(thoughtful string music) - We grow up believing that the American dream is ours for the taking, that we're all entitled to a happier, richer, better life than our parents had.

Instead, what many once saw as their birthright has devolved into a loss of faith and a bitter cynicism that the game is rigged, that the American dream has become the impossible dream.

Today, our distinguished bipartisan panel talks about how to rejuvenate that once bright promise for all Americans.

Joining us are Sohrab Ahmari, author of "Tyranny, Inc.: "How Private Power Crushed American Liberty- "and What to Do About It," Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, who represents Connecticut's Fifth District, David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of "Ours Was the Shining Future," and Alissa Quart, author of "Bootstrapped: "Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream."

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

David, I'm going to start with you.

You have written a biography of the American dream with a title that's in the past tense, as in ours was the shining future, which begs the question, whether the American dream still exists.

Does it?

- Well, I think it still exists, but I think it needs a lot of help.

I think that if I were to extend my title, maybe it would be, "Ours Was the Shining Future "and Could Be Again," (chuckles) but it's going to take real changes because Americans who were born in 1950 had a 92%, Americans who were born in 1940, I'm sorry, had a 92% chance of out-earning their parents.

That's amazing.

I mean, it's a virtual guarantee, right?

Even if you were laid off or had a health problem, you did better than your parents.

And for young people today, the odds are roughly 50/50.

It's more like a coin flip, and that's a very alarming change, and I think it explains a lot of the cynicism and anger that has corrupted our political dialogue.

And so to me, reinvigorating the dream isn't just about the economy, it's also about really everything else in our society.

- It's also about mindset.

I mean, you can feel the anger, you can feel, it's, as your colleague David Brooks talks about, the fact we've gotten meaner.

People are cranky right now.

And I think that's part of what we're going to be talking about today, but, as well as the economics of all this.

I do want to ask about some of the factors that have really undermined the American dream, greed, the culture of greed being one of them.

Also, how you say we've strayed from our ideals of democracy and equality and liberty, and how has that impacted where we are today?

- I don't think people are any less moral or ethical than they were in the middle of the 20th century.

I think the human condition doesn't change that rapidly.

But we do live in a different culture, and we live in a less patriotic culture and less communitarian culture than we used to, and I like your word Jane, we live in a greedier culture than we used to.

I mean, George Romney, the son, the father of Mitt Romney, he was the CEO of an auto company.

And he decided, even though his contract entitled him to a large bonus, that it was unseemly for him to make so much more money than his employees.

So he went to his board of directors decades ago and he said, "Please take this bonus back from me."

It is impossible to imagine a CEO doing something similar today.

And it's not just a couple examples.

CEOs have always had a huge influence over how much money they're paid, but back then, they didn't feel the need to pay themselves vastly, vastly more than their workers.

They didn't lobby to have extremely high tax rates on top incomes repealed.

They accepted the idea that we were in a culture and an economy in which we all needed to depend on each other, because they'd been through the Depression and they had been through World War II and they saw Soviet communism as a huge threat, and they wanted to make sure that the American economy worked for everyone.

And today, we just have a corporate culture, that's not the only factor, but today we have a corporate culture that is much more self-seeking, that cares much less about the United States as a society, is perfectly willing to move plants overseas, and is less invested in local communities.

Corporate chieftains are not building the beautiful temples in the middle of cities that really helped our communities the way they used to.

- Jahana, you are seen by many people as the face of the American dream, and because your story could be several miniseries, actually, I'm just going to run through a couple things.

You grew up, your mother was a teenage mother who struggled with addiction.

You went to sleep very often hearing gunshots outside.

You might wake up to a body in the hallway.

You then became pregnant at the age of 16.

You were homeless, you dropped out of high school.

And then the story turns, because you then went on to earn four degrees and became a teacher.

You became the National Teacher of the Year in 2016.

You went on to make history as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress in the state of Connecticut.

And the question I have for you is, was the American dream your North Star, or was that something that you didn't even think about as you navigated that survival?

- You tell the story so seamlessly, and I wish it were that easy.

There were so many things that I was just unaware of at the time.

When you're in it, survival is the number one thing that you're worried about.

I was not in rooms or in spaces and places where I saw different opportunities or alternatives, but I read a lot, I had a lot of people in my life, I had teachers, so I imagined that if I just did my part, at some point, I just always interacted with just amazing people, but it wasn't one of those things where I ever even expected that I would wake up and walk into this dream or whatever.

It was this idea that you grow up thinking that certain people will have this kind of life and other people will have a different life and as long as I can take care of my children and not put 'em to bed hungry, then I'm doing better than my mother.

So the idea of, everyone starts at the same place and you have a North Star and you work as hard as the person next to you and you get to the same place just is unrealistic, and I recognize that.

And I know it sounds like I don't believe in the American dream, but I am the American dream.

So for me, it was just, give me a fair shot.

Just give me access to the same opportunities.

I don't want you to change any rules, I'll take the same test as the person sitting next to me, but let me take it in a school that has heat.

