Why should we care about government, anyway? With Eric Liu 

Valerie Boyd: Today, we’re talking to Eric Liu, CEO and co-founder of Citizen University, a nonprofit organization working to strengthen civil engagement across the United States. Eric began his career in Washington on the Hill, and then in the Clinton White House, where he worked as a speechwriter and domestic policy advisor. 

He’s worked in the media and the social sector, including as the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program, and served on the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service under President Obama. He’s also written multiple books, given TED Talks, and been a tireless advocate for people to embrace their civic power and connect across partisan divides. 

Today, we talked to him about civic engagement, trust in our public institutions, and the peaceful transfer of power. Eric, thanks so much for joining us.  

Eric Liu: It’s great to be here, Valerie.  

Valerie Boyd: So, Eric, I’d love to start with your government service and ask about your several different roles in government, including in the Clinton administration. 

Did government work spark your career in civics or was civics always in your blood?  

Eric Liu: That’s a great question. Civics was not always in my blood per se, but service I think was, in two ways. I, I’m a child of immigrants. And I think that’s kind of foundational as a fact for me that, you know, my parents were born in mainland China, went to Taiwan during the years of war and revolution there, came to the U.S. in the late fifties, met in the U.S., met in New York, and I was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and, the household I grew up in wasn’t particularly political, although it was quite civic, I suppose. My parents were very involved in the neighborhood and Chinese community and other sorts of, um, civic activities. 

But there was also just an ethos that was mainly unspoken that I felt very strongly, and I think, many kids of immigrants, many second-generation Americans probably can relate to this. And the ethos was basically that all I had done was have the dumb luck to be born here. That it was my parents who had done the heavy lifting, made the hard choices, made the sacrifices, and so the question for me, growing up in the United States, in the Hudson Valley, in an IBM town at the peak of American prosperity and power in the, you know, I was born in ‘68, so, the question for me was, not just, oh, how did I luck into being born here at this time, but what was I going to do to make it worth it? 

What was I going to do to earn it in a sense? And, and I think that ethos was very much in me. It was in my blood in a different way, too. I had a grandfather, my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, but was kind of a legend in my family lore. Was a young, he was the son of a farmer in Hunan province who became a pilot, when the Republic of China was created and he ultimately, joined and, and later on led the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during the Sino Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. 

And his name in Chinese is Liu Guoyun, and, and Liu is the family name. Guoyun translates roughly into deliverance of the nation. And he actually, you know, the son of a farmer, his father made a big bet and, and the bet was correct that Liu Guoyun would actually be part of the deliverance of his nation. 

And the creation of the Republic of China and all that, but for me growing up with stories and images of this grandfather and being rooted in American soil and, having absorbed all of those kinds of implicit lessons from my parents about be useful, contribute to this country now, all led to an orientation toward service. And I was curious about that. And so, when I was, when I got to college, I, didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but, spring break of freshman year, I went to Yale College, and Yale had all of these externship opportunities for two weeks where you could get placed in the office of various Yale alumni.  

And, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up, so I applied to like an architect’s office and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and some other offices and, uh, a, a bank maybe, but I was drawn enough to political and, you know, politics and civic life that I also applied to a few offices on Capitol Hill. 

Ended up getting an internship, in the office of a guy named David Boren, who at the time was a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, and I spent those two weeks of freshman year spring break in his office and that was my first introduction to D.C., to politics, to national politics, and, from there, a lot of what you read in my introduction unfolded. 

I, after graduating, went to work for Senator Boren. When President Clinton was elected, I went to work for President Clinton and all of that. It was actually, the deeper lessons that I’ve had about democracy and citizenship came not from Washington, D.C., but from the other Washington, where I live now, here in Seattle, and that’s a whole different layer of democratic life and, and putting, concrete, tangible expression to some of the high ideals that animate national political life. 

But I’ll save that for later, just to say all of that was kind of the journey that starts with being a child of immigrants and growing up with this ethos of be useful to this country.  

Valerie Boyd: Well, one thing I’ll save for later too is, is following up on what you raised about what inspires young people to join the government. 

And I think there’s a tie between the Partnership for Public Service’s work and, and your work there. One more point of connection is when my last job in government was doing international affairs and a lot of the young people that we hired were Boren scholars.  

Eric Liu: Oh, yes.  

Valerie Boyd: And, um, and so I suspect that’s a namesake for your first boss. 

Eric Liu: Totally. And look, I think, it wasn’t just that I got to work on Capitol Hill. Senator Boren was a great mentor and teacher. He had a very young staff. We were all in our 20s and he would just throw us into the deep end and figure let us fail, let us figure stuff out, because naturally he, he loved to kind of you know watch us try things and then when things did or didn’t work come and do a post-game analysis of why it might have been better to talk to this person first before you try to, you know, roll out this policy or whatever and that spirit of, teaching, and also that spirit of, you know, there aren’t a whole lot of, people like that left, in politics anymore who think of their role as kind of stewarding, institution in trying to give opportunities for young people to, to grow into their own. 

So, I love that that, that’s a through line between your work and, and mine, Valerie.  

Valerie Boyd: Well, me too. And, and I also love that your grandfather’s name deliverance of a nation weighs on you, that there’s no pressure there.  

