(bright music) - [Narrator] The School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership presents The Civic Discourse Project: Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospects.

This week.

- You can be your own publisher and no one says you have to have editors.

Nobody says you have to have fact checkers.

And guess what?

Lots of people on social media don't, including the character who runs what used to be called the outlet formerly known as Twitter.

- [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership.

And now, Richard Haass, senior counselor with Centerview Partners at the Council on Foreign Relations, speaks on "The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens."

- This is a really dangerous time.

And if you're not worried, I'd simply say, pay closer attention.

You ought to be worried.

You ought to be worried about the world.

You ought to be worried about the country.

And in some ways, what's happening out there affects what's happening here, and vice versa.

I mean, just think about it.

Here we are, it's October 2023.

Obviously, we are all absorbed with the horrific violence that we've seen in the last few days in the Middle East against Israelis.

And we'll see where this crisis unfolds.

But for the last year and a half, to the extent people have been looking overseas, they've been focused on Russia's violent, aggressive war of choice against Ukraine, which has been one of the most costly, by every definition of the word costly, conflicts in modern times.

We've got the growing friction between the United States and China, in many ways, the two most important actors of this year.

And North Korea.

People may not be paying attention when North Korea has built up a sizable stockpile of nuclear weapons and an evermore numerous and evermore capable stockpile of missiles that can deliver them with greater accuracy and greater distance.

Iran is obviously also building up many of its capabilities and supports, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that are applying their trade of terror.

At the global level, we've recently pretty much, not complete, we've pretty much come out of COVID-19 and the pandemic.

Depending upon how you count, but close to 20 million people around the world lost their lives.

It won't be the last pandemic.

This one, again, hasn't gone away.

Climate change is not just a future threat, but it's a present reality.

That before this century is over, as important as everything I've mentioned is and will be, it's not inconceivable that the defining dynamic of this century could yet turn out to be climate change and its implication for modern life, economic, social, political, you name it.

We're at the dawn of lots of new technologies, not just cyber, which is a little bit less new, but obviously AI, things going on in biotechnology.

And I would simply say, technology is far, far, far outpacing the ability of governments, much less the world, to contend with them, how they might be regulated.

How do we basically figure out emphasizing the good and discouraging or pushing back against the bad?

We are not even in the right ZIP code on that.

I mentioned a lot about strong states around that.

We've also got an epidemic of weak ones.

For a lot of countries in the world, the problem is not invasion from a neighbor, it's implosion from within.

You've got governments that cannot fulfill the obligations of governments, which has implications for their own citizens, but then for their neighbors.

Coups have become more commonplace of late.

Migration is increasing around the world.

And then, as if all that were not enough, and it's more than enough, to be honest, it's a dangerous time here at home as well.

And let me talk about the danger on two levels.

One is the danger of what you might call systemic political dysfunction.

We have become the gang that can't shoot straight.

We can't get things done.

And what it means is that pressing challenges grow ever more pressing.

We see, for example, that the debt is mushrooming.

And it's become not just larger, but far more expensive to service, as rates have gone out.

And this is gonna crowd out all sorts of much more productive investment.

We've got a problem at our border, our southern border.

It's essentially out of control.

And, you know, I live in New York, but all around the country we see the implications of this.

I think if I had to choose one area of real crisis in America, it's not as dramatic perhaps as the budget or the border, it's K-12 education.

The one thing most American, I mean, Americans have to do is from the ages of 6 to 16, they've gotta go to school.

Well, we are not delivering across the board anything like equality education.

So then people are leaving school at 16 or 18, or whenever, and they don't have the skills to navigate life successfully.

Think about it.

People line up around the world at American consulates.

Why?

To go to our great universities.

How many people line up at American consulates around the world to go to our inner-city public schools?

Not too many.

And that's also something.

There's no reason why we can't produce things that are better.

Or maybe there's lots of reasons, but we're not overcoming that.

So this dysfunction has real impact on our society.

It also makes it harder for us to come together for foreign policy.

It certainly makes it harder for us to send the message that democracy is a wonderful, productive, efficient form of government.

You should adopt them, people around the world.

We can have our diplomats talk till they're blue in the face about the advantages of democracy or the pitfalls of authoritarianism, but it's never enough in foreign policy to talk the talk.

You've gotta walk the walk.

And we are simply not walking the walk to a large extent.

And then worse yet, in addition to democratic dysfunction, the reality now is democracy itself is at risk.

You know, we're closing in on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Comes in less than three years.

Summer of 2026.

And I guess the glass half empty school of thought would say it's amazing.

Here we are around after two and a half centuries.

And the not so, you know, positive, the glass that's half full side say, "Who wants to take bets that we're around in two and a half more centuries, or that American democracy is thriving in 25 years?"

