megias in the Office of Alumni Relations and Resource Development at Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this Wiener Conference Call. Today, we are joined by David Gergen, who is a professor of public service and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School where he works with a new generation of rising leaders. He is a senior political analyst for CNN and, in the past, served as a White House advisor to four US presidents of both parties, Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He has twice been a member of election coverage teams that won Peabody Awards, which honor excellence in television, radio, and online media. We're so fortunate that he has chosen to share his thoughts today with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends. Professor Gergen.

David Gergen:

Thank you, Mari. Thanks to all of you for coming. I want to extend a special thank you to Malcolm Wiener. This series is named after Malcolm. He's been such a generous supporter of the school, and he's also contributed enormously to the intellectual life of the school. Malcolm was born in China, and there are so many questions that now revolve around US/China relations. It's always good to get his perspective. He was an Aegean prehistorian. I think I understand what that means, but it's fascinating. And so you can see he's a man of many talents. He was also in investment management and he's been very much a philanthropist in his retirement years. So thank you, Malcolm, for you and your family. You've been terrific for us at the Kennedy School.

Now, we've just come through perhaps the most consequential election in our lifetimes. There may be more ahead. All of us have been on an emotional rollercoaster where times when you have wondered, "Can life get any worse?" and then it gets better, and then it gets worse again. You're never quite sure. I think we're sort of in a cycle that we just haven't quite figured out yet. There's a great deal of uncertainty ahead. I think the one thing we can be sure of after this election and where we now stand some two weeks after the Election Day itself, is that on January 20th of this next year, there will be a change of command. Donald Trump will officially leave the presidency on that day and Joe Biden is going to be inaugurated on that day. I'm very confident that's where we're going to be.

I'm less confident about telling you anything else about where we're going to be before or after because it's so darn unpredictable, isn't it? I think we just have to realize that. There are going to be days ahead when you're scared. There are many people today who are frightened about where we are. There are going to be days ahead when loneliness is once again going to build up because of the pandemic that has been a real issue in public health. But there are also going to be days that are really bright and promising, especially about your generation and generations that are coming up. I think these should be teaching moments for you when you really can get your hands around how does this country work, how does democracy work, how do we hold it together not only in the United States, but in so many countries overseas, how do we maintain the liberal order. These are transcendent questions, but the elections we've just had are going to move us one way or the other closer to solutions. We'll have to wait and see how that is.

I will tell you, I do think that at a time when Americans have been so pessimistic ... 80% of Americans have said before this election that things were out of control, they were unhappy in the country ... I do think there was good news in the election on a few fronts, and that was the avalanche of voters who came out. We haven't seen anything like this since 1900. Many of those voters were young. Many of them were people of color. Lots and lots and lots of them were women. All three of those groups in our society are going to be more heavily represented in the years ahead. This is a foretaste of what's going to come, but if our leadership in the House and the Senate ... We have people in their 70s and increasingly in their 80s. The day is swiftly coming when younger people are going to be able to step forward, and much of what we do at the Kennedy School is about preparing you for lives of service and of leadership.

I do hope you take some excitement from the kind of showing we had demographically in this election. It is also true that we haven't had the kind of mayhem in the streets that some were predicting. The FBI was privately warning CEOs of the gunfire that might come. Look at how many stores were boarded up not only in Washington, but New York, and even Boston, and Denver, and places far beyond. But we didn't need those boards, as it turned out, so that's good news as well.

But all of this begs the question, and I think it is an important question, a critical question. It is, can the new government govern? Can Joe Biden as the incoming president make big things happen? Because we all know that we're in the midst of several crises. It's not just the pandemic, which is raging now and getting so much worse by the day ... the numbers are startling ... but it's also the fact that as the pandemic gets worse, the economy is more likely to stall and we're going to see an end to some of the progress we've been experiencing. Many economists, the Trump people in particular, felt that we were going to have a V-shaped recession. That is, we would go down fast, but we would bounce out fast. Now the question is, is the V starting to look more like a W? Are we going to go down fast, come up some, then go back down again, and then eventually come back up?

Nobody knows the answer to that question. What we do know is the economy and our capacity for economic growth is going to depend heavily on how much progress we make regarding this pandemic. Whether it be reviving our commitment to social distancing and masks and the like, or whether it be through vaccines, we've got to get this under better control. That will be the number one objective of a Biden presidency when he takes office. He understands if you can get that problem solved, there's a lot of other things you can get solved as well.

And we have the climate crisis, we have the crisis of race relations. There are many things that are coming to a head at once. I can't identify a time since Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal of the 1930s ... I can't identify a time when so many crises have hit the United States at once, and yet our president ... unlike FDR, our president is playing a very weak hand. Joe Biden thought ... his team thought ... They were fairly confident since he had public opinion polls, it looked like he was 8 to 10% ahead. If he had finished up with 8 to 10%, he would very, very likely go on to keep the Senate, and the Democrats were assuming that he would increase the numbers in the House of Representatives so that in his first two years, he'd have the White House and the Senate and the House, then he could get big things done.

