Eric Liu
Eric Liu confronts feelings of powerlessness and the significance of patriotism in the U.S. He is the CEO of Citizen University and author of "You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen." Find him at www.citizenuniversity.us
Transcript
Eric Liu:
That is a very dangerous thing for a country when one side thinks it gets to own patriotism and own the flag, and when the other side actually disavows it and despises it. That's a recipe for disunion and it's a recipe for kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today's guest is almost too perfect for this podcast. Eric Liu is the founder and CEO of Citizen University. His organization confronts something I definitely see more of today, and that is this hyper-individualism, the cynicism, and general feeling of powerlessness that is so pervasive among Americans. His civic Saturdays are these faith-like gatherings where people sing together, they hear readings, they consider a sermon about the role of being a citizen that help foster a community of togetherness all across the country. Our conversation explores the layered dynamics of power, history's enduring lessons, and the significance of embracing patriotism.
It is my pleasure to share this conversation with you, Eric. It is great to have you on this podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Eric Liu:
Ted, thank you for having me.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Eric, we end every episode with the same question and I actually am going to flip things for this episode and ask that last question first because I think it is going to really underpin the entire conversation and it's a big question, but I think you're up to it. What does it mean to be a good citizen?
Eric Liu:
Well, first of all, lemme just back up in even using that word in the name of our organization, Citizen University, and all of our mission statement is about building a culture of powerful, responsible citizenship. What we don't mean in the first place is something that's restricted only to a legal sense of United States citizenship. I do believe United States citizenship matters hugely, but in our work, we think about citizenship and the idea of a citizen in a broader, more capacious ethical sense, of being a member of the body, a contributor to community. Understood that way, there are plenty of people who lack the documents but live like big citizens and there are plenty more people who have the documents and don't. We have in our work, Ted, a very simple equation that defines citizenship or what you're asking about really good citizenship. And the equation is this: power plus character equals citizenship. To live like a citizen in the way that I've been describing requires both a literacy in power, a fluency and understanding of what power is, what forms it takes, how it flows, why that flow is what it is, how it came to be that way, how it can be changed, and how you can practice power. But then coupling that literacy in power with a grounding in civic character, a set of norms and values, and again, dispositions that are not only about individual virtue and personal attributes of grit and perseverance and so on and so forth, but kind of character in the collective.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Why or how did you discover the importance of the literacy in power as it relates to citizenship?
Eric Liu:
Well, power itself is a word that a lot of people have an allergic reaction to. It seems a little bit like a dirty word. People are power mad. They're power hungry, someone's going on a power trip. Those aren't generally words of praise, right? Power is a bad thing. And I think one of the things that we teach centrally in our work is that power is not inherently a dirty word or a dirty thing. Power is like physics or fire. It just is. It is a force that it certainly can be put to negative, malevolent uses, but it can be put as well to beneficial uses. In fact, the fact that they can be put to malevolent use only doubles your obligation to understand what to do with these things and how they could actually be put to beneficial use. And the other part of your question, why literacy, I think is maybe at the heart of your question, it's hardly even metaphorical. To be able to read and write is a central skill in a society and to be able to read and write power is also a central skill of citizenship in a democracy.
If I were to ask you, sitting in Brooklyn, draw me a map of power in Brooklyn, and you had a whiteboard like, okay, you might start with, oh, okay, well, who's the member of the city council that represents my part of Brooklyn, who's the captain of the police precinct here? And that'd be one layer of power in Brooklyn. And then you'd get to, okay, well this business person, this developer, this person who runs a local press here, this person who runs an ethnic press here---and all of a sudden you'd have a much more complex picture of who runs Brooklyn. You realize that that's a thing to be able to write and read, and therefore to be able to rewrite and to be able to revise. And that to me is a matter of literacy.
Ted Roosevelt V:
As you see people becoming more literate in power, I wonder if that changes their sense of the role of their ability to participate in power. Is it empowering to understand this or is it disempowering in some cases to understand this?
