| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
of America 250. | |
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Cox. | ||
| When connection is needed most, Cox is there to help. | ||
| Bringing affordable internet to families in need, new tech to boys and girls clubs, and support to veterans. | ||
| Whenever and wherever it matters most, we'll be there. | ||
| Cox supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. | ||
| Throughout the course of the morning, a discussion when it comes to civility and American politics. | ||
| Our first guest joining us on that discussion, Alexandra Hudson, goes by Lexi Hudson. | ||
| She's the author of The Soul of Civility, Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. | ||
| Lexi Hudson, welcome to the program. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| Pedro, happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| Thrilled to be with you again. | ||
| I want to start, though, by asking about the events like we saw yesterday in Washington, D.C., the shooting of these National Guard members, what it does overall when it comes to this idea of where we are as a country when unrest and things like this happen. | ||
| We don't know a lot of the details, sure, but in the larger context of civility and the things you write about, what are your thoughts on that? | ||
| We live in a crisis of dehumanization right now, where we insufficiently appreciate the profound gift of being human in ourselves and others. | ||
| And we see that in this current moment defined by political violence across the political spectrum. | ||
| It was the Charlie Kirk assassination in September. | ||
| It was the murder of the Democratic senator and her husband in their home this past summer. | ||
| I mean, it just, and the list goes on. | ||
| There are so many instances of it. | ||
| And again, we don't know a lot about the details of the most recent act of political violence in Washington, D.C. | ||
| But it's time to curb this crisis of dehumanization by recovering an appreciation of our shared personhood, our shared human dignity, our shared humanity. | ||
| That's what civility is about. | ||
| Our shared common dignity is the moral and intellectual foundation for our obligation to treat others with civility. | ||
| Civility is the bare minimum of respect that we owe and owe to others just by virtue of our shared moral status. | ||
| Full stop, no qualifications. | ||
| No, well, this person is affiliated with this party or this person did that. | ||
| We each have that basic right and obligation to be treated as human beings first. | ||
| And we've lost sight of that. | ||
| And it's time to do something about it. | ||
| You mentioned the assassinating of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| You mentioned the deaths of those Democratic legislators. | ||
| Do you think we've, as a nation, have learned something along since that time in recent memory? | ||
| Do you think we've made some strides towards improving civility in your mind? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And I'll tell you why I feel hopeful. | ||
| I mean, it's always tragic when we have to hit rock bottom in more ways than one in order for people to recognize that we have to do something about this. | ||
| So, for example, I've been contacted since my book came out two years ago, increasingly by leaders across the country, across politics, across vocation, across geography of people saying, I loved your book. | ||
| Now what? | ||
| How do I embody it? | ||
| And just this week, I was working with a small bipartisan group of state legislators in Texas. | ||
| And I don't know how much you know about Texas state politics. | ||
| I've learned a lot about it in recent weeks and months when I've been working with these legislators. | ||
| It's very toxic. | ||
| It's very vicious right now. | ||
| And these people have come to me and said, we want to lead a book study around your book in the legislature, a bipartisan book study, and just to have your book be a canvas, a catalyst for having a conversation about personhood and human dignity and common respect amongst our colleagues. | ||
| And that is just one of many examples that are causing me such hope. | ||
| I'm working with local mayors, city council persons. | ||
| We just gathered over 100 of these civic leaders in Carmel, Indiana. | ||
| Carmel is one of these communities that reached out to me and said, we love your book. | ||
| What do we do now? | ||
| How do we embody it? | ||
| And in September, 100 of us gathered and was such a hope-filled endeavor because it was people who gathered around these core ideas of my book: that civility is not politeness, agreement is not the goal, but rehumanizing one another across deep difference is the goal. | ||
| People are recognizing the problem and they're doing something about it. | ||
| And that gives me such hope. | ||
