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CREWMAN: I don't know if you know this,
but there's some water if you need it at any point, okay?
So both cameras are rolling. We'll just slate it here.
- Is that a good spot, Robert? - ROBERT: Yep.
Here we go.
- All right. - CREWMAN: Okay, we're rolling.
SMICK: Okay, we're at a moment of crisis in this country.
But even before the coronavirus appeared,
America was suffering from another epidemic--
an ongoing epidemic of hate.
Will the bitterness, acrimony, and division
prevent us from ever coming together to solve our problems?
Why is there this rise in hate?
[ dramatic music ]
♪
NIALL: Something's gone very wrong
in the fabric of American society,
which leaves people vulnerable
to the appeal of the political hate industry.
[ dramatic music ]
We are living in James Madison's nightmare.
♪
We live in a zero-sum world.
We are absolutely convinced
that for one side to get ahead,
the other side has got to lose.
We know what happens with empires
when they lose sight of the values
that made them great.
SMICK: Historians suggest empires last, on average,
only about 250 years.
How old is America?
250 years old.
HOST: The statement, which was how horrible it is,
- is talking about-- - WHOOPI: No, no, that's what you--
I'm sorry, that's what you said.
- But you know what's horrible- - WHOOPI: You said
- that it was--it's okay. - When people who shouldn't be here
end up murdering the children of American citizens.
- You know what's horrible? - NIALL: Five days a week,
I am confident that the U.S. Constitution
will withstand whatever is thrown at it.
ROSEANNE: [ screaming ] God damn it!
I thought the bitch was white!
Two days a week, I wonder if it must have been like this
in the later stages of the Roman Republic.
- Is Hamas-- - Sir, you invited me on here--
Do something about your dad's immigration practices,
you feckless [ bleep ].
Is that a patriot or a wannabe dictator's butt boy?
If you're a baby mama, you just might be a redneck.
When John Boehner played golf with President Obama--
It'd be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu.
They're the enemy.
- HOST: Who's the enemy? - Obama and Biden!
HANK JR: Are you kidding? The three stooges!
AMY: I think you'd have to be
crazy or a hermit
not to be worried about the country at this point.
- [ bleep ]! - LEON: We're living at a time
when the institutions created by our forefathers
are being tested.
If a tree falls in the woods,
how do we get Kellyanne under that tree?
America's like a dysfunctional couple
on the way to divorce court.
Say something funny and I'll laugh.
Okay, how's this? Knock, knock.
- Who's there?
- I'm miserable every waking second.
[ forced laughter ]
- Hilarious!
- Nobody's making progress,
because everybody's on opposite ends of the spectrum.
I will not yield to the gentleman,
and the gentleman will observe regular order!
This is a political food fight.
Food fight!
I don't want to name any names,
but leadership of both of our major political parties
contains a lot of old people,
and before people reach the stage of dementia,
they often turn nasty.
We've always had partisanship.
We've never had this level of dysfunction
because of partisanship.
FRANCIS: We do face this real danger
of a center falling apart in the country
being guided by the extremists on both sides.
SMICK: We are right at the edge
where we have so many things going for us as a country.
The one thing that could take us down is politics.
Politics isn't broken. It's fixed.
When we look under the hood of the political system,
what we find is so corrupt and so rigged,
that the American political system
is flirting with a crack-up.
SMICK: A lot of people are making big money sowing division.
ARTHUR: Powerful people are getting rich and famous
and building their careers by making us hate each other.
SMICK: If you look at the flash points in America,
whether it's terrorism
or dealing with rogue states like North Korea, Iran,
whether it's dealing with Russia and China, cyber...
NIALL: Plus climate change, alarmingly high debt,
the worst drugs crisis in American history.
LEON: All of those ingredients are churning out there,
and the country is divided.
[ gunshots ]
NEWSCASTER: Six people injured,
including Congressman Steve Scalise, now in critical condition.
When you look at the threats to America, they're terrifying.
What if we faced a challenge even worse than COVID-19?
Our enemies now know how to penetrate our defenses.
Biological warfare, not missiles and tanks,
can kill our people and ruin our economy.
Cyberwarfare can destroy our democracy.
Can we come together and protect ourselves...
or are we divided forever?
[ "If You Are But a Dream" begins ]
TECHNICAL ENGINEER: Sinatra recording, take three.
SINATRA: ♪ If you are but a dream ♪
♪ I hope I never awaken ♪
♪
♪ It's more than I could bear ♪
♪ To find that I'm forsaken ♪
♪
♪ If our romance ♪
♪ Should break up ♪
♪ I hope I never wake up ♪
♪
♪ If you ♪
♪ Are but ♪
♪ A dream ♪
♪
[ kids shouting ]
Hold on, hold on. Who started this battle?
Somebody in for a lickin'?
You bet! We're gonna smear him!
- [ overlapping shouting ] - Hold on!
- What's it all about? - BOY: None of your business!
- Scared to tell me? - No, I'm not a-scared.
- I'll fight you, even! - [ chuckles ]
- Not if I can help it. - We don't like his religion.
- His religion? - BOY: Look, mister.
- He's a dirty-- - Now, hold on!
Do you know what this wonderful country is made of?
It's made up of a hundred different kind of people
and a hundred different ways of talking
and a hundred different ways of goin' to church.
But they're all American ways.
Close your eyes and let me tell you about it.
[ lightly edgy music ]
♪
DAVID: I was in Munich, in Germany,
talking about international security...
And I looked around, and I thought,
you know, bad things can happen to good countries.
A terrible thing happened in Germany,
a Germany that was becoming modern
and that was increasingly dominant in the world
in the 1920s.
It encountered a populous movement...
That tapped a deep anger, resentment
in the German population.
[ dramatic music ]
It's very easy for our passions,
our resentments to become inflamed by politicians.
And when that happens,
even the best countries aren't immune.
SMICK: Those of us who are of a certain age,
we worry about our children and grandchildren
and what kind of world we're going to leave them.
I'm frankly worried about the slime pit of partisanship
that's keeping Washington from getting anything done.
And most of all,
I'm worried about our country gorging on hate.
[ lightly edgy music ]
They brought the world economy and financial system
back from the brink,
but they haven't dealt with the fundamental problem
that got us into this difficulty in the first place.
NEWSCASTER: That's very interesting.
You could move the market
- with a statement like that. - SMICK: Well...
[ lightly edgy music ]
♪
NEWSCASTER: David Smick was in the room in the 1980s
when tax reform was being hammered out.
♪
I think America's going through an identity crisis.
We don't understand our heritage,
we're terribly worried about where the country's going
in the next 10 to 20 years.
Are we even allowed to think of ourselves as Americans anymore?
America is a story that was supposed to end well.
Is this is it for the Constitution?
Is capitalism finished?
Or has America only just begun?
There are a lot of people who believe that America's over,
that the only thing left is the fight over a dying carcass.
But I've always believed in the power of ideas
and creative solutions.
So I'm on a journey in search of answers.
I began by talking to people with unique experiences,
and a lot of them appear in this film.
My biggest question is,
why are we wasting so much of our nation's energy on hate
when we could be spending that energy
doing some amazing things?
I'm probably pretty sensitive to the notion of change.
When I was 14, our house burned down.
We lost everything. I was just absolutely stunned.
I had one valuable possession--
shoebox full of baseball cards,
but that was gone, too.
I saw my parents in crisis.
Here we were living in a Holiday Inn.
From that point on, I have stamped on my brain
that change is the one constant.
Assume nothing.
Stability is not a certainty.
Look at how quickly the coronavirus
has turned our lives upside down.
And there are other threats out there just as horrifying.
It's got me frightened for the United States,
for our country, because I'm worried--
all that anger and division,
Washington out of control, a hate show--
we think we're going to get a free pass.
I wouldn't bet on it.
America succeeds when we build each other up,
not when we tear each other down,
particularly when we come together
to address the threats to our future.
United we stand, divided we fall.
America succeeds when it has a purpose.
So buckle up-- we're on a roller-coaster ride of uncertainty.
It doesn't have to end in disaster,
but we're going to have to step in and end the clown show.
- [ gavel pounding ] - [ overlapping voices ]
PRESIDENT PRO TEMP: The Senate will come to order, please.
There's been a pattern of disruption.
- SENATOR: Mr. Chairman, it's outrageous! - [ overlapping shouting ]
Shouting at members of Congress so loud,
at times police are called in.
[ crowd chanting indistinctly ]
MAXINE WATERS: I reserve the balance of my time--
- MAN: The gentlelady yield. - And, no, I do not yield
not one second to you!
