(inspiring music) (inspiring music fades down) - America's like a dysfunctional couple on the way to divorce court.

For the past 30 years, we've been mired in an endless war that's undermined the idea of a shared America and damaged our souls.

Today our distinguished bipartisan panel weighs in on what's really at stake in the nation's culture war.

Joining us are James Davison Hunter, sociologist and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, Dana Nessel, Michigan Attorney General, Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, and author of "Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All," And Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers.

And we're honored to have you all with us.

And James, I'm going to start with you.

30 years ago you wrote a book about the conflict over flashpoint issues, the politics of abortion, of race, of gay rights, the same issues dividing people today.

Back then, activists told you they felt like they were in a war.

So you called your book "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America."

You say we've doubled down on the war part, that today fear is our common culture.

Explain.

- Well, first of all, I think that the roots of the culture war go back even further than 30 years.

This is a culture war in two senses.

It's a culture war in the sense of a conflict over cultural issues, a political conflict over cultural issues.

And that means there's a mobilization of resources, of political parties and the like around certain kinds of issues, different sides of different issues.

But there's a culture war going on at a different level.

And that's really not the politics of culture, but the culture of politics.

And by that I mean the culture, the cultural assumptions, the cultural imagination that under, underwrites political imaginary to begin with.

The culture of politics is really a much deeper conflict and one of the reasons why we can't talk to each other.

So the culture war has intensified over the last 35 years, 40 years.

And even as it's intensified, it's also changed.

It's been reoriented.

And I think part of the common culture under all of it is a common culture of fear.

- Alright, because I can remember growing up, and there were controversies about prayer in the school and about civil rights and, you know, racial equality, but people weren't like going for each other's throats.

I mean, it was a different dynamic.

You didn't have that level of vitriol.

And you're saying that because everything has become so highly politicized, that's the difference?

- Well, there's always a political dimension to it.

I think that we've lost a common political and cultural language across America.

There used to be a deeply flawed, but nevertheless, common political culture that competing sides could work within.

It contained our differences.

That common culture has largely disappeared.

And as a consequence, we are left with our competing interests, oppositional interests, but no way of speaking to each other.

- Randi, you come from a proud tradition of teaching.

Your mother was a teacher, you're a teacher, yet former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo called you, you're smiling, the most dangerous person in the world, which is a big title right?

Now, he did this to attack basically the teacher's union and to make you the face of that, but also to attack what he called, and I'm using the word that he used, which is "filth" that's being taught in our schools.

And the reason you're so dangerous is that you and the union are going to undermine our republic.

What's up?

I mean, what is that about?

- Well, I think, as James was saying, think about it, "fear, teaching filth, most dangerous."

There's a sense of, "Oh my God, what's happening in schools?

What's going on?

How are they doing this stuff?"

And as opposed to what we teach is knowledge, is empathy, is understanding, it's bringing the pluralism and making it real.

But there is this fight right now, and I often talk about it, and I was so glad to hear what James was saying as this race between hope and fear and the tribalism that happens right now.

There's not a lot of places where people who are different actually mix with each other.

And public schooling is one of those few places.

- Let's take sex education as an example.

There's always been a tug of war back and forth.

Parents, they're not quite sure how much they want the kids to know.

Again, the dynamic is very, very different now.

And you have parents.

Who are legitimately concerned about the notion of, you know, proposals with transgender kids using bathrooms and all this stuff.

And they really are concerned about the kids and trying to be sensitive.

What's the role of that, do you think in this?

- So I think that, look, go back to the Scopes trial and Darwinism and the teaching of evolution.

Go back to what happened during the HIV-AIDS crisis.

There's always been tough crises within schooling that we have had to mediate and navigate.

And so one of the things that is actually right about what you hear underlying the parent, right movements, is that parents need more agency.

They just, like, teachers need more agency.

There needs to be more conversations.

Schools need to be trusting environments.

And so the processes by which you approve a book, you do a curriculum, there needs to be real transparency about it.

The problem is that when you end up doing a book ban or you censor education or history, there's a whole lot of other parents who are saying, "What happened to my kids?"