Eric Liu: Well, you know, it’s a different form of government service, but for a quite, a quite good stretch of college, I actually thought I would be entering public service through the Marine Corps. 

I was inspired by my grandfather. I always wanted to do something in the military and I went through Marine Corps officer candidate school when I was at Yale, and finished both summers and was, you know, eligible for a second lieutenant commission when I graduated, uh, but it was during senior year that I had a, I had to really kind of search and with, with friends and mentors ask, what form of public service was going to be the most, the way in which I could be most useful, in which the, the kind of ways that I am could be most brought to bear. 

And enough mentors stood on one shoulder and said, go into government service, in something, you know, in, in politics, versus going into the military. And that’s what I chose ultimately to do. But I also think it’s really important for the work that you all do at the Partnership for Public Service. 

You know better than most that, uh the, the breadth of ways to serve is so great. And we, we in the United States, in the years since 9/11, have gotten into a, almost a rote habit of thanking military veterans for their service, uh which we should, and I think we need to build up the habit of thanking people who go into other forms of public service, whether it’s at the Department of Housing and Urban, Urban Development, or AmeriCorps, or the Peace Corps, or the Surgeon General’s Office, or EPA, that these are forms of being useful to our country.  

And all of that was formed both during those years, but also, yeah, as you say, with my grandfather’s name, kind of emblazoned on my heart.  

Valerie Boyd: You took the words out of my mouth about celebrating civil servants, but I, I want to, before we dive into some of the work that you’re doing now, I want to fast forward and ask you to introduce our audience to Citizen University and the work that you’re doing there. I think it’ll help ground this conversation as we talk about trust in government and the role that each of us play.  

Eric Liu: So, Citizen University is a national nonprofit whose work is all about trying to foster a culture of powerful, responsible citizenship. 

And we do that through a variety of different programs, which I can talk about in a moment. But I want to back up and just emphasize some of the core words and what I just said. Culture. We really do believe in the centrality of culture, and, by that I mean the norms, values, narratives, habits, rituals, that add up to how we behave together in public, how we live together, what we make as a way of being normal, in the way we govern ourselves in a multiracial democracy like ours. 

And that civic culture is so important, it is actually, I, I would submit to you, upstream of policy and politics, that, and elections even, that, you know, your room to make change through structural reform in elections and policymaking is defined by what kind of culture you have. If you have a culture that is hyper individualistic and super nihilistic and cynical, and mistrusting of government and each other, then your room to make change through government is extremely cramped. 

But if you have a different culture in which everybody takes responsibility for their part of the problem, in which we balance rights and responsibilities, in which we, understand that, that democracy works only if we believe democracy works and, and that we therefore have to kind of keep on nurturing institutions that are worthy of our, of our faith, then you, then you have more room to make, take actions together and solve problems together in big ways. 

And so, our, work is all about really emphasizing the culture side of the equation and. We think about citizenship itself, not in terms of documentation status or passport holding. That notion of citizenship, important as that is, we, we are focused on a broader ethical conception of citizenship that we define in this very simple equation, which is that power plus character equals citizenship. 

To live like a citizen in this sense requires both an understanding of power and how power works and what power is and what forms it takes in your community, in your institutions, and how you can draw that map of power, redraw that map, draw yourself into that map of power. But then to couple that fluency and that literacy and power with a grounding in civic character, a set of values and norms that aren’t just about you and aren’t just about now but are about what we’ve inherited and what we owe the future. 

And are about a set of norms and values that are, again, oriented towards service and contribution. And that, recognizing that people aren’t born with those tenets of civic character. They have to be cultivated. Through practice, through intentional gatherings and rituals, and, all of our programs, some of them are about rituals, we have a program called Civic Saturdays, which are just a, a civic analog to faith gatherings that happen all over the country. 

We train people, catalytic people, from small towns, big cities, red and blue places, in dozens of states around the country to lead these gatherings, and they take the form and the structure of church or synagogue or mosque, of a faith gathering, even though they’re not those things. They take that format structure on purpose, because again, the only thing that binds us together in a country as diverse as ours, where we don’t have a common God, a common language, a common ancestor, a common history, and a common piece of soil, is a set of ideas, a set of promises, and that you can think of as the American creed. 

And much of the time when we do think about it, we are thinking about the ways that our country has betrayed the creed. We’re thinking about the ways in which we have not lived up to all men are created equal, in which we have undermined the idea of government of, by, and for the people. 

And so Civic Saturdays are meant to invite people into a ritual where we can kind of Not just stew in private anger, but actually come together and ask each other what’s broken What’s broken in our hearts what’s broken in our community and what responsibility do we have to take now where we live? 

For creating a new kind of set of norms and habits and behaviors and invitations for people, to recognize that there is no them that’s breaking everything. It’s us, it’s us either checking out or us actively breaking things. And so Civic Saturdays is one of our programs, and there are others I can talk about. 

