Gretchen Carlson, David Brooks: Political common ground in a polarized United States

0:11 Chris Anderson: Welcome to this next edition of TED Dialogues. We're trying to do some bridging here today. You know, the American dream has inspired millions of people around the world for many years. Today, I think, you can say that America is divided, perhaps more than ever, and the divisions seem to be getting worse. It's actually really hard for people on different sides to even have a conversation. People almost feel... disgusted with each other. Some families can't even speak to each other right now. Our purpose in this dialogue today is to try to do something about that, to try to have a different kind of conversation, to do some listening, some thinking, some understanding. And I have two people with us to help us do that. 1:05 They're not going to come at this hammer and tong against each other. This is not like cable news. This is two people who have both spent a lot of their working life in the political center or right of the center. They've immersed themselves in conservative worldviews, if you like. They know that space very well. And we're going to explore together how to think about what is happening right now, and whether we can find new ways to bridge and just to have wiser, more connected conversations. 1:35 With me, first of all, Gretchen Carlson, who has spent a decade working at Fox News, hosting "Fox and Friends" and then "The Real Story," before taking a courageous stance in filing sexual harassment claims against Roger Ailes, which eventually led to his departure from Fox News. David Brooks, who has earned the wrath of many of [The New York Times's] left-leaning readers because of his conservative views, and more recently, perhaps, some of the right-leaning readers because of his criticism of some aspects of Trump. Yet, his columns are usually the top one, two or three most-read content of the day because they're brilliant, because they bring psychology and social science to providing understanding for what's going on. So without further ado, a huge welcome to Gretchen and David. Come and join me. 2:33 (Applause) 2:37 So, Gretchen. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Why did they do this? 2:47 Gretchen Carlson: There are a lot of reasons, in my mind, why it happened. I mean, I think it was a movement of sorts, but it started long ago. It didn't just happen overnight. "Anger" would be the first word that I would think of — anger with nothing being done in Washington, anger about not being heard. I think there was a huge swath of the population that feels like Washington never listens to them, you know, a good part of the middle of America, not just the coasts, and he was somebody they felt was listening to their concerns. So I think those two issues would be the main reason. I have to throw in there also celebrity. I think that had a huge impact on Donald Trump becoming president. 3:34 CA: Was the anger justified? 3:37 David Brooks: Yeah, I think so. In 2015 and early 2016, I wrote about 30 columns with the following theme: don't worry, Donald Trump will never be the Republican nominee. 3:47 (Laughter) 3:48 And having done that and gotten that so wrong, I decided to spend the ensuing year just out in Trumpworld, and I found a lot of economic dislocation. I ran into a woman in West Virginia who was going to a funeral for her mom. She said, "The nice thing about being Catholic is we don't have to speak, and that's good, because we're not word people." That phrase rung in my head: word people. A lot of us in the TED community are word people, but if you're not, the economy has not been angled toward you, and so 11 million men, for example, are out of the labor force because those jobs are done away. A lot of social injury. You used to be able to say, "I'm not the richest person in the world, I'm not the most famous, but my neighbors can count on me and I get some dignity out of that." And because of celebritification or whatever, if you're not rich or famous, you feel invisible. And a lot of moral injury, sense of feeling betrayed, and frankly, in this country, we almost have one success story, which is you go to college, get a white-collar job, and you're a success, and if you don't fit in that formula, you feel like you're not respected. And so that accumulation of things — and when I talked to Trump voters and still do, I found most of them completely realistic about his failings, but they said, this is my shot. 4:58 GC: And yet I predicted that he would be the nominee, because I've known him for 27 years. He's a master marketer, and one of the things he did extremely well that President Obama also did extremely well, was simplifying the message, simplifying down to phrases and to a populist message. Even if he can't achieve it, it sounded good. And many people latched on to that simplicity again. It's something they could grasp onto: "I get that. I want that. That sounds fantastic." And I remember when he used to come on my show originally, before "The Apprentice" was even "The Apprentice," and he'd say it was the number one show on TV. I'd say back to him, "No, it's not." And he would say, "Yes it is, Gretchen." And I would say, "No it's not." But people at home would see that, and they'd be like, "Wow, I should be watching the number one show on TV." And — lo and behold — it became the number one show on TV. So he had this, I've seen this ability in him to be the master marketer. 5:56 CA: It's puzzling to a lot of people on the left that so many women voted for him, despite some of his comments. 6:04 GC: I wrote a column about this for Time Motto, saying that I really believe that lot of people put on blinders, and maybe for the first time, some people decided that policies they believed in and being heard and not being invisible anymore was more important to them than the way in which he had acted or acts as a human. And so human dignity — whether it would be the dust-up about the disabled reporter, or what happened in that audiotape with Billy Bush and the way in which he spoke about women — they put that aside and pretended as if they hadn't seen that or heard that, because to them, policies were more important. 