[music playing] - Hi.

Hello.

My name is Kwame Spearman.

I'm the CEO and co-owner of Tattered Covered Book Stores.

This year along with PBS-12, we've started a Leaders as Readers series in which we take leaders in our community and ask them about how literature has influenced their lives and, more importantly, what's their favorite book?

Today we are honored to have Senator Michael Bennet.

- Thanks, Kwame.

Thanks for having me.

- Senator, talk to us a little bit about the book you selected for us.

- The book I selected, which I bought in your bookstore, by the way.

- Thank you.

- The Tattered Cover, this beautiful place, and have marked up on every single page.

- He has very bad handwriting.

- My mother would be very unhappy.

My handwriting is terrible, just illegible.

You know, I have been deeply concerned for a very long time that our democracy is incredibly fragile.

That democracy is fragile generally, not just here in the United States but everywhere in the world, and there are a number of reasons for that, there's a variety of reasons for that, but one reason I think it's vulnerable here is because of the deep income inequality we have.

The lack of economic mobility that we have that wasn't always true.

That wasn't the way the land of opportunity was supposed to work.

We have the worst income inequality we've had since the 1920s, and we have less economic mobility than almost every other industrial country has, and in trying to sort out, you know, the election of Donald Trump and the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, you know it occurred to me that, in human history, when people lose a sense of opportunity that's when somebody shows up out of nowhere sometimes and says I alone can fix it as Trump said.

He didn't do it, but he said I alone can fix it.

You know you don't need a democracy.

You don't need the rule of law.

You should expect your public sector and your private sector to be hopelessly corrupt and hopelessly bankrupt.

That was the dark vision he ran for president on, and that's the dark vision he won on, and one more vote the second time, the first time.

I thought, there - nobody has done a better job of kind of crystallizing why that came about in my view than Michael Sandel, who is a professor who wrote a book called the "Tyranny of Merit: Can we Find the Common Good" and that's pretty good question, I think.

- And you give a great preface into the book.

- What's a summary and key takeaways, and then we will go deeper?

- His base -- there's so many dimensions of what he's trying to argue, but I would say, first of all, he points out we're not a meritocracy.

Which we're not.

Anyone who -- I was the superintendent of the Denver public schools.

Anyone who spent time working with kids in an urban school district, I think, has a sense of the profound inequality that exists in this country and the profound talent, you know, that is being ground up by institutions that aren't working as well as they should be, and that case -- the educational system -- but there are other examples as well.

So, that first argument is we are not a meritocracy.

A lot of people believe that we are.

I share that view.

Then he argues we shouldn't want to be a meritocracy.

- Which is -- when the book gets very interesting.

- And that argument basically, he says, if you live in a place where you think it's a meritocracy, inevitably the people who get to the top think they deserve to be at the top, and the people who are at the bottom think they deserve to be at the bottom.

What he says is that creates too weak a solidarity.

That's the word he uses, too weak a solidarity for us to be able to debate and negotiate the big moral questions that we have to move the country forward as a democracy.

And, you know, I still don't necessarily know whether I agree with him on the we shouldn't be a meritocracy point.

I do think that -- that his weak solidarity point is an important one and where -- what he concludes, and I share this view, I think, is that it's really important for us to have a democracy and an economy where everybody feels like they have a productive role.

Everybody has the chance not to just be a consumer, you know, in what has become, unfortunately for too many people -- an economy dominated by dollar stores and the rest, and instead be in an economy where people can really feel like they can make a productive contribution.

Not just to the economy but also to the democracy.

- So, I want to go a little bit deeper.

You have had a long, illustrious career leading up to your time in the Senate.

Previously you were superintendent of Denver public schools, and you talked about a note that Sandel makes of meritocracy is an illusion.

Go a little bit deeper there and -- how did this book sort of represent what you saw on the ground?

- You know, one of the things -- Barack Obama wrote in a book that he wrote once.

He said the best thing about being in the Senate is you can get your phone call returned by anyone in the world at least once.

They might not call you back again, but they -- they -- but they will call you back once.

- Did you make a phone call to Cambridge?

- I did.

So I called Michael Sandel, and that's what I do.

I call.

When I read a book that I love or am really interested in, you know, I call the author and say, any time you are going to be in DC or in Colorado, you know, let me know.

In Michael's case, we were in covid, and he is a pre-- he is an eminent guy, a philosopher.

He was in Spain and living in an incredibly beautiful place.

