The Commonwealth December 2020/January 2021

DR. MICHAEL V. DRAKE | MARIA HINOJOSA | U.S. FOREIGN POLICY RETHINK PETE BUTTIGIEG | CONSERVATISM | SUNNY HOSTIN AND DON LEMON

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

JOHN LITHGOW

Poetic tribute to a prosaic political world $5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

DEC. 2020/JAN. 2021

On the Road to Freedom

Understanding the Civil Rights Movement April 11–18, 2021 • Travel to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery.

• Visit important sites of the movement, from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to Little Rock High School.

• Meet with many figures who were involved, such as 16th Street Baptist Church bombing survivor Dr. Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, Bloody Sunday foot soldier Annie Pearl Avery, and Little Rock Nine member Elizabeth Eckford.

• Experience the newly opened Memorial for Peace and Social Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.

• Meet with members of the Equal Justice Initiative and learn about the work that is being done today to fight racial injustices in the legal system.

• Explore the Mississippi Delta, tour Malaco Records and the B.B. King Museum.

Cost: $3,995 per person, based on double occupancy

Brochure at commonwealthclub.org/travel | 415.597.6720 | travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40

INSIDE

Commonwealth The

December 2020/January 2021 Volume 114, Number 6

FEATURES 8 Pete Buttigieg What’s in the future for the former presidential candidate?

16 Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper A new U.S. foreign policy.

22 The History of Conservatism Edmund Fawcett on the evolution of the Right.

30 Sunny Hostin and Don Lemon Overcoming self-doubt.

36 Dr. Michael V. Drake Meet the University of California’s new president.

44 John Lithgow

Actor, author, political poet.

52 Maria Hinojosa

Flexing Latinx power.

DEPARTMENTS 4

“In Spanish, I’m saying these kids need to know that they can speak to a journalist, that they have that right. We want them to know that they are loved, that we’re not afraid of them. There are people who are on top of what’s happening to them. Then I say to this little girl, ‘I wanted you to hear me, because I see you. I see you, because once I was you.’”

—MARIA HINOJOSA

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Editor’s Desk

By John Zipperer The Commons Upcoming program highlights Program Info About Club programs

ON THE COVER: Actor, author and reluctant poet John Lithgow took out his political frustrations in verse. (Photo by Robert Zuckerman.)

ON THIS PAGE: Journalist and media executive Maria Hinojosa. (Photo by Kevin Abosch.)

DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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Commonwealth The

December 2020/January 2021 Volume 114, No.6

EDITOR’S DESK

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL

John Zipperer

FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub twitter.com/cwclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub commonwealthclub.org instagram.com/cwclub ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2020 The Commonwealth Club of California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub.

Published digitally via Issuu.com.

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Photo by Alexandra_Koch

Apart for the Common Good

A

s we make our way through the end-of-year holidays, a lot of people are remembering something that is at the core of The Commonwealth Club.

It’s in the name: commonwealth refers to the common good—our shared prosperity and community.

This past year, the whole country shared some of the most challenging conditions of our lifetimes, but we experienced them mostly on our own. The economic crisis, the pandemic, confrontations over racial justice, and a vitriolic election campaign—those were the overarching national challenges, but for the most part we learned about them, endured them, and tried to do something about them from the privacy of our own homes.

For some people, it was not a big challenge to spend all of their time at home. For others, it led to a financial or mental health crisis.

It certainly is a challenge for our members from all backgrounds and ways of life. But it was also a direct challenge to The Commonwealth Club of California. In normal times, people gather in our auditoriums to hear speakers, ask them questions, maybe chat with them after the program or get a book signed, mingle with other members and guests at a social hour. Since mid-March, none of that has been possible.

The challenge wasn’t just a matter of a financial threat to the organization; it was a threat to our mission to explore and inform at the very time when multiple crises were requiring the types of programs we share.

So, as you know, we went all-digital, holding our programs online. Since March, we have produced more than 320 online programs, and as you can see at commonwealthclub.org/events, we’re not slowing down. We’ll be ready to return to in-person programming when that is safe, but for now, you can be proud that your membership and your support has made possible our many programs on COVID-19, vaccines, economic impact, schools, mental health, racial justice, and the election. And in good Club tradition, we also had some fun online this year, talking with chefs, novelists, television critics, and others.

We’re going to keep doing what we do, because it is needed now more than ever. As people in the Bay Area and elsewhere take personal actions with regard to masks, social distancing, and vaccines, the nearer we all will come to the day when we can gather in large groups again to learn, celebrate and enjoy our common wealth.

JO H N Z IPPER ER VI C E PRESI DENT O F MEDI A & ED I T O RI AL

This season, give a thoughtful gift for the thoughtful people in your life.

Receive a special rate when you purchase a gift membership

commonwealthclub.org/gomspecial

LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Dennis Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston LaDoris Cordell Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube

Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS * Past Chair ** Past President Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** John Busterud** (deceased) Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Dr. Joseph R. Fink** Rose Guilbault* Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Dr. Julius Krevans** (deceased) Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Robert Saldich* (deceased) Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu** ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

Leave Your Legacy Make a lasting impact through a planned gift.

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To learn more about how to leave a legacy gift to The Commonwealth Club please contact N WE AL TH 6 THE COMMO Kimberly Maas at kmaas@commonwealthclub.org or (415) 597-6726.

Upcoming Program Highlights DECEMBER 1

DECEMBER 9

DECEMBER 17

Alicia Garza: The Purpose of Power

David Kennedy: The Future of Democracy in America

JANUARY 12

7-1/2 Lessons About the Brain

DECEMBER 2

The Myth of Chinese Capitalism Saving Freedom with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough DECEMBER 3

John Brennan: Inside the CIA and the Fight for Intelligence

Adrian Tam: Out and Proud vs. Proud Boys

The Impact of COVID-19 on Refugees

DECEMBER 10

“Take Out Girl”: The Cost of Survival DECEMBER 11

Surviving the Silence: Screening and Discussion on the 10th Anniversary of the DADT Repeal Making History with Sarah McBride: Special Annual Michelle Meow Year-End Program

Michael Eric Dyson with Angela Rye: Reckoning with DECEMBER 15 Race in America DECEMBER 7

Sadhguru: Mark Twain and Vedanta at The Commonwealth Club

A Conversation with SpeakDestination Health: Driving er Nancy Pelosi Equity in Health Care DECEMBER 8

Reading California Book Discussion—The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California

DECEMBER 16

The Virtual View from Tokyo: Shin Ushijima

Making Conversation JANUARY 13

Dr. Edward Maibach and Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz: The 2020 Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication JANUARY 19

This Moment in Climate with Michael Mann and Leah Stokes Operation Moonglow JANUARY 26

White Freedom JANUARY 28

Mai Khoi and the Art of Creative Dissent

Special Virtual Holiday Party!

DECEMBER 2020 /JANUARY 2021

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Pete Buttigieg on the campaign trail. (Photo by Gage Skidmore.)

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Pete Buttigieg NOT DONE YET THE FORMER PRESIDENT-

ial candidate argues that re-building trust as an American ideal is the key to tackling our country’s biggest challenges. From the October 7, 2020, online Inforum program “Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”

PETE BUTTIGIEG, 32nd Mayor of South Bend, Indiana; 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate; Author, Trust: America’s Best Chance

BAKARI SELLERS, Former Member, South Carolina House of Representatives (2006–2014); 2014 Democratic Nominee for Lt. Governor—Moderator

BAKARI SELLERS: I wanted to start on something that’s near and dear to my heart; I believe it to be near and dear to yours as well. You had a chance to meet and talk to congressman John Lewis before he passed away. What did you take from his life experience as it relates to the issue that you delve into, the thesis of your book, trust for communities, and how that sometimes is too often left out of the equation that we deal with on a daily basis?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I’ve been thinking a lot about the legacy and the lessons of Representative Lewis; getting to know him better during the course of the campaign was one of the most moving experiences. I write about the fact that as chance would have it, my last day as a candidate, pretty much the last thing I did in public before we headed home to South Bend to end the campaign, was participating in that march at Selma, commemorating the incredible courage of him and those who were with them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

He joined those who were marking the occasion.

We didn’t know he’d be there, because we knew DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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he was ill. But he came out and he told everybody there—and his voice even then was resonating—telling us to use the power of the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of the nation. It was such a stirring moment.

I wrestled with exactly how best to write about the role of trust in that period in the 1950s and ’60s, when he and others were marching to make America a democracy and doing it in a way that I think revealed a tremendous amount of trust. There was not trust, of course, in the good faith of the institutions they were trying to change.

They knew exactly what was waiting for them as state troopers were ready with violent intent on the other side of that bridge. But there was a level of trust in each other, trust in their solidarity, and I think trust in the capacity of the system to be reformed when confronted with a demand.

That’s something we ought to remember now, as I speak to a lot of young people who are rightly frustrated with the system, saying, “Why should I bother to vote? Why should I be part of a system that is broken in so many ways?” And [I] invite them to consider the power they have to make it less broken, if and only if they use the power that comes with the battle.

SELLERS: I learned a lesson from the South Carolina state capitol; I would always tell people that the greatest currency you have in politics is not how much money you raise, but the relationships that you build. But those relationships rely on trust.

Let’s take a step back and talk about what it means, and even more important, why does it matter? Because to be honest with you, you can win the White House and nobody trusts

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a thing coming out of your mouth, as we’ve seen in recent history. So talk to me about what does it mean and why does it matter?

BUTTIGIEG: So the reality is nothing works if we don’t have a basic level of trust.

The simplest transactions in our lives—you go to a restaurant, you’re trusting that they’re not going to poison you and they’re trusting that you’re going to wait until you’ve paid up before you leave. It’s often in unseen ways that trust plays such an important role.

I write about some of the experiences in Afghanistan that made me really think about being able to trust those around me, but in less dramatic ways. We do this every minute. Every time you go through a green light, you’re trusting your life to the idea that the person waiting at red is going to obey the traffic light on their side.

And of course this is true in the political arena and definitely true in the international arena. Consider the fact that we’re confronted right now with a virus that really won’t be beaten unless we can trust one another to do the things that are needed to protect ourselves and each other—to wear a mask, for example. In fact, public health often depends on whether people trust the medical advice that they’re getting. I was especially disturbed to see statistics suggesting that as many as half of Americans are not sure they would get a vaccine even if one was approved.

If that proves out, then we’ll never beat this pandemic.

So there are real, direct, life-or-death consequences to whether we have that level of trust, political trust in our leaders, social trust in each other, to get through life and to confront big problems around us. I think these are some of the questions that should be

on our mind as we go into this voting season that’s now underway. What can we do to make sure that we hold leaders accountable, that we demonstrate that we expect a level of trustworthiness from them? And how do we build up those relationships that are not direct in-person, in-the-room relationships, but are still intimately important, like the relationship that each of us has to the people who make decisions over our lives everywhere from the Supreme Court to city hall?

SELLERS: What did you learn about trust while you were on the campaign trail?

You were mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

You were running for chair of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. You

announced you’re running for president of the United States. You didn’t have a whole team of people. It was you and our good friend the communications savante, Lis Smith. And then you’re on “The View” and on “TMZ Live.” There was not a TV screen or an interview that she shied you away from.

But talk to me about the trust, not just with the team around you, because we didn’t see any of those leaks or things fall apart. We saw you were very well-prepared going into debates and proposals and platforms. Talk to me about trust and the things you learned on the campaign trail.

BU T T IGI E G : It’s a hu g e pa r t of

Pete Buttigieg’s first appearance at The Commonwealth Club was in 2019 during his presidential campaign. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)

campaigning, and I think maybe even more so when you’re campaigning young. I enjoyed your account of that experience in your book, My Vanishing Country, how you establish those relationships. Because when you’re asking somebody to vote for you, especially when you’re running for president, but really for any office, in many ways, you’re asking them to trust you with their lives. You’re asking them to trust you with the lives of their loved ones. There’s something very serious and very intimate about that. The

best thing that you can do is to try to help them know you think about the people in your life that you would trust with something very confidential or with something very important or just something intimate, like looking after your house or your kids while you’re away. More than anything, you want to feel like you know them.

So what does it mean to know somebody to [the degree] where we can trust them? Well, a lot of it’s being able to see how they act, and decide whether it’s predictable or not.

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The word predictable has a lot of negative connotations, right? Because predictable means boring, but also predictable means I can count on you. I think that’s something that we’re really lacking right now in the political space.

The president seems to think it’s a strategy to be unpredictable. I don’t know that that’s a strategy or not, maybe it’s just an excuse.

But whatever it is, it’s extremely destructive of the possibility of trusting anybody. Because what you learn on the campaign is people want to know you’re going to be the same person tomorrow that you were yesterday, that you’re going to be the same person in office that you were on the trail when you were asking for their vote.

Often you’re asking people to make a down payment of trust before they know for sure how you’re going to act, which after all is what trust is all about. If we all acted in predictably, certain, perfectly upstanding ways all the time, trust would disappear as a concept; it wouldn’t even make sense. We wouldn’t need it.

Trust matters, because we’re not always sure what to expect of one another. So we have to form our expectations, make ourselves vulnerable to what somebody else is going to do, whether you’re telling them a secret or trusting them with political power.

That’s the experience that really an election, I think, exchanges. I mean, the election is maybe the greatest exchange of trust we have in our civic life. We as citizens are trusted to make decisions of incredible importance over who’s going to lead us. In turn, we expect those leaders to be trustworthy when we give them that assignment.

SELLERS: Do you remember the times when you could forget who the president was for two, three weeks at a time? Just four years ago, you didn’t have to really worry,

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you could just— BUTTIGIEG: Wouldn’t that be nice?

SELLERS: —trust. Do you remember? You didn’t have to stay up and look at Twitter all night. So I completely agree with what you’re saying.

Talk briefly [about] one of the unique experiences you have [that is shared with other mayors such as] Steve Benjamin, Frank Scott, Randall Woodfin, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, London Breed. You all have this unique executive experience. In fact, you all probably wouldn’t make the best legislators, because you all can’t be one to 435; you want to be one of one.

BUTTIGIEG: It’s a different animal.

SELLERS: It’s a different animal. Talk about the difference in our relationships in understanding trust from your perch as being mayor versus that of being a part of a legislative body.

BUTTIGIEG: I think one of the biggest things about being an executive is you don’t have a peer group. By definition, there’s only one mayor, at least in your city. Hopefully you get to know your counterparts. I’ve loved getting to know some of the mayors you just named. But at the end of the day, there’s only one mayor, and there’s only one governor, there’s only one president.

When you’re in that executive role, the role of trust is huge, because it’s just a different feel from being in a committee room where people are testing different ideas, seeing what’s convincing, poking each other a little bit. You have to rely so much on the team around you. You have to rely on them to be telling you the truth. You have to rely on them to tell you things you might not want to hear in order to help you make a good decision. You’re relying on them to challenge you if you’re going in a direction that could be a mistake and you haven’t thought about all

of the reasons why. And then you’re relying on them to go and carry out the decision, whatever it was, even if they’d recommend something else. It’s that kind of trust that I think can be formed in a swift amount of time when there’s a big challenge in front of you.

But everyone from military officers to business leaders, to executives and government learns the extent to which—no matter how strong you would like to view yourself as—you just can’t do it alone. You really are dependent on the competence and the integrity of the people around you.

SELLERS: Let’s go back to your military background. Can you talk about that experience in Afghanistan and war zones?

Trust has to be something that is everywhere.

BUTTIGIEG: Trust is a huge part of what makes it possible for the military to function.

One of the things I was reflecting on as I wrote the book is how quickly that trust has to be established.

I was an intelligence analyst. In theory, my job was at a computer, but in practice, they wound up needing me to do a lot of vehicle runs between Kabul and Bagram or around the city of Kabul just because I happened to be long-gun qualified, and that was something they needed per protocol to get people around.

SELLERS: You can shoot?

BUTTIGIEG: Yeah. And not always straight, but enough.

SELLERS: I’m learning something new.

BUTTIGIEG: I don’t mean to present [a false picture]. I wasn’t kicking down doors; I wasn’t a Navy SEAL. But part of my job was to go outside with the vehicle and get people safely and alive or get equipment safely from point A to point B. I remember thinking about how much I trusted people when somebody got into my vehicle for the 30th time, the trust that we’d established.

But then I started thinking, What about the trust that was there the first time somebody got into my vehicle? Not knowing anything about me, what kind of person I was, my personality—all they might know about me was that they’d been assigned to get into the vehicle I was driving and that they could see my rank and my name on my uniform. That was it. And they were going to trust me with their lives. Of course, it was mutual. What I realized is that we create institutions and structures and customs in order to place that sort of down payment on trust before it can be validated by the

experiences we have. That’s what training is about; that’s what rank is about. But it’s also what it’s about to be part of a group that has a strong sense of belonging.

All you should have to know about somebody in uniform is to look at the flag on their shoulder and you know that we’re part of the same team, even if they’ve got a different political viewpoint than you do, or they’re from a different part of the country or they have a different racial background; whatever it is, you know that you’re in it together. I’ve thought a lot about what it would take to create that same sense of group belonging for more Americans without more Americans having to have the experience of going to war.

I think there are a lot of ways to do that, and we’ve got to be on the lookout for those sources of group belonging that are not about excluding outsiders, but about creating that sense that we can turn to each other, that you know, whether you’re a part of a sports team or a club or a faith community or a political organization, or a military unit or whatever

Seemingly no politician visits San Francisco without hearing from former Mayor Willie Brown. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)

it is, it can create such important bonds of trust that you can then take out into other contexts and use to build the relationships that we really are lacking in this country.

The number of Americans who say you can trust other people to do the right thing has been falling at almost catastrophic speed. If we don’t shore it back up, we’re going to find that the U.S. will become like a lot of lowtrust societies that do worse economically.

They do worse in terms of safety. They do worse in terms of justice. That’s a direction we’ve got to reverse for America to have a good balance of the 21st century.

SELLERS: We did a lot of background— you as mayor and you in the military. I do have a question though about the moment we’re in now. Do you think we’re at kind of a tipping point when it comes to distrust or mistrust?

BUTTIGIEG: I think we could be. I think it’s up to us, and a lot depends on the answer

to that question. Look, this is the beginning of the 2020s, right? If the rest of this decade goes the way the first year of this decade went, we’re all in trouble, because I think a lot of us feel like 2020 has been a long few years.

But I also believe that this decade ahead of us is a deciding decade that could lead to enormous progress if we started to establish a fairer tax code and actually invest in the things that make it possible for people to thrive, to cut poverty, to have real infrastructure, to invest in education, to address health. If this is the decade when we choose to finally wrestle and wrangle down the racial inequities that have been with us for 400 years; if this really could be, as some have called for, a third reconstruction, building on the first one after the Civil War, the second one in the civil rights era—if this was the decade that America actually got the job done. If this was the decade that we actually confronted climate change—and

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it’ll have to be, because this will be one of two things: the decade we failed permanently to deal with climate change or the decade we somehow got on top of it. One of those two things will have to come true, and we’ll know very quickly. So all of this in ways we don’t always think about depends on trust, the ability to build enough trust in the possibility of our institutions to reform, to go in and actually do it.

The trust we have in science and expertise that will be needed in order to make the kind of decisions and sometimes difficult choices needed to get ahead of the climate crisis. The amount of trust in this better shared future that’s going to be needed for a lot of white Americans to lay aside some of the benefits that exist as a consequence of the racialized inequities that we live in. All of these things are either about to happen or they’re about to not happen in a very permanent, painful and devastating way. It’s part of why I thought it was so important for this book to come out this year.

SELLERS: I want to talk about a specific incident, because unfortunately I think Black people are in a really unique situation, that blood has to be shared or images have to be shown so that, one, you can understand the distrust that some people have of an institution or a system, and two, ironically, being able to trust in what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and try to bring us together.

Talk to me about the George Floyd case, that 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and how it took that for a lot of white folks to understand the distrust that black people have of this community. Talk to me about that incident, that moment and how you evaluate that moment as we are coming up on these other series of moments that you talked about.

BUTTIGIEG: The murder of George Floyd awakened so many Americans, partly because

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it closed the gap—because everybody saw this horrifying killing literally before our eyes. It closed this gap between what Black Americans had been saying about the Black experience and what white Americans have considered about how deep it runs.

In other words, I think what was different this time is it’s not so much defeating the likes of the KKK and the Proud Boys, that’s got to happen. But this was more about an awakening of what needs to change among white people who consciously would detest racism, but in so many ways continue to participate in this racialized society that works to the benefit of white Americans and to the detriment of Black Americans.

A lot of this, again, has to do with trust, partly in terms of trust as a resource just like financial capital. If you have more of it, you can do more in life. And Black Americans have been systematically distrusted. We can put a number on how much people are trusted with credit ratings. And there’s a of data about the racial disparities in credit ratings, even for otherwise equally credit worthy people.

It’s certainly the case in what Bryan Stevenson has called the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that Black men, young Black men in particular, experience that puts their lives in danger every time they encounter a police officer, but also creates maybe a different kind of pressure just getting through life. Things again that Black writers and voices have been talking about for a long time. But I think the pivotal nature of the moment of George Floyd was the invitation to so many well-intentioned white people to be not just vaguely sympathetic, but specifically active in trying to do something about it.

SELLERS: One of the things [about which] I really wanted your understanding, because I’m still not there yet—distinguish between

trust and faith.

BUTTIGIEG: It’s a great question, one I’ve been thinking about a lot. In fact, you could spend all day on Google Translate putting in a word like trust or faith, translating it into some other language then translating it back into English and see what comes back. Not every language has the way we do of talking about trust or confidence or faith.

Consider the word trusty, which is not quite the same thing as trustworthy. But we have that word to refer to the kind of affection that we have for maybe a pocket knife or a friend or a trusty steed that we can count on.

The way we talk about this I think reflects the way we think about this, too. And if you look in scripture, there’s a lot about trusting in God. Every faith tradition has something about how we trust in a higher power or trust in an order of things. I think having that kind of trust, which is intertwined with faith in the spiritual sense, gives us a better ability to have a level of trust in one another. I’m not saying you’ve got to subscribe to a particular religious tradition in order to experience this, but I think it is clear that part of what humanity has been searching for ever since the earliest faith traditions emerged is a basis for some level of trust in a frightening and uncertain world.