MAN: Mr. Chairman, this is an intolerable harassment of the witness.
BONNIE COLEMAN: What is wrong with that? You need your medication!
I've got a valium pill that you might want to take
before the second round.
- Are you stupid? - They've decided that we're just stupid.
You're willing to bring this country to its knees!
Not the American way--
these damned bills that come out of here all the damned time!
When you listen to politics today,
people talk to each other with contempt,
as if the other side were actually worthless.
We can discuss these issues without being uncivilized.
It's the same thing I tell my six-year-old.
ARTHUR: Every time the Republicans say,
"The Democrats cannot be trusted,"
the trust for Congress goes down.
When the Democrats say,
"The Republicans are just all a bunch of crooks,"
that weakens the trust
that Americans have in the institution writ large.
[ camera shutters clicking ]
LEON: In my over 50 years of public life,
Washington today is probably the meanest
and most partisan I've ever seen it.
[ light classical music ]
[ woman singing operatically ]
[ camera shutters clicking ]
♪
[ plane engine rumbling ]
Good job tonight. Good job tonight.
♪
LEON: For me, when I was in Congress,
governing was good politics.
I don't think they think
that governing is good politics anymore.
They think stopping the other side,
beating the other side up-- that's good politics.
Hell, I went back to Congress,
and I talked to a group of new members,
and I described to them how the legislative process
worked when I was there.
Introduce a bill, goes to the committee,
goes to the subcommittee.
You have hearings, you have markup.
Goes to the floor.
Everybody felt like they were part of a process.
And that's missing now.
Nobody wants to go out into no-man's-land
and try to cut a deal
because they'll get shot in the back.
I, James A. Baker do solemnly swear...
JAMES: Back in my day, we all went to Washington
with the idea that we wanted to do the nation's business--
Democrats and Republicans.
[ dramatic musical sting ]
[ dynamic music ]
♪
[ overlapping shouting ]
♪
REPORTER: Mr. Secretary.
- REPORTER: Mr. Baker-- - Mr. Secretary.
JAMES: We got some responsible Democrats
and responsible Republicans together.
They both were willing to give a little here,
take a little there.
And sadly, I think today,
we elect representatives to the Congress,
and they go up there
and they don't get the country's business done.
Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar.
All for the Gators-- stand up and holler!
It was an obscene period in our nation's history.
Not our nation's, but at World War II.
I mean, we-we all... lived in this century.
I didn't live in this century, but in this century's history.
Because we did not have-- matter of fact, we fought--
Hitlerism.
[ light music ]
Look, unfortunately,
the most qualified people in America
don't run for public office.
When you look at the ideas that both parties want to do,
maybe we're better off with gridlock.
The only thing worse than the clown show
would be if the clowns
actually get some of their ideas implemented.
Imagine, Mr. Speaker, a world without balloons,
the injustice of there being no helium
to get that high-pitched voice
that we all hold near and dear to our hearts.
JAMES: The Congressmen particularly,
their week is from Tuesday afternoon
till Thursday afternoon,
then they go home to raise money for the next election.
They don't bring their families to Washington with them.
Many of the things that we were successful in accomplishing
when I was there, and throughout our history,
were accomplished because we had people
on both sides of the aisle who were somewhat friendly.
Even though they shared different policy goals,
they socialized together from time to time.
We don't have that anymore.
- MAN: Leon. - LEON: Part of the problem
is we forget history.
There are some common bonds that bring us together.
I mean, de Tocqueville understood that.
When de Tocqueville came here,
he wrote that there's an ingredient in the American people
that he did not see in Europe.
People cared for one another.
There was a sense of community, a sense of compassion.
There is a spirit of the American people.
I think it's a good impulse
that we not whitewash our history.
But I think a lot of young students don't know
what is it that makes America distinctive?
[ drumming ]
[ "Seventy Six Trombones" begins ]
♪
You know, I was Secretary of State
of the United States of America for 40 years.
I traveled to over 90 countries,
and I saw firsthand the way people feel
about the United States of America.
We have been historically a force for good.
We've won three hot wars and one cold one,
and we've never asked for anything
more than enough ground to bury our dead.
♪
ALAN: We are the good guys.
You begin to wonder, maybe there's something
indigenous to the psyche of the American people
that always gets us to the top.
KEN: Look at us!
We weren't around 300 years ago.
You go to Italy, there's nothing younger than 500 years.
Go to France.
Go to Ger-- go wherever you want.
They had multiple centuries' jump on us.
Look at what we did. And we're all a bunch of mutts!
[ "Seventy Six Trombones" continues ]
♪
LEON: My father and mother were Italian immigrants to this country.
I used to ask my dad, why the hell did you come all that distance?
No money, no skills, no language ability.
And my dad said, "You know, the reason was
"because your mother and I believed
we could give our children a better life in this country."
AMY: I grew up in the Midwest with my three younger sisters,
and my parents were immigrants from Asia.
They were actually Chinese minorities from the Philippines,
so they're sort of like triple outsiders.
SMICK: My grandmother, when she was 19 living in Norway,
faced the prospect of an arranged marriage
with a much older man that she couldn't stand.
And she and her sister got on a boat,
came to the United States, didn't speak English,
both worked as maids.
This was the American dream,
to have her daughter and her grandchildren prosper.
CHRISSY: My father was a survivor of the Holocaust.
He was what's called a "hidden child,"
so he was placed with a Christian family during the war.
And he came here as a very, very small child,
at the grace of our great country.
AMY: A lot of people are desperate to come to this country,
and there's a reason for it.
And it doesn't mean that this country is perfect.
FRANCIS: My grandfather came from Japan,
and they were put in relocation camps during the war.
He lost his business, you know,
that he had spent a lifetime building.
And so, you know, they've suffered
from that kind of racism.
AMY: The founding fathers did own slaves.
And a lot of the principles in our Constitution
were not extended to most of the people in the country.
But the United States, at its best,
is a country where someone could be Croatian American
or Italian American,
Irish American, or Korean American
and intensely patriotic at the same time.
[ helicopter blades thrumming ]
- HAWK: I... - CROWD: I...
- I believe... - I believe...
I believe that we will win!
CROWD: I believe that we will win!
HAWK: It's like an abusive relationship
that black people have with America.
It's like the country beats the crap out of us,
but we love our country.
I'm Hawk Newsome.
I'm the president of Black Lives Matter in New York.
Real Americans, everyday hardworking Americans,
regardless of socioeconomic status,
are people with love in their hearts.
And I believe in that America.
I believe in that idealistic America.
GOLDSTEIN: The United States of America
was a gift from God to the world
that became a haven
for all mankind to come to,
especially for the Jewish people,
right after the Holocaust.
It gave us a chance to rebuild ourselves.
ROGER: A number of years ago, I took our youngest son
with me to New York for a couple of days.
And among other things,
we climbed the Statue of Liberty.
And we found ourselves next to a British fellow
and discovered that he was an entrepreneur.
And I said, "Well, what are you doing here?"
And he said,
"There is no place
"that I am aware of on the Earth
"where you can come with a new idea
"and get it funded and embraced
as you can in the United States."
SMICK: That's the genius of the American spirit.
People sense that they can start with nothing,
and they can end up at or near the top.
They're dreamers. They mortgage their homes,
they max out their credit cards.
They want that idea to succeed so badly, their teeth hurt.
LARRY: You know, there was no closer student of America
than Winston Churchill.
And he famously said that the United States always,
always gets it right,
but only after exhausting the alternatives.
We've got our problems,
but I'd rather play the hand of the United States
than play the hand of any other major economy in this world.
[ bombastic music ]
♪
ALICE: I love the myth of American exceptionalism,
the can-do spirit,
the impossible takes a little longer
"we can fix it" kind of attitude.
We have believed it over a long time,
and I think it's a very useful belief--
to believe that you're unique and you're special.
[ stirring music ]
♪
ALICE: I am very grateful that the president
has expressed confidence in me and my abilities.
But you have to reckon with the fact
that we are not even talking about
the major issues that this economy has to grapple with,
because politics has become so partisan.
[ car horn honks ]
Too much debt is a problem.
And inequality is a huge problem,
especially the decline of opportunity
for people to move into the middle class.
HOGAN: The average person doesn't want to spend their lives
arguing with their neighbors and friends
about the vice of an angry politics.
They're worried about, you know, paying their bills
and worrying about their sick kid
or taking care of their elderly, you know, parent
or, you know, the issues that they're dealing with every day.
[ edgy music ]
♪
SMICK: I grew up a public-school kid
in a blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore
in which most of the neighborhood
faced tough financial times.
My next-door neighbor drove a cement truck.
