>> host: you are watching booktv on c-span2. we are on location at claremont mckenna college in claremont, california. we are talking with professors who are also authors richard has now is professor john pitney, professor of politics and author of this book, "the politics of autism." professor pitney, page one of

your boat, autism is local. what do you mean? >> guest: it is political in a couple different tenses. first in the obvious sense that involves public policy. public policy, all levels of government, federal government, state, local government, even international dimensions are they are the politics of autism. it is also political in a deeper sense that every part of autism policy involves profound disagreement. there are disagreements over what autism is, who has the, how much is there and that is really political in an entirely different sense. the next one i'm trying to get across in this book. what is autism? >> guest: autism as far as general consensus goes, a de facto social communication. but that is where the consensus

ends. everybody agrees that involves back, but it can come in any number of varieties. the cliché in the autism community of is if you met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. it can involve being nonverbal or can involve talking too much in the wrong situations. one source of the insurgency is we don't really know where it originates, what causes it. we do know that it involves the brain. scientists have not localized that particular brain damage and enable it to say this is autism. it can only be diagnosed through observation of behavior and interviews and people disagree about the interpretation of the

behavior and interviews and that is why there is some disagreement over the extent of autism and that is part of what autism is so profoundly political. people disagreed over what it really is to begin with. >> host: when did the word become part of our vernacular? >> guest: it was first used by psychologists back in 1910. psychologists who also coined the term schizophrenia used it to refer to extreme form of social isolation. to refer to the disorder we are talking about post-1943. johns hopkins university. the o'connor, psychiatrist said jon hoch in, what a landmark article describing autism as we know it today. he looked at a number of

children who seem to be socially withdrawn, but at the same time didn't have the same kind of intellectual problems as children with down syndrome. what is remarkable is that the very first person diagnosed with autism is still alive. a man named donald triplett. it shows you how recent this phenomenon is at least as far as we recognized it. autism of course has probably existed throughout the ages. but the term of the diagnosis we know only goes back to 1943. >> host: where is donald triplett today? >> guest: donald triplett grew up in mississippi. part of the reason he was diagnosed, he came from a fairly well-off family was able to get to baltimore in 1943. he ended up having a reasonably good life. he worked and he had been an

african-american in mississippi in 1943 his entire life course, entire trajectory would have been radically different. >> host: when did we start talking about the spec terms >> guest: spec term came into play much more recently in the 80s and 90s. that's when people started noticing that autism came in a variety of forms, including iceberg or syndrome, which was later is going on in the 1980s and became a formal diagnosis only and may be 94. full spectrum involves a certain amount of controversy because there are those who say that autism not to apply only to cases of the most severe in parabens and there are those who would argue that people who are very verbal, who can actually work for a living ought to have a different kind of classification.

again, this is what autism is so profoundly political because it involves such disagreement over basic terms. >> host: what is the iceberg or syndrome? >> guest: aspirate or syndrome was considered to be a separate form of autism that is high functioning, involves kids who are very verbal to begin with, socially awkward, physically awkward, but are able to talk and often talk too much, talk in the wrong situations. it was added to the diagnostic and statistical manual in 1994. however, the fifth edition more recently eliminated after as a separate diagnosis, folding it into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder. >> host: was not political,

controversial? >> guest: is extremely controversial because would have been you had a number of people who had gotten the diagnosis and had embraced it as part of their identity. there are also scientists who believe that it really has a distinct condition and that future editions than the statistical manual will reenter iceberg or as a separate diagnosis. i should add that some of the terminology i just use is itself controversial. we use the term disorder. we used the language of defect and people in the autism community favored a different way of talking about it. they see autism is in or logical, not a disorder and certainly not as a disease. this is also a source of

controversy and animosity within the community. >> host: professor pitney, when was the worst legislation and in before mucking at this issue developed? >> guest: federal legislation dealing with various disorders has been in place for a long time. a key milestone occurred in 1975 when congress passed what was then called the education for all handicapped children act and was later renamed the individuals with disabilities education act. this is the central federal statute on special education and it really shapes the lives of people with autism and other disabilities as well. if you get an individualized education program, that is some thing that was essentially structured by this statute. it was her name the individuals with disabilities education act of 1990 and has since been

amended. other federal laws including the combating autism act of 2006, which reorganize federal research efforts on autism, but even i was controversial was the name of combating autism. more recently when it was up for reauthorization, self advocates have checked into that term and they into that term and they had a hash document were sent to stop combating me because they regarded autism as part of an identity. as a result, the name of the law was changed to the autism cares act. it did change the substance of the legislation but symbolically and moved. >> host: individual with autism is a chronic condition? >> guest: yes, that doesn't necessarily mean the same kind of impairments are going to follow you through your life.