We’ve got to think about the trust that we have in each other through the lens of the trust we can have in our place in the world, perhaps our place in the universe. I think many believers organize our understanding of that place according to a faith tradition.

But whatever moral tradition you hold to is a big part of what makes it possible to make that down payment and make yourself a little vulnerable, trusting someone else before they fully earned it.

SELLER S: The words that will be synonymous with [Donald Trump’s] tenure as president had been fake news. He’s talked about it from the beginning. I don’t want to harp on the bad politics of it, but talk to me about how it erodes the trust coming from the highest office in the land in our institution of media and journalism, which is a necessary institution. How do you rebuild that post?

BUTTIGIEG: Forty, 50 years ago Walter Cronkite would literally end his news broadcast by saying, “That’s the way it is.”

It was his sign-off. There was an expectation that certainly broadcast media could give you a clear sense of what had happened.

And then there was still politics around it.

There were ferocious controversies over what was reported in the news, but no one would think to say that thing that you saw you didn’t actually see.

There’s that saying, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.” Nobody thought of that. They just would argue over the same set of facts.

People would have different values that would lead them to make different conclusions or your different interests that would lead you in a different direction. But those different interests, those different values, those were being negotiated on a single field of fact.

Now fast forward to 2020. The facts haven’t changed. There’s still a set of things that either happened or didn’t happen, and the truth is out there. But it is increasingly viewed as acceptable to attack an unfavorable news story by saying, “No, that didn’t happen,” and calling it fake news.

We must remember the origin of fake news actually was something very different, which was news that was not really designed to get people to believe in it for longer than it took to get you to click on it. But when you clicked on it, somebody made money. There were Macedonian teenagers who could make tons of money by putting up a story that you’d see in your ad stream that would say Britney Spears has been devoured by alligators, and just out of curiosity, you’d click on it.

And you wouldn’t go through life believing it, but they’d make a couple of cents every time somebody did that. There are some pretty rich Macedonian teenagers, because that’s how fake news got started, or at least how fake news came into our vocabulary.

Now, I actually have a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who’s been discussing how a different conception of fake news goes back to the colonial days. I’ve got to think that if I was walking down the street in the 17th century and you handed me a political pamphlet that had been printed on a printing press, I probably would have been a little bit impressed that you had a printing press and I would have thought, “Well, I better at least look at what this is.”

Then eventually we wised up, and we had that expression, “Don’t believe everything you read.” I think we don’t have that same wisdom yet when it comes to all the stuff that bombards us on the internet. So paradoxically, even though everybody can be their own reporter today, we actually need journalism more than we used to because there’s more information.

“We need more editors and reporters, not just to figure out what the little bits of information are out there, but to make sense of them.”

We need more editors and reporters, not just to figure out what the little bits of information are out there, but to make sense of them. That’s something that cannot be automated, and it cannot be outsourced. We need people of integrity—as, by the way, we have in many places in journalism—to play that role. It’s only going to matter more the more raw information hits us and comes our way.

SELLERS: Tell me what your hope is for the next four years, even if Donald Trump is reelected.

BUTTIGIEG: That’s a pretty painful if.

But my hope is that America is ready to fix what is broken at a deeper level than we have been in a long time. That does mean structural change. As a country, we’ve amended our constitution in some substantive way at an average pace of once per decade, and yet it’s been about 50 years now since we’ve made some changes. We know some [possibilities are] to get money

out of politics, to have a national popular vote, things that would increase trust in our system and would probably increase participation, which would make the system just truly more trustworthy, which in turn would increase trust. All of these things have a chicken-and-egg quality, and they either get better and better and better, or they get worse and worse and worse.

My hope is that the 2020s will be a decade where we get out of the negative cycle into a positive cycle, but that’s going to require some very concrete and ambitious decisions about where we’re going to take things.

I think that probably does require a new president. But no matter who the president is, it’s not just about the president. You know from your time serving in the legislature how much power our system places in the hands of state officials. It’s one of the reasons why I believe in finding the power in state and local office too, because that’s where a lot of this actually plays out.

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A NEW WAY TO LO CAN AMERICA REINVENT ITS FOREIGN POLICY IN

these post-post Cold War times? From the October 6, 2020, online program “Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper: Re-Imagining U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Dr. REBECCA LISSNER Ph.D., Assistant Professor, U.S. Naval War College; Co-Author, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty‑First‑Century Order Dr. MIRA RAPP-HOOPER Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Yale Law School; Co-Author, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty‑First‑Century Order In conversation with Dr. GLORIA DUFFY, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California

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Photo by stokpic.

OOK AT THE WORLD GLORIA DUFFY: It’s my great pleasure to introduce today’s program and guests— Rebecca Lissner, assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and Mira RappHooper, senior fellow at Yale Law School.

They are coauthors of the new book An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty‑First‑Century Order. I’m also pleased to say that Rebecca was an intern at The Commonwealth Club about six years ago, and I want to congratulate her on her successful journey since then.

Let’s start by asking both of you a broad

question: What do you mean by the title of your book, An Open World? “Open” in what sense?

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER: The short answer is that Rebecca and I see there as being an international battle underway between forces of openness and forces of closure. We believe that the United States can only stay safe and secure and prosperous if it defends an open world.

Well before the COVID crisis, which of course has upended [everyone’s] last few months, the U.S.-led international system was

already under considerable strain. America’s geopolitical edge was eroding as China continued to rise. U.S. tech companies were rejecting cooperation with Washington, while authoritarians like China and Russia used digital surveillance to tighten their grips.

And the domestic political polarization in the United States eroded our power further from within. These trends all raised the specter of the fact that we could have a 21st century that was closed, in which authoritarian states ended American access to important waterways or trading hubs, cut off our DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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access to friends and allies around the world, and ended our leadership atop important international institutions.

And of course the pandemic has only accelerated and deepened many of these forces, making it all the more likely that countries, including the United States, will increasingly seek safety by turning inwards, closing their borders and limiting travel, cutting themselves [off] from the outside world. But this would be a world that would be more dangerous for the United States, and the measures that we’ve had to put in place these last few months should not be our destiny. Rather, to lead the 21st century, the United States must pursue a strategy of openness that pioneers new forms of international cooperation in an open world, REBECCA LISSNER: Why don’t I take this opportunity to just share what we exactly mean by an open world and what an openness strategy is? An openness strategy is the new foreign policy vision that sets out to defend the United States’ most vital interests and values, even though it is no longer the world’s unrivaled superpower. It recognizes exactly that the U.S. can only stay safe, secure and prosperous in an open world. So what does that mean? An open world means that, first, all states should be able to make free and independent political choices without foreign interference in their domestic decisionmaking processes and without outright domination by more powerful nations.

Second, international waterways, airspace and outer space must all remain open and accessible for commercial and military transit, which means that countries like China should not be able to restrict international transit through vital waterways like the South China Sea. And third, global cooperation and trade should proceed through international institutions that are governed transparently and modernized for 21st century challenges.

It’s important to recognize that to realize these three pillars of an open world, the U.S. does not need to dominate the world militarily. It just needs to prevent other countries from doing so, while joining with likeminded allies and partners to build a powerful coalition for international openness.

DUFFY: What are the benefits that you see the U.S. has had as a result of policies of openness of the past?

RAPP-HOOPER: It’s such an important question. Openness in many ways has always been the center of America’s strategy in the world. But what we’re calling for here is a

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Documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz.

new foreign policy that places that at a core focus for the United States, particularly as American power in the world is increasingly constrained.

At least since the end of World War II, U.S. policy makers have always sought to keep the world open in some form. In the final days of World War II, FDR conceived of an open world as a way to end the Second World War and potentially continue cooperation with the Soviet Union. An aspiration which unfortunately was dashed when Stalin made it clear that he did not intend to cooperate with the West. But the reason that FDR sought openness was because only if continents like Eurasia stayed open could the United States access the vital markets it would need to keep itself prosperous, could it have the security ties it would need to allies to keep both the United States and those allies safe, and only under those conditions could it access the waterways and skies that would allow it to navigate freely the world in ways that would allow for trade and for military access around the world. But although Roosevelt’s vision for openness during the Cold War did not come to be, the United States remained committed to a version of openness within its democratic sphere of influence throughout the Cold War.

REBECCA LISSNER .

After the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it saw almost no constraint on the idea of openness in the world. Sitting atop a newly powerful geopolitical position with no rival to contest its power, the United States faced almost no constraint to any action it might take on the global stage. Sometimes that led to excess, things such as the invasion of Iraq. But in that world, the United States was able to trade freely, was able to connect with its security partners freely, and saw no challenges to navigating the seas or skies that are so vital to its security.

But now that China is not only rising but largely has risen, the United States can no longer take openness as a guarantee. Rather, if it is to be able to continue to access the world in these ways that have been so beneficial to its safety and its prosperity, it’s going to need to place openness at the center of its strategy in ways that acknowledge there are these newfound constraints on its power, and yet place this at the centerpiece of its alliances and its approach to international institutions if the country is to stay safe and secure.

DUFFY: Is part of your premise that because of our advantages as a society—our education, our resources, our prowess in business and commerce—that the U.S. does

“To realize . . . an open world, the U.S. does not need to dominate the world militarily. It just needs to prevent other countries from doing so, while joining with likeminded allies and partners to build a powerful coalition for international openness.”

—REBECCA LISSNER Journalist Maria Ressa.

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER . better in an open environment, especially economically, because we tend to be more competitive?

LISSNER: That is absolutely true, and it’s a really important point. When you think about the fact that 95 percent of global consumers are actually beyond American borders, it becomes very clear that if the U.S. is to be prosperous, we need to be engaged in an open and interdependent international system and international economic system.

But it’s not just dollar-and-cents. It’s also our security that is at stake here, because if a hostile adversary were to come to dominate crucial regions of the world, that would mean that the United States would find itself threatened. And we saw in World War I and World War II what happened when the United States tried to retreat behind its own oceans and behind its own borders and had to intervene late in two world wars, because at the end of the day, American security and our prosperity are inextricably linked with that of the world.

Now it’s also the case that openness, as we define it, as it relates to international cooperation, is also vital. This speaks to the health and safety of everyday Americans.

We are living through right now a pandemic that illustrates how many threats Americans face in a very immediate way, emanating from overseas, but they also can only be addressed through international cooperation that transcends borders. The problem is that the architecture of international cooperation that was built in the 1940s is simply not suited to the challenges and the opportunities of the 2040s—challenges like pandemics, climate change, cyber security and internet governance. We have a structure that’s becoming rapidly outmoded and irrelevant to the most important challenges that we face.

So a critical pillar of an openness strategy is the renovation of those legacy institutions and the construction of new ones, so the United States can keep itself, its allies and its partners safe, secure and prosperous in an open world.

DUFFY: Can you say a little bit about how the structures need to be updated or new structures need to be built to deal with the increasingly globalized challenges like climate change, pandemics, etc.?

RAPP-HOOPER: Absolutely. As Rebecca already alluded to, when we talk about international organizations, experts sometimes use the shorthand international order, and that

refers to the international norms, institutions, and rules that generally govern international politics. In the current day, the institutions that we’re usually referring to—the United Nations, for example—were largely set up in the immediate years following the Second World War with the United States at their helm.

But of course much has changed in the world since these institutions were first architected, and power in this international system has changed along with them. And because institutions like the United Nations are ultimately propped up by the power of their leaders, it shouldn’t surprise us that some of these changes mean that these institutions are no longer fit to the world that we’re facing.

I’ll give you just a few examples. One is the world trade organization. Of course this is the main international institution that governs global trade, that has been incredibly important in facilitating international cooperation and lowering barriers to beneficial trade over the course of decades.

But after China acceded to the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, only then did we come to understand that the organization was not properly equipped to DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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deal with some real challenges that China presented to the international economy, such as its use of intellectual property and the fact that the World Trade Organization doesn’t govern digital services. But there’s no way to change the World Trade Organization except by mutual consent of all of its members. Now that China’s inside, it’s not eager to alter the rules that are working in its favor in many ways, allowing China to exploit the economic openness of other societies, even though it keeps its economy partially closed. So part of the challenge here is to figure out how to renovate international institutions like the World Trade Organization to bring them up to speed.

But there are other areas such as the Internet and cyberspace, where there are almost no rules at all that govern these new technologies that we care about so much.

Many of the regimes that do exist are only piecemeal; they’re in their earliest stages, and they’re not binding on the most relevant countries involved. So there is a charge for the United States and its allies not only to renovate institutions like the WTO, but to create new forms of governance in these allimportant areas like technology and climate change, because if it fails to do so, it can bank on the fact that China and other countries that support China’s closed preferences will

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write those rules instead.

LISSNER: I just want to underline one point that I think we’ve alluded to repeatedly, but ought to be stated explicitly, which is that the reason why the United States can no longer pursue the same post-Cold War foreign policy that it has been pursuing for so long is because its position in the world has changed irreparably. The reason that it’s position in the world has changed so much is because of the rise of China. China has experienced meteoric economic growth over the past several decades. It is now the world’s largest economy by some measures and its military has expanded in parallel. While China itself rose within a U.S.-dominated international environment, it now seeks to change that environment and to write new rules of the road for 21st century international politics that better reflect China’s own power and preferences. So when we lay out this openness strategy, both the necessity for it and the content of it, it’s important to recognize that the chief antagonist of openness that we identify is China.

That is because China is the only country in the world that both has preferences for closure and the means to bring that closure about. That closure could come about in a number of different ways. It might take a 19th century kind of form, whereby China

actually uses military force to annex its contiguous neighbors or even Taiwan. But it also might take a subtler 21st century form, in which China uses digital infrastructure, physical infrastructure, or new technologies, as a means to assert its dominance over other states, whether in Asia or overseas, to coerce the political leaders of those states, to suborn local officials, to spy upon them.

So we need to be attuned to both of these kinds of threats that are emanating from China. It requires a different set of American responses, because it’s no longer going to be sufficient to just rely on American military power to deter Chinese aggression. We also need to match China in these new spaces—whether technological, economic, commercial, or ideological. So an openness strategy is responsive to the full-spectrum threat that China does pose and this new condition of international politics that is frequently referred to as great power competition. That is the resurgence of rivalry between very powerful states in the international system where the U.S. is no longer far and away the dominant and uncontested superpower.

DUFFY: Underlying what you’re saying, it seems as though to prevent any country from being a hegemon, China or otherwise, and constraining this environment of openness

“The primary determinant of the U.S. role in the world, and the question of whether or not the United States can stay strong enough to support a strategy of openness, will be whether or not the United States reinvests in itself.”

—MIRA RAPP-HOOPER

and threatening the U.S. role in an open world, we must maintain a strong defense.

We must maintain our defense spending.

What does our security policy look like to keep the openness open so that we can and compete well in it?

RAPP-HOOPER: It certainly is true that keeping the world open requires defense spending and thinking about the prospect of military competition. But competition in the 21st century is not just occurring in military form.

In many ways it’s occurring in other forms, primarily such as economic and technological forms. If the United States is to keep the world open and maintain a leadership role, it’s going to need to focus there as well. First things first, however, is that for the United States to keep the world open, it will not just need to think about its own defense budget or even its foreign policy budget. It will need to reinvest in itself. The primary determinant of the U.S. role in the world, and the question of whether or not the United States can stay strong enough to support a strategy of openness, will be whether or not the United States reinvests in itself.

There we’re thinking about policies that support education, that certainly prioritize our recovery from COVID, that transition the United States to a sustainable and green

economy, that support immigration and that foster our base of innovation so that we can continue to be the powerful country we should be in the 21st century, because only then do we have the capability to start enacting this strategy. But alongside that, we not only want to see us prioritize a robust defense, as you suggest Gloria, let’s think about how our national security budget and priorities should be positioned more broadly. If China were to close off parts of the international system, it almost certainly would not prioritize doing so with the military instrument first and foremost, rather it would do so using economic coercion or even new technologies like 5G telecommunications technology to siphon off data and spy on foreign countries by building their digital infrastructure.

So if the United States is going to compete in that world and keep it open, it’s going to need to prioritize its State Department, its Treasury Department, its development funding, all of these tools of foreign policy that have been deprioritized in recent years, but are so essential to the United States role in the world outside of the military domain.

Only if we remake those aspects of our foreign policy and reinvest in diplomacy as the primary instrument of American foreign policy will we have the chance to make good on an opennes strategy like this one LISSNER: That’s a critical point. If I could just embroider upon it for a moment, I think it’s important to recognize that all of these domestic investments are absolutely crucial and they show that the traditional distinction that we’ve made between foreign policy and domestic policy is simply no longer operative in the 21st century, where so much of America’s international strength depends fundamentally on our domestic strength.

But there’s another piece of this, too, which is even if the U.S. makes all the right choices at home, it nevertheless cannot keep the world open on its own. We need to work with allies and partners. Allies, especially in Europe and in Asia, are tremendous assets for the United States. Together with our allies, we have something on the order of 28 times the GDP that China has. So that’s something that will be really hard for China to overcome if we all stay lashed together and act in defense of openness, both in Asia and in Europe.

Much of the success of this strategy will depend on the decision of our allies to join us in backing institutional reform efforts in places like the WTO, in the UN Security Council, in joining with us to set new

rules and norms to govern the Internet and emerging technologies, in upgrading their own defense strategies to protect the global commons. And, in the case of Europe, in joining with the U.S. in seeking to push back against China in Asia, in addition to pushing back against Russia in Europe. So it’s really important to recognize that the domestic piece of this is absolutely vital. It is necessary, but it’s also insufficient, because this is a global battle underway between openness and closure. And our friends are a crucial element of the winning coalition that will be required to succeed in these efforts.

DUFFY: Well, speaking of that, one of our audience members would like to know which countries the U.S. should prioritize in rebuilding our relationships.

RAPP-HOOPER: It’s a great question. We’re afraid that with the extent of the damage that has been done in recent years, there will be a need for the United States to press forward on multiple fronts at once. We will not have the luxury of simply picking and choosing amongst a few vital relationships, but we’ll have to reprioritize our alliances overall.

A primary source of our strength is our treaty allies in Europe and Asia. That is, our 30 NATO allies—a huge base of support, in economic and military and political terms— as well as our five treaty allies in East Asia, all of whom have really been a sort of geopolitical source of America’s strength in both regions for many decades.

But if the United States is to rebuild its relationships with its allies in the years to come, it’s going to need to do more than simply recommit to them and announce that it’s back on the global stage. It’s going to need to remake these alliances to face down some of the threats and challenges that we’ve been talking about today. It’s going to need to cooperate with its allies to face down climate change, on the global health response to COVID, to cooperate to produce technological alternatives to China’s 5G systems, and to improve defenses in cyberspace and against political interference, like Russia’s disinformation campaigns and election meddling.

So it won’t simply be enough to restore ourselves to the alliance system that the United States left a few years ago. Rather, Washington will have to take up the charge to remake that system for this world of far greater and more diverse challenges if it is to help us on this way forward.

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CON

The

FROM CONSERVATISM’S ROOTS IN THE

European upper-class to its adoption of pro-capitalist ideas to today’s mass populist movements of the hard Right, Edmund Fawcett provides a history of a powerful movement. From the October 27, 2020, Humanities Member-Led Forum online program “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition.”

EDMUND FAWCETT, Former European and Literary Editor, The Economist; Author of Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition In conversation with GEORGE HAMMOND, author of Conversations With Socrates

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EDMUND FAWCETT: My book is, I trust, a timely history of the political Rights in France, Britain, Germany and the United States. Its message in a sentence is this: Conservatism has always been as much a source of disruption and turbulence as it has been a wise avoidance of heedless change.

I think once that idea is grasped, it’s much easier to understand both the appeal and the up-and-down history of conservatism since its origin in the early 19th century. On reaching the present, my history spotlights a question that hangs over liberal democracy in Europe and the United States: Which conservatism is it to be? Is it to be the— broadly speaking—liberal kind that helped sustain liberal democracy after 1945? Or is it to be an illiberal, one-nation kind claiming to speak in the name of what it calls “the people”?

In some very general, ground floor sense, conservatism speaks to a kind of universal human desire for order and stability, for tomorrow to be like today. Politically, conservatives have indeed stood for order and

NNSERVATISM

e Fight for a Tradition stability, for the rule of law, for prevailing distributions of property, for familiar customs, for effective economy that pays the bills and puts food in the shops. But at the same time, with quickening pace later in the 19th century, those very aims required conservatives to embrace what they initially feared and shunned, namely modern liberal capitalism, this fantastic machine of innovation and prosperity that is forever turning society upside down and creating new tomorrows.

So conservatives, to sum up, offer stability and disruption, continuity and change.

The tensions, the difficulties—I think everything that makes the conservative story interesting comes back to that basic conflict.

Conservatism has promised and still promises national community and global markets; social peace and meritocratic competition; competence in office, and yet suspicion of government; cultural stability and continual cultural change.

As a left-wing liberal, I’m not promising

that my account or my story is neutral. I trust it’s objective. If that’s worked, I hope that conservatives will recognize themselves in their tradition. I hope that the Left will see its opponent’s position, which like careless chess players they’re very often prone to ignore. I wrote the book with a comradely question for the Left: If we’re so smart, how come we’re not in charge? I wrote it so the question for the Right could be as sharp as possible: Will conservatives reconstruct a center conservatism, or join the rush to an illiberal hard Right?

GEORGE H A MMOND: It’s a ver y interesting way of presenting the idea. I think a lot of people will understand this tradition a lot better by the end of this hour, because it’s so different than what people think, especially what you said about capitalism.

Everyone assumes that conservatives are totally on the side of laissez-faire capitalism and so on. And they did not start that way at all. In a way it’s just because that’s the current institution, that’s the status quo that they

now support. So conservatives really started as monarchists and in favor of the established church basically, and any other institutions that were in power at the time they didn’t plan to change.

You start in the 17th and 18th centuries and sort of the foundational ideas of modern times for conservative thought. So tell us a little bit about [Joseph] de Maistre, [Edmund] Burke and the ideas that you illuminate.