Some are oriented toward young people, and the teaching of, of civic power in ways that are about, both conservative and progressive ideas, really mixing these in ways that recognize that America has two strands of DNA, you know, some that are, focused on deep conservative ideas of tradition and place and, and liberty, and some that are focused on progressive ideas of equality and belonging and so forth and that, and we’ve got to weave those together. But all of that work, I have to say, Valerie, and this goes back to what I was alluding to earlier, is somewhat informed by my time in D.C., but in, in an indirect way. I came out of D.C. and came out of my time working in media and politics and so forth, recognizing that I had this massive accumulation of power. 

I knew people who were decision makers. I knew people who were in high positions in office. I could make stuff happen. All this stuff and every, I think every listener to your podcast, wherever you are, you don’t have to have worked in the white house. 

If you’re even caring enough to listen to Transition Lab podcast, you already yourself have a mound of power, some inventory of forms of people power, ideas power, connections power, money power, you know, power of understanding how government and state work, and when you take stock of that inventory of your, your personal civic power, you come as I came to after I left D.C. to a very simple binary question, which is, “Am I going to hoard or am I going to circulate?” 

And I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people in these times right now hoard. I came out of that experience feeling like I had to circulate. And that was a big driver for creating Citizen University, to kind of share what I had begun to understand and internalize. About how power operates and how you couple power with character in ways that are about, helping to bring, everyday Americans into a sense of greater responsibility taking in our civic life across political divides, across racial and generational divides. 

In, in ways that, roll up to the kind of public service that you all are about. 

Valerie Boyd: So, one of the themes that you’ve touched on, and I think in your, in your writings, you’ve talked about the idea of legitimacy for the government as the widespread belief that institutions of power are just, both in their origins and their operations and should thus be respected. 

And you’ve said it’s slow to accumulate and quick to evaporate. And so, this, this is really complimentary to a theme of trust in government that the partnership has been prioritizing, in the last year or two and, and, looking ahead for future years as both how do we increase, the public’s trust in government? And as you said, there are so many public servants that are air traffic controllers and nuclear safety experts and managing food safety. How do we tell those stories? And also, how do we help improve the trustworthiness of government. How can effective management help Americans really trust that the government is acting in their best interest. 

So, what part of that work starting out has been some, some surveys and a national survey found that when you, ask people about trusting government the first thing they think about is kind of bickering, at the congressional level, and they tend not to be, thinking about career civil servants. 

But when you dive in and ask about, do you trust the National Park Service? Do you trust the safety of water? When it comes down to it, people are appreciative of their interactions with different agencies. And one more thing that we did in this survey data was look at, the, the peaceful transfer of power. 

And we were really concerned last year to see that, out of, uh nationally representative sample, 44 percent of Americans were either unsure that there would be a peaceful transfer of power if a new candidate won in 2024 or that they didn’t believe there would be. And that feels like just a red alarm for one of our, one of the institutions of our democracy that that has sort of defined us since our founding. 

So, I want to go back to your, work on the idea of legitimacy, that the institutions of power are just, and ask for your perspective. Are American institutions suffering from a lack of trust and legitimacy today?  

Eric Liu: I mean, it’s incontrovertible that they are. We are in a period of a crisis of, of trust, a crisis, a creeping crisis of legitimacy, and to me, there’s so much in what you just shared, Valerie, that is worth unpacking. So yes, starting with the question of legitimacy, legitimacy does rest on an, on an assumption of justice. What that assumption is, it has to be a systemic assumption. 

Let’s take the courts, for instance, right? Do courts sometimes get it wrong? Sure. Do court, are courts sometimes corrupt? Yes. But are courts sometimes just doing their best and still get it wrong? Of course. You know, courts are not machines. They’re made of humans making human judgment, and that’s true of both judges and juries. 

And so, to believe for instance in the rule of law is not necessarily to believe that courts get it right and are just every single time. it is to believe rather that there is a system that if you, that if you pre commit to a set of rules in which there is neutral adjudication of disputes, And if you pre commit to that and you know that you’re going to win some and you’re going to lose some and you might quite not like a result that, that it’s that pre commitment that keeps the thing going, that if we only, as citizens decide, I’m not going to pre commit, I’m only going to selectively commit, and I’m only going to commit, to treating these institutions as just if I like the result, then you have completely at that point undermined the whole point. 

Of legitimacy and of self-government and institutions at that point, you are retreating to, only one half of my equation to raw power and what can raw might, get you, without the, the civic character side of forbearance. And that civic character side, of trust that recognizes that we have to pre-commit to the rules of the game. 

And I think that, that is a cultural norm, right? There’s, that cannot be legislated. Congress today cannot legislate that we believe more in our institutions. This is a matter of us in conversation. And so, a podcast like this is part of that. The gatherings at Citizen University pulls together, is part of that. 

The ecosystem of civil society associations all around our country is part of that. And people in conversation with each other about these topics is part of that. Now, just because people, if you, you know, your surveys show that trust is declining and people’s faith in each other and in our institutions is eroding, just what, just because that’s true doesn’t mean that that is inherently problematic, right? 

There are, there are two big bangs in the formation of the American Republic, for purposes of your focus at the Transition Lab. One is, yes. The peaceful transfer of power in the example set by George Washington, and who practiced forbearance. He didn’t do what he could have done. 