And if I had asked that question a couple of decades ago, I think most people would've taken the bet.

Not so much now.

So again, and when I am pessimistic, my goal is not to drive you to despair, it's to drive you to action.

As I look around this room, I see a whole range of ages, from my generation to younger.

But imagine you're 40 or younger.

So you've roughly had a degree of political...

So you turned 18, plus or minus.

You know, not that far off from 9/11 two decades plus ago.

So think about the last 20, 25 years.

9/11.

And then in the aftermath we realized that actually we did have a lot of information and warning.

We just didn't connect the dots and put it together.

Agencies weren't talking to one another.

People didn't take intelligence seriously.

We had a financial crisis that could have been avoided in 2007 and '08.

And we've had a more recent financial crisis or problems, which, again, were largely manmade.

Nothing inevitable.

The fact that we now have extraordinarily high interest rates by recent standards, and we've got some inflation that is structural, didn't have to be that way.

As they used to say, mistakes were made.

Two unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Millions of Americans lost their lives during COVID-19, during the pandemic.

Wasn't inevitable.

Are there actually any explanations for all these things?

Yes, democracy's hard.

I get it.

It is a hard form of government.

Party weakness.

People think political parties are a problem.

Actually, the lack of political parties is more of a problem.

Parties introduced a degree of discipline, often a moderating.

They were mechanisms for compromise.

Right now, we have, what, 435 members of the House, 100 members of the Senate, each of whom is essentially his or her own political party.

They have independent access to money, independent access to media.

They're under no pressure to get along.

Plus, because of gerrymandering, so many people in the House are in districts, not only where you do not get penalized for being radical, you actually get rewarded for it.

Given the nature of how districts are drawn and the fact that so many of our primaries are open only to members of the same party.

So you're not forced to appeal to people who are outside your own political inclinations.

I grew up in an era of our three networks, the era of broadcasting.

Welcome to the era of narrowcasting.

Thousands of cable outlets, radio station, satellite radio.

Plus, because of social media, everybody can be his or her own publisher.

I put out this thing that Chris mentioned on Substack.

All of you can do it too.

You can be your own publisher.

And no one says you have to have editors.

Nobody says you have to have fact checkers.

And guess what?

Lots of people on a social media don't, including the character who runs what used to be called the outlet formerly known as Twitter.

And he's purveying misinformation and tending people to sites and there's no penalty.

Indeed, we live in an age where the Congress and the Supreme Court has essentially decided that we are not going to regulate meaningfully the content on social media.

Essentially, we've thrown our hands up at that.

We've done away with public service, in many ways, not just the draft, but other forms, and said, "We disparage the so-called 'deep state.'"

We seem to forget that tens of millions of Americans actually work for government.

Federal government, state government, local.

I hate to break the news to you, we are the deep state.

We are the government.

And by the way, why would we want to disparage it?

We want the most talented people in America in sight.

I don't want them to go to Goldman Sachs.

I want them to go to government.

I want them to work for state government or local government or go into the federal government.

I want people to join the military.

I want the smartest people to join the intelligence community or the foreign service.

So rather than disparaging public service, you know, we can't pay them a whole lot, we can at least pay them with respect.

But we're not.

We no longer teach our story in our schools.

Why do we think that people are born understanding, well, they're born with full knowledge of American history?

That with two kidneys and two lungs comes deep ingrained knowledge of American history.

Why is that?

Why do we think that?

Last I checked, it doesn't.

It's not in our DNA.

You know, here, again, we're one of the great universities here, but, you know, whether it's high school, colleges, university, whatever, we would never, ever, ever want a young person to leave the campus, with or without a degree, who couldn't read and comprehend at a fairly high level, write, speak, do critical analysis, be able to do basic math, be able to access the internet, and so forth.

What is democracy?

Why is it valuable?

What has it delivered?

What does it take to operate?

What's the nature of the relationship between citizens and a democracy if it's going to succeed?

Not just to survive, but but thrive.

We're no longer telling our story.

It's interesting.

And, you know, the authoritarians, I don't like most of what they do, but they understand one thing better than we do.

Haven't thought about this till now.

If you look at what authoritarian regimes do, the Chinas, the Russians in this, one of the things they are fanatical about is the writing and rewriting of history.

One of my colleagues has published a book about dissident historians in China and how they've been repressed.

Because they're telling the truth.

And one of the things that system doesn't want known is the truth.

Mr. Putin, in order to prosecute this totally unjust, unwarranted war, is trying to control the narrative.

The authoritarians understand that history is not something simply about yesterday.

It also has an impact today and tomorrow.

If you control the history, you control the narrative, you shape the debates.

They are paying attention to it.