My best friend's father was a plumber.
As a child, I was always terrified
that my parents weren't gonna make it financially.
They never talked about it openly,
but you felt that sense of, you know, we're up against the wall,
even though it was a very happy childhood.
I don't think people in Washington understand
that half the country
experiences this kind of nagging financial anxiety
on a daily basis.
And they were experiencing this anxiety
even before the economic meltdown
as a result of the coronavirus.
[ background chatter ]
[ distant siren wailing ]
GOLDSTEIN: My parents had ten children.
It was no easy task to bring up ten children.
My dad always came home with a smile,
always had something good to say.
You never heard a negative word out of his mouth.
SMICK: My father was a Presbyterian minister,
and I was the black sheep of the family.
I was the guy who asked all the bad questions.
But we were close.
And when my father died,
at his funeral, I was really struck,
because there was a common theme
that my dad had a gift for loving the unlovely.
The people that no one cared about--he was there.
Americans, whether Republicans, Democrats or Independents,
we need to learn how to love the unlovely.
In some cases, it might be an immigrant,
and for others, it might be someone living in the Rust Belt
who didn't benefit from the globalization lottery,
who lost everything when their factory and jobs moved overseas
and their families fell into opioid addiction.
America's divisions are no longer based just on party,
race, or ethnicity.
They're now based on class and even geography.
You have the elites, mostly on the coasts,
versus average folk, who are caregivers,
first responders-- the people who work with their hands.
The elites from both political parties
have a bad track record.
It started in Vietnam.
The heartland sent its sons to be butchered.
The sons of the elite took college deferments.
During 9/11, the first responders went up the stairs.
The young investment bankers came down.
And then less than a decade later,
the bankers nearly tanked the world economy,
yet no one went to jail.
Instead, they got a tax break called "carried interest."
[ dramatic music ]
Wonder why people are so resentful and angry today?
Our leaders have consistently failed
to look out for the little guy.
The velvet-rope economy has enabled a new aristocracy
in brains and money
to cut itself off from the rest of America,
and that's dangerous for our democracy.
[ dramatic musical sting ]
ALICE: We can't afford to be two countries
where one country
is cities and coast
and the other is the heartland.
I grew up in the Middle West, so I relate to this.
But is where small towns and small cities
are not doing well.
The greatest economic problem we face today
is something called "social mobility."
The American dream is vanishing for a lot of people.
30 years ago, a person born into
the bottom 25% of the country economically
could study hard and work hard,
and they had about a 25% chance of rising to the top 25%.
Today...
only a 5% chance.
Restoring upward mobility should be viewed
as a national emergency.
The traditional route to wealth and success
has been cut off for many Americans.
[ edgy music ]
ARTHUR: For my money, the most interesting question
is not income inequality.
It's opportunity inequality.
In point of fact, mobility's gotten harder in this country.
SMICK: When I first came to Washington in the 1970s,
everybody was worried about the high cost of capital--
in other words, it's going to make us globally uncompetitive.
But now capital is cheap.
And our next job is to worry about human capital.
I believe that capitalism has been the greater creator
of wealth and opportunity that the world has ever known.
The integration of our global economy
has made life better for billions of men,
women, and children.
Free market capitalism has taken billions of people out of poverty.
But the coronavirus changes everything.
We need to rethink global capitalism.
Do we really want our industrial supply chains
in ruthless and unstable parts of the world?
Can we psychologically withstand global financial meltdowns
that seem to come every decade or so?
The American economy's out of balance.
Finance and banking have become more important
than coming up with revolutionary ideas
and inventing and making things.
Our financial markets
are propelled by computer-driven investors.
Algorithms, not people, are driving the stock market
and sometimes driving it into the ground.
In addition, free market capitalism
has become a lot more top-down than bottom-up.
Large corporations overwhelm the small enterprises.
They lobby for special corporate welfare,
manipulate patent laws, they get special tax breaks,
they change the rules to stifle competitors--
anything to avoid a level playing field.
In the grand battle between David versus Goliath,
David doesn't have a chance.
Washington doesn't get much done.
But there's one area where both parties seem to come together--
when they're working on a bill
that benefits a large multinational corporation
in their own district or state.
Then both parties work together.
So consider this analogy about two cows.
- [ clank ] - [ moo ]
You have two cows.
Under communism, the state takes both
and gives you some milk.
Under socialism, you have two cows.
You give one to your neighbor,
but your neighbor lacks the incentive to milk the cow,
so total milk production drops.
Under fascism, you have two cows.
The state takes both,
shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.
Under corporate capitalism, or Wall Street capitalism,
which dominates today's economy,
you have two cows and engage in financial engineering.
This is a little like Adam Smith
meets the Twilight Zone.
You sell three cows to your publicly traded company
using letters of credit
opened by your brother-in-law at the bank,
then you execute a debt equity swap
with an associated general offer
so that you get all four cows back
with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows
are transferred to a Panamanian company
secretly owned by the majority shareholder
who sells the rights to all seven cows
back to your listed company.
Your annual report says the company owns eight cows
with an option on one more. Phew!
Under Main Street capitalism, you have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
Everyone benefits.
You sell your herd and retire on the income.
We need more Main Street capitalism--
capitalism for the little guy.
You know, Americans historically have been tinkerers,
inventors, and outside-the-box thinkers.
They engage in what some economists call
"mass flourishing" from the bottom up.
We take on challenges and risks
that a lot of other countries don't do.
That has been the secret to our success.
But this spirit of dynamism, of creativity,
is under assault.
It's very tough if you're a small business.
It's very tough if you're an entrepreneur.
The system seems to be rigged against you.
The American economy has gotten more rigid
over the past couple of decades,
and especially since the financial crisis.
And that's what really freaks Americans out,
and it's making us hate each other.
Hate comes from feelings of humiliation.
When people feel humiliated, particularly in the economy,
that humiliation turns to anger.
And then the anger becomes hate.
There is a very intimate relationship
between economics and identity.
If you have a job, it's not just a source of resources,
it's also a source of your identity or your dignity,
your self-esteem.
Where is the dignity in poverty,
in going home and looking at your family
and realizing that there's no food in the refrigerator,
your lights are about to get cut off,
and you're about a payment away from being evicted.
How can you hold your head up, you know?
And this isn't just black neighborhoods.
You look at poor white people.
They may own homes, but they have rising property taxes.
They can't make their mortgages.
Jobs are being outsourced,
factories that are used to employing them
are no longer there.
This is not what the American dream is supposed to be.
FRANCIS: So one of the big problems is simply
people that thought they were middle class or working class
that have lost status.
And if you lose that job,
it means that society has somehow devalued you.
It's that loss of value
that actually creates the greatest anger.
[ bell dinging ]
NEWSCASTER: The Dow tumbled more than 500 points
after two pillars of the Street tumbled over the weekend.
Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old firm,
filed for bankruptcy.
Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman,
which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.
I'm starting to find another job.
[ indistinct chanting ]
[ bluesy music ]
♪
Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!
ALICE: We allowed the crisis of 2008 to happen.
It should never have happened.
A lot of the animosity towards capitalism today,
a lot of the resentment,
is borne of what those kids saw in 2008.
ALICE: Young people and wage earners whose wages were not going up
were looking at this and saying, "These fat cats aren't like us.
They're making out like bandits."
And they were right.
The people who lived through the financial crash are still angry.
- I get kind of sick and tired-- - With all due respect,
I get sick and tired of the richest people in this country
- who are getting richer and richer and richer-- - MAN: Regular order!
After the financial crisis,
both parties had walked away from capitalism.
It's an irony, because capitalism is under attack,
but I don't even think we're doing capitalism anymore.
The most important price in the world
is long-term interest rates.
And post-financial crisis,
we went from what were emergency measures
to literally having central banks
setting the price of money.
So we're not engaging in capitalism here anymore.
There's no price signals to Congress,
and it's all about free money.
SMICK: Zombie corporations that are loaded with debt,
but they're walking around buying back their stock.
As we saw during the coronavirus market meltdown,
these companies are the financial systems' dangerous soft underbelly.
It's not free market capitalism,
it's free money capitalism.
What we're looking at here is America shutting down.
These stay-at-home orders
are effectively shutting down the economy.
Can the economy handle a month's long shutdown?
SMICK: In response to the global pandemic,
our economy was put into a medically induced coma.
For once, Washington did the right thing
and gave people and small businesses money
simply so they could survive.
Now, how quickly we come out of the coma depends on one thing--
our confidence.
Will average families and consumers and small-business people
still be as optimistic as they once were about America's future?
Will they still dream big and dare big?
