tuesday, january 5, the balance of power in the senate will be decided by the winners of the two georgia runoffs. republican senators kelly loeffler and david perdue are defending the control of the chamber. follow the results and hear from the candidates in these final races of campaign 2020. live coverage on c-span, c-span.org, and the free c-span radio app. watching c-span, your unfiltered view of government. c-span was created by america's cable television companies in 1979. today, we are brought to you by the television companies that provide c-span as a public service. , historian david kennedy, author of "american pageant and freedom from fear" on the

challenges and threats to democracy in america. this is from a commonwealth club of california event. >> we couldn't do it without the support of you our viewers and that program is only available because of your willingness to support the club so in that light, i would suggest consider donating to the club. it is very simple today. ust text the word "donate" to the phone number or go to the commonwealth club website and you can do that. this is a special program today, at least in my heart because the initiation of

a series of programs the commonwealth club will be doing over the next several years. club will be doing over the next several years to explore the intent is to explore the fundamental principles that founded our democracy and how that democracy has evolved, considering obviously current events and the ability of our present system of government to survive. present system of government surviving what i will call existential threats to the structure that our founders established back in 1787. the pandemic i think is exposing in real time many of the faultlines that may exist in the system by which we are allocating governing powers and we see as much declamation of the willingness to exercise responsibly as there is aggregation of power. today's program with david kennedy we really set the stage for future programs and we will

do a delve in-depth into certain issues that threaten what we will call the effective functioning of our government system. to give you a sense, of a few of those, the combination of the disinclination of congress today with its traditional constitutional role and the contemporary or sequential roles of power of the executive branch, and other area will be the control of campaign-finance and the need for house members to be reelected every two years and how that influences decision-making. a big one is fragmentation of traditional media and the growing role of social media informing and this informing public opinion. on a positive note, we will look at the ability of congress to amend our system generally and achieve greater social justice and equity and how the systems can be restructured to maybe

affect that. we are honored for our initiating of this program to emeritusd kennedy, an professor of history at stanford university. david will provide a foundation for our discussion. he is one of our most preeminent american historians, having prize.d the pulitzer david was chosen purposefully for this initiating program because of his scholarship regarding the economic and and politicalsis history and he pays particular attention to the national character and our american psyche which plays a large role in how things play out today. we will have plenty of time for

audience questions so just submit those to the chaplain on your screen. without further focus of time on outlines, let's get to the question and welcome to you, david, honored to have you here. >> thank you, it's an honor to be here with you and to be the inaugural veteran in this series on the future of american democracy. everything has a history when we can't navigate the future very well if we don't understand the history. you need to know where you come from. remarksegin with a few about the constitutional convention in philadelphia.

we still live with the constitutional democracy. some of the futures are to be perhaps are some more troublesome than others. to 1787.back rereading james strikes me [indiscernible] was at thehe debate constitutional convention of many items. the presidency as was to find that that national convention really was a police -- a piece of political innovation.

i want to focus as we begin this discussion today on some other features of the constitution itself. particularly what presented itself between the larger states and the least populous states. when the 13 colonies came agether, they still retained lot of its own sovereignty and the title they adopted was the united states and that's something we need to remember. at the time of the american

civil war, it was a vernacular of american speech. in a speech on the floor parliament in 1945, winston churchill mentioned the united states. back in the 18th and 19th there was a deeply rooted sense of where expected sovereignties were. it's how we set up the scheme of representation and national legislation. they proposed something called the virginia plan. unicameralted a

wouldation in each state be represented proportionate to its population. new jersey had less population larger statesby and held on for unicameral representation. new jersey and virginia would have the same amount of delegates. gives us compromise the bicameral nomenclature we have ever sense in which one chamber, in the house is based on population. the other chamber the senate is based on geography. plan sohe virginia every state got two senators and the upper chamber hello restent -- lower chamber, states got representatives relation -- in relation to the population. california had been the largest

eight by population and had the largest delegation in the house of representatives. incidentally, this scheme of organizing the legislature was a indicationsraphic and also formed the electoral college. it is determined in the electoral college that each state would have votes proportionate to the congressional delegations in both chambers. ofry state at a minimum three. ande were to represent us -- there were two senators and one representative at least stop structure of our representation and elections are ways of understanding what's been happening in their elections in recent years. there we go.