FAWCETT: With a small course correction, I think that’s right. Thinkers like de Maistre and Burke, [and James] Madison—these are in a way conservative forerunners. It may seem like a very kind of picky semantic point, but I think conservatism—like liberalism, its opponent—these are 19th century phenomena. You don’t really get them before. Why do I say that? I think for two reasons, which come back to your question. One is that both of them are responses to a completely new condition of society. Great population growth, great productivity growth, much of it driven by DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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modern industrializing capital. And the folk who wrote in the 18th century, like Burke and Maistre, even Madison, they couldn’t imagine this. However, they had very wise or at least for them very pertinent points to make about something else, the French Revolution. This was very important.

HAMMOND: The difference between how the French Revolution and how the American Revolution was perceived—that’s one of the things I really want to talk about. So let’s get into that.

FAWCETT: It’s crucial. I mean, very, very quickly, both Burke and Maistre, writing in the 1790s—where were critics of the French Revolution? They weren’t there. They weren’t saying chopping off people’s heads is a bad way to do politics. They weren’t saying anything as crude as that. Their point was that essentially the French Revolution marked an entirely new kind of politics in which brainy people—intellectuals, lawyers, journalists—began to say how politics ought to be conducted. And to Maistre and Burke, how politics ought to be conducted was given.

Burke, an English, Irish, conservative, a Tory, how politics was be conducted—it was given by custom. It was given by tradition. For Maistre, a Savoyard Catholic, politics was to be conducted by, in essence, divine authority.

In both their cases, they thought that ordinary folk were simply not capable of organizing their own affairs. They needed to be guided. Of course, the French Revolution in a broad sense was against that. “No, no, no. We’re all part of politics. We can all argue about it. We can all pitch in.”

Madison was very interesting, because unlike Maistre and Berg—who really sort of held up their hands [to] change and said, “We want to stop this,” and of course it was in vain—Madison thought of constitutions.

In other words, a big change, an American revolution, in order to preserve a certain stability, a certain authority in government.

So he was in a way thinking of constitution to avoid revolution.

But the three of them were all in advance of conservatism. They handed on to conservatives in the 19th century a set of ideas, which were very useful to conservatives.

The suspicion of intellectuals, the importance of custom, the importance of stability.

But I think they weren’t, strictly speaking, themselves conservatives.

HAMMOND: We’ll move to the past again, but I want to talk about Madison and the Constitution. One of the things that’s helpful for Americans to understand clearly is that the Founders did not try to create a wide open democracy. They were aiming at

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“Liberalism and conservatism lay out a feast; democracy draws up the guest list.” something else altogether, and Madison and his constitutionalism was a form of how to control this situation.

FAWCETT: That’s a very pertinent point.

It kind of broadens as we go later into the history. If you could say conservatism and liberalism are on this side, democracy is a very different idea. You could think of conservatives and liberals, and preconservatives in Madison’s time, if you will, this is an argument about how to do politics among a very small group of people. They’re almost all men in the United States. They’re almost all white, but indeed across Europe, they’re almost all white, they’re almost all men. It’s a tiny, educated, propertied part of society. Of course, there are exceptions and it’s becoming more widespread, but by and large, this is a minority preoccupation.

What does democracy do? Democracy, in the broad sense, completely blows that argument apart. It says every last one of us in society has a voice. We have something to say in politics; we have something to say to our bosses; we have something to say in cultural and ethical life. We’re not dominated. We’re not told what to do and that’s an end of it.

And above all the point about democracy is a matter of range. It includes everybody.

Whereas both the conservatives and the early liberals didn’t see it that way. You could see it this way: Liberalism and conservatism lay out a feast; democracy draws up the guest list.

HAMMOND: Certainly at the beginning, when people were even considering democracy, they weren’t considering it as a universal right. As we very well know, it took a long time for the vote to get to everybody, and we’re still arguing about it.

FAWCETT: Indeed. Historians and others among your listeners may correct me, but I think there were property qualifications for the vote until the 1820s and ’30s; in other words, 30, 40 years after the Constitution.

Blacks were

disenfranchised, of course; women didn’t get the vote until 1918. So in terms of electoral democracy, the United States was a very slow developer, as well as Britain. In 1918 in Britain, I think still something like 20 percent of men didn’t have the vote, women didn’t get the vote until then.

HAMMOND: It’s interesting. It seems to me that as a culture gets more and more confident, it allows more and more people to take part, because they don’t feel that [it’s a threat to the] stable status quo. Wherever they are on a scale, a lot of people have this desire for the status quo to keep continuing.

When people are confident, they don’t think it’s going to be disrupted by sharing.

FAWCETT: You see that arc in the conservative story. Again, go back to the sort of pre-conservative Madison. He and the Founders were immensely wise in the way that they provided these counterbalances. You may feel that [it is] too resistant to change, but it is a remarkable mechanism. And one of the overriding concerns, particularly for Madison, was the fear that minorities with a valid point of view would get kind of squashed out by majorities.

But to go forward, that arc of growing confidence is very important for conservatives, because they start out rather timid and afraid in completely new circumstances. After all, you’re looking at people who are the sons and grandsons of people who simply by nature expected to rule. It never occurred to them that they would have to justify themselves. I mean, they might have to justify themselves to some nasty contender who said, “No, you’re not the right king. This one is.” Of course there was conflict, but in terms anything like we think of today, as rulers needing to justify themselves, it didn’t really happen. This was a class used to ruling. However, they were now the outs, and the liberals were the ins.

So conservatives started out very underconfident in that. They were also very frightened of the people. They knew a great deal about people one by one. The boss knew his workers, the squire knew his tenants.

The

priest knew his parishioners. But in terms of this growing new thing called modern society, they hadn’t a clue and they had no sociologists. They didn’t have a lot of data.

So they had to have to rely on quite a lot of imagination and fear.

Over the 18th century, when they got into trouble, they tended to get into trouble by exaggerating the danger of the people. But by the end of the 19th century, they’d overcome that. In Britain, you had Lord Salisbury, who in the middle of the 19th century as a young man [was a] ferocious anti-democrat. [The unpublishable things] he said about people!

By the time he was taking office at the end of the 19th century, he and his agents had started a modern democratic machine with almost all the familiar things that we expect of it, that slowly took over and began to dominate British elections. Something similar happened in your country at the time of [William] McKinley, when they developed the Republican Party into an effective modern machine. [Along with Republican Senator] Mark Hanna, a Cleveland man at the time when the industrial Midwest was one of the hearts of the country.

HAMMOND: Very hard to be a successful political party and call the people the deplorables. You lose way too many of the voters.

FAWCETT: Absolutely. Something that is quite difficult for us on the Left to understand is how successful the Right has been at listening to and winning the votes of—that slippery phrase—the people.

But anyway, by the end of the 19th century, certainly in the United States and in Britain, they had very effective parties—and indeed in France. Germany was a more difficult case.

H A M MON D : You set out the book as a

study of all four of those countries. And for good reason. You’ve got a couple of hundred years of history of an attempt in all of those countries [of the development of] democracy.

I thought what was interesting was that the rise and fall of conservatism, although not exactly at the same year or the month or anything like that, but the waves in all four countries seem to be fairly right on. I want to talk a little bit about that pattern, because we’re experiencing another version of it right now. And maybe [explain] why that happens, at least to the extent that’s possible to say.

FAWCETT: I think that’s right. You have in the conservative tradition a kind of a long wave that works itself out over the 19th century, as conservatives become in effect a capitalist party. They agree with free market liberals that capitalism—finance capital, industrial capital—these are the good way to go. There’s no resisting it.

HAMMOND: And that was a pillar of their resistance before that period of time.

FAWCETT: They tended to support institutions and interests that didn’t really do a lot for modern capitalism, like the large landed interests, the church, the monarchy in Britain. And in France, the ultras as they were called, who were now constantly trying to bring back a monarchy that was really kind of wa lk ing

dead, even at the beginning of the 19th century. This was not important for capitalism.

It wasn’t helpful. So they did have to learn that lesson that you couldn’t fight in vain to defend dying institutions. But they did come to see that they were defenders of capitalism. In some sense, to use this puzzling phrase, they became sort of liberal conservatives in the sense that liberals are for the free market.

They didn’t become liberal in every way.

They often were very illiberal. They continued to be very illiberal in social matters, in matters of punishment, in matters of sexual morality.

Almost all the conservative parties took a very long time, indeed into the late 20th century, to get that message or to accept that. But in the core element of economics— free market—and the functioning of pluralistic institutions, by the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, the Republicans in the United States, the Tories in Britain and the conservative parties of the Right in France had by and large become blended w it h “r i g htwing liberals.”

However, there were two

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“Given [conservatives’] political dominance in the 20th century, you could say they have created a modern world in which they don’t feel completely at home.” difficulties for them. One is that modern liberal society does upset a great many things which conservatives hold dear: cultural tradition, ethical authorities, order, instability in society.

This has been an abiding puzzle, but you could say that, given their political dominance in the 20th century, conservatives have created a modern world at which they don’t feel completely at home. So that tension, those hesitations, always allowed two things for the mainstream conservative parties, who have a fantastically successful long run of governing. One is the outsiders in politics who sort of don’t buy into what I call the liberal status quo. They’re always making trouble.

You saw this in the 1890s, particularly in France and Germany. You saw it again in France and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s.

You see it now in the rise of what I call the hard Right—very disaffected, angry, that sees itself as somehow the people against the elites. That’s something that is common to all the countries and runs through the history.

The second approach, and this is quite interesting, is what I’d call cultural and ethical criticism. This runs through the history. To take some British examples, from [poet Samuel Taylor] Coleridge through T.S. Elliot, who was American but became British, through the late [philosopher] Roger Scruton, there’s a very, very strong, eloquent thread of conservative thinking, which is that plural, modern, diverse life is an ugly or wrong way to live. It’s not essentially a political [movement], at least in a macro-political sense; it’s not that kind of movement. But it’s much more of a cultural criticism. “We’re doing it wrong.”

“We’re leading the wrong kinds of life.” And

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this has been very, very powerful.

HAMMOND: That word wrong you use, that’s the crucial thing, because it implies a whole bunch of assumptions— FAWCETT: And not afraid of saying “You’re wrong.”

HAMMOND: And there’s a right and a wrong way to do things.

FAWCETT: That’s a very good point.

HAMMOND: One distraction here is because people don’t talk about this cultural issue as much as other ones, but legitimacy: to be a legitimate birth versus non-legitimate birth. If you go back to our childhoods, legitimacy was a fairly important thing. In a world today, there are countries where the majority of the children are not legitimate.

It’s the legitimacy-bastard idea; it used to be a really, really big issue. And it’s now not disappearing because there are countries, like—I just looked up the stats—China and India are still under 1 percent of the children are illegitimate. Whereas in the United States, it’s nearly 40 percent; in parts of Europe, it’s the same. And it’s over 50 percent in some of the Scandinavian [countries]; and in South America, which has been a Catholic [region], very Christian, it’s over 60, 70 percent. It’s such a fundamental shift, obviously that over the history of humanity, we’ve continued to make children in many different ways, and there’s been lots of different cultural institutions, FAWCETT: Marriage takes many forms.

HAMMOND: It was totally legitimate 3,000 years ago to have many wives and in only in

a few places many husbands—but that kind of thing. I thought it was a good custom to talk about as this is one of the things that has changed dramatically and the conservatives complain about it, but they complain about other things much more than they complain about that.

FAWCETT: That’s true. I’m in my midseventies, and if I think of the ethical change in society in my life, it’s quite extraordinary.

There’s been an acceleration. It’s quite extraordinary. Personally, I think it’s welcome.

I hear open-mindedly many of the difficulties. I think on the historical point, illegitimacy mattered hugely to royal dynasties and people with a lot of property, but bastardy and legitimacy didn’t matter so much to most folk. Push the centuries back, the solemnization of marriage is not modern, but it was a sort of relatively late development for ordinary folk—I’m not talking about the ruling classes. So all of these moral ideas are kind of continuous in character— marriage, then legitimacy—but that content changes. I think what is disturbing and is indeed disturbing for many conservatives, and probably not just conservatives, is when change accelerates. It has accelerated extraordinarily in the last several decades. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but I think getting used to it is clearly difficult and requires a lot of arguing. [Laughter.]

HAMMOND: And as you pointed out, though, it’s not that this is a brand new thing.

It’s just a return to [the idea that] a thin veneer of civilization is disappearing,

FAWCETT: That was a sort of slightly pointy-headed point of mine a moment ago.

It’s not very comforting to be told they didn’t have marriage in the 10th century. “Okay, Edmond, but you know, living in the 21st.”

The historical point has its limits.

HAMMOND: So let’s go back to the “current” time then. I wanted you to talk about [German Chancellor Otto von] Bismarck, a little bit in Germany. You make very good points on Bismarck. The German part of [conservative history] is a little bit different, but it is interesting to see a country where it wasn’t a country, basically how the Prussians moved it to “Germany,” and then what the consequences were in the 20th century.

FAWCETT: The German case is very difficult, because of what they did from 1930 to 1945. They visited on themselves and the world a kind of worse catastrophe than is imaginable. I worked in Germany many years, and they recovered quite brilliantly in many ways. But that happened, and it’s very difficult because that happened to see the history beforehand in any way but a main road leading to that self-inflicted catastrophe.

I think historians know that and avoid it, but writing a general book of the kind I did, even I found that difficult. There were conservative traditions in Germany. These were not fascistic traditions in any way. They were conservative productions. They were landed. They were connected with eastern Germany to some extent—you know, East Prussian lands. But on the other hand, they were also very strong in Hamburg, in Dusseldorf, in centers of industry. They were very like the parties that we talked about earlier—McKinley and Salisbury’s parties.

Bismarck is a very interesting figure, because he is a case where you had a really quite authoritarian figure who is nevertheless governing under the rule of law, governing with quite a number of civic and local freedoms, personal freedoms. So was this somehow a completely authoritarian society?

No. Was it an authoritarian government?

Yes, up to a point. But remember that Germany was unified of many, many different [principalities], kingdoms, cities and so on.

Indeed, up until 1918, when the empire fell apart, it was both governed at the center by Bismark and the Reichstag—the national parliament—and by all the localities.

So actually it was a sort of Rube Goldberg construction. When one thinks of authoritarians and thinks of somebody being able to pick up a telephone and give orders, which are then carried down—it wasn’t like that at all. So Bismarck was both constrained

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by Warren Leffler; Ann Coulter, Donald Trump and Sean Hannity by Gage Skidmore; Condoleezza Rice by Tech Crunch; Boris Yeltsin

by Velislav Nikolov (EU2018BG); Dinesh DSouza by Mark Taylor; Edmund Fawcett photo courtesy the author; James Madison by John Vanderlyn; Joseph de Maistre by Karl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein; Tea Party protest by Surfsupusa; Ronald Reagan with Jeane Kirkpatrick is an official White House photo; Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán courtesy of www. kremlin.ru; additional photos unattributed or otherwise in the public domain.

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by the rule of law and by freedoms, but also by simply the circumstances of this construction.

I think he’s an interesting example. German conservatives in the 19th century who argued for that kind of conservatism, they said, “Don’t fuss so much with institutions, with democratic accountability; focus on maintenance of personal freedoms and the rule of law.”

HAMMOND: Well, it’s interesting how the Hanoverians did better in England than they did in their own country. [Laughter.]

I think the reason that people try to stay away from a more nuanced idea about Germany’s history is that everybody wants to believe it will never happen in their country. Yet German civilization was not all that much different than the French and the British, the Americans until the post-World War I—problems and all, right?

FAWCETT: There is a strain of historical thinking, which survives somehow, that the self-inflicted disaster 1933–45 was baked into German history. There’s another strain which, while allowing for long-term trends, sees huge contingency in what happened. When you look carefully at the mistakes that were made and the chances for continuing the fragile liberal democracy, the missed chances, you see contingency played a huge part. You bring up a point that I think is worth stressing.

Particularly on the Left, they kick around the label fascist with abandon. You have similar abuse on the Right; I’m not making a partisan point. But on the Left, “So-and-so is a fascist.”

This is very misleading. Indeed, even the hard Right now in Germany and in France, the hard Right represented by the Trump Republican Party or the Brexit Tories in Britain—it’s not fascist in any historical sense.

However, there are certain common appeals to this mythical being—the people. That’s quite something to keep your ear open to.

The other thing is, remember fascism was historically specific. It arose across Europe and in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s after a disastrous war and fueled by a catastrophic economic slump. So it had a whole series of particulars that don’t have present-day counterparts.

HAMMOND: Yeah. It’s crucial to see those nuances, because if you just revert always to calling someone either a communist or a fascist, it’s not helpful. There’s a whole spectrum that we’re always dealing with. You have this whole spread of personalities that are comfortable in different ranges. And if we see how big that center is, I think that’s where the stability of democratic civilizations come about.

I also think that the way that Germans

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“There are lots of ways liberal democracies can weaken and become corroded and even die. They don’t have to become fascist.” treated the post-World War II situation, once we got to the mid-’50s and taught all the children that this was a terrible thing and made it very clear and lived up to what the problem was and recreated a very democratic society—I think that shows the strength of the civilization that existed prior to the disaster.

FAWCETT: I completely agree. And then, you know, there were legitimate quarrels—it was partly generational—but the legitimate quarrels in the ’60s about the speed and thoroughness of Germany’s historical reckoning with itself. But that quarrel, which seemed very important at the time, now it seems less important. I think people would agree fully with what you’ve just said. There has been a historical reckoning, and not just a kind of intellectual admission or presidential statements, which are important, but the creation of a society that in many ways tried to make sure that this could never happen again.

Just throw in there a related point to “this never happening again.” There are lots of ways that liberal democracies can weaken and become corroded and even die. They don’t have to become fascist. There’s a counterpart foolishness on the Right to the mudslinging of the Left [calling opponents fascists]. The counterpart foolishness is to say, “Okay, the hard Right—it’s very troubling for conservatives, but look, it’s not fascist.

Phew. We can relax.” They’re not fascists, but we can’t relax. Or at least if you’re a certain kind of liberal-minded conservative, you shouldn’t relax.

HAMMOND: In all four countries, the hard-Right is in power—in a way in the United States, it’s in power in the United Kingdom, it has a growing thing with [Marine] Le Pen’s group in France, and it’s a

small minority but still growing all the time in Germany. It’s kind of interesting that their hatred for fascism is keeping that down. Give us some nuances about these things. None of them are fascist. They’re tending a little bit toward the illiberal, rather than a liberal approach. So why don’t you give us a little nuance about how we should think about the different shifts and why they’re taking place at the current time, because it’s a prosperous time. It’s not a time of fear and depression, even war.

FAWCETT: No, I think that’s quite right.

COVID is a huge disruption, but let’s sort of go back a year. You’re quite right. The “hard Right”—the phrase now has gone into common currency, but I think a lot of people, particularly conservatives, are dubious of it, they think that there’s something invented here. A chimera, some mythical beast that isn’t really there.

When you look at the Republican Party of [Mitch] McConnell and later Trump, if you look at the Tory Party that in effect became the anti-European party in the last two or three years—if you look at the differences and similarities and then contrast them with the old French National Front, which has renamed itself National Rally, or with this smaller party in Germany—but still very strong­—called the Alternative for Germany, there are so many differences of situation, history, language, even some policies that you say, “Indeed, this is a chimera. This contrast between liberal conservatism, center-minded conservatism, and the hard Right is false.”

And there are many conservatives who say that.

Against that, I will cite some conservative authorities who certainly think there is a dangerous, illiberal, populistic hard-Right.

In my country, two examples are a wonderful journalist and writer, historian Ferdinand Mount, who used to run Margaret Thatcher’s think tank in Whitehall in the government.

He shakes his head; he’s written furiously against the present Tory government. Indeed I think he even used the phrase a kind of fascism light at one point, which I thought was rather ill-advised, but still. Another person, another very good historian, Max Hastings, has said that Boris Johnson, the prime minister is ruling from the Trump playbook.

In your country, George Will, David Brooks, Ross Douthat—three generations of excellent conservative commentators, have all raised serious doubts about the character of Trump Republicanism or McConnell Republicanism. They have said, “This is something different. This is not us.”

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CALL ME BY MY NAME Old friends Sunny Hostin and Don Lemon discuss identity, success, and just when is the right time to change your name.

DON LEMON: It is my pleasure to welcome my very dear friend Sunny Hoston, Emmy Award-winning legal journalist and cohost of “The View.” Sunny grew up in the South Bronx and through hard work, determination and the support of her parents, her family, she obtained a law degree. She went on to become a federal prosecutor and was soon recognized for her stellar work prosecuting crimes against women and children. She is a fighter. She is in it to help people.

After leaving the court, she went to Notre Dame Law School. She suddenly became a television legal analyst and was one of the first national reporters to cover Trayvon Martin’s death. She broke ground with that.

She continues to use her platform to be an advocate for social justice and to provide a powerful voice to the marginalized and voiceless people of this world.

So tell me, why did you decide to write ?

SUNNY HOSTIN: I just feel that the truth of it all is that you do hold the power to be the difference. I’ve always believed that. We’re in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis, a national debate over policing, what I think is a delayed reckoning with systemic racism. I have been journaling for so long and had been writing, and I thought, “If not now, when?”

I had spoken to [U.S. Supreme Court Associate] Justice [Sonia] Sotomayer—that sounds like a huge name drop, but it’s the truth. I had spoken to her a lot about sharing

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“WHAT ARE YOU?” THAT’S A QUESTION that has followed Sunny Hostin throughout her life as a half Puerto Rican and half African-American woman. She and CNN’s Don Lemon discuss racial identity and injustice.

From the September 29, 2020, online program “Sunny Hostin with Don Lemon: Identity, Race and Justice in America.” Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation SUNNY HOSTIN, Co-Host, “The View”; Author, I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice, and Living Between Worlds

In Conversation with DON LEMON, Anchor, “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon”

my story, and my story, as you know, Don, has more failures than success. I thought, Is it time to share that, warts and all? Because my story is painful—[I] grew up in the South Bronx projects with teenage parents.