What he could have done was say, you know what? I’m super popular and I like being president and you know what? I think we had it all wrong. I think the country is better when you have continuity. And I’m just going to stay on after my second term, and he probably would have gotten away with it. He probably could have gotten away with it because of how loved and respected he was at that time. 

And because of how ill organized institutions were, would have been in opposition to that, but he forebore, he did not do that. Right. And, and we have the traditions that we’ve inherited since then. But the other part of the big bang from the, from the country’s birth is, you know, the foundational mistrust of government and institutions and a fear of creeping tyranny at every turn. 

That’s how America was born. And so, you can’t eradicate that from our DNA. Every survey, even in the best of times, is going to find on some level Americans don’t trust And Americans don’t trust concentrated power, and they don’t trust concentrated power, especially when it’s held by faceless, nameless bureaucrats who are doing things they think they don’t like. 

So that’s, you know, that’s price of the ticket in America, is accepting that on some level, people will always, accepting on some level, people will always mistrust, government. But I think what is dangerous in what you’re describing is not, is both the levels of mistrust, but also the evaporation of the pre-commitment, the pre-commitment to the rules of the game. 

You know, if you take a sports analogy, you know, in a baseball game, it’s opening, opening week, in major league baseball, as you and I are speaking here, and you know, how would a baseball game go if the players and managers didn’t pre commit to the rules, norms, and expectations, including the expectation that umpires make rulings and that we have to abide by them, right?  

If, if an umpire called a third strike and the third out in an inning and the, and the team at bat just said, no, we don’t accept those results. We refuse to leave the field. And if their fans then stormed the field, you know, that’s not a game, that’s not baseball, the, the institution of baseball breaks down at that point, and we’re just talking about a kid’s game in that case. 

Democracy is not a kid’s game, but the same factors apply, the same norms, the same need for pre-commitment that undergirds not just the specific peaceful transfer of power, but the broader question of the rule of law. I think this is, peaceful transfer of power is one very It’s a very salient instantiation of the rule of law, and it’s one that could break the rule of law, but there are other forms of the rule of law that in our everyday lives, we accept and we, and we stick with even when we hate the results, even when we see that various institutions are corrupted or are doing things against the will of the people. 

We believe that the only remedy for that is more rule of law, is more participation in those same institutions to use the mechanisms of law to unrig what we perceive to be a rigged game. But that going outside of, that set of pre commitments to raw force, violence, power, and doing stuff just because you can, as George Washington did not, is a recipe for national breakdown. 

Valerie Boyd: I think that’s a, you make a fascinating point that the nation is founded in, in mistrust of, government and constructed the entire system around checks and balances and constraining power. You started to answer the next question about the norms and cultures that govern civic life today and how they might change to make our democracy healthier and more accessible to everyday people. 

One thing I think you’re saying is that the adherence to the same rulebook or the, the rule of law is an important way to do that.  

Eric Liu: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s foundational. I happen to be serving on the American Bar Association task force right now on democracy. And this is a project that I’m helping to lead the charge on, on, on, on the rule of law. 

So, one of the things we’re doing is we’re creating a simple guide that lawyers, educators, parents, coaches can use in community conversation about what do we mean by the rule of law. There’s no question in this fraught, heightened, polarized, time, but especially during this election year, during which one of the presidential candidates is in court for various reasons. 

That we’re going to have many, many conversations, arguments, debates, and protests around quote unquote the rule of law. And so, it behooves us as Americans, it behooves everybody to take ownership of that idea, to really sit with what do we mean by that and not just be spectators as one side or the other or both politicize and distort the meaning of that term for their own ends. 

And, and so we’re hoping to catalyze community conversations around the United States using this simple guide on what do we mean by the rule of law and the framework for this, conversation guide is that comes from the U.S. government actually. Some people don’t know, you know, again, those of us who will come from families where there are immigrants know this, when immigrants take immigrants who are wanting to become United States citizens have to take a naturalization test and pass this test to become citizens. And, you know, that that test includes a lot of questions that are simple questions of fact. How many states are there? How many senators does each state have? What’s the longest river in the US? Things like that. 

But every now and again, there’s kind of a ringer of a question, a big deep philosophical question. And one of the questions among the 100 questions on that citizenship exam is, what is the rule of law? And I would bet, Valerie, that, you know, if we just went, you know, woman, man on the street right now and asked random passersby, what is the rule of law? 

Heck, if we went to a bar association meeting and asked a bunch of lawyers what is the rule of law, they would not be able to coherently, quickly, fluently say what actually that means. Well, the naturalization test says that there are four approved answers to that question. What is the rule of law? 

That no one is above the law, that government must obey the law, that leaders must obey the law, and that everybody must follow the law. And so, this ABA Task Force document is going to be framed around those four answers that immigrants memorize when they become U.S. citizens and unpacking what each of those means. 

And we want Americans everywhere, whether you were born here, whether your parents came here on the Mayflower, or were brought here by force, and enslaved on other boats, to ask these questions and to grapple with these answers about what we mean by the rule of law. Because that’s the only way in a democracy, that we sustain a sense of legitimacy, that kind of ownership of the question. 