in any case, let's go with this slide to start with. is a very familiar representation. i won't belabor the point that this is something we are now all familiar with human though some members of her body politic are still spinning it. terribly useful [indiscernible]

we need to get a little more granular and keep in the back of mind the architecture comes down to a form of the electoral. here is a much more informative view of what happens in the 2020 election. these are results by county. distorted for bit the simple reason that the further we go west in the united , the counties get bigger so some county show quite large. there are some pretty obvious facts we can derive from this.

this is a useful way to think about the way our fellow citizens voted in the election of last month. angle to draw another into this analysis and that is where people live in this country. there are approximately 3100 counties in the united states. hence, the american population represents a trend that's been in place for a century or more

were americans started moving through the city. it was sometime in the mid-19th century. population shrank in the urban population group. it expanded steadily. we are heavily concentrated in a small number of places. put these two together, these people booktvow -- voted by county in 2020 and

again, the correlation is pretty obvious. there is a heavy african-american population in the urban areas. the correlation of where people live and how they voted is clear. the schematic map is represented here. it takes a moment to stare at it. this is from the 2016 election.

these are those who voted for hillary clinton and the size of the county with los angeles county in the upper left. it's obvious what's going on with your, democratic -- demographic anti-seem to be white opulence. you look on the right side and representedcounties in this schematic are represented by the size of the cell. most of them are so small you couldn't possibly put a label on them. the thing i want to emphasize is not just that the populated

counties voted democratic as if youd in 2020 but also look at the top of the screen, proximately 480 counties voted for hillary clinton in 2016. this accounted for nearly 2/3 of the democratic vote which is a technical way of saying that they were the most economically productive and counties in the unit states. in terms of their economic weight and their productive those are the places that tended to vote democratic in 2016. the same schematic put together for the 2020 election and what counties that voted

for joe biden, those counties accounted for 70% gdp. we see a deepening of the trend of minority counties accounted for a disparate portion of the share of gdp. this is a roundabout way of saying that what we have seen in the last few election cycles is the increasing segregation of ,ur electorate by geography most of the suburban voters vote some districts vote republican. the voter divide correlates for the families with echo monica --

economic dynamism and prosperity. 1787t to take us back to at the constitutional convention. want to talk about something that's been much in the news to do with the alleged dysfunctionality of the electoral college. i will cast my vote monday as an electoral representative.

as theen is certified winner in california. why -- that's not why i am not on the bandwagon to abolish the electoral college. several'sn through presidential elections. the electoral college vote in the popular vote have not been comparable in five of those. 53 out of 58 presidential elections, has no problem about the disparity between the popular vote in the electoral college vote. i take that to be a glitch but not really a defect. over thety infrequent course of historical time for there to be a disparity and it's usually not all that troublesome.

in 1888, they got terribly excited about that. 1876 was a big deal in 1888 and 2000 and 2016. say those areuld cases 15 years apart. 1876 and 1888 were only 12 years apart. it can only be changed by constitutional amendment. reason why we have overhad discussion on this

200 years. three quarters of the states have to ratify a constitutional amendment so it's very difficult to ratify a constitutional amendment. so i think it's out of the question. there are at least seven states that have only one representative and two senators. montana, delaware, vermont and i can't remember all of them. there is seven states that have only three electoral college votes.

there is a comparable number of states that have four electoral votes. it's just ridiculous to think we can get rid of the electoral college. ofre is another implication since 1887.mpromise i think the more troubles you -- troublesome issue today is not differencenal between the electoral college and the popular vote but the increasing disparity of andesentation in the senate the electoral college in the electoral machinery in general.