But what we really in every one of these situations, whether it was sex ed, whether it was, you know, any conversation about labor rights, about gay rights, whether it's conversations about biology, about COVID, conversations any day.

When something terrible happens in the world as a school teacher, what do you teach your kids?

How do you approach it?

All of these things -- underlining throughline, teachers and parents need to have a voice at the table, so that there's trust.

So even if you disagree on an issue, if you trust each other to be doing the best interests for a student or for a child, you are going to be able to be successful.

- Dana, you are the first Jewish person ever to be elected as Michigan's Attorney General.

You're also the first openly gay individual to be elected to that post.

And your job is really to protect the public interest of all Michiganders.

And yet you have been caught in this cultural conflagration.

You and your family have received death threats.

And I guess I want to ask you, what is at the heart of that sort of attack on you, a stranger?

These folks don't know you.

What drives that?

- I think really, when you're talking about any of these issues, when we really saw a change in America, in my state, in the world, I think social media drives a lot of this in the way that people are siloed.

And if I could just say, I remember back, you know, when I became an attorney in the 1990s, I worked as a prosecutor and later as a defense attorney in the biggest courthouse in Michigan, the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit.

And every day we would see people who were of all faiths and all sexual orientations and you know, all, you know, ethnic backgrounds.

But we didn't know really that much about each other, except for that we interacted with clerks and deputies and judges and opposing counsel.

And you got to know people really just as people.

You talked about things like, you know, your kids, and where you went on vacation, and just sort of those kind of mundane trivialities of life before you ever knew if somebody was a Democrat or a Republican or if they were gay or any of those things.

So that later on if you did learn that stuff, you already knew that person and you could say, "Well, I don't want to do anything that is hateful or discriminatory against that person because I now know them as a human being."

But we start off in a place now where, I mean, upon first contact, like you already know everything about a person, and you already have these misconceptions, these perceived misconceptions that have been, I think, exploited, frankly, from America's enemies who want to drive these wedges and these divisions.

And we never really get to know each other as human beings anymore.

And I think that the internet, again, has allowed people to threaten public officials in a way that they feel is fairly anonymous, that they could never do it in previous times.

And it's just, I don't know, it's exploded into so much hatred and divisiveness and animosity, and I wish we could go back in time and just not have social media anymore.

I think we'd be in a very different place.

- James, I see you're wanting.

Just go ahead, please.

- No, I agree.

I think that's exactly right.

I don't think that social media is at the heart of the cultural conflict, but it aggravates it.

It intensifies it.

It makes us abstractions of the real human beings.

And I think that a big part of what we need to recover, and I'm not even sure it's possible, but it is to remember that there are human beings underneath the abstractions that are used in social media.

We forget that.

Dana's absolutely right about that.

- Suzanne, I want to ask you, you wrote an op-ed, in which you quoted Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, who wrote the holocaust classic "Maus," who talked about the fact that he's never lived in such a Orwellian society, that it's not about right versus left, that this is a culture war that's spun out of control.

And his fear is that the real casualty is going to be freedom of speech.

How worried are you about that?

- No, I'm very worried.

I am the CEO of PEN America.

Our mission is focused on freedom of speech, and we see it as being under threat from the left and the right.

On the left, we have people calling for books and journalists and entire perspectives, viewpoints, to be shunted out of our discourse.

We have people piling on online to stigmatize and expose and humiliate individuals with whom they may disagree.

And coming from the right, we are dealing with this ferocious movement to ban books and curriculum in our schools and in higher education, shunting whole ideas and ways of thinking, whole subject matters, identities, to the margins within our schools.

And my deepest fear is really that we're at risk of losing a rising generation to the principle of free speech, that young people are increasingly alienated from the idea of free speech.

They believe, on the one hand, that free speech is just a smoke screen for hatred.

It's that which enables those who are against them to menace them and make them feel uncomfortable.

And on the right that that free speech, you know, has to be pushed to the wayside in the name of trying to defend, you know, some notion of a golden age of society that people worry is slipping away.

And, you know, in terms of our democracy, I believe free speech is at the bedrock of it.

And that if we cannot shore it up, you know, none of our institutions and none of our constitutional principles will be safe.

- Randi, the whole notion also of disinformation plays an enormous role.

