At the tmp and everybody here at busboys, welcome. Thank you for coming. We are very fortunate this evening to have with us eric lou to talk about his new book youre more powerful than you think. A citizens guide to making change happen. What a timely work. In the wake of last novembers election, my staff and i the bookstore have been approached many times by customers concerned about the course of events have taken and wanting to know what they can read to help them decide how to get more involved in civic life and effect change. Well, erics book is now a good place to start. He began writing it before donald trump launched his bid for the presidency trumps the election is one manifestation of a mounting turbulence in us political and civic life that weve all been seeing for some years now. Into a book about civic power, what is, how to practice it, and why anyone would actually want it. As as a writer, educator and cic entrepreneur, eric has been thinking about Democratic Values in the role of citizenship for a number of years. Back in the 1990s he was a speechwriter for president bill clinton, and later the president s deputy domestic policy advisor. More recently founded and remains ceo of Citizen University which promotes the art of citizenship to a variety of programs. He also is executiv executive df the Aspen Institute citizenship and american identity program. Additionally he is a regular columnist for cnn. Com and a correspondent for theatlantic. Com. And hes written several previous books on such topics as mentoring, patriotism, and the role of government and citizens in our society. As well as a memoir three years ago that told not just his story but was a broader exploration of cultural identity. His new book grew out of a ted talk that eric gave in 2014 on civic power. Its a very popular talk which i urge any of you who havent seen it yet to watch. Before turning the mic over to eric i would just like to thank to other organizations are joining us in sponsoring this evenings event. Citizen university, and erics program at the Aspen Institute for citizenship and american identity program. We greatly appreciate their support. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming eric liu. [applause] good evening everybody. It is i may have messed up your mic. It is great to be with you this evening, and i just want to begin with a round of thank yous, brad, to you and lisa for your part of the pmp busboys poets partnership. When i lived in washington this space did not exist much less this concept of making food and ideas in this way that is really at the very root of what civic life is supposed to be about, typically isnt supposed to be about, well, each of vegetables. You can eat your vegetables tonight. Enjoy eating or vegetables in company of others in a space like this. Its really wonderful to be in, to be with you this evening. I also want to thank so many friends, so many friends who are, some as longstanding friends that they are family, some who are newer and colleagues at different kinds. I want to take offense at cspan for being with us today to cover this conversation. And really what i have in mind this evening is a conversation. So what i would love to do is just share some thoughts that are embodied in this new book, youre more powerful than you think, and then open it up for some conversation and discussion that can take the form of q a or can just take the form of you sharing your sense of the state of the union right now. Let me just begin in the first place with a word about this moment that we are in. As brad said in his introduction, we are living through times that we know they are tumultuous and we know they are without precedent, and yet still it is sort of staggering to take in the reality of what we are expensive right now. Im not talking only about the election of donald trump and the immediate aftermath, staggering as that has been. Im talking about the ways in which over the course of many years now, but you think about it, over the course of several decades in the United States, weve had this concentration of wealth and opportunity and this polarization of our politics, and the severity of any quality that has given us exactly the kind of uprisings we are seeing across the left and the right here in the United States. They are the same kinds of uprisings using all around the world right now. The arab spring, the orange revolution, the green revolution, the umbrella revolution. All of these movements like the Movement Status from the pier since least the tea party and occupy wall street through the current time or movements that are in progress. Some have achieved electoral victories pick some of achieved very little in the way of tangible outcomes that all are part of the sorting moment that we are in. Naming this moment as a moment of incredible cross ideological citizen power is really important for us. Part of the thing about being in washington, d. C. , and being in the capital is theres emanating from the city not necessarily places like busboys poets or politics and prose but emanating from the capital there is a narrative right now in American Life that says politics and civic life is essentially the house of cards. It is this dark apocalyptic dystopian vision of what it means to be in this republic. And the thing about widening our lanes and looking beyond the beltway and looking beyond whats happening in this town is you realize that from left, right and center there are these incredible surges of bottomup citizens are going on all around the country. Part of that surge wheezing just in the weeks since donald trump became our president , and the label resistance has been attached to that surge, but again it was a surge of civic power from people who had long check out of politics, who had long decided the game is to break to participate in, that brought donald trump to power in the first place. So recognizing all these are part of the same moment, same arc of civic power is i think this thing i really want is to reset into. The second thing id like to say the seating is just to unpack a bit what even mean by power. Talking about power in d. C. Is sort of like talking about money in wall street or