| Do you think that those who live in the political world or those who heavily follow politics, to what degree is it harder for them to reach those ideals that you talk about? | ||
| I think the trend that we see is that in politics, you have to hit a personal rock bottom before you recognize the costs of human dignity. | ||
| I mean, I had one of my champions in the Texas state legislature send me that MSNBC report about Marjorie Taylor Greene when she talked about it. | ||
| She said, I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry for the way that I contributed to the vitriolic tenor of our public discourse. | ||
| And it took her kind of being publicly malained and dragged through the mud for her to recognize, you know what, there are costs to how I treat, how we treat other people. | ||
| And I actually saw the same thing when I served in federal government. | ||
| I was in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I was at the U.S. Department of Education 2017, 2018. | ||
| I saw a very, very, and this is part of the story of why I wrote my book. | ||
| My experience in government was a microcosm of our deep divisions. | ||
| And I didn't feel like I was being part of the solution and I wanted to be. | ||
| And I remember seeing really, you know, confident world leaders come into the administration, come in and lead, and then they would get totally chewed up and spit out by their principal, by the public, and leave kind of broken shells of themselves. | ||
| And I remember Rex Tillerson, for example, when he left the State Department, his parting words to the State Department when he left were, please, please be kind. | ||
| Just be kind. | ||
| You know, and that was like all he could say. | ||
| And it's like, I was there. | ||
| I was broken myself by federal government. | ||
| That was what galvanized me again to write my book, The Soul of Civility. | ||
| And so I understand when you have just been utterly eviscerated and have nothing left, all you want is just like you'll grasp onto any remnant of human goodness and human kindness. | ||
| And it's too bad that it takes hitting that to get there, but it's a good sign that more and more people are saying, you know what, maybe we should reconsider the consequences of what we do and say. | ||
| This is not cost-free. | ||
| They're a cost to us personally, costs to society, costs to others. | ||
| And we have a responsibility to act now. | ||
| Lexi Hudson is our guest. | ||
| And if you want to ask her questions, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| One for Republicans and Independents. | ||
| 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text your questions or comments at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Ms. Hudson, you on this day especially, I suppose as people gather around tables, this idea of politics might come up. | ||
| There might be disagreements. | ||
| But you said in your first point that this doesn't necessarily mean that you have to agree on these things. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Agreement is not the goal. | ||
| In fact, democracy in democracy, disagreement is a feature, not a bug. | ||
| And I think it's kind of insulting when some of these very well-intentioned people, leaders, or groups try and say, you know, we don't actually disagree as much as we think. | ||
| If we just, you know, we see eye to eye more than we think. | ||
| We just have to, you know, sweep our differences under the rug and find common ground. | ||
| And my message is actually, no, we are going to fundamentally disagree. | ||
| Again, that is a feature, not a bug of democracy. | ||
| The question is, how do we disagree in a way that actually strengthens our relationships and promotes, is a catalyst for enlightenment progress, and again, strengthening these bonds? | ||
| Because how we're disagreeing now is toxic. | ||
| It's scorched earth. | ||
| It's like us disagreeing, Pedro, you and I means you are the enemy, you know, and I will do anything to defeat you. | ||
| And that is the death knell of democracy, the death knell of friendship and human flourishing. | ||
| And so my message is that disagreement doesn't have to be this way. | ||
| How do we channel disagreement by keeping the dignity of the other front and center, keeping the goal of the relationship and preserving it front of center, that we can actually catalyze, use disagreement to be this catalyst for progress, for growth, and for strengthening not just our relationships, but democracy. | ||
| Calls lined up for you. | ||
| This is Chris. | ||
| Chris joins us from Maine, Democrats Line. | ||
| You're on with Lexi Hudson. | ||
| The book is called The Soul of Civility, Timeless Principles to Hill Society and Ourselves. | ||
| Chris, good morning. | ||
| You're first up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My question is going to be: how can we possibly solve the problem of civility in this country when 45% of the country, the right-wing, basically hold themselves up in a single little box of listening to daily hatred against the other half of the country? | ||
