Thanks, Robert, and thank you all for inviting me.
It's good to be with you tonight.
Robert mentioned that I have three kids.
We do something that's a little bit atypical, I think, for most families in the Senate.
Melissa and I are mom and dad first before we have this public office, and we're trying
to raise three little kids, and she doesn't want them all week, every week by herself,
and I don't want to be away from them all week, and so we do a family commute.
So I want to introduce my 12 year old, who's somewhere here.
It's dark from where I stand.
Back there is my 12 year old daughter.
We have a 14 year old girl, 12 year old girl, five year old boy, and we rotate who commutes
with dad every week.
So Alex drew the long straw or short straw to be my date for the week.
We talk a lot in Washington about all that's wrong in politics, and there is a lot that's
wrong in our politics, but I want to give you one report from the field to encourage
you a little bit first, because there's a lot that's right in America despite a lot
that's bumpy in our politics right now.
My little illustration from the field, again, because we live in Nebraska, we live about
a mile from where I grew up, a farm town about an hour outside of Omaha, and as I go back
and forth every week I try to do field events listening to and learning from Nebraskans
on the weekends, and as you travel the state you think they're going to be policy-centric
conversations or politics-centric conversations.
I find this quite inspiring actually, that as I've been traveling Nebraska the last five
or six weeks, almost everywhere I go, almost the only thing anybody wants to talk about
in Nebraska when I show up is our 14 year old daughter and the experiences that she
had for the month of March living on a ranch.
So some of you that I know in the room I know follow me on Twitter, and on Twitter I'm a
dad far more than a public figure, and our 14 year old girl, it's hard to figure out
where to get her hard work, and we want her to suffer, because we know that's an essential
part of developing character.
So Nebraska is known for work ethic and football and a whole bunch of other great things, but
we're also the largest cattle state in the Union.
So there are a lot of baby cows born every spring in Nebraska.
So we shipped our 14 year old daughter out to live on a ranch for the month of March,
and the cattle ranch she was at, she had her hand in about 245 deliveries in some way or
another over the course of that month, and I missed my daughter being gone from dad and
mom and brother and sister for that long, and so she was texting me over the course
of her month living on this ranch, and I realized these texts, the sort of "ick" factor of a
14 year old girl experiencing a whole bunch of rubber gloves to the shoulder that she
had never experienced before, there was too much there that was too good to lose.
So we actually had, as Corey would text me throughout the day, I just started converting
them to tweets.
So I made up this hashtag, #FromTheRanch, and whatever she was learning as she was delivering
baby cows or vaccinating or tagging or pulling cows, I started to tweet it out, and everywhere
that I go in Nebraska now people say to me, "How do we make our kid suffer?
How can we get for our kid what you got for your kid?
Can you give me those people's phone number?
Because I need to call them up.
My 14 year old is playing too many video games."
So why do I say that and why is that relevant to our discussion here?
Because the distinction between politics and culture is really important.
There's a lot that's broken in our politics, but there's a lot about our culture that's
still hopeful, and there's a lot to dream about and a lot to try to recover, and culture
is well upstream from politics.
Politics is downstream from culture.
The analogue I think to the three stories that you're going to hear tonight from Mike
and Melony and Bryan, is there's actually a lot in the think tank community and the
not-for-profit sector and in social entrepreneurship in America right now that's working, and yet
it's not really informing our political discussion very much.
Why is that?
So I'd like to spend my 15-ish minutes with you focusing on that barrier to opportunity,
which is the crisis of political vision that we have right now.
Mike, Melony, and Bryan who I was just backstage with and have read their comments over the
course of this weekend, they're three really inspiring folks and they're three people that
have a lot to teach policymakers in this country, and yet right now they're not really a model
for a lot of what we should be doing in the public sector, and I'd like to talk a tiny
bit about why that is, because I think that we do face a crisis of political vision that
flows partly from the fact that we have two exhausted political parties right now.
We have a conversation Washington that is really stultifying relative to the vibrancy
and vitality of the American people and relative to the magnitude of the challenges we face
right now and what really needs to be accomplished in our time.
I think we're reaping the fruit of a lot of what President Reagan predicted well before
he was a Republican president, well before he was a Republican governor of California.