You know, let me take that same test with an instructor who has thoroughly prepared me for it.

So for me, it's about making sure that the opportunities exist and that we are removing the barriers for people to just do their part, and at least have a chance at the American dream.

- Because what you're talking about is, there's no shortage of talent out there.

It's about where the talent is being basically fertilized, if you want to, so that's what you're saying.

- Yes, absolutely.

I think one of the biggest shockers for people when I say I was the National Teacher of the Year is that I was also a high school dropout.

I was never not smart.

I always did well in school, I always thrived in school, but being smart is not enough when you're going home and the lights may or may not be on.

Being smart is not enough when you're assigned a project and you don't have a home computer at home.

So I like to share that with people because there's this idea of, if you just have this internal grit and ingenuity and work really, really hard-- - It'll be okay.

- It's not enough, you know, it's not enough when you know you're smart enough to get into college, but your mom can't sign a parent loan because she doesn't have the credit or the employment to be able to do that, so being smart is not enough.

And that's the part I think that people who are outside of that bubble don't realize.

It's like, well, if you just did your part, and I've had so many students who literally could be doing anything that they wanted to anywhere in the world because they are some of the brightest, most talented people I've ever met, but had to turn down even a scholarship because they're also the babysitter and in charge of paying three bills in the household at the age of 16.

So it's just having access to those same opportunities.

- It's about opportunity.

Sohrab, you grew up in Iran, and you saw America as the promised land, at least that's what I've read, and you saw that we fostered independence here and characters you admired like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, and there was this fierce independence, and then when you were 13, your family came here.

And in your book, "Tyranny, Inc." you talk about the contrast between what you saw as that promised land and where we are today with all of our many, many issues.

Talk about that.

- Yeah, sure, I mean, Luke Skywalker definitely beat Islamic Republic, you know, (Jane laughs) (chuckles) television.

Yeah, so I, one contrast among many from the America that the typical immigrant imagines and what I actually ended up encountering is of course how hard it is early on.

So in my case, I immigrated here just with my mother.

My parents were divorced, my father never left the old country, and given the kind of brutal exchange rate and my parents' divorce, the fact was that in Iran, we were kind of middle class, even edging into upper middle class, kind of a Bohemian family, my dad was an architect, my mother was an abstract expressionist painter (chuckles) in Iran, whereas when we moved to the US, initially we had to live in a mobile home park, so I was like deeply, this was a trauma for me growing up, you know, more attuned to American culture before I ever set foot here, that the house we initially moved into sat on wheels.

But by the time I was in my mid-20s, you know, I was working for the Wall Street Journal editorial page and had this kind of, obviously it was famous for promoting kind of low taxes, free trade, kind of the ideology of Paul Ryan, more or less, if you can imagine that, and you know, initially in my mid-20s, my conclusion was from that was, oh look, see?

Like, I began in a trailer park.

Now here I am in Midtown Manhattan writing editorials for The Wall Street Journal about tax policy in Europe or something.

But the reality was that I actually came from an upper middle class background, so I was part of the kind of global educated class, and when I got here, after a temporary blip with poverty, I was back on track.

For lots of other Americans, that transition doesn't happen because social mobility has largely, as David writes in his book, as Alissa has documented, has ground to a halt, and the thing that I would propose, since we're talking about the American dream, is precisely what is the American dream?

Because what Paul Ryan types say is that the American dream is about everyone starting at some same level and you know, you pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

It's equality of opportunity.

That's actually a relatively recent turn in American kind of thinking about these things.

The Jeffersonian ideal is actually much more equality of outcomes.

It was, the idea was that everyone has a piece of land and you work.

Of course there was slavery involved in that and Jefferson never was able to reconcile that, but lots of the Founding Fathers, including, for example, Jefferson says the government's task should be, and I'm slightly paraphrasing, that no one should go without a little piece of land.

The government's task is that.

It's only by the mid-19th century after the industrial revolution, where suddenly, that dream became elusive for the vast majority of people who become wage workers, that we started more or less talking about the American dream as a matter of social mobility.

You know, the society may be deeply unequal, but as long as the elite class can recruit enough people from the bottom who are smart enough to rise up, then the system is legitimate.

That's what I would put forward, that is not the original American dream.

It's actually a, far more than Paul Ryan types would admit, the American dream is equality of outcomes rather than mere equality of opportunity.

- Either way, how are we doing?

- I mean, David documents this, and we have a country in which nearly half of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 in cash to pay for an exigency.

That tells you something, or half of fast food workers have to rely on public welfare to make ends meet.

We're we're becoming a low wage economy characterized by a very kind of relatively narrow elite, whether you want to call it the 1%, the 10%, and everyone else who is precarious or at risk of falling into precarity.

All right, well-- - Can I just?

- Go ahead.

- Because you glossed over something that is really important to that story, the idea that Jefferson never reconciled the fact of slavery.

There are so many inherited traumas of so many people in this country where the system, the way they have built, so it's not just about opportunity for so many people, it's not just where you fall economically.

