welcome to the westminster town hall forum where for thirty one years we have invited voices of conscience to explore the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective learn more about the forum online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim hart anderson i'm a senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nick with mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and the moderator of the forum it is my pleasure to introduce tonight's guest speaker e j dionne is a columnist for the washington post a senior fellow at the brookings institution and a university professor in the foundations of democracy and culture at newspapers he is the author or editor of numerous books including why americans hate politics which was nominated for a national book award and his newest book our divided political heart which is when bill clinton and bob dole where the candidates and we're grateful golden voice of radio voice newsman you see him up there was such a generous introduction it was so much nicer than the introduction i received once which ended and now for the latest joke from forum is very representative of the state of minnesota which is given the nation so many gifts the gifts and good government civic engagement social justice and norwegian charisma much in fact it is one of your great parishioners walter mondale who invented the term norwegian charisma and he is a very very very dear man it's also very nice and charitable of you to invite arrogance which you might spur arrogance but you might say we work pretty hard that but these days as many of you see it in your newspapers or online there are those little email addresses underneath them people actually write us quite often and for some reason they worried us more when they disagree then when they agree i think this might have something to do with the original sin but i won't preach on that today one of the negative e mails and i always like that i can actually repeat in this holy place we began with the words dear mr dion are you as dumb in person must be if you get nothing else out of my talk tonight you'll be able to answer that question itself i want to talk a bit on my new book our divided political heart which i cannot resist at the outset it talks a lot about our founding fathers would make an excellent father's day gift i must and it's a lot about the tensions in the us as americans and it's a book and in many ways about who we are and we americans are actually a very confusing people perhaps especially to ourselves the self portraits we create are often contradictory other products of our culture all seem to celebrate conflicting values is our country better or better personified by the communitarianism of jimmy stewart in it's a wonderful life or the rogue individual is i'm of clint eastwood in dirty harry does woody guthrie's this land is your land or frank sinatra's my way speak more directly to who we are is the american experimenting unique because it works it recognize the limits of individual accomplishment something sometimes illustrated in john steinbeck novels or because it acknowledges the sanctity of independence as a liberated say by jack you'll walk are divided political heart grew out of my love for the american story a nd it's tensions there's a paradox right at the beginning of the book because the first sentence refers to widespread worries about american decline which i think have been a very important to our politics  in recent years but the book is very distinctly not in a decline his book it's an indie decline his book it's actually a hopeful book about our future because in argues that the classic american balance between individual ism i community and also between government and the market and between private and public i helped us get out of scrapes before and and has done so again and again i never tire of quoting winston churchill who offered my very favorite take on us as americans americans he said ten always be counted on to do the right thing after they have exhausted all other  capacity for self correction indeed the fact that we talk so much about our decline is a sign of what a high opinion we have of our country because we always seem to think that we are in a place from which we can  decline and out of our fears is true and out of our fears of decline have come some extraordinary political moments if feelings of decline usually start in specific crises in foreign policy or economics or as was the case at the end of the bush administration boat but these concerns quickly morphed into a sense that we are in the midst of something larger a spiritual cr and that's when we start asking ourselves who we are all who are when we debate history and history's lessons and we disagree on what they are barack obama's election i think was very much rooted in a sense that he was the person to solve a kind of spiritual crisis that affected the country his very campaign was geared toward this crisis remember those posters carrying that single word of hope and that change we can believe in poster slogan i have always thought that the word believe was at least as important as the word change in that obama slogan and it is no wonder that his campaign so often felt like a religious crusade and so it's no accident that the tea party also responded to this sense of spiritual crisis by reaching back to our founders in the constitution and my book it should be said is in some ways inspired by the tea party even as it is quite critical of their view of who we are and quite critical of their take on the american story i think the tea party at the beginning of the book in fact because they were right to go back to the origins of our country and those of us who are progressive as i think of myself i think need to have an argument with them we progressives i think i've been too willing to leave the argument about america history to the right we have been to to unwilling to embrace the american story which i believe is at heart a progressive story should our conservative friends be the only people who carry copies of the constitution around in their pockets why do we leave quoting the federalist to conservatives why do we leave the declaration to them of the most forward looking politicians and moral spokesmen in our