| And so the history of this sort of comes from the far right-wing radio of Rush Limbaugh that I used to listen to in the 80s and 90s and Glenn Beck. | ||
| And then it sort of filtered into Newt Gingrich. | ||
| And then Fox News came on the scene with its commentators. | ||
| And if you listen to Fox News any evening of the week, if you listen to right-wing radio any day of the week, you're going to hear them say repeatedly over and over and over again, how much me, a veteran, my dad, a veteran, how much we hate America. | ||
| And then it's gotten to the very top with the Speaker of the House who, respecting the No Kings rally, these are his words. | ||
| He said, Democrats hate America. | ||
| They hate capitalism. | ||
| They hate our free enterprise system. | ||
| They hate our principles. | ||
| They hate the ideas we come into work every day to fight for. | ||
| They hate the idea of the rule of law. | ||
| They fight against it. | ||
| They're opposed to law enforcement. | ||
| They hate the military. | ||
| That's the Speaker of the House. | ||
| And he's simply repeating what Fox News says every single day and what we hear on C-STAN every single morning. | ||
| It doesn't matter that I wore the uniform. | ||
| It doesn't matter that my dad did 200 missions over Vietnam for our country. | ||
| No, we hate America. | ||
| And 45% of the country believe that. | ||
| And even one of the callers earlier today said that when they said the Democrats are pro-Hamas. | ||
| So how do we get around anti-civility when half the country believes this disgusting belief that I hate America? | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Chris, thank you. | ||
| Chris, happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| Thank you for taking the time to call in and share your concern, which many people feel. | ||
| I have been in 135 cities in five countries on book tour the last two years with my three small children under five. | ||
| And I get this question almost every time. | ||
| In fact, just last week, I was talking to a friend and they said, they said to me, Lexi, like, your work doesn't matter as long as the person in the White House stays in the White House. | ||
| And I hear this all the time. | ||
| You know, people want to blame. | ||
| How do I fix this person? | ||
| And I mean, first of all, Chris, feel free to gift copies of my book, The Soul of Civility, to people in your life who you think need it this year. | ||
| I joke that it's a great gift for your best friend or your worst enemy. | ||
| And sometimes that's both the same person these days. | ||
| But the point is, my message, my encouragement to you, Chris, is to not point fingers and blame, but to look inward and say, what can I do right now to be a part of this solution to incivility? | ||
| And frankly, and division, echo chambers, and frankly, loneliness. | ||
| I think loneliness is at the root cause of this crisis of incivility, because frankly, it's easy to say, let's just all talk nicely together and let's all be kinder to each other. | ||
| But it's a cliche that's also true, that hurt people hurt people. | ||
| And a lot of these people who are shouting from the rooftops vicious, hate-filled, dehumanizing things, they are broken. | ||
| And what could it mean to show kindness to these people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'll tell you a story there. | |
| There once, you know, this happened thousands of years ago. | ||
| There was a very impoverished named Eumaeus. | ||
| And he had very little in the way of means and possessions in life. | ||
| But one day, he encountered someone who seemed to have even less than he did. | ||
| And an even more impoverished beggar showed up at his doorstep, you know, ragged, war-torn, and hungry. | ||
| And Eumaeus didn't ask any questions. | ||
| He said, welcome, stranger. | ||
| Come into my home. | ||
| Let me feed you. | ||
| Let me bathe you. | ||
| Let me give you some clothes, a place to rest. | ||
| And only after all of his basic needs had been met, Eumaeus said to the stranger, now tell me your story. | ||
| And Eumaeus didn't know that this person who seemed to have way less materially than he did was his long lost king and master and best friend, Odysseus, who had been lost at sea for 10 years after the Peloponnesian War. | ||
| I love this story from Homer's Odyssey. | ||
| This is quintessential hospitality at its finest. | ||
| In ancient Greek, this concept of zinea was kindness to the stranger, kindness to the person that you don't know. | ||
| And this might sound disconnected from your question, but I don't think it is because what does it mean to show hospitality to the stranger at our Thanksgiving dinner table today and throughout this weekend? | ||
| We're busy. | ||
| We are overloaded. | ||