Do I want to share all of that? Is it hopeful enough? Is it aspirational enough? And she said, “You’ve got to share it, because it is, and it can be the story for other people. And promise me one thing: You do it in Spanish and in English,” because it’s so important for those people that may be struggling with English as their second language— and English is my second language—with everything that’s going on in the world, do that for the little girl, for the little boy that will read it in Spanish.

LEMON: I’m sure you thought, What are people going to learn from me? As everyone who’s writing a book [thinks], right? They do that. Especially when you have the humility, when you’re as humble as you are, you wonder like, Is anyone going to care about what I write? What can I offer? You said you have more failures than you have successes, but people don’t realize that’s kind of how life goes, right? You take those failures and those are building blocks to the successes.

But why did you feel that way?

HOSTIN: Absolutely. It’s the age of social

“I get messages like, ‘You’re talking about income inequality, poverty and the struggle. You’re sitting on “The View.” You’re wealthy. You don’t know anything about it.’”

—SUNNY HOSTIN

media. So I get immediate feedback every time I’m on the show. I try to be a voice for the voiceless, ’cause that seat on “The View” is so very important. I would get these messages like, “You’re talking about income

Photo facing page: Sunny Hostin at a tribute to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who received The LBJ Foundation’s award honoring those who right wrongs, champion justice and serve humanity. (Photo by LBJ Foundation/Jay Godwin.)

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inequality, and you’re talking about poverty and you’re talking about the struggle.

You’re sitting on ‘The View,’ you’re wealthy.

You don’t know anything about it.” I just remember thinking people don’t know my story. They don’t know how hard it’s been.

LEMON: They see you on “The View” and they think, “Oh, overnight success.”

HOSTIN: Yes, decades. I’ve been a lawyer for 25 years. I’ve been on television for a long time. This is just the success you’re seeing, but you’re not seeing the failures. And there’ve just been so many of them, LEMON: Usually I like to use my haters as motivators and my failures as building blocks. So what did you learn from those failures?

HOSTIN: I’ve learned a tremendous amount of resilience. My father used to always say, “You have to be twice as good to go half as far.” I’ve learned that no one can take excellence from you. So every time I’ve been fired, and there’ve been many times—at CNN, there was one time my contract wasn’t renewed, but I knew that I had done my best, that I have been excellent. So I could leave with my head up. And I learned that there would be another day. I learned to use my voice, that it was OK. I learned that humility is OK. I actually also learned recently that I’m not as good at sticking up for myself as I am at sticking up for others.

LEMON: Who told you that?

HOSTIN: My husband told me, and you did.

LEMON: Sunny’s and my offices used to be right across from each other, and we would often look to each other for advice and comfort and feedback. But go on, Sunny.

HOSTIN: You’ve often said, “Lean in, Sunny . . . you don’t stick up for yourself,” and it’s so true. I write in the book how it’s really easy to stick up for other people, to tell other people’s stories. It’s certainly was really hard for me to tell this story, because I wasn’t only telling my story. I was telling the story of my parents. I was telling my mother’s story.

My mother didn’t speak to me for about a week after she read the book. Because I talk about addiction, I talk about mental health, and I bear a lot of secrets in that sense.

I found that, my goodness, I did not want to talk about possible discrimination. I did not want to raise my hand and say, “This is happening to me. Is this true? Don’t treat me this way. I should be valued more.” I did not want to do those things! I found that out about myself, which was a little bit shocking

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that I talked the talk and I can defend other people and prosecute cases and stick up for victims, but it was really hard for me to do it for myself.

LEMON: Okay. I have to just pick up on something that you said, because I think being where we are in this business, there’s a lot of advice that we can offer people that’s [useful] not just in this business, but just in professional life anywhere. You said that you wouldn’t stick up for yourself. Oftentimes when you get to these positions—and we know as you get up, it’s a pyramid, it’s rarefied air there, very few of these kinds of jobs—you want to stick up for yourself, you want to stick up for other people, but then you worry that if I do that, am I going to lose my platform? And therefore there won’t be anyone like me with this voice. Was that part of it.

HOSTIN: It was a huge consideration.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get an email or a tweet—you know, when preCOVID I’d be on the street and mothers and even young people would come up to me and say, “Oh my God, thank you for being who you are. You represent me.” That meant a lot for me. I thought if I stick my neck out, even for myself, there won’t be someone like me on “The View” or on television.

One of the reasons that I always wanted to be a broadcast journalist—you know, we didn’t watch a lot of television when I was growing up. We had one TV in the house, and I read a lot of books, but we didn’t watch a lot of TV. What we did watch was “60 Minutes.” We watched it every Sunday, religiously, and I would pretend to be one of the reporters. But there weren’t any that look like me, and my parents were like, “Don’t do that, because you’re not going to be able to feed yourself.” So I remember the power of representation. The thought that I would take a chance and risk being that representation for those people that would stop me on the street was nerve wracking.

I remember asking my family when I was typing the foreword—I typed it in like 25 minutes, because it just poured out of me—I remember thinking, “Is this smart?”

I showed it to my husband and I said, “This is professional suicide, right?” And he was like, “Yeah, possibly.” [Laughter.] I was like, “No, lose my job, right?” He was like, “Maybe.” I did it anyway, because I leaned in like you often tell me, because I felt like, my goodness—pandemic, economic crisis, national debate over policing—

LEMON: —African Americans and people of color affected more by this crisis— HOSTIN: —and I don’t have the courage to do what I talk about every day on the show from a privileged position. I would be a hypocrite.

LEMON: There you go. The reason I knew that I can so relate to you, because you remember when I came out— HOSTIN: I remember we talked about it, and you wrote about it in a book, LEMON: I was going to lose my job; I’m never going to work in this business again.

And I leaned in, and it was the total right thing to do. I always tell people to live in their own truth. You’re living in your own truth. Is that where that name [of your book] comes from—I Am These Truths? Where did that come from?

HOSTIN: I came up with the title of the book after it was written. In my home office at my desk where I did a lot of the writing, I have all these stickies with things on it. I have quotes from the Constitution.

LEMON: Do you remember I used to keep a copy of the Constitution on my desk?

HOSTIN: Exactly. It says, “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.” I just started thinking about all the themes in the book, about equality, systemic racism, and pay and equity. And I was like, I’m finally telling the truth, and these are my truths.

I hope it encourages people to not be ashamed of where they come from and just tell the truth. I was like, “Wow, I am these truths.” That’s where it came from, because it’s very powerful to say that the truth of it all is that we are equal and that we hold the power to be the difference.

LEMON: People of color, immigrants—you are the American story. So when someone tries to otherize immigrants and people of color it’s doubly insulting, because of the work that people of color did—no pay, slavery, all those things, building things. So when people try to otherize you and make you feel like you’re not an American, is that infuriating for you?

HOSTIN: It’s painful. It used to make me angry, but now it’s painful. One of the things that I thought about when I was writing the book, [was] why do people still question my background, my ethnicity—why is it so odd? When I was writing it, it had just come up again. We had interviewed a family on the show, and it was a Spanish-speaking family. One of the family members, the

“Oftentimes when you get to [senior] positions, it’s rarefied air, very few of these kinds of jobs. So you want to stick up for yourself, you want to stick up for other people, but then you wonder, ‘If I do that, am I going to lose my platform?’”

CNN host Don Lemon.

—DON LEMON

grandmother, didn’t speak English. So I conducted the interview of her in Spanish, and I would translate for the audience. I’ve got all these noxious tweets like, “Sunny must be Spanish today. Why is she speaking with a Spanish accent?” And it was just that I was pronouncing the words properly.

I realized that my parents got married in 1968, just a year after the Loving decision when interracial couples were allowed to be married. My mom [is] a white Hispanic, also Jewish descent. My father’s a black guy.

When they got married, it had just become legal. I was like a unicorn. There really weren’t people that look like me. So people kind of stare at our family. They tried to live in Georgia, which is really kind of crazy, and the KKK ran them out of town. So for me, I had been otherized my entire life, even though I’m only in my fifties; it was just unusual. So I think that is why I’ve lived that life of a struggle of identity.

But it saddens me that 50 years later, people still question it, because they still want to put you in this box. I don’t understand.

LEMON: Well, people have to be able to categorize something in order to feel like they have to be comfortable. I can understand a

little bit, but not as much as you. I wrote in my book about the experience in Louisiana, the Brown paper bag, light skin versus dark skin.

[Lemon is referring to a rumor that CNN had a test for anchors that their skin couldn’t be darker than a brown paper bag or they would not be accepted by viewers.—Ed.] In the winter I was light skinned, so I could hang out with the light-skinned Black folk. Then in the summer I was dark skinned, some weird color thing.

I remember when we had this conversation [in which you said], “Don, you realize that people on CNN, they don’t know that I’m Latina. They just think in terms of African American and white, Black and white.”

And I said, “Well, Sunny, let people know that you’re Latina. It’s okay to be.” You felt stuck in that world, in a no man’s land. Am I this? Am I that? Am I kind of both like, do I have to choose?

HOSTIN: I did. It was for a lot of reasons, and it was weird, because our offices were right next to CNN en Español. [Laughter.]

They never asked me to do any reporting.

I was like, That’s kind of weird. I think one of the reasons, and I blame myself, is because I changed my name. My real name’s Asunción.

LEMON: So how did it morph? Did you morph to make it more American or cuter or friendlier?

HOSTIN: I’ve always been Asunción, my family calls me Asunción, and my friends from back in the day all call me Asunción.

When I was in college, there were a couple of people that would say, “A-a-a-” [having trouble pronouncing it] and I noticed it, so I would say, “You can call me whatever you want.” They’d say, “How about Sunshine?”

I’d say, “Okay, that’s fine.” When I started doing Court TV with Nancy Grace, who is a great friend of mine, she could not pronounce my name. And when I say could not, the struggle was real. She would be like, “and joining me is the cohost today [mumbles incoherently].”

You could see the struggle. At one of the breaks, she said, “Can I say something to you?” I said, “Yes, Nancy, what would you like to say?” I knew what it was about. She said, “This name thing. This Asunción; no one can pronounce it. They can’t say it.” I said, “Well, what would you like me to do about my name, Nancy?” She said, “Do you have a nickname?” I felt the pressure at that point, when I have this legal legend telling me this name is not going to cut it. I said, “A lot of people call me Sunny.” Then she said, DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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“Change the chyron: Sunny—S-U-N-N-Y.” I just went with it, to be honest with you. I didn’t like it, but I went with it. And after that, my career kind of took off. [Grace] knows TV. LEMON: Sometimes people get offended [by such offers of help], but sometimes people just are looking out for your wellbeing. And she was like, “This will work for you because I know TV.” HOSTIN: That’s what she told me LEMON: So sometimes you have to roll with it and lean in.

HOSTIN: Don always tells me to lean in.

She said, “You’re going to make it in this business. I haven’t seen anyone do this as well as you, without any training. You were made to do this, but that name is going to hold you back. People can’t remember it.”

And I got to tell you, she was right, but I felt like I sold a piece of myself. My grandmother never forgave me for it, because I was named after her sister. People would sort of stop me when I was with her and say, “Hi, Sunny.”

And she would be like, “No, Sunny!” and it would infuriate her. I do think that at CNN, if I were Asunción Hostin, just like Soledad O’Brien, people would have known my identity. So I kind of did that to myself. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have changed my name. I would not have, and I can’t go back now. Everybody knows me now.

LEMON: When I was a reporter, when I left New York and went to Birmingham, my first news director said she wanted me to change my name. She didn’t like the last name Lemon. I knew in TV, like if it’s snappy and something that people can remember, it’s great. I’m like, Don Lemon, that’s a name that people change their name to for TV. She wanted it to be like Don Clark, Don Johnson, something really simple. No one will ever remember that, but everyone will remember Don Lemon. Everyone remembers Sunny.

You talk about [how] you were too lightskinned for the Black community, too dark skinned [for other communities]; people didn’t get it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 in an essay—it’s called “The Crack-Up”— “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Why do you think it’s so hard for people, even intelligent people that you’ve worked with in the past, to understand that someone can be Black and Latina?

HOSTIN: It’s really fascinating, isn’t it? I

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mean, look at Barack Obama. The president is half Black and half white, but nobody can really reconcile that. I think a lot of it has to do with the history of this country—the one-drop rule, where if you were one drop Black, you were considered Black.

LEMON: Wait, can we just talk about that for a little bit? That one drop was important, because you could be 99.9 percent something else, but if you had just a smidge of Black in you, you were— HOSTIN: You were Black. And because of that history in the country, legal documents reflect that. Race is just a social construct anyway. So my life experience reflected that. On my birth certificate, it says Black, and then it also says Hispanic, which is interesting. I looked back at it, and it says “mother: white.” Interesting. When you would fill out any standardized test, you had to choose Black, white, or Hispanic, and I would sometimes try to circle everything,

and it would reject the form.

LEMON: Of course you did. [Laughter.]

HOSTIN: I think, again, it just goes back to the history of our country and the way people are indoctrinated to this day. I remember feeling if I choose one, does that mean my mother doesn’t exist, or if I choose the other, does that mean my father doesn’t exist—and who I am in all my complexity? I really believe that it is unique to this country, because I’ve traveled a lot of places, and I’m accepted in more complexity in those other places than I am here.

LEMON: That is an American thing. I think that personifies what we’re going through right now. People who have to put you in a box. Even now, people want to put you in a box. Everyone is so divided.

There’s no nuance, because people could not understand Sunny when we were on CNN together. Like you can hold two thoughts at the same time; Sunny and I could just

“People are always shocked that Meghan McCain and I are friends.

Even though we battle it out on-air, we can go out and drink later.”

—SUNNY HOSTIN

go at it on TV. “I completely disagree with you.” “What is wrong?” “Why do you think that?” Then we would go have a drink later.

It’s like, people can’t do that anymore? What is it about the country and society that can’t hold two thoughts at the same time, opposing views?

HOSTIN: It is worse than it’s ever been. I remember sort of honing that skill when I prosecuted cases at the Justice Department, I would argue to the death in the courtroom.

If you were the defense attorney, you knew when I walked in, I needed to win because I was prosecuting child sex crimes. I felt that I was on the white horse, and I was coming in to save the day and you stood in my way.

I went to the wall with it. We would argue, and then we’d go out for drinks.

Some of these defense attorneys were my closest friends, much like you and I are dear friends. We would battle on CNN, much like we do on “The View.” People are always shocked that Meghan [McCain, fellow “The View” host] and I are friends. Even though we may battle it out and say all kinds of crazy things to each other on-air, we can go out and drink our bourbon later. Unfortunately I think that that kind of respect for difference of opinion is gone in our country right now.

It’s just gone. This kind of relationship that we have requires a respect for a difference of opinion.

L EMON: L evel of forgiveness a nd understanding of being curious rather than judgmental.

HOSTIN: It definitely requires intellectual curiosity. A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t have that, and they certainly don’t have a respect for difference of opinion. When you

talk about intellectual curiosity, what that means in my view is, “Why is this person saying that? And what experience has led this person to say that?”

So I see value in that there is always value in a different opinion and how that person got to it, if only for you to strengthen your feelings about something else, the opposite opinion, if only to make you feel that way.

For some reason we can’t do that anymore.

I would point to the relationship that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had with Justice Scalia. You read their opinions and some of their dissents, and you would think they hated each other.

LEMON: That one’s hard for me, because I know, like some curiosity, but sometimes I’m like, okay, well, they’re making law.

HOSTIN: They went out to lunch together every Friday. They were quite fond of each other, but they didn’t agree on anything.

LEMON: Yup. I think we need more of it. I do.

I left out a very important part, that your dad also had to change his name in the ’70s.

And then here you are in the 2000s having to change your name. Did you talk to him?

HOSTIN: Yeah. He did it, and we call it code switching. Now, you know, there are all these words for it.

LEMON: You know what’s weird though, Sunny? Code switch is like you talk to people one way, and then [speak another way to others]. But after a while, if you get to a certain position, it all kind of becomes one thing and you just do it. Like it’s much more natural now. I find now it doesn’t surprise people when, like I told Chris [Cuomo] the other night on the air, I’m like, “You stupid.”

[Laughter.] And I was like, I know that is not proper English, but I that’s how we talk to each other.

HOSTIN: It’s true. When my parents were coming up, it’s now the early ’70s and this interracial couple, they’re trying to get an apartment in Manhattan, trying to get out of the South Bronx. They’ve got me, I’ve just been skipped a grade, my school can’t really teach me properly. I’ve seen my uncle get stabbed in front of me. They’re like, “We’ve got to get out of the projects.” So they start trying to interview together for apartments. And the minute they show up, the apartment’s no longer available.

My mother’s name is Rosa, her maiden name was Rosa Beza. So she realizes, “If I change Rosa to Rose”—and my father’s name is [William] Cummings—”if I become Rose

Cummings, and I show up with my light hair and my light eyes, I’m going to get the apartment if I show up alone.”

My father realizes when he sends his resume out as an I.T. guy, if he uses Willy Moses Cummings, there ain’t a lot of white guys named Willie Moses. But if he changes it to Bill Cummings, William Cummings, he’s going to get the job. So he changed his name to Bill Cummings and my mother changed her name to Rose Cummings. We got the apartment in Manhattan, and he got the job. That’s just the way it was. What saddens my dad is that we still do it today.

It shouldn’t be that way. But it is.

LEMON: There’s a little bit of difference. I understand how you feel about your name, trust me, and especially because of your grandmother. You know, it’s ownership.

They’re proud of you as a, can I say Blatina?

HOSTIN: Blatina, right. [Laughter.] AfroLatina.

LEMON: But you did it because Sunny was just easy and it was perfect and it fit.

But I understand if you’re looking back, you have the success that you have, you wouldn’t have to change your name. It’s a different time now.

I want to ask you, when you look at what’s happening now, this racial reckoning—I call it the summer of George Floyd, the summer of unrest—if you could go back and tell your younger self, in the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting [in Kenosha, Wisconsin], what would you tell yourself back when you were reporting about Trayvon Martin or back when you were entering law school or back when you were entering news television?

What would you say?

HOSTIN: You know, when I was younger, I definitely thought that if you did the excellent work that you would succeed.

I think that was a very simplistic way of looking at things.

I think if I’m being honest in the seat that I sit in right now, I would advise my younger self that it isn’t a meritocracy and to be ready for that. It isn’t just working really hard and being excellent. They help, but it isn’t just meritocracy, and that indeed you do have to look out for those potholes and you do have to in a sense play the game and be more strategic. Like you always advise me to do.

Be more strategic. And certainly be more of an advocate for yourself, I think I would tell myself. I often thought that that it’s only about the work, and it’s just not. There’s a bigger picture there.

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Meet New University of California President Dr. Michael V. Drake He takes the helm at a time of pandemic, THE 21ST PRESIDENT of the University of social distancing and serious budget choices. California oversees UC’s MONICA LOZANO: For purposes of full disclosure, I want to mention that I served on the Board of Regents of the University of California for 15 years, and President Drake and I overlapped for almost the entire time. Today I’m pleased to welcome back to California, to The Commonwealth Club, this prominent academic leader the day after the election for a timely discussion of the challenges facing public higher education and the challenges facing our nation more broadly.

So, welcome, President Drake. It’s good to see you again.

MICHAEL V. DRAKE: Wonderful to see you, Monica.

LOZANO: You had great success when you were at The Ohio State University. You increased enrollment, increased diversity, brought in more research dollars. But there was something about this particular opportunity that compelled you to come back not just to California but to the University of California, under what everybody would say are probably the most challenging times in its history. I want to ask you about that decision to come back, but I also want to think about leading during times of crisis. That must have been something that called to you also, because, as we said, the challenges facing the UC are just tremendous right now. What made you come back?

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DRAKE: My wife and I were Californians.

We grew up here. We met in college—I was in college near here. Then she went to law school at Berkeley when I was in medical school. So we raised our family here, and our family’s here. We felt like Californians. We always were planning in some way to at least spend some part of the next phase of our lives reconnecting with California. That was always in the offing.

We weren’t planning on doing something quite this intense, I think. We thought about another phase of life.

But honestly, during that time of the initial lockdown when we were dealing with COVID, I had been working quite intensively with The Ohio State University for all of those years. During the time of the lockdown, it just seemed like this wasn’t the time to be on the sidelines, that we really needed all hands on deck. Discussing with the committee the opportunity to come back if there was something that we could contribute to this effort, this seemed like a time for all of us to be doing our best to help us get through this extraordinarily challenging time in our country’s history. That was compelling. That was one thing.

Let me say the other thing that was really compelling is, with the [experience] of being at UCSF and being at the office of the president in a different role, a couple of decades ago

world-renowned system of 10 campuses, five medical centers, three nationally affiliated labs, more than 280,000 students and 230,000 faculty and staff. From the November 4, 2020, online program “Meet New University of California President Dr. Michael V. Drake.” Part of The Commonwealth Club’s series on Ethics and Accountability, underwritten by the Travers Family Foundation.

Dr. MICHAEL V. DRAKE, M.D., President, University of California In conversation with MONICA LOZANO, President and CEO, College Futures Foundation

Dr. Michael V. Drake was appointed UC president this past summer.

being a chancellor for many years, we had the opportunity to meet many wonderful people.

The chance to come and to work again with those people on this great enterprise was really something that was extraordinary compelling.

LOZANO: How has it been? When you mentioned meeting wonderful people, you’re not able to physically meet with anybody right now. So how has it been in terms of acclimating to the institution, getting to know the enterprise? It’s obviously changed six years later. How are you spending your time actually familiarizing yourself with both the people and the issues of the university?

DRAKE: Yes, this is a strange time for all of us. It’s a time unlike any time any of us have lived with. I can say that without fear of contradiction. I mean, we’ve not ever had a time like this in our lives. That has been unsettling I think for everyone. I’ve actually been saying to colleagues that work can be challenging and stressful and hard. We deal with real problems, and those things can require energy from us. We often would get energy back from the people that we’re working with. The joy of being with people and working on things together really is enabling and empowering. Now, we have the problems to deal with; we don’t get the payback and the positive feedback of being with people. That really is stressful I think for all of us. It’s stressful for our faculty. It’s stressful for our students. It’s stressful for our staff.

Like I’m sure you do and many others, we’re on Zoom all day, so the people are there, but we really do miss the human connection.