Well, it hasn't worked out that way. In the Senate, he's actually down to the point where the Senate probably is going to stay in Republican hands. Much depends upon what happens in the state of Georgia where there are two runoff elections. The runoff elections in Georgia historically have been a way, frankly, to keep Blacks from winning big seats. The runoff situation is such that if you're a Black, you can win a plurality in a main election, but if you then have a runoff because nobody got to 50%, the two top people ... A Black person, an African American can get in the runoff, but it's very, very ... If it's a Black versus a white, it's hard to win. It's just hard to win, and that's one of the reasons that runoff system was invented. In this case, the two Democrats ... one is Black, one is white ... have uphill fights. We'll just have to see. The Democrats need to take both seats.

For the Democrats, there is one bit of good news and that is in-Trump party fighting has broken out, and in the public, you can read about it in your morning papers today, the fights have begun. That may well open the door for the Democrats to pick up at least one and maybe even two of those seats. The world would turn upside down if they pick up two seats. It would be a much better day.

But it was also startling for the Democrats to lose seats in the House of Representatives. Not to gain them, but to lose them. The Republican Party now in the House is in the best position of any minority party in half a century. They have enough seats that they can really make a difference, and they also are hungry and they think there's blood in the water that they can take the House back from the Democrats next time out.

So Joe Biden first of all has the problem of dealing with Congress and can he make a deal. Much of what happens in dealing with Congress, if it's a Republican-held Senate, much depends upon which Mitch McConnell shows up at the bargaining table after January 20th. Is it the Mitch McConnell who in the past has been a graveyard for Democratic proposals, things that Nancy Pelosi got passed? She got a ton of legislation passed but it went nowhere because it died in Mitch McConnell's office. Is it the Mitch McConnell who was spending his time trying to bring down Barack Obama, which he made a major priority for himself? Is it that Mitch "Hardball" McConnell going to show up, or is it the Mitch McConnell that Joe Biden knew well and even was friendly with way back when in the Senate? They cut a lot of deals together and they became friends.

When Joe Biden's son, Beau, died ... his prized son, huge crucible in the life of Joe Biden ... there was one Republican senator who came to the funeral. That was Mitch McConnell. He does have that side to him. If Joe Biden can rediscover that, if it comes out, maybe they can get some things done. But understand, a lot is going to depend on that relationship. Joe Biden, by nature, is a healer. Joe Biden, by nature, is a negotiator. By nature, he wants to get along and get things done. He's not a big bull thinker, but he's a very good person. He's a very decent man. He's empathic. He understands. He comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania. That's all about who he is. He's a man of real faith and serious faith in his Roman Catholicism, and his wife is a strong Catholic. They're very, very good people and I think they're going to grow in the American public over time.

But still, the question is, how do you govern with this Congress? That's a hard question. Second part of this question is, how do you govern as Joe Biden with the in-Trump party, tensions in your own party between the Progressives and the Moderates? The Progressives and the Moderates in the House had their caucus conversation about two weeks ago, the caucuses of the membership by that party in that House. All of them were on a phone call, and the phone call broke out in fights. It was a two-hour phone call and it broke out in fights between the Moderates and Progressives, the Moderates insisting, "We're going to lose the House of Representatives unless we stick with a more Centrist message," and the Progressives saying, "No, no, no, no, the way we got young people out, the way we got people of color out on the streets to vote, the way we mobilized the left requires progressive initiatives." Those fights are not going to be easy, but I think Joe Biden is the best person the Democrats could have to resolve the fights, but understand the pressures are going to be very, very intense as we go along here.

Finally, the one other real challenge ... and this is the one that ... it's the wildcard, let's just put it that way ... is what role does Donald Trump play after January 20? We know right now he's already causing serious, serious problems for Democrats. Holding up this transition is a serious problem. I'm happy to talk more about that. But know it has endangered the lives on Americans for the Biden people to be barred from talking to the sitting administration and learning from them what they're doing about the pandemic, what are the plans for the vaccines, what have you learned about job creation, where are we on climate, all these kind of questions. They need to have that time together, and right now, Donald Trump is squashing that.

We've never seen anything like this before. Yes, there were delays in the Bush v. Gore election back 20 years ago in 2000. When that happened, it cost them about three weeks, four weeks of time on the transition. But when it was over, when they finally got it resolved, Gore was extremely gracious in saying to George W., "You've got the ball. You've got the baton, and I'll support you every step of the way." And so the country was ready to be poised for a real, real comeback. That's not the case here. We've got bad blood in the water because this is quite intentional on the part of Donald Trump to deny, and breaking precedent, 200-year tradition of turning over the government to the next person and letting them get ready to govern. We don't know where Trump is going to go on this.