It is literally all of the systemic structures that are in place.

- Alissa actually addresses something else very different because you're on a mission, your book is called "Bootstrap."

You feel that the American dream is dangerous in that it perpetuates this notion, again, that we should all just, we're just all capable of doing this, and if we don't do it, it's your fault because you somehow are deficient or inferior or it's your fault.

That's really the whole, that's the message, right?

- Yeah, there's a lot of self-blame and shame in the discourse around becoming in this country.

And I loved a lot of the things you were, the Raj Chetty numbers about people born in 1940 having 92% chance of improving on their parents' fate, and now people born in the '80s, 50/50 chance, and that really shows you what has happened to huge swaths of our population, like we're not able to have this thing, this American dream thing.

But also, to go back to your point about what it was initially, like the American dream as James Truslow Adams coined in 1931, he even considered it imperfect.

He wrote it was imperfect.

He also implied that there was a communitarian element to it, that it was for a community.

So a lot of these terms, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, which by the way started as a joke in the 19th century, it was a joke.

They called, yeah, a farmer, he was mocked in a newspaper for pulling himself up by his bootstraps, 'cause it was understood as an absurdity.

If you try to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you'd have to be Simone Biles to be able to, (laughs) and even then, so who could do that?

So the idea itself is like a, it can't be done, and all these terms have an impossibility built into them.

And even in the language of them, have an impossibility.

- But basically, again, it's about not feeling great if you're not able to accomplish what everybody thinks you should.

It's punitive really, in its way.

- Yeah, it's absolutely, it's punitive, and that's another form of individualism.

Because if you're hell-bent on punishing yourself constantly and judging yourself for not making the grade, for not having two cars and a house, for not being able to pay your college debt, you know, and that's what a lot of people, you know, I have to say, you know, conservative folks are saying, you know, calling college debt a debt transfer scheme and things like that, a scam, you know, when we're perfectly happy to pay back the Silicon Valley Bank's bailout, so I think that's part of-- - And the auto industry and the mortgage industry - Auto, and the mortgage, and, yeah.

- and the financial sector.

- But if we're blaming the poor schmo who tried to do the right thing and claim that dream and went to two-year college, four-year college, whatever, and really worked for it, you know, it's because it's their fault, it's an individual, it's a technique to separate people from each other, to separate their fates from each other.

So then they're not thinking in this way about outcome, belonging, what this country really means.

- Right.

David, you also coined an expression, the great American stagnation.

You've been writing about it, I think, for, you know, a while.

And I was really kind of shocked to realize that Gallup, in terms of right track, wrong track, the majority of Americans haven't thought that we've been on the right track since 2008, and it doesn't matter if the economy is shrinking or if it's flourishing and it doesn't matter if there's a Democrat in the White House or a Republican in the White House, people feel that America has lost its way.

Now, again, this goes, I'm going to go back to the cranky thing.

This basically kills spirit.

It kills a sense of we can do this together, that we're in it together.

Talk about that.

- I think a lot of it is rational too.

I mean, you'll sometimes hear politicians or pundits, who tend to be pretty well off, say, "Why is it that Americans are so grumpy "when the economy is so good?"

And I think the answer is that the economy's not so good for the people who are so grumpy.

I don't mean all of them.

(audience laughs) The economy's good for some people who are grumpy, but if you look at, I mean, income growth has trailed behind economic growth for the bottom 90%, median net worth for, so that's basically the typical household's net worth, has done nothing in the 21st century.

It's been flat.

And we can fight over these economic statistics, but to me, the kind of tiebreakers are, people are really unhappy, they say the economy and our society's not doing well, and then to me, the statistic that clinches it is that the United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any rich country in the world.

We're below every country in Western Europe.

Were below Japan and South Korea and Canada and Australia.

We're even below some countries that aren't that rich, like China and Chile and Slovenia.

And this is not one of these things in which it was always this way, that it's something inherent about us as Americans.

In 1980, the United States had a normal life expectancy for a rich country.

And so I actually think the American dream is a very valuable idea, right?

It does date to 1931 and the original definition is a "better, richer, "happier life for all our citizens of every rank," and so this idea of equality is built into it.

I think that's a really good idea.

I think people want their lives to get better over time.

The problem to me is we're not living up to it.

And I think that's why people are so angry.

- But I want to know where the disconnect comes in.

Jahana, you talk to people all the time.

I mean, you're representing a district that's been hollowed out in many ways in terms of American industry and has gone through tough times.

And some of the numbers, David, I know you're an economist and so I defer to that obviously, but you know, there are some pretty good numbers that are coming out about the economy in terms of GDP and you know, low unemployment and other factors, so what is the disconnect?

Is it just as simple as the people who are grumpy are the ones who aren't doing well, or?

- Well again, I think it's, obviously these are policy choices.

I can tell you that in the housing projects where I grew up, I'd never heard anyone say the word GDP my entire life.

No one ever said GDP.