will haveight states 70% of the u.s. population. this is a representation of the deepening demographic change of the migration of people who live in more densely populated areas then was once the case. here are the more practical implications. we will see that 30% of the controlled 68% of the

senate. way toate is on its becoming an increasingly unrepresentative body. retains its original power. it must consider ratify treaties and has to ratify judicial appointments. it's constitutional function is very important that's on its way even moreg unrepresentative of the american people at large. conclude this part of the presentation and get into the discussion with roy.

this has to do with polarization. what are the drivers? this is a complicated discussion that i don't have formal explanation ready to present but let me propose three points. you might call them technological. parts of human nature have come into play kinner elections. is whatctural factor roy has referred to. this is the fragmentation of the media. thereration or so ago, was a finite number of national media and network television and

and that'snewspapers where most people got their political information. it cannot be revived and it has gone. social media is big now so technologically, we now live in an over populated media environment where there is a large number of information and misinformation disseminated to the public at large. that is a technological, it'stural fact and difficult to see how we can dismantle that technology. there are two characteristics of have become that we aware of in the last couple of years.

it's the readiness all of us faith in those opinions that reaffirm our existing opinions. we are more inclined to people who agree with us. that's just a fact of human nature. peoplemedia can target that their existing beliefs are just confirmed. there is exploitation of the natural human tendency toward this. that seems tock

be true about how one might or reverse the mission that the mitigation of confirmation bias happens. this is a human tendency. people who are simpatico and in a book published a few years ago , he talkedbig sort

this is a perverse side effect of affluence. people can choose where they live. this was not true historically, people lived where work was or where their family was, but now people can have discretion about way there -- where they live. we are now living in places where we are surrounded by like-minded friends and neighbors. i will give you a few numbers about this. this is going to be my penultimate point. , the number of landslide counties, counties where the separation of the two candidates was more than 20%, the percentage of counties that were

landslide counties with overwhelming majorities for one side or the other was 13%. in 2000, the number of landslide counties, again, where one party or the other one by more than 20%, was 18%. in 2020, the number of landslide counties with a counties voted by more than 20% one way or the other was 50%. , wehe last couple decades , to sorted ourselves out , in-minded people conversation or on social media. powerfully entrenched in our pre-existing political situation. you,point, then back to

roy. this is kind of a gratuitous point. to a lot of people's surprise, donald trump made significant african-american, latinx populations, particularly in the southeast in florida and the rio grande valet. velley -- valle. -- valley. there are, by calculation and , 265 counties we are at least 40% of the workforce is

blue-collar. , the new dealties democratic coalition, save for the democratic party. least 40%es were at of the workforce is blue-collar. of those jointed 65 counties, joe biden won 15. that tells me something pretty robust about how working-class thers are trending toward party that historically is not the party of the working class, the republican party, and that inputes some seismic shift the political orientation of our society and our political future. i am good to stop there, i think i have exceeded my time, i apologize for that, but happy to turn it back to you for questions and conversation. roy: thank you, you did not exceed your time because you

took on a monumental array of concepts. it is fascinating to start thinking about them. what i'm going to do, because i'm looking at my window with the audience questions, and there are some terrific questions, so i'm going to start their and see how many we can audience isse the an important part here, not me. around questions rotate loss of trust. institutions and we have seen graphs and so forth. could you comment on the changes we have seen in the confidence that we have in our various governance institutions? dr. kennedy: that is an excellent question. on another occasion -- i'm not going to do it today -- i could

put up sobering graphic data about the erosion of trust in our society. data prettyize the clearly, i believe. institution, congress, judiciary, courts, the scoutsncy, churches, boy , the media, you name the institution. with one big exception, which i will get to in a moment, as a people, we have lost confidence in our national institutions. the question on the heels of that observation is why. that is a topic too complicated in this occasion, but at least

part of the explanation is that those institutions have failed us to some degree in the last couple generations. the exception to that pattern that i mentioned is also worth pausing on because the one institution that commands more respect in our society today that it did a generation or two ago is the military. this has something to do with the fact [indiscernible] belief thatsonal part of the respect we give to the military today is in part at least motivated by gratitude that our sons and daughters are not in harm's way in a drafted military force and we are glad that somebody else is bearing those burdens, and therefore we give them deference.