I will tell you from my personal perspective ... Because, look, as someone who's come through this ... I've been through several transitions. I worked in them and I covered them and one thing and another. These are precious moments for our presidents. They're really precious for the country, and to squander this opportunity suggest to me that Trump's purpose here, his choice is not simply to slow down the transition, not simply to hold on to the curtains and not leave the Oval Office. I think it's increasingly clear that the effect, if not the intention, is to sabotage the Biden presidency. We've never seen that before. We used to have honeymoons. Presidents would come in. They'd get weeks in which the media would celebrate, their party would celebrate, the other side was gracious, and they had great honeymoons. Then we got to a place where we didn't have honeymoons. There was sort of dog-eat-dog. Now, there's an intentional effort to undermine and to block the presidency of an incoming president so he's damaged even before he gets in the fight.

One number I'll leave with you and then we'll turn to your questions. There was a poll by a group called Politico ... which is important in politics ... /Morning Consult. They started the poll before the elections. They asked people whether they expected the elections to be fair and open. 35% of Republicans said they did not think the elections would be fair and open. This was before the elections. After the elections, they went back out in the field and asked people, "Do you think the elections were fair and open?" The number of people who felt on the Republican side that they were not fair, they were not open, and therefore Joe Biden is illegitimate had doubled. It's gone from 35% to 70%. That's what I mean by the damage that's being done to undermine and de-legitimize Joe Biden before he ever gets there, and that is a very, very serious issue.

I'm reluctant to use the terms about this. I think we need to be candid with each other about what really seems to be going on. I'll leave it there, Mari. Thank you.

Mari Megias:

Great. Thank you very much. We're now going to open up the session for questions. To ask a question, please use the virtual hand raising feature of Zoom and Margaret Miller will notify you via Zoom's chat feature when it's your turn to speak. Please note that you may experience a short lag time, so be sure to unmute yourself when you hear from Margaret. Finally, our participants would appreciate it if you can state your name and your ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø affiliation before you ask your question.

I'm just going to kick things off with a question that had been submitted earlier, and that is, "This election is challenging the foundations by which our democracy functions. What are the most critical foundational problems with the election process, and should the Electoral College be abolished?"

David Gergen:

Man. It's not just the elections, but our whole politics are now challenged, and the foundations of our democracy. There are a number of books out now which I think are quite good about this subject. The one that I have found and that I recommend to students is written by two Harvard professors, Ziblatt and Levitsky. But it's How Democracies Die. How Democracies Die. One of the reasons I like it, it's short. It's also very understandable and it's very direct. It came out three or four years ago, but it's still pertinent today and if you look them up, you'll find that they have written other articles or given TED Talks or things like that, that you might want to pursue.

But they make a point that democracies are under threat in a number of questions, especially in the West. We've seen Hungary, Poland, and the like, and we've seen it in Turkey, we've seen it in the Philippines, Venezuela. You can go through a significant long list of countries, not to mention Xi and Putin and Modi, in some ways, from India, is moving in the same direction.

The issues we face that we need to get on the table that they bring up toward the end of the book is whether multiethnic societies can survive and thrive as democracies. They make the point that the history has not been kind to multiethnic societies. Usually people start to separate out by their identities and they come into conflict, and in particular, if there's a dominant group ... one multiethnic group is dominant and there's a minority group ... If that minority group grows and begins to threaten the dominant group, warfare can break out. Graham Ellison's written a whole book about this, which is [inaudible 00:19:30], too.

But we're having a really hard time, in my judgment ... I may be wrong. But we're having a hard time in that a lot of white, working class people feel threatened today because they feel that the elites ... and especially in government, a place like Harvard ... are not paying them serious attention. They're not really trying to help make sure they get an even break in life. The breaks are going to African Americans and going to Latinos and the like. The African Americans argue ... with complete justification ... they're not getting a lot of breaks. They're getting crushed by the police and a lot of other things and it's an unfair system. So you've got the minorities in the country feeling they're getting a pretty raw deal ... they're not getting what the Declaration of Independence promises ... and yet the dominant group feels threatened, especially the people who are working class who feel marginalized.

We have not yet learned how to come to grips with this. We had lots of conversations back four years ago when Donald Trump first got elected about, "We need to go to hillbilly country. We need to get our students out in rural America to understand what's going on. We need to understand what's going on in rural parts of Western Europe," which are going through some similar kind of challenges. So it's not just this election. It is more largely whether we can reconstruct a civic culture in which our politics thrive in that soil, but in ways in which we can all live together.

That is the issue we need to be addressing more and more. How do we help you and educate you, train you, and develop you as students in particular to go out into that world and give us the kind of leadership and rebuild the civic life of the country? That, I think, is going to be one of your major missions. I think what our role ought to be is to focus on this, to help try to understand more ourself. A lot of us are older in the faculty. We don't get all of this. We've never seen anything like this either, and we find it pretty frightening at times. But it's going to require all of us to be more open to having candid conversations and listening with respect to people who don't think like us and who don't look like you.

Mari Megias:

Thank you very much. Our next caller is on the line. Rob Rodriguez, if you could let us know your ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø affiliation and ask your question.