But Reagan, the Democratic Labor Union organizer, who then ultimately ended up traveling the
rails for GE talking about the meaning of America in factories across this country,
and talking about what unites us, and that Reagan, the Democratic Labor Union Reagan,
not just the Republican president Reagan, would say, "In any free republic you're always
only one generation away from the extinction of freedom."
If you don't pass along the meaning of America to the next generation, you can expect that
small R republic that you have will be in peril, will be in danger of being lost, and
I think what's happening right now in this city is we're reaping the fruits of the last
40 or 50 years where we've ceased to talk in a meaningful way about the shared vision
that unites us.
I have no real intention to talk about presidential politics at all tonight, but just as one brief
aside I would say that one of the dispiriting things about the moment we're at is you can
sort of predict what the next six months are going to look like.
Do we expect that the presidential campaign of the next six months is going to be a big,
uplifting conversation about what we need to restore and revitalize the country?
Heads nodding so vigorously I think some of you might need medical help.
I really think there's a woman in row three who just dislocated a vertebrae, but right
now we know that where we're headed is not where we really should be headed.
The conversation we're going to have is, "She's more evil than I am," or, "He's more evil
than I am," and we're already starting this conversation about the lesser of two evils.
There's already this punching conversation developing where people punching each other
in the face is not likely to inspire anybody.
I spent of this weekend at college and high school graduations and commencements.
I'm sure many of you did as well, and when you're talking to 18-22 year old kids, they're
pretty dispirited about our political conversation.
People in this city, people who are obsessed with politics, whether in the professional
classes or in the media talk a lot about political polarization.
I think the much bigger challenge of the moment we face is actually political disengagement.
When you listen to young people, they're not motivated to get engaged in a shared conversation
about what makes America great and what shared vision we should have together.
They're really put off by this and they're right to be put off by this.
So I want to try to set aside politics for a bit and set the stage economically where
we are, because we are at a really, really interesting moment in global history.
It's scary, to be sure, but it's also interesting.
I'm a history guy by background.
So business strategy by my work history, but my training is as an academic historian.
I think that in an overly simplified way you can say there have only been four kinds of
economies in the history of the world.
Hunter-gatherers, settled agrarian farmers in the kind of villages where I'm from, the
rise of the cities and big tool economies that are associated with industrialization.
We think of it as this big, disruptive moment from 1870-1920 or 1930.
The fourth major economy in the history of time is whatever we've just entered, but we
don't even really have a name for it.
Sometimes we talk about it as the information economy or knowledge economy or the IT economy.
Sociologists, economists, and demographers kind of call it the post-industrial economy,
which is another way of saying we don't have any clue what to call it.
So you have hunter-gatherers, settled farmers, pastoral agriculture, you have big tool economies
and the rise of cities, and you have whatever we're entering now.
We started into this new kind of economy, this digital economy, this highly, rapidly
dislocated, disrupted economy, 20, 30, 40 years ago, and it's scary, but it also has
huge opportunities, but our policy conversation hasn't been updated since the late industrialization
fights.
So in many ways when you talk to young people, they know that we're entering a really changed
world.
As recently as the late 1970's average duration at a firm was still nearly 30 years.
I was born in '72.
I'm between some generations, but think of your parents or grandparents in this room,
and they came into a world when they heard their grandparents talk, and people had the
same job their whole life.
Largely our parents and grandparents knew a world where people often changed jobs maybe
once.
Maybe it was different than their parents or grandparents, but by and large once you
got settled down at something after high school or college you were probably going to work
not just in that industry, but that firm until death or retirement.
Now we live in a world where kids who walked across the stage at graduations in Nebraska
and 49 other states and the District of Columbia this weekend, they're not just going to change
jobs, they're going to change industries three times before they turn 30.
The sort of magnitude and pace of disruption is unprecedented in human history.
The historian in me is always skeptical of people who say something's unprecedented,
but this really is new.
We've never done this before.
We've never created a society of lifelong learners, and we need to do that now.
Right now our national conversation is limited to a few sources of angst, a few causes of
maybe competition on the supply side of the labor market.