Eric Liu:
I think it can certainly be both, and it depends on what you do with that reading of power. Pick your place in the United States, how rigged a game can feel, and that's not just national politics and the kind of politics of national grievance about rigged games. Actually at the most hyper-local levels is often where you find the most rigged because people are paying the least attention to it. And there's just this sense of, well, that's just the way it is and it's the way it's been and I've got to kind of go along with it. And understanding of that can be disempowering. But it can also, if you couple your reading of the current map with a reading of history and a reading of the ways in which over the course of our country's history over and over again, what seemed like to be some of the most unequal, stacked decks, rigged games, have been occasions for people starting at the smallest scale to ask, why is it this way? Why can't we change things? I know this podcast isn't all about your great-great-grandfather, but I happen to be a student of TR, Teddy Roosevelt, and to use literally the title of Edmund Morris's iconic biography, the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and that rise was at a hyperlocal level in New York City politics, realizing how corrupt and rigged it was and saying, you know what? This is kind of BS. I think a few of us could change this. And a few people like him did change it, in the way that closed, clannish, precinct-level democratic clubs, sub-party clubs operated then changed it in the way that the most corrupt institution, the NYPD---back then, a long, long history of rigged games and institutional corruption. And he broke that, and that's partly a story of an exceptional man by force of his exceptional personality, but the actual civic story was that he did almost none of that reform alone.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's so interesting that you referenced Teddy Roosevelt. I think his most famous speech is "Citizenship in a Republic." It's more colloquially known as "the man in the arena" speech, but it's often interpreted as an ode to rugged individualism when in fact, if you read the whole speech, it's an ode to collective action in a republic. And the quote that gets pulled out most often is a lead-in to him saying, yes, the individual is important, yes, they have to try---but every individual is going to be overrun by collective action and that you need to do things through collective action. So you're exactly right to say that he was a force of nature, but he very much understood the need for the collective
Eric Liu:
Rugged individualism never got a barn raised. Rugged individualism never cleared a field. Rugged individualism is not what made D-Day possible, and it's not what made the moon landing possible. Rugged individualism again is a strand of DNA that must be comfortable with a sense of mutual responsibility-taking and collective vision and common purpose.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm curious about where you think we stand as a nation right now on that culture of citizenship.
Eric Liu:
Well, I think we're not in a great place. So much of our conversations about democracy being in trouble right now focus on one half of the cycle, which is our political institutions. People fixate on the electoral college and the Supreme Court and gerrymandering and so on and so forth. But political institutions are always in a cyclical relationship with civic culture.
Civic culture: the norms, the narratives, the habits, the values, the rituals, the mindsets that determine what we think is okay in how we live together. Those things are always influencing each other. And so when you have political institutions that are rigged and corrupt and captured, that feeds a civic culture of disengagement and cynicism and nihilism, right? And there's a lot of pain and there's a lot of brokenness in civic and communal life, and that gets expressed unfortunately through a very blunt instrument for pain relief, and that's called a presidential election. That kind of change, that kind of culture change is least effective at a presidential election national level. It's most effective when you look around at a human scale of who are your neighbors and what are the ways in which we foster this culture of showing up, seeing each other in each other at a communal level, at a human scale. And so I do think that culture precedes structure.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Eric, what I hear you saying is that presidential elections are more of a symptom of the problem, not the problem themselves, and that the problem itself is this decline, the civic decline that's taking place. I wonder if in your work you've identified some of the causes for the civic decline over the last---call it twenty, thirty, forty years.