And again, ownership of the question doesn’t mean reaching common ground consensus. We are meant to argue about this all the time and contest it in case after case. But to do so again within that frame of pre commitment that there are rules that we bound ourselves to for how we resolve our disputes and how we deal with each other and how we live together. 

And that idea of the rule of law is, is central to peaceful transfer of power. It’s central to civic power itself, and it’s central to self-government in a democratic republic. Without it, we’re lost.  

Valerie Boyd: I’m tempted to follow up with my sense of concern about how, how each man and woman on the street could answer the questions on a naturalization test. 

As someone who believes in the rule of law, I’m not sure I could have offered those answers those definitions without your prompting. So next time I’m asked, I have, I have you to thank. So, it’s tempting to talk a little more about civics education, but I’m responsible to bring us back to the peaceful transfer of power. 

One thing that you’ve written and talked about, and even in this interview is the need for civic rituals to bind us together, and I do have the sense that the peaceful transfer of power has been a civic ritual, maybe not a frequent one, only every, every four or eight years. 

But, as you think about promoting other civic rituals, is there advice there about how we can promote the peaceful transfer of power as a fundamental ritual here too?  

Eric Liu: Well, first of all, yes, I totally agree. This is a core civic ritual. And where I would slightly amend what you said is, the, the presidential is every four years, but everywhere in America, every year brings this same ritual. 

There are city councils in off-year elections, in odd numbered year elections, that will be doing the peaceful transfer of power. Members of the House of Representatives every two years are engaged in the peaceful transfer of power. This is not just an executive branch presidential question, accepting the results of duly certified elections. 

And then transferring power, transferring the power to represent. Or the power to execute, depending on what branch you’re in, right? And that is everywhere. It’s one of these rituals we stopped seeing because, you know, when, when things are going okay, we don’t notice them. This just becomes a, you know, a ministerial administrative, a bureaucratic thing that you gotta do, and so forth. And there’s a snapshot of somebody doing the oath of office. But when things are contested, yeah, it’s, it’s a much more, you, you realize the importance and the fragility of the ritual. And Valerie, to your question, I think you know what is super important here is recognizing that, you know, civic life, democratic life. 

I’m a real Tocquevillian when it comes to this stuff. Like I’m about the habits of the heart. I’m about the more, what he called the mores, the social, the social habits that we have that form a democratic culture. And you can’t, again, you cannot legislate your way to that. 

You cannot impose a top-down structure. If you could, then the Arab spring would have been a success. Then, you know, simply the knocking off of a dictator or a tyrant and imposing a democratic structure on some of those states would have led to a, you know, thriving democracy. But it didn’t because there wasn’t a set of habits of the heart on the ground. 

There weren’t norms of forbearance, there weren’t rituals of everyday power sharing, participation, learning how to disagree well, learning how to, learning how to win, win well and learning how to lose well, in policy and election, contests. None of that was in the preexisting soil, you know, when the Arab Spring happened and so that thin layer of topsoil blew away, and tyrants returned. 

And so, and again, this is not to, like, sit from the mountaintop of America and say, you silly nondemocratic countries, we’re in a state right now where our own democracy is, is weakened. And where we ourselves are forgetting, the ways in which ritual, habit, power, and norms actually make the thing go. 

Not the laws and not the formal policies. You can have the beautiful constitution as we do. But it’s a question of whether we, as Ben Franklin said, keep it. Whether we can keep this republic, through our everyday habits. And so, to me, a peaceful transfer of power from one elected official, one administration, one member of the legislative body to the next, is, is one of those rituals and it’s, it’s one of those that we invest with meaning. 

And so, looking at the peaceful transfer of power, not as a thing in which you’re sitting in. Back on your couch as a spectator watching on TV a thing happen or in the case of January 6, a thing almost not happen. But rather to think about ritual as a thing in which you are the co-creator, you are the participant, and we are the ones who invest everything with meaning. 

And I think that is, that’s really important for us to remember here. Again, this is not just for an elite set of lawyers and policy makers and wonks to worry about. But it’s for us all to say whether or not we like the results of the election, if we, understand that they were, fair and, free and fair, that we’ll, that we, the people, will accept those results, and recognize that the way to undo those results is to go back and win the next election. That, that is, I think, a, a deep norm that requires us to regularly nurture it and not just every four years watch it on TV. 

Valerie Boyd: That’s true. We both promised to get back to one topic about how your time in Washington state has inspired you, at least as much as your time in Washington, D.C. And, it does get to, I think many of the themes that you’re talking about, about the role of each of us in our, you know, whatever the institution might be and, the different groups that we belong to. So, can you tell me a little bit more about, about how Washington state has shaped you too? 

Eric Liu: Absolutely. So, I, I came out to Seattle in 2000 after my time in the Clinton White House. And one of the things that had drawn me to Seattle in the first place was its open, relatively, unhierarchical civic culture here, that you could just arrive and start showing up and start making things happen. 

And if you had an idea, you could start to just invite people into making it happen. And that proved to be the case. And that was very thrilling, to me having come from D.C. And, very early on, I got involved in things like the Seattle Public Library Board. I was a member of the library board here. 