Unfortunately, what they are doing is rewriting and distorting history for their own purposes, at home and abroad.

We are ignoring history.

And what happens then, if you ignore it, you know, like anything else, vacuums get filled.

So if we don't essentially tell our story to ourselves, if we don't teach our own history, that space will get filled by this or that conspiracy monger, or this or that group or individual who have a distorted, narrow view of our ourselves.

This is a country that was founded on ideas.

And if we want this country to continue to do well, much less exist, we have gotta perpetuate those ideas.

And here I am, a foreign policy guy by training, by vocation, but I have, again, come around to the idea that this is actually the biggest national security challenge facing this country.

So let me give you two images, two coins.

One's this coin, the citizenship coin.

One side is rights, one side is obligations.

Citizenship is about both.

The other's the national security coin.

One side of national security is the stuff of foreign policy, kind of debates we have about Ukraine and the rest.

The other side of the national security coin is this: It's our ability to function as a democracy.

That it's not something that others will admire and want to emulate, but it's that our partners around the world will trust, that our foes around the world will take notice of, and that can deliver to ourselves.

So we basically decide this democracy is worth keeping and worth fighting for.

And again, I think for the first time in modern history, this is now in doubt, but the good news is it's in play.

And it's not too late.

Nothing is irreversible.

Everything is reversible.

But good things just don't happen because they're good.

Good things happen because good people come together to make them happen.

So good people, make them happen.

Thank you very much.

(audience applauds) (gentle reflective music) - Thank you, Richard, for those remarks.

I wanna start with a question about the broad theme that you raised, that we ought to be worried.

And yet, you're calling us to have hope.

Your lifetime experience.

For goodness' sakes, why are you not in despair?

Right?

My hunch is that you've seen a lot in your career, right?

The Cold War.

To think that we won the Cold War and other things.

You've seen America come back up out of difficult situations and say, "If we will work and work together, we can do what needs to be done."

- The reason I'm not in despair, and no one should be in despair, is history teaches us what this country can do.

I mean, you mentioned the Cold War.

Last I checked, correct me if I'm wrong, the Cold War stayed cold.

It was a four-decade conflict between the great powers of the day that did not erupt into direct confrontation, much less nuclear war.

Last I checked also, the Cold War ended peacefully, on terms that even an optimist would not have dreamt of, in terms of how we came out vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

And by the way, two years later, the Soviet Union was no more.

So not bad.

But think about other things beyond geopolitics of the last 75 years.

The average American lives several decades longer.

We've had problems in the last few years.

I understand.

Particularly with male life expectancy.

But if you compare '45 until now, it's still a massive increase.

Secondly, wealth.

You look at the GDP per capita in the United States after World War II and now, orders of magnitude difference.

Look how much we've changed.

If we look at the civil rights movement, extension of the vote to 18 year olds, and so forth, this is a country, and recently, the gay marriage, what this democracy shows is an ability to adjust and adapt.

The innovation.

You know, we got through COVID.

Yes, a lot of people died, though I think a lot of those people died because of their individual or certain collective decisions.

But look at two things that got us through COVID as well as they did.

One was the mRNA vaccine.

When COVID began, the estimation was, based on traditional science, that it would take somewhere between 7 and 10 years to develop a safe vaccine.

It took closer to 7 to 10 months.

Fantastic.

And then the vaccine was safe and effective.

Unbelievable.

And then the other technology, which doesn't get the credit it deserves: Zoom.

Zoom meant that none of us had to choose between going to school or going to work, or doing a lot of other things, and staying alive.

Zoom allowed us to continue many aspects of our lives without putting our health at risk.

And it just shows to me the creativity of this society, in part also, many cases, because of years and years of some of the most talented people around the world coming here.

So I see lots of reasons to look at democracy and say, "Hey, we've got a lot to be proud of in terms of rights, economic performance, social change, foreign policy accomplishment."

It's an unparalleled record.

So one, I think we've got something worth keeping.

We have the ability to correct our floors.

What I think we've gotta do is remind people why it's valuable, and then we've gotta get working.

And one of the reasons I want people, I should have said this when I was speaking, to adopt some of the obligations, I think if a slightly larger number of Americans adopts these obligations, I think things will begin to get better, full stop.

But then it also creates a context where it's just possible that some of those more ambitious structural political reforms that now are non-starters, it could create a context where some of those have a better chance of getting adopted.

So no, I don't think anybody should despair.

Nobody should give up.

And small changes could have very big outcomes.

Look how close American politics are right now, the balances.

So small numbers of people getting somewhat more involved could have an outsized difference.

So I would hope my message tonight is one of, in a sense, is I really wanna galvanize people to do things, more than anything else.

- How can we encourage more Americans to serve their communities and country?

