WEBVTT 00:00:00.699 --> 00:00:02.457 So if you've been following the news, 00:00:02.457 --> 00:00:04.946 you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids 00:00:04.946 --> 00:00:06.019 headed for the United States, 00:00:06.019 --> 00:00:09.486 all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years. 00:00:09.486 --> 00:00:12.539 Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal. 00:00:12.539 --> 00:00:14.046 That actually wouldn't be such a problem, 00:00:14.046 --> 00:00:16.150 because if we were really all going to die, 00:00:16.150 --> 00:00:19.188 we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took, 00:00:19.188 --> 00:00:21.318 and we'd find a way to deflect them. 00:00:21.318 --> 00:00:24.020 I'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way, 00:00:24.020 --> 00:00:26.156 but they're wrapped in a special energy field 00:00:26.156 --> 00:00:30.506 that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:30.506 --> 00:00:32.410 Last March, I went to the TED conference, 00:00:32.410 --> 00:00:35.246 and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist 00:00:35.246 --> 00:00:38.156 who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, 00:00:38.156 --> 00:00:40.621 and it seems that the predictions he made back then 00:00:40.621 --> 00:00:42.462 are coming true. 00:00:42.462 --> 00:00:45.949 This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises, 00:00:45.949 --> 00:00:47.558 and if we keep on going the way we're going, 00:00:47.558 --> 00:00:51.026 we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise 00:00:51.026 --> 00:00:52.374 by the end of this century. 00:00:52.374 --> 00:00:56.162 Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels. 00:00:56.162 --> 00:00:59.404 This is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like. 00:00:59.404 --> 00:01:02.412 Low-lying cities all around the world will disappear 00:01:02.412 --> 00:01:06.210 within the lifetime of children born today. 00:01:06.210 --> 00:01:08.506 Hansen closed his talk by saying, 00:01:08.506 --> 00:01:12.643 "Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. 00:01:12.643 --> 00:01:14.996 That is the equivalent of what we face now. 00:01:14.996 --> 00:01:18.770 Yet we dither, taking no action to deflect the asteroid, 00:01:18.770 --> 00:01:20.479 even though the longer we wait, 00:01:20.479 --> 00:01:23.556 the more difficult and expensive it becomes." 00:01:23.556 --> 00:01:25.363 Of course, the left wants to take action, 00:01:25.363 --> 00:01:28.699 but the right denies that there's any problem. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:28.699 --> 00:01:30.277 All right, so I go back from TED, 00:01:30.277 --> 00:01:33.171 and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party 00:01:33.171 --> 00:01:35.636 in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting 00:01:35.636 --> 00:01:38.378 a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin, 00:01:38.378 --> 00:01:41.974 and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin 00:01:41.974 --> 00:01:45.340 in National Affairs called "Beyond the Welfare State." 00:01:45.340 --> 00:01:48.539 Levin writes that all over the world, 00:01:48.539 --> 00:01:50.750 nations are coming to terms with the fact 00:01:50.750 --> 00:01:53.051 that the social democratic welfare state 00:01:53.051 --> 00:01:56.570 is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable, 00:01:56.570 --> 00:01:59.134 dependent upon dubious economics 00:01:59.134 --> 00:02:02.771 and the demographic model of a bygone era. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:02.771 --> 00:02:05.416 All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, 00:02:05.416 --> 00:02:08.094 but look at these graphs that Levin showed. 00:02:08.094 --> 00:02:10.544 This graph shows the national debt 00:02:10.544 --> 00:02:13.626 as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, 00:02:13.626 --> 00:02:15.707 if you go all the way back to the founding, 00:02:15.707 --> 00:02:17.823 we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War. 00:02:17.823 --> 00:02:21.161 Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, 00:02:21.161 --> 00:02:24.213 and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive. 00:02:24.213 --> 00:02:26.946 Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, 00:02:26.946 --> 00:02:29.668 get down to near zero, and bang! -- World War I. 00:02:29.668 --> 00:02:31.370 Once again, the same process repeats. 00:02:31.370 --> 00:02:33.278 Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II. 00:02:33.278 --> 00:02:37.636 We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP, 00:02:37.636 --> 00:02:41.316 really unsustainable, really dangerous. 