| People respond way better to kindness and to bids of invitation than we realize. | ||
| And how can we use our tables, our hearths, our homes, our lives to be tools of healing and warmth and friendship and hospitality that can set the foundation for the conversations that you want to be having with people? | ||
| And so, Chris, thank you for caring. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving. | ||
| And I encourage you to think, what is your role in having in being part of the solution? | ||
| And I think it starts with extending friendship and hospitality this weekend, even at our Thanksgiving tables. | ||
| In Oklahoma on our line for independence, this is Guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hey, good morning, Pedro. | ||
| Good morning, Alexandria. | ||
| Hey, did either of you happen to watch the show with Mimi and Henry Olson about four or five weeks ago when he was talking about what we're experiencing today and the Trump derangement syndrome? | ||
| No, feel free to summarize it. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well, Henry Olson, he was on the show with Mimi talking about the corrupt media, how they demonized, dehumanized President Trump for 10 years basically since he came down the golden escalator. | |
| And anyway, Mimi, in the last month, she's asked two people, Henry and also Representative Mike Flood, to define the TDS, the Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'd like to do that for you this morning. | |
| You mentioned dehumanization. | ||
| There's a program that was implemented back in the 60s from the CIA, and it's called the five Ds. | ||
| They start off with their opponent. | ||
| Do they want to demonize? | ||
| When you demonize somebody, that takes away any credibility and you lose any trust in them. | ||
| Like Trump, he's a Russian spy, KGB, he stole the election. | ||
| So that wipes out their trust and credibility. | ||
| The second thing you mentioned, Alexandria, was dehumanizing somebody. | ||
| As an example, Nikolai said in the film, you're a bottle cap or a piece of lint that needs to be discarded. | ||
| It takes away any emotion or human feeling that you have towards that person. | ||
| So you can assassinate somebody and justify it or not feel it's a bad thing. | ||
| So, Guy, for matters of time, I don't think we're going to be able to get through all the points of what's the question for our guests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The third D is you divide, which the country has completely defied. | |
| And then the fourth D is you deflect. | ||
| Everything's Trump's fault. | ||
| And the fifth D is the outcome, the disintegrative outcome that we're seeing, the assassinations and so on. | ||
| Okay, that's Guy there in Oklahoma. | ||
| There's his summary. | ||
| What do you take away from that, Lexi Hudson? | ||
| Oh, it's a fascinating thing. | ||
| I hadn't heard about the five Ds, the CIA protocol that our questioner was just referring to. | ||
| But it is true that our crisis of division is a national security crisis. | ||
| I mean, I have Civic Renaissance is my newsletter intellectual community dedicated to beauty, goodness, and truth. | ||
| I invite everyone listening to please join us over there if you want to learn more about how we can each be a part of the solution. | ||
| And I have this small cohort of Civic Renaissance ambassadors, people who are trying to embody these ideas in their community and be agents of social change. | ||
| And one of them is a national security expert, and he is passionate. | ||
| This is Rich in Evansville, Indiana. | ||
| He is passionate about civility because he deals, he's a former hostage negotiator. | ||
| He's a security consultant now who sells, unfortunately, security systems, multi-million dollar security systems for schools because of the threats that we face every day, sending our kids to schools. | ||
| We don't know what threats our children might face in these institutions. | ||
| And what he says is that the work he does day to day, it wouldn't be necessary if we all had an appreciation of the personhood and dignity of ourselves and others. | ||
| It's a downstream intervention, and he sees civility as an upstream intervention. | ||
| So he's passionate about bringing civility to his community and nationally as well. | ||
| And I mean, the government is working now. | ||
| Like it's open and it's operating temporarily. | ||
| But I was reflecting a lot about the crisis of division and civic friendship in Congress after we hit the longest government shutdown in America's history. | ||
| And I was reflecting on back in 1995, 1996, where we had two shutdowns in one year, a similar time of hyper-partisanship and gridlock, where our government wasn't working and people wanted to do something about it. | ||
| They said, you know, an unprecedented amount of political capital and philanthropic capital was harnessed to get Congress out of Washington and recover civic friendship. | ||