history did not do that martin luther king's i have a dream speech drew it inspiration from the promises of american history and in the particular promises of our declaration of independence dr king spoke of a promissory note that had been handed to african americans that it come back stamped unpaid insufficient funds it was a very powerful way to make his case and he was making his case from our history abraham lincoln's most important political speech before he was president was his speech at cooper union in new york city where he insisted that the founders of our nation ultimately foresaw as he did the eventual extinction of slavery in the united states lincoln did months of historical research to give a speech that the historian harold holzer believes made him president what do i mean by a divided political part of the core argument of my book is that from the very beginning americans have been torn by a deep but healthy tension between our love of individual as  affection for community too often and especially in recent years i think we have told our story almost entirely on the individual istic side we have emphasized individual liberty to the exclusion of our dedication to community and also to equality of value we argue about in every generation we have not focused enough on how the liberty we prize depends upon the willingness to come to the defense of each other's liberty how liberty depends upon strong community energetic government and a concern for the common good consider the very first word of the constitution of the united states it's not the word i it's not the word individual not the word liberty it's the word we in the preamble to our constitution it goes we the people of the united states in order to form a more perfect union establish justice insure domestic domestic tranquility provide for the common defense promote the general welfare yes welfare is in the first paragraph of the gods and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity again ourselves and our posterity do we do ordain and establish this constitution and the declaration of independence is a perfect reflection of the balance between individual isn't in community it begins by describing those unalienable rights that come from our creator a life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but in the last paragraph of the declaration of independence of the founders pledge their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor they understood that we cannot protect individual liberty unless we act together and we've had a parallel argument related to the role of government in our history i had a lot of fun in this book going back through the legacies of alexander hamilton and henry clay and abraham lincoln and also the populist and progressive legacies of for those of you who might listen to david works and me on the radio n p r i told david the one of the joys of writing this book was finally to figure out why he was utterly crosswise to current american politics he is the last surviving american whig through and through fire and back both of us have a certain affection for the whigs and a friend suggested we could organize the most boring of then in american history which would be called  stock if you believe that the federal government played a little role in the development of our country you have to write among others clay hamilton and lincoln a lot of other people out of the story entirely if you believe that the constitution is absolutely clear and can be read only one way then you have to deal with the fact that within three years of the enactment of that document alexander hamilton and james madison its two leading interpreters in the federalist were at each other's throats over whether the federal government had under the constitution the right to establish a bank of the united states my chapter on the constitution is called one nation conceived in argument and i could not resist quoting my friend a legal scholar garrett apts who said that justice scalia and other original as to their jurisprudence in what they call originalism seem to be saying i knew the founders the founders were friends of mine i know how they think but actually the constitution was created out of a series of compromises including some we would very much disapprove of today as on slavery it defends competing values as former justice david souter is said and i think we do ourselves a disservice to think that the founders were unique or sainted and received the constitution says tablets from the heavens yes they were gifted men and we have a lot of reasons to be grateful to them but they were also adventurous embarking on a radical experiment for their time rooted in the idea that a people could themselves govern sow's to think of the constitution as a shadow set of shackles designed to keep our country in exactly the same condition it was in seventeen eighty seven and to prevent us from addressing new problems in new ways does a disservice to the bold and it venturous nature of our found distinguish it from the british system which he said was rooted in laissez faire economics the american system as conceived by clay was an alternative to pure laissez faire because he believed the government had a major role to play in building our country the club for growth would not be pleased with class clay favored a strong federal role in launching internal improvements which sounds so much a nicer than the word infrastructure if my book accomplishes nothing else i'd love to replace the word infrastructure with internal improvements it is the same way to or as it's the same thing work for into the bridges and canals and roads roads that fostered commerce and bound our nation together as hamilton did an important role for the federal government in building us up as a manufacturing nation he was more than a century ahead of richard nixon in proposing what we came to call federal revenue sharing for the states and why we should not goon history too much into today's political arguments i suspect clay might have had some sympathy for president obama's stimulus proposals particularly aid to the states and the investment in infrastructure new technologies and spending  educate ation in frustration once when clay's opponents were saying his program was