if you get early intervention, particularly with applied behavior analysis, you can learn certain coping skills that enable you to function in society. many people with autism can pursue all kinds of occupations and they are. for example, there is a pulitzer prize-winning music or date, timothy paige, who learned late in life he is on the autism spectrum. there are many other authors who are now coming forward, talking about their lives and not his son. a lot of this is the result of early intervention. >> host: john pitney, your boat, "the politics of autism," where did you come up with the interest? >> guest: someone close to me as autistic side verse 10 exposure to it. but as i started studying it, i noticed there were many first-hand accounts of autism, both by pairing of autistic

children an increase in the autistic people themselves. i figured there is a great literature on that. i probably can't add too much to it. what i discovered is there is a gap. there was no real book about the politics of autism and i've got it back when an obviously political science. i worked in government and politics seem natural for me to write a book like this too felt a particular gap. so it comes from first-hand observation, but also from my experience in politics. >> host: ronald reagan, george w. bush, what were there at first when it came to autism? ayes ronald reagan played an interesting role as governor of california. reagan as governor of california signed an act which was a landmark state law providing services to people of developmental disabilities including autism.

the letterman act establishes a set of regional centers, which organized and help families of people with developmental disabilities access services. so that was a very important step. president george h.w. bush played a very important role in fanning the americans with disabilities act in 1990. this is a landmark statute, probably the most significant of a right of since the civil rights of the mid-1960s, giving people with autism and other disabilities access to a wide variety of opportunities throughout the society. bill clinton signed legislation, updating various disability laws and president george w. bush signed the combating autism act of 2006. >> host: this in any way an issue supporting research on

autism. i don't want to used combating autism. >> guest: is a very unusual issue these days because there is various and bipartisan dimension to this. we've had democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives joining together on this issue. this doesn't mean it's free from contention. the length of contention tend to cross party lines rather than follow party lines. one example of course is the issue of vaccine. starting in the 1990s, there developed a theory that vaccines cause autism. it originated in an article in the british medical journal of the lancet that was since retracted and the author was stripped of his ability to practice medicine in. the vaccine. cause partisan and ideological lines. you have some liberal democrats of robert kennedy junior, donald

trump on the republican side congressman bill posey of florida, all strong believers in the vaccine theory and then you have opponents also crossing partisan and ideological lines. the issue is very contentious but it isn't necessarily contentious in a partisan way. >> host: on the vaccine issue, do you have an opinion and have it distract did her mother after us? >> guest: yes, i do have an opinion. vaccines don't cause autism. the science is very clear. research in any number of ways has shown that there is no connection between vaccines and not to them. it is a distraction because the amount of money available for research is very limited and money that goes to the studies of this debunked link, that is money that can't go for more

productive areas of research. it causes a great deal of anger and hostility within the community and unnecessarily because there is no basis for this linkage. >> host: at this point, what is the estimate of people on the spectrum? >> guest: the latest estimate is 168. like everything else involving autism, controversial because the estimate comes from the centers for disease control. it's not based on a census. it is based on studies done 11 different types. scientists disagree about the validity of those studies, about whether they actually capture autism or whether they define it properly. you are going to get very different estimates. the big question is has prevalence of autism increased over the years? if you look at the estimates for the centers for disease control, the numbers of people getting

services and schools, those numbers appear to increase. however, has there really been an increase or has there been an increase in awareness of autism and the willingness of people to come forward? most people agree that it has at least something to do with it. then increase awareness, different diagnostic standards are going to account for part of the difference. the big question and nobody has a firm and there on this, is there a real increase over and above the apparent increase? nobody has the answer to that and that's a source of ongoing controversy. >> host: cores to talk about autism in the united states. what about other countries? >> guest: that's a huge question. i didn't have the opportunity to address it in this book. i hope other scholars pick up this topic.

there is a fairly limited amount of data about this topic. we know some about autism and britain and canada. but here the problem is different cultural expect patience when it comes to diagnosing onto them. because what we regard as quote, unquote autistic either in the united states, i'd actually be standard behavior in another country. example, i contacts. a clinician talk to an adult and the child avoids eye contact. the clinician will say maybe that could be a sign of autism. in other cultures, however, that is just the way children approach adults. that is what they are taught to do. so devising across national measure that takes counter cultural differences is very difficult and one of the inventors of autism research.

>> host: from your book, page 108, two trends will influence autism politics in the coming decades. first the identified population will get bigger and second, the general population will be getting older just as he autism tsunami arrives. >> guest: two things are happening. again, we don't know the actual problems of autism increasing. but we do know the number of people who had either a medical diagnosis of autism or an educational termination of autism is going to increase. that means there are people who are going to be looking for government services, who i've grown up with the label of autism and that is going to affect having an america government that is going to place demands of government budget. at the same time, there is going to be pressure on government budgets through the aging of the

baby boom generation. more and more people are going to get older and they're going to be placing demands on government cannot particularly when it comes. this is relevant because people with alzheimer's are going to need home health care. in fact, they will need many of the same kind of professionals who take care of people with autism who have severe impairment. that is going to be a problem in the years ahead, simply supply and demand. demand is going to increase further services, but the supply might not catch up. >> host: "the politics of autism" is the name of the book. navigating the spectrum is the title. claremont mckenna professor john pitney junior is the author. you are watching booktv on c-span2.