| There was a civility retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Half the time, congresspersons talked about institutional barriers to civility. | ||
| And the second half, they free played. | ||
| Kids and family members and congresspersons, you know, threw football and grilled out together. | ||
| And everyone came back from Hershey after four days there and said, this was amazing. | ||
| We need to do this again. | ||
| You know, Newt Gingrich was speaker of the house at the time and he said, Let's have a civility retreat every year. | ||
| And they should have done that because what happened was just a few months after this amazing intervention that got everyone friendly and talking and these steely relationships were thawed, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and it was scorched earth politics once again. | ||
| And what this tells me is: A, civic trust is what makes our democracy work. | ||
| It has been strained, it has been rebuilt. | ||
| It's strained now. | ||
| It can be rebuilt through an intervention that I, you know, let's do another civility retreat. | ||
| I think, I think, I think we're overdue for one, but the reality is a one-off intervention is not enough. | ||
| This thing called civic friendship that makes our democracy work and allows our representatives to serve the people that elected them, it requires day in, day-out commitment to this joint project of living well with others. | ||
| And this is a national security threat. | ||
| Thank you, Guy, for your question and your insightful reflections. | ||
| Rather, it's time to recover common dignity and civic friendship at the local level and in Congress. | ||
| So, to that point, we have a viewer off of X, David Roth, ask about what do you do about our dear leader who thrives on incivility and encourages it? | ||
| Do we respond with grace? | ||
| And I'll follow up with that saying, people who sit like in the president's chair, do they have that much influence over how day-to-day people interact with each other? | ||
| It's, you know, it's unquestionable that the tenor of how our leaders talk and talk to each other, talk to their supporters, talk to their dissenters, that matters without question. | ||
| But it's not enough to just point fingers and blame and say, if that person or that thing doesn't change, then it's hopeless. | ||
| And I'm not going to do anything until that person changed. | ||
| We can't do that. | ||
| I'm currently working on the children's book, the kind of classroom read aloud and family read aloud version of my book, The Soul of Civility. | ||
| And one of my heroes of civility that I talk about in my book and in the children's book, he's this unsung hero of moderation. | ||
| And he's the hero we need in these polarizing days that we live in now, Erasmus of Rotterdam. | ||
| No one's heard of him today because he didn't pick a side. | ||
| He was a Catholic, but he criticized the Catholic Church for abuses of power during the Protestant Reformation. | ||
| In fact, he was an intellectual predecessor of the Protestant Reformation and inspired this young monk called Martin Luther. | ||
| And he and Luther were friends, and he wasn't a Protestant, so Protestants don't claim him today. | ||
| He never left the Catholic Church. | ||
| He instead wanted to promote reform within the institution through education and over time. | ||
| But anyway, so no one remembers him today, but he was an intellectual superstar during the European Renaissance. | ||
| And he wrote this amazing book on manners for children. | ||
| And he has, it's called A Handbook for Manners on Young Children. | ||
| And it's one of these books that I explore. | ||
| And it was, again, it was translated into every European language. | ||
| It never went out of print for like several centuries. | ||
| And this is again at the dawn of the printing press, where it was just a runaway bestseller. | ||
| There are many insights Erasmus has from this book that I love, but my favorite one is what he calls the wellspring of all civility, where he says, readily ignore the faults of others and avoid falling short yourself. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| It's such an antidote to what our world wants to tell us to do. | ||
| And what the world wants to tell us to do is point fingers and blame, which is so disempowering, frankly. | ||
| And Erasmus' reminder is: don't point fingers and blame. | ||
| Look inward first. | ||
| Forgive others. | ||
| Focus on what you can do. | ||
| Avoid falling short yourself. | ||
| This is Jerry. | ||
| Jerry joins us from New Jersey on this Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| Democrats line. | ||
| You're on with Lexi Hudson. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Alexa. | |
| I have a comment, and I got a question for you. | ||
| You know, I'm going to tell you something. | ||