One way to restore confidence
is for our leaders to come together
to address problems that they so far have ignored.
Never before in history
has the world created this much money, credit, and debt.
We're in uncharted territory.
Washington needs a road map
for navigating this brave, new world.
We have trillion-dollar budget deficits,
and nobody cares.
Light a match under that,
and deficits will upend the system.
STAN: It's interesting that young people
can see climate change 30 to 50 years out,
but for some reason, they can't focus on the debt problem
15 or 20 years out.
There's no question
there'll be a day of reckoning.
Capital is being misallocated,
and when it finally ends,
it's going to be really, really bloody.
NIALL: The economics is important,
but it doesn't explain the intensity
of partisan feeling.
[ overlapping shouting ]
Then I think you need to turn to culture.
[ crowd shouting ]
I grew up in Glasgow, in the west of Scotland,
where for centuries, there had been tension
between Roman Catholics and Protestants.
And you didn't just kind of wake up and say,
"I'll be a Catholic today."
It was something that you were born with
and stuck with for life.
But go to an American baseball game,
and the level of hatred for the other side is incredibly low
by the standards of Rangers and Celtic,
the two soccer teams I grew up with.
ANNOUNCER: And it'll run out of play.
That was nice of him.
ANNOUNCER 2: That is very nice of that young man.
- Oh, my God. - Aww.
NIALL: People sit there eating hot dogs,
and I'm always struck by the fact
that nobody's really hating even the Yankees in Boston.
In the United States, people join tribes,
often at times of personal crisis.
Teenagers are particularly prone to join a tribe.
So I think to understand the United State,
you have to understand what is it
that leads somebody to become woke
or, for that matter, a neo-Nazi.
CROWD: [ chanting ] Move, move, move, move!
AMY: We are at a moment where every group in America
feels threatened.
It's not just religious minorities,
like Jews and Muslims who now feel threatened.
Christians feel threatened.
When groups feel threatened,
that's when they retreat into tribalism.
They become more insular, more us-versus-them,
more defensive and demonizing the other side.
I think in the last few years,
we've seen a rise in hate, race-based hate,
religion-based hate, gender-based hate.
If we want to get to that place of racial harmony,
which I think we're closer to now than ever before--
things might become a little bumpier before we get there,
but I think we're closer to that place that we need to be.
We're just going to have to be realistic
about what's happening in this country.
CREW WOMAN: We're ready, if you want.
Okay. Great.
SMICK: You've had a hell of a life. Tell us your story.
DEREK: When I was born, my family had already been building up
their ideology of sanitized white supremacy.
[ dramatic music ]
♪
So-called Civil Rights Movement produces
anti-white preference in a majority-white country.
WOMAN: Derek was the most prominent
young white supremacist in the United States.
My parents were fairly typical middle-class
white families in America,
and they became much more extreme in college.
My father is the one who popularized the term "white nationalism."
My dad had worked on my godfather's campaign
of cleverly worded white supremacy.
The current outbreak of violence over the shooting
of an African American is how
Jewish supremacist-dominated mass media
engages in deliberate incitement
of racist hatred against European Americans.
My nationalism is rooted in anti-Semitism.
If you actually break apart their ideology,
they want separation of people, they want mass deportation.
We believe we have the right to maintain
our countries as white nations.
We believe we're being subject to genocide.
I was 19 years old, and I totally believed the entire ideology.
I ran for a local county seat and won it.
I made national news.
It really seemed like
I was going to take over this movement.
The white nationalist movement
provides a lot of social support to people.
You can't discount that.
They join a movement of people
who are completely unapologetic,
who become godparents for each other's children
and support each other financially.
It's like that level of commitment is almost religious.
SMICK: I think many Americans are lonely.
They're no longer associated with a club
or a church or a community group.
The family structure is broken down.
So they reach out to these activist groups
and political parties,
but they have a loyalty that's so fierce,
they want to destroy the other side.
And the effect is almost like a drug...
and studies show that human beings
actually take pleasure when the other side fails,
or suffers a misfortune.
Our brains actually light up.
[ crowd chanting ]
DEREK: My father started
the first white supremacist website.
He really brought the movement onto the Internet.
The number of self-described "hate organizations"
has increased 69% in our country.
Many of their sympathizers keep in touch
through stormfront.org,
which was founded by our guest, Don Black.
DEREK: He viewed that as a total sea change
and how he was able to talk to a few hundred people
and instead start talking to millions.
DON: Over the years, I've distributed
tens of thousands of leaflets.
But we never were able to reach the kind of audience
that we can now so easily and inexpensively.
You can't understand the polarization
of American politics and society
without realizing that the public's fear
has been completely,
structurally transformed by the Internet.
Things that we thought were going to be beneficial
oftentimes are just the opposite.
In 1900, you could buy heroin in a Sears, Roebuck catalog.
Dentists prescribed cocaine.
Social media--it's supposed to be this great thing
that would connect the world,
but it's clearly been less than that.
Good news doesn't sell newspapers.
Predicting imminent disaster--
now, that's what gets people's attention.
SHELBY: Flame-throwing, hot headlines
are what get the instant clicks.
Clicks bring ads, clicks bring money.
It then becomes a feedback loop
that is changing journalism for good.
It's not just social media, it's all kinds of media.
There really isn't enough news to talk about
24-7, 7 days a week.
There's just not. You know, turn it off.
You got to snap out of it, like Cher said.
Snap out of it!
LIZA: You don't have to keep the TV on.
We don't need that.
NIALL: The algorithms used on Twitter
or on YouTube
are designed to exacerbate polarization.
On Twitter, every emotive word that you use in a tweet
will increase the probability
of its being retweeted by 20%.
If you look at the number of followers,
the more extreme they are, the more followers they have.
The centrists are nowhere in the world of social media,
because to be in the center is, by definition,
not to be retweeted.
You can see opinions that would, in the past,
have been considered the village crank
talking at the bar with one or two buddies.
And now the village crank can connect with 30,000 people
around the country or around the world.
ALEX: Sandy Hook is a synthetic,
completely fake, with actors,
in my view, manufactured.
The odd thing is that the promise of the Internet,
which was to be a highly decentralized network
in which everybody would have a voice...
Hello, good morning, good afternoon.
NIALL: Has been greatly betrayed
by the giant companies like Google, Facebook
that now dominate the public sphere.
It's always a shock to discover that there's evil in the world.
But this evil was there before Google, Facebook--
But it was never so exponentially distributed.
I don't know how, in a world
where humans can upload over and over again
things which are evil, how you can prevent that
without having a censorship regime.
Do you really want to put in government sensors
on what people say? I don't think so.
SMICK: I think Schmidt's offering a false choice.
What if these companies that now edit for content
face the same libel laws asThe New York Times
and other news media outlets?
What if Google and Facebook
turned down all political advertising
and turned off the algorithms
that keep conservatives and liberals
from ever hearing the other side?
The American people would avoid a lot of heartache,
and Google and Facebook
would still be two of the world's richest companies.
A lot of people want to destroy our tech companies.
But does that really make sense,
given that the Chinese
are in the process of building up their tech sector?
But we need reforms. The status quo is unacceptable.
The notorious trolling boards, such as 4chan and 8chan,
they were supposed to be bulletin boards
for unregulated free speech.
But they actually have become breeding grounds
for conspiracy theorists,
manifestos that sometimes lead to violent acts.
GUARD: Keep going! Run out that way!
NEWSCASTER: Moments before the mass murder in El Paso,
the suspect detailed his plans and ideology
in a post on the Internet forum 8chan,
a haven for white extremists.
That diatribe also inspiring an apparent copycat
who, five weeks later, opened fire
at a Poway, California, synagogue
after posting on 8chan.
GOLDSTEIN: What happened to me...
it was a fraction of a second.
I'm heading to wash my hands.
I listened to the children that were playing behind me,
and then I hear gunshots, and I turn around,
and then I see a terrorist
standing in the lobby of my sanctuary.
And he's lifting up his AR-15
to shoot at me.
And in my mind, whatever happens to me,
whether he shoots and gets me or not, that's irrelevant.
I got to go attempt to save the children.
I knew the chances of me surviving that was almost zero.
I mean, 15 feet away,
as I turned to gather the children,
that's when the bullets ran out.
Inexplainable how just two fingers got hit.
Nothing else on my body got harmed.
But I was able to get the kids out of the room.
NEWSCASTER: Worshippers describe the heart-stopping moment
a gunman stormed into a Poway synagogue and opened fire.
Right now we know that one person was killed,
three others were injured.
This all played out on the last day of Passover,
one of the most holy days of the year for Jews.
