Jonathan Haidt: How common threats can make common (political) ground

72,728 views ・ 2013-01-07

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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So if you've been following the news,
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you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids
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headed for the United States,
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all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years.
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Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal.
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That actually wouldn't be such a problem,
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because if we were really all going to die,
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we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took,
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and we'd find a way to deflect them.
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I'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way,
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but they're wrapped in a special energy field
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that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us.
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Last March, I went to the TED conference,
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and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist
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who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s,
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and it seems that the predictions he made back then
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are coming true.
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This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises,
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and if we keep on going the way we're going,
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we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise
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by the end of this century.
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Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels.
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This is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like.
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Low-lying cities all around the world will disappear
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within the lifetime of children born today.
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Hansen closed his talk by saying,
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"Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
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That is the equivalent of what we face now.
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Yet we dither, taking no action to deflect the asteroid,
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even though the longer we wait,
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the more difficult and expensive it becomes."
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Of course, the left wants to take action,
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but the right denies that there's any problem.
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All right, so I go back from TED,
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and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party
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in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting
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a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin,
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and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin
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in National Affairs called "Beyond the Welfare State."
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Levin writes that all over the world,
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nations are coming to terms with the fact
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that the social democratic welfare state
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is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable,
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dependent upon dubious economics
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and the demographic model of a bygone era.
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All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid,
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but look at these graphs that Levin showed.
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This graph shows the national debt
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as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see,
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if you go all the way back to the founding,
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we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War.
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Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off,
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and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive.
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Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off,
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get down to near zero, and bang! -- World War I.
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Once again, the same process repeats.
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Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II.
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We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP,
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really unsustainable, really dangerous.
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But we pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, what's this?
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Why has it been rising since the '70s?
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It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded,
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but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending,
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especially Medicare.
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We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II,
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and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet,
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and when they do, this is what will happen.
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This is data from the Congressional Budget Office
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showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen
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if current situations and expectations and trends are extended.
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All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs
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are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes,
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or in terms of the data they present,
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but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing.
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Let me translate for you.
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"We are doomed unless we start acting now.
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What's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party?
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Can't you see reality? If you won't help, then get the hell out of the way."
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We can deflect both of these asteroids.
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These problems are both technically solvable.
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Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times,
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the mere fact that one side says, "Look, there's an asteroid,"
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means that the other side's going to say, "Huh? What?
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No, I'm not even going to look up. No."
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To understand why this is happening to us,
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and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology.
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So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality,
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and one of the most important principles of morality
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is that morality binds and blinds.
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It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values
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but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.
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Think of it like this.
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Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet.
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There are only a few species that can do it.
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That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound.
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And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story.
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They're always all siblings who are children of a single queen,
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so they're all in the same boat.
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They rise or fall, they live or die, as one.
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There's only one species on the planet that can do this
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without kinship, and that, of course, is us.
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This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon,
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and this is Tenochtitlan.
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Now how did we do this? How did we go
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from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago
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to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years?
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It's miraculous, and part of the explanation
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is this ability to circle around sacred values.
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As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations.
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This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca.
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It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together,
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they unite, they can trust each other, they become one.
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It's as though you're moving an electrical wire
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through a magnetic field that generates current.
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When people circle together, they generate a current.
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We love to circle around things.
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We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other.
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We can fight as a team, as a unit.
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But even as morality binds people together into a unit,
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into a team, the circling blinds them.
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It causes them to distort reality.
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We begin separating everything into good versus evil.
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Now that process feels great. It feels really satisfying.
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But it is a gross distortion of reality.
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You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress.
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This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting
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in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis,
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so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is,
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you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues.
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And what you can see is that,
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in the decades after the Civil War,
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Congress was extraordinarily polarized,
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as you would expect, about as high as can be.
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But then, after World War I, things dropped,
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and we get this historically low level of polarization.
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This was a golden age of bipartisanship,
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at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together
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and solve grand national problems.
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But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on.
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Polarization rises.
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It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals
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could all work together in Congress.