new york, or talking about image in hollywood. Its just a thing that is so ambient and so ever present that people stop naming or describing a really thinking rigorously about what they mean by the word. But i want to see what exactly it is that a mean when i say power in civic life. I mean simply this. A capacity to ensure that others do as you would like them to do. To some people that is an uncomfortably menacing definition. To some people that sounds very authoritarian or domineering, but i invite you to step back a second and think about it not even in context of partisan politics but just in the context of your relationships. Family, friends, coworkers. All of us all the time are in this swirling ecosystem of power in which we are trying to ensure that others do as we would like them to do. That power as a place out in civic life is on issues of course public common concern. The thing about power, even though so much of the word in this house of cards age has a negative moral valence is that power nearly as neither good nor evil. Power just is. Its like fire. Simply because it can be put to go use does not mean that we are absolved of the responsibility of understanding how it can be put to good use. One of the ways in which this book aims to explore the topic of power is to frame it in the first place as a subject upon which we must get literate. We have to learn how to read power and we have to learn how to write power. And to do that, talking about power an in civic life ive kinf boiled down the patterns come the ways that powe are unfoldine common and political life into three broadly speaking three walls. I want is a word about each of these laws of civic power. The first is this. Not a surprise anybody yet it is worth naming. Power compounds the rich get richer, the powerful get powerful, people with clout get more clout. Power compounds and concentrates in ways that turn became ultimately into a winner take all game. Power left to itself yields monopoly. That is true in economic life. Its true in civic life. Its true in community life, and that dynamic of course is true as well of powerlessness which also compounds. When you dont have a voice, you tend to get less voice. When youre on the margin you tend to get pushed farther out into the margins. And again you dont have to think about National Politics and president ial politics. Just the life of this community, washington, d. C. , this neighborhood in washington, d. C. , a neighborhood in tremendous flux that is full of both opportunity but also tons of displacement is a story about the way in which power concentrates and competence. That is long over one. Law number two is that power justifies itself. In civic life, every kind of narrative, propaganda, ideology, background story or explanation that would might have about why the economy works the way it does, why white people tend to have more wealth than a nonwhite people, why men dominate our institutions and not women. All the expeditions that people offer for the states of affairs are ways in which power justifies itself. Power will create narratives and the ideologies and store six point everyone who lacks power white is that they rightfully lacked that power. And why it is that those who happen to have concentrated that power are the rightful holders of that power. This aiken plays that are so many, many domains of our life. In economics of course the ideology of trickledown economics is the classic instance away which power justifies itself. That those who already have privilege and wealth need to be coddled and taken care of so that you dont kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. So that their wealth can ultimately trickle down to leak its way down to the rest of us. Thats a story many people tell and a story that many people left and right democrats and republicans have for decades bought into. If you take these first two laws the ways in which power concentrates and power justifies itself you can get into a pretty grim situation. You could into a situation that you can see certainly around the world right now if you think about how institutions are collapsing in a place like venezuela today, where the legislature, now the courts are beginning to yield an concentrate power to a single dictatorial authoritarian leader. You realize this is one realtime instance of a place where power is concentrated towards a monopoly winner take all kind of system, and it is justifying itself with ideologies and stories about why that has to be so. If it were just those two laws will be stuck in a pretty grim doom loop. But what has saved us, what helps us break out of that loop is law number three. Which is of this. Power is infinite. Power is infinite. I cannot underscore this enough. Power in civic life is not like energy in a physical system where you have a lot of conservation of energy and is only so much in the system and if you get more energy than that must be someone else is getting less energy, right . In civic life the amount of how the system can hold is infinite so that if you learn how to give a public speech, if you learn how to organize your neighbors can if you learn how to frame an issue in a way that is compelling to the media, you dont diminish by one with my ability to give a public speech or to frame an issue or to mobilize my neighbors. All youve done is added to the net amount of our circulating through our ecosystem. To say that power is infinite is of course not to be pollyanna or naive and to begin that all people are therefore equally powerful. Of course not. What i mean is that all people at all times no matter what end, the power they may think they have at the moment are capable of generating more out of thin air. How . To this magical magical act called organizing. The simple act of inviting one other person to join you in some kind of common endeavor generates power where it did not previously exist. The simple act of inviting or creating a space where theres permission for a few other people to join in to explore what our common purposes and endeavors ought to be generates power where it did not previously exist. And so this third law about the infinitude of power in civic life is the one that