Eric Liu:
We've been living through this deep---040, 50, 60 year---this tectonic, grinding shift of concentration of wealth, the fact that a small handful of families in the United States control more wealth, more of the nation's wealth than the bottom 50% of us, than 150 million of us. Literally your great great grandfather is spinning in his grave. I mean, that is the kind of stuff that led to the progressive era that led to angry populism and angry revolutionary spirit on both the right and the left, starting in the 1870s, 1880s and all the way through the early 19 hundreds. But a whole sequence of other decisions that we made in our national politics that you can think of as trickle down economics. All of these things led to an eroding of our middle class, a rigging of our tax system to reward wealth. And so to me, the raw angry populism of left and right in American politics today is not a surprise. In fact, quite frankly---whether it was the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or the original rise of Donald Trump or the rise of Bernie Sanders or Trump's reelection---these things are literally right on schedule. They are exactly what happens when you have a couple of generations of this grinding kind of inequality and concentration of wealth. So I think that's the big one.
What we have also this time more than they had in the United States 120 years ago, is this big demographic shift as well. Again, in our lifetimes just for the last 60 years, for the first time the United States is trying out what it looks like and feels like to have a multiracial democratic republic, you put that together with the zero sum scarcity thinking that comes when you have an age of economic inequality and it becomes much more explosive.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What I think is maybe the silver lining in what you're talking about is when you talk about things sort of being right on time and that it's happened before, it suggests that this is a cyclical trend as opposed to a secular trend. But I guess the underlying question would be, do you believe that? Do you believe that this is a cyclical trend, that this is something that does happen and that there is a pathway out of this?
Eric Liu:
I believe that it is an emergent trend. I believe that the angry zero sum nativism and angry populism on both left and right in the United States right now is the emergent phenomenon that comes out of a complex adaptive ecosystem that gets rigged the way ours has gotten rigged. I don't say cyclical though, because cyclical almost can give you a little too much confidence of, well, things go this way and then things correct themselves and it happened before, it'll correct itself again. No. Emergent phenomena are emergent in that cause leads to effect, but then what we do with those effects, what the effects in turn cause us to do, that's unwritten. And when you get to a point where people get checked out, where people just start yearning for a strongman to fix things for us, where strongmen come to power through democratic means, through what some of the founders feared as a mobocracy, people start feeling like, you know what? What I want is not freedom, but freedom from freedom.
When you look at authoritarian systems, autocratic systems, systems that have to run up through a central command and control to a central leader, those are systems that are completely not resilient. They can't adapt because they don't take the signals from the bottom up. And a democracy sends signals from the bottom up. And again, a presidential election is a very blunt way of receiving and sending those signals. And as much as I don't like Donald Trump, the man and the public figure, I am very attuned to those signals and I want to figure out how does this system, how does the body heal itself? And it heals itself by listening to those signals. What are the pain points? So again, it's not cyclical in the sense that, oh, the pendulum is going to swing back and we're going to fix ourselves. It's emergent in the sense of this stuff is happening now. Now we get to choose and we get to decide how do we respond to these signals.
Ted Roosevelt V:
My interpretation of the most recent presidential election was that most voters were faced with two candidates, one of which was saying the system's broken, one of which was saying, the system's fine and we need to make some small changes on the margins. And the signal, the main signal, that was sent was there's a strong sense that the system is broken right now. And I don't know that that message is an incorrect message on the whole.
Eric Liu:
I mean, the system is broken. Most of us are not being represented by our system right now. But I think even beyond that, which is almost a political science kind of---before you get to the political science of it, I think a deeper instinctual thing that we got to remember is that all politics is pain relief. Like I said, a presidential election is a very blunt instrument for pain relief. It's a binary, it's very oversimplifying. But in the 2024 election, one candidate offered pain relief. The other candidate, not really. One of the programs we have at Citizen University are these gatherings that we started in 2016 called Civic Saturdays, and these gatherings are like a civic equivalent to a faith gathering. They're like a civic church or synagogue or mosque, and they're happening at every scale of local life, at a neighborhood level, at a city level.