unconstitutional particularly his efforts to help american manufacturing he said do we live in the only country in the world with a constitution that is written for other countries but not for ourselves i am so like many progressives later on including f d r clay and others expressed frustration with those who did not see the constitution as a liberating document and i argue that our friends in the tea party are looking back to an exceptional period in our history and turning it into the typical period it is the one period when a kind of radical individualism as  opposed to balanced american individual ism predominated and that was the period of the gilded age the thirty five years that run roughly from the civil war to the ascension of teddy roosevelt to the white house and this radical bass when he said that i want my daughter to grow up to marry a nice corporation i and it's it's also in that period or in the aftermath of that period i think the court wants to move back in that direction now and this gives me a different view of the populace and progressives than some might have and i write a lot about both of them but they  are often seen now as the creators of some brand new big government approach i whereas i see them as restoring the american tradition a balance between government and the market that dominated  our country for two hundred of our two hundred and thirty five years herbert croly the great progressive thinker who influenced teddy roosevelt argued the progressive sought to use hamiltonian means to serve jeffersonian ends they wanted to that to use an active federal government to ensure greater equality of opportunity a healthier economy and an economy not dominated by the trusts or by a very small number of people those who are looking for encouragement in our current debates can go back to some of the things that most teddy roosevelt and woodrow wilson said about trusts and concentrated economic power some of their quotations make it sound like roosevelt and wilson hung around at occupy wall street encampments it's quite astonishing how strong their rhetoric was if we have always sought a balance between individual ism and community we have also seen a balance between in this state in the market and we have used government to check concentrated private power even as we have used constitutional means to check untrammeled government power again it's the idea of balance and a sense of power balancing off power i said at the outset that my book is to decline us and it is i think that what we are groping toward right now as a politics that again reflects this balance i think that what we are seeing among our conservative friends at the moment is an attempt to overturn the long consensus under which we have governed ourselves since teddy roosevelt's day  capitalist economy and so i think that if we were store this balance restoring this balance is the best recipe for ending our feelings of decline i said also at the outset that we progress as should embrace our history i think of how much progressive changes happened we first extended the franchise from property owners to all white men we eventually expanded franchise to african americans after the civil war took it away and then after years of struggle african americans won it back we extended franchise to women we created much broader economic opportunity if the whigs in the hamilton helped us in understanding the importance of a strong federal government the jeffersonian of the jacksonian reminded us of the importance of equality and democracy and so i think today we have an obligation to our republic to the generations came before us and to those who will come after to keep this republic and preserve our traditional balance now i think when you get to be my age the temptation is to kind of cranky views about the new generation and since i don't want to admit i'm my age i actually have an extraordinarily positive view of the generation coming up i believe that is new generation is unusually well suited to keep this american promise balance it is at once one of the most individual istic am one of the most communitarian generations in our history and it is a generation that is more tolerant than any of the other generations it is a generation more comfortable with technology than those of us who came to or at age sixty and yet they use the new technology and quickly form social networks they are custom to the entrepreneurial society in which we live and yet this generation has devoted more time to service than any other that has come along for a long time and it is not just as the cynics say that they had to do it to get out of high school or because they wanted to get into college the fact is that service transforms individuals and turns them into transformative generations this is what happened to our greatest generation and this i believe is what will happen with them i want to cause by making two points one is to go back to work declaration and then the other is to close by by having a reverie on john winthrop and bruce springsteen and you know i will explain to you what they have in common because partly because i was writing this book and partly because of the tea party i actually went back one july fourth weekend  carefully and slowly read the declaration in its entirety and many of you remember who read the declaration or heard it was cited every year on n p r actually that there is a long list of abuses and usurpations says jefferson called them explaining why we were revolting against the king a few interesting facts on this taxes did not come up until the seventeenth item of that of that list and the item was neither a complaint about tax rates nor an objection to the idea of taxation our founders were mad simply because the crown had imposed taxes on us without our consent their point was about consent and not taxes at the very first i'd on their list condemn the king because he refused to assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good note that the signers wanted to pass laws not repeal them and they began by speaking of the public good not individuals the second grievance reinforced the first accusing the king of having forbidding his governors to pass laws of immediate impressing importance again our forbearers wanted to