What we do is try to put extra intention into doing our best work in that realm, but I will say I miss the fact that we’re not able to be together. I’m in my normal office where I was many times as vice president and a few feet away from where I met hundreds of times in the conference room. There’s no one else on the floor. It’s a strange thing. I will say though that the real resolve of the people in the community, the resolve of our colleagues, brings great energy to our meetings, and actually we’re making great progress even under these difficult circumstances.

LOZANO: I want to spend a few minutes talking about the impact of the pandemic on the operations of the university. Obviously campuses were restricted in terms of having students onsite. Talk to us about the way in which you’re making decisions regarding the impact of COVID on operations, and then what you foresee in terms of spring enrollments.

DRAKE: Well, I’d say first there really is DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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Moderator Monica Lozano of the College Futures Foundation interviews new UC President Dr. Michael V. Drake for The Commonwealth Club.

the impact.

If I may back up a little bit to the spring: I teach a freshmen seminar. I’ve been teaching a freshmen seminar for years. I taught it when I was at UC Irvine. I taught the freshmen seminar when I was at The Ohio State University. I really noticed the students I’d gotten to know in the first part of the semester, and then we were online and separate. We had our first Zoom, and I remember how happy I was to see them all.

They seemed happy to be there. We missed each other. I could actually feel great to have a connection, great to see people and be able to talk with them in this format. But we missed each other and the energy of being together.

I know that broadly we would love very much to be able to bring people back together as soon as we can appropriately, but we want to make sure we do that in a safe fashion. We’ve been very thoughtful about repopulating the campuses in a slow and even fashion. We had a meeting today with the chancellors to look at the COVID positivity rates on campus, and we’ve done tens of thousands of tests, hundreds of thousands by now, across the system. So bringing people back, repopulating the campus, but doing it in a safe and effective way is something that’s always been paramount in our planning.

I will say that on the campuses, we’ve been pleased with the positivity rates with our students living in the dorms. Almost all of our classes are virtual. Almost all the classes now are online. And that’s certainly

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going to be for this time, and I’m going to say that the overwhelming majority of classes will be online starting in January as well. But we have from several hundred to a few thousand students living on campus, socially distancing, using non-pharmaceutical methods of protecting themselves, masks, hand-washing, social distancing—the non-pharmaceutical interventions. That experience has worked well. The positivity rates on the campuses are dramatically lower than the positivity rates in the surrounding communities. We’re watching that very carefully.

As we’re able to maintain that, it will allow us we believe to have more of those students who wish to come back to campus, to live.

Even though the classes are largely remote, we’ll be able to increase the number of students on campuses, we hope, in the winter and spring. We’ll know more about that really in a few weeks. The country is experiencing a surge. We have to see how we do with this surge. But the hope will be that we’ll be able to maintain this great differential between the students who are living on campus safely and communities, even those relatively safe communities, where the students have lower positivity rates.

Your question about the impact broadly on operations—we’ve had significant impacts in many ways. We’ve had obviously a state budget reduction. We’ve had losses in our health system, because we were not able to do elective procedures in the springtime.

Much of that has been recovered now, so that’s going better. We have significant losses in our auxiliaries. Tens of thousands of students lived with us on campus, and now those students are not there. Some are, but not nearly as many as we normally would have. There’s a great delta. Our costs haven’t gone down nearly as much, but with no one living there, there’s no revenue. The campuses have had to absorb that. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars that had to be refunded in the springtime and then not received here in the fall.

We’ve gone through a real effort of belttightening and avoidance of costs and a whole series of other things to try to help our budgets to balance, but there’s quite a bit of stress on the system.

LOZANO: I was thinking about your comments about the positivity rates, and it seems to me that, at least for our audience, it might be interesting for them to hear about the role that our medical enterprise is playing in terms of testing, tracing, pursuing a vaccine. It just feels that this is where UC really matters, and it is about these grand challenges that face humanity, where we can actually bring the best of our research and medical facilities to bear.

DRAKE: Yes. LOZANO: So maybe you could describe a little bit about what’s happening in that realm.

DRAKE: Well, it’s a big topic. I would say that our health system, UC Health, began to be focused on the pandemic really in January,

“There are few institutions that

can do as much as we can, who can participate the way that we can in trying to find the solutions to these challenging problems. We want to make sure that we’re fully doing the best that we can.”

—MICHAEL V. DRAKE before there were cases here in the United States, to look at the public health challenge that might come to us. We’ve seen things in the past, nothing quite like this, but we had SARS years ago, we had Zika, we’ve had other infectious diseases that were arising overseas that we expected or feared might come to our shores. That kind of planning and discussions began really in January.

By early March when there began to be cases here, our health system really sprung to life, and I would say that, starting then, it’s really been seven days a week for the leaders of our hospitals, for our clinicians, for our nurses, for our other critical personnel, the essential personnel that we have driving and doing food service. All the things that require hospitals to work have been going really full tilt since the beginning of March.

We’ve learned a lot. We’re better able to treat patients now, because we’ve seen what works with this novel disease. Remember, it’s a disease that no one had ever seen before this six, eight months ago. But we’ve learned to do a good job there, to try to treat people effectively when they come to our hospitals and to our ICUs. In addition to that, we’ve been working with public health, with county health, with state health officials, so that testing and contact tracing where appropriate has been done. Our universities are doing testing for the communities of patients that they serve and also in many cases are doing testing for local entities, other educational institutions, et cetera. We’ve been doing our best to ramp up testing and be a good source of that.

Then we have, at this moment, while we’re speaking, there are people taking care of patients in our intensive care units, in our

wards. At the moment, there are people in our laboratories working on development of vaccines and also working on development of antivirals and other treatments to be able to do a better job of taking care of our patients.

That’s a 24/7, 365 effort really for us, and it will continue throughout the winter and into the spring. This is going to be with us for a while.

LOZANO: I wanted to stress this is when the UC makes us proud. It plays such an important role in terms of dealing with these large-scale, global issues, like this particular pandemic. There is a question from the audience that asks whether or not there’s other particular issues, global climate change, et cetera, that you intend to prioritize during your presidency.

DRAKE: Let me say that COVID-19 is an extraordinarily pressing issue for us on a daily basis now, so we are working on that actively. Every time I have a chance, I want to make sure that I thank and acknowledge our health-care workers who have done such an incredible job putting themselves at risk, particularly at the beginning when we didn’t know what this was, but putting themselves at risk in order to save the lives of strangers.

It’s the work that they do every day, but it’s come into a bright focus over these last several months. We really do thank them with all our hearts and want to acknowledge that.

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t arrive in a perfect and completely mannered world.

We have other issues that were with us in December and January of last year that remain with us now. The threat of climate change I see as an existential threat to humankind and one where, as a system, we feel like our responsibility is to really be at

the forefront of helping society to deal with this great threat to humanity. So we have a multitude of things that we are working on to try to do our best to both be good citizens in addressing climate change within our own facilities and across our own university, but also collaborate with others to stimulate research and to try to address this. For me, it’s one of my top priorities.

You mentioned the size and scope of the university. There are few institutions that can do as much as we can, who can participate the way that we can in trying to find the solutions to these challenging problems. We want to make sure that we’re fully doing the best that we can.

LOZANO: Well, we appreciate that.

Especially in California with the wildfires and everything, climate change is real, and we’re experiencing it every day in this state.

Let’s go back to the operational impacts of the pandemic, if you don’t mind. You mentioned virtual instruction, distance learning, distance teaching, how difficult that was to actually convert all your courses to online. One of the questions I have for you, President Drake: Is there anything out of this moment that is durable? In terms of how you think about the educational and academic activity of the university, what do you see as the role of online and/or hybrid education?

Then if you can also address the concerns people have with regards to equity and issues of access, especially for low-income, first generation students of color that are frankly suffering through a lot of hardship right now.

DRAKE: Yes. First, as you mentioned, the rapid shift in which we went from our normal method of instruction to fully online last spring—I really want to give kudos to

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the faculty, the amazing resilience of the faculty in being able to shift the thousands and thousands of courses immediately to an online format in a way that was able to deliver educational content to students to allow them to continue to make progress toward their degrees. I also want to thank the students for their resiliency and being able to adapt to a whole new way of learning for many of them and under, as you mentioned, many unequal circumstances. Our students have done an incredible job. So our faculty on the one hand, but our students on the other, have really worked together to continue to create and project an educational pathway forward.

That’s very important.

Things that we learned. We’ve been for really 10, 15 years moving to more and more courses online or more and more parts of courses that are taught online. My own course was a seminar. We would meet together once a week, but all of the materials were delivered to the students in electronic format for years. There were no books, no papers, nothing to buy. They used an iPad and got the information that way, and I communicated with them that way. So we were quite used to using technology to enhance our instruction.

At my last university, we had a higher percentage of students—even though they were living on campus and taking most of their courses in a traditional way—a high percentage of students, about 40 percent in a given semester, were taking at least one class online to help smooth their pathway or passageway through the educational curriculum. I think that here at the University of California, we’re going to have more online and technology-enhanced opportunities for our students as they move forward.

We probably got there a little more rapidly than we would have, because necessity is the mother of invention, but I think that’s going to stay. I think that we had capacity to have more online instruction available, and this allowed us to ramp that up a little more quickly than had we not been in a position where that was as necessary.

I’ll say we mentioned the health system and all of the things that we’re doing. We went to only emergency and serious issue care in the springtime. Elective surgery and other things were put on a back burner for a while. But when we did that, we stopped seeing patients in the clinic and went to telemedicine, and the overwhelming majority of the visits that we did, orders of magnitude more visits in telemedicine in April than would have been

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the case in February. Those numbers stayed high through April and May and then began to decrease as we started seeing more patients back in the clinic. But we didn’t take the telemedicine visits down to anywhere near where they’d been before.

Now we’re still seeing tens of thousands of telemedicine visits a month, and I think that that will be a permanent change in the way that we offer visits. So, actually more clinic visits in October than would have been the case in October the year before. A big slice of that would have been telemedicine visits. That would have been tens of thousands in October 2020 and only a handful really in October 2019. Some of those changes, I think, are going to be a permanent acceleration to the future.

LOZANO: There’s a question from the audience that asks whether or not you anticipate campus life getting back to some sense of normalcy. When would that be, and do you think it’s going to be later than 2021?

DRAKE: Well, I’m hopeful. I can’t predict the future. I love campus life. I’ve been at universities for my life, and I’ve realized what a privilege is. I really remember talking to my students last spring and seeing them and asking them how they were doing, and they just really wanted to get back to school.

They wanted to get back to campus. They love everything that happens. They really love being with each other and the experience of the social and political growth that happens in the campus environment. It’s something that’s a special time; you and I remember those times from our lives a few years ago, and our students love that today.

We would really look toward getting back to something of a normal residential campus experience as [much s] we can, to be honest, and in the same way that we look forward to all the other things that we loved so much about being people in society, meeting friends and family and spending time together, going to restaurants and movies and whatever we were doing, going to ballgames and concerts, all of those things. Those were the things we looked forward to and the things that were fun, and we put them all on hold. My wife and I have grandchildren, just my favorite thing in the world always, and my life was really planned around when we could spend time with the grandchildren. Now we don’t see them. That’s really heartbreaking in that way for many, many people.

We’re all really doing everything we can to get back to being able to see each other safely.

When that will be will depend on a couple of things. One, when a safe and effective vaccine can arrive and be distributed. That will take time, no matter what. If it were available today, we would still be months and months before it could be distributed broadly enough to make things safe. That really takes us well into next year before that would be our pathway back. But the sooner the better, and my fingers are crossed that we are able to get something that comes out shortly.

Our own behavior now though, the things I mentioned, the so-called NPIs, wearing masks, hand-washing, and social distancing, those things are incredibly important now.

In fact, many public health experts say that they are as preventative and as protective as a vaccine. The more of us that do that today, the lower the incidence of the virus will be, the safer our communities will be. We get into a positive feedback loop of fewer and fewer people who can be infectious and protecting ourselves. So I think the more that all of us can do everything we can now to protect ourselves and protect our communities by wearing masks and washing hands and maintaining social distance, the healthier our communities will be over this winter and into the spring.

Another thing that we can all do now is get flu vaccines. As you know, the flu symptoms and COVID-19 symptoms are very similar, [but the] COVID-19 is much worse, many more people hospitalized with COVID-19.

But every year, we have hundreds of people in California hospitalized with the flu. With the impact that we fear may come from surges over the winter, we want to make sure that we don’t have diseases masquerading as COVID-19 that divert the energy and care of the health-care system, or have our hospital

President Drake says that the switch to digital life went well, but he shares the general desire to get back to “normal,” in-person life.

beds taken up by disease that we can help to prevent with a vaccine, like the flu. I’ve had my flu vaccine. I hope you’ve had yours.

LOZANO: I have.

DRAKE: Okay. Good. I just would say that’s a very important thing that we can all do now to make November and December and January and February as safe as possible. The more we do that, the sooner we’ll get back to being able to spend time together.

LOZANO: I read that you had instructed, if I’m correct, for anybody who either resides or is educated or works at a UC facility to get a flu shot. There’s a question also from the audience that just came in, President Drake, that asks what advice you have for students to stay motivated during this prolonged period of time.

DRAKE: I’ve been reading books of the blitzkrieg in the Second World War to get a feeling of how people, when they find themselves under kind of a broad societal siege, move forward through those times.

I think there are a couple things that have worked for us throughout history. One is to take a wide-angle view. The things that are in front of us right today are challenging and a drag, and I wish that they would stop, and I can’t make them stop, and that’s frustrating.

We take a step back and know that we as a country, we as people, we as families have made it through tough times in the past, and that if we stick with it, day by day, step by step, we will make it through. It’s all we can do, but it’s what we must do really to move

forward. Just take a step back and remember that many people in the world have dealt with many very serious things, that people today are living through famine and warfare and other things that are threatening their very existence on a daily basis. What human beings seem to be able to do is to take a step back, to take the long view, and keep walking, put one foot in front of the other and move forward. I’d encourage that.

I believe, although it’s a facsimile of connection, that doing Zoom calls and phone calls and FaceTime and other things with friends and family, all of whom are going through this in different ways, that’s an extremely important thing to do, more important than ever. If I may just say for us, our family is distributed across this country and in other places, and we’ve been able to do things like have birthday parties where there are people from multiple countries together, which wouldn’t have been the case normally.

At Passover, we had many different members of our family who were on multiple continents being able to spend time together. Those kinds of things are available using technology.

They’re a substitute for what we would really like to be able to do, but they are something.

I would encourage that, and to do what you can to take that step back and that wideangle view to not allow yourself to get yourself down, to understand that this is a drag and it feels like a drag because it is, and that step by step we’ll move our way through it and get to the other side.

LOZANO: That was wonderful advice.

The institution does have a responsibility to supporting students during this period.

DRAKE: Yes. LOZANO: Now, before, and in the future.

One of the things that we’ve heard is that students are concerned about their mental wellbeing, issues around affordability. They’re not on campus. They’re not working. They may have lost income. And I actually want to go to the first question from one of our Travers Fellows, Tara Madhav, who’s a senior at UC Berkeley, who has a question for you about affordable housing.

DRAKE: Great.

TARA MADHAV: President Drake, my name is Tara Madhav, and I’m a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in political science and history. Many UC students struggle to find affordable housing in order to attend their respective universities. What steps can you and the UC take in order to ameliorate the affordable housing struggle for students?

Thank you for taking the time today to answer my question.

DRAKE: A very important question. Very nice to have a chance to say hello. Affordable safe housing is really a basic human need, and it’s an issue for people around the world [and in] this country. It’s certainly an issue for California broadly. It’s one of the real challenges in the state of California. We do a few things to try to help this.

For one, on all of our campuses, the campus housing that we provide is below market rate.

We have housing that is less expensive than living in the community broadly, and we in fact build it for that to be the case. In the last five or six years, we’ve added about 17,000 more beds on our campuses, and I know that we have plans to add 15,000 more beds between now and 2025. Our goal there is to have [it be as] affordable as we can make it, safe, effective housing for students to live on campus when that’s their preference. And, again, 17,000 new beds and 15,000 more in the planning phase to be able to address that.

We also want to do all we can. We have food pantries on our campuses and other things to help students who are experiencing homelessness or find themselves food insecure.

We of course provide broadband and other types of support to make sure students can stay connected. We understand that, with a wide range of student backgrounds that come to our campus, we’re very proud in fact of the number of Pell students we have, the number of first generation students that we have. We have the most diverse class in our history this year; that part of our axis is something that’s very important.

So we do our best to make our campuses supportive, safe places for our students to be.

It’s one of the reasons that we’re working so hard to make the campuses safe enough to invite more students back, because we can do a better job of helping to support them when they’re with us than we can as they’re distributed broadly around the state and, I’m sure, many of our students live even in other states and other countries. Our ability to be able to help is enhanced by being able to have students on campus, and we’re working hard to try to increase those numbers.

LOZANO: It leads me to think about the decisions that are made and that are reflected in your operating budgets—$2 billion was a number I heard in lost revenue. Some of it has been made up. But you’re now working with your chancellors. We don’t know where the state will be in terms of its budget for the

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UC. So what are the priorities that you have established? What are the principles that you’re asking the chancellors to consider as they make budget decisions? What stays? What goes? What’s important and fundamental to the public service mission of the UC? DR AKE: We really focus on our core mission, and our core mission is the creation and transmission of knowledge, teaching for our students to help them continue to make progress toward their degrees, support for our faculty who are doing research, as we mentioned earlier, the research of the type that will be able to help us deal more effectively with pandemics as they come in the future and climate change and all the other things that are critical to our future. So we want to maintain support for our faculty in their teaching and support mission, maintain support for our students in their learning and progressing toward their degrees. Those are our core missions.

We also have a real core commitment to our very dedicated, really wonderful staff.

You mentioned we have 220,000 faculty and staff. The majority of those are staff positions.

People have their whole careers with us and really are the backbone of the University of California. We’ve been very committed to doing all we could to protect those people who are working with us. Many are able to do their work remotely during this time and work at home. Some have jobs that don’t lend themselves well for that, and we really worked hard to try to protect those people and those jobs. We’ve done reassignments or trainings or other kinds of things and worked it to do the best we can to keep that workforce whole.

[What] I speak to the chancellors about really is protecting our core mission and our people.

If I may say, in my medical background, when you are losing blood pressure, the higher functions don’t get supported as much. You may not think clearly. You may black out and faint. But the breathing center and the heart, the things that keep you alive, your body kind of focuses attention on making sure that those things that you need to stay with us, that those things are the places that get the focus. We really want to focus on making sure that we protect our core mission so that, as we emerge from these difficult times, we can continue to accelerate forward.

LOZANO: I’ve also heard you talk about that there is opportunity that comes out of moments like this, a moment of crisis. I want to turn to the second big issue that emerged across American society this year, which had to do with the issues of racial reckoning and systemic racism in institutions, in higher education. I’ve heard you use the term “It’s

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time for us to be anti-racist.” Can you talk to the audience about what are the kinds of changes that you would like to see occur within higher ed—perhaps broadly, but at the University of California—that tackle these issues of systemic racism that may make it difficult? As proud as you are about Pell and diverse students, campus climate becomes an issue. Talk to us about your thoughts regarding this moment of racial reckoning.

DRAKE: It is an important moment of racial reckoning, but we’ve grown up in the United States, and the United States has had a real issue with race since before its origins. The modern version of this country really was built on the back of racism in a profound and these days almost unimaginably unacceptable fashion. But the legacy has never really left us.

That original sin has been a part of our daily lives for all of my life, all of your life, Monica.

We deal with this in lots of ways, at work, at home, broadly. It’s always been there.

I’ve watched over my life continual efforts toward trying to come to a reckoning with this and to try to make progress. Most of the time, the progress is slow, small, a few steps forward, a few steps back, a few steps forward, a few steps back. Every once in a while, we seem to have an opportunity to take a larger step. I’m hoping that this is one of those opportunities to take a larger step.

The stark recognition, I guess, of the social injustices that are faced by so many people—I’m thinking specifically now of the social injustices faced by African American men in this country all along—were really played up in horrible fashion on videos now.

These things that have been happening, or that we might read about, or we might not hear about, we now can see. I think that for millions of people the stark reality that this is actually happening here in our own country still today, and happening time and time and time and time again, was enough to make people say, “My goodness, we really have to

do something to try to address this.”

We’ve been talking about things we can do that really are anti-racist. It’s been baked into our culture for so long that it’s like a fish and water. You don’t see it for what it is. There’s a joke about a fish saying, “How’s the water?” and the other fish says, “What’s water?” Y You don’t see it so much, because you get used to “Well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way they’re supposed to be.” Taking a step back and saying, “Well, gosh, do they have to be way?” I think is part of anti-racism. What can we actually do to make things better?

We as a university community are continuing with these discussions. We are going to have a symposium after the first of the year to talk about security and safety on campus and what we can do to be exemplars of best practices. These are things we want to do on our campuses where, again, we want to be exemplars of best practices. We need to do them and live them in our communities.

We need to be examples for the rest of the country and honestly the rest of the world in how we can treat each other with respect and compassion, no matter who our parents were and who we are today. That’s just something for us to work on every day.

LOZANO: I remember when I was on the Board of UC Regents, and we talked a lot about campus climate. Then under my tenure, when I was chair, they adopted a statement of principles against intolerance. There was a foundation there, but it still shows up, and students still, and I’m sure faculty and staff also, are dealing with these issues that you described.

I’d like to now go to our second question from a Travers fellow, Katrina Bullock, who has question for you.

K ATR INA BULLOCK: My name is Katrina Bullock, and I’m a junior at UC Berkeley studying political science with minors in education and African American studies.

Many first-generation, low-income students

“What my colleagues and friends and many of us

have done is try to broaden things so there are more people who look like us there in our wake than there were in front of us as we arrived. We hope that we develop communities that are welcoming and nurturing to our students.”

—MICHAEL V. DRAKE of color struggle with succeeding in university settings due to resource inaccessibility and the reality of imposter syndrome. How can the UC system address elitism at the university level and make a more accommodating experience for nontraditional students seeking higher education?