And if it's in your book, please tell me the chapter.

I haven't read it yet, but.

- It's in the book, and I talk about...

Curious, is it chapter seven, eight?

- Obligation eight: respect government service.

- Yeah, it's obligation eight.

- Thank you.

- I think there's a way not to do it and there's a way to do it.

The way not to do it, I would say, is make it mandatory.

Then we would have a massive debate about whether things should be mandatory.

And people across the political spectrum would resist it.

So I don't want to go down that path.

I think what we need to do is incentivize it.

How do we incentivize it?

One way is with money.

So if you look at what California's doing, they have various public service opportunities.

They're paying people a decent wage, and they're training them.

So that's one thing you do.

Another thing is people who go through these supports say it's a gap year or whatever.

Just like employers give advantages or preferences to veterans, which is great, they could give preferences to people who went through this.

Schools for admissions.

You could say, "Hey, you did this in high school, but then you spent two years doing this.

Well, okay, you weren't the greatest student in high school, but you do this, you did this.

You grew up, you learned a lot.

You're in."

That would be something.

And we could stop talking it down.

We could start basically encouraging people.

Again, we want the best and brightest.

This is a fantastic training opportunity.

For young people who haven't had great home experiences, haven't had great schooling experiences, this could be a great equalizer.

To use Israel as an example, Israel was a place where the military, you know, where language skills and other skills were going... You know, there's a lot of books that have been written how so much of the economic success in Israel were based upon relationships and skills learned in the military.

So again, public service here could have amazing payoffs.

But I think what's critical is to get out of the volunteer thing and make it a one or two-year or however long experience where people go and get direct benefits, and then they can bring those back to the society.

- My background is as an engineer, and as such, my training is based on looking for data, analyzing the data, running experiments, and coming up with a common set of facts.

- Oh?

- When I look across our society today, I don't see that we have such a thing as a common set of facts.

And the term alternative facts, of course, has risen as well.

When I then look at the number of people that have bought into what I will call the propaganda that the election was stolen, I struggle to think of how we can start by coming up with an agreement as to what those facts are, what is reality.

So I'd like to hear your views on how important that would be.

Or do you let folks believe what they will, First Amendment and everything else, social media platforms, everything else?

It makes us be so far apart.

How can we even start to show up to have a conversation around something as basic as an election?

To your point earlier on the heroes who stepped up- - Yeah, I got it.

Sure.

- and certified the vote.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

- Thank you.

- Look, your basic proposition is unfortunately right.

You cannot have debates in a society without a common set of facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a senator from New York, was Richard Nixon's domestic policy advisor or professor before that, and said, "Everybody's entitled to their own opinions, just not their own set of facts."

And he's right.

So we could have all the debates we want about certain subjects, but it's gotta start from certain factual foundations or propositions.

You can't mandate it.

People have the right to spout misinformation.

Again, I've been thinking long and hard about it, and I do make it the first obligation about being informed.

I don't think you can stop people pedaling alternative facts, which is preposterous concept, or misinformation or baseless conspiracy theories.

There's always gonna be a market for that kind of stuff.

What you can do, though, is make consumers better.

Essentially, what we need to start putting into our education, and I think particularly for middle schools and high schools, as well as college, is we ought to have a whole chunk of education, I think it's part of civics, and you call it information literacy.

And we basically say, we don't wanna tell people how to think or what to think, but we want to teach them how to consume information.

How do they know what's a fact?

How do they know what's purporting to be a fact really isn't?

Where do you increase the likelihood, if you go there, you'll encounter facts?

What are places that traffic and facts have in common?

What are places that don't traffic and facts have in common?

What's good, if you will, information hygiene?

You know, we have, like, concepts of physical hygiene and a cyber hygiene.

So what's information hygiene?

New Jersey is now requiring courses on this be taught for schools.

Finland does.

This ought to be a requirement, I believe, for high schools around the country, that we train people in, again, in how to be critical consumers of information.

I think that it's not perfect, but that's the best I can think of.

- In high school, I took a class called Current Issues, and one of the main topics that we talked about was the debt ceiling.

What do you think the best way to fix that problem?

And when do you think that will happen?

- Best way to deal with the debt ceiling is to get rid of it.

Debt ceiling is a total nonsensical piece of political activity, 'cause what it does is you're basically voting to raise your ability to borrow based on spending decisions you've already made.

If you don't want to increase your debt, don't make the spending decisions.

It's ridiculous.

So it adds a whole level of uncertainty that doesn't affect the basic spending decisions.

No, we need to have a serious conversation about indebtedness, about spending, taxation, but the debt ceiling is one of the single dumbest ideas out there.

- And please join me one last time thanking Richard Haass.

Thank you so much.

- [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership.

(upbeat music)