enact laws they were not anti government zealots abuses nine three three nine also recorded in some way to how laws were passed and how justice was administered and the document really didn't get to anything like big government oppression until item number ten and i want to tell my anti government friends that if you want it to having to government rhetoric it ought to sound like this jefferson wrote he has a wreck did a multitude of new offices and sent him there swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out our us eat out their substance they knew how to do rhetoric in those  thirty john winter gave a speech in titled a model of christian charity and here is what he said he said we must delight in each other make others conditions our own rejoice together more and together labor and suffer together always having but for our eyes our community as members of the same body now is there any doubt that rush limbaugh would have called this great puritan a socialist and then there is bruce springsteen i don't know how many of you have heard the new springsteen album but the very first song on that album i think is a rather condensed and economical version of the john winthrop sermon in that song is where ever this flag is flown we take care of our own and so from sixteen thirty to twenty twelve with bruce springsteen we have this concern for the community and the common good now if you suspect that i am wrapping myself in springsteen in an effort for a modest writer to get some of the sales from bruce springsteen you would be absolutely right in your but i think it's very important that that winthrop and springsteen were saying this i think they were speaking of some of the that with the very best things about us the theme that makes us americans i want us to celebrate the american community again with with springsteen and winthrop and i believe our country will be better off for doing so thank you very much i'm tim hardy anderson senior minister westminster presbyterian church and moderator of the forum our speaker tonight is a washington post columnist and author of the new book our divided political heart e j dionne while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i'd like to thank the hennepin county library for their co sponsorship of tonight's forum made possible with funding from the minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and now mr dionne if you would return to the pulpit i will present the questions from our audience first one has to do with the nature of democracy it's been said that democracy is not just an external form of government but an interior attitude or way of being would you comment on this i think whoever wrote that question is a very close to john dewey i wish i could see you identify yourself because that's a very john dewey view of democracy talk about democracy as a way of life i very much feel that way myself i agree with this with the thrust of the question entirely i don't think it up democracy is a form of government elections are central to it and the ability of free speech is central to it incidentally one of the great quite a lot in the book about the citizens united decision and i asked the basic question how can you have free speech if one side owns the microphone  but i but i think that democracy is about course i don't mind it when the westminster church owns the microphone the but i think democracy is very much about our attitude towards each other it's about a kind of egalitarianism in the way we treat each other it's a kind of basic respect it's one of the reason why i've never liked it when a sort of liberals condescend to people who disagree with them or coastal people and i grew up in massachusetts coastal people used terms like fly over country  goodness sake those states and fly over country were among the most progressive states in our union the fountain head of populism and so i think we should when we are when we think of ourselves as small the democrats we should behave in small the democrats in our beliefs and with each other several questions about the supreme court what impact does the current distrust of the supreme court's objectivity have on our justice system in the long term consequences if they overturn the health care law and will the citizens united decision destroy our democracy the supreme court's objectivity it sounded for a second like an in the book i talk about bush v gore in citizens united is kind of bookends of i believe he moved away from democracy put aside what people felt for partisan or other reasons about which he gore i still don't understand why recounting ballots somehow violates the constitution the united states but what's really what the i mean there are some of us who just won't get over it i know  what really is troublesome about that decision is there was really a democratic language in there that you know and that they they justices in the majority say in one sense rightly that it is still the case in the constitution the individual voter does not have the right to vote for president that's what the language says and what it ignores is about one hundred fifty years of democratic development it is true that at the beginning of the republic the electors were elected by state legislatures and it was only over time that the people in the states voted for their electors but this was part of a great democratic advance and included ultimately the the election of senators by popular vote instead of by the legislature and so much  thinking behind bush v gore seems like a pushback against democracy and so it is with citizens united it is very distressing that the original case brought to the court didn't even raise the issues that citizens united ended up deciding in fact as justice stevens put it in his dissent the majority had to change the case in order to change the law they were overturning at least thirty years of precedent they work effectively overturning practice t is absurd because corporations have no feelings no commitments no conscience is they are not persons they don't even vote in an election and i think that the imbalance of money in our system is very very dangerous and again it has a gilded age i feel to it i don't think a small number of billionaires should have that much more power than the