Rob Rodriguez:

Yeah, good afternoon, David, and thank you so much for your comments and your insights. My name is Rob Rodriguez and I graduated from the MPP program in 1992. Full disclosure, I also worked in the Clinton administration. My question is directly to what you were just talking about. I had a haircut this morning and I have a lovely conversation with a 50-year-old woman who had voted for Trump. It was a good conversation.

Here's my question. We talk a lot about division. In your opinion, is there really a division of values in this country? Or is it more of an image division? Because as I try to understand better the Trump supporter, I'm getting an image ... and I haven't tested this broadly, but ... that 73 million people in the country have come to view the Democratic Party as the party of handouts, kind of teetering on socialism and distracted by identity politics, whereas the Republican Party is the party of taking pride in pulling your weight, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. If you agree with me that this is more of a division of image and that we're in a world where Twitter and other image makers Trump is a master of, what would your advice be to the Democratic Party in terms of the media sources to destroy this image disconnect? Thank you.

David Gergen:

A couple good questions, Rob, that are buried within that. Listen, I have been saying it's [inaudible 00:24:00] values and image. There are value structures that are simply different. The Republican Party ... Let's take two values of liberty and equality. You may think you can embrace both of those qualities, and we try to, in our life, to embrace both. But the truth is that Conservatives tend to favor liberty and the Liberals tend to favor equality. You'll find various social scientists will argue this, that if you want total equality in a society so the government runs everything, you're going to lose a lot of your liberty. If you want total liberty so that you have capitalists who can have free rein, you can go back to Adam Smith, every individual counts and it's what you put in, the like, you're going to wind up with a lot of progress, perhaps, on the economic side, but a lot of inequality.

So the issue becomes how do you balance those two in a way that is respectful of both sides that if you're born in this country, no matter what zip code you're born into, you can [inaudible 00:25:12] choose a different zip code and make it there. That's what you want aspirationally. But there are a lot of people who feel like ... and the social science supports ... they never get outside their own zip code, in effect. They stay there buried down in [inaudible 00:25:26]. A lot depends on what you think is a better society, a more just society, a more livable society.

At the same time, I do think that ... to go to your point about image, there's so much disinformation out there now. I'm from the South and I know several people who voted for Donald Trump and they have such a different view of what reality is. I mean, it's really hard to have whole conversations because they tend to see that everything the Liberals are doing can be interpreted in a way which is really, really negative ... everything the Democrats are doing ... can be interpreted in such a way to make them look ... they're greedy or they're this or they're that or they're just simply manipulating you. And others on the Liberal side feel like Fox News is running the world.

So it's a really hard question about how we close those gaps. We sometimes have a hard time at the Kennedy School, frankly, as you well know better than I do. The students have some strong differences as well and feel very strongly about how you talk about these things. One of the reasons that I'm for national service is I think that if we have the younger generation out with jobs as we did with the old Civilian Conservation Corps back in the New Deal ... and if you don't know about that, you really ought to read up on it because it's such an interesting chapter in our life, most popular program in the New Deal ... was that Roosevelt proposed that we put young men and give them a job out in the forest creating our parks and changing the face of nature in a very positive way and we'd pay them one dollar a day. Three months after he proposed it, we had 250,000 young men out in the woods. And guess what? It was an extremely popular program and it threw people together who were different classes.

There's a new book out called Caste, C-A-S-T-E, which gets into this that you might want to take a look at. But it's been for a long, long time, we have separated out ... You can get onto the elite street, you can come to Harvard, you can do all the kind of things associated with that, but that guides you in a very different direction than being out in the hillbilly country. We need to find ways ... and I think national service is one ... where we work together. Strikingly, the generation that was the most successful and has often been called the Greatest Generation was the World War II generation. That was made up essentially of young men ... many, many young women, but young men in particular ... who put on the uniform, went overseas, put their lives on the line, saw a lot of their buddies chopped up, came back, and decided that they'd saved the world and now they wanted to save America.

They built the middle class in this country. The 1950s and the early 1960s were certainly, in retrospect, were almost golden years in a lot of ways. Not all, not race, not gender, but in a lot of ways, the 50s and 60s were very good. But because they had worked together, they'd fought together, they fought under the same flag and they had an allegiance that went deeper than whether you're a Conservative or a Liberal ... When I went to Washington, I met a lot of people who were strong Republicans. I met a lot of people who were strong Democrats. But I can tell you almost to a person, they first and foremost thought of themselves as strong Americans. Party came second, the country came first, and we've lost that. We need to regain it, and I think your generation can do it.

Mari Megias:

Great. Thank you very much for that question. Our next questioner is Bob [Ferry 00:29:03].

Bob Ferry:

Hi. Thank you, David, for doing this.

David Gergen:

Sure.

Bob Ferry:

This is very valuable. Kind of in the same theme. I saw something in the Post the other day that Biden carried 490 counties that represent 70% of the economy and that Trump carried about 2500 counties that represented some 30% of the economy. Your national service idea is really intriguing, but I'm just wondering, if you had your old job back and you were advising President Biden on how to address that, I mean, how would that inform your counsel to him? Is there anything specific, apart from national service, that you might advise him to look at?