that is the only institution of consequence in our society that people have more confidence today than a generation or two ago. whenever i mentioned this, i want to be clear, i am not predicting by any means that we are on the verge of some kind of military coup. that would be an outlandish proposition given the facts and evidence, but i will say, if you look around the historical landscape, societies going back as far as you care to go that have lost confidence in all of their leaders accept the general -- accepted the general are not examples that we should be eager to emulate. this is something we should worry about -- i am not is goingg that there to be some kind of military coup. another issue has not to do only with our confidence in institutions, which is

measurably less than it was, but even more disturbingly is the fact that we have lost confidence in each other as citizens. data, noabundant matter how you compress it by region, by education level, by race and ethnicity, by age, no matter how you parse it, all categories have lost confidence and trust in their fellow citizens. we trust each other less than we did. people are somewhat more trusting than people of color, but the difference is not terribly material. disturbingt is most is when you parse the data by age group, it is millennials, the youngest, who are the most mistrustful. if you are talking about the future of democracy, we are talking about the future of the youngest people and they are the

most disillusioned with institutions and the most distrustful of one another. that is a pretty disturbing fact, it seems to me. roy: yeah. axis of millennials and their trust in laissez in congress -- in let's say in congress. is there a lower level of trust in that age group than over safety five? rememberdy: i don't the trust in institutions data being broken down by age. that is highly likely that it has been done, but off the top of my head, i don't have access. roy: that's ok. it was just a quick thought. the point you made about the senate, someone brings up a comment and i think it is

appropriate that if you take the numbers that you had in your last slide, they become exacerbated if you consider the 60 vote majority rule in the senate wherefore most significant legislation, it takes 60 votes to pass, so that it skews those numbers even further. is that accurate? dr. kennedy: absolutely right. amplifiesster rule and exacerbates the already unrepresentative character of the body, not sickly a majority, which is not enough anyway, you need a super majority. which then seems to me turned around and you have a senate that does nothing, so it legitimately increases our lack of confidence that we are going to get any productivity at all out of the congressional side of our three branches of government

, which takes me to another question that goes back to your point about the original founding fathers and that is that if you look at the constitution under article 1 is the congress and that is a long section. if you go to article 2 about the president, it is a relatively short section dealing mostly with impeachment and how the electoral college works. this question makes the assumption, and i think it is valid, that that showed a preference in the original framers for emphasis on the governance by our legislature, but we have moved today towards a strong executive and an ineffective legislature. could you quickly describe the dialectic by how we got here? dr. kennedy: i can describe it but i'm not sure i can do it quickly. [laughter]

there is a history behind it. don't quote me on the exact numbers but i think article 1 that deals with the legislature has 50 paragraphs in article 2 which deals with the executive has i believe 15 paragraphs. on the face, it suggests that the founders thought the center of gravity of the political system was in the congress, not the executive. recollect the 1830's, the age of andrew jackson, presidential candidates were put forward were nominated by congressional caucuses, which meant that we had a defective -- de facto parliamentary system, where parliaments chose the executive branch, or the prime

minister is also the executive. , but itnot our system looked like that for the first half-century. theye 1820's and 1830's, began to form something that the founders had not anticipated, political parties. the parties took the presidential nominating away from the congress and parties and all their members met in conventions to nominate their candidates in congressional caucuses were no longer the mechanism by which candidates were put forward. , butill have conventions the last convention that went to a second ballot, where it was not a foregone conclusion when the convention convened, was 1952 at the democratic

convention, it took two ballots to get adlai stevenson. were a purpose of mass participation through political parties in nominating presidential candidates for little over a century. something has happened in our time that has rendered conventions basically infomercials. they just try to drum up enthusiasm. the big change is a product essentially, from 1968 through 1972, when senate republicans used the use of primaries the electorate at large to the primary election is now the principal mechanism were avenue through which president or candidates get nominated. that was done in the name of more democracy, direct participation by the citizenry,