00:02:41.316 --> 00:02:45.943 But we pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, what's this? 00:02:45.943 --> 00:02:48.952 Why has it been rising since the '70s? 00:02:48.952 --> 00:02:51.745 It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded, 00:02:51.745 --> 00:02:54.439 but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending, 00:02:54.439 --> 00:02:56.593 especially Medicare. 00:02:56.593 --> 00:02:59.688 We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, 00:02:59.688 --> 00:03:02.679 and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, 00:03:02.679 --> 00:03:05.949 and when they do, this is what will happen. 00:03:05.949 --> 00:03:07.678 This is data from the Congressional Budget Office 00:03:07.678 --> 00:03:10.505 showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen 00:03:10.505 --> 00:03:14.620 if current situations and expectations and trends are extended. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:14.620 --> 00:03:17.552 All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs 00:03:17.552 --> 00:03:22.183 are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, 00:03:22.183 --> 00:03:23.378 or in terms of the data they present, 00:03:23.378 --> 00:03:27.851 but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing. 00:03:27.851 --> 00:03:29.687 Let me translate for you. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:29.687 --> 00:03:33.354 "We are doomed unless we start acting now. 00:03:33.354 --> 00:03:36.334 What's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party? 00:03:36.334 --> 00:03:40.723 Can't you see reality? If you won't help, then get the hell out of the way." NOTE Paragraph 00:03:40.723 --> 00:03:43.004 We can deflect both of these asteroids. 00:03:43.004 --> 00:03:46.394 These problems are both technically solvable. 00:03:46.394 --> 00:03:49.173 Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, 00:03:49.173 --> 00:03:52.165 the mere fact that one side says, "Look, there's an asteroid," 00:03:52.165 --> 00:03:54.406 means that the other side's going to say, "Huh? What? 00:03:54.406 --> 00:03:56.984 No, I'm not even going to look up. No." NOTE Paragraph 00:03:56.984 --> 00:04:00.088 To understand why this is happening to us, 00:04:00.088 --> 00:04:04.134 and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology. 00:04:04.134 --> 00:04:06.792 So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality, 00:04:06.792 --> 00:04:09.179 and one of the most important principles of morality 00:04:09.179 --> 00:04:12.429 is that morality binds and blinds. 00:04:12.429 --> 00:04:14.863 It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values 00:04:14.863 --> 00:04:18.776 but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:18.776 --> 00:04:19.882 Think of it like this. 00:04:19.882 --> 00:04:23.945 Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet. 00:04:23.945 --> 00:04:26.104 There are only a few species that can do it. 00:04:26.104 --> 00:04:29.104 That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound. 00:04:29.104 --> 00:04:32.204 And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story. 00:04:32.204 --> 00:04:37.101 They're always all siblings who are children of a single queen, 00:04:37.101 --> 00:04:38.960 so they're all in the same boat. 00:04:38.960 --> 00:04:42.281 They rise or fall, they live or die, as one. 00:04:42.281 --> 00:04:44.572 There's only one species on the planet that can do this 00:04:44.572 --> 00:04:47.147 without kinship, and that, of course, is us. 00:04:47.147 --> 00:04:49.418 This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, 00:04:49.418 --> 00:04:51.741 and this is Tenochtitlan. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:51.741 --> 00:04:53.833 Now how did we do this? How did we go 00:04:53.833 --> 00:04:56.827 from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago 00:04:56.827 --> 00:05:00.845 to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years? 00:05:00.845 --> 00:05:03.888 It's miraculous, and part of the explanation 00:05:03.888 --> 00:05:08.112 is this ability to circle around sacred values. 00:05:08.112 --> 00:05:12.036 As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations. 00:05:12.036 --> 00:05:15.888 This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. 00:05:15.888 --> 00:05:19.033 It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together, 00:05:19.033 --> 00:05:23.404 they unite, they can trust each other, they become one. 00:05:23.404 --> 00:05:25.585 It's as though you're moving an electrical wire 00:05:25.585 --> 00:05:27.722 through a magnetic field that generates current. 00:05:27.722 --> 00:05:30.645 When people circle together, they generate a current. 00:05:30.645 --> 00:05:32.178 We love to circle around things. 