He let me spend an hour and a half, you know, in a conversation with him on a Saturday morning just talking through -- talking through his book.

- And so, normally, I would want to go deeper in your background, but I'm fascinated by this conversation.

For everybody who hasn't read the book, this came out in 2020.

- Right.

- And to your point, he was trying to, in many ways, analyze what had happened in 2016.

- Yeah.

- And he came up with sort of this theory that, you know, we over-deliver or we over-talk about meritocracy, right?

And that has a disastrous consequence, particularly for the people that fell on the wrong side of it.

- So one of the interesting things about education -- that was ask you asked, soft of drifted off on you, was his whole perspective is higher ed, and in fact, it's really the Ivy League.

- Correct.

He is an Ivy League professor.

And what is not mentioned in this book at all is K-12 education or the state of our K-12 system.

That was fascinating because we then had a conversation where he sort of could illuminate some more of this stuff that he was thinking about from the higher ed perspective, and his conclusions were, you know, maybe we should have much better vocational education, much better opportunity for people to be able to, you know, get into -- be able to go to the Ivy League which -- the numbers here are shameful in terms of what -- what the most elite universities in America are doing with respect to the poorest people in the country.

That is nothing, basically.

People that -- these institutions that have more than any other institutions in the country really aren't doing anything to help us solve this income inequality that we have.

What he hadn't seen was how tough the results are, and so we talked about, you know, Raj Chetty's data, for example, that shows that when you look at the lack of preschool in this country, the lack of quality -- of our K-12 system and the lack of access to higher ed you discover that our education systems actually reinforce the income inequality we have instead of liberating people from their circumstances.

So it's one more, you know, so -- people might make the argument to me, Michael Bennet, I don't like your Bolshevik child tax credit, you know, let's -- let's -- the education system should take care of all this, and my answer is let's fix the education system because we got to give people more opportunity.

What I said to Sandel was, you know, in my mind, one of the most significant things we could do for kids is say to kids that we are going to have an expectation that's real that if you are graduating with a High School diploma in this country, you should graduate with the skills to earn a living wage, not just the minimum wage.

So that you begin to build wealth over the course of your lifetime.

Meaning that alone would transform the lives of millions of Americans and transform the American economy, but it was invisible to him.

So, it was just -- I mean, it was -- interesting.

He actually -- he -- the end of it, he said I'm coming to Aspen Institute in -- June, I think it was.

He said will you be on a panel with me and I did -- so I ended up at the Aspen Institute with him.

- That's amazing.

- Interviewing him about his book.

- Another part that he talks about, which we see with trying to get people interested in reading, is that there is this notion of if you are doing a certain job, maybe you are on the wrong side of this sort of meritocracy spectrum.

We see the same thing with reading where if people aren't traditionally reading the canonical books, they don't consider themselves to be readers.

Give me some thoughts or at least how Sandel viewed this notion as of depending on what your role was in society, how you viewed yourself, and did you see that percolating during your days as a superintendent - One of the things he is very critical of is what he describes as the neo-liberal kind of orthodoxy that began with Regan and went through Clinton and some other stuff where, you know, among other -- among many other things, you know, we basically privileged people in America that wanted to make stuff as cheaply as possible in China or Southeast Asia over lots of other choices we could have made like protecting our own supply chains, like our national security, like having decent wages, you know in our country so people could actually afford to support a family.

One of the things he says is we are never going to be satisfied just as a nation of consumers.

We have to feel like, as I said earlier, we are making a productive contribution and that whether people are working in this bookstore or teaching in the Denver public schools or, you know -- or providing people mental health services on the western slope that they are providing a productive role.

I think part of that is what people learn.

That's not the only thing, but the idea that you know, I mean again, they go back to schools.

The idea that the Colorado teacher of the year this year who is from Glenwood Springs, and she came to see me when I was in DC because she is getting an award there.

In passing, she wasn't even complaining; she said 70 to 80% of the teachers in my middle school and in my High School have to work two and three jobs just to live in Glenwood Springs.

You know, when I was the superintendent in Denver, I never met a teacher who didn't live in Denver because who wouldn't want to live close to the school where they were teaching?

Now, if you are a teacher in Denver, you can't afford to live in Denver.

You now -- you have to live far away.

Now you have to work two or three jobs, and pretty soon, you feel like you just can't get ahead.

I think a lot of Americans feel that way because of an economy that is working incredibly well for the top 10%, in fact, the top .

