Do you think those days are over when you could ever have principled, articulate um you know, coherent leadership?

No, I know, I mean, I mean, the worrisome thing for us now in America and I think there's an echo here is that one of the things teddy Roosevelt warned against was that democracy would break if people in different regions and religions and races began seeing each other as the other rather than his fellow american citizens.

And that's certainly what's happened in our country.

There's been a polarization for years actually between the people in the rural areas, between older people who felt like the country had passed them by, They lost their manufacturing jobs, they lost their middle class status.

They felt the elites weren't paying attention to them.

They felt the system of education hadn't given their kids mobility and then the people on the coasts for whom the financial world has been very good to them.

And this huge gap has arisen between the rich and the poor.

And the problem is that you need people going into politics whose desire is to heal those divisions and mr trump ran on exacerbating those divisions and is continuing to do so he found that group of people who were feeling hurt by the system and made them feel as if he were on their side.

And the one encouraging thing, which in and of itself is extraordinary because he is actually of the cause of their misery.

Absolutely.

And he's done nothing to help it.

And and he but and and he came from from that world that they were feeling and somehow celebrity and entertainment projected itself.

I mean, that's the worrisome and a very loud mouth.

And and and and you know, people in the rallies make America great again, isolationism, terribly unfair tariffs where, you know, America has been taken advantage of and immigrants are the cause.

So he found a scapegoat for these people for what was their problem, which was nothing to do with immigrants.

He's got a non diverse group of people who but there a core group, no matter what he does.

I mean, it's so many times during the campaign, we think it's over when this access Hollywood cape came and he talked about how he could do anything to any woman because of his power.

We thought it was over when he said john McCain, the senator wasn't a hero because he didn't break out of the prison.

You know, we thought that's the end.

Um in fact, there's been so many times when we thought it's the end.

And yet somehow that base stays with him.

But I think to your larger question, the one encouraging thing about the midterms was that my worry has been in these last years that the best people are not entering public life.

And maybe that's why we have a earth of leadership.

They know, you know, their private lives are gonna be exposed by the media.

They know they're gonna have to spend huge amounts of their time raising money and they spend like four hours out of every day?

They say raising money, which means they've got to appeal to a small group of people who often are the wealthy people and it hasn't been fun being in politics.

I mean, congress has gotten so little done, there's been so little bipartisanship for so long.

Would you want to go into politics instead?

These same people going into the financial world or they're going into to make money?

But the midterm elections were encouraging because a whole group of new people came into politics because of trump.

They've been so energized.

So you had more women by far than ever, ever before.

Teachers and doctors, People who've never been in public life before.

And you had young people voting 500% times more than they did in the last midterm, you had the largest midterm long term lines.

So maybe the citizens are getting awakened to the fact that they have to take some responsibility because they voted, I mean, not they, but the young didn't vote as much as they should have a lot of Hispanics didn't vote like you would think they would have and now they're they're energized.

So if that happens, maybe we'll see a change, but will those people who do those new people Ascend to leadership?

Where does leadership come?

I mean, they okay, they run against the grain and they've achieved.

But how do you, how do you believe that they will go forward, given that they're now doing it in the context of the social network of an election, for example, in America which cost $5 billion.

You know, that the Hindrances are vast.

I guess the hope I have is that every real change that's come place in our country has come from a movement.

I mean when Lincoln was called the Liberator, he said, um don't call me that.

It was the anti slavery movement that did it all.

And that's true.

The anti slavery movement arose.

It took years to develop.

It then creates the old the republican party and then Lincoln becomes the spokesman for that.

The progressive movement in the cities and states was there long before teddy Roosevelt and franklin Roosevelt and it already started settlement houses, there was a social gospel in the churches.

They were trying to soften the terrible aspects of the Industrial Revolution.

And of course, the civil rights movement was there before Lyndon johnson.

So what we need in our country and maybe here too is we need a political revolution.

The way we elect our presidents is no good.

The congressional boundaries are drawn by partisans gerrymandered.

Um the money in the system is absolutely the poison.

Um, and and there's, you know, there's ways to change those things.

I mean, there's constitutional amendments to get rid of some of them.

There's changes in the congressional boundary lines.

FDR said problems created by man can be solved by man.

Um, So I guess I'm still optimistic that we've been through worse times before and we've come through them again.

But it's very hard to see.

It's because these guys that are coming into the Congress and these women are going to be a freshman, you know, and the leaders are the old people and even like nancy Pelosi, our speaker, If she wins, will she then go against these younger people that are saying they won't vote for her or will she have the generosity to realize?

I've got to include them in the system even though they didn't vote for me.

It's it's a complicated thing.

But somehow we've got to believe that democracy is not failing.

Although I was saying to john, I saw an article in the paper the other day where it said that right now people in America they would, a parent would feel worse if their child married somebody from the opposite party than if they were different religions or races.

That's how hyperpartisanship things are in our country.