00:05:32.178 --> 00:05:35.876 We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other. 00:05:35.876 --> 00:05:38.717 We can fight as a team, as a unit. 00:05:38.717 --> 00:05:41.876 But even as morality binds people together into a unit, 00:05:41.876 --> 00:05:45.848 into a team, the circling blinds them. 00:05:45.848 --> 00:05:47.656 It causes them to distort reality. 00:05:47.656 --> 00:05:51.693 We begin separating everything into good versus evil. 00:05:51.693 --> 00:05:55.591 Now that process feels great. It feels really satisfying. 00:05:55.591 --> 00:05:59.810 But it is a gross distortion of reality. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:59.810 --> 00:06:03.218 You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress. 00:06:03.218 --> 00:06:05.450 This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting 00:06:05.450 --> 00:06:08.281 in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis, 00:06:08.281 --> 00:06:10.957 so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is, 00:06:10.957 --> 00:06:14.183 you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues. 00:06:14.183 --> 00:06:16.237 And what you can see is that, 00:06:16.237 --> 00:06:18.622 in the decades after the Civil War, 00:06:18.622 --> 00:06:21.111 Congress was extraordinarily polarized, 00:06:21.111 --> 00:06:23.654 as you would expect, about as high as can be. 00:06:23.654 --> 00:06:26.630 But then, after World War I, things dropped, 00:06:26.630 --> 00:06:29.535 and we get this historically low level of polarization. 00:06:29.535 --> 00:06:31.227 This was a golden age of bipartisanship, 00:06:31.227 --> 00:06:34.502 at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together 00:06:34.502 --> 00:06:37.510 and solve grand national problems. 00:06:37.510 --> 00:06:41.959 But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on. 00:06:41.959 --> 00:06:44.800 Polarization rises. 00:06:44.800 --> 00:06:47.766 It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals 00:06:47.766 --> 00:06:49.598 could all work together in Congress. 00:06:49.598 --> 00:06:52.439 They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, 00:06:52.439 --> 00:06:55.712 but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, 00:06:55.712 --> 00:06:57.982 the force field increased, 00:06:57.982 --> 00:07:00.746 Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart. 00:07:00.746 --> 00:07:02.733 It became much harder for them to socialize, 00:07:02.733 --> 00:07:04.211 much harder for them to cooperate. 00:07:04.211 --> 00:07:09.052 Retiring members nowadays say that it's become like gang warfare. 00:07:09.052 --> 00:07:12.564 Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, 00:07:12.564 --> 00:07:16.080 Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie? 00:07:16.080 --> 00:07:18.066 Do you know why they do this? 00:07:18.066 --> 00:07:22.208 It's so that the Bloods and the Crips will know which side to vote for. (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:07:22.208 --> 00:07:24.974 The polarization is strongest among our political elites. 00:07:24.974 --> 00:07:27.152 Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington. 00:07:27.152 --> 00:07:30.588 But for a while, there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people. 00:07:30.588 --> 00:07:31.896 Well, in the last 12 years it's become 00:07:31.896 --> 00:07:33.983 much more apparent that it is. 00:07:33.983 --> 00:07:37.205 So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey. 00:07:37.205 --> 00:07:39.845 And what they do on that survey is they ask 00:07:39.845 --> 00:07:41.857 what's called a feeling thermometer rating. 00:07:41.857 --> 00:07:46.094 So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know, 00:07:46.094 --> 00:07:48.869 Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party, 00:07:48.869 --> 00:07:51.795 the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life. 00:07:51.795 --> 00:07:54.477 The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel 00:07:54.477 --> 00:07:56.940 about Democrats, and they like them. 00:07:56.940 --> 00:07:59.645 You know, ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale. 00:07:59.645 --> 00:08:02.660 Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise. 00:08:02.660 --> 00:08:04.734 But when you look at cross-party ratings, 00:08:04.734 --> 00:08:07.269 you find, well, that it's lower, but actually, 00:08:07.269 --> 00:08:09.253 when I first saw this data, I was surprised. 