We've built engines of polarization,
and they now dominate the Internet.
This is a key reason
why politics has become so toxic.
The politicians have become activists,
and extreme is the new norm.
You think I don't realize
that the Democrats are promoting issues
and drawing things out to keep people mad?
You think that the Republicans aren't starting fires
to promote hate in their base?
[ carnival music ]
It's like a magic show.
They are showing us one thing and doing another.
♪
I think everybody has had repeatedly the conversation,
"Washington is broken."
- MAN: Every vote... - Must count!
Our political system
essentially puts the voter at the bottom.
We need to elevate the power of the voter
as the premier customer
and make the currency of votes
more important than the currency of money.
SMICK: During each election cycle in America,
a whopping $16 billion
is funneled to only 19,000 insiders.
That's about the number of people
that fit into a basketball arena.
Why?
They want access to the largest industry there is--
the $4 trillion U.S. federal budget.
Politics is big money, and it's also dark money.
- [ thunder rumbles ] - ♪ Ain't there somethin' ♪
♪ That money can't buy? ♪
SMICK: Dark money has grabbed the American political system
by the throat.
The 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United,
allows billionaires and corporations
to spend virtually unlimited amounts
on indirect support
of candidates and their causes,
and they do so anonymously.
♪
Combine this with the Internet,
including the deep and dark web,
where the truth goes missing and hate lurks everywhere,
and the result is the poisoning of politics in America.
First Republicans were the dark money masters.
Now it's both parties.
Dark money is swamping our politics.
Is this the day democracy died?
The risk is that any billionaire or government
anywhere in the world
can quietly help decide our elections.
Foreign governments already use Internet bots and trolls
to foment division.
Global criminal syndicates regularly roam the Internet.
- [ funky music continues ] - ♪ Whose money? ♪
SMICK: We are risking the fundamental thing
that defines us as Americans--
the confidence that our elections are legitimate.
75 years ago during D-Day,
a lot of brave people sacrificed their lives
to save our democracy.
Is this how we repay them,
putting Congress and the White House up for sale?
Is there an adult in the room in Washington, D.C.
willing to say, "Stop this insanity"?
KATHERINE: Why is there so much money in politics?
Because it delivers
a phenomenal return on investment.
Politicians around money
are like drug addicts around cocaine.
We need to have the money come in,
more from guys like me.
Why would I care if I pay more taxes now?
I can afford to pay more, and I should.
I agree with that.
But that money should not be used
for the politicians to enhance their own status
for the next election.
That's what this is all about.
George Washington, in his famous farewell address said,
"Beware of political parties."
Political parties are nowhere mentioned
in the U.S. Constitution.
[ frenetic music ]
A person can give
$847,500 annually
to either or both of our political parties.
But someone running as an Independent
is limited to receiving only $5,400 every two years.
The parties have colluded to create fundraising rules
that allow their candidates to receive
313 times more money
than an Independent candidate.
Roughly a third of Americans identify as Independents.
But to the recent immigrant, there is a mystery.
And I'm a newly minted American
who only became a citizen last year.
Hey, where's the Independent party headquarters?
Where's the leader of the Independent party? I'd like to join.
Parties have colluded where the bar is so high
to be on the presidential debate stage.
And if an Independent
can't get on the presidential debate stage,
that Independent has no chance
of crossing the finish line in November.
We have a classic duopoly. There's only two players.
You've got choice A, Democrats, choice B, Republicans.
The only thing either side has to do is convince the voter
to choose them as the lesser of two evils...
And neither side has to deliver results.
And this lack of accountability
is a key reason
why we have gridlock, drama, and dysfunction
instead of results in the public interest.
[ farcical music ]
SMICK: People think that if their political party wins,
they'll control Washington forever.
Of the last 14 presidents,
7 have been Republican, 7 have been Democrat.
Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Trump came into office
controlling both houses of Congress.
But at the mid-term elections,
most of the time that majority has been lost.
Two years later-- back to divided government.
Control of the U.S. Senate
has regularly switched back and forth
every four to six years.
Voters don't seem to trust either party for very long.
What does that mean?
Partisan legislative solutions seldom last.
The other party comes in and reverses direction.
Complex politically thorny issues are never addressed.
The American people lose out.
KATHERINE: In the United States,
elections are won with a plurality,
which means that you just have to have the most votes,
but you don't really have to have a true majority.
So in a three-way race, someone could win with 34%,
which means they won, but it also means
that 66% of the people preferred someone else.
The big swing to the Silly Party and, of course,
the very large swing back to the Sensible Party
and a tendency to wobble up and down in the middle,
because the, ah, screw's loose.
LARRY: The most conservative Republican wins,
the most liberal Democrat wins,
and neither one of them has to appeal to the average person.
FRANCIS: It's crazy that we allow the two political parties
to manage and run elections.
They're gonna advantage themselves
to the extent they can while they're in power.
KATHERINE: I was talking to a Washington insider, and he said to me,
"Everybody knows Washington doesn't work for anyone
except for those of us who work here."
SMICK: A political system that serves only a few
is politically unsustainable.
A lot of the big money in politics
is used to sow division, to preserve the status quo.
They don't want change.
The American people need to ask,
why do we want money to play this great role
as a political divider?
The majority of us,
on both sides of the political spectrum,
are tired of this-this angst.
They're tired of these extremes.
They're tired of this constant state of polarization.
We want to make progress. We want to come together.
But we have to do it in a real way.
There have been a number of demonstrations in recent months,
including this one in Charlottesville that turned deadly.
Now a group is planning what it calls
the "Mother of all Rallies."
HAWK: We went to Washington, D.C.,
and we had a reporter in the car.
He was like, "You remember that Mother of all Rallies is down here."
So we're like, "Okay, we're gonna go to the Mother of all Rallies."
[ overlapping shouting, cheering ]
[ tense music ]
We get out of the car, we suit up,
we get our signs and our flags ready.
We start to march over to the Mall.
As we're walking up,
the closer we got to the actual rally,
we heard people were calling us,
you know, the N-word.
As far as I'm concerned,
black people built America for free,
so this is as much our country as it is anyone else's.
But there was one fella who was standing in front of us.
He said, "Would you like to go onstage?"
And I kind of look around, survey the group.
And folks nodded, like,
"Yeah, let's go up there and let's give it to 'em!"
CROWD: USA, USA!
HAWK: As we approached the stage,
people start to gather around us.
And then the police officers, they were sweating profusely
because they knew if these people rushed us
that they're going down with us.
What a lot of people don't know is,
we were almost kicked off the stage.
And this man was, like, "All right, you stand there and line up
and put your fist in the air."
And my response was, "Who do you think you're talking to?"
And he says, "If you don't want to do that,
then you get offstage."
MAN: They want to get they spotlight,
I'm gonna get they spotlight on my spotlight.
I go on this rant. "I'm not leaving this stage.
You brought me up here. I'm going to speak."
And Tommy Gunn says, "No, they came up here,
they're going to say their piece."
I'm standing here and letting our presence be felt
and letting them know that we are in direct opposition
to everything that they're promoting.
I was going to go up there--
And there's terms we use in the streets called "read them to filth"--
it means tell them exactly who they are
and how we feel about them.
But it was like the skies open up
and-and God spoke to me directly.
I know it sounds crazy,
but God spoke to me and said,
"Let them know who you are."
After months of divisive rhetoric,
a moment of unity in an unexpected place.
NEWSCASTER: When members of Black Lives Matter
went to a rally in D.C., they were prepared to protest.
But what they did not expect was this.
We're going to give you two minutes of our platform
to put your message out.
Now, whether they disagree or agree with your message is irrelevant.
It's the fact that you have the right to have the message.
The first thing out of my mouth was, "I'm an American."
I am an American!
[ crowd cheering ]
They all went crazy. Like, "What do you mean?
"You're a protestor. You're a civil rights activist.
"You're a self-proclaimed liberator.
You love America?"
Yes! I love America!
And the beauty of America
is that when you see something broke in your country,
you can mobilize to fix it!
[ stirring music ]
And now they're clapping. They're going.
So when you see a man murdered,
choked to death after he calls for his life 11 times
and nothing happens, you have to do something about that.
And then there was, like, this awkward
"I can't believe I'm clapping for this guy."
We say, "If a cop is bad, he needs to get fired
like a bad lawyer, like a bad [ bleep ] politician!"
[ crowd cheering ]
"You know, this is not what I believe in,
but he's kind of right."
Secondly, I said, "I'm a Christian."
"Raahhr!" Everybody's going crazy.
[ loud cheering ]
I don't think my Bible is any different from yours
when it says, "Love thy neighbor"!