saves us from the doom loop of laws number one into their call these laws actually you for us as citizens, and by the way i want to say in almost every instance of users, if the name of our organization, Citizen University, in the name of language power when a talk about it, im not talking about a limited notion of citizenship as documentation status under the u. S. Immigration and naturalization laws. I mean citizen in the deeper ethical sense of a member of the body, a pro social contributor to community, someone who believes in leaving something behind that is greater than oneself. I mean a nonsociopath. And that notion of citizenship being a nonsociopath [laughing] is harder to live up to then it seems. There are few examples then you might like in our politics right now. I want to just date that notion of citizenship properly defined when we think about our roles in lives of citizens, these three laws of power ive described yield the three imperatives of action for us. So from the first place the reality is that power compounds and concentrates and it tends towards these monopolized winner take all games, well then our first imperative is to change the game. If in the secondplace power justifies itself and is always spinning ideologies and narratives of why the people who have power and wealth and clout have it, then our imperative as citizens is to change the story. And if in the thirdplace winner reminded that power in civic life is in fact, infinite, not zerosum, not finite, not limited to the current allegations and current inherited structures of power, then the imperative for us at all times etc where we can change the equation. So changing the game, changing the story in changing the equation is a way i think about our work as citizens. In the course of this book i describe under each of those three imperatives several strategies for us, whether you are an active is, whether you are an interested bystander, whether youre somebody who has been involved in civic and political life all your career, or whether youre one of the millions who today are just deciding for the first time that i should get involved, that i should actually step off the sidelines into the plainfield, no matter who you are right now it is a time for us to become literate in the strategies of exercising citizen power so that we can change the game, change the story, and change the equation of power in civic life. Let me say a few words just about, a couple examples of each of these as we open while debtor as a open up water conversation. To think about changing the name, what ar of the examples i often share from my home state of washington, i live in seattle. I been there since i left the Clinton Administration a year in the year 2000. One of the great virtues of being in the other washington, what we think of as the same washington, is that you are in a place that is deeply woven into the fabric of National Economic and political life, india Global Economic and political life and yet give a great distance from the conventional wisdom that captures so many imaginations in this town. One of the benefits of that distance is thinking slightly typically and having cited different toolsets of what you can do on different issues. One issue that a group of friends and colleagues of mine in seattle in Washington State get really activated on after the sandy hook massacre was gun responsibility. We decided that of course would meet it an initial push us home in this room and run the country did to try to get our congress to act on responsible gun reform legislation. That failed to weaken thought how about the statement of such washington. We can get her legislation which was at the time democratic controlled to remove on legislation. That failed. What we realize was in both cases the United States congress and Washington State legislature, it didnt matter particularly the large majorities of the people of the voters and constituents supported things like universal background checks for gun purchases. What mattered was the was a finite number of legislators and a finer number of legislators who could be controlled and bought or threatened by the nra and other groups in the gun lobby. For the nra was a very effective thing to play an inside game, and inside game of legislative action to make sure that a small number of legislators could be not even particularly threatened but just sort of warned about the price that would be paid if they were to put their name behind legislation for reform. And that was enough to chew and freeze and kill any effort of reform. We were frustrated, angry. We yelled, we stopped and then we decide we needed to in fact, play a different game. In Washington State like in many western states we have a different game available to us which is going straight to the people. So we began to organize people to get a ballot measure on the ballot, collected signatures all across the state come every county in the state, and would put a measure on the ballot to enact the background checks for gun purchases that the legislature refused to pass. And after that kind of mobilization, after bypassing the legislature after deciding to get people not just in our state but all country to sit up and pay attention, Washington State became the first in union to pass by a vote of the people universal background checks for gun purchases. [applause] thats just one simple example of decide how youre going to change the game, and not just a on the terms and in the format of the game previous he has been reached in. Changing the story is a similar act and a similar set of choices for strategy. When i think about changing the story, i think, as you walk into the door hit you you might see some of the placards on the polls there, and upcoming black lives matter rally about the location of the police force in washington, d. C. , the fact that there are these placards and his posters, that theres a conversation in the United States about Police Brutality and Police Violence is the result not of the elites, not a policy makers, not of congress. As a result result of unsung citizen activists, many of them for the first time getting involved in civic life. Some of the marching, some of th