average citizen in a country that believes in one man one  maybe i should correct myself one person one vote partner were glad you did that i was going to do it for you and your sharp i don't want to try to say have you know let's talk health care several people have asked about the consequences of the supreme court overturns the health care law your comment partly it depends on how they overturn it i mean i very much hope they don't overturn it i think that we have been struggling for a very long time to extend health coverage to all americans i think it's immoral that we don't have health cover audience and it's very peculiar because we're the only rich country in the world that doesn't do this and there are many different ways to get to universal coverage and while the not perfect there is no legislation that's perfect but it is based on a whole series of compromises so was the original social security act and so if we take this if we were worse this forward step i think it would be a terrible thing for the  country the i think the court could do a number of things they can strike down the whole act or they could just write down the individual mandate if they just struck down the mandate and tried to left the rest of the law there the law doesn't really work fully without parts of the law do but the the law as a whole doesn't work without the mandate i think at least that would force congress to act i worry if they toss the whole thing together the energy and the support to pass another  at something approaching universal coverage is just not going to happen anytime soon and i know there's a big pundit argument over whether or not president obama would be hurt or helped by this there's a line of argument that says well he could go after the court  all the problems in the health care system then fall onto the republicans or he saved from an unpopular lot these judging by some of the polls i just think it would be a real defeat for him because it is the singular  domestic achievement of his first term and i think it would be as severe a severe setback and it people might ask i don't have any idea what the court is going to do this piece of me that thinks that there will simply be a five four conservative ruling i took some heart in at the end of the argument that justice kennedy seemed to have some real doubts about whether this was appropriate for the court do  but i sure hope that those who have been doing it stop talking about liberal judicial activism and begin to think about conservative judicial  christians to fully embrace and ransomed she's an atheist so it's i assume that's the inherent in the question i do find that disturbing and in the book i talk about how strange it is that  of our christian brothers and sisters i'm a christian seem to embrace radical individualism which seems so antithetical to the christian spirit it's actually antithetical to the great american evangelical tradition even were central in the fight against slavery william jennings bryan many people know him because of the scopes trial but in fact he was an extraordinarily progressive american politician an early advocate of women suffered an early advocate of the income tax and read world regulation of all kinds of progressive reforms and i think that and i think that some of what's happened is that a sort of very much an individual istic emphasis within within certain styles of christianity i've often wondered for example whether you learned something from whether someone says jesus changed my life or jesus changed the world and i think in the forest you see a very much of an interior emphasis on  bishops overstepping in their opposition to the affordable care act provision of contraception coverage first of all i feel very uncomfortable answering a question about my church in a presbyterian church supported the church's view when that when president obama gave absolutely no no what commendation to religious groups and notably the catholic church on the contraception mandate i was very critical of him because i thought pluralistic society that honors religious freedom and turns to religious organizations for a lots of forms of service we should have reasonable accommodations to their views  secondly i still don't like the way the underlying regulation is written because it suggests that the only it is suggested by definition that the only religious institutions or churches or places where you preach to your own when in fact homeless shelters hospitals and all sorts of social services are very much people who are in them do it out of a religious conviction and so i so it to that extent i have sympathize a reasonable step toward trying to balance the fact that the vast majority of americans think it is reasonable and proper to have contraception in their health plans the fact that many of the people who work at the religious institutions don't necessarily share their religious presbyterian pulpit to say what role do you think religion should have in american politics today boy that's a that's a big that's a big question first of all a bit let me talk a little bit about the book on that  score because we act as if religion's influence on politics is something entirely new that it was invented by jerry falwell in one nine hundred seventy nine when in fact religion has played a vital role pretty much since religious lines i think we go in phases on this i do believe that our up a person of faith cannot help but have their faith influence their view of politics i always confound people by saying i became a liberal because i am a  catholic because of the church's social teaching because of what it taught us about what you said about the poor and reflecting more broadly in the contemporary christian tradition on what weinhold niebuhr wrote and what martin luther king preached  and so i cannot deny anyone else the right to base their political convictions on or to have their have their faith influence their religious convictions i once said that ralph reed in the debate that i am aware of the christian coalition  would defend this right that he has but he first but he would have to explain to me where jesus endorsed and cut in the capital gains tax which i could not find in my scripture but i also think i think a we should we should rule out religious