| I watch C-SPAN every morning, every morning, faithfully. | ||
| And the callers that call in are so full of hate. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it, okay? | ||
| Now, one of the reasons I believe this is happening is you got the media, and I say this about all stations: the lies, the lies that come across the media. | ||
| The short, you know, like I heard, what's his name, your host there. | ||
| He was talking about the illegal that was here, and he said, oh, he came in on a visa. | ||
| Well, it expired in September. | ||
| So the man was here illegally, but they don't tell you the facts. | ||
| And the problem is that when you don't get the facts, you get the hatred. | ||
| It's festered. | ||
| You got people that call in about Trump, I mean, literally want to see him go, either get assassinated, go. | ||
| You have Republicans. | ||
| You got Charlie Kirk that was killed. | ||
| There were people celebrating it, celebrating it. | ||
| And I blame the media for that. | ||
| C-SPAN is the worst. | ||
| It generates the hatred every day, every day. | ||
| And they don't stop it. | ||
| They let the callers just keep going on and going on. | ||
| And I'm sitting here in my sunroom and I'm thinking I'd like to shoot these people for them. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| I'm going to stop you there after we let you go on and go on, caller, just so you know. | ||
| But Ms. Hudson, if you wanted to respond. | ||
| Thanks, Pedro. | ||
| So respectfully, I'd like to disagree with the caller. | ||
| This is what, Pedro, my, I don't know, third or fourth, fifth time on C-SPAN. | ||
| And I love the callers. | ||
| I love hearing what people have to say. | ||
| I've always been treated with respect by callers and with, and of course, from hosts in the C-SPAN team. | ||
| So respectfully, I'd like to disagree. | ||
| And frankly, I want to praise C-SPAN for having this open forum to have these open and honest dialogues. | ||
| This is a core argument I make in my book, The Soul of Civility, that there is an essential distinction between civility and politeness. | ||
| I learned this firsthand when I was in government in D.C. 2017, 2018, that politeness is technique. | ||
| It's external stuff. | ||
| It's what we do. | ||
| It's what we say. | ||
| And it's not, and focusing on what we do and say, or what we don't do and don't say, is not enough to alleviate our deep differences and help us navigate our deep differences. | ||
| So we have to focus on civility, which is a disposition of the heart, a way of seeing others as our moral equals, worthy of respect. | ||
| And sometimes actually respecting, actually loving someone requires telling a hard truth, engaging in robust debate, even saying something that someone doesn't want to hear, risking offending them, hurting their feelings. | ||
| That's actually a way to love and respect people. | ||
| Today, people are too often content with politeness, you know, sweeping difference under the rug, polishing over difference, which is what the etymology, the root of our word politeness, comes from the Latin word polyere, which means to smoother polish, you know, sweep these differences under the rug. | ||
| Let's not have these uncomfortable conversations. | ||
| Let's save them for another time. | ||
| Civility, by contrast, says, no, I'm going to respect you enough to have this open and honest conversation. | ||
| I'm going to respect myself enough to speak up when I have something to say. | ||
| But I'm going to do so in a way that respects your personhood, that respects your dignity. | ||
| I'm not going to let this devolve into dehumanization. | ||
| I'm not going to let this devolve into threats of political violence or actual political violence. | ||
| I am going to have this conversation, this open and honest debate in a way that respects you enough. | ||
| And so, thank you, C-SPAN, for having this forum to let people bring their thoughts to the fore. | ||
| Of course, having some curatorial discernment, but frankly, there's not enough places like this. | ||
| So, thank you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| But to her point, she said that if people would get all the facts, then suddenly this great change in their attitude and presentation or demeanor will happen. | ||
| Do you find, given your experience, that's the case? | ||
| Or do people just hold on to what their mindset is when it comes to disagreeing with people? | ||
| To be honest, that's part of the sort of patronizing thought line of thinking that I'm trying to move away from. | ||
| People often say, Oh, if people just, if others, the other, just saw the world as I see it and had the same set of facts that I do, we would surely all agree. | ||
| And that's what I think is so patronizing because people can have the same facts and still have disagreements, still have different visions of flourishing and the good. | ||
| And that has always been the case, Pedro. | ||