00:08:09.253 --> 00:08:12.548 That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, 00:08:12.548 --> 00:08:17.125 they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible. 00:08:17.125 --> 00:08:19.440 It drifts downwards very slightly, 00:08:19.440 --> 00:08:23.301 but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama. 00:08:23.301 --> 00:08:26.053 It plummets. Something is going on here. 00:08:26.053 --> 00:08:28.454 The moral electromagnet is turning back on, 00:08:28.454 --> 00:08:30.614 and nowadays, just very recently, 00:08:30.614 --> 00:08:32.854 Democrats really dislike Republicans. 00:08:32.854 --> 00:08:36.370 Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing. 00:08:36.370 --> 00:08:39.220 It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too. 00:08:39.220 --> 00:08:42.945 It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart, 00:08:42.945 --> 00:08:46.901 pulling left and right into their own territories 00:08:46.901 --> 00:08:49.710 like the Bloods and the Crips. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:49.710 --> 00:08:52.724 Now, there are many reasons why this is happening to us, 00:08:52.724 --> 00:08:55.644 and many of them we cannot reverse. 00:08:55.644 --> 00:08:58.141 We will never again have a political class 00:08:58.141 --> 00:09:01.700 that was forged by the experience of fighting together 00:09:01.700 --> 00:09:04.444 in World War II against a common enemy. 00:09:04.444 --> 00:09:07.978 We will never again have just three television networks, 00:09:07.978 --> 00:09:11.151 all of which are relatively centrist. 00:09:11.151 --> 00:09:15.991 And we will never again have a large group of conservative southern Democrats 00:09:15.991 --> 00:09:19.782 and liberal northern Republicans making it easy, 00:09:19.782 --> 00:09:24.100 making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation. 00:09:24.100 --> 00:09:26.748 So for a lot of reasons, those decades after the Second World War 00:09:26.748 --> 00:09:28.551 were an historically anomalous time. 00:09:28.551 --> 00:09:32.268 We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:32.268 --> 00:09:34.866 But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens 00:09:34.866 --> 00:09:38.012 and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, 00:09:38.012 --> 00:09:40.436 because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly 00:09:40.436 --> 00:09:44.059 to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s 00:09:44.059 --> 00:09:49.154 that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution. 00:09:49.154 --> 00:09:51.346 These changes are detailed in many books. 00:09:51.346 --> 00:09:53.586 These are two that I strongly recommend, 00:09:53.586 --> 00:09:55.737 and they list a whole bunch of reforms. 00:09:55.737 --> 00:09:58.507 I'm just going to group them into three broad classes here. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:58.507 --> 00:10:01.545 So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional, 00:10:01.545 --> 00:10:04.889 hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is, 00:10:04.889 --> 00:10:10.163 do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place, 00:10:10.163 --> 00:10:11.557 and when you have closed party primaries, 00:10:11.557 --> 00:10:14.621 and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting, 00:10:14.621 --> 00:10:18.617 you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans. 00:10:18.617 --> 00:10:22.204 So open primaries would make that problem much, much less severe. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:22.204 --> 00:10:26.955 But the problem isn't primarily that we're electing bad people to Congress. 00:10:26.955 --> 00:10:30.355 From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders, 00:10:30.355 --> 00:10:33.335 most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working, 00:10:33.335 --> 00:10:35.996 intelligent people who really want to solve problems, 00:10:35.996 --> 00:10:38.621 but once they get there, they find that they are forced 00:10:38.621 --> 00:10:41.552 to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship 00:10:41.552 --> 00:10:43.201 and that punishes independent thinking. 00:10:43.201 --> 00:10:45.779 You step out of line, you get punished. 00:10:45.779 --> 00:10:47.546 So there are a lot of reforms we could do 00:10:47.546 --> 00:10:48.718 that will counteract this. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:48.718 --> 00:10:51.938 For example, this "Citizens United" ruling is a disaster, 00:10:51.938 --> 00:10:54.137 because it means there's like a money gun aimed at your head, 00:10:54.137 --> 00:10:56.902 and if you step out of line, if you try to reach across the aisle, 00:10:56.902 --> 00:10:59.418 there's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent 00:10:59.418 --> 00:11:05.083 to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:05.083 --> 00:11:07.386 But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change 00:11:07.386 --> 00:11:10.213 the nature of social relationships in Congress. 