6:46 CA: Right, so just because someone voted for Trump, it's not blind adherence to everything that he's said or stood for. 6:53 GC: No. I heard a lot of people that would say to me, "Wow, I just wish he would shut up before the election. If he would just stay quiet, he'd get elected." 7:03 CA: And so, maybe for people on the left there's a trap there, to sort of despise or just be baffled by the support, assuming that it's for some of the unattractive features. Actually, maybe they're supporting him despite those, because they see something exciting. They see a man of action. They see the choking hold of government being thrown off in some way and they're excited by that. 7:26 GC: But don't forget we saw that on the left as well — Bernie Sanders. So this is one of the commonalities that I think we can talk about today, "The Year of the Outsider," David — right? And even though Bernie Sanders has been in Congress for a long time, he was deemed an outsider this time. And so there was anger on the left as well, and so many people were in favor of Bernie Sanders. So I see it as a commonality. People who like Trump, people who like Bernie Sanders, they were liking different policies, but the underpinning was anger. 8:00 CA: David, there's often this narrative, then, that the sole explanation for Trump's victory and his rise is his tapping into anger in a very visceral way. But you've written a bit about that it's actually more than that, that there's a worldview that's being worked on here. Could you talk about that? 8:24 DB: I would say he understood what, frankly, I didn't, which is what debate we were having. And so I'd grown up starting with Reagan, and it was the big government versus small government debate. It was Barry Goldwater versus George McGovern, and that was the debate we had been having for a generation. It was: Democrats wanted to use government to enhance equality, Republicans wanted to limit government to enhance freedom. That was the debate. He understood what I think the two major parties did not, which was that's not the debate anymore. The debate is now open versus closed. On one side are those who have the tailwinds of globalization and the meritocracy blowing at their back, and they tend to favor open trade, open borders, open social mores, because there are so many opportunities. On the other side are those who feel the headwinds of globalization and the meritocracy just blasting in their faces, and they favor closed trade, closed borders, closed social mores, because they just want some security. And so he was right on that fundamental issue, and people were willing to overlook a lot to get there. And so he felt that sense of security. 9:26 We're speaking the morning after Trump's joint session speech. There are three traditional groups in the Republican Party. There are the foreign policies hawks who believe in America as global policeman. Trump totally repudiated that view. Second, there was the social conservatives who believed in religious liberty, pro-life, prayer in schools. He totally ignored that. There was not a single mention of a single social conservative issue. And then there were the fiscal hawks, the people who wanted to cut down on the national debt, Tea Party, cut the size of government. He's expanding the size of government! Here's a man who has single-handedly revolutionized a major American party because he understood where the debate was headed before other people. And then guys like Steve Bannon come in and give him substance to his impulses. 10:15 CA: And so take that a bit further, and maybe expand a bit more on your insights into Steve Bannon's worldview. Because he's sometimes tarred in very simple terms as this dangerous, racist, xenophobic, anger-sparking person. There's more to the story; that is perhaps an unfair simplification. 10:36 DB: I think that part is true, but there's another part that's probably true, too. He's part of a global movement. It's like being around Marxists in 1917. There's him here, there's the UKIP party, there's the National Front in France, there's Putin, there's a Turkish version, a Philippine version. So we have to recognize that this is a global intellectual movement. And it believes that wisdom and virtue is not held in individual conversation and civility the way a lot of us in the enlightenment side of the world do. It's held in — the German word is the "volk" — in the people, in the common, instinctive wisdom of the plain people. And the essential virtue of that people is always being threatened by outsiders. And he's got a strategy for how to get there. He's got a series of policies to bring the people up and repudiate the outsiders, whether those outsiders are Islam, Mexicans, the media, the coastal elites... And there's a whole worldview there; it's a very coherent worldview. I sort of have more respect for him. I loathe what he stands for and I think he's wrong on the substance, but it's interesting to see someone with a set of ideas find a vehicle, Donald Trump, and then try to take control of the White House in order to advance his viewpoint. 11:53 CA: So it's almost become, like, that the core question of our time now is: Can you be patriotic but also have a global mindset? Are these two things implacably opposed to each other? I mean, a lot of conservatives and, to the extent that it's a different category, a lot of Trump supporters, are infuriated by the coastal elites and the globalists because they see them as, sort of, not cheering for America, not embracing fully American values. I mean, have you seen that in your conversations with people, in your understanding of their mindset? 12:30 GC: I do think that there's a huge dif