So when we're talking about the stock market and the economy, that is not the indicator or the measure of success for someone who says, "Yes, there's a job available, and I would like to apply, "but I don't have reliable childcare, "and I don't have public transportation to get me there."

So there's all of these other things, even to your earlier point, Sohrab, about land ownership.

The American dream is connected to land ownership.

That's how families equate wealth, so when you are talking to people in communities that have been redlined, where no one in the family has ever owned property, we're having very different conversations.

So if we truly want to live up to that ideal of the American dream, then everybody has to be on board, not just the people who benefit from it or who are benefiting at this point.

So we have to make some intentional policy choices that say, if you are willing to do your part, your government has your back and will create those opportunities for you to usher your family into the middle class.

And then the last thing I'll say is, I really know that for many of the people who I grew up around who had never said the word GDP, the thing that was important for them was a union job.

Those people worked in factories.

They worked, that's how they got to the middle class.

They had health insurance, which was a big thing, so when you talk about why we are so far behind many European nations, we don't have health insurance, childcare, you know, paid parental leave, all of those things that jumpstart children in those countries before they ever even enter the world, we are lacking.

- Well, okay, and you have jumped ahead to a key theme of the show, which is about unions, - Oh, look at me.

- which actually-- - Without even trying.

(Jahana laughs) - I know.

And basically we're going to just hold off a little bit on it, but I want to go to Sohrab, because you all do agree about the union situation, but I want, you have a very interesting, Sohrab, ideological perspective, because it's a multiple personality perspective.

You, well, that's, I mean, really.

You are ferociously conservative in cultural issues, passionate about cultural issues.

But you were also a fan of the, and I want to get this right, the economic policies of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie.

So Bernie Sanders.

That's quite a schism, people might say.

So my question to you is, what does that mean?

- Sure, I mean, so I think that cultural conservatives in this country, like David's colleague on the editorial page, my friend Ross Douthat, get a lot right about the idea of, what does human flourishing look like?

And they draw on, you know, classical and Christian ideas that human beings thrive in families, that they thrive in community, that it's good for us to worship God and there's lots of empirical evidence that shows that people who go to church tend to have better health outcomes even and so on and so forth, so I agree with a lot of my friends on the right about that.

Where I part ways with the right, and why I'm kind of unusual but I would say not alone, is that a lot of those folks completely discount the role of material conditions in creating the cultural outcomes that they want or don't want, right?

So why is it, of course we should want higher rates of family formation.

Of course we should want higher marriage rates.

Of course we should want church attendance to go up.

All the things, by the way, that typically, you know, the upper crust of American society does all of those things.

They tend to get married and stay married.

They're much more, communities are much more likely to be churched, and so on.

But could it be that we've created an economy in which doing those things is really, really hard for working and lower middle class people?

And that's where I lose conservatives, 'cause they pay very little attention to how, for example, like Jahana mentioned, the de-industrialization that this country went through beginning in the 1970s and '80s, what role could that have, the difference between stable union jobs, high wage union jobs, and the kinds of service economy jobs that are utterly precarious, that you have to rely on welfare to make ends meet?

Could that have some effect in people not choosing to get married or not choosing to venture the risk of having children?

So I think, you know, for not all of them, but for many of the goals that I, kind of vision of human flourishing that I, I'm a convert to Roman Catholicism, that I want to see, actually, it's things like, for example, Senator Warren's Stop Wall Street Looting Act which is a great proposal because a lot of our problems with the loss of industry and manufacturing, and just the real economy in general, have to do with Wall Street, you know, private equity and hedge funds that hollow out the real economy and transfer what's, you know, a win-win for workers and consumers into the asset ledgers of the financial industry.

And just the vision of an economy in which we build stuff is very important and I think the Biden administration is taking some important steps in this regard, but just, you might have lots of GDP growth, but if it's all like apps, you know, for, I don't know, like wasting time or financial industry sort of movement of abstract asset-on-asset ledgers is not the same thing as the dignity and the kind of dynamism that comes with building stuff, and that's what we've lost.

- Right, I saw, I'm going to go to-- - Can I defend?

- Go ahead David, yeah.

- All right, I just wanted to defend Sohrab's mix of views for a second without necessarily endorsing them all.

Sohrab, I'm sure we disagree about significant numbers of things, but you know who else is culturally or socially moderate to conservative and economically progressive?

Most American people.

Polling shows this really clearly, right?

American people are left of center on economic stuff.

They don't want Medicare cut, they don't want Social Security cut, they think companies should pay higher taxes, they think the rich should pay higher taxes, they think the minimum wage should be higher.

And most Americans are also well to the right of highly educated liberals who staff the upper ranks of the Democratic Party.

Most Americans are more religious than college graduate white collar liberal professionals.

Most Americans are more patriotic.

They say the United States is the best country in the world.

They are more likely to say that they support the American military.

You can kind of go issue by issue.

Most Americans believe that border security is very important.