And I happened to be on the library board during the years where we were Executing a nearly 200 million dollar bond measure to build or renovate all the branches in the city and to build a brand new central library, and to do that as a matter of legitimacy, we went to all 27 neighborhoods where there would be branches And held the civic ritual of what we called hopes and dreams meetings And this may sound incredibly hokey or naive to your hard bitten D.C. listeners But we meant this in earnest. We went to different neighborhoods and asked people if you’re going to have a new branch or renovated branch. 

What do you want? What do you hope for what kinds of space meets the needs of the people in your community? This might be a community with a lot of, you know, senior citizens. There must be a community with a lot of non-English speakers. This might be a community of people, where it’s, you know, everybody takes transit to work. 

And so, you want to have something where it’s kind of easy in, easy out. And, and what were their dreams? What were the things that they would love to see for their families, for their kids, for their elders in these branches? And that deep listening informed everything. It informed collections decisions, informed events and programs decisions, and it even informed the architecture decisions of how these branches got built to reflect the spirit of the community, the ethnic spirit, the history of a place. 

And that, I would say, was one of the deepest experiences in small democratic citizenship that I’d ever had that so much of what I realized that so much of what I’d gotten good at in the other Washington and D.C. was, I love my time in D.C. Don’t get me wrong. There’s literally not a minute of my time in D.C. I didn’t you know, I don’t cherish, but so much of what you learn in national politics is a certain kind of kabuki theater. 

It is positioning. It is pretending to act on an issue so that the other side can pretend to act on in opposition to you and nothing actually happens. That, that happens a lot of the time in Washington D.C. And part of that is our constitutional scheme. As you said, checks and balances mean governments not supposed to be able to do stuff so easily. 

But it’s also the incentives of national televised politics where everybody’s performing and trying to make people think they’re doing something. But when you get down to the local level and do something like serve on the library board, you either are or you are not delivering. You either are or you are not building a branch, that met the hopes and dreams of the people in that neighborhood who are super vocal and who have a, have a very strong sense of ownership of that library and of their neighborhood. 

So, that was one example, but then I joined other things, um, after the Sandy Hook Massacre, in Connecticut. A friend of mine and I, who both had young children at the time, just were so horrified and frustrated and felt like, you know, Congress was completely blocked at that time. But that we had to do something; we could do something at least in our state. 

And so, we called a breakfast meeting the next morning with a group of other civic catalysts, faith leaders and organizers and so forth. And out of that breakfast meeting was born an organization called the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, and this organization named on purpose, to say that we’re not against gun rights, we’re just saying that as grownups, all rights come with responsibilities, and it’s time for us to pay attention to the responsibility side of the ledger. 

And this grassroots organization has become an absolute force both in Washington state and become a model for the country It has passed so many ballot measures by overwhelming majorities to do things like create background checks and to create red flag laws and to, you know, again take hand take guns out of the hands of people who might pose a threat to others or to themselves And has been successful now in our legislature, that again, this was a tangible hands on case of relational, trust based, place based organizing rooted in a narrative that was meant to welcome and at least not, not, completely turn off people who might be strong Second Amendment advocates and gun owners, but to recognize that yeah, most gun owners take a really high sense of responsibility for their gun ownership with their families, with how they store their guns and so on and so forth. 

And that that was a part of the culture that we could tap into. And build a coalition of people who wanted common sense reforms. I’d worked actually with Max Stier, with the, with the head of, the Partnership for Public Service. He and I, you know, became good friends working during the Clinton years on trying to move gun reform policy, which went ultimately nowhere, in any lasting way. 

But in Washington State, we could do it, and we did it, in this community bottom-up way. So there are many examples like this that, again, were not only about the practice of power and the connecting it to a sense of civic character and to a narrative of what we all owe each other in a diverse community, but was also about just, again, that sense of don’t be a spectator, you know, participate, join, and, and to me, I want to circle it back to your focus on the transfer of power and transitions in general. 

That what it means to govern ourselves is to first to govern yourself. You. You the person. You the citizen. You, the member of the community. Govern your own impulses. You know, we have a political and civic culture right now that is just giving so much permission to our most infantile toddler like impulses. 

I want it. I want it all. I want it now. If I don’t get it all, I’m leaving. If anything seems slightly different from my worldview, I reject it. I think you’re a conspiracy. I think you’re evil. I think you’re godless. I think you’re terrible. I want only purity. I only want it my way. Right? These norms, these habits, these ways of living and being are toxic. 

They are poisoning our culture, our politics, and ourselves. And so to govern ourselves, one thing that life in Seattle and Washington State has taught me is that self-government begins with governing thyself, and to get to where we can roll up to where we as a nation accept the peaceful transfer of power in our federal elections, including the presidential election, begins with checking your own impulses to tear it all down or burn it all down when you don’t get what you want, when you don’t see a result that you like, or when you are discomfited by hearing a point of view that differs from your own. 

Take your toys and leave the, leave the, leave the field, right? That’s the impulse that people have right now. That, check that. That’s not what grown-ups do in community. That’s, you know, only sociopaths and toddlers get to do that. They hardly get to do that at all after a while, right? We curb them. 