DR A K E : K at r i n a , t h a n k you ; a n extraordinarily important question, and one we work on really every day. It’s an interesting thing. We believe very much in access, affordability and excellence. By access, I mean that we want to make the university broadly accessible to people from all walks of life, from all corners of California, and from other places in the country and around the world as appropriate. But we really, particularly for California students, we want students who work hard and who’ve achieved well to be able to aspire to the University of California.

We do a better job than most in tuition relief; we have programs that neutralize tuition for families [with incomes] up to $80,000 a year. So tuition becomes not a barrier for those families and less of a barrier for families just above that level. That’s very important.

But if you’re the first in your family to go to college, if you come from a community that is underrepresented on our campuses, yes, you will find yourself being a bit unusual as, forgive me, I was in all of the phases of my career. That was just something I was used to.

It was something that you sort of got used to.

Like I said, the fish and water, you get used to there not being people like you around as you move forward.

What my colleagues, I hope, and friends and many of us have done is try to broaden things so there are more people who look like us there in our wake than there were in front of us as we arrived, and we hope that, as you mentioned, Monica, that sense of community, that we develop communities that are welcoming and nurturing to our students. I did work on this honestly 30, 35 years ago.

One of my favorite books is called The Enigma of Arrival by the writer V.S. Naipaul,

a British writer but of South-Asian Indian origin. It was written about his life, when he arrived from Trinidad—where he was born—in England for his education and then where he led his life until he passed away [after] many decades. But all of us when we arrive someplace that’s new to us feel strange. We’ve had an idea of what it’s going to be like in our minds before we get there, but having not been there, that idea is never quite like what the reality of being there is. We have to go through that growing into and becoming a part of that community, and that is disquieting for everyone in some way. If you’re the first in your family to do that, it’s more challenging and more threatening, and you don’t know necessarily that everybody else is feeling that way, although that’s commonly the case.

We work very much on the campus in orientation and in creating affinity groups and places where people can go for support to let you know, every student, that we admit you on purpose, that you’re a part of our community, you become a part of our university family, and we’re there to be able to support you. And, actually, our community is better because you’re there, and the contributions you make to the community are critically important.

One last thing I’ll say, Monica, is that part of that then means that we have diverse communities and that our students are meeting people who are unlike people that they’ve grown up with, no matter who they are. Each one of us is as different from the other as the other is different from us. One of the big opportunities and one of the big joys that we have is getting to know and find commonality with people from different backgrounds, but that’s always a challenge and can be threatening. We as a community continue to work on making that a safer and more rewarding place to be.

LOZANO: This issue of access in particular, it seemed like in 2020, the UC made some giant, symbolic and substantive statements about its commitment to access, both in terms of its reflection on the use of standardized

testing and admissions, also a very important statement around the rollback of Proposition 209 and what is now, as of yesterday, Prop 16 that was on the ballot. That issue around the lack of ability to use race, gender, ethnicity in admissions decisions stayed. I think some of us are concerned about the original impact of Prop 209 on the UC. So the question is not just around those wonderful supports that you have in place once students are on campus, but what can you do to ensure that your admissions policies are actually such that you are able to pull from diverse student populations.

DRAKE: It’s something we’ve been working on really for decades. I was the admissions director at UCSF in the 1990s, and we worked really hard on being able to make those statements. We wanted to walk the walk, and we’d let others talk the talk. We wanted to actually be doing it. A couple of times, we were pleased that we had the most diverse medical school class in the country and also the most selective. Part of our proof point is that it wasn’t excellence or diversity, it was excellence and diversity, and in fact diversity made us better. We couldn’t be our best unless we had broad access and broad inclusiveness.

Then we worked hard in making sure that we could promote people through the ranks.

We were starting with very little, but step by step things got better. Year over year, we’re still committed to that.

I can just say from my own experience, in the last six years, I was a part of a system for a long time working on [this issue]. It was one campus there, but we were able to increase diversity dramatically, a 50 percent increase in Latinx students over six years, a 50 percent increase in Asian students over six years, roughly 100 percent increase in AfricanAmerican students over those six years, and at the same time, interestingly, symmetrically, an 18 percent [increase] of four-year graduation rates, the same 18 percent that happened at Irvine.

Who knows where that comes from? But we had a terrific increase in four-year graduation rates, an increase in six-year graduation rates, an increase in research funding. All of the things that we would use to measure success and excellence were up at all-time records at the same time that we dramatically increased our diversity and also increased our number of Pell and first generation students.

So my lived experience is that a university can continue to raise its profile in all of the academic success and research things that we care about as we at the same time improve our access and our affordability.

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A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN LITHGOW Photo by Robert Zuckerman.

PUT A CREATIVE MIND IN ISOLATION FOR 8 MONTHS

and don’t be surprised if he emerges with a book of satirical political poems, along with a companion video collection of stars reading the poetry. From the October 1, 2020, online program “A Conversation with John Lithgow.”

JOHN LITHGOW, Actor; Author, Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown: Verses for a Despotic Age In Conversation with LENNY MENDONCA, Director Emeritus, McKinsey and Company

A

year ago, when John Lithgow published his first collection of poems, Dumpty, his publicity tour took him far and wide before big audiences. It’s therefore oddly appropriate that for the publication of his second book, Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown: Verses for a Despotic Age, Lithgow made the rounds of online interviews, such as this one, to discuss a book he wrote and illustrated while home isolating with his wife, and produced a series of videos of the poems being read by various actors and political figures—each of whom did so from their own homes.

The actor began our program by reading a poem from his new book.

JOHN LITHGOW: Trumpty Dumpty wanted a crown To make certain he never would have to step down.

He wanted a robe made of ermine and velvet.

The Constitution, he wanted to shelve it.

With impeachment awash, his ambition had grown.

He wanted an orb, a scepter, a throne, Six royal palaces, six royal carriages, A church dispensation for six royal marriages, Courtiers installed on his own Supreme

amazing actor and all kinds of wonderful Court And royal beheadings, if only for sport. things. This relatively recent, at least that He craved the occasional royal precession we know of, foray into poetry and art, what And, gasp, the eventual royal succession. made you do that?

LITHGOW: I sort of backed into it. I cerTrumpty Dumpty gets his way Unless the public has something to say. tainly didn’t set out to write political satire If we let him have all of his favorite in verse. I’ve always written verse, just occasional verse. I’ve written funny poems that things, We’ll have to endure the divine right of include everybody’s name in the cast of a play on closing night. I’ve actually done two kings.

LENNY MENDONCA: We’re especially commencement speeches at private schools with small graduating happy to have you right afclasses in which I used the ter your newest book came “I didn’t set out names of every single one out. I had the pleasure of of the graduates in doggerel reading it. I also had the to write political completely to their pleasure of watching you on satire in verse. . . . poems surprise, finding out and Stephen Colbert last night, talking to the dean of their so it’s nice of you to join us I was never serischool about all the scanafter the Colbert show. dals they’ve been involved LITHGOW: Did I suffi- ous about it. I’m in within the last couple of ciently make a fool of my- still not serious weeks, little things like that. self last night?

And then, around about MENDONCA: It was about it, but I’m the late 1990s, I had been fantastic. Appreciate you at least dealing doing a lot of entertaining joining us here today and of children: concerts with talking a little bit about the with serious orchestras. In fact, I’ve even book to get a feeling for it, subjects now.” performed with the San including what we just saw to kick off the program with your reading Francisco Symphony, and doing videos for of one of your poems. But before we get kids and albums for kids. I began writing into that, can you just tell us a little bit verse, rhyming verse stories and picture about, Why poetry? We all know you as an books, and I wrote nine of them, some of DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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them Times bestselling picture books. But, said yes. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m nevin all of that, I was never serious about it. er going to be able to do this.”

I’m still not serious about it, but I’m at least Along comes, to all of our grief, the dealing with various serious subjects, now. pandemic, and sheltering in place and What happened was [this. At] another lockdown with nothing to do—except I one of these occasional poetry events, I had something to do. That’s when I wrote rewrote the third verse of all those poems, and I had Gilbert & Sullivan’s “I Am “I am not the these extraordinary subthe Very Model of a Modjects. I had impeachment, ern Major-General” for kind of person the coronavirus pandemic, New York Public Theater who would get Trump’s incredibly inept Gala outdoors in Central handling of all that, and Park a couple of years ago, on MSNBC and then the Black Lives Matter and it was just after Mike hold forth with movement. That was just Flynn had been charged about at my deadline, but and apprehended and fired. my own anger I even got to address that.

He was very much in the Why verse? I don’t know. and wrath, like news, and I sang the entire Don’t come to me for poGilbert & Sullivan patter Steve Schmidt. litical punditry. You come song in the character of me for entertainment.

But I can be very to Michael Flynn. And, when That’s what you expect. So I unleashed my own verse, perverse and I thought, What better use “When President Obama of my entertainment skills made me head of all things subversive and than to skewer this man clandestine, he’d realized get at them in my and to express my own anhe’d brought to life a govger and rage and pessimism ernmental Frankenstein. own way, which and fear through lightBut then, I made a killing is with satire.” hearted and very funny, in a case of public pilary by witty, poems? shouting ‘Lock her up!’ in my harangue Just as it happened with the first book, opposing Hillary,” etc. the poems get more savage as the book Well, when I told my literary agent goes along because you’re dealing with about this, it was like the sun coming up. some very, very dark subjects. But there’s He immediately saw a book. We had got- something fascinating about that. I love ten together to discuss, “You’ve got to write dealing with dark subjects in a lightheartsomething, John. What are you going to ed manner. The irony of that is something write?” Suddenly, he knew exactly what I Thomas Nast knew all about. Thomas Nast was going to write and he said, “I can sell and Jonathan Swift—great satirists. I’m this book tomorrow.” And that was two not a great satirist. I’m a total beginner at years ago. I set off to write my first book. this, but it has struck a chord and I’m just It’s called simply Dumpty: The Age of Trump delighted. in Verse. That was such a smash hit last year, MENDONCA: Talk a little bit about the covering the first two years of Trump’s ad- illustrations, as well. They’re definitely enministration, that my publisher, Chronicle livened at least my reading of it to get a Prism, right there in San Francisco, your sense of, visually, what we’re talking about. pride and joy, they begged me to write an- What’s that like? other one.

LITHGOW: Just the same as I don’t reI said, “I just can’t. It’s so hard thinking ally consider myself a professional poet or about all those meters and rhymes. And, a professional humorist, I’m not a profesbesides which, I’m working. I’m working sional illustrator, either. But my original a lot. I just won’t have time to do it.” But, ambition was to be an artist. I grew up in once again, my agent, the guy who thought a theater family. I had no intention of beof the first book—David Kuhn, a fantastic ing an actor. I didn’t want to go into the literary agent—said, “You’ve got to do this. family business. Besides, from as long as I There’s going to be an election in Novem- can remember, I have had a certain facility ber. If you get this book out before that with art. At age seven and eight years old, if election, you can discharge your political people asked me what I wanted to be when duties,” and he was absolutely right. So I I grew up, it was an artist, and I was very

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serious about it.

But, being in a theater family, by osmosis I was becoming a very experienced actor.

My father produced Shakespeare festivals, and I appeared in about 20 Shakespeare plays by the time I was 20 years old and arrived at college as a fully formed actor and became a campus star, and that was that. If you get a big enough response as an actor, you’re doomed. You’re not going to do anything else for your life.

You know, the wonderful thing about doing the poems is I would imagine the illustrations even as I wrote them. By the time we finish, I’ll be reciting a poem, Joe McCarthy’s, and I knew exactly the drawing I was going to make of that: Joe McCarthy coddling a little baby Donald Trump in his lap in a rocking chair wailing away.

It’s wonderful to find a visual joke to go along with a verbal joke.

MENDONCA: As you said, you have been doing this under a pretty dark time.

It’s a serious topic. You throw COVID on top of it and you’ve got people who feel, in many cases, not very happy about the world. Is this cathartic for you? Does this feel part of your own release for dealing with these times? Is this just work, or what is it for you?

LITHGOW: That’s a very good question, Lenny. I’m not sure that catharsis is exactly the word, but it’s pretty close. There is a certain elation to . . . well, it’s the creative process. I can look at something like that little video; I remember the moment when I thought of every single one of those rhymes, and you think of it as a kind of mini orgasm. That’s a fairly rude way of describing it, but it’s like, “Oh, yes!” It’s very, very hard work. It’s dogged drudgery because I sit in complete silence. If a pickup truck backs up and makes that little beep, beep, beep sound three blocks away, I go into a fit. You have to go into this trancelike state, which is why I was hesitant to do it again. It’s just too darn hard.

But, boy, when you think of the last line of the last stanza of a poem, well, it’s cathartic, sure enough. Also, the poems are very savage. I really take a few people completely to pieces, like Erik Prince, John McEntee, Elaine Chao, people who really deserve it. But I, myself, am not the kind of person who would get on MSNBC and hold forth with my own anger and wrath like Steve Schmidt, a man who I absolutely just love listening to, but I couldn’t do that.

In a still from their live program, actor/author/illustrator John Lithgow (left) with moderator Lenny Mendonca.

But, I can be very perverse and subversive and get at them in my own way, which is with satire.

MENDONCA: Now, you’ve had a chance to both do readings of your poems and have fellow actors and actresses and friends read them as well. How did that come about for others engaging with it, and what’s that feel like?

LITHGOW: Oh, I was just so thrilled with that. Because it was COVID, you couldn’t do a proper book tour, [so] we arranged things like this, a lot of virtual interviews and appearances. A couple of months ago, I thought, “Wait a minute, let’s get creative about this. Why don’t I . . .” because I was being asked to do all sorts of things, just talking into my iPhone and texting it to someone or putting it on Dropbox. I made a little list of my favorite people and favorite actors, and I mixed in some politicians and politicos and journalists and even an epidemiologist, and I asked them if they would be willing to simply record themselves in their home reading one or a few of my poems. I got in touch with a fabulous director and very good friend of mine, Tim Van Patten. We were working on “Perry Mason” at the time, and we said, “What about this, Tim? What about making videos of my poems as a way of selling the book?” and he said yes immediately.

He was a big Thomas Nast fan and he loved what I was doing. So I contacted my pals. They all said yes. This is Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, Alan Alda, Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Sam Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and on and on and on, and mixing in Steve Schmidt, James Carville, Laurie Garrett—that’s the epidemiologist.

They did a wonderful job. Tim works with these three delightful young men who have a company called Triptych Studios, and they spun it all together. We’ve now

released eight of them. We created our own YouTube channel. It went up just the beginning of this week. Eight of them have already been posted, but there will be another 15, 16 of them right up until election eve. They made use of my illustrations [in the videos]. They’ve managed to animate them. It’s just completely marvelous. I’ve never done anything like that, but you just have to get creative.

MENDONCA: That’s a wonderful way to bring something to life when you can’t have everybody around listening in person.

Have you gotten any negative reaction or just ribbing from the Right, from the administration, at all?

LITHGOW: There have probably been some very critical things thrown up on the Internet, but I don’t see them in any of the comment sections and I don’t look for them, anyway. I’m an actor and most actors are scared to death of bad reviews, no matter who they come from. But, secretly, I think everybody was hoping we would get Trump’s goat and elicit a couple of tweets from him. Hasn’t happened yet, but, God, he’s doing everything else; he’s a total lunatic these days, so I’m ready.

MENDONCA: Did you watch the debate?

LITHGOW: Yes, I did; unbelievable, an unbelievable spectacle. Who would have dreamed that our politics would be so debased? While it was happening, I wanted to vomit. But as soon as it was over and I saw all the commentary, which was completely appalled by Donald Trump, I began to feel a certain elation, as if we’d just watched him politically immolate himself. I mean, you look for all these signs. We’d been doing that for three or four years now, thinking, “Oh, he’s done it, now. There’s no way he can recover from this,” and we’ve always been wrong. I don’t know. I remain opti-

mistic. It’s almost as if he’s doing our work for us.

MENDONCA: Well, he’s certainly giving you a lot of material for your next poems.

LITHGOW: Not just that, but you know way back in December and January of last year when we were talking about what this book should be and how should it be different from the last one, I said, “You know, this is bad. This book has got to be really tough and really dark. He’s now behaving like a king. Why don’t I make up an opening poem, “Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown,” and make that the title of the book?” Well, look how prescient that was, not to congratulate myself, but that’s exactly how he’s operating, more now than ever.

You know, I wrote that lighthearted poem back in January. It’s taking on such dark meanings when I say, for example, “courtiers installed in his own Supreme Court, and royal beheadings if only for sport”—that’s a much better line now than it was eight months ago.

MENDONCA: I think you were going to read another poem for us? “Fake News.”

LITHGOW: Oh, yes, “Fake News.” This, I urge you all to go to the YouTube channel I was talking about. I’ll read it all right, but I won’t read it as well as my friends Whoopi Goldberg and Sam Jackson. They’re just completely wonderful.

People say that heretofore, I kept Black tenants from my door Using legal trickery, But fake news doesn’t bother me.

They say that falsifying facts Is how I skirted all my taxes.

People call it larceny, But fake news doesn’t bother me.

Constantly, I’m found at fault, Charged with sexual assault, Harassment and adultery, But fake news doesn’t bother me.

Starving students, people say, Had their futures ripped away

By Dumpty University, But fake news doesn’t bother me.

They smear me with the vilest things Like payoffs for my casual flings From the campaign treasury, But fake news doesn’t bother me.

People say I monetize All my presidential ties, Boosting my prosperity, But fake news doesn’t bother me.

They say my meddling in Ukraine Left an ignominious stain Tantamount to treachery, DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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But fake news doesn’t bother me.

They say in days corona viral I propelled our downward spiral Through my imbecility, but fake news doesn’t bother me.

Not withstanding crimes like these, I’ll continue as I please.

Fake news doesn’t bother me.

I’ll just rewrite history.

MENDONCA: If we had a live audience, there’d be a lot of applause going on. We can see it virtually. That’s very fun, very fun, and prescient, as well. Had you seen his income taxes?

LITHGOW: No, that’s what I mean. I wrote that early on, in January. It was one of the first ones I wrote. Coronavirus had never even been heard of, but I was able to stick that last stanza in when coronavirus hit about “days corona viral.” By the way, it was a wonderful event that I can tell you about. I’d written three or four of these poems, one about Roger Stone, one about fake news, of course. There was one called “Twinkle, Twinkle, Kenneth Starr” about all the defense team in the impeachment trial, and I was invited by Senator Debbie Stabenow to be the after-dinner entertainment at a retreat of the Democratic Senate caucus in Baltimore in the Johns Hopkins rare book library. I flew to Baltimore and I read my first four poems from this book.

It was the first time I had ever read them aloud for anybody, and I was reading them to United States Democratic senators, and they laughed and applauded. They gave me a standing ovation. For me, personally, it was just a historic night.

MENDONCA: That’s fantastic. Well, that would have been great after-dinner entertainment.

LITHGOW: In the course of writing this, obviously, there’s a lot going on every day in the news, and the president doing something else. What prompts you to [think], “This is something I want to write about,” or, “Here’s something that gave me an idea?” Is it just pick up the paper or turn on the TV or look at Twitter and find something, or how do you decide what you want to write about?

LITHGOW: Things become very self-evident. With both books, I sat down and wrote a kind of a database of 40 great subjects or great characters. These characters are simply amazing. As an actor, you’ll go through life looking at people who behave so crazy, it’s always very liberating. As a character actor, I always feel, “What a re-

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

lief. There’s no way anybody can tell me I’m it is a history book, and history books are overdoing it.” These people are nuts, and there to remind you about what happened; they’re fantastic subjects for comedy. When you may have forgotten this, but it was imthey hired John McEntee to be the head of portant. And, in my mind, it’s even more hiring and firing in the White House per- memorable if it’s told in rhyme. sonnel office at age 29, this young jerk who There’s something about rhymes hitting hadn’t done anything, it’s a perfect subject at the end of a sentence in perfect mefor a poem. ter that just a little firecracker goes off in And of course any numyour brain when you read ber of the others, I would “There’s only four that rhyme and you just dig deep into my research, remember. I did an entire just learn everything I could people who have monorhyme in the first about someone like [Trump truly lasted from book, which means every impeachment attorney single line ends with the Jay] Sekulow or [Secretary day one: Trump, same rhyme, and it was on of Transportation] Elaine Jared Kushner, the subject of Scott Pruitt.

Chao and collect all this Everything rhymed with stuff, a lot of it that escaped Ivanka Trump, Pruitt, but you didn’t hear people’s notice or they’d for- and that little the word til the very last gotten about it, and I would line. Well, you don’t forget [put] all those little factoids creep Stephen Scott Pruitt after that. into the text of the poems. Miller. How MENDONCA: No. I will An interesting thing hapsay, as I was reading the pened. When my first book grotesque it is introduction and then read came out, many of the peo- that those are the the book, it did remind me ple I’d written about, their [that] if this were a film, you moment had come eight, people who are would say there’s too many nine, 10 months before, in this. That was basically running characters people early in the Trump just three months ago and administration: Tom Price, our country?”

I’ve already forgotten since Scott Pruitt, Harold Bornthere’s been 15 new news stein, Ronny Jackson, Anthony Scaramuc- cycles on a new character. ci. Those were the subjects of the poems in LITHGOW: I know, and it all happened the first book. like, “Why, wait, whoah, slow, slow down.

But people’s response [to those poems] Slow down, I can’t handle all of this,” would be, “My God, I forgot all about which, of course, is what everybody is feelthose people,” and I began to realize, “Well, ing in this administration. Somehow or that’s what I’m doing to these books.” I’m other, these two books, volume one and writing an odd, offbeat kind of history, but volume two, God help me, I hope there

will not be a volume three. Just putting how do you feel about it in terms of what’s all these stories together, all these people going to come out of this? together, just compacting them into two LITHGOW: Well, I’m deeply worried, 120-page books of poems, it has an in- of course, and it’s been an economic cacredible impact of just how grotesquely tastrophe for most artists. I don’t think I bad this presidency and this administra- know any actor who’s acted, who’s been tion [are]. Maybe you can name a couple paid to act for the last 10 months. I go of people who are long gone and who back to work in two weeks on a TV series probably left with their heads held high, that was suspended last February, and I’m one of the very, very lucky and it was their decision to actors. It’s been a catastroleave, people like Jim Mat- “It’s been an phe. Again, the optimist tis, but you can’t name any in me says, “Well, it may other fine people. Or, there economic take a long time, but the may have been fine people, catastrophe for arts will be back. People are but they were stained by desperate for them. They’re the experience of being in most artists. You desperate to, somehow or this administration. There’s can’t convey the other, grapple with this exonly four people who have perience on an emotional truly lasted from day one: arts without level through the arts.”