Most Americans think we went too far in shutting down the economy during COVID, and so it's really interesting to think about, that obviously there are, you know, there are many exceptions and caveats, but the polling is extremely consistent that Americans are further to the left on economics than they are on what we might call cultural or social issues, they're further to the right on those cultural, social issues, and really interestingly, this is true across racial groups.

And I think one of the reasons why, in the last five years, we've seen the Democratic Party lose ground among, significant ground among Latino and Asian American voters and a couple percentage points among Black voters, is the Democratic Party has moved so far left on a lot of these social issues that many working class people feel talked down to and they say that party doesn't represent me.

At the same time, these working class people really agree with the Democratic Party much more than the Republican Party on these economic issues.

- David, I wanted you just to underscore something that I was going to ask you about, which is that you also say that people on the left tend to demonize and vilify working class folks who don't agree with their, as you just mentioned, their cultural points of view, and this is not helpful.

- No, no.

And I think immigration's a really important issue, right?

If you do polling and you look at views on immigration in Texas, one of the reasons why Democrats lost Latino voters in 2020 is because Latino voters think that Democrats aren't sufficiently concerned with border security and with undocumented immigration.

And that is also true of most Americans.

And yet, often when the Democratic party talks about this view, it basically says, "If you're in favor "of strict border security, it's because you're hateful."

And look, we can disagree about the right level of border security, but you can be in favor of more or less immigration without being a hateful person.

And I think the Democratic Party, and particularly cultural and social liberals who often are affluent and are disproportionately white, need to really think about this language that basically says to voters, if you disagree with us, it's because you're stupid or it's because you're hateful.

I think it's inaccurate.

- Would you repeat that?

(Jane chuckles) - I also think it's not good political strategy.

- No, I'm sorry, I just think it's such an important point to make because that's, as I say, it's just alienating, driving people apart, and as we said, not helpful.

Sohrab, let me just go to Alissa quickly because you, in term of, you also have another job in addition to the books that you write, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and you're looking at poverty in this country, which many people say is a choice, that we could fix it.

And yet, we haven't for 50 years, there hasn't been a solution.

What do you tell people?

- Well, so yes, I run this organization, EHRP, which I created with Barbara Ehrenreich, late, great Barbara Ehrenreich, and we wanted to make sure that it was not only the rich writing about poverty, and that's, this was after the 2008 recession, and so we started to recruit people, 37% of our grantees, it's a nonprofit, have experienced financial hardship themselves.

And the most important thing for us is to try to get these voices into mainstream media, so we co-publish with a lot of publications.

And, you know, what comes up a lot are people who have been unhoused who are writing about that experience and, you know, they don't even trust the editorial process because they've, you know, the things that you're talking about, about a middle class identity that was interrupted, I think they call it in some circles accumulated advantage, where you have that in the background, that's like sociology, and then it comes back later when you've now kind of settled into American culture, that you're, what was interesting, what David just said about shaming and blaming people about cultural conservatism, because that's sort of parallel to the shaming and blaming of people around economic insufficiency.

So I think, again, these are all kind of tactics to minimize ordinary people.

- Right, you, go ahead Sohrab.

- Just very quick point in response to David's and Alissa, what Alissa just said, so there's this thing, a politician in Germany named Sahra Wagenknecht who's a leader of their Left Party or used to be, and she calls it lifestyle leftism.

She says it's a leftism that's not concerned primarily with, you know, with the left, the kind of social democratic left at its best used to be concerned with, which is power, empowering lower and middle class people relative to employers, relative to capital, but rather is always kind of lecturing people about their consumer choices, lifestyle choices, and so on and talking down as David said.

Now to criticize my own side, the flip side of that is a kind of, what I call fake neo-populism that coincides with the Trump phenomenon in 2016, and what that is is, of course there's been this dealignment between the working class or much of the working class and the Democratic Party, and Republican Party, some Republican politicians have swooped in, some of them have authentic and real solutions to those people's problems and are trying, but lots of them, they're like, well yes, the GOP is now the vehicle for the multiracial working class.

We're such a working class party, we're proposing cutting Social Security, you know?

Or to be, you know, and the definition of what is working class, often, on the right remains this mythical, it's actually the independent self-owner of a roofing business, you know, and it's not what the actual working class looks like today which might be, you know, a Filipino lady who works in hospitality, like wage laborers.

It's still an idea of, typically, if they even pay attention to union workers, it's typically, it's sort of, you know, electricians, carpenters, et cetera, teamsters, burley teamsters, which are a part of the working class, but you also have, you know, people who have college degrees and are working in the service industry and they can't reproduce themselves, they cannot subsist, but by selling their wages so they're working class, but this kind of fake neo-populism writes off all of those in favor of largely a kind of racialized idea of what the ideal working class is.

- Everybody's jumping to jump in here.

- I just want to ask you quickly Sohrab, so what do you, 'cause you're in the belly of the beast in a way, I mean, what do you tell people when they do this kind of cosplay poorism?

(laughs) Like what do you, I mean, do you call them out?