We curb them because the way we live together in society is to accept each other’s differences and to do so in that pre commitment to a set of rules that enables us to live together, and you see that most vividly when you live in a relational context. Where the person you disagree with isn’t some abstraction but is that person who actually lives in your neighborhood and you have to keep on seeing them or is that person who actually works in an organization in your city that you will encounter again. 

You can’t just torch them. You can’t just do kabuki theater and play and pretend that you’re not, that you’re listening to them but you’re not really. You actually have to relationally engage with them and being a citizen of this community, I’m not selling Seattle or Washington State as some nirvana. 

I’m saying wherever you live. If you live in Tulsa, if you live in Tallahassee, if you live wherever in this country, if you live in Brownsville, Minnesota, the same things apply. Govern thyself, take ownership of these norms, cultivate the character that rolls up to a kind of civic culture that enables us to live together, to win some, to lose some, to recognize that we don’t, nobody has a monopoly on right or the truth. 

And to give some good faith such that we can become worthy of good faith. And again, I know to a lot of your hard-bitten listeners that will sound incredibly naive. This is what the rule of law requires of us, right? Seen one way, the entire body of work of the Partnership for Public Service and your transition lab is incredibly naive. 

That people are just going to do what they want to do. And people are going to re-rig the game the way they want to rig it. Why have a professionalized process for preparing people to do the best job they can to transition into power? It’s not naive. It’s called responsibility. It’s called actually making this government worthy of us and worthy of trust. 

That’s what you’re doing, and that’s what we’re doing at Citizen University, and that’s what I’ve, you know, tried to, express, in the learning journey that I’ve had in my life in both, both D.C. Here in Seattle and now in our work nationwide through Citizen University.  

Valerie Boyd: See, even though you’re focused on, on citizens and civics and, and working primarily at a state and local level and we’re focused mostly on effectiveness of the federal government, I knew we had a lot in common with where our, with where our work is trending. 

Speaking of our hard-bitten listeners and kabuki theater, you might have advice for individuals hoping to have better conversations across the aisle. What can you tell us there about disagreeing better?  

Eric Liu: Well, I will tell you, I will point you very specifically to a project that I helped to catalyze called the Better Arguments Project. 

This is a partnership of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit called Facing History and Ourselves. And the Allstate Corporation, we, we together created this project, and it grew out of a piece that I wrote for the Atlantic right around the time of the 2016 election, actually. In October of 2016, a conventional wisdom had started to take hold in the beltway that said, that Hillary Clinton was pretty likely to win and pull it out, but wow, that was close. How, amazing and, and kind of scary it was that Donald Trump could come this close to winning, and that, you know, the, the imperative after, you know, the election would be that, for Hillary to really, build bridges and, a and do reconciliation so that we wouldn’t have this kind of fracture again. 

And what I said in this article in The Atlantic was not so fast. Number one, not so it wasn’t clear to me at all at the time that Hillary Clinton was going to win. It seemed quite up in the air. But also, not so fast, whoever was going to win, what I was saying is don’t rush to reconciliation. 

One of the silver linings of that election year was that it laid bare deep abiding divides and fractures in our society, deep fractures of legitimacy, deep sinkholes of faith and trust in, in government and in each other. And what we needed to do was not to try to paper over that and pretend that that didn’t happen. 

And that American history teaches us that when you try to do that, bad things happen. And that what we needed to recognize was that actually it’s okay to argue. That properly understood and you, you alluded to this a moment ago, Valerie, when you spoke about our constitutional scheme and design properly understood America is an argument. 

We are meant perpetually to argue about local versus natural national power. We are meant perpetually to argue about pluribus versus unum in our emphasis about colorblind versus color conscious approaches to the law and constitution. We are meant to argue perpetually about freedom versus equality and which ones we prioritize and that these two things aren’t just mom and apple pie, both nice things. 

Overemphasizing freedom will lead inevitably to levels of inequality. Overemphasizing equality will lead to the infringement of liberty and freedom. And that, we’ve got to figure out how we want to argue that out and strike balances. And so that the point of American civic life, even in this toxically polarized age, is not to have fewer arguments, it’s to have less stupid ones. 

And that there are actually ways, in fact, to have less stupid, to have better arguments. And out of that article that I wrote, came this project in which we’ve worked with a group of experts to define a framework for how to have better arguments. And there are five kinds of elements to a better argument. 

I won’t go through all of them, but for your, your hard-bitten listeners right now, I will start, I will share the first of those. And again, it will challenge some of your listeners. It will challenge people who think about politics right now in a zero-sum way. But, but principle number one of a better argument that we teach in this project is take winning off the table. 

Again, that seems so naive and hopeless and an invitation to getting steamrolled by somebody. But I guarantee you, in conversation, in relationships, you know, whether it’s with that uncle at your Thanksgiving table, whether it’s with that coworker that you just see the world differently from, you know, whether it’s at a public event where you’re protesting one side and someone’s protesting another, advocating another, that take winning off the table, that when we engage in an argument, not to win, but to understand good things can happen, that it changes the energy that when the other person senses that you’re not there just to, play gotcha to trap them that you sincerely genuinely want to understand where they’re coming from how they see the world why they’ve come to this point of view that you fundamentally think is wrong they will sense that you’re not trying to trap them and they will begin to reciprocate and the goal of a better argument is not, in fact, common ground. 