Trump, Jared Kushner, being with But, it’s very hard beIvanka Trump and that cause you can’t convey the little creep Stephen Miller. people, without arts without being with They’re the only ones who people, without connectare still around, and how connecting with ing with people and comgrotesque is it that those are people and municating with people. the people who are basically communicating The saddest part about this running our country? experience has been how MENDONCA: As you’re with people.” lonely we all are. We’re just out having these virtual conversations, what do you like to have not used to being so isolated. Thank God people take away? In addition to, obvi- I have a wife who I would rather be with ously, reading the book and reacting to it, than anybody else, so in fact sheltering in what do you want them to feel afterwards? place has been a very, very sweet experiLITHGOW: You ask such great questions, ence, a rare experience, but it’s been very Lenny. You know, the entertainer in me melancholy, and of course the news is so wants them to be delighted, wants them to disturbing every day.

We will recover from this. My own have a wonderful time, ironically enough, a wonderful time contemplating a really grandfather passed away when my dad terrible time. I feel ambivalent in many was four years old in the Spanish flu epiways about the whole process, because I demic in 1918. During the depths of that know I’m preaching to the converted. I epidemic, it must have felt like the world know that the only people who are enjoy- was coming to an end, but we did recover ing this book are people who agree with from it and we will recover from this. But me and who are saying, “Oh, yes, thank it’s hard to hang onto that hope, and the God you’ve written this.” The people who awful thing is this terrible political anxiety don’t agree with me, they hate this book that sickens us at the same time. It’s really, if they know about it at all. I don’t expect really a tough thing to live through, but they do. I always say, “I hope to sell lots we’re all living through it together.

When I was growing up, my parents’ of copies to liberals, but lots of copies to Trump’s people, too, because they’ll only generation would all tell their rueful funwant to burn it; but if they’re going to ny stories about the Depression and being starving actors in New York. My dad was burn it, they have to buy it, first.”

MENDONCA: We’re doing this discus- a New York actor in the late 1930s, just sion and you’re doing other ones like it to never worked. In fact, my mother was a help engage an audience when you can’t do waitress at Stouffer’s on 5th Avenue, which performing arts; you can’t have a live audi- was a great job. Because of that, they fed ence. Are you worried about what’s going everybody in their little apartment in the to happen to the arts during [the pandem- Village. [They]tell those stories as if it was ic]? We’re obviously in a respite now, but the most exciting time of their lives. So

maybe we’ll look back on this and tell people how we survived.

MENDONCA: Hope so. I’m sure we will in one way or another.

LITHGOW: We’re all helpful people.

MENDONCA: So how are you able to restart your acting in a couple weeks, given the environment we’re in?

LITHGOW: Well, I guess things are slowly coming to life in the film industry in LA. They’re taking us through all sorts of protocols, a lot of which I’m not even aware of, yet. I haven’t been through it. I’ve been going to recording studios. There’s only one or maybe two people there and we’re all very careful to do little odds and ends of jobs.

I don’t know. Somehow, we’ll just creep back into action just the way sports have.

But, it’s very halting. They keep canceling football games, basketball games and entire conference seasons just because of two or three infections. So I don’t know. It’s going to be a little tough.

MENDONCA: I do hope you’re right, and I certainly feel like that there is a pentup interest in people wanting to both get out personally, but, if they can’t out, at least engage and watch and enjoy something that takes their mind away from the day-to-day. So I would assume, as soon as you’re able to start producing again and filming and acting, that there’ll be an audience just thirsting for it.

LITHGOW: Yeah, because we’re not seeing anything new, anything that’s been produced in the last eight months.

MENDONCA: In addition to being able to spend more time with your wife than you might have expected, how are you keeping yourself sane besides writing poetry?

LITHGOW: Well, that’s been a big part of it. I wrote a book. I illustrated a book.

Then, I co-produced these 21 videos, something I’ve never done in my life. I’ve been reading novels, as I haven’t given myself the chance to do in a long time. But mainly, it’s been the book, and that’s been pretty special. I’ve had a wonderful time with this one.

MENDONCA: That’s great.

I think we have another video to watch.

MENDONCA: Okay, it’s “Recipe For Disaster.”

Samuel L. Jackson: “Recipe For Disaster.” Try a viral new cuisine, COVID-19. Offer it to each civilian, DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

49

300-million.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: It’s quick and easy to prepare microbial fare. First, preheat an anxious nation with misinformation. Take what other leaders tried and set aside.

Wayne Knight: Place the 50 sovereign states on separate plates. Sow confusion and distrust. Make your crust. Insist on sycophantic praise.

Whip the glaze.

Steve Buscemi: Stir the pot for all to see on live TV. Add DeSantis, simmer low. Cuomo? No. Kristin Chenoweth: Pound Jay Inslee, call him “snake,” then prebake.

Claim it’s Gretchen Whitmer’s fault, pinch of salt. If the kitchen is a mess, slam the press.

Margaret Cho: If the pastry comes unstuck, pass the buck.

Senator Jon Tester: Are supplies arriving late? Blame the state.

James Carville: Chuck all science-based advice. Puree twice.

Laurie Garrett: If the stock exchange careens, boil your greens.

Stephen Root: For a dash of ignorance, add Mike Pence.

Steve Buscemi: Use your clueless sonin-law for the slaw.

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John Lithgow got many people from the political and entertainment worlds to read his poems on his YouTube channel. Above, clockwise from top left: Samuel L. Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Wayne Knight, Steve Buscemi, Kristin Chenoweth, Margaret Cho, Whoopi Goldberg , Stephen Root, Laurie Garrett, James Carville and Jon Tester.

Wayne Knight: Slash the funds for W.H.O. Knead the dough.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Add some spice to this fiasco with Tabasco.

Whoopi Goldberg: Once you learn how it can kill, throw in dill. When 100,000 die, bake your pie. When, at last, the horror’s done, claim you won.

Samuel L. Jackson: It takes no time at all to master national disaster.

MENDONCA: I loved that. The poem was terrific. The illustrations were fantastic, and having that array of voices be able to bring it to life must have been really fulfilling. Before knowing you were going to do it as part of this discussion, it was one of my favorite ones. It’s a very challenging topic, obviously, but written in a way that reminds you what happened to this entire disaster that we’re talking about and how much the lack of response at the leadership level is responsible, or at least in part, for how bad it is. So it was very well done.

LITHGOW: I saw that as an allego-

ry along the lines of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, and yeah, that is by far the darkest and toughest poem.

But we were talking about the coronavirus. That, when I wrote it, there were only about 80,000 people dead, and now there’s more than 200,000. Our president talks about it as if it hasn’t even happened or as if it’s all over. It’s far from over.

MENDONCA: So as you were working through this book during this time, a lot of events have occurred as this president has continued to be in the media. Are there things that you wrote about or things that you considered writing about that you think people didn’t pay as much or have not paid as much attention to that you can bring some light to? You mentioned Elaine Chao was one example. We all know about COVID. But some of the poems in there, to me, were illustrating through the way you described it both verse and art of something that people may not know as much about or remember as much.

LITHGOW: Well, certainly. I wrote about

Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman and the charges against him of countenancing sexual harassment. I wrote about Erik Prince and his special ops. A lot of them are poems that we did not do videos about because they really are grim. John McEntee was an easy one to tease. I was astonished when I did the research on Elaine Chao, this sort of very sweet, apparently sweet woman who is truly one of the most corrupt figures in the Trump administration, and there’s a whole long poem; I call it “A Pandemic’s a Terrible Thing to Waste” about how Trump has managed to fire five inspectors general, and I do a little stanza on each one of them.

It was appalling how methodically [Attorney General Bill] Barr and Trump have gone about de-fanging the entire inspector general process, and it’s quite specifically to make sure that Trump and Barr are not implicated in anything. That’s the kind of thing that sneaks under the radar, and the whole idea of “A Pandemic’s a Terrible Thing to Waste” is, when there’s a terrible crisis like that, things happen late on Friday night at the very nadir of the news cycle. You have to pay attention to what this administration does on Friday nights because it is so extralegal and they so count on people not quite noticing it. So there again, you can learn a lot from that poem, because it’s all true.

The thing we chose to do quite early on—they are the poems and they are outrageous because the behavior is outrageous and the people are outrageous, but they are accompanied by completely factual, completely deadpan little reminders what the actual facts of the matter are, because these poems are all based on the truth.

MENDONCA: One of your more recent films was to play Roger Ailes in Bombshell.

How did that compare, in terms of trying to get into that character with trying to communicate through poetry? What was it like to play someone that bigger than life?

LITHGOW: It was a wonderful experience—very, very complex man. You know, every time I play a villain—and I play just as many villains as I have heroes and fools; I always say my stock and trade are scoundrels and fools—well, the scoundrels, when you play a villain, it’s fascinating to really, really work on finding out what is redemptive about that person or what is remorseful about that person. That’s how

I approached Roger Ailes, a man who had they pierced together? his compulsions, but surely he wishes he LITHGOW: Yes, they were in their homes. didn’t and got no satisfaction from them I created a little grid. I picked 21 poems that I thought would be really playable and, in a way, is a very pitiable creature.

I took the ingenious move, if I say so and I asked people [to read]. Most people myself, I tracked down an old friend of read three or four poems, and there’s a big mine who had been Roger Ailes’ producing section of limericks, you will remember.

I doled them out to absopartner in the 1970s when lutely everybody, and they Ailes was trying his hand at “An old friend all read the entire poem. theater producing in New And then, these wonderYork. In fact, he produced who had been ful guys, they cut them the first hit production of Roger Ailes’ protogether so that, like in the Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot case of the video you just l Baltimore,” amazing fact. ducing partner saw, you see the whole enMy friend Steve Rosensemble taking turns. feld, who was his produc- in the 1970s was We had great fun, and ing partner, described him. appalled by Ailes’ I got involved late. They He was very upset. He was would edit it and then I very appalled by Ailes’ be- behavior late in would revisit it and say, havior late in life, but he life, but he found “You know what would found it very upsetting that work much better is put nobody was telling the sto- it very upsetting Buscemi down here and ry of what great company that nobody was Edie Falco up here,” and I he was, what a great sense injected myself. of humor he had, how he telling the story I deliberately had kept could make you laugh for of what great my distance. I wanted to 40 seconds straight. Very open it and close it. But interesting, a completely company he was, then, I decided, “No, they different Roger Ailes than what a great need me here on this one,” the conventional wisdom. I because I didn’t want to ask found it much, much more sense of humor them to do it again. interesting playing the part I’ll tell you a wonderful once I tracked Steve down he had.” little side note. We got perand heard all those stories.

MENDONCA: You certainly brought mission from SAG, our union, for all of him to life, very effective. When they do these people to perform and for it to air a movie about—which, I’m sure there’ll be on television and use it as a clip as we’ve a dozen of them or more—the Trump ad- done tonight. All the actors agreed, but we ministration, which character would you had to make sure that the union approved it, and they did on condition that we pay want to be?

LITHGOW: I’m afraid this guy [Assistant each of them a nominal fee, and that nomSecretary of Health and Human Services inal fee was $15.

So I just love the fact that I paid Glenn Michael] Caputo, who just emerged for a moment and is now gone for ever. That’s Close and Sam Jackson, Meryl Streep and the part for me. I even look like him, and Alan Alda $15 a pop. I said, “Spend it he is . . . ugh, these people are so insane, wisely.” but there are several. All the sort of fat, MENDONCA: I’m sure they needed the bald white men over 70 years old, they’re work and were grateful for the $15. It already looking for me to play those parts. looks like they were having fun doing it.

Actually, I’ve already been asked to play LITHGOW: Oh, they all had a wonderful Donald Trump a couple of times, but it’s time. They were really delighted, and they just too damn soon for me. I did play him. all did it completely on their own. I wasn’t We did a live-streaming of the Mueller re- there to say, “Do it faster or do it funnier.”

They all did a great job, and if they didn’t, port last June.

MENDONCA: Can you describe a little we just would substitute somebody else in bit more the videos that go along with this for that little particular stanza.

And now James Carville can say he’s actbook? Were your friends in their homes recording like we’re doing now and then ed with Meryl Streep.

DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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JOURNALIST AND MEDIA EXECUTIVE

Maria Hinojosa shares a personal account of America’s greater immigration crisis. From the September 23, 2020, online Inforum program “Maria Hinojosa: Latino USA.” Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

MARIA HINOJOSA, Founder, President and CEO, Futuro Media Group; Anchor and Executive Producer, NPR’s “Latino USA”; Author, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America JACQUELINE MARTINEZ GARCEL, CEO, Latino Community Foundation—Moderator

LOVE & HATE IN A TORN AMERICA Trailblazing Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa on immigrants, discrimination and what’s happening with the Latinx vote.

JACQUELINE MARTINEZ GARCEL: I have to say that when I got the email from The Commonwealth Club, I actually did a triple-take. I said to myself, “She wants me to interview her?” A hundred thoughts and questions rushed through my mind. Then I got your book, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. I got the hard copy, but I also did the audio because you’re an amazing storyteller, and I wanted your voice to guide me through these pages.

When I read through it, it just all came together. This book felt like a sancocho for me, honestly, Maria. First, I just want to say thank you for writing this. It’s so powerful. I would recommend this book for any beating heart that is wondering how we’re going to turn this corner from this dark period of history right now. It’s when we read her story that we can understand how our story, our legacy, our generation’s going to fit into this crazy upside-down world we’re living in right now.

I actually want to start [at] the moment that you were a baby in your mom’s arms, just come into Dallas, Texas. Here she is, this petite, young woman, five feet tall, facing this man who you later describe as 100-year-old redwood, because he was so tall. It was in that moment that your mom, when she was threatened, the thought of you being taken away from her because you had a little rash on your skin that you had just gotten because you had a blanket in the plane; they threatened that

they would take you away from her. That’s when your mom [reacted], her voice just resounded.

I want to hear from you, how did that moment, as you reflected on it, shape your recognition of your own voice throughout your life?

MARIA HINOJOSA: The arrival of my mother is an important part of the story, and I didn’t really realize what was happening. I would often tell the story, once I got it, because I didn’t get it until I was in my 30s.

Part of what I hope happens with Once I Was You is that people actually start asking. It’s hard to get people to tell the arrival stories, because some of them are really hard. There’s some shame. I realize that this is what happened with my mom. First time I heard the story, it was like, “No, because we arrived. We all

Maria Hinojosa DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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had our green cards. We were going to meet dad who was at the University of Chicago in Chicago.

“This very tall immigration agent at the Dallas Airport in the early 1960s said that you had the measles and that he was going to have to put you in quarantine.”

My mom is speaking, and she’s like, “And I just stood up to him.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no.” The way that I would tell this story was that my mom understood what it was to be an American. Even before she was an American, she had a green card. She was like, “I know my rights. I’m going to stand up.”

I would tell the story—if I was on stage with you at The Commonwealth Club, I’d be prancing around and telling the story about this little woman who stands up. That was the applause moment in my speeches. It was like, “Oh, now I know where I get my voice, tiny but mighty—my mom.”

Then, I’ve been reporting about children being taken from their parents, for not just in the past 10 years, but before that. But certainly when we heard the audio of toddlers and four- and five-year-olds screaming for their parents, it was a shocking moment for everybody.

I was at the airport, and my mom called.

My mom was in tears. She just said, “I realized that that could have been me.” I was like, “What are you talking?” She was like, “Ma.” She says, “Mamita, the women who have had their babies taken away from them, that could have been me. Those babies, that could have been you.”

I just went into a mini-state of shock, because then it all made sense. I never realized that what was happening, to be honest with you. I was like, what a fluke this was, at this Dallas immigration agent at the airport.

What a total fluke. That guy was crazy.

Well, no actually. There was a policy of taking children. I’m going to use a slur now.

So, please understand, but there is a very particular. There is a very particular slur that is used for Mexicans. That slur, you know what it is because you know that there are two words that go together for the slur. The words are dirty Mexican.

By law in the state of Texas until the year 1964, you could actually search and check Mexicans to see if they were dirty. That’s what this led to. There was actually a campaign. It’s complicated, what happened in El Paso and all of this, but that law was on the books in Texas until 1964. That’s why that immigration agent was looking at me. That’s why he was going to take me when I had a tiny little rash. I wasn’t just a fluke.

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The next part of Once I Was You, if I had time, would have been to do the search, get the architectural plans for the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport in 1963, ‘62, and find out where was the room where they were going to take me. Then, you’re like, “Oh, wait.

There was a room?” I wasn’t the only one.

This is exactly what he said. He said, “We’re going to keep her.” That’s when my mom— it wasn’t the feminist, “I’m an American with a green card, and I’m going to speak.” It was trauma. That’s what my mom called to say.

She said, “I realize what it was, was I was in a state of panic, and that’s why I started screaming.”

This has been going on for a long, long time. Too long.

GARCEL: Somebody had to take us to that moment. You start your book with this beautiful letter that you write to this little girl that you met at McAllen Airport [in Texas]. That inner voice of that speaking to you wherever you go, that turns into that louder voice where you speak out loud and you choose to speak in Spanish in that moment in particular, so those children can hear you.

Talk us through what was going through your mind at that airport.

HINOJOSA: Except for the pandemic I’m a seasoned traveler, which means I know airports really well. I’ve been to all 50 states.

I know airports. I know airport body language. That morning at seven o’clock in the morning at the McAllen Airport, I see a little girl. I’m actually on my knees trying to find a plug as usual. I look up, and I see a beautiful little girl with the most amazing skin and eyes. I realized she’s not looking at me. She’s looking through me.

Also, when kids are at airports, kids are like this; they’re just like, “Oh my god. We’re at an airport. What’s going?” That’s what caught my eye. Then, when I did the wide angle and I zoomed out and I was like, “Oh, my god, she’s one of these kids.” Oh my god, I’m seeing this. It’s happening. I had seen it before, but I hadn’t realized. That’s the whole idea, that these children are being transported in the airports, and it’s happening in plain sight. It’s kind of really sinister.

When I realized, “Oh my god, this is my moment,” I went and I sat next to her. I had not so much a journalist moment; it was like a mother moment, because I felt like, “Oh my god. She hasn’t seen her mom.” I sat down so that nobody would realize what was going on. I just started talking to her very quietly because the so-called chaperones—I would say they are the traffickers, kidnappers. I’m sorry. The definition of being traf-

ficked is that you do not know who is taking you from place to place. You do not know where you’re going. You do not have access to your documents and you have been told not to speak to anyone.

These children are being trafficked as per the definition of being trafficked. The chaperones would not let me speak to them. What happens in the end, is that I’m like, “Okay.

Well, I have to say something. They’re not letting me speak to these children. I need to say something to these children.” Then, I get into Spanish, I start basically talking to the chaperone, but I’m actually talking to the kids in Spanish. I’m saying these kids need to know that they can speak to a journalist, that they have that right. We want them to know that they are loved, that we’re not afraid of them. There are people who are on top of what’s happening to them.

Then, I say to this little girl, “I wanted you to hear me, because I see you. I see you because once I was you.”

One of the most challenging parts of this book was when I was finished and finding the title. We could not come up with a title.

It happens. I was very sad. I was like, “How is it?” My agent was like, “Don’t worry. It’s all going to fall into place. Don’t worry.”

Then, finally, we had another reader come in. They were like, “There’s your title.” I really, really love it.

GARCEL: It’s so beautiful, Maria. It actually speaks to who you are as a person, as a journalist. It’s seeing people, seeing them. So much of this book is about seeing the humanity in all the worlds that you traverse; from seeing that little girl to being in places where most people would overlook, or looking for a hidden story. It’s just so beautiful to be seen and written throughout this entire book.

One of the things that stood out for me throughout it was how you crossed borders both physical and emotional, class borders and race borders between Mexico, the U.S., Washington Heights and Midtown, Manhattan, having [Dominican musician] Juan Luis Guerra in your house with [public radio journalist] Scott Simon.

But one of the things you said about that moment is that you love the fact that neither of them knew who they were. These worlds that you’re a part of, that you go in and out of, have become a superpower for you. It’s grounded you so beautifully in who you are.

That was a defining moment for you. Talk to me about that moment that it all came together, not needing to be defined by one world over the other, but all these worlds

“[T]he so-called chaperones—I would say they are the traffickers, kidnappers. I’m sorry . . . these children are being trafficked as per the definition of being trafficked.” —MARIA HINOJOSA that you were part of.

HINOJOSA: Juan Ruiz is a friend of my husband’s. My husband actually designed [the cover of Guerra’s fourth album,] Ojalá Que Llueva Café. Juan Ruiz was in town.

They came up. Isidro Bobadilla, who is his percussionist, actually is the reason why I met my husband, because I knew Isidro.

Everybody was hanging out at a super big party. I had invited Scott. I was like, “Come on up.” He came up.

We had opened up the roof. I just remember saying this is like the jam. Scott Simon is here, and a certain group of people at the party knew who he was. They were like, “Oh my god, Scott.” Then, a whole other group of people knew who Juan Ruiz was. They were like, “Oh my god.”

Yeah. I do think that living in all of these multiple worlds helped me to understand being a border crosser in multiple ways, understanding that concept.

I loved writing about growing up on the South Side of Chicago near the University of Chicago, but it was a Black community.

Then, every week, we would drive—once we finally got a car—to the Pilsen [neighborhood], 18th Street in Chicago, which is where the Barrio Mexicano was, and how my mom would become this perfect Mexican woman in El Barrio Mexicano. She was speaking to everybody [in Spanish]. Seeing

my mother in another place and then driving back [home], like it was another world, I think this allowed me to not be afraid of the crossing back and forth of the living in Washington Heights and working at CBS News. I did feel like, especially as a journalist, it gave me a superpower because I was like, “Y’all don’t even know what’s happening uptown.” Now, interestingly, what it meant as a journalist was that it gave me real life experience for what communities were living through.