00:11:10.213 --> 00:11:14.524 The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted, 00:11:14.524 --> 00:11:17.595 friendly, very socially skillful people, 00:11:17.595 --> 00:11:20.949 and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships, 00:11:20.949 --> 00:11:24.228 make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter, 00:11:24.228 --> 00:11:26.613 you've got to use your personal skills, 00:11:26.613 --> 00:11:29.004 and that's the way politics has always worked. 00:11:29.004 --> 00:11:32.084 But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives 00:11:32.084 --> 00:11:34.469 changed its legislative calendar 00:11:34.469 --> 00:11:38.125 so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week. 00:11:38.125 --> 00:11:40.354 Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning, 00:11:40.354 --> 00:11:43.203 they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon. 00:11:43.203 --> 00:11:45.108 They don't move their families to the District. 00:11:45.108 --> 00:11:47.426 They don't meet each other's spouses or children. 00:11:47.426 --> 00:11:49.940 There's no more relationship there. 00:11:49.940 --> 00:11:53.736 And trying to run Congress without human relationships 00:11:53.736 --> 00:11:56.563 is like trying to run a car without motor oil. 00:11:56.563 --> 00:11:59.400 Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up 00:11:59.400 --> 00:12:03.233 and descends into paralysis and polarization? 00:12:03.233 --> 00:12:04.984 A simple change to the legislative calendar, 00:12:04.984 --> 00:12:07.311 such as having business stretch out for three weeks 00:12:07.311 --> 00:12:08.874 and then they get a week off to go home, 00:12:08.874 --> 00:12:12.199 that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:12.199 --> 00:12:15.335 So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it? 00:12:15.335 --> 00:12:17.719 There are a number of groups that are working on this. 00:12:17.719 --> 00:12:19.871 No Labels and Common Cause, I think, 00:12:19.871 --> 00:12:22.010 have very good ideas for changes we need to do 00:12:22.010 --> 00:12:25.175 to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:25.175 --> 00:12:26.998 But I'd like to supplement their work 00:12:26.998 --> 00:12:31.062 with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this. 00:12:31.062 --> 00:12:34.112 Nothing pulls people together like a common threat 00:12:34.112 --> 00:12:37.905 or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, 00:12:37.905 --> 00:12:43.227 unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, 00:12:43.227 --> 00:12:46.181 in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart. 00:12:46.181 --> 00:12:49.104 Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw. 00:12:49.104 --> 00:12:52.214 But what if the situation we face is not a single threat 00:12:52.214 --> 00:12:54.051 but is actually more like this, 00:12:54.051 --> 00:12:55.481 where there's just so much stuff coming in, 00:12:55.481 --> 00:12:57.562 it's just, "Start shooting, come on, everybody, 00:12:57.562 --> 00:12:59.812 we've got to just work together, just start shooting." 00:12:59.812 --> 00:13:02.437 Because actually, we do face this situation. 00:13:02.437 --> 00:13:04.973 This is where we are as a country. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:04.973 --> 00:13:07.167 So here's another asteroid. 00:13:07.167 --> 00:13:08.843 We've all seen versions of this graph, right, 00:13:08.843 --> 00:13:12.677 which shows the changes in wealth since 1979, 00:13:12.677 --> 00:13:15.276 and as you can see, almost all the gains in wealth 00:13:15.276 --> 00:13:20.170 have gone to the top 20 percent, and especially the top one percent. 00:13:20.170 --> 00:13:22.298 Rising inequality like this is associated 00:13:22.298 --> 00:13:24.971 with so many problems for a democracy. 00:13:24.971 --> 00:13:27.939 Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other, 00:13:27.939 --> 00:13:31.392 to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not. 00:13:31.392 --> 00:13:34.350 Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts. 00:13:34.350 --> 00:13:35.940 Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood. 00:13:35.940 --> 00:13:37.992 We're not all in the same boat, and that means 00:13:37.992 --> 00:13:42.901 nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good. 00:13:42.901 --> 00:13:45.777 The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now, 00:13:45.777 --> 00:13:50.719 and the right says, "Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem." NOTE Paragraph 00:13:50.719 --> 00:13:53.298 Now, 00:13:53.298 --> 00:13:55.647 why is that happening to us? Why is the inequality rising? 