What I really wanted was to show these folks
there are two guiding principles
that we both have in common,
which are the Bible and the Constitution.
[ cheers and applause ]
I think we made progress.
I don't think that activists
received the message well.
I don't think that politicians received the message well.
But Americans, they saw that as a coming together
to find common ground, and they appreciated that.
At some point, we're going to have to talk
to the other side.
And, I mean, the rest is, I guess, viral history, right?
SMICK: I don't believe we're born haters.
Hate is something we learn.
And it can be unlearned.
The opposite of hatred and anger is not love.
The opposite of hatred is empathy.
Now, back to your story--
you decided to go to New College.
So what's the one big thing you learned
from your experience of breaking away?
DEREK: When I showed up to this little liberal arts college,
at first, no one knew my background.
I was still doing a radio show in the morning with my dad.
Nobody happened to Google me.
It was only in the second semester where it came out,
and it became an enormous controversy
on this little campus.
People who I'd made friends with felt really betrayed.
But the next thing I did
was start attending a Shabbat dinner
from a practicing Orthodox Jewish student
who lived next to me.
I went just because
there weren't that many social invitations.
And what was unexpected is that I kept coming back.
[ soft music ]
His dinners were very diverse,
and that was a space where we were able to talk.
My ideology said that they didn't belong in the country.
Having to reconcile that was extremely difficult for them,
and also keep in mind this wasn't a couple of weeks.
It was years of engagement.
♪
TREVOR: From the very beginning,
you were taught to think a certain way.
How do you even begin the journey
of starting to think differently?
♪
DEREK: Leaving a community and a whole ideology
that felt very central to my life
was extremely difficult.
Condemning it meant condemning everybody who was in my life.
It was not changing my mind that was so hard.
It was changing community.
♪
It was not clear whether there was
any sort of family relationship
beyond the ideology for a long time.
David Duke was committed to the idea
that it was Stockholm syndrome
because I had been among lefty, anti-racists for too long.
I think over time, my family came to recognize
that I could be the same person
and have realized how we were wrong.
♪
I think community is the essential element.
People don't change their minds
because you throw facts at them.
People change their minds
because their community changes,
because the people that are important to them change.
So now not only are you not racist,
your last name is Black, which...
- [ laughter ] - Is like an added...
is like an added part of the story.
The most satisfying kind of connections are not bonds,
they're bridges where we find the common story between us,
despite our differences.
Bonding can actually lead to in-groups and out-groups.
The bridging commonalities
are so much more satisfying on a deep, human level
and leads to an enduringly good and healthy and strong society.
[ light music ]
America is a country where the idea was
that the national identity,
the glue that held everybody together,
was going to be a document.
It was going to be adherence
to the principles in the Constitution.
SMICK: The rights granted by the Constitution
are unique and precious.
The rule of law was largely responsible
for making America the dominant economy in the world.
Even if the other party takes over, your rights endure--
the right of ownership and to express your opinion.
You can't say that about some other countries.
What's unique about our Constitution
is that it basically said
that this country is open to anyone of any race,
any background, any ethnicity, any religion
who was willing to subscribe
to the principles of the Constitution.
I am often not happy with my country,
but I'm happy that we have the ability
to voice our opinions in this country,
to assemble in this country.
SMICK: We desperately need to teach civics in our schools.
The Constitution doesn't limit our rights.
It's the reason we have those rights.
The Constitution protects minority rights in particular.
It brings reason to the national debate.
Look around the world
at countries that rely on emotional will,
the will of extremist mobs, to make decisions.
It's pretty ugly.
And their economies are ugly, too.
If you're a new immigrant,
you're required to take a citizenship test.
That means you have to show
your understanding of the Constitution
and our basic form of government.
Why not have every high-school graduate pass a similar test?
It could be pass-fail, but it's part of the history curriculum.
AMY: What I worry about today
is that you're seeing attack on the Constitution now
coming from both the left and the right.
The Constitutional Convention was built on compromise.
The Constitution was only ratified because of compromise,
and the framers believed that the reason to slow down deliberation,
so that people could be guided by reason rather than passion,
was to allow compromise to prevail.
[ stirring music ]
NEWSCASTER: Five hours after the House passes the measure,
the Civil Rights Act of 1964
is signed at the White House by President Johnson
before an audience of legislators and civil rights leaders
who have labored long and hard for passage of the bill.
There's warm applause from members of both parties
as the President sets to work.
SMICK: There are examples of tremendous efforts
at bipartisanship.
In 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president,
the Social Security system was going broke.
Everybody said, there's no way
Republicans and Democrats will get together.
It's not gonna happen. It happened.
Take whatever problem you have,
and Jim Baker you put out to solve it--
it got solved.
JAMES: We were fortunate in 1983
that we were able to touch the third rail
of American politics, Social Security,
and do it on a bipartisan basis
with two really strongly ideological leaders
of each party, Tip O'Neill of the Democrats
and Ronald Reagan of the Republicans.
Political disagreements--
Sure, I said some things about Tip,
and Tip said some things about me,
but that's all history.
And anyway, you know how it is--
- I forget. - [ laughter ]
ALICE: I'm a veteran of the 1990s
successful effort to balance the budget.
By golly, we're gonna balance that budget.
And, Alice Rivlin, did that-- I see skepticism.
That was a bipartisan effort.
The first President Bush gets a lot of credit for it.
Bill Clinton gets a lot of credit for it.
Newt Gingrich gets a lot of credit.
RAHM: Gingrich and the Republicans in the House
have presented pediatric care--
no eye and dental-- but outside of Medicaid.
And Bill Clinton's health care was pediatric, eye, and dental
by expanding Medicaid into kids whose parents worked.
We made compromises.
A lot of people in the Democratic party hated that deal.
It created the political space
to get a health-care deal done.
Purists in the party got-- we sold out.
On the other hand, today they're defending the package,
but back then, we were nothing but slime-bag whores.
Pragmatism should not be a dirty word.
The responsible center in American politics
is disappearing.
That is a real problem,
because it is from the center that we get things done.
It is from the center that we govern.
[ quiet music ]
There are a lot of ingredients
that go into a successful economy.
But one of them is a political system
that works.
If you go back and examine the period of Ronald Reagan
and Bill Clinton,
those were the years where, when they had no other choice,
both parties were willing to compromise to get things done.
The economy grew at 3.8% per year, on average.
It may be coincidental,
but compare the years after that
of George W. Bush and Barack Obama,
in which compromise seldom happened.
The economy grew at half that rate--
1.88%.
There are some things
that have been accomplished constructively
on a bipartisan basis.
We're here today to begin debate
on a piece of legislation
called the "First Step Act of 2018."
This happens to be
the most significant criminal justice reform bill
in a generation.
SMICK: The crime bill was an effort to ease up on the 1990 reforms
that led to the incarceration
of large segments of America's young, black male population.
It's called the First Step Act,
which said black people are incarcerated at higher rates
than white people for the same crimes.
They have longer jail sentences.
People realize that such high rates of incarceration
weren't keeping a safer society,
were a moral blight in terms of discrimination,
and were an enormous economic burden.
This is not a partisan issue.
Republicans and Democrats both agree
that you should not go to prison
based upon how much money you have.
The Senate overwhelmingly passed
a criminal justice reform bill on Tuesday night.
Right now you're witnessing history
on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
It is a Christmas miracle under way.
NEWSCASTER: The First Step Act, as it is known,
would change sentencing laws,
establish more early-release programs,
and expand job training meant to reduce recidivism.
CHUCK: None of us expected an 87 to 12 vote.
When people trust each other,
you can sit down and, uh, get legislation, uh,
that's good for the country.
The net result of it last night
is nothing short of an historic vote.
Although it was a difficult negotiation session,
what we came out with in the end was a good bill.
And in many ways, it was made better by the fact
that we had reached out to someone
who initially didn't share our view at all.
You've got literally
the National Association of Manufacturers,
Fox News, and Sean Hannity on the same page
with Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, the ACLU, cut50.
Something beautiful is happening.
It was the product of a long period
of discussion, deliberation, and negotiation
involving both political parties.
LARRY: We've got to elect leaders who are committed
to look at evidence, analyze, debate,
and ultimately compromise.
Why can't every day on Capitol Hill be Christmas?
The answer is that to compromise,
you have to give up something.
Too many people are afraid of compromise
'cause they feel that the other side
is not willing to give up anything,
so they're going to be looked at as the sucker.
So how do we get out of this?
We need to champion the politicians
who are willing to come together
and reach bipartisan solutions.
The House will be in order.
SMICK: There is a myth that nothing can pass Congress.