- I definitely, I mean obviously I call them out (chuckles) and you know, at the, risking becoming a pariah on the right.

But I would say, look, there are people, primarily in the Senate, I think people can think of who they are, who are trying to think about what it would mean to actually service the working class, because it would be good for, for example, the US labor movement to not be so dependent on the Democratic Party.

The reason they are is because they've gotten the back of the hand from post-Reagan Republicans for two generations.

But if you had a Republican Party that, as it did during the Eisenhower and Nixon tradition, actually competed for the labor vote, then you'd have an actually independent labor movement that can in fact play off both parties against each other for the best deal they can get.

Hey, you know, Democrats, if you don't pay attention to us, there's Senator So-and-So doing this and that.

But as it is, you know, for the most part, the actual organized movement of working people continues to get the back of the hand.

You know, they elect Trump, you know, union households were decisive to Trump's victory in 2016, and what do they get?

They get a Department of Labor that's stuffed with union busters and Scalia sons, so.

- All right, Jahana, did you have a comment?

- Well, just wanted to follow up on two things.

I think one of the things that has to happen is redefining some of these terms.

You and Sohrab, you mention, what does it look like flourishing, the idea of married Christian household with children?

That's not everybody's dream.

That's not what everyone aspires to.

And if we are truly to have inclusive policies, we have to think about all of the families, all of the individuals who fall outside of that and define that as success as well.

And Alissa, I love that you are actually talking to the people who are affected, because these are the things I hear every day when I am chairing the committee on nutrition and my colleagues are saying, "No, we aren't going to assign work requirements "to food programs," because, you know, they rattle off all of the numbers of people, it's like 50% of those people are children.

You know, you don't understand or appreciate who was the recipient of many of these benefits.

I was on food stamps when I had my children, but I was also working three jobs, going to school full-time.

So the idea of who is the recipient of many of these programs, many of these benefits is just so outdated and really does not reflect a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-religious country.

So the American dream is also having choice over what that dream looks like and the pathway to that dream.

Because if that were the case, everyone in my community said to me, you should be a nurse's aide because you can get a job very quickly, work in a nursing home and you'll have a steady paycheck.

That is just a false assumption as well.

- David, I want to hit that point, 'cause this ties into what I'm going to ask David about, and that is that, you know, there seem to be a lot of programs or well-intentioned people who are trying to really address some of the things we've been talking about on this broadcast.

But you say there's no overarching big initiative that's really addressing the middle class or trying to elevate the middle class and poorer people, and you also say that the American political system created these problems, and only the American political system can fix them.

- So I mean, look, I understand why Americans are deeply cynical about democracy in our country.

As we've been talking about, our system hasn't been delivering the goods to people.

Living standards have stagnated for huge portions of this country.

But if you look at the long history of this country, including recently, small-D democratic political movements have been remarkably effective.

So just look recently.

If you went back in time 20 or 25 years, nobody thought that same-sex marriage would be legal as quickly as it became legal.

(chuckles) It's a remarkable turnabout, and it was a small-D democratic movement that made it happen.

Think about the successes of the disability rights movement.

They're remarkable and they're inspiring and they've changed this country for millions of people.

Think about the women's rights movement and the Civil Rights Movement.

They really did change this country.

There are also examples on the political right.

I mean, look at, did people who oppose abortion respond to Roe v. Wade by saying the system is rigged in 1973?

No, they organized and they won elections in conservative states and they got presidents elected who appointed Supreme Court justices who did what they wanted, and they responded by organizing.

And I think the most relevant example for our discussion here today is the labor movement.

I mean, unions lost basically every fight that they tried to win in the 19-teens and 1920s.

I mean, they just lost again and again and again.

And the government almost always intervened in strikes, sometimes violently, on the side of companies instead of workers.

And then, through this massive labor movement in the 1930s and '40s, first predominantly white, but relatively quickly becoming multiracial, the Black-white pay gap in this country shrunk in the '40s and '50s substantially, even before the Civil Rights Movement, because of the labor movement.

You basically had this incredible grassroots movement combined with an administration in FDR and Harry Truman who supported it.

And you got this remarkable decline in hours and this remarkable increase in wages, and that to me is what we have been missing.

Look, I've been in a union, I've been a manager at The New York Times who's tried to manage a union, I know unions aren't perfect.

But corporations aren't perfect either, and if you have a world with imperfect corporations not checked by imperfect unions, you end up with the economy we had in the early 20th century and the economy we have today, which is highly unequal and with high corporate profits and low wages, and that's really not healthy for a society and nothing is as powerful at counteracting it and raising mass living standards as labor unions are.

- I think Alissa wants to respond to that, go ahead.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I keep saying we have to go back into the past to get to the future, because there are moments in the past that we could get inspiration from, including that there used to be 30% enrollment in US unions, now it's 10%, but I think we have to look at also our labor laws, which are restricting union creation.

And I'd also add to like what you were saying about movements, like during the pandemic, we saw a lot of positive changes that have been, to some extent, reversed.