| As long as we've been together as a species, we've been trying to come together and do life with other human beings. | ||
| And it's always been hard because we're never going to see things the same way. | ||
| And it always will be the case. | ||
| It's a naive goal to say, let's just make sure everyone has all the correct information and all the correct facts, and then we'll perfectly agree. | ||
| That's just not going to be the case. | ||
| What I would rather focus on, instead of trying to cultivate perfect information and perfect agreement, is trying to, again, revive this basic appreciation of personhood, which is the key antidote to our dehumanizing time. | ||
| Once we see other human beings in the fullness of who they are, beings with innate dignity and worth, we will see that we owe them a bare minimum of respect, even when we vehemently disagree. | ||
| I'm not saying all ideas are equal, Pedro. | ||
| I'm not arguing that all ideas, you know, for an intellectual marketplace where all ideas come to the fore and we just hash them out in public. | ||
| No, some ideas ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history, such as ideas that put people and ethnicities on a racial totem pole. | ||
| But I am arguing that all persons are equal, and even those persons who have hateful views deserve a bare minimum of respect just by virtue of our shared personhood. | ||
| Jesse joins us from Arizona, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Lexi, I just really wanted to say I like your idea about progressive disagreement. | ||
| And, you know, I'm a social studies teacher, so I'm going to break this down. | ||
| I'm going to say for the media, I love C-SPAN. | ||
| I think they do a great job of trying to create a progressive discussion with disagreements. | ||
| I think for political purposes, I think the political parties really need to have more disagreement in their parties and allow that. | ||
| I'm going to say for social purposes, adults are not going to fix this problem unless we focus on helping the kids with this issue. | ||
| I just had an interesting staff member from Buffalo tell me he heard a lot of Hispanic kids here using the N-word and really talking bad about black kids. | ||
| And he didn't realize how bad that racial issue was. | ||
| And I told him I'm from New Mexico and it is a pretty interesting issue. | ||
| So I just think that's really interesting. | ||
| And then finally, for business purposes, I will say I started my own business, PencilPals.shop, and I have red and blue color ink pens. | ||
| And it doesn't matter what party anybody's in. | ||
| I tell all my students, you know, if you're a teacher, you got to love all your students. | ||
| It doesn't matter where they're coming from. | ||
| So I just think everyone's awesome. | ||
| And I think we just all need to try to keep, yeah, just trying to be ourselves and trust. | ||
| I think trust is the ultimate issue. | ||
| We got to trust each other beyond everything. | ||
| That's the biggest issue. | ||
| Jesse there in Arizona. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
| Thanks, Jesse. | ||
| I want to personally invite you to reach out to me. | ||
| I want you to be as a social studies teacher, part of the small working group of educators across the country I'm working with as I'm writing this children's book and the curriculum. | ||
| So please reach out to me. | ||
| We'd love you on part of the civic renaissance community and also your help with this. | ||
| But I know we're low on time. | ||
| We're running to the end page, where I want to leave viewers and Jesse in particular with three tips for how to navigate Thanksgiving dinners, dinners. | ||
| We're hosting three out of four days this weekend. | ||
| And so, and I thought of it because of this first thing Jesse said about our party system, which is so broken. | ||
| You know, he wanted, he called for more dialogue and debate within party systems. | ||
| And this is what's so hard about the American party system right now. | ||
| It's so reductionistic where there's so much diversity within, you know, Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| There's like spectrums within each party that it's so, there are so many limitations to just to just saying, oh, I'm Republican or I'm a Democrat because it doesn't capture the fullness that there's so many spectrums within that. | ||
| So I want to argue my first tip that responds to that reductionistic moment we're in where we think we know everything about someone based on one aspect of who they are. | ||
| We hear someone's a Republican, we hear someone's a Democrat, and we think, oh, you know, I know everything there is to know and this person has nothing to teach me. | ||
| I want to, this is my first of three of three tips for your Thanksgiving dinners this evening and this weekend. | ||
| The first is unbundling people. | ||