You're living in a, you know, post-truth era where people can't agree on the facts and that just exacerbates the situation.

- Well, I think there's two.

twin issues that we have to grapple with.

One is this issue about free speech, but the other is this issue about humankind and human beings, meaning that there is this, and Dana just said it, there's this intensity that you are already on a different side, if you are different by nature of religion, sex, on and on and on and on, if you believe in public schools or if you don't believe in public schools, if you are in the south, or if you're in the north, if you are a Republican or you are a Democrat.

And so that absence of empathy or that absence of actually listening to each other.

So there's a humankind issue, that pluralism of America.

So in America, we always had this issue about rugged individualism versus the collective.

You know, Reagan versus FDR.

But what happened is that there was still a sense of what it meant to be an American.

So that, and I want to say that is, I'm not saying that both free speech and empathy have, you know, an equal stance here.

But the issue about empathy, if we don't deal with that, when we immediately get to speech, there's the issue we are living in a fact free society right now.

So how do you then mediate through that if you can't have people even speak to each other.

- Can't wait to get to the solutions section of this show.

Oh boy.

(Randi laughing) Dana, you know, you were inspired by Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and the story of Exodus because you wanted to help people fight discrimination.

And you have talked about the fact that people, we don't humanize each other anymore.

We're living in a time where each side sees the other as an existential threat, and there's an assumption made going in that they're going to destroy the other, one side's going to destroy the other.

Now, how do you deal with that?

- Well, let me say this as a sort of a microcosm in terms of solutions.

And I think that to some extent, believe it or not, I think I have found some degree of a solution, just internally, when it comes to my department, the Michigan Department of Attorney General, for better or for worse, we have civil service for all but five employees in the department, which means that, you know, a Democrat can't just come in and fire all the staffers that were hired by my Republican predecessors, for instance.

So I came in and I had all these individuals that were conservative Republicans, which my two, you know, predecessors as Michigan AGs were.

And you know, I said like, "Are you going to want to work with me?

You know, are you going to want to stay in the office?

I'm a progressive democrat."

And these folks were like, "Yes, we like working here.

We want to try to work with you."

And so, you know, what I did is I developed very close relationships with these very conservative Republicans, many of whom I actually was on the other side of cases when I was in private practice fighting against the Michigan Department of Attorney General.

And I think we've learned from each other.

I think that many of my staffers maybe have changed their views on a few different subjects.

But also, you know, I get to hear the other side of it as well from people that I know I like and I respect.

And so my solicitor general, who is the top appellate official in my state, she's a Catholic, a very devout Catholic, a conservative Republican.

Same thing with my deputy solicitor general.

Whereas my chief deputy in the office is a Muslim woman who immigrated here from Lebanon, is actually very progressive.

Sometimes, you know, they change our opinion.

Sometimes we change their opinion.

Yes, at the end of the day, I'm their boss.

So I guess I have the final say, but I always want to hear what they have to say because sometimes it does influence me and change my mind about how I want to handle a particular matter.

And that's just a microcosm of, you know, solutions as to ways to listen to each other and, you know, see each other as less of as caricatures and more like just real people.

But I wish we could do that on a larger scale somehow.

- I want to go back, James, to sort of the genesis.

Let's go back to the last 30 years.

I know this predates that, but the culture wars predate that.

But initially in reading what you've written, basically the catalyst was Roe v. Wade.

I mean, that seemed to be the lightning rod that started this off.

And then, as you say, that gradually gave way to racial equity, you know, conflict over racial equity and the Black Lives Matter movement.

And my question is, now that Roe has been overturned, has there been a shift back to that or not?

- I think it's bigger than that, Jane.

Roe v. Wade was a flashpoint, and it became an issue when it was nationalized through the Supreme Court.

That's when the politics of abortion became really intense.

And it was really the flashpoint of a larger debate about sexuality, about the family.

You might remember back in the late 1970s and early 1980s into the rest of that decade, all the talk about family values.

Abortion was a window into that.

And it extended into a whole range of family related matters.

Most of the early years of the culture war in fact didn't address race at all.

It was mostly a conflict within the white middle class.