We saw, you know, amazing government programs, Child Tax Credit, relaxed SNAP and Medicaid enrollments.

- Reduced child poverty by 50%.

- 50%, exactly, I say that all the time.

We saw mutual aids being formed, mutual aid groups where people were helping each other in communities, we saw participatory budgeting, a whole range of different things that were in response directly to this very isolated moment that then became a very communitarian moment.

So, but, so we can get inspiration even from that recent past, too.

But I, you know, Homestead Act of 1862, the biggest land giveaway, I mean this is like the way past that we, you know, again, this is people, unfortunately mostly white people, got this property, and then generations later, there was a land wealth that was given away by the government.

You know, the GI Bill.

I mean there's models for different kinds of social care that that gets us towards this, what I think of as a new American dream, because I don't think, whatever the one that we used to call the American dream was capacious enough for everyone.

- I'm going to-- - And all of those things have to be factored into the equation, because even when you're talking about apprenticeships, we have legislation for paid apprenticeships.

You can't, even if someone, there's not a lot of people from my community who could work for nine months or 18 months learning a trade and not get paid.

They're not people who can do an unpaid internship.

So again, unless those opportunities are equally available to anyone, to everyone, then the outcomes are disproportionate.

So you cannot talk about any of these things as just the intended outcome.

You have to look at every factor that is a part of going into that.

And it is disproportionate across segments of our economy, to different communities, access to how these things are done, so it's not as simple as people make it out to be on either side.

- Final questions.

Time's almost up.

Sohrab, I haven't gotten to several of the things I wanted to ask you about.

We've talked about union support and I know you're a strong advocate for unions, as is everybody on this panel.

But I do want to ask you about, just personally, because you did convert to Catholicism, you have amplified this whole message of economic justice, you have talked about the fact that you also lived in a place, I think you used the word precarity, about health issues and health insurance.

What is it you want to see happen?

- So at the risk of, (chuckles) again, echoing everyone on this panel, I do think that we want, what we have right now is a low wage, high benefit economy.

And that's, as my friend Michael Lynn argues, that's the worst economic combo you can have.

Now when people say high benefit, it doesn't mean that our benefit system is extra generous.

In fact, it's quite the opposite, it's very miserly.

It's means-tested in all sorts of ways.

It just means that as a share of the total amount of money that working lower class people need to make ends meet, public benefits make up a large portion of that relative to wages.

What that really means is that the rest of us, you know, as a society, we're subsidizing low wage employment.

What we want is a high wage, low benefit economy.

Why is that important?

Because as we have it right now, a low wage, high benefit model puts working class people at the mercy of two groups.

It's not just employers where you're in a service industry, you're precarious, you're, you know, your relative power is low.

You are also at the mercy of the benefits administrator, "Ah, did you use your food stamps to buy a six-pack of beer "and, you know, a pack of cigarettes?"

You know, and that-- - You can't buy those things with food stamps.

- Exactly, yeah.

It's totally disempowering and it removes people's sense of dignity.

So that's what, I think that's what we want to get to, is a high wage economy.

Will a high wage economy address all sorts of other issues that we have, the cultural issues that David mentioned?

No, but it just gives that sense of, you are not precarious.

It's, you're not in the situation where the slightest mishap, whether you have a disagreement with the boss, or God forbid, you get sick, you are going to plunge through an abyss, a financial abyss that you can't recover from.

And I think the answer, one huge answer to that is an economy in which labor draws a higher share of the social income and has greater say over how workplaces are run.

- Alissa, your final question is this.

You're lobbying for what's called an Interdependence Day because you think dependence has become a dirty word.

- Yeah, I'm pro-dependence.

I think that we need to reclaim the value of depending on others and the grace and the craft of leaning on people, that it takes a lot of skill to get government benefits.

It takes a lot of skill to be in a family.

I mean a lot, all the things that we think of as belonging, it takes a lot of skill to be disabled, differently abled and have a caregiver that you're taking care from every day, and that you're willing to be vulnerable and in need around.

And so for me, the sort of existential reframe is towards what I call the art of dependence, which is to sort of see the value, each of us, I mean, this isn't just like a class issue.

This is across the board, because I think until we start to see ourselves as vulnerable, we can't accept vulnerability in others.

- David, your fellow journalist Jane Mayer has called your book cause for outrage and a plea for hope.

And I happen to know that you net out on the side of optimism because you're also a student of history's lessons.

Explain.

- Well, it comes back to this idea that we really have done remarkable things in this country.

I mean, there is no country that built a middle class as large and as prosperous as ours.

There is no country anywhere in the world that more people want to move to than our country.

It remains a beacon for people all over the world.

And when you combine America's great strengths while acknowledging its terrible flaws, when you combine its great strengths with its ability to change over the decades and centuries with those movements I just mentioned, the recent success of the marriage equality movement, really the grassroots movement to prevent President Trump from repealing Obamacare, that was a successful grassroots movement.