David Gergen:

I think we need to be thickening, if I might use that word ... It's a good question, Bob. We need to be thickening the civic side of our lives a lot more than we have so that there are more places where one can volunteer, a person can work to help improve the quality of life in their own community, their own neighborhood. We need to be looking for experiences like that. I don't think this can all be done top down. I think Joe Biden can represent the kind of humility that we need in the Oval Office, and I think he can do wonders for the country by spending time in the Kentuckys of the world where he's not going to get a lot of votes, but he could sure help to improve the quality of national life and be into the Wyomings and some of these other states, which are deep red.

We need people from blue states going into red states and vice versa. I think the efforts that are being made by elite universities to make sure that young people who have promise who have families of almost no income ... If your family has less than $60,000 and you can get yourself into Harvard as an undergraduate, the rest of your way is paid by the university. I think those are very, very good things.

There's a member of our faculty at the Kennedy School ... he's a member of the faculty over at Harvard Yard, as well ... named Robert Putnam, or Bob Putnam as he's known. For a short time, he was dean of the Kennedy School. But in any event, he was the one who wrote a book about Bowling Alone. That was the title of the book, and it was a very pressing book about the degree to which people used to belong to bowling clubs. It was very, very popular for a long, long time. But they'd go out every Tuesday night and go bowling, or I have a son that goes out and plays tennis every Monday night and he has a community of tennis players in North Carolina to do that. But they had ways to connect with each other and form communities. But that gradually has changed. We all stay home and look at social media. We can't even go out and see our friends now. It's much worse, and loneliness is going way up.

There's a study that loneliness now is doing as much damage to people during this pandemic ... The rise in loneliness is doing as much damage as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I was stunned when I heard that. It's taking a huge toll. Well, the reason I'm bringing up Bob Putnam is he's now got a new book, which has just come out in the last two or three books. It's called Upswing. Upswing. I haven't had a chance to look at it seriously yet. I've just flipped through it. But it does appear to me something that we ought to be talking about at the school because it's about how do we solve these problems of isolation, of social groups breaking up, of people being more isolated from each other. They get into if you're on the left, you watch MSNBC, and you're on the right, you watch Fox, and then you go to the different universities, all those kind of questions. How do we break out of that? I think a lot of it, in Putnam's view, has to do with enriching communities in which we live, especially the civic life in the communities.

Mari Megias:

Thank you very much.

David Gergen:

[crosstalk 00:33:29]

Mari Megias:

Just want to note that our next Wiener Conference Call on December 9th will actually be with Bob Putnam and his co-author, so ...

David Gergen:

[inaudible 00:33:37]

Mari Megias:

... keep an eye open for that invitation.

David Gergen:

What'd you say?

Mari Megias:

Our next Wiener Conference Call will be with Professor Bob Putnam. That will be on-

David Gergen:

Yes. You should do that. Very well.

Mari Megias:

Our next question came in over the chat, and this comes from an alum of the Center for Public Leadership, Katie [Laidlaw 00:33:54], who is a 2020 graduate of the Kennedy School and the Business School. Her question is, "What do you think we do with polling going forward? It's veracity and authenticity were again challenged, as it was in 2016. As you noted, Biden's team thought there was an 8 to 10 point lead. It was again not reflective of ground truth. What are your thoughts on what should happen going forward?"

David Gergen:

I'm sorry, I couldn't hear very well.

Mari Megias:

Oh, sure. The question has to do with polling. What will happen given forward, given the inaccuracies of the polling in this election cycle?

David Gergen:

Well, let me tell you what a pleasure it is to hear from Katie Laidlaw. We served on the Duke University Board together some years ago. She was a graduate of the undergraduate and they pulled her in to do that. She was terrific. Then she worked for Palantir after leaving the Kennedy School, and I wouldn't be surprised if Katie's revenue stream is quite a lot larger right now having worked with Palantir. But she's a wonderful young woman, and I'm so pleased to hear from her. She was a fellow here at the Center for Public Leadership and one of our mainstays.

Polling. There was one long piece, and it was written by Nate Silver, who's one of the gurus in this area, in The New York Times. It was still early in this thinking, but it went after page after page after page. I couldn't finish it because it had all these theories in it and I wasn't sure where to go with it. I must tell you, other than that ... and I give credit to Nate Silver. He's been very, very good for the most part. They would argue, I think, if you check it out, that, in fact, as the final vote numbers are starting to come in, the gap between Biden and Trump has gone up to 4 to 5%. Biden won it by 4 to 5%. There were polls showing it would be around 7 to 8%, and there were some polls saying 10%. But the point that people are making now in the polling industry is it wound up being closer than it was that first night when our impressions of how awful the polls were, how they completely blew it ... That was what we first thought that first night. I think it's a little more complex.