And it wasn't that race wasn't an issue.

It just wasn't elevated into the kind of intense debate that it did after the murder of George Floyd.

- I have to ask you, James, 'cause you've been observing this really closely, does the intensity of this surprise even you or not?

- It does, and I think that's part of what's changed in the last 30 to 40 years.

I would mention a couple of things.

One is the end of the Cold War.

With the Cold War, for the most part, left and right had a common enemy.

And when the Cold War came to an end, instead of finding an enemy outside of the United States, people turned inward to the enemy within.

That was one factor.

Another factor was some of the great successes that progressivism had through the 1990s and 2000s, in particular, gay rights.

This was long the bete noir of conservative Christians.

So the success of gay rights was an important factor.

The third element that intensified things was the Great Recession, because in the Great Recession, progressives for the most part, who were now more and more representative of the well-educated, professional, and managerial class, they survived it relatively well.

The middle, lower middle, and working classes have never really recovered from the Great Recession, and its horizons of opportunity have continued to shrink, which leads to the fourth factor, which was Donald Trump himself, because though he was a man of great privilege, he understood both the cultural and economic resentments of the working and lower middle classes and played them with insolant ease.

I think those are some of the larger macro factors that have contributed to the intensification of this conflict.

- I want to mention one other factor, which Dana, I know has a real, I was going to say passion, I'm not sure that's the right word, but given that you are a member of two minority communities, basically, you have a real strong feeling about the separation of church and state, and that's something that has also changed recently, given some of the Supreme Court decisions.

Would you comment on that?

- Yeah, well it's essentially this novel idea, and I know, I feel like I have a good command as to how it came about, having tried the marriage equality case in Michigan, the third, and what I hope to be final time, that a case of marriage equality is tried in a state or federal court in America.

But you know what essentially happened is that, you know, you had folks who were on the losing end of a lot of LGBTQ cases and issues and, you know, decided that the best way to fight back for those who opposed the advancement of LGBTQ rights was to take the First Amendment, and instead of using it as it had traditionally been used as a shield against discrimination, to use it, instead, as a sword to skewer those that you oppose.

And we've seen this, of course, in all the major LGBTQ cases and most recently of course, when we're talking about whether or not non-discrimination laws can be utilized to protect gays, lesbians, transgender people.

And now this novel idea that, again, is fairly recent where, you know, the Supreme Court has essentially said that you can discriminate against someone based on their sexual orientation or their gender identity if somehow your religious beliefs feel compromised by that.

And so I think that quite honestly, I feel like that's done grave damage to the advancements that were made.

And now, you know, whether or not somebody wants to serve me a cup of coffee, you know, it can somehow turn into, well, by me having to serve you a cup of coffee, somehow that, you know, is compromised in my religious beliefs, then really, you know, any civil rights issues, I think start to fall by the wayside in some way, shape, or form.

And I think that's incredibly damaging and a great concern to me.

- I want to get to Suzanne in a second because you track the rise of book bans and parental groups that are leading that sort of initiative, Suzanne, but I want to start with Randi, because you say that basically what's going on is, and you mentioned it earlier, it's to sow distrust, mistrust, fear.

It's to basically, I mean, you say this is really almost a strategy to get rid of public education?

- I mean, there's three wars going on right now.

There's the political war, that's division, division, division.

There's the culture war that, you know, James and others have talked about.

And there's the privatization war that we have had for many years, particularly in the aftermath of Brown v. Board in the 50s.

That's what's going on in terms of these universal voucher cases.

I did the exercise of looking at the curriculum that I taught at Clare Bryan in high school in Brooklyn, New York.

And by the way, Dana, I used to teach the "To Kill a Mockingbird" to my street law class to show what law, legal, what courts were like to my essentially, you know, African American street law class and AP gov class.

But I went back to my curriculum from the 1990s and probably three quarters of it, my AP curriculum, three quarters of it, I would not be able to teach in Texas or Florida right now.

And this is in the 1990s, and no one had a problem with it.

In fact, my parents of my kids, we went and debated the Bill of Rights, and they were proud of their kids for being able to have differing views from each other and do these debates.

