Director of operations here and on behalf of our entire team thank you for being with us tonight. We are a nonprofit and by joining us you are supporting us at a time and we have been deeply impacted by a the cancellation of events and also help being authors during a challenging time to release about. Thank you. We are looking forward to this event. He has been a good friend over the years in the socalled my jewish life story telling show. Weve also been excited because of the accessible conversation democracy ahead of the 2020 election is one of the most important things we will be talking about right now. Said the new book is called democracy. And spells out how the democracy is different from the democracy were born into. The redesign system of government is responsible for the trouble america finds itself in. As he helps us to understand this new system of government he lays out solutions and with a wide range of domestic policy issues to serve as the lead joke writer and is currently developing a sitcom for abc. And tonight will be in conversation with comedian and actress and star and also the founder of a community of americans who share personal stories of they have been impacted by political policy to humanize policy and break that political barrier of entry. You can submit questions throughout the Program Using the q a button at the bottom of your zoom screen. So thanks again for joining us and welcoming us into your house spirit just to give context so as the youngest president ial speechwriter at age 24. That is so young. So i feel like the following i wonder if you do. Was that a dream . You have literally worked with him. I dont know if it feels like it was a dream or is a dream now. And then you say wait this is life . But my colleague might have been the youngest ever. She was 20 do they get younger and younger. And i am working on that. So me telling you and then to disable you are the expert. Some excited to get into that vibe now. I have a whopping total selling one book before this. Space and hopefully wilo back in the person one day in the nottoodistant future and politics and prose which is the bookseller tonight so all for one event. So lets get going. I cant wait to be there in person to check it out. So, david, how did you get into politics in the first place . Did you always have an eye towards . Guest not really. I grew up in the kind of household we talked about Current Events like others might have talked about sports, the people followed this stuff but i never thought that i was going to get into college, i thought i would work at college. But i was in an improv group and i kind of thought some of the work weve been doing like writing a script, hell did that work, i thought i would be doing that in my early 20s and then i saw barack obama gave a speech after the Iowa Caucuses in 2008 and he was talking to organizers in the crowd and said both represent ideals that is impossible odds that speech completely changed what i wanted to do so i had deal organizing and then when i moved to dc to a speechwriting firm west wing writers for a couple of years, an amazing place to learn the ropes, then i got lucky when valerie jarrett, the Senior Advisor was looking for a speechwriter and a chief speechwriter at the time and one of the cohosts of classic american now said if you apply youll be the only applicant for this job so i said okay i can do that. So i got a very lucky path to work in the white house and it was amazing. Host its like you were there and you did whatever it took and thats so cool and so exciting. So, you first wrote for obama and then you wrote democracy in one book or less, how it works. What did you mean by that and why did you write this book . Guest i think a lot of us, a lot of people i know on the Progressive Side of the spectrum or is the thing where you say if hillary had won maybe i would have gone into Something Else and for me, when trump was inaugurated, i had a moment where we all knew it. It wasnt a profound. The pick one person to be the president and yes we want one thing and got a different thing. What struck me is and how shocking that was how confident is when i was in the Obama White House it happened over and over again but issues like immigration, climate cut taxes on rich people. Its happening right now with our response to covid. In these issues surrounding systemic racism and because of the physical process these have taken to banks that change will be difficult or impossible. I think that is the most important question that the we e facing right now is how do we do some thing about the disconnect between what we want in our democracy gives us. Then i also thought about it like i want to write a book like that but also for people like me where it is too thick or depressing or technical im not going to get through it. I might have been on my shelf so you think i read it but im not actually going to. So why write a book about these issues somebody like me would read and now here we are. Host so cool. We were talking about prepping for this talk. Its important and exciting for us to talk about the connection between how democracy really works and the systemic racism that protesters around the can create and around the world specifically led by the blacklight is Better Movement are standing up against. My first question with that in mind is can you give me a brief overview of how they original lawmaking in the country, the constitution by how they were talking about democracy and policy, setting the precedent for policymaking expresses systematic racism. First its like porn and orange people, black men were not people, women are nothing. It just feels so rooted in White Supremacy but is it just the playbook for White Supremacy in america, how to keep the power in that supports . Guest heres what i would say. I took ap government and worked for [inaudible] not to make too big a deal out of it but i did take ap government. I feel like you might have a future in politics. [laughter] i know all the words to schoolhouse rock. I thought i knew this stuff into the story we all learned which isnt true but isnt entirely true. It started in one place and had these