I think the polling industry does have a lot to answer for, though. I think they really ought ... It's a professional group. I once edited articles about polling, and it's complex in terms of your modeling, especially if your demography has changed rapidly on you. You're not quite sure who's going to show up. Then it becomes much harder to be accurate within a degree of confidence. The polling industry does have an association where they come together and they have annual conferences and compare notes. There seems to be a forum like that. They really need to explain to the country soon just how far off were they, why are they off, what are they going to do about it.

As Katie's question suggests, we faced these same questions four years ago when Hillary lost as she did. How did they miss it? They offered some good explanation but promised they would fix it, and then they said they had fixed it before this election. So I think the point is ... and I don't mean to be too careless about this. The point is, I think we're in a never-never land now. I don't think we know whether to believe the polls or not. We cite them when they tell us what we believe already and we try to ignore them when they tell us what we don't want to hear.

Mari Megias:

Great. Thank you very much. Our next questioner is Mark Reichert. If you could please unmute yourself and ask your question, Mark.

Christopher Reichert:

Hi. Sorry, I guess my Zoom thing must say Mark Reichert. This is Christopher Reichert. I'm a mid-career 2005, so great to be on this call with you. I'm so glad you mentioned service. Just the other day, by chance, I found my 1980 Youth Conservation Corps card in a pile that I was going through. I think I was one of the last ones before Reagan canceled that program. But I do remember my time in the forest, improving the forest and trails, so great memories. So-

David Gergen:

Do you think it changed your view of civic life at all, Christopher?

Christopher Reichert:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I volunteer quite a lot, and I think that's part of my ethos, which is I think you need to give back. In a civilized society, it can't all be done through the private sector or the public sector. It really has to be done by individuals at the ground level, whether it's in your community or helping an alumni group or a church or whatever it might be. I really think that's an essential ingredient in making our society function, so I do volunteer a lot.

So thinking of some of the themes you mentioned earlier ... One of the areas that really concerned me was this fact-free zone that I feel like we're in at the moment. I corresponded with a classmate, a Kennedy School classmate, during this whole election cycle and he and I disagree politically very much, but I know him personally so I thought, maybe I can talk to him personally offline, so it's not some sort of Facebook public content, one-upmanship, about what his opinions were, what are his positions? And really, what I got back was terms like "sheeple" and "MSM," which I had to go look up was mainstream media. I pointed out to him that Fox News was, by very nature, mainstream media because it's the most popular, but that didn't go over very well. And so it devolved quite readily and quite easily into negative space that didn't allow for good correspondence.

So that kind of really concerned me that even on a one-on-one level with a person that I knew, it was really hard to break through. And so, I guess my question to you is, we have lessons on the positive side from FDR with ... you mentioned the WPA and the Conservation Corps and public service. We also have lessons from a very negative side with World War II, with Germany and Hitler. And so we do have examples of how we somehow got past them. Germany is now, I would say, a very well-balanced democracy. We, on the other hand, seemed to have slipped into something that's a bit negative. And so how do you think we move past this? Are there books or lectures or articles or journalists or anyone that we could look to to guide us as we talk to our family, our friends, our community?

David Gergen:

Well, Christopher, with all candor, I must say I'm going through a process right now with a person I've known for a number of years. This is a friend, and I'm finding that the conversations are very, very difficult, trying to talk through it the same way you have. I've felt not just frustrated but somehow inadequate trying to open up those channels, because the answers that came back were, I thought, sort of rote and it came directly out of watching a Tucker Carlson or somebody like that. I've been trying to watch more of Fox, because I have a relationship with CNN so I tend to not watch a lot of television, but I've been trying to watch more Fox just so I understand it, and it's very, very well produced, but I think it's quite wrongheaded in many cases. But I find that the combination of Fox and now conspiracy theories joining in ... And Trump is angry at Fox because it's not enough pro-Trump and he may well start or buy or whatever it's going to be, create a new network to the right or perhaps more personalized to him. We'll have to wait and see.

But I think the question of having conversations is hard. I was on a group once at the Aspen Institute on religious pluralism. Madeleine Albright and I co-chaired a group on religious pluralism, a task force. One of the things I learned that came from Eboo Patel, who lived in Chicago and one of the people that really tries to bring ... He's Muslim. He brings together people of various good basic faiths and different faiths. And what he found, if you want to really have a candid conversation, if you take 10 people and put them in a room and they're all different from each other and you have them talk about their differences and talk through their differences, they will actually come out more different than they started and saying that they really were not like the other person and they didn't feel at all close to them.

But if you had them spend a day to a day and a half, say, working on a project, like building a roof for Habitat, and they spent a day working together carrying nails and buckets and one thing and another, then when you put them in a room, they get along famously. But it was they had to get to know each other not in their differences, but in what their common humanity, and that then gave them the capacity. I've been sort of toying with that idea. Is there a way you can ... Can the nonprofit world do more with that than we have been doing to encourage it?