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They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees,
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but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up,
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the force field increased,
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Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart.
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It became much harder for them to socialize,
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much harder for them to cooperate.
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Retiring members nowadays say that it's become like gang warfare.
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Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates,
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Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie?
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Do you know why they do this?
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It's so that the Bloods and the Crips will know which side to vote for. (Laughter)
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The polarization is strongest among our political elites.
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Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington.
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But for a while, there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people.
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Well, in the last 12 years it's become
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much more apparent that it is.
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So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey.
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And what they do on that survey is they ask
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what's called a feeling thermometer rating.
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So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know,
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Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party,
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the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life.
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The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel
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about Democrats, and they like them.
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You know, ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale.
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Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise.
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But when you look at cross-party ratings,
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you find, well, that it's lower, but actually,
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when I first saw this data, I was surprised.
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That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations,
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they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible.
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It drifts downwards very slightly,
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but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama.
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It plummets. Something is going on here.
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The moral electromagnet is turning back on,
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and nowadays, just very recently,
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Democrats really dislike Republicans.
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Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing.
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It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too.
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It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart,
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pulling left and right into their own territories
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like the Bloods and the Crips.
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Now, there are many reasons why this is happening to us,
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and many of them we cannot reverse.
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We will never again have a political class
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that was forged by the experience of fighting together
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in World War II against a common enemy.
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We will never again have just three television networks,
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all of which are relatively centrist.
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And we will never again have a large group of conservative southern Democrats
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and liberal northern Republicans making it easy,
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making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation.
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So for a lot of reasons, those decades after the Second World War
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were an historically anomalous time.
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We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe.
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But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens
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and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better,
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because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly
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to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s
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that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution.
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These changes are detailed in many books.
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These are two that I strongly recommend,
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and they list a whole bunch of reforms.
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I'm just going to group them into three broad classes here.
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So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional,
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hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is,
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do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place,
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and when you have closed party primaries,
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and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting,
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you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans.
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So open primaries would make that problem much, much less severe.
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But the problem isn't primarily that we're electing bad people to Congress.
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From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders,
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most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working,
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intelligent people who really want to solve problems,
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but once they get there, they find that they are forced
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to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship
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and that punishes independent thinking.
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You step out of line, you get punished.
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So there are a lot of reforms we could do
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that will counteract this.
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For example, this "Citizens United" ruling is a disaster,
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because it means there's like a money gun aimed at your head,
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and if you step out of line, if you try to reach across the aisle,
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there's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent
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to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising.
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But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change
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the nature of social relationships in Congress.
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The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted,
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friendly, very socially skillful people,
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and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships,
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make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter,
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you've got to use your personal skills,
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and that's the way politics has always worked.
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But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives
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changed its legislative calendar
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so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week.
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Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning,
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they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon.
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They don't move their families to the District.
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They don't meet each other's spouses or children.
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There's no more relationship there.
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And trying to run Congress without human relationships
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is like trying to run a car without motor oil.
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Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up
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and descends into paralysis and polarization?
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A simple change to the legislative calendar,
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such as having business stretch out for three weeks
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and then they get a week off to go home,
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that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress.
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So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it?
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There are a number of groups that are working on this.
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No Labels and Common Cause, I think,
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have very good ideas for changes we need to do
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to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective.
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But I'd like to supplement their work
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with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this.
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Nothing pulls people together like a common threat
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or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy,
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unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology,
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in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart.
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Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw.
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But what if the situation we face is not a single threat
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but is actually more like this,
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where there's just so much stuff coming in,
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it's just, "Start shooting, come on, everybody,
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we've got to just work together, just start shooting."
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Because actually, we do face this situation.
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This is where we are as a country.
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So here's another asteroid.
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We've all seen versions of this graph, right,
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which shows the changes in wealth since 1979,
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and as you can see, almost all the gains in wealth
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have gone to the top 20 percent, and especially the top one percent.
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Rising inequality like this is associated
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with so many problems for a democracy.