great ideals and we are every year, every decade we are moving closer to realizing our ideas. The truth is more complicated because there is a lot of backsliding that takes place and also a lot of ways in which the power structures talking about systemic racism, they are the slaveowning power structures in the country influenced and embedded themselves in the political process and i think that is a fundamental contradiction. I write in the book about James Madison who had profound and enlightened ideas about who should participate in democracy. He was ahead of his time and yet he believed that it was acceptable to own human beings as slaves. I dont plan to know how to wrap ones head around that. All i know is those have been existing in parallel for some time and one of the things i think thats important is that is going to and because a lot of the elements in the political process but are rooted in systemic racism today are now being used by authoritarians, not just a game primarily to suppress the nonwhite voters also in general to try to corrode for democracy. So, we are going to have to either play the best version of the story and remove this stain that we started with or we are going to succumb to it. We are going to have to choose, and i think that is coming to a head. I think the bill is coming due. What gives me hope is to see what happened in recent weeks and the idea that people are fighting back against both systemic racism and authoritarianism coming and we are seeing how they appeared together. You have a president that is standing for both the confederacy, rather shockingly at this point in history, and also turning the military on peaceful protesters. He is performing both of these acts simultaneously. So i think it shows that those two things are hand in hand and fighting them needs to go hand in hand as well. Host with this truth we are relying on, i might just give up the idea that you are so dope and your ideas are so romantic. Its like this idea of wanting to be the better thing and pretending you are like me are not like the lowest common denominator behavior, which i think actually shows up in policy that you are talking about. Something i love that we are talking about [inaudible] guest yeah, im missing out on the line. Host it is like something hard to swallow that we have to signup [inaudible] what i love about you in our conversation as friends is when you say its coming to a head and democracy will either meet and will sustain, i wonder are you optimistic about peoples original goals in the country as it pertains to pursuing democracy or are you optimistic about democracy or the human spirit where another structure we are moving forward . Guest i guess what i would say host to coming to a head moment. Guest what i would say is im less optimistic about the human spirit frankly. I think if you look at the scope of history, generally speaking the tendency is for the power to concentrate in the justice of people and weve seen it in this country, too. Its not just something that happens in other countries. Its the same way we see economic inequality. In the book we have economic inequality and also power thanks to the campaignfinance law return one and into another as quickly as possible, but i think we talked about the bad side of the stories of what weve learned and i think there is no something where if you look at the founders like James Madison, they created a system that could improve itself and will to be a good person and own human beings, you cant get james madisocome and getJames Madisonm that gradually could transcend to some of thsome of the peopled it and i think that is something that gives me a lot of hope about our democracy is that even now this is the country debate the question i went through, gerrymandering, what is the latr processed, although schoolhouse rock stuff and a question i kept asking mysel myself is can we fe process using the process and the answer is yes. Its not easy. I cheated a little bit in the book title, its not easy but its easier than you think. We cannot trust this is going to go a long time but with the tools we have an outspoken as they are, we can make ourselves better and repair. Really going down the rabbit hole on this analogy that you get that idea and i think that is what is so important in writing the book is not trying to say we need a constitutional amendment to do this because that isnt going to happen, or we need mcconnell to decide that hes a good guy all of a sudden. Its just not going to happen. Host ewe guest i spent more time on Mitch Mcconnell than anybody except for jackie, my wife, and my cat. The host we were doing a call about the show and you said there was a party at Mitch Mcconnell sold frat house. Why are you stalking this guy committed you get to the party, what is your obsession, like how can you even look at him . Guest first in the first i talk about iran into Mitch Mcconnell and i did say hes more handsome in person, so lets start there. Start with a nice thing. And then say i dont think which mcconnell is solely responsible for everything thats happened to the country within our lifetime. One of the nice things talking to you about the book and politics in general, ive been thinking about the democracy change in our lifetimes and we are basically the same age as we have the same frame of reference for it. I do think that Mitch Mcconnell understood better than just about anyone thats one of the things about politics as opposed to other endeavors is the players right to rule and so while we were focused on the players on the field, whats everybody doing, who was waiting up for election, he was focused on rewriting the rulebook and his party have an easier time every time and so in the same way that if i was doing a beatles i might take a picture i dont think i needed to do a Mitch Mcconnell tried to crash a frat party and i would say to anybody if you are a man that is 30 or older and think of crashing a frat party, dont do it. I thought that it would be like hijinks but it was feared and i felt old and i didnt get into the frat house which is for the best but im glad i tried. I feel like i made the pilgrimage i needed. Host