And you go back further to the disability rights movement, the women's rights movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the original suffragettes movement, we have changed this country before, using our political system to do it.

We've done it to make this country do a better job of living up to its stated ideals than it long did, and that doesn't make me think we're guaranteed to do it again, there are many reasons why I worry about our future, but it does make me think we are capable of doing it again.

And what I would like to see above all is I would like to see more political energy from both sides focused on lifting the living standards of working class people.

It really has been the missing ingredient of the biggest grassroots movement in our society in recent decades.

And I think if that changed, I think we could see real change in people's living standards, and frankly, a country that felt less broken.

- Very quickly because I, this, what you're talking about reminds me that there have been some stirrings among Republicans who used to sort of, again, vilify anything except the free market and capitalism, and now, it's my understanding, they're starting to look at perhaps the fact, there should be some government intervention in policies.

Would you talk about that for a minute?

- Yeah, sure.

I think Sohrab captured this exactly right, which is it's real and it's small.

(chuckles) It's real and it's on the margins of the Republican Party.

And so Donald Trump runs for president, talking a big game about being different from past Republicans, he didn't promise to cut Medicare, he said he didn't think trade deals were that good, and then what does he do?

He comes in and as Sohrab said, he staffs the Labor Department with union-busting officials and he passes a huge tax cut.

There are a few Republicans who seem more genuinely interested, Republicans including Marco Rubio have signed a statement saying they believe in labor unions.

Republicans are showing a new interest in antitrust.

President Biden's laws on infrastructure and semiconductors got Republican votes, at least in the Senate.

And so it's on the margins, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that there are parts of the Republican Party that acknowledge that the promises of the laissez-faire crowd, the promises of the Reagan Revolution, the idea that if the United States moved more toward the laissez-faire economy than any other advanced economy in the world, which we did, the promise was that would bring prosperity for all, and that promise has not been fulfilled, and most Republicans are not reflecting on that, most Republican politicians, but a few have started to.

- Are you optimistic, just yes, or, I mean-- - I have to be because reform in this country happens in the middle.

The New Deal coalition was a coalition of people who disagreed about other things.

The Jacksonians, similar, and so we've got to build reform in the middle here.

- All right, Jahana, you get the last word.

I watched the speech you gave at the ceremony at the White House back in 2016 when you were honored as National Teacher of the Year, and in that speech you said, "Like many students, "I know what it's like to have a dream, "and to live in an environment "where nothing is expected to thrive.

"I know what it's like to struggle to find sunlight "and constantly be met with concrete barriers."

Too many kids still live that way.

You meet them.

What do you say to them?

- I am them.

I am them, so what I say to them, I said that day, I say every day, I legislate from the perspective, that's the way the story began.

It doesn't have to be the way it ends.

To David's point, you brought up so many amazing pieces of legislation that have moved our country forward.

I think we all have a responsibility to keep moving in that direction and not go 50 years back.

I tell those kids, you just do your part, and I as a legislator will do my part.

And to Sohrab's point, all of these grassroots movements where people are paying attention, I am uninterested by Republican colleagues who sign statements or say that they support something.

I am more interested in the way people vote on this legislation.

So when you talk about raising the wage, there's legislation to raise the wage.

When you talk about feeding children, there's legislation to feed children.

When you talk about securing the border, there's legislation to secure the border.

So all of these things are policy choices.

When you answered, do you believe in the American dream?

And you said, "I have to," I believe in it because I know it works, because I'm what happens when it works, because I have seen too many people who move those concrete barriers out of the way, too many people who use their agency and advocacy to invest in me in the communal way that you talk about, not because they were related to me, not because they would have any intrinsic or reciprocal benefit, but because it was the right thing to do.

One of the things I, my kids, we studied the Constitution, and the very first part of the preamble is, "to build a more perfect union."

We acknowledge that we are not perfect, but we also recognize that we all have a responsibility, not just elected officials, but every single person, to move us forward.

So I do believe in it.

It does exist.

It is still there.

I tell those kids, just hold on.

You just keep your head down and you keep working, and I will make sure that I do everything in my power so that you don't have to at least have as many obstacles as I did or the same obstacles.

And at some point, they will take it from here and move us forward for the next generation.

- On that note, we're going to turn to our silver lining, and today's silver lining features two different takes on the American dream.

When Nick Rathod's parents left India to come to America, they had just $8 in their pockets.

Determined to give back to his new country, Nick became a civil rights attorney and served in the Obama White House.

Then he decided to pay his American dream forward by starting the American Dream Fund to help support immigrant entrepreneurs.

When Amy Zhang became an American citizen in 2020, the country was mired in the COVID pandemic.

Hate crimes against Asians were on the rise and concerns about whether our democracy was in danger were growing.

That turmoil led Amy to reject the glossy fantasy of the American dream and to challenge us to focus on the state of our nation, with all of its flaws, and to hold America accountable to live up to its ideals.

We're grateful to our extraordinary guests for their insights and inspirations, 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.

(thoughtful string music) (happy string music) (triumphant band music)