>> why is our congress so dysfunctional? i believe there at three reasons, madam speaker. the first is the harshness of our town. both parties are guilty of this, madam speaker. both parties. >> the name of the book is why washington won't work at my co-author tom rudolph and i had a couple reasons for writing. the first is about real politics. in washington, things just simply aren't getting done. we've seen some of the least protect it, spend we've seen in the history of the country. figuring out why that is is an extraordinarily thing to do. part of it was also academics, scholarly. other might seem crazy to people who want scholars, the debate about whether americans are polarized. when tom and i started to write the book, it was very much about trusting government. it wasn't so much about

polarization. our first idea is related to the writing of the book is that people say they don't trust government and yet they want to do it. but i love it. they love most of government. they loved the military. they like to programs that benefit from that social security and medicare. the thing that government spends a lot of money on. our book was very much supposed to be about that point that people really have no idea what government is. they have a stereotypical picture in their mind of some didn't, but it's not actually what government does. as we started to explore this more, this is where it came to realize that this key change in american politics wasn't really trust in government at its root. what was striving not with this negative set of feelings that people have about their opponents. this is relatively new. we started to see this really

genuine almost hatred that developed among republicans about the democratic party and about the republican party that really dates especially strongly to 2004 around the kerry bush election. it is him and testified with each election. maybe less so because of the economic collapse and everyone trying to survive. 2012 was the worst we've seen. 2010 we found some incredibly amazing reading in terms of just how negatively we feel about the other side. just to put into some good, we asked these questions of people. we asked the people to place themselves on a scale of zero to 100 or a few of the group you give them an hundred. if you get the group together and wrote and you have mutual feelings about it, you give them 50. the feelings are publicans express about democratic

hearties these days is more negative than the feelings expressed about atheists. that make it a feelings that democrats express about the republican party these days is more negative than the feelings expressed about christian fundamentalists which democrats most disliked. we are talking about intense negatives feelings in the early 2000 are worse today than ever. the thing important to keep in mind is that the public feels does affect away politicians behave. if you have republicans in the congress as we had in 2009, 2010, 2011 and so forth, they don't have to worry too much about compromising because their reelection can assurances. republicans in the electorate are going to believe their side of things, the republican side of things because their

constituents dislike democrats so much. and the mass public, people often say we want to compromise. but what they are really saying is that they are republicans, they want democrats to compromise. they don't want to make confession themselves. they want compromise that they really want republicans to believe in the things that they believe in already, things that are really critical to understanding polarization is the way of politicians have been behaving over the course of the last 15 or 20 years. they haven't been compromising with each other very much anyway. the increase in the disagree about everything. i think a big part of this is how close the margins are to congress these days at every election were close enough, we could be the majority if we just wait until the next time and

then we look at what we want out of the political process. there is no reason for them to compromise. that sends a message to the people of the electorate that the other side ideas are worth anything. that they are all bad that they are all worth absolutely nothing. as a result, what we end up with is a lack of compromise but the representative level, which sends the message to her very people that the other side ideas are worthless and they get this out of polarization. the thing that i think feels that even further is that we live in these media bubbles for ordinary people if they are republicans you can follow their blogs and listen to bill o'reilly and rush limbaugh. if you're a democrat, you can do the same thing with msnbc and the proliferation of liberal

blogs. you don't really ever have to come into contact with elements that challenge your way of thinking about things. trust is central to this. it has been well known that trust in government has been dropping since the 1950s and 60s had we been asking the same survey questions since then. to give you a sense of the common survey question is how much of the time due trust to do what is right? just about always, most of the time are some of the time. in the 60s, around 70% of people will say just about always are most of the time. these days it is more like 20. there has been a complete collapse. more consequential, what tom and i find more consequential than not if the partisans of the party that is not in the white house, these folks are completely unwilling to trust government, especially these days. we found in a survey in 2010 only 2% of republicans said they trusted the government in washington most of the time are

just about always. in fact commit zero people in the survey said just about always. only 2% said host of the time. these people are important because these are the people want to get the governing party i get shot. they say ideologically maybe i'm not with them for my party is that with them, but maybe i will give it a shot. now there is nobody on the other side who is willing to give the other ideas, the idea that the other party a shot. that is important because think about if you are republican representative and you are trying to decide whether you should compromise with the majority party. well, none of the republican state chairman, the people who reelect you support these programs. so why in the world for? that this has changed. if you go back to the 1970s and 1980s and even into the

1990s, 30% or so a partisans of the other party trusted the government in washington to do what was right. now it is about 5%. so this is the key change in american politics. there is no pressure from the constituency representatives to compromise. i mentioned these scaling from before. they are bounded between zero and 100 absolute last. when people used to talk about -- very nasty as people in the 70s, 80s and 90s about the other side, they used to get scores about 45 or 50. there were actually perfectly fine. this was during periods when richard nixon was president. democrats didn't exactly love richard nixon. this is when jimmy carter was president. but that was a sense of things. we realize the key change to politics over the course of the

last 40 years was this increase in negative feelings towards opponents. the story of mitch mcconnell really drives home that the incentives for policy makers have changed. so mcconnell started in 2009 with barack obama president as minority leader with 41 feet in the senate and he made a conscious decision, which he and sharon regrets having broadcast. .. ..