- But Suzanne, you're going to tell us that the rise of parental choice groups and school choice groups is really an explosion almost, and increasingly they're having success in elections.

I think it's fair to say that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngen won based on a platform of promoting parental rights.

Talk about that and tell us how you see it.

- I think there are kind of three convergent strands here, and I would add to what was mentioned before in terms of what is intensified polarization, the pandemic and just the disruption of education, learning loss, the challenges that parents faced, in terms of how to shepherd their children through that very difficult period.

And it did intensify resentment in some places between parents, teachers, and schools.

You know, here in New York City, there was a lot of consternation.

I will say the big difference is when the pandemic was over, when the schools reopened, you know, we got over it and we moved on.

And I think what we've seen in other parts of the country is that that pandemic related tension melded in with a concern about the pace of social change.

And we've touched on this some in the conversation, social media, the degree to which parents no longer control the flow of information to their own children.

Overwhelmingly that flow is happening online.

Parents may not even be able to see it.

And you know, with this sense of loss of control is an intensified drive to put your hands on that which you think you can control.

And that has played out in our schools.

And part of is a sense that social change is moving too quickly, that there are new identities, new ways of living that are coming into and manifesting in people's own families and people's own children.

They're not sure what to make of it.

They're made uncomfortable by it, they're not sure where those ideas are coming from, what influences are at play, and you know, some of that is just natural struggles of parenting and a reprise of things we've seen in prior eras.

But what is different here is that it has become fodder for an organized, concerted movement that comes under the rubric sometimes of parental rights, but it really has nothing to do with parental rights.

It's about asserting the ideology of the minority over the majority.

You know, this is not about parents opening up their kids' backpack and finding something that they think is not quite right or age appropriate.

This is about a movement aimed to intimidate teachers, to disrupt education, to box out certain narratives and identities from our classrooms.

So I think it's very important to understand it for what it is.

- Well, at the risk of sounding like little Mary Sunshine, James, aren't there concerned parents who I mean, you know, look, it's like a crazy world.

You've got social media.

You've got all these different variables.

You've got AI coming.

It's really a lot.

And I guess James, what I want to I ask you is how much of this do you see as really political, and how much of it comes out of parents who are just angsting out over all of, you know, these new developments?

- Well, look, our politics today have become a symbolic politics.

And part of the conflict over education, parents' rights and so on, is ultimately about the nature of education, not what it does on a daily basis, but what it symbolizes.

Schools are the primary institution in which a national culture reproduces, generation after generation.

And part of what animates the conflict over the schools, are competing ideas and hopes about American society, what it will become.

And parents are caught in the middle of that, in part because at the same time we have this kind of this epistemological anarchy.

There is no common authority by which anyone can agree on anything.

We no longer believe in God across the country in the same ways.

So God is no longer a common authority.

We no longer believe in a common humanism.

It's no longer a foundation of authority by which we can resolve disputes.

Science is completely disputed.

So what common authority can bring us together by which we can sort through things.

The other element to this is that progressives, for the most part, dominate the leading culture forming institutions of American society.

They are overwhelmingly influential in higher education, in science and technology, in advertising and entertainment, in social media and so on.

And what are the institutions over which conservatives have any remaining influence?

Well, it's mostly local politics, local and national politics.

And so they play that card, the political card, because it's really the only set of tools that they have at the national and local level to influence our public culture.

So it is ironically a movement that was always about small government is now playing the political and governmental card to the max.

And I think to their own discredit.

- I do at this point want to turn to more solutions and how you all see this as being something that we can approach step by step.

And Dana, James just raised the whole issue of conservatives serve on school boards.

They get elected.

It may not be sexy, I shouldn't say that, but you know what I mean.

Sorry.

(Randi laughing) Well, you know, everybody wants, and national federal politics.

- Don't worry, somebody will ban you for saying that.

- Probably, I'll be canceled.

It's okay.

But the point I'm making very seriously is that they, conservatives knew that that's where they could, as James was talking about, get power.

So this is really about winning elections as much as anything.

Right?

- Well, I mean, yes and no, I guess, right?

Because, you know, I will say that, you know, right now, so here in the state of Michigan, we've had some, you know, substantial changes in the last 10 years, right?