I'm on the board of a nonprofit called New Profit, Vanessa Kirsch's here in Boston, and we're trying very ... We support startups, especially social enterprises that are looking for their second tier financing, and it's been very, very successful. We're trying to have as many people co-running these nonprofits as possible because we feel that that makes a huge difference if you can get ... The white community really has to wake up to the idea that we can't have whites dominate the leadership positions in the nonprofit world. It's got to be a shared sense of responsibility. I think we need to keep working on that, Christopher. But I will confess to you up front, after trying to have good conversations and failing with my own friend, I don't think I have the answers yet.

Christopher Reichert:

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

David Gergen:

Thanks.

Christopher Reichert:

Well, I'm sorry to hear, actually.

David Gergen:

No. I understand.

Christopher Reichert:

Thank you.

David Gergen:

Sure.

Mari Megias:

Great. Thank you, Christopher. Our next questioner is Nancy [Zhang 00:45:06]. Nancy, if you'd like to unmute yourself and ask your question.

Nancy Zhang:

Hi, can you hear me?

Mari Megias:

Yes we can.

Nancy Zhang:

Okay, great. I wanted to react to your comment that you think that there's hope in a way of building from the ground up enriching communities. It seems to me that given the degree to which geographically we have siloed ourselves, that that won't necessarily be a very productive avenue, particularly given the rise of national scope media such as Fox News. I mean, propaganda was a big part of why Hitler came to power. So my question to you is, relating to Fox News, Breitbart, et cetera, do you think we should try and reinstate some of the media rules that used to exist on broadcast and extend them even to cable to prevent this kind of fact-free zone, to prevent this kind of very skewed media poisoning our discourse?

David Gergen:

Well, Nancy, it's perplexing about this. In theory, I think the idea [inaudible 00:46:30] I haven't thought of the background on this. When we had over-the-air networks and they dominated our television viewing, given the seriousness of them and how much power they had, they were required to be balanced. So if you had Presidential Candidate X on shortly before a major federal election, then you had to have Candidate Y have equal time. It, in fact, I think, worked very, very well. I'm trying to remember the dean of the ... Newt Minow, from Chicago, is the dean of ... Martha Minow, who was the dean of the law school here, the Harvard Law School. He had a lot to do with getting the fair and balanced perspective out there. When we went to cable, it was ruled that those laws no longer pertained, and since then it's been the Wild West-

Nancy Zhang:

But I think that's been kind of a key strategic error, if you will, in how things have then evolved.

David Gergen:

I agree, and I wish I could recite ... I knew at one point, whether that was ... I know there were legal cases that resolved it, but whether that was what was desirable or whether that was pushed on them, I'm not sure. But I do know that it worked. As I say, once we got into cable, it had become the Wild West, and especially because it's not only cable news, it's also social media. There's a lot more disinformation and misleading information that gets on social media, and you can't balance that. There's no way you could do that.

I have to tell you, Nancy, I think that as a realistic matter, the Republicans would balk like crazy at the idea of the government controlling the cable news folks, as well as the cable people balking at it. Because if you're a Conservative, you think social media and Fox have been sort of the saving grace of the country. They've kept us from going over a cliff as a country. That's their perspective on it. I wasn't sure what you meant about the geographic distinctions or differences or divisions.

Nancy Zhang:

Well, if you look at the map, especially in the 2016 election, where the blue areas were very concentrated on the coast or in the urban centers, and then the rest of the country being red, even if you do it on a county-by-county basis. And so you can see if you're doing things at a local level, you're still in your silo, so to speak, your political silo.

David Gergen:

Yeah, no, you're right. It's got to be top down and bottom up at the same time to be, I think, successful. The questions have come up about things like the Electoral College. We have an imbalance in our system. It does deserve a lot more serious attention, and I think the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness. On the other hand, it is in the Constitution, to get rid of it, you've got to get a lot of Western states like Wyoming to give up power. I started out by saying people don't give up power easily in this country. And even Nancy Pelosi has said, "If you want power, you've got to grab it. It's not going to come easily to you."

So I don't have easy answers for that. I would argue, thankfully, I don't think we're anywhere near Hitler yet. But it is worth keeping in mind that Hitler came to power through democratic voting. It is possible that democratic ... and in the Ziblatt/Levitsky book, you'll find numerous instances in which a country, through the democratic process, elected a president or prime minister and that person then, given the uncertainties, the anxieties in the populous took their countries to the far corner and became very authoritarian, if not totalitarian. That's been what we've seen across much of the world now that we have to strike back at.

One of the things that I think we should be aware of coming out of these elections ... There are a lot of people in the world that may breathe more easily because of the outcome of the elections, but-

Mari Megias:

Right. They-

David Gergen:

Let me just add this. America is not back yet as a leader, intellectual or in terms of policy. Other nations are looking to us with more skepticism now, and a number of nations in Asia are now looking increasingly to China for leadership. It was quite striking this last few days when 15 nations in the Asia Pacific signed a trade pact among them, and that the US was not at the table. These 15 nations were huge, including China, and China took a lot of the leadership role. But think of that, to have a big international agreement struck on trade where we used to set the rules of engagement on trade. Basically, the WTO was essentially an American-led institution. But here we have a great big trade pact, the United States is not even invited to participate. We've got a lot of work to do to get ourselves back into balance.