collecting political leadership. they argue that the primary system has contributed to not only that it is a ration of political parties and marginalization as organizations in our political culture, but polarization. what we know about primaries? it is the members of each party that shows up, not the median voter. we get more extreme candidates as a result of relying more on primary elections to bring candidates forward. asked me to do this quickly and i told you i couldn't, so i'm going to add a note to that. it cuts across the grain of something you said earlier about

the ever more powerful president. i'm trying to bite a book about this. -- write a book about this. it seems to me the argument i'm ising to make in the book that we have fetishized the presidency, this has been going on for the better part of a century. it begins particularly in the era of theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson where there was a self-conscious and articulate body of thought that the congress was incapable of coherent government, but the president -- the presidency was an institution where you can muster the kind of focus and energy that was commensurate with an appropriate to the scale and complexity of a modern urban industrial society. fragmented institution of the congress could not do it. example,ilson, for

summed up a lot of this when he famously said the president is at liberty in law and in conscience to be as big a man as he possibly can. somewhere around the turn of the politicalry, aspiration got invested in the presidency and the president was the person who could deliver. beginning in the early 20th century and down to the present day, presidents ran on programmatic platforms, square deal, new freedom, new deal, fair deal, some would say ordeal. the president becomes the spokesperson for a coherent policy package that is the platform on which he or she runs the office. promising the elector that he, the president -- the electorate that he, the president, is going to get it done.

congress and the the congress remains this divided, fractured, fragmented body that is difficult to muster around anything. so we have his consequence in our history. in the reconstruction. bring as well, because most of the south was out of the congress and it was essentially a one party congress were a decade or so. new deal, same situation, democratic party was ierwhelmingly the majority, think only 16 republican senators. 1960's case would be the , huge majorities in both chambers. , the president is hamstrung by the restrictions of the constitution. time, political

entrepreneurs become candidates, not disciplined where the -- not disciplined by the structure of their parties, so it is a recipe for chronic frustration in our political system. then you had the executive order, which often strikes me as being used more for messaging than for actual impact. dr. kennedy: almost by definition, executive orders lack statutory authority or standing. they are notoriously impermanent. can reversecutive the order. look what the trump administration did with obama's executive order about daca.

it is not a very rational way to do legislative or political issues. roy: but it is the default position for a president who can't get congress to even take up his bills. topic move to another that several people have brought this up. this paul's our lens back more broadly. ourhave written -- pulls lens back more broadly. you have written about the depression and world war ii, which were times of national crisis. we are undergoing a similar period now with the combination of the pandemic and economic change in the fractionalization of confidence in our governmental systems. how would you compare the american psyche during the period of the depression and world war ii to what we see

today in our own behaviors? i can offer a few thoughts. if they will fully answer the question. at the outset of the great depression, it actually appears on the historical scene on herbert hoover's watch. 1929 was the onset of the depression. , the firstdebate seven years of the depression, franklin roosevelt's first term, what if anything was the appropriate role for the federal government to play in the face of a crisis like this?

understandot really what was the scale and velocity of the crisis. but people knew something serious and terrible was going on. consensuswas not about whether the government had a role in the play. , thepeople and society legacy that comes out of that period is we came to some agreement as a society, in the face of a crisis of that kind of magnitude, it is not only appropriate for the government to play a role, is obligatory, it is necessary. for proof of that hypothesis or , looking at the incoming obama administration in

the 2008/2009 financial crisis, there was virtually no debate anywhere as to whether the government should do something. the question was what, on what scale, and how fast. they did it in both administrations, incoming and vigorouslyhey acted against that crisis and stopped in its tracks. 9033 israst is dramatic. we now expect government to do something in the face of a crisis, whether it is economic or medical, and the case of covid. agree on theean we particular policy, but there is an expectation that was not there three or four generations ago that government is the