And we gave it this format because when you ask people do they think the system's broken, they'll say yes, and they may feel angry about it, but when you ask them what hurts, that's a different kind of inquiry. That's a different kind of space, and it's a kind of space that is about heart and about belonging and about a yearning to be part of something in which you're not alone. And it makes you remember and recognize that democracy itself only works if enough of us believe democracy works, and that is a measure of faith. We take a leap of faith every day to think that the game doesn't have to be rigged forever and people don't have to be screwed over forever. But you have to nurture that faith and you have to be reminded that you're not alone in your loss of faith, in your doubt about whether the system actually is going to work for me. You can't just do that as a spectator, scrolling and doom scrolling, looking at national politics, you've got to be able to join face-to-face with people like you and unlike you, and sit in a room and talk about what hurts, be reminded of what we have in common, and then recommit as one does at a faith gathering. Recommit to each other, recommit to trying to make this thing work. Everybody has to start searching out or creating spaces and arenas and rituals where we can start feeling our way forward together.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Something that's come up a couple times on this podcast recently in similar conversations has been the decline in organized religion and the decline in third spaces. And I'm curious: how much, was it a direct response to that or is it just sort of natural that it's filling that role?
Eric Liu:
When the 2016 election happened, we said, okay, we can't take our time mapping out a plan for Civic Saturdays over the next few months. We got to do one now Saturday. And so four days notice, we put together, it was the Saturday after the 2016 election, the very first such gathering. And we just whipped it together, just creating gatherings in which people could express voice, having a rough frame of a faith gathering, finding somebody who could sing. And we use the basement reading room of Elliot Bay book company here in Seattle, our great independent bookstore, and we hope that 30-40 people might show up at this first one and 220 people crammed into this reading room because we tapped into something. This was not an intellectual, cognitive thing of, hm, it seems like over 75 years there's been a decline of da-da-da-da, let's create some associations that can counter that decline.
No, this was a: people are hurting and there's no place for people to go. Let's make something. Let's invite people into a space. To me, democracy is not a machine. It's not a mechanistic, technical, cogs and gears thing that you kind of oil from time to time and it runs itself. Democracy is a garden and gardens require gardeners. Gardens don't run themselves. If you treat a garden as a laissez-faire affair, it'll go great for a while, but then pretty soon noxious weeds take over and the thing dies. And what we have forgotten how to do in our lifetimes is how to tend to the garden. And that means how to join a club. That means how to start a club. And I'm not talking just political and civic clubs, it can be a club about sports, it can be a club about---a book club. Whatever it is, that habit of joining is one that we've got to rebuild, and that's the DNA from which the rest of associational life begins to emerge. And it took 50, 60 years for that to decline, and it's going to take a good long time for it to revive, but we've got to start somewhere and we've got to start now.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You talk about the habit of joining and it reminds me of a defense of patriotism that you've made a couple times in the past, and patriotism has been a word that has gone out of vogue in some circles, certainly among progressives--- something that I find disheartening in a lot of ways because I grew up in an era where being a proud American was an expectation, I think for most people. It's not to say that the country was perfect, but I was really quite pleased to see your full-throated defense of patriotism. What led you to that as kind of a piece of the puzzle here?
Eric Liu:
I mean, for starters, I'm the child of immigrants, and when you are the child of immigrants, when you are a second generation American, you are conscious all the time that all I did was have the dumb luck to be born here.
I literally am the inheritor and therefore the steward of a ton of opportunities that other people made possible, starting with my parents who did the heavy lifting and took the great risks to come to a new society with no connections or resources, but then also to be the inheritor in a deeper sense. That every freedom we have is a responsibility to sustain and nurture the ecosystem that made such freedoms possible. And then I think the flip side of that is when you're the son of Chinese immigrants, you're also very conscious of the ways in which this country has broken its promises over and over again from minute one.
And so my notion of patriotism has never been this kind of blind celebratory jingoism. "Hey, my country's awesome, we're number one, woo-hoo!" If that's the depth of your patriotism, that's not true. That's a very shallow, fake patriotism. But if all you have conversely is, "my country sucks. My country's been breaking promises from minute one, my country's been oppressing me and people like me from the beginning, why should I believe in this?" That also is no way to live in a society. And unfortunately, I think what's happened in our lifetimes is that the American right has wanted to believe only in a positive, "tell me only the good news"-version of patriotism. And the American left has bought into an idea that America could do no right and has only been wrong and has only been the oppressor. And I think starting in Vietnam, it just became more fashionable among American progressives to keep patriotism at arm's length.