| Unbundling people is a mental framework I use in my book to basically see the part of someone that we may not like or disagree with, something they've said or done, in light of the whole of who they are, which is the irreducible dignity and personhood and worth of them as a human being. | ||
| And even zooming out and seeing the fullness of our relationship, the full context of our interactions with them. | ||
| For example, to me, the unspoken crisis of our crisis of dehumanization is the number, the shocking number of lifelong friendships and personal relationships that have been ended over political disagreement. | ||
| And that's not how it should be. | ||
| We've let politics matter too much. | ||
| We need to put politics back in its proper place and instead recover, recover friendship, recover the most important things in life, family relationships. | ||
| And unbundling people can do that. | ||
| Aunt Agnes is at your dinner table. | ||
| You disagree vehemently on one issue. | ||
| Remember how she showed up at your piano recital growing up. | ||
| Remember all the times she cared for you when you were sick. | ||
| Don't just say, you know, she voted for this person, therefore I can't have her in my life. | ||
| Zoom out, unbundle her, remember the context. | ||
| That'll help you and help you be happier and more joyful this holiday and beyond. | ||
| So unbundle people. | ||
| Second, don't talk politics, this Thanksgiving table, this Thanksgiving, around your dinner table. | ||
| It's okay to draw a bright red line and say, you know what, this is not the forum for that. | ||
| This is the form for friendship, for bonds, for relationships. | ||
| And let's nurture, let's cultivate those bonds of love rather than bringing the divisiveness that is everywhere. | ||
| Politics is everywhere in a way it hasn't been in the past. | ||
| It's bad for democracy, bad for society, bad for our souls. | ||
| Draw a bright red line around, like you know, say, politics does not cross my threshold at my front door. | ||
| Don't bring it in the house, don't bring it around the table. | ||
| Just say this is a conversation for another day. | ||
| Talk about everything but and nurture those bonds, the relationship. | ||
| So, unbundling, don't talk politics. | ||
| And my third point is: remember the hidden superpower of the 21st century. | ||
| I learned this from my amazing grandma Margaret, who passed away five years ago. | ||
| It is unoffendability. | ||
| How to be unoffendable is the hidden superpower, underrated superpower of the 21st century. | ||
| Remember if that, that if someone says something that you find deeply uncomfortable or offensive, you have it within your power to say, I'm not going to be offended by that. | ||
| That is, that is like you can control. | ||
| It's not like someone, we're not like animals. | ||
| We're a step above animals, where it's not just like, you know, input, stimulus, offensive thing, output. | ||
| We have to be offended. | ||
| We can actually choose and say, I am, I'm not going to respond. | ||
| I'm going to choose to rise above that, ignore it, you know, whatever you will. | ||
| But remember, that is within your control to be unoffendable, like my grandmother was, who is totally unflappable. | ||
| So, three tips to bring to your Thanksgiving dinner table. | ||
| Oh, sorry to interrupt. | ||
| At the end of the day, how do you know if your efforts on this idea of civility are successful? | ||
| How do you gauge that? | ||
| I gauge it by this growing movement that is afoot. | ||
| I have, you know, 50,000 people on Civic Renaissance, my newsletter and intellectual community, and growing. | ||
| I have these ambassadors across, again, geography, vocation, civic renaissance ambassadors that are building institutions around my book. | ||
| I have to promote flourishing across difference, to not try and erase difference. | ||
| And they are actively, you know, convening and fundraising to build initiatives around these ideas in their local communities. | ||
| I hear all the time that people are being encouraged by this message that we don't have, we can't, we don't have to, and we, in fact, cannot wait for the other, you know, for this person, for that leader to change. | ||
| That we have way more power to be a part of the solution than we realize. | ||
| People are taking that message to heart. | ||
| I work with these people every day, and I'm so encouraged by that. | ||
| And I have reason to hope, and I hope you and your viewers do as well. | ||
| The soul of civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, written by Lexi Hudson, joining us on Washington Journal. | ||
| Ms. Hudson, thanks for your time. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving to you. | ||
| A pleasure. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving, Pedro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum, inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | |
| From Washington, D.C. to across the country. |