prejudice as a reason for voting i'm against you know i think we've been through that often enough and i also think that we go through phases that prohibition split between wets who wanted to end prohibition and rise wanted to keep it and then a funny thing happened on the way to nine hundred thirty two it was called the great crash and suddenly the country is in an economic mess and around that to approaching the thirty two election a democrat missouri wrote to jim forli that he couldn't understand why i went what democrats were arguing with dry democrats over liquor when neither could afford the price of a drink and so i think there are times for cultural politics and there are times for other kinds of politics i think we're moving to some degree to a different phase but we your having a lot of arguments that touch upon moral convictions that are often rooted in religion and i think it is normal that people's religious convictions would affect that and you're seeing it in the christian church with different parts of the christian church winding up on quite different sides on many issues including gay marriage in an earlier book you suggested that the extremes in america have captured the debate you said that people ought to come to the center to get things accomplished you still feel that way when if the center didn't keep moving right i wouldn't be when i say that quite seriously that and that i am kind of temperamentally moderate in case you couldn't tell and and i do believe that as i say in the book that i believe in this balance between public and private i do not want state ownership of everything in our society or even most things in our society i believe in me a state that helps take care of people and regulates the market but i also believe the market has benefits i think that's a fundamentally moderate  view and i think that by worrying about this a lot in the book that and i didn't really talk about much in my talk that my biggest problem with conservatism is not conservatism itself which i have a lot of respect for but the movement of conservati a position far to the right of where conservatives used to be when you think overall richard lugar losing the primary in indiana for not being conservative enough his lifetime conservative rating was seventy seven percent if my math is right that's more than three quarters of the way to the right and yet he becomes a liberal it's a whole attitude toward government and government spending where are a lot of conservatives used to accept that sometimes you do have to raise you'll ever read that quotes the late senator jacob javits a liberal republican a great lank i admire the progressive republican tradition that you have seen in this state in so many ways so i still have great sympathy for moderation but i think this moment requires a certain kind of opposition to a short drift to the right so we can get back to a point where we can talk about moderation who's going to win the two thousand and twelve presidential election and why i suppose you shouldn't talk about betting in a church but if i were to bet now i would be still bet on president obama but i wouldn't give the odds i would have given a couple months ago the i  think that he has certain structural advantages in the electoral college i've been struck that even in the midst of eight point two percent unemployment he's been able to hang on to quite an extraordinary large base of support i think what one thing that pres obama has in common with president reagan indeed is a very strong political base it's there but the events in the economy over the last couple of months complicate that i think governor romney has recovered more quickly from that we'll call it extremely interesting republican primary then people anticipated so i think it's going to be a very close campaign the other thing is president obama won with fifty three percent in a year they could not have had circumstances more favorable to democrats outspending john mccain by a very substantial amount of money so you know and so i think that points to an election that's very close in which most voters are committed with a very allowing them to stay in the u s is that a good political move i think it first it's a good it's a good move on the grounds of justice and it's good for the country the  who you know and i think a lot of even americans who are more restrictionist in their views of immigration i think look at the children children who were brought to the united states by their parents it's not as if they made an affirmative always like the story that franklin roosevelt spoke to the daughters of the american revolution and began his speech fellow immigrants and it says something about us and i think it well i it is much more likely to help in than hurt him politically because it's not a radical move but it is finally doing something on the question of immigration where action has been blocked for three or four years we have time for one final question this one from a student in the audience what advice do you have for the upcoming generation on how to live out the balance of individual ism and community not just now but for decades to come admire your generation is because you are more practical than the sixty's generation and you are more idealistic in the eighty's a generation of these are all the cliches but since i've kind of pandering to your generation i thought you wouldn't mind but i and i think that what you're seeing in your generation is a struggle how do i lead a rewarding personal life your professional life without completely losing my personal and family life and without completely losing track of my obligations to the community so many of you have as i said earlier done so many forms of service engaged with people very different from you in communities very different from your own and i don't ever want you to lose that spirit we often associate that kind of openness with youth but i always like john robert i suppose i'll close with this that we should always think of it the way robert kennedy did when he said now is a time for youth not a time of life but a state of mind a quality of the imagination a preference for adventure over the love of these and i think you should stay young in that way the thank you all very very much