And that is a very dangerous thing for a country when one side thinks it gets to own patriotism and own the flag, and when the other side actually disavows it and despises it. That's a recipe for Disunion and it's a recipe for kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. To me, true patriotism, it's to understand the United States is a nation built on a foundation of words and ideas. We are a credal nation, we are made up of nothing but a creed that is both an incredibly powerful thing and an incredibly fragile thing. The only measure of patriotism is are you trying to push our society, our communities, and ourselves to close the gap between our creed and our deeds. And in a country that has had as its heroes, people like your great great grandfather who was an incredible progressive, an incredible force of nature, an incredible reformer, and not to be anachronistic, but held views that would not be considered enlightened today and was a proud imperialist in many ways and had many things that were part of the ugly that go along with the good and had worldviews that were part of the bad that go along with the beautiful.
That to be a true patriot is to close that gap, but also to remember that union means holding all these things together in an integral whole. That there is no pure vision. There is no vision of "I'm 100% pure and good, and I've excised from myself and from my life, all the impure and the bad." That is a road to authoritarianism, thinking that you can just get purity and banish the impure. Our history is impure. Our communities are impure, our leaders are impure, and frankly, our own hearts are impure in this way. The point isn't to try to banish the bad parts. The point is to accept them, to recognize them, and then to commit to transcending them and minimizing them in ways that are grown up and in ways that are about the beautiful possibilities, again, of a multiracial mass democratic republic.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's beautiful. And what are maybe the more practical, actionable items that people can do at this point to embody that spirit now?
Eric Liu:
The first practical thing I would say to every listener is join something right now. Join a club, join an association, build that muscle of being with a group of unlike people where you have to come to a common agenda toward common purpose, resolve differences under a common set of rules and expectations. The second thing I would say is read and take in media in a way that is not just from sources you agree with, diversify your diet. But if you are left of center, start reading principled conservatives.
If you are a conservative, a moderate conservative, start reading thoughtful people on the left. And so you've got to diversify your diet intellectually, ideologically, and politically. The third very practical thing is just serve in ways that are about a third thing. And what I mean is this: any form of service at the local level, any form of volunteerism or engagement. And again, this doesn't have to be your form of joining a club, it can be just once or twice a year, but some form of joining with people who are very different from you, where what you're coming together to do is not talk about yourselves, not talk about your worldview and my worldview and let's hash it out, our difference in worldviews. But we're working on a third thing. And then I think the last thing I would say very practically is read history. And that can be American history, that can be global history, that can be hyper-local history. But understand that all of these things have happened before, all of the fights, all of the arguments, all of the challenges and struggles over power have precedent and you can learn from them. And our attention spans have shortened so much. And so to be able to read history is really important for living like a citizen.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you for this conversation. It's been really informative for me. You're unbelievably eloquent and I really appreciate the time you've taken to talk with us today.
Eric Liu:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, but also just thank you for, I mean---literally everything I've just said about what it means to live like a citizen, you're doing, both by having this podcast and by stewarding your great-great-grandfather's legacy by finding new ways that are relevant to our times to show up and to be useful to society. And I think every one of us comes with our own particular baggage, our own particular advantage, our own particular perspective, our own particular liabilities. And it's for each of us to decide and choose, what am I going to do with that? How am I going to show up? And this podcast is a great example and leading by example of what it means to show up. So thanks, Ted.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate it.
Thank you again, Eric. I'm confident that you've inspired our listeners to show up in new ways, whether it's by volunteering or joining a club, or even hitting a Civic Saturday. To learn more about Eric Liu's work or to get involved, just head to CitizenUniversity.us. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.