I remember when I was living on 106th Street. I was married to German [Perez].

Raul was born. We lived on 106th Street, which was Crack Alley. That was the name of 106th street. I called 911, because there was a shooting on the street corner. People were dealing drugs. I called 911.

I got a recording, “Please, hang up and try your call again. All circuits are busy.” I was like, “What is going on?” This happens in our communities, but other places, you call 911 and an operator answered. I remember my editor at NPR was like, “Yeah.

That didn’t happen.” I’m like, “It happened.”

This was kind of the gaslighting where we as people of color are experiencing—like right now, we’re experiencing a certain reality, and our hair is on fire saying something is going on. We’re being told, “Yeah—no.” This is what we’re living through right now.

The fact that the book would be released at the same time that the story is breaking about forced hysterectomies on women, I think is very telling about what I’m trying to say. We have a problem in terms of immigration in this country. We know that, but the level of dehumanization, it’s beyond alarming. I do hope that the Mexican government files an international human rights case against the United States government.

I’ve been waiting.

Sadly, if you know Mexican politics, the leftist indigenous president of Mexico is, I’m sorry, a collaborator of Donald Trump’s— very, very, very, very disappointing. I’m not sure if that will actually happen, because of the geopolitics. Once again, immigrants thrown under the bus by both parties, by both governments. It’s desperately sad.

GARCEL: Actually, it’s funny you use those words. That was the segue to this next part of the conversation about this present moment. Your book felt so much like a warning, sounding alarm all over—1986 to 1996, 2006 sounding the alarm, sounding the alarm. Here we are and Latinos make up 59 million in our country, 32 million, largest ethnic voting block in our countries, second largest ethnic [group].

Here we are getting headlines about what’s happening—not new to the United States— happened in Puerto Rico, happens to MexDECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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“We want to be the first to create an investigative unit that is specifically uncovering stories of systematic and structural abuse of Latinos and Latinas and immigrants.” —MARIA HINOJOSA

ican-American woman, the sterilization. It’s happened. Maria, can it get any worse?

The other thing I tied to this question is, we’re about to have [a second presidential] debate. I’m thinking, “Maria should have been the one moderating that debate, first of all.” If you were the one in front of those two candidates right now—what you say in your book is still true, this is not a Republican or Democrat [issue]. Both of them have thrown us under the bus. They’re all equally responsible. Can this get worse? What would you say? What would you ask these two candidates?

HINOJOSA: Oh, sweetie, let me tell you.

You know what’s sad to me is that it’s less than two months to the election and neither Kamala Harris nor Joe Biden has agreed to speak with me. I don’t understand that. It makes me very sad that they feel like they have to be afraid of me. I don’t think that I’m a mean person. I don’t think that I’m a scary person.

Actually, if you listen to all of the interviews that I did with presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders is not really soft and gushy. I made him get a little soft. I don’t understand why they’re afraid of me. Latinos and Latinas, we have questions. As the second largest voting bloc in this country, we deserve answers. A politician that is afraid to speak to a journalist, I don’t even understand that.

I’m just like, “I’m not going to bite you. You

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know what I’m going to ask you. I would hope that you already have thought about an answer.”

Four years ago during the presidential debates, I was complaining about this. I was saying how is this possible? This man is running on an anti-Latino, anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant platform. He began his campaign using hate speech. Why is it that we call it hate speech, but other people just call it his campaign? It’s hate speech. Do I want to be in the same room as this person? I’ve been actually. He sat behind me on Broadway during Def Poetry Jam. Donald Trump sat behind me. He left at intermission. He left a bunch of hand wipes all on the floor right underneath him. . . .

I think what’s hard for us is really watching this erasure happening as we speak.

Here’s what I say to my colleagues. I don’t understand. And this is like when people say, “Well, what can we do. What can we do?”

In this particular case, for example, I don’t know.

My colleagues in the mainstream media could say “We’re in a boycott. We are not going to participate in the presidential debates until you name a Latino or Latina anchor.”

Just one. I was actually saying, “Why only just one?” You’re Dominican. I’m Mexican.

We have different experiences. Yet, Dominican and Mexican—actually super important to have both of those perspectives.

I feel like this erasure—I’m getting really angry about it, because it’s the basics of journalism, of accountability journalism that a community that is being attacked have a chance to ask for accountability. We as Latinos and Latinas are being denied by the presidential debate commission. Shame on them.

By the way, it’s like six people. It’s not a big commission. It’s six people.

GARCEL: We wrote letters. Latino Community Foundation was writing a letter to them. We publicized it. We reached out to The New York Times, because it’s embarrassing that at this moment in history—2016, a defining moment for this current president, how he went out campaigning—we’re not going to have a moderator that’s Latino to represent the second largest voting bloc in our country. It’s just mind-blowing.

HINOJOSA: It’s mind-blowing, but the thing is that we cannot be gas-lit. You did the right thing. We’re going to use our voice. It may feel like a drop in the bucket, but that is what we have to do. That is absolutely what we have to do.

GARCEL: Maria, some questions are coming in [from the online audience]. I’m going to go back and forth, because one question that just came in relates to that. She’s a young journalist. She’s saying, What advice do you give us at this moment to continue?

It’s hard time to continue to use our voice.

What advice would you give young journalists right now?

HINOJOSA: My advice is, please, don’t give up. After you read Once I Was You, please read the book, News for All the People, by Juan González. The reason why is because you will understand that your role as an American journalist is essential to the history of this country. Essential.

I’ve been interviewed by several Latina journalists. It’s adorable now, because there are many. They’re like, “Were you really the first? What was that like?” I’m like, “Well, to be honest with you, I was really happy I had a job.” But I understood that I was the first. With that came an understanding of my privilege.

Then, I was like, “Well, if you’re privileged that you can be here, then you have a responsibility to use this privilege.” I know how frustrating it is for young journalists.

Futuro is small. It’s growing, but it’s small, but I want you to think—Futuro didn’t exist 10 years ago. There will be others. As far as we know, I’m the only Latina right now running a nonprofit newsroom in the United States.

I also didn’t know that when I created Futuro. So understand that there are going to be other opportunities. If you want to work in a mainstream [media organization] like in The New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle or the LA Times, go and put in the work there and find your allies so that you can withstand it, because it’s not easy. But also, there are other opportunities that are going to come up. Futuro is growing right now.

Big picture is just find your allies, find the people who you can let it all out. Find a way that you, whatever it is—meditating, working out, dancing, listening to loud music— whatever it is that helps you to come down and then realize that you are a part of history and that we need you desperately. I know it’s so hard, but please try not to give up.

Even if you have to leave journalism and come back or leave journalism and do something else but you still do journalism on your free time, don’t give it up. We need you.

GARCEL: We need more Latino-led newsrooms. We need more stories being told from us by us. There’s just not enough.

HINOJOSA: Before you go to your next question, I want to actually say something about that, because Futuro media is actually in the process of growing.

One of the things that we’ve developed— which I’m so excited about and this hap-

pens because I have an amazing chair of my board who has inspired me to write the book. Deepa [Donde] actually said to me, “You know what, Maria? Let’s create your own unit within Futuro.”

Even though I’m the founder, it’s like my next thing. We created the Futuro Unidad Hinojosa, which we call the FUH. What I’m doing with the FUH is that we are in the process of launching an investigative unit that I’m going to run and create because—guess what, Jacqueline—there is no place that has a consistent investigative unit that is looking at stories that need to be uncovered specifically for the Latino-Latina community. Not even Univision, not even Telemundo have consistent investigative units, because it’s expensive. It’s hard work.

It takes time. You have to work on a story for a year, for example.

We are trying to do that. We want to be the first to create an investigative unit that is specifically uncovering stories of systematic and structural abuse of Latinos and Latinas and immigrants in the United States of America. The tip of the iceberg is the horrors. When you ask that question “How much worse can it get?” It’s there already, I’m sorry to say.

There is no way that we can prove that an infant, a toddler who doesn’t even speak English, how are they going to talk about the fact that they’re being sexually assaulted in an immigrant detention cage. That’s happening right now.

Women are being raped right now. People are being fed food with maggots right now because that’s how the private prison industry makes money; it buys expired food, and it serves it to us. Investigative work. Let me tell you, I am fired up.

GARCEL: We should be. We need it desperately. We need it with respect and dignity to lift up those voices with integrity.

There was a moment where you were questioned in terms of your Latino agenda you were bringing to the newsroom. [you had to] get the story to Walter Cronkite; you were told “He’s not going to read that,” but you push. You push, Maria. When you said this, you made it clear you’re not pushing for yourself. You’re pushing for everyone else who is going to come up behind you, and we can keep pushing forward.

HINOJOSA: I really loved writing this, because I had never put it on paper. The story goes that I end up working at CBS. My father was finally happy that I had a network job, even though I had told him I don’t know how long I’m going to stay,

because getting into a network is good, but I also write about the golden handcuffs. If you start working in one of these places it might be hard to leave, because you’re making money. Money is a nice thing to have, but it may mean that you don’t necessarily do the best journalism necessarily.

Anyway, so I was working at CBS News.

They asked me to produce Walter Cronkite’s end-of-the-year commentary. It was the year 1987. That was the way to keep him connected to CBS, because he had already retired.

As a producer, I had to write his commentary. I really suffered through this, because of my imposter syndrome. I was like, “My god.” I was suffering through this.

I wrote a lot of drafts by hand. I remember writing it by hand on that long legal pad and then going back. I worked really hard, because I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t coming off as the angry Latina, that I had to be a good journalist and know that Walter Cronkite was going to read this.

I had to internalize Walter Cronkite.

That’s when I was like, “I’m a good writer.

I can try to do that, but I will never see the world through his eyes.”

That’s okay. I’m not a lesser journalist because of that. Anyway, so the story goes, I write this commentary and my boss says, “Now, Walter will never read this.” It was really taking on the government, because Oliver North was a convicted liar at that point. I guess he had already been charged.

Anyway, corruption galore in the United States of America, with the contras and all of that stuff under the Reagan administration. I said, “Well, I think he’ll read it.” He said, “No. It’s too much you.”

I thought he was going to do this. I said, “Well, let’s go downstairs to the fishbowl,” which is where they produce the “CBS Evening News.” Even today, it’s called the fishbowl, because it’s all glass offices around the anchor desk. We went down there. I said, “Don’t tell him who wrote it. Just give it to one of the senior editors. See what he says.”

He went down there. He handed it to [Cronkite]. He read it. It was short. He was like, “Yeah. This is good. Just change that word. It’s great.” It was that moment where I was like, “Stop gaslighting yourself. You are good enough. You are good enough.”

I did feel like I had to take one for the team. [CBS News producer] Norman Morris was such a champion of mine. Then, in this moment, he let me down. I was like, “I’m not going to let you down. I’m going to prove to you that the reason why you DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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hired me is because I am good. I’m good at what I do. It’s not just because I’m Latina.

It’s because I’m good.” But there was a lot of imposter syndrome that followed me up until not too recently.

GARCEL: Maria, the other thing that you talk about in the book [is] California Prop.

187, 25 years ago last year. Prop. 29 happened around the same time. It was part of this trifecta of an anti-immigrant set of policies that were trying to hush us, push us out, criminalize us.

This year Californians have an opportunity to actually reverse it with Prop. 16—the [Proposition] 209 ban on affirmative action.

Prop. 16 [would] reverse that. Any insight on how the outcome of that might affect the rest of our country?

HINOJOSA: What happened in California with Prop. 187 had ripple effects all the way to my house. At that point, my family was still in Chicago. My mother and my sister became American citizens—they’re based in Chicago—because of what was happening with Governor Pete Wilson and California.

Other than that, I don’t think that they would have become citizens. That’s the kind of ripple effect that that had. As you know, the ripple effect also was that it created a slew of Latino and Latina activists who have become empowered. They were the precursors to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Can you imagine California putting forward a Prop. 187 now? I want to remind people that my early years of journalism here in New York City were covering racially motivated hate crimes in New York City.

New York—where we really try to all get along, and I think we’re doing a pretty darn good job considering we just took down the pandemic, this one city. That’s what was happening here.

If you think of New York and California now, it’s like, “That was old stuff and we’re so past that.” What happens in California is going to have a huge impact in the rest of the country. If that happens, if affirmative action is reinstated, it’s going to be another plateau, but the point is we’re having a moment of reckoning right now. [California voters rejected Proposition 16 by 57.2 percent to 42.8 percent.—Ed.] One of my staffers said something like, “This third iteration of Black Lives Matter.” I was like, “No, mamita, not third iteration.” Black Lives Matter began the day the first black and slave person arrived here.

It has been consistent throughout. The anti-immigrant sentiment that we deal with is built on anti-indigenous hatred, anti-black

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hatred, anti-immigrant hatred. We need to make those connections.

GARCEL: Again, the questions are coming in. Any advice for a first generation Latina trying to have a conversation with her Mexican parents about anti-blackness?

HINOJOSA: We’ve just got to have it, just got to have that conversation. Its like I don’t even know where to begin, but if you can, talk to your parents about what happened in Mexico. What happened is that Mexico was very forward thinking. In the mid1800s, they had a caste system that was all about caste based on race.

Then, in 1865, Benito Juarez is elected president, the first indigenous president. So you can use that as an entry [into the discussion with your parents]. Let’s talk about anti-indigenous hate in Mexico. Why is it so hard to accept our indigenous selves and yet Mexico did elect Benito Juarez—who by the way his most famous saying is respect for other people’s rights brings everybody peace. Brilliant Benito Juarez, an indigenous man.

Mexico then got rid of the castes. Mexican, Black, white—you were all Mexican.

Then there was no Black or white. That’s a beautiful thing, but it erased the fact that there were many, many, many Black Mexicans. Therefore, we didn’t have a way to talk about Afro-Mexicanos. We didn’t have the language, because they didn’t want to talk about the issue of race, which in many ways was kind of progressive.

If we can talk about our own families, I immediately think of, “Oh, my god.”

When I had the moment, my revelation growing up in a Black community hearing anti-Black statements from my family, then just kind of thinking about this and looking one day at my uncle. I’m just like, he looks black. What’s up with her? What’s up with the facial marking?

That’s why I was like, “Can you talk about the Olmecas and the Cabeza Olmeca,” which if you see is a Black Mexican, then maybe you can say, “We have to understand that it actually is part of us in Mexico.” Then, if you can talk about the history of racism in this country, why do you have racism against Black people? Well, because they were brought here in chains, and there had to be a way to make them feel less than.

That’s all part of the narrative. We don’t want to participate in a narrative that makes a human being less than.

If you’re able to make those connections and then maybe move to, “You understand the way people talk about Black people is

the way they talk about us.” To my dad, who had issues around internalized homophobia, I would say, “Papi, don’t use that word, papi. There are members of our family who are gay.”

In some ways, it’s just like old words that they just can’t get out of. With patience and love mostly, if possible—it’s how I would have those conversations.

GARCEL: Wherever we started, we’ve just got to open our mouth and be the ones to initiate those conversations. My dad is Black Dominican; mom is white Dominican. It’s painful that we don’t talk about this and center our own pain from the anti-Blackness in our own community.

HINOJOSA: I’ll see you. You’re going to come to Washington Heights soon enough.

GARCEL: I was just there two weeks ago.

HINOJOSA: Oh my god. We would have to go to Elsa La Reina Del Chicharron.

GARCEL: Yes, I went there three times while I was there, mask and all, waiting my 10 minutes outside to get my libra de chicharrones.

HINOJOSA: Okay. People who don’t know, I didn’t know about Elsa until 10 years ago. I really should not be eating pork, but let me tell you something— GARCEL: I can just smell it right now.

HINOJOSA: Oh my god, there’s nothing like it. Oh my god.

GARCEL: All right. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get some chicharrones. Then, we’re going to get a cafecito.

This is from Peter: Any advice to both [political] parties on how to improve their reach to varied Latinx for their votes?

HINOJOSA: Both parties? Well, the Republican Party is going to have a lot of work to do. I don’t really know how they’re going to repair this. The fact that, let’s say, 25 percent of Latinos and Latinas support Donald Trump and this Republican Party is cause for concern, but I’m not really sure that you can grow it much beyond that. I don’t know how you recuperate and rebuild the party that is built on hatred and anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment.

I’m really not sure what’s going to happen. I’m really watching all of the former Republicans that have now formed the Lincoln Project. What will those Republicans do, because they’re now all supporting Democrats? We need a Republican Party.

We need that friction.

The Democratic Party, time is running out. I have said this publicly all over the place. You really cannot win huge and big unless you have massive Latino and Latina

“What we did learn after the enthusiasm of

getting Barack Obama elected [is] that no matter what happens, it is up to all of us to hold them accountable. Period.” —MARIA HINOJOSA voter support.

Do you know about the elections in Puerto Rico, what that’s like? Oh, my god, it’s a party. The elections in Puerto Rico involved caravanas, caravans with speakers that are as big as my room, speakers that will blow your head off and the speakers have jingles for each of the candidates. I’m like, “When is the Democratic Party here in the United States going to figure out contra?” Just get the caravanas. Get those flags going. I’m not a political activist. How is it that I can figure that out and they can’t?

GARCEL: They haven’t gotten to know us.

They don’t listen. They don’t see us.

Maria, the other question related to this one: Some Gen Z Latinos are feeling really disillusioned at our political system specifically because they don’t want to vote for either Biden or Trump. What do you have to say to them?

HINOJOSA: I don’t know who it was that said it so beautifully, because I’ve just seen so many things. It was somebody super political who basically was like, “Yeah, Biden’s got problems all over the place. I’m voting for him. There’s no doubt about it.”

At this point with Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who also was not perfect, but okay— with her gone, this is some very scary stuff.

The possibility of Donald Trump being able to name even more people to the Supreme

Court would be a real-life horror for us.

I’m going to tell you something that someone close to me said, but maybe this will be a reason why Latinos and Latinas should absolutely get to the polls and vote no matter what. I feel the disrespect. Bernie Sanders would not have won were it not for Latino and Latina voters. We showed up. Then, it was kind of like, “Thank you.

Next.”

But this person said to me this morning, “I think I better make the appointment at the gynecologist.” I was like, “Okay. Why? For your annual checkup?”

She said, “No. Given what’s happening in the country with the Supreme Court, I think maybe I should get my IUD now in case Donald Trump gets reelected.” There’s a reason why I stopped watching The Handmaid’s Tale. I could not continue because it was too close to home. We are at that point.

I’m going to make a joke now, because it’s getting really deep here. I’m five things that this president doesn’t like, which is why if he gets reelected, it’s going to be really challenging because I am these five things.

I am Mexican.

I’m an immigrant.

I’m a journalist.

I’m a woman.

I’m flat chested.

I know. You guys are like, “What? What

did you say?” I can say that because it’s my body. You can’t say that, but I joke.

But the truth is that we couldn’t imagine four years of Donald Trump. It was a very scary moment. Look what we have: forced hysterectomies, children who are in cages ripped apart from their parents, Muslims being banned from this country, trans people being banned, Puerto Rican people being insulted by having paper towels thrown at them, and a kind of bullying.

Donald Trump, he’s the product of a psychopathic father. I did read Mary Trump’s book. He’s also not very smart. We all see this. He cannot get the basic names of states right.

The deference that media gives to him, it needs to stop. This is an authoritarian regime that we’re living in. That is a reason, maybe not to get enthusiastic, but let me tell you this. What we did learn after the enthusiasm of getting Barack Obama elected? I’m not on a political train. I’m not like, “Yeah.

He won. It’s all good.” We have learned now that no matter what happens, it is up to all of us to hold them accountable. Period.

It’s not like, “Oh, he won. It’s all good.

Oh, it’s a Black man. Yes.” No. Democracy doesn’t stop. Activism doesn’t stop. Demands don’t stop because of that.

DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021

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The Commonwealth Club organizes nearly 500 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs are held throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are typically one hour long and frequently include panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session. Many evening programs include a networking reception with wine.

PROGRAM DIVISIONS

CLIMATE ONE

INFORUM

MEMBER-LED FORUMS

Discussion among climate scientists, policymakers, activists, and citizens about energy, the economy and the environment.

Inspiring talks with leaders in tech, culture, food, design, business and social issues targeted towards young adults.

Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields. Most evening programs include a wine networking reception.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/CLIMATE-ONE

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/INFORUM

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MLF

RADIO, VIDEO, & PODCASTS Watch Club programs on KAXT and KTLN TV every weekend, and monthly on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club programs air on Marin TV’s Education Channel (Comcast Channel 30, U-Verse Channel 99) and on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub

CreaTV

KAXT/KTLN TV

Subscribe to our free podcast service on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcast-subscribe

Hear Club programs on more than 200 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States. For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/ In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs select Tuesdays at 7p.m.

TuneIn.com Fridays at 4 p.m.

KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

TICKETS Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all events—including “Members Free” events—require tickets. Programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705. Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. Select events include premium seating, which refers to the first several rows of seating. Pricing is subject to change.

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THE COMMONWEALTH

HARD OF HEARING? To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Mark Kirchner seven working days before the event at mkirchner@commonwealthclub.org.

SPREAD THE WORD —and the videos and the podcasts

When you share a social media post about a Commonwealth Club video, audio podcast, or even just a message about an upcoming program, you help introduce others in your social media network to the work that the Club does.

It’s a great way to show that you’re in the know about the latest ideas and speakers and thought leaders. facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub instagram.com/cwclub twitter.com/cwclub

As 2020 comes to a close and 2021 begins,

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

we wish you a happy and safe holiday season and a wonderful new year.

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2017

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SAND DUNES, CANYONS & WILDFLOWERS

March 21-26, 2021 With our expert naturalist guide, explore Badwater Salt Flats and Ubehebe Crater.

Marvel at the panoramic views of Telescope Peak. Watch the sunrise at Zabriskie Point and walk between the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon. Learn about the resilient desert pupfish and wildflowers. Stay at the Oasis at Death Valley.

Details at commonwealthclub.org/travel

| 415.597.6720

|

travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40