1, top 1, the top 5%, but hasn't really worked for 90% of the American people who feel like they can't afford housing, they can't afford health care, they can't afford education or early childhood education.

When you are in a situation like that, as I said earlier, I think that is when a democracy begins to unravel and when people that don't have the interest of the democracy at heart have a tendency to try to overturn things.

- That is a great opportunity to go into your passage.

You have selected a part of the book that you would like to read.

- Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's kind of -- I could have picked a bunch of different things here, but I thought this one sort of captured the kind of indictment of what I'm trying to figure out.

- Sure.

- So I thought it was -- thing that might be interesting to read.

"One of the failures -- one of the failures of the well-credentialed meritocratic elites who have governed for the past four decades is that they have not done a very -- they have not done very well at putting questions such as these," moral questions, "at the heart of political debate.

Now, as we find ourselves wondering whether Democratic norms will survive, complaints about the hubris of meritocratic elites and the narrowness of their technocratic vision may seem trifling, but there's the politics that led to this moment, that produced the discontent that populous authoritarians exploit.

Facing up to the failures of meritocracy and technocracy is an indispensable step toward addressing that discontent.

and reimagining a politics of the common good".

- So good.

- It is so good.

- It's great and, you know, for those who haven't read it, I encourage you to.

Michael Sandel one of the great political philosophers of our day.

There are some very interesting theses that he presents throughout the book.

You are a lifelong reader.

You are an author as well.

Let go back a little to your childhood.

What inspired you when you were growing up, and how did reading help cultivate you to be successful?

- You know I was an -- my mom was a school librarian, an elementary school librarian, and so we had, among other things, a rule in our house that you could watch ten hours -- you could watch one hour of television a day, but if you saved up ten hours of TV you would get a book.

I was enough of a sucker, rule follower, I don't know which it was -- one or the other that I did that often, you know?

Every now and then, my brother and I would watch an episode of Star Trek and lose -- you would lose the ten hours.

She -- she wasn't just, you know -- she didn't just care about reading.

She also -- she had -- she was a librarian.

She was a professional, and she had a passion for children's literature and for -- and for reading and just -- and both my parents read a lot, and I have always read a lot.

I mean, I -- when I was, even to this day, when I first got into the Senate, I spent my flights back and forth from DC, you know, reading the newspapers or reading the news or reading an article or reading stuff that my staff was working on.

About ten years ago, I stopped, and I started reading books on those flights.

I have, you know, people say, oh, man, it must be terrible to be on that airplane.

I have eight hours a week when I'm reading stuff that most people I know never have the time to do that.

A lot of it is kind of in this vein because I am -- I want to really figure out -- I believe so strongly that -- that the election of Donald Trump was such a wrong direction for this country.

I feel so worried that -- that the democracy is fragile, that our economy is not working well enough for enough people in this country that -- that is has led me to read this stuff.

I feel very optimistic that we are going to figure it out.

You know?

- And are there any books that sort of hit that level of optimism or propose things that you are in favor of it?

- I mean, I think Sandel's book, in the end, is optimistic.

In the end, he says -- as I said, we have to find a productive role for people.

We have to come to the make -- you know, make tough moral decisions, and that's what we have to make.

I mean, one of the things that I -- I say to people in my town halls all the time, all the time for 14 years saying to people, we didn't -- this country was not created on the idea that we would agree with each other.

It's created on the -- with the notion that we would disagree with each other, and out of this disagreement, we would create more imaginative and more durable solutions than any king or tyrant could come up with on their own.

That is what democracy is supposed to be about.

That's why we live in a democracy.

If you want to live in a place where everybody agrees with each other, then the only place you will find that is possible is a totalitarian society.

We see that in Russia and China today.

You know, I think we have got something else to offer here because of our abundant natural resources, because of the innovation in the United States, but there's some things that we have to do, you know?

We have to create an economy that, when it grows it, grows for everybody again.

We have to make this energy transition that's so critically important to our kid's future.

We have to have an immigration system that actually makes sense and continues to drive economic growth as it has for the entire history of this country.

You know we have to educate people in America so that they can fulfill their potential.

The good news for all of us is there's no shortage of stuff to do.

I mean, we are going to spend the rest of our lives -- I think, saving this democracy.

I think that's, you know, that's a worthy enterprise.

- This is a -- a softball question, but, you know, as you noted, country -- many ways founded on this notion of debate, some would say that debate has become polarization.

Do you find books as a possibility of that bridge?