Yet there are a number of proposals that would pass
if simply put to a vote.
When you basically consign the bottom 25% of society
to substandard schools
and to earning less than their marginal value product
and to being on, basically, public assistance,
you've said, "We don't need them."
Well, we do need them.
You need every oar in the water in the modern world economy.
SMICK: You know, sometimes higher paying jobs
are in one part of the country
and the potential employees in another.
So why not provide federal vouchers
for average working families to help with the moving expenses
so they can take these jobs?
Let's have Wall Street private equity firms
give up their absurd carried interest tax break
and then use that extra revenue
to really build up the middle class
by expanding a provision in the tax code
called the Earned Income Credit.
♪
The first step to reforming capitalism is quite simple--
make a lot more average folk capitalists.
[ babies crying ]
Let's make every child at birth a capitalist.
Set up an investment account and a stock index fund
with a $5,000 low-interest-rate loan.
Not a handout--a loan.
And then as they get older, let them add to the account
and use some of it for education.
Pay it back in 50 to 60 years.
By then, that account could easily reach
half a million dollars or more.
Let these kids experience
the same miracle of financial compounding
that made Warren Buffett rich.
I admit it--I have a bias in favor of startups.
They are essential to raising the level of social mobility.
Companies are incubators for new ideas.
It's a continuous series of reinvention
based on innovation.
That's the nature of a dynamic economy.
That's the economy that produces opportunity.
Startups are also the great equalizer.
I mean, women today are at the forefront
in reinventing the American economy.
I love startups for one other reason:
they start up in America.
Multinational corporations create jobs,
but a lot of them are overseas.
When the person starts a company,
it's less a matter of the head than it is of the heart,
because the head would tell you it's too risky.
But the heart says, "I have this desire to create.
"I have an idea.
I will risk everything to have this business succeed."
That's what free market capitalism is all about.
We cannot have a corporate sector
with huge political connections shut down this process.
There needs to be a huge moral element to capitalism.
Capitalism was originally designed
for the betterment of mankind using the competitive process.
It was not, get yours and forget everybody else.
It's mine, you understand? Mine.
All mine! Get back in there!
Down, down, down, go, go, go, mine, mine, mine!
[ chortling ]
In America, attacking billionaires has become
the new national pastime, and with good reason.
I know some billionaires who are incredibly greedy bastards.
MAN: Go back to Davos with the other billionaire elite
who think they know how to run the world!
- That's not what democracy means! - [ crowd booing ]
SMICK: But other contributions to society--
using their wealth
to eradicate entire diseases worldwide.
Inequality is a problem that desperately needs to be addressed,
but it's important that our politicians
don't demonize success.
It takes a lot of nerve to start a company.
It takes incredible talent
to make it a world-class success and jobs producer.
It's easy to see wildly successful people
and think they're superheroes with special powers.
They're just people with extraordinary visions.
Plus, they have the nerve and the courage
to actualize those visions.
KEN: I sleep so well at night, in spite of the fact
that I became very financially successful.
NEWSCASTER: Business icon Ken Langone
is onForbes Magazine's
list of the richest people in the world.
NEWSCASTER 2: Ken Langone is a legend on Wall Street
and throughout the business community.
LESLEY: Ken Langone made his fortune as a cofounder of Home Depot.
WOMAN: Who better to discuss
if the American dream is alive and well than Ken Langone?
KEN: I was born to a wonderful family, a loving family.
My father was a plumber, and he went to the eighth grade.
My mother worked in a school cafeteria,
and she went to the seventh grade.
Great values, great example,
great work ethic,
but always struggled financially.
I wake up every morning with a fear of going broke.
Don't ask me why. It's totally irrational.
But it's there.
[ quiet music ]
I had a burning desire to not be poor.
I liked to work. I enjoyed working.
♪
I worked in construction,
delivered newspapers,
collected cardboard, worked at a butcher shop.
I sold beer, I dug ditches, caddied,
I gave out cigarettes for R.J. Reynolds,
sold Christmas wreaths, sold neckties.
As long as I could see a way to sell something
for more than I paid for it-- that was me.
♪
There's no sin in getting rich,
as long as getting rich is not the only objective.
We've created over a half a million jobs right now,
working, health-care benefits, feeding their kids,
paying their mortgages, from four of us,
four guys with an idea and no money.
There are people in the world
who understand
that the more you give away, the more you have.
I went to NYU for medical school,
and NYU just received an endowment
from the guy who owns Home Depot.
LESLEY: Going to medical school today takes a willingness
to incur a crushing amount of debt.
But now one of the country's top schools
has come up with a radical solution.
Ken Langone, Chairman of the Board of Trustees,
and his wife, Elaine, let everyone in on a secret.
As of this very moment, the NYU School of Medicine
is now a tuition-free medical school--
[ cheers applause ]
Oh, my God!
[ uplifting music ]
That day...
was without question...
where I felt the most satisfaction...
for my success.
These kids went nuts!
And one father yells out,
"I told you you picked the right place!"
[ chuckles ]
It all of a sudden gave a meaning to what I'd done
far beyond what I thought I had done to that point.
But you can never take away from me this moment
where I'm looking at 100 kids in the eye,
and they know they're going to be relieved
the burden of $200,000, average, each, in their life.
Gone. Over.
More than half the kids in our medical school,
this new class, are females.
♪
There was a redemption in the effort.
[ stirring music ]
♪
SMICK: Capitalism needs to be measured
not just by the bottom line, but by the people it serves.
I mean, it's really the good shepherd model.
We must all move ahead.
But we can't afford to leave anyone behind.
I think we need a return to the idea of government
as a protector of the middle class.
I think we need a recognition on the part of business leaders
that they have shareholders but they also have stakeholders.
And the values of their stakeholders
count in terms of how they treat their workers.
You know, Americans,
they don't want to hate each other.
This whole populist, tribal,
dogmatic, lockdown,
contemptuous set of politics-- that's a crummy product.
You know what I love about Democratic capitalism?
We won't put up with a crummy product forever.
KATHERINE: Any other industry where you had consumer dissatisfaction
at the 80%, 90% levels,
you would see an entrepreneur
who would come in with a new product
designed to serve dissatisfied customers.
So the question is, why don't we see that in politics?
I think there are actually some structural reasons
for the polarization in Washington
that you could actually fix.
So one of the big problems
is simply a "first past the post" electoral system.
American voter turnout, overall, is low.
In a primary, it's super low.
The only people that vote in primaries
are almost always more extreme
than the average voter in the party.
♪
Partisan primaries forces candidates
to go right and left.
Someone's elected, they go to Congress,
they're presented with an opportunity
to solve a huge national issue
with a bipartisan compromise on immigration or health care,
and they have to vote no because they don't think
they can get re-elected through their partisan primary
if they vote for it.
So here's what we need to do--
eliminate partisan primaries.
When a voter goes to the polls,
there's just one ballot,
be they Democrats, Republicans, Independents,
and the top four vote-getters
advance to the general election.
Now, same piece of legislation, same legislator.
This is an outstanding bill for the country,
so now I won't get kicked out in my primary.
My vote can finally be yes on bipartisan compromise,
in opposition to the kind of gridlock that we see today.
KATY: The state of Maine
made history during the 2018 mid-term elections.
It is the first state to use a ranked-choice ballot
to select members
of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
NEWSCASTER: Proponents say it leads to fewer attack ads
and more voter voices.
FRANCIS: Rank-choice voting permit third parties
to run more easily.
Actually creates an incentive
for politicians to cooperate with one another.
In rank-choice voting,
you have to win with a true majority.
So let's say that you had four candidates on the ballot.
When you go into the voting booth, you pick your favorite.
But then you also pick second choice,
third choice, fourth choice.
Then the polls close, and the first place votes are counted.
If someone has a true majority, over 50%,
the elect's over, there's a winner.
But if nobody has the support
of a majority of the electorate,
then the candidate who came in last is eliminated,
and voters who had selected that candidate
now have their second choice votes counted instead.
And that process of elimination continues
until you have a true majority winner.
This always results in the election of the candidate
with the broadest appeal to the most number of voters.
But that requires two thirds of the country--
what I call the "common sense middle"--
to have the same knowledge about all the candidates
that those on the extremes do.
If our two political parties have a better idea for reform,
put up or shut up.
But the status quo of division and stalemate is unacceptable.
It's getting late.
Americans are becoming suspicious
of the partisan swindle.
They now know what's going on. They're tired of the spin.
They're desperate for truth.
STAN: We've got a lot of divisions,
but probably a more likely scenario
would be a new party from the center.
I have to believe they're 60% to 70% of the country.