Mari Megias:

Great. Well, thank you very much for that comment. We have another questioner on the line, Roxanne Cason.

Roxanne Cason:

Hello, David.

David Gergen:

Yes, hello.

Roxanne Cason:

How are you?

David Gergen:

I'm good, but I think better now for hearing your voice.

Roxanne Cason:

Oh, thank you, thank you. Appreciate your taking time. I had sort of been hoping that we would begin to see you, and you know I've always appreciated your thinking on things. I have a couple of comments. It struck me ... and this is not what I actually called in to ask about, but it just struck me that with this criticism on white supremacy and all the critics on Christians that have been coming forward, this idea that ... I think we should be at the table in China, too. But I also hear these messaging about colonialism and it's somewhat, why would we expect to do that when they can do what they're doing just fine without us? I do think things have changed internationally, and you know I've worked internationally for so many years.

One of the things that I am responding to is the comments ... a couple of people talking about the difficulty ... and you also ... in having conversations with people that don't agree with your perspective on politics and remember from many, many years about difficult conversations and the importance of acknowledging what another person thinks, hears, and relates to you as, let's say, what their truth is. There's been such a degrading of conversation over the last four or five years, name calling, and I think we know from studies that have been done that anger is very contagious, that the social media ... if you've seen Social Dilemma ... grabs your unconscious in a way that ... As Tom Nichols said, "Why don't you just pull up your boots and don't listen to anything?" It's kind of really difficult for much of the population to extract themselves from the various points of view.

I hardly ever hear anybody say, "I know that the House of Representatives was attacking. I know that you think that Obama really started this whole harassment of Trump and therefore that just changed the whole public conversation." I don't know. It's, I agree, very hard to talk to people about these various perceptions of reality. I think that it's going to be a very difficult public venue or discussion without figuring out a way of acknowledging whatever the other person's reality is that's different from your own in order to get to the next step. And I am fearful that if we don't figure this out ... You had 73 million people and 70% of the people polled who think that the situation is much more concerning. And now all these issues around the voting and you don't know who to believe, really.

David Gergen:

I agree.

Roxanne Cason:

And I also think that there is something happening on people with this whole resistance idea, that people who have no ... They're not highly educated, their brains are not highly tweaked to really think clearly about things. They're not analytical, coming up with all sorts of opinions about what is so. I've always respected your approach because you were always even handed. On one hand, people think this, on one hand, people think that, but here are the facts that we seem to find maybe somewhere in between. I don't know that.

But I think that people are getting so entrenched in their perceptions and so snarky about it that people forget that people are human beings with feelings, and when they are feeling attacked, there is a defensiveness that comes up. And these kinds of feelings are very contagious.

Mari Megias:

So David, what do you think about that? What do you think about the vindictive insults that are being hurled and the lack of humanity of the other side?

David Gergen:

I don't pretend to have answers, Roxanne. I want to make sure people who have just heard you know how much you've contributed to the school and the Women and Public Policy area in particular. You've been very, very kind and helpful and generous.

Roxanne Cason:

Thank you.

David Gergen:

[crosstalk 00:57:47] so thank you, Roxanne. To put one more layer of complication on this, it is also true that in the last few years, that line has become almost sort of like the norm in our public life. And when you start a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you upfront about facts and you realize that you don't even share the same facts ... Daniel Patrick Moynihan was famous for saying ... and he was a wonderful man. He was famous for saying, "Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts." So often in public dialogue right now, you're lied to two or three times, by the time you figure out what's true and what's lying, you're off to different conversation and it's hard.

I would note that to go to this balance ... A few years ago, I wrote a biography of Cicero, who was a great orator, of course, and the way he persuaded people of his perspective was in the first third to half of his speech, he would present the viewpoint of one group. And which he was quite ... And then the next half or the next third of the speech for the second group and do the same thing. People realized that he understood and had heard what they had to say, what they thought. Even though he might disagree with it, he at least heard them properly. And in the last 10 minutes or so of the speech, he would then say where he came out and he was much more credible because he had expressed the views of each group in ways which they thought were actually ... captured what they had to say.

I think that's a role that Joe Biden could play that would not be the standard political pap that would give us something that he could appeal on a cultural level and a human level and not on a five-point policy level. Policies are great, but in order to get them passed and get them done, you need people who can agree.

Mari Megias:

Great. Well, thank you very much for that question and answer. We are at the end of this Wiener Conference Call. I apologize that we didn't get to all of everybody's questions, but I'd just like to thank everyone who dialed in to listen to this call. A special thanks to Professor David Gergen. Our next call will be held on December 9th with Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, who will discuss their new book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. Thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

David Gergen:

Thanks, Mari. Thanks, one and all.