00:13:55.647 --> 00:13:59.265 Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization, 00:13:59.265 --> 00:14:02.111 is actually this fourth asteroid, 00:14:02.111 --> 00:14:04.086 rising non-marital births. 00:14:04.086 --> 00:14:07.022 This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births 00:14:07.022 --> 00:14:09.000 since the 1960s. 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:12.279 Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers. 00:14:12.279 --> 00:14:14.687 Whites are headed that way too. 00:14:14.687 --> 00:14:17.032 Within a decade or two, most American children 00:14:17.032 --> 00:14:19.901 will be born into homes with no father. 00:14:19.901 --> 00:14:22.255 This means that there's much less money coming into the house. 00:14:22.255 --> 00:14:26.213 But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos. 00:14:26.213 --> 00:14:28.448 As I know from working with street children in Brazil, 00:14:28.448 --> 00:14:33.510 Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:33.510 --> 00:14:37.527 Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s, 00:14:37.527 --> 00:14:41.406 and the left has been saying, "It's not a problem. It's not a problem." 00:14:41.406 --> 00:14:43.112 The left has been very reluctant to say 00:14:43.112 --> 00:14:46.717 that marriage is actually good for women and for children. 00:14:46.717 --> 00:14:48.678 Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here. 00:14:48.678 --> 00:14:50.172 I'm actually more critical of the men 00:14:50.172 --> 00:14:52.165 who won't take responsibility for their own children 00:14:52.165 --> 00:14:54.996 and of an economic system that makes it difficult 00:14:54.996 --> 00:14:58.229 for many men to earn enough money to support those children. 00:14:58.229 --> 00:15:02.597 But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem, 00:15:02.597 --> 00:15:06.332 and one side has been more concerned about it than the other. 00:15:06.332 --> 00:15:08.565 The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid 00:15:08.565 --> 00:15:10.845 with a front-page story last July 00:15:10.845 --> 00:15:15.059 showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:15.059 --> 00:15:18.653 We are becoming a nation of just two classes. 00:15:18.653 --> 00:15:21.395 When Americans go to college and marry each other, 00:15:21.395 --> 00:15:24.095 they have very low divorce rates. 00:15:24.095 --> 00:15:27.140 They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids, 00:15:27.140 --> 00:15:28.683 some of them become tiger mothers, 00:15:28.683 --> 00:15:30.359 the kids rise to their full potential, 00:15:30.359 --> 00:15:32.782 and the kids go on to become 00:15:32.782 --> 00:15:37.073 the top two lines in this graph. 00:15:37.073 --> 00:15:39.703 And then there's everybody else: 00:15:39.703 --> 00:15:42.947 the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage, 00:15:42.947 --> 00:15:44.650 who don't have as much invested in them, 00:15:44.650 --> 00:15:46.434 who don't grow up in a stable environment, 00:15:46.434 --> 00:15:51.392 and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:51.392 --> 00:15:54.957 So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing. 00:15:54.957 --> 00:15:57.971 As before, we've got a problem, we've got to start working on this, 00:15:57.971 --> 00:16:00.003 we've got to do something, 00:16:00.003 --> 00:16:02.643 and what's wrong with you people that you don't see my threat? NOTE Paragraph 00:16:02.643 --> 00:16:06.445 But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, 00:16:06.445 --> 00:16:09.048 we'd see that these two problems actually 00:16:09.048 --> 00:16:11.795 are best addressed together. 00:16:11.795 --> 00:16:13.538 Because if you really care about income inequality, 00:16:13.538 --> 00:16:15.845 you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups 00:16:15.845 --> 00:16:18.976 that are working on ways to promote marriage. 00:16:18.976 --> 00:16:21.182 But then you're going to run smack into the problem 00:16:21.182 --> 00:16:23.710 that women don't generally want to marry someone 00:16:23.710 --> 00:16:26.062 who doesn't have a job. 00:16:26.062 --> 00:16:27.875 So if you really care about strengthening families, 00:16:27.875 --> 00:16:29.536 you might want to talk to some liberal groups 00:16:29.536 --> 00:16:32.942 who are working on promoting educational equality, 00:16:32.942 --> 00:16:34.702 who are working on raising the minimum wage, 00:16:34.702 --> 00:16:37.542 who are working on finding ways to stop so many men 00:16:37.542 --> 00:16:39.581 from being sucked into the criminal justice system and 00:16:39.581 --> 00:16:42.935 taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:42.935 --> 00:16:48.783 So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way. 00:16:48.783 --> 00:16:51.575 How many of you can see all four? 00:16:51.575 --> 00:16:54.190 Please raise your hand right now if you're willing to admit 00:16:54.190 --> 00:16:57.183 that all four of these are national problems. 