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Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other,
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to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not.
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Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts.
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Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood.
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We're not all in the same boat, and that means
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nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good.
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The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now,
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and the right says, "Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem."
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Now,
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why is that happening to us? Why is the inequality rising?
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Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization,
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is actually this fourth asteroid,
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rising non-marital births.
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This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births
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since the 1960s.
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Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers.
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Whites are headed that way too.
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Within a decade or two, most American children
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will be born into homes with no father.
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This means that there's much less money coming into the house.
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But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos.
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As I know from working with street children in Brazil,
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Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids.
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Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s,
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and the left has been saying, "It's not a problem. It's not a problem."
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The left has been very reluctant to say
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that marriage is actually good for women and for children.
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Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here.
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I'm actually more critical of the men
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who won't take responsibility for their own children
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and of an economic system that makes it difficult
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for many men to earn enough money to support those children.
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But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem,
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and one side has been more concerned about it than the other.
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The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid
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with a front-page story last July
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showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality.
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We are becoming a nation of just two classes.
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When Americans go to college and marry each other,
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they have very low divorce rates.
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They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids,
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some of them become tiger mothers,
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the kids rise to their full potential,
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and the kids go on to become
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the top two lines in this graph.
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And then there's everybody else:
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the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage,
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who don't have as much invested in them,
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who don't grow up in a stable environment,
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and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph.
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So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing.
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As before, we've got a problem, we've got to start working on this,
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we've got to do something,
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and what's wrong with you people that you don't see my threat?
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But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders,
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we'd see that these two problems actually
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are best addressed together.
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Because if you really care about income inequality,
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you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups
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that are working on ways to promote marriage.
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But then you're going to run smack into the problem
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that women don't generally want to marry someone
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who doesn't have a job.
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So if you really care about strengthening families,
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you might want to talk to some liberal groups
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who are working on promoting educational equality,
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who are working on raising the minimum wage,
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who are working on finding ways to stop so many men
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from being sucked into the criminal justice system and
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taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives.
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So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way.
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How many of you can see all four?
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Please raise your hand right now if you're willing to admit
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that all four of these are national problems.
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Please raise your hands.
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Okay, almost all of you.
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Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members
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of the Asteroids Club, which is a club
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17:22
for all Americans who are willing to admit
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17:25
that the other side actually might have a point.
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In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground.
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Common ground is often very hard to find.
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No, we start by looking for common threats
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17:35
because common threats make common ground.
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17:38
Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think
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that people could ever lay down their swords,
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17:44
and left and right could actually work together?
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I don't think so, because it happens,
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not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way.
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17:54
This is something we can do.
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17:55
Because Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility,
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and they've formed dozens of organizations,
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at the national level, such as this one,
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18:03
down to many local organizations,
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18:05
such as To The Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida,
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18:07
which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate
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18:10
that sort of working together human relationship
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18:13
that's necessary to solve Florida's problems.
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18:16
Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS,
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18:20
and on so many humanitarian issues,
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18:23
liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies,
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18:26
and at times they really have worked together
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18:28
to solve these problems.
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18:30
And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see
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18:33
eye to eye on criminal justice.
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18:35
For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population
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18:39
in this country has quadrupled since 1980.
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18:43
Now this is a social disaster,
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18:45
and liberals are very concerned about this.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting
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18:50
the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system
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18:53
that's just sucking in more and more poor young men.
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18:56
But are conservatives happy about this?
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18:58
Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system
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19:01
costs an unbelievable amount of money.
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19:04
And so, because the prison-industrial complex
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19:07
is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls,
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19:11
groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives
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have come together to form a group called Right on Crime.
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19:19
And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center
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19:21
to oppose the building of new prisons
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19:23
and to work for reforms that will make the justice system
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19:27
more efficient and more humane.
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19:30
So this is possible. We can do it.
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19:33
Let us therefore go to battle stations,
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19:36
not to fight each other,
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19:37
but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids.
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19:41
And let our first mission be to press Congress
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19:44
to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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