Immigration and trade are scary and disruptive in certain ways for people, but this weekend
as I'm talking to 18-22, 23 year old kids, you know what came up multiple times?
Robots.
I haven't heard that discussed in the presidential campaign, but there is no magic bullet around
immigration or trade that's going to change the nature of what robotics are going to do,
and jobs that are routinize-able, if that's a word, and predictable, those jobs are going
to become more and more rapidly disintermediated and disrupted, and we're going to need to
create a completely different kind of conversation than we've ever had before, and right now
our politics aren't really up to that level of disruptive conversation.
We have two political parties that seem to be wanting to have a fight about whether we
should make America Europe again or make America 1950 again.
Neither of these are very interesting.
I was talking to an analyst the other day who said, "What we're dealing with as a business
strategy matter is two failed enterprises in these two political parties."
The party that I'm a part of is largely suffering from a declining customer base because root,
core Republican voters are dying.
The Democrats don't have the same customer base problem, but they have a massive product
problem because the Democrats are still trying to pretend if you just expand 1965 entitlement
programs and the chassis of the federal government from 50 and 51 years ago, that somehow this
is only three tinkers away from being a working system.
It's not true.
The Democrats are trying to sell central planning in an age of Uber.
Both of these parties have a massive vision problem about what we need to accomplish in
our time and place, and I think that one of the places to start is by just recognizing
that demographically the middle class really is shrinking.
I'm part of a political party that doesn't like to admit this very much.
Democrats regularly act like any problem that we find, there's something that if you just
gave more power to Washington and to central planners and bureaucrats, it's tinker-able
in a Wilsonian way from academic papers of 1890 and the presidency of 1912.
It's not fixable.
But then you look at my party and say, "What are we offering instead?"
We don't have much of a vision for young people.
We don't have much to offer that's optimistic and persuasive about where we're headed.
Pew came out with a study last week that showed out of 230 metro areas in America, just over
75% of Americans live in these 230 metro areas.
203 of the 230 have had a declining share of their population in the middle class over
the last 15 years, and it looks to be accelerating.
What does that mean?
It means that there's a lot of angst among the public, and we should be having a conversation
about what it looks like to create that society of lifelong learners.
We should be having a conversation about how to make more poor people and people going
through disruptive events able to become independent again, not be having a conversation about
how to make more of the middle class dependent again in new and expanding ways.
We should be having this big conversation about the good, about the telos, about the
end of public policy.
By that I don't mean in any way to limit pluralism.
I believe the American experiment is gorgeous and beautiful largely because the First Amendment
is the beating heart of the American experience and the First Amendment is kind of a road
map for how to recognize that in a continental nation of 320 million people with lots and
lots of diversity, we want to come up with a way to honor all the dignity and natural
rights of everybody and set up a world where those people can live in harmony where we
wrestle through what the good life looks like in our different communities, but in a way
that says we don't believe in violence in the public square.
So what America is fundamentally about at the federal level is an architecture or framework
to be able to live out that pluralistic society, but everybody who's advancing a vision for
what a good life looks like in a pluralistic society should have a shared sense that the
American idea is that we want all of our people to be thriving, vibrant, independent, and
free.
A huge part of what I think you're going to hear about tonight is particular people who've
lived really heroic and/or served other people in special ways who are trying to become heroic
and pull themselves out of dependency back into a place where they're contributing to
their community, and I think one of the fundamental heuristic devices we should use when we think
about policy conversations is, are we ultimately trying to re-empower families and religious
and cultural institutions and mediating institutions and local enterprises?
Are we trying to re-empower them with whatever the new welfare state becomes?
Or are we trying to displace them?
Right now I don't think we're having that vibrant conversation we should be having about
how to make more people independent when they go through these times of disruption, because
it's going to be more and more of our shared experience to have those kinds of disruptions.
Instead we have a political playing field that has one party that seems to want to make
Washington more powerful and trying to centrally plan things, and another party that looks
like we've largely exited the playing field.
I think the kinds of less political conversations that you're going to be entreated to tonight
are the kinds of things that can give a lot of people hope and a lot of people optimism,
and I'm grateful to be able to kick this thing off and look forward to learning with you
tonight from Mike, Bryan, and Melony.
Thanks for having me.