instrument of our collective will, it is not just there to get out of the way, it has bigger responsibilities. even in donald trump's republican party, especially some of the younger people in that party, particularly people like josh hawley, a junior thetor, even he talks about need for government to go big in the face of the twin public health and economic crises that we are in. , there seems to be, however, this inclination to sit down and allocate, let's limit it to the pandemic, allocate where the responsibilities for public health exist within the states and where they exist within the federal government. i think most of us find that puzzling because going back to

the analogy of world war ii, all the defense efforts were national. you did not have state building a national was pulling together and i think what is behind the question is what have we lost? ay can't we pull together in time like this when we are able to do it so well during world war ii? maybe one way to think about it is in the current crises, especially the pandemic , we are realizing federalism, that we saw a lot of legacy attachment, the ideal of local government control, and that came to the fore in this

matter. the response should have been nationalized at the front of this crisis and consistently carry through. roy: yeah. another vector -- we are almost out of time but i love that several people have brought up -- there was ays book about intellectualism in american life and the question is, how much of that dominates to settleal inability on a single set of facts, to settle on a single set of authority, to settle on the and reasonof logic and rational thinking -- you

know where i'm going with this -- the whole issue of our anti-intellectualism and the role that plays in the democratic process. dr. kennedy: i think he was correct when he wrote that essay. this is something deep-seated in our national dna. it is not just an artifact of the modern moment, it has been there a long time, and it is kind of a radical application of the idea of equality. our most foundational principle is all men are treated equal. that has been part of our culture from the outset. anybody who asserts any kind of authority based on better --

greater knowledge, wealth, leads over to what many would regard as demonstrably accurate expert data and interpretation of the data. it is a feature of our country that becomes particularly troublesome in moments when we it.ly needed -- need they don't have 100% of the answers, but they have more. roy: i trust people more who tell me that they don't know everything then people who tell me they do. certain honesty does not hurt. last question. this goes to your goal as a as arian -- role historian. always been had

like corks, the fundamental building block of policy discussion or policy debate starts from a great set of facts. how does your profession deal multiplicity of factual renditions of the same event? ,r. kennedy: frankly interpretations of the same set of facts is what keeps people like me in business. [laughter] we are constantly arguing with one another and over generations, we argue about how to make sense of this or that or the other event, person, developing, whatever it might be. someone described in the work of historians collectively is to chew on various interpretations around facts.

it seems to me is relatively straightforward. data does sometimes come to light. but that is not how historical understanding advances. history as a way of thinking is a dialogue between the present and the past. changingnt is always and our perspective on the past thereby changes. the dialogue is always changing. but the factual data is a pretty stable compound. when i went to graduate training to become a historian in the 1960's in american history, there were certain topics, nobody paid attention to them. for example, women's history.

another example, environmental history. especially environmental history, if he said that phrase to someone in the 1960's, they would not know what you are talking about. now it has become a big deal and is not because the facts have changed, is because we are interrogating the past on that dimension in a way that we did not used to. a dynamicstory is discipline, it is always changing and we are always asking the questions and we hope we have better answers. roy: thank you, that is a perfect ending for this first of our hopefully many discourses on the future of democracy. one of our challenges will be picking our facts. making sure we are open minded, making sure that we present all sides of a question, but that we don't present so many sides of a

question that our discussion becomes kaleidoscopic. remember -- [indiscernible] roy: exactly. resonateshomily that but is difficult to apply in human discourse, it seems. so i want to thank you very much for a wonderful introduction. what you have given us is a sense of how we have to look and howwhere we started we originally conceptualized this country in order to discuss where we are going from here with the vector from today forward is going to be and that is what we will be talking about. of the you on behalf commonwealth club, on behalf of our viewers, and with that, i'm going to officially ended this >> you are watching c-span, your

unfiltered view of government. c-span was created by america's cable television companies in 1979. today we are brought to you by these television companies as a public service. >> c-span's "washington journal," every day we take your calls live on the air about the news of the day and discussing policy issues that impact you. this week is our authors week series. for my trump organization executive vice president with whatook "tower of lies," my 18 years of working with donald trump reveals about him. and the republican party and the