You may end this better argument still holding to your prior views, both of you, but you will not be able, after going through a process like this, you will not be able to dehumanize people on the other side quite so readily. You will not be able to flatten them into two dimensional caricatures. And, and devil figures the way we can right now, you would have to, if you truly listened and tried to understand this person, and took winning off the table, understand their own complexity and contradictions, which would in turn become a mirror for your own complexity and contradictions, that we’re all three dimensional people, and that that habit of engaging, it’s slow. 

I grant that it’s slow. It’s slow work. It’s relational work. It doesn’t move at internet speed or social media speed. And so, maybe it’s hard to catch up, but it’s the only way that we can actually rebuild, that base layer of trust in each other, in civic life, is to over and over again, in all our institutions, in schools, in faith organizations, in community associations, to rebuild this habit of civic curiosity, civic learning, in the sense of, I want to understand. 

And again, check out betterarguments.org, you know, has the other principles of a better argument, and I think that, you know, I think it’s a really good question that you asked, because the peaceful transfer of power, what’s implied behind it is a set of sometimes not peaceful arguments. And very heated debates and worldviews and, you know, existential seeming clashes between the sides. 

And I want to say, you know, we have to keep believing that democracy is a game of infinite repeat play, that this is, that nothing is existential, and nothing is final. It may feel that the stakes are high, and the stakes are high, but that if you start treating this as existential, it gives you permission to want to wipe the other side off the face of the earth and dehumanize them and flatten them and just be rid of them, whether literally killing them or just blotting them out of your consciousness. And again, that is no way, that’s what’s happening all around the world right now. That is no way for a country like ours to, to, to stay together.  

Valerie Boyd: I think that’s, that’s very important context as we’re, as we’re heading into this election season. 

So, I might turn it around a little bit for my last question and ask, what gives you hope as we’re in this election cycle? 

Eric Liu: There’s actually a ton that gives me hope. The people we work with, the civic catalysts that Citizen University trains, All over the country. I mentioned our civic Saturday program, civic analog to faith gatherings. There are hundreds of those people leading these gatherings around the country now we have another program called the civic collaboratory where we train people in a form of mutual aid rooted in community, for people who are very different from one another to come together and ask for help from one another, moving projects in their community, and then giving investment, investing capital of every kind, social, intellectual, relational, institutional capital in their neighbors. 

And it’s sticking, it’s working in places around the country. And they give me hope, people who are doing this. Frankly, you guys give me hope. You know, people who are outside of D.C. think that D.C. is broken, like you said. Your surveys show that people have a picture in their mind of how dysfunctional Washington is, and it is in many ways, and yet, at the same time, there are patriots, professionals, and patriots, like you all, at the Partnership for Public Service, who are trying to build the best possible tools for us to govern ourselves. 

And also, to shine a light on, again, not just the case study of the nice person at NASA or the good air traffic controller or that food safety, person at the FDA, but actually through those nice stories of good people doing good work that literally saves our lives, you’re reminding us of a deeper lesson, which is that government is us. 

And that government is us literally in that we know people who are doing these jobs, but it’s also us in that, you know, this goes back to power literacy. When you ask most people the central question of all civic power, which is, who decides? Who decides? Most Americans answer with a blanket answer, they. I can’t believe they decided to do X or Y, right? 

They, they, and that’s at every level. They decided to change the hours of the school bus. They decided. To give aid to Ukraine when we said we weren’t going to do aid to Ukraine, whatever the, whatever level of government they, and part of the message of the partnership public service. And part of the message of citizen university is there is no, they, the self-governing democratic Republic. 

There is only various combinations of we, various permutations of us taking ownership of the choices, taking responsibility for deciding, and doing our level best in good faith to make decisions the best way we know how. And you all are showing us the kind of high bar version of that, to make decisions not based on just the choices, BS, conspiracy thinking, fake news and fake science, but actually with rigor, with invitation, through listening to people, with a process, with rules, with things that can be passed on ritually from one administration to the next, one generation to the next.  

That’s the gold standard. And so, I think anybody who cares about citizenship, even if you’re not a super nerdy scholar of transitions of power or the federal government, operations and the professionalism of the civil service. 

Everybody can learn from how you all do stuff because what you’re doing is showing us what it takes to take responsibility. And I think that the fact that you’re doing that, it’s just another thing that gives me hope.  

Valerie Boyd: I wanted to close by saying that the work you’re doing gives me hope. And lest we end by patting each other on the back, I, I will say thank you for reminding us that there is no they. 

There’s just various permutations of us and that everyone in the government is people who are, who are making choices the best they can with the resources and the, the permutations in front of them. And I’m just so pleased that you’re doing the work that you’re doing to bring, to inspire people across the country to take ownership for, for our government, for our civic life, and to have better conversations and work together. 

So, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. It’s wonderful to meet you, and I hope this conversation turns into a larger partnership in the future.  

Eric Liu: I would love that, Valerie. Thank you so much, and thanks to Max and all your colleagues there for making this great conversation possible. 

Valerie Boyd: Thank you.