00:16:57.183 --> 00:16:59.040 Please raise your hands. 00:16:59.040 --> 00:17:00.687 Okay, almost all of you. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:00.687 --> 00:17:03.529 Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members 00:17:03.529 --> 00:17:06.792 of the Asteroids Club, which is a club 00:17:06.792 --> 00:17:10.033 for all Americans who are willing to admit 00:17:10.033 --> 00:17:12.936 that the other side actually might have a point. 00:17:12.936 --> 00:17:15.967 In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground. 00:17:15.967 --> 00:17:17.861 Common ground is often very hard to find. 00:17:17.861 --> 00:17:20.045 No, we start by looking for common threats 00:17:20.045 --> 00:17:23.714 because common threats make common ground. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:23.714 --> 00:17:27.538 Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think 00:17:27.538 --> 00:17:28.909 that people could ever lay down their swords, 00:17:28.909 --> 00:17:32.515 and left and right could actually work together? 00:17:32.515 --> 00:17:35.002 I don't think so, because it happens, 00:17:35.002 --> 00:17:38.866 not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way. 00:17:38.866 --> 00:17:40.305 This is something we can do. 00:17:40.305 --> 00:17:44.340 Because Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility, 00:17:44.340 --> 00:17:46.091 and they've formed dozens of organizations, 00:17:46.091 --> 00:17:48.264 at the national level, such as this one, 00:17:48.264 --> 00:17:49.912 down to many local organizations, 00:17:49.912 --> 00:17:52.270 such as To The Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida, 00:17:52.270 --> 00:17:54.745 which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate 00:17:54.745 --> 00:17:58.191 that sort of working together human relationship 00:17:58.191 --> 00:18:01.231 that's necessary to solve Florida's problems. 00:18:01.231 --> 00:18:05.626 Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS, 00:18:05.626 --> 00:18:08.522 and on so many humanitarian issues, 00:18:08.522 --> 00:18:11.546 liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies, 00:18:11.546 --> 00:18:13.429 and at times they really have worked together 00:18:13.429 --> 00:18:15.346 to solve these problems. 00:18:15.346 --> 00:18:18.069 And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see 00:18:18.069 --> 00:18:20.065 eye to eye on criminal justice. 00:18:20.065 --> 00:18:24.018 For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population 00:18:24.018 --> 00:18:27.971 in this country has quadrupled since 1980. 00:18:27.971 --> 00:18:30.555 Now this is a social disaster, 00:18:30.555 --> 00:18:32.607 and liberals are very concerned about this. 00:18:32.607 --> 00:18:35.394 The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting 00:18:35.394 --> 00:18:38.266 the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system 00:18:38.266 --> 00:18:41.044 that's just sucking in more and more poor young men. 00:18:41.044 --> 00:18:43.377 But are conservatives happy about this? 00:18:43.377 --> 00:18:46.459 Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system 00:18:46.459 --> 00:18:49.531 costs an unbelievable amount of money. 00:18:49.531 --> 00:18:52.110 And so, because the prison-industrial complex 00:18:52.110 --> 00:18:56.347 is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, 00:18:56.347 --> 00:19:00.079 groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives 00:19:00.079 --> 00:19:03.911 have come together to form a group called Right on Crime. 00:19:03.911 --> 00:19:06.567 And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center 00:19:06.567 --> 00:19:08.545 to oppose the building of new prisons 00:19:08.545 --> 00:19:11.886 and to work for reforms that will make the justice system 00:19:11.886 --> 00:19:15.007 more efficient and more humane. NOTE Paragraph 00:19:15.007 --> 00:19:18.302 So this is possible. We can do it. 00:19:18.302 --> 00:19:21.383 Let us therefore go to battle stations, 00:19:21.383 --> 00:19:22.642 not to fight each other, 00:19:22.642 --> 00:19:25.968 but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids. 00:19:25.968 --> 00:19:29.039 And let our first mission be to press Congress 00:19:29.039 --> 00:19:32.982 to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation. NOTE Paragraph 00:19:32.982 --> 00:19:36.982 Thank you. (Applause)