We have, well, an entirely democratic government right now for the first time, I think in my lifetime.

So all of our executive office holders at the statewide level, both our United States senators, our legislature has flipped from red to blue, but yet we're still a state that's really sort of tearing apart at the seams in many ways because we are a purple state, even if right now the Democrats have been more successful in elections.

And I think that we can talk about abortion as being a primary motivator for that.

You know, having rights that have been stripped away after some 50 years, I think motivated a lot of people to come out to the polls and vote for Democrats, both nationally, but certainly in the state of Michigan.

But I will say what's so difficult about this conversation about education is the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, you know, who long has been a critic of vaccines, and I don't just mean COVID vaccines, I'm talking about measles, mumps, you know, polio, has struck out and said one of the biggest problems about public schools is how they teach Darwinism, how they teach evolution.

And I just, you know, I don't even know where to go with this because, you know, we're really talking about, you know, a hundred years or more of scientific advancements all of a sudden having at least the people who are in charge of the Republican party in our state saying, "Well, we're going to throw all of that away.

We're going to throw all of that out."

But that being the case, there are so many things that we should be able to get behind together.

And I know in my state right now, you know, I'm working really hard to make changes as it pertains to protection of seniors in a way that should be completely nonpartisan.

- Right.

- And yet I have Republicans fighting me, just because I'm a Democrat, and they don't want to work with me, irrespective of really, you know, how we should all care about seniors because whether you're a democrat, an independent or Republican, we either are seniors or are going to be seniors, we hope one day.

But it's just sort of, you know, a reflection of the fact that we can't seem to get along when it comes to anything anymore.

And if we don't make substantive changes to that soon, we are just going to lose our democracy.

We're going to lose America as we know it.

And everything we love about this country will no longer exist.

- So I do still think, James, that there are things that bind Americans together, a sense that our kids should do better than our generation, a sense of a better life, a sense that in a democracy, and no one has ever accused me of being naive or wearing rose colored glasses, but a sense of how do we create a better life for ourselves in our communities?

How do we help kids become readers?

How do we actually bring together the science of reading and trying not to make that political, how do we give teachers tools like on disinformation or on reading?

How do we create wrap around services, around schools so we have a welcoming and safe environment in a school and bring parents in so they feel that community regardless of party.

And last, how do we really not only deal with learning loss and loneliness, as I was talking about earlier in terms of the wraparound services, but how do we actually make schools fun and interesting for kids, and have the practical skills that actually kids who are aspiring, and families who are aspiring to the middle class, so that they're prepared for college and career?

So that is what our attention is right now in terms of really dealing with and meeting people where they are, particularly kids, and listening, because as you learned as a school teacher a long time ago, it's not what's said, it's what's heard.

- [Jane] Right.

- That's our campaign this year.

And we're spending the time, all year long seeding, sustaining, scaling, these kind of education initiatives: wraparound services, practical skills, experiential learning and literacy, literacy, literacy.

- Right.

Suzanne, if you could make a first step, in terms of improving on what's happening in this country, what would it be?

- You know, probably long term, I would say doing a much better job teaching our kids to navigate the information ecosystem that they inhabit.

You know, we give kids 12 years of education on English language and literature, which is wonderful.

We should never back away from that.

I think they need at least, you know, Randi would determine how exactly how much, but four or five years of a course on how to digest what you're taking in from social media, how do I understand where it comes from, how to seek out the information that is credible, how to detect information that is false or misleading.

The pace of the distribution of that information is only going to accelerate.

I think this is a generational thing.

I think it should be embedded in every public school curriculum.

We've made some progress, but we have not scaled this to anywhere near the level that I think is necessary to equip kids to deal with the world that they're living in and figure out how to find trustworthy, reliable information.

In the immediate term, I see no alternative to leadership.

I think we need leadership to stand up to these forces, to stand up for the truth.

There's been a concerted effort.

The reason why experts and scientists and incredible journalists are so distrusted is the result of a concerted campaign waged from the top to convince people that it's fake news, that it's not to be relied on, that they should dismiss everything they hear, call it into question.

And if we don't have leaders standing up on all sides of the political spectrum, that's going to be very hard to reverse.