interesting about the players fighting the game versus playing the game. I see this regarding gerrymandering where i say republicans cheat because they cant win. If it were a fair fight, they are sore losers, they dont want to lose, so they each. But when i talk about achieving, would you say that its not cheating so much as it is in writing a rule . Guest theres an important distinction and its not like one i think in conversation is easy to say that it was stolen versus it was unfair. A lot are unfair but very few of them are stolen, to give one example. George w. Bush wa wouldnt haven florida and therefore wouldnt have one or 2000 election without these purchases that took 12,000 eligible voters off the roll and a disproportionate number were africanamerican. Without that in place, he he wod have become president. But i dont think that he stole the election. He took advantage of an unfair rule. Host its just shady. Maybe they did and they let at six guest it is in substantial but the reason i think it matters for the rest of us who you dont want to say they dont actually have a democracy unless that is the case but i dont think it is. Guest this is sort of a thing that needs to be said any time by two white people talk about racism. I am not an expert on most of this. The one thing i feel like i was really surprised to learn was the extent of the way, we talk about the way tha that would pet this point in the process, but i wanalongtime take the Senate Filibuster for example. There was this kind of agreement, and i dont think northern democrats were frankly any liberal republicans would have said they agreed this enjoyment. They would have said they had no choice. You have democracy and progress on these different issues and i would think about this golden age of the senate, eisenhower or kennedy, the beginning of the kennedy years or if they are. We did all these things in the country that we also had a filibuster which allowed southern segregationists to block every single piece of civil rights legislation. One of the things in the book, and its possible some of you watching maybe i should have known this, but i didnt is that antilynching bills kept coming before the senate so in many cases they had Popular Support and passed the house, they camee before the senate and the filibuster killed them and because of that the senate could pass antilynching bills. This happened over and over again and that was the price that essentially we paid for democracy working in so many other different facets is to say on this one issue thats important to the south which is maintaining a white supremacist structure were not going to be able to do anything about that with all the other ways. I think the difference now is even if they wanted to make that trade which i dont think you necessarily want to do it even if you wanted to, you couldnt because the choice is no longer between democracy and antiracism on the other hand soap we are in a moment where the stakes are higher but that should give us hopin us hope thl work because us hoping for word because if they hop into one of these things i do think it will help us accomplish the other. Host this bargain and trying to test these antilynching bills, we dont know how to pass it. Its connected and how bush won and georgia and long lines at the polls. People for hours and hours were not given a day off. Its covid time. But lets just talk about how it is embedded in the political process. Guest that is a good example what we saw in georgia last week. Its not just one state or one election. 2012, which i looked into when i was writing part of the book, there was a wavelength similar and it turns out actually you cant find one that is as long as the longest people had to wade into those. Its not just because they have a lot of money at disney world. They are being linked and potentially and those long lines are affecting nonwhite voters more so than white voters, so on average in 2012, black voters waited 23 minutes to cast a ballot and white voters waited 12 minutes. Nearly 50 rights after. To exercise their democratic rights on average. So, we think about these things and again, it goes back to how i learned the story of america. I learned that racism and segregation, these were things we had kind of take have kind oa couple of decades before i came along. And we are still working on obviously, but we have done the hard work and now we are just kind of taking care of the details. Clearly that isnt true. And again, i dont mean this on all the features. I didnt think enough about this stuff. But when you look at it over and over again, that ends up being part of the answer and one of the things we see in American History in this process, and i know that she just did a sixth i book come and im paraphrasing but she said attacks on democracy never only affect the target, Something Like that. And i think i was als there wasa good point. These things go handinhand where the long voting lines that are disproportionately affecting the nonwhite voters make it miserable for all sorts of people and so, what we are seeing here is this deliberate attempt to mismanage. I think thats the most important thing we can take away from what happened in georgia in particular because in some states they are trying their best but are not doing very well. Georgia is doing a bad job and thats something we are seeing across the country and its scary because people are trying their hardest. If you try to mismanage an election maybe they will succeed also and that isnt so good. Host im going to jump around a little bit with my questions because this relates to we were talking about how democracy abuse in one place leads to abuse on the whole. Paraphrasing of this agency. Just for example, if the black population is disproportionately affected by police brutality, we are all less safe because of that. That means we are less safe and less protected. Regarding voting, there are tactics used to disenfranchise black voters and also attack the rights of other people like jews, you have this example in connecticut. Guest whats interesting about this, thats kind of a euphemism, is you see attacks on Voting Rights an