You know you are -- you are in Washington.

You are seeing a lot of that polarization.

What is the role of literature?

- I wrote a book.

You mentioned that earlier when we were talking about that, which I appreciate that.

Many people -- read my book as voted for me in my presidential campaign.

- Your debut was at Tattered Cover.

- It was, and I really -- I mean, I like the book very much.

At the end of the book, it -- like it mostly because I know my kids will know what I thought about all of this stuff someday, and that means a lot to me.

But, I have a -- the book is all -- there's -- so much literature in that book that is -- that I -- that I quote and that's included throughout American history, and at the end of it, I say that the best moments for me in a town hall in Colorado is very often when I'm in a red part of the state but not always, is when someone comes up at the end of the conversation and says to me, you are obviously reading something different than what I'm reading.

What are you reading?

And then I will say this is what I'm reading.

What are you reading?

So at the end of my book, I included a bunch of stuff for further reading for people that are interested in -- you know, the kinds of --.

- What were some of those books?

- Well, Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Between the World and Me," Ta-Nehisi Coates "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy," C.L.R.

James' incredible book about the Haitian revolution, David Blight's book about Frederick Douglas, I mean the list goes on and on and on.

- You have to buy the book to get the list.

I understand.

- No, and you should buy -- you should -- you know, buy the book and get the list because, you know, it's -- the list is -- in my mind is a love letter to democracy.

It is a love letter to America.

I think that reading books is an essential part of, you know, of our -- of citizenship.

One of the things I conclude in my book is that you know, the way we need to think about ourselves as citizens and the role we play as citizens is as founders of this country.

We have to think of ourselves in that elevated way because, you know, that is the responsibility that we bear.

We can be good founders, and we can be bad founders.

You know,?

Something like Frederick Douglas, who -- there's a great example of someone completely self-taught.

Born a slave in Maryland, was taught how to read in Baltimore by the person that his owner had shipped him to until the -- until the husband, you know, stopped it.

But then he was just reading and reading and reading.

Escapes and ends up going to Massachusetts, where he meets with the abolitionist movement there.

I think it was on Martha's Vineyard.

And he basically said to them what is your argument?

What is the argument you are making?

They said the argument we are making is that the constitution is a pro-slavery document, and this guy, Frederick Douglas, born a slave, completely self-taught, said to these abolitionists, because of what he had read, says to them you have it exactly wrong.

The constitution is an anti-slavery document.

We are not living up to the words of the constitution.

I just think the power of that, of being able to make an argument like that based on the knowledge he acquired, is the way, you know, we are going to make progress in this democracy because our entire -- the entire history of this country is -- has been a battle between the highest ideals that have ever been written down on a page, the constitution that Frederick Douglas was talking ability, and the worst impulses in human history, something Frederick Douglas knew well, in our case, human slavery ask that battle in different forms exists to this day and that's why it's important to understand where we have come from because that's how you figure out where you are going.

- Amazing.

This has been a wonderful conversation.

Last question for you.

In 2010 you had a Commercial that I feel like has been -- it's a part of the political canon where your daughters.

- Yeah.

- Were campaigning for you.

What are they reading right now?

- They are -- they are -- that's a great question.

So, my oldest daughter, Caroline, is a senior in college.

She is studying history.

She is -- she is spending a lot of time reading about great powers, kind of the strategy stuff.

She -- I was telling one of her friends or -- I told Caroline about this book, and one of her -- her friends rolled his eyes about it.

He didn't think much of Michael Sandel as I did.

She is more important than what she is reading because of what she has read.

She is recently written a really long paper about Denver as a port city.

She took a class called port cities and said to her professor I want to argue that Denver is a port city.

The professor said you're crazy.

She said I'm going to make this argument, and she not only made the argument but the sources she saw -- the original sources in Denver from the founders here.

They were arguing that we were a port city.

They were saying Columbus had run -- had stopped and that we were the port that was going to get us to India.

That's -- one example.

My daughter, Helena, is my next kid is -- reading literature and history, and she is the editor for her school newspaper.

- Cool.

- And spent the summer writing newspaper articles in Brunswick -- or in Portland, Maine.

And my 17-year-old is -- I don't know.

She is -- she is actually she is 18 years old first of all.

Secondly of all, because she is 18 years old, she won't tell me what she is reading.

- Understood.

So, senator, Michael Bennett, thank you very much.

- Thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.

- Thank you.

And thank you for watching, everybody.

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