We need to see some courage, particularly from those on the conservative side.

There's so many who quietly decry all this, but they're afraid to speak up, afraid of the political consequences.

And as long as that is the case, I fear we will be somewhat stuck.

- James, turning to you as the voice of moral leadership here because you're calm, you're really, really calm, and I think that you've studied this problem.

- [Suzanne] Are you saying I'm not calm?

- What?

I'm sorry?

- Are you saying that I'm not calm?

- Yeah, I'm with you.

I get it.

But, you really have studied this problem, and I know you're involved in ethics and religion, and many studies, and how do we break this habit of contempt?

I mean, that's kind of what it is.

It's like the assumption that something should be negative.

How do we start to do that?

- Well, let me first just respond to the first question that you asked about solutions.

And I'll pick up from what Randi said.

I really like what Randi said.

She was offering cultural solutions, not political solutions.

And there are no political or legal solutions to the culture war.

And I'll just give you an example.

Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision tried to unify the nation in the majority opinion on Dred Scott.

And clearly it was a galactic failure.

Four years later we were at war.

Through winning the war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment, slavery was overturned.

But this was also an attempt to provide political and legal solutions to the problem of slavery.

And while reconstruction was not a complete failure, this is a society that had still not worked out the problem of unequal humanity.

And as a consequence, the worst parts of slavery were simply reconstituted into Jim Crow, Code Noir, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan.

And that legacy continued for over a century.

It continues to today.

Let me just fast forward to Roe versus Wade.

Again, an attempt to impose a national solution on a cultural problem, on a nation that hadn't worked through the differences between a woman's right to choose versus the humanity of the unborn.

The overturning of Roe versus Wade clearly changed the terms of the debate, but it didn't resolve the underlying cultural solution.

So we do need to engage each other at a human scale.

We do need to engage each other culturally, and more deeply than we do.

And we we're looking for shortcuts through politics and the law.

And while they have their place, no question about it, these disputes are far more complicated than what the law and what politics can address, and not least of which is the mutual contempt that we have for each other.

These are human issues, not legal and political issues.

- I'm glad you keep clarifying, making that point.

'cause I'm not sure people think about it in those terms.

So that's really, really important.

Dana, you have twin sons in college, Alex and Zach, and I would imagine that watching what you've gone through with death threats, and being attacked and targeted and everything else has been harrowing for them.

But I guess I want to ask you sort of the last question for you is, what do you want them to take away or what are they taking away from growing up in a culture that marginalizes Jewish people, marginalizes gay people very often, how are they growing?

- Well, as is the case with virtually all twins, very differently.

And, you know, one of my kids has gotten very deeply involved in politics and is actually the president of the University Democratic Club.

And the other one wants nothing at all to do with politics whatsoever.

And, you know, can definitely battle about whether or not the Lions are going to, you know, win the Super Bowl, which they are for sure is how we're feeling.

(Randi laughing) - You heard it here, right?

- Never happened before, but it's just about to.

But something struck me that my totally apolitical sports, you know, nut son said to me just yesterday, and that he said something, he has friends who are in Israel, and he just put something out on his social media saying, you know, basically, you know, "I pray for the safety of my friends."

And boy, the vitriol that came back to him.

And he said, "I will never say anything political again out loud, ever, because I don't want, you know, the blow back that we all get from just even voicing our opinions on almost every to topic that there is right now."

And so I really hope that first of all, you know, we need to do something about the algorithms as they appear on social media right now.

That's something that Congress can do.

Congress can pass artificial intelligence technology restrictions that will, you know, at least help to not, you know, widen the divisions that we have, but at the end of the day, we're going to have to have systems in place where people come together, again, not on social media, not on MSNBC or Fox News or anything like that, but just in person together as like human on human, and get to know each other like we used to in the good old days.

Because if we don't do that, if everything is through technology the way that it is right now, and everything can be people being put into silos into one thing or another thing in something we love or something we hate, we'll never solve this crisis that we're in right now.

And I certainly don't have all the solutions, but I just often feel like, boy, if I could just sit down with certain people, and get to know them and have a conversation with them and talk about our families and talk about, you know, what we eat for breakfast and talk about the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance," which is very nonpolitical, but will make you feel better about your life choices if you watch it.