I don't know why it hasn't happened yet.
We've seen in some of the other countries,
these things just evolve.
And I wouldn't be shocked to see it here.
If you want to feel encouraged in America today,
look at cities and states.
We're seeing less polarization in the legislatures,
more cross-partisan compromise.
LIZA: What happened with gay rights?
State by state by state started passing legislation
for gay rights.
It happens on the local level.
[ uplifting music ]
I believe in the American people.
♪
We all have our politics.
We all have our hates and our fears, but deep down,
there is a love of country that I think prevails.
SMICK: You've been through an horrendous experience
that is, no doubt, life-changing.
If America's political leaders were in this room,
what would you tell them?
After the attack,
I saw my members huddled in horror.
I grabbed a chair, and I stood up,
and I saw these downtrodden, horror-stricken members
of our congregation.
What do I tell them?
And I gave them the strength to know,
"Let this not consume us. Let is not swallow us up.
We're going to rise up."
You know what happened?
Every single member that was there did not go home.
They continued the service.
We were not shut down for a moment.
These members,
who had all the right to run away from there,
run home into their beds, and cry their hearts out,
they did not.
[ voice breaking ] They made sure the services continued.
That's what our leaders need to do.
You need to empower it with rhetoric of positivity,
of kindness, generosity, and love.
That's what will make the difference to change.
We are all the same.
We're all God's children.
I'm living on borrowed time.
Every breath is a gift.
Ask yourself--
God has given me another day.
Am I going to use this day
to spread negativism or positivism?
Let us demonstrate
that we love peace more than hatred.
- WOMAN: That's wonderful. - I'm getting there.
[ laughter ]
The key to our time
is the complacency that set in
after the Cold War ended
and then after the Iraq War failed.
We're still in one of those moments of self-absorption.
We want the rest of the world to just go away.
Please leave us alone.
We're trying to have an argument on Twitter here.
And at some point, that illusion
that we can be alone will be shattered.
The lesson of American history
is that it usually takes a major humiliation
to alert us to the peril that we're in.
[ siren wailing ]
[ somber music ]
♪
We are transitioning to some dangerous times.
We live in a world that is curved.
That is, we can't see all the risks,
but they're just over the horizon.
Things we thought could never happen are happening now.
♪
[ train whistle blows ]
The horrific George Floyd murder
taught us that chasing the devil of racism
is never ending,
but the dark forces of division in America
must be defeated.
Democracy's on the run.
So, if ever there was a time for unity
and, to be frank, some humility,
the time is now.
When we're dancing with the angels,
the question will be asked,
what did we do...
to make sure we kept our democracy intact?
The first rule of holes is to stop digging.
We've got to make a market economy work for everyone.
Good evening, everyone.
Americans getting the reality check
of where we are tonight.
REPORTER: With infection spreading fast...
REPORTER 2: Jobless claims are surging
REPORTER 3: A pitched battle to keep patients alive.
[ reporters talking over each other ]
SMICK: The coronavirus crisis has taught us many things--
to protect our future, to stop the hate,
to respect our scientists and inventors,
to bring together the best
of the public and private sectors,
to stand up for the little guy.
And last but not least, to remind ourselves every day
that an America at war with itself
is an America doomed.
[ dramatic music ]
LEON: As Secretary of Defense,
I used to look at these young men and women in uniform,
look in their eyes,
and I would say to myself,
"These are people who are willing
"to put their lives on the line
and fight and die for their country."
[ light music ]
And if there are young people that are willing to fight
and die for their country,
it's not too much to ask political leaders
to maybe take a few risks
in order to govern this country.
You know, John F. Kennedy once said,
"Let's not seek the Democratic answer or the Republican answer,
but the right answer."
You've got to be willing to listen to the other side.
Any issue-- somebody tries to find it,
where it sits on the ideological plane.
My view is, does it move you forward,
or does it move you backwards?
And that's a different way to look at things.
♪
We have to come together as a country by breaking the habit of contempt.
And the only way that you break the habit of contempt is with love.
Why do people say no to ending racism?
A lot of people want to get to the finish line
without running the race.
It's a marathon.
We have to keep taking steps to get to a place
where we can heal as a country.
[ music building ]
I have this phrase that I chant in the streets.
- It's, like, I... - CROWD: I...
- I believe... - CROWD: I believe...
I believe that we will win!
- CROWD: I believe that we will win! - I believe that we will win!
In my heart, with my faith
and what I'm seeing in this country,
I believe that we will win.
I believe that we'll find a way to love
and respect one another.
As Assata Shakur said,
"We have nothing to lose but our chains."
[ pensive music ]
SMICK: Okay, final question. Warren Buffett,
who knows something about future valuations,
he has said, "America's best days lie ahead."
Do you buy this?
I am inherently optimistic
about the strength of this country.
The problems we're having today,
they pale in comparison to the problems
we had in advance of the Civil War.
We've prevailed over those. We will prevail over these.
I would love to believe
that America's best days lie ahead.
But, of course, I'm a historian.
I'm alive to the reality
that most great powers,
at some point, peak.
I am optimistic about America's future.
If you go back through history,
people thought the Russians would surpass us.
We got it together, and it didn't happen.
The President of the United States
declared a crisis of the national spirit.
The malaise lifted.
People felt that the Cold War was over and Japan had won,
and we had a period
of remarkable economic prosperity.
Patrick Henry declared
that the spirit of the Revolution had been lost.
That was in 1792, and he was wrong.
And so it is the great strength of America
that America can change and shape its future
that makes it very resilient.
STAN: We've borrowed so much from the future.
But one of the things that's made me hopeful,
I believe we're going through
one of the great productivity booms
since the Industrial Revolution,
driven by the tech sector,
artificial intelligence, and the cloud.
A lot of this, of course, goes unmeasured.
♪
SMICK: Long before the coronavirus hit,
the world was already experiencing
an industrial decline, with shrinking global trade.
Yet America's flexible and innovative economy
was best positioned to take advantage
of these global challenges.
And we still are.
ALICE: I believe that America's best days
are ahead of it.
At least they could be if we come to our senses
and start managing the problems that beset us,
rather than denying them.
DAVID: In the end, it's gonna depend on your kids, my kids--
their resilience.
They're gonna live in this world
that's going to have problems we never dreamed of.
The genius of the system is that it is very adaptable.
America moves to correct its mistakes.
That gives it a tremendous resilience.
America's not losing its soul.
America is always in the long and bumpy,
choppy process of finding its soul.
I believe in Warren Buffett. [ laughing ]
If Warren Buffett says the great days are coming,
I bet on Warren Buffett!
[ laughter ]
KATHERINE: There is, without a doubt,
a road to best days ahead for the country.
But let me be clear. We are not on that road.
And I...
♪
I don't think
that we do ourselves justice
to pretend that that road is just around the corner,
and that it's somehow part of America's birthright
or our pre-destiny because it's happened that way before.
This best days ahead
is both an opportunity and a responsibility.
But it's also, most importantly, a choice.
[ bleep ]!
♪
LEON: Washington's not gonna change from the top down.
I wish it could. It's gonna change from the bottom up,
when we elect new representatives
who say the most important thing to them
is not party, it's country.
[ funky music ]
♪
LARRY: There'll never be another America.
We're it!
♪
It's an experiment in humanity.
It almost would be impossible to duplicate.
♪
I wish I could live to be 200 'cause I'm sure
it's gonna even be better than it is right now.
Absolutely.
We've proven as a nation...
you give us a mountain to climb,
and we'll show you how to climb it.
SINGER: ♪ 'Cause we got love ♪
♪ Baby, we got love ♪
♪ Whatever ♪
- ♪ We do ♪ - CHORUS: ♪ What we do ♪
- SINGER: ♪ We do it together ♪ - CHORUS: ♪ Do it together ♪
SINGER: ♪ We do it together ♪
CHORUS: ♪ Do it together ♪
♪
SINGER: ♪ When we walk in ♪
♪ Hand in hand ♪
♪ People stop and stare ♪
♪
♪ Lord, they're talking about us ♪
♪ But we don't even care ♪
♪ 'Cause we got love ♪
♪ Baby, we got love ♪
♪
- ♪ Whatever we do ♪ - CHORUS: ♪ Whatever we do ♪
- SINGER: ♪ We do it together ♪ - CHORUS: ♪ Do it together ♪
SINGER: ♪ We do it together ♪
♪ Oh! ♪
♪ Our thing! ♪
♪
♪ Oh! ♪
♪
♪ Oh! ♪
- SINGER: ♪ We do it together ♪ - CHORUS: ♪ Do it together ♪