- We'll all be watching.

- Things like that.

(Dana laughing) But things like that, if we can just get to know each other right again, just as people.

And so however we can go about doing that, I think it will really help to heal us culturally and heal us on a national level.

(audience applauding) - James, that's a tough act to follow, but I'm going to ask you, you've been quoted as saying that "Giving up is not an option, that you have to have hope."

You've studied a lot of this problem.

Do you still have hope?

- Well, yeah, because I think that despair is not an option.

I think despair is simply not a democratic option.

It's not a human option.

But we have to realize too, what's at stake.

And what's at stake is that a post-truth democracy is a contradiction in terms.

A democracy without some kind of common hopes, without some kind of sense of a common fate is impossible.

We are at risk of losing our democracy.

It's important to remember that some kind of solidarity is essential in any kind of society, but in especially a democratic society.

And if solidarity can't be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively.

That is a fact.

And both the right and the left have that kind of authoritarian impulse within them, certainly at the extremes.

The other thing that's important to remember, and there's a lot of historical precedence for this, is that culture wars always precede shooting wars.

It doesn't mean a shooting war is necessarily going to happen, but you never have a shooting war, you never have that kind of political violence without a culture war preceding it.

So we've already seen plenty of signs that this is in the offing, that this is an option that's being considered by factions on all sides of the culture war, and most prominently right now, certainly from the right.

- [Jane] Right.

- So there's an awful lot at stake.

And I do believe, I love some of the things that Dana said about engaging each other at a human level of changing the algorithms.

The problem is that so many of those initiatives to transcend the warring hegemonic projects, they're mostly local, and it's very difficult to scale those up to a national level.

We've got a lot of work to do, and leadership is going to be absolutely crucial to initiating constructive responses.

- All right, Randi, I'm going to ask you a question, and we're running out of time, but I know that you're a fast talker.

So you have said you're the luckiest person in the world.

You alluded to it earlier that you work at the nexus of education and the labor movement, and yet you've been through the wringer.

Your life is not a cakewalk.

I mean, we've all seen you be attacked.

We've all seen what you've been through.

And I'm going to ask you the question that I ask a lot of people, what sustained you?

Why can't you walk away and, you know, go home with Sharon and you know, make, I don't know, kugel or something?

I mean, it's just.

(Randi laughing) - It's because my wife's a rabbi.

- Oh yeah, she's a rabbi.

Yes, your wife is a rabbi.

But I'm serious.

What?

How?

- What sustains me is what James just said about the solutions that we put forward.

What sustains me is that the public square, that every single day, nine-- or every single Monday through Friday, 90% of Americans' children walk through a school, and actually are engaged in learning, and actually are engaged in their future.

What sustains me is that people see 88% of kids in America, young adults in America, see the labor movement as a way to help them have a future.

What sustains me is that we are in the fight for a better life.

And so yeah, all these other people, you know, do whatever they're doing in terms of social media.

I completely agree with Dana about we need to change the algorithm.

- Right.

- But what sustains me is that America as a concept is about opportunity and freedom, and public schooling and the labor movement are about helping people get there.

And I'll be damned if people stop us from helping people have a better life.

That's what sustains me.

(audience applauding) - Well, all of you have been absolutely crucial to this discussion, and we are so grateful you've been with us, and we are going to end, as we always do, on a silver lining, which we hope gives people a little bit of hope.

And today's silver lining is about an activist who defied being canceled by the culture wars.

Zoe Zephyr ran for office because she thought it was the best way to fight for social and economic justice.

In 2022, she became the first openly transgender woman to be elected to the Montana State Legislature.

But when she called out a bill that would restrict gender affirming care, her majority Republican colleagues formally banned her from returning to the State House floor.

After she was silenced in her own state, Zoe and her crusade catapulted to the national stage where today she continues to champion transgender rights.

We're grateful to our extraordinary guests for their insights and inspiration and to you for joining us today.

Until we see you back here next time, from the Frederick Gunn School in the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, for "Common Ground," I'm Jane Whitney.

Take care.

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