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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and with us now former presidential hopeful and South Bend, Indiana mayor, Pete Buttigieg, who has a new book called Trust. It just came out and it's already number 11 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. It makes sense that people would be hungry for this kind of thing. We'll talk about the book and talk about the news Mayor Pete, thanks for coming on with us, and welcome back to WNYC.

Pete Buttigieg: Thank you. Nice to be back.

Brian: If I may start on the news, I've been quoting you on the show in the context of the so-called court-packing debate because you ran for president in part on an interesting idea for expanding the court, but in a way that would de-politicize it and stop this vicious cycle. If you still hold that position, could you explain what you've been advocating?

Pete: Yes. My views haven't changed. To me, this is not about one side getting their way. It's about reducing the political temperature of the court and every vacancy on the court. I don't think we can go on like this where every time there's a vacancy there's some kind of ideological deathmatch in the Senate, and there are some very interesting options for bipartisan reform. I was delighted to see Vice-President Biden state his support for convening a commission to identify some of these options.

Some of them involve rethinking the size of the bench, but I also I'm concerned, of course, that we've got a much more immediate issue when it comes to the court, which is that the court is being used potentially to strip away healthcare from millions of Americans after the Republicans failed in their promise of legislatively repealing Obamacare despite their professed reluctance to legislate from the bench it's seems to be their agenda in a case to take down the ACA that will go before the court in a matter of weeks. I think it's very important that we focus on that matter as well.

Brian: We've been talking a lot about that on the show. Do I have your proposal correctly? It would be five justices appointed by Democrats five by Republicans, and then those 10 justices select another five?

Pete: This is called the balanced bench proposal. I do think it's the most promising of the forms or flavors of reform that I've seen. It might be that they choose. It might just be that they have to unanimously agree on anybody brought forward. The point is that you would have a sizeable number of judges who were there not because they're preferred by one party, but because everybody can agree that they're good jurists.

You could have some kind of requirement that they be seated in order to have a quorum for the court so that you can't just get these bad faith efforts to keep seats open. No, this may or may not be the right answer, but it's certainly one of the most promising that I've seen. I think it represents the level of imagination that ought to go into what a commission should consider and recommend to the country and to the president.

Brian: You and Amy Coney Barrett are both from South Bend. Were there any local politics that involved both you and her that the rest of the country might be interested in knowing about?

Pete: Not that I know of. It's true we both live in South Bend. Matter of fact, I think she and I lived three or four blocks apart. Ordinarily, I'd be delighted about any event that moves my hometown any closer to the center of the political universe, but in this case, it's, unfortunately, an appointment that has a lot of implications for things that are very dear to me, for my loved ones who have preexisting conditions. Even for my marriage which is evidently a little bit less secure and a little bit less equal if some of the doctrines espoused by judge Barrett and the conservative majority she's joining were to prevail in the future.

Brian: Not just doctrines, but when she said sexual preference rather than sexual orientation at her confirmation hearing, was that the gay rights equivalent of Trump at the debate last week saying Barack Hussein Obama?

Pete: Well, we certainly noticed it. I think it was one of those revealing slips that tells you how a person comes with the world. I just don't believe that she views the love and the commitment of same-sex couples and LGBTQ Americans as equal or so she hasn't spoken in a way that reflects that. It's just one more reason why our community and so many Americans are deeply skeptical of her appointment as we are skeptical of the process that sees her appointed while people are voting for president.

Brian: Before we move on to your book, there was a political article recently called How Amy Coney Barrett's Religious Group Helped Shape a City. The people of praise isn't well understood by outsiders, but its influence and social conservatism run deeply through this Indiana city, that city, of course, being South Bend. Do you agree with that premise about its influence running deep in South Bend?

Pete: It's a group that's certainly influential and certainly very conservative. Now, I also think that the real concern here is not any individual memberships or affiliations that affect how judge Barrett seeks to run her life. What worries me is the power that she's about to get over mine and all of ours. At the end of the day, this is about power and that's how the Senate Republicans have viewed the court for a very long time. I think there are a lot of conservatives who are privately disgusted by President Trump but have decided that ride this tiger in order to get their way on the bench, now it seems they're poised to get it.

Brian: You're right that the only relevant question when it comes to somebody's religion is if the religion as a group or the individual wants to establish its particular beliefs on everyone as government policy, do you think people of praise as a group or Amy Coney Barrett as an individual is out to do that?

Pete: Well, I'm certainly worried about the judicial philosophy that could do that. Look, this isn't theoretical for me, partly because I live in Indiana where just five years ago under then Governor Mike Pence legislation came through effectively saying it was okay to discriminate so long as you remembered to invoke your religion as an excuse. Now to me, and I say this not just as a member of the LGBTQ community, but I also say this as a Christian.

This I think is a terrible precedent and a terrible message to send about how religion and law ought to interact. Now, thankfully there was a bi-partisan outcry, and that legislation was withdrawn back in Indiana, but five years on, we can see that those impulses are alive and well, and I'm afraid those impulses are part of what drove her appointment.

Brian: Pete Buttigieg is with us if you're just tuning in your book is called Trust: America's Best Chance. Why did you write a book about trust?

Pete: Well, the big problems we face as a country right now depend on cooperation if we're ever going to solve certainly that's true of dealing with the pandemic. It's going to be true in dealing with climate change, our crises of racial and economic justice, all of them call for a lot of cooperation in order to improve. Cooperation in turn depends on trust. If you look at every objective measure trust is declining even plummeting in the US and that's true of a lot of different kinds of trust.

Political trust, that is to say, faith in the government, social trust, people's confidence in one another and fellow Americans, and even global trust measured by how many countries say they trust the United States to do the right thing. The threefold crisis in trust is I believe now reaching emergency proportions at the very moment when we need to increase our ability to cooperate. What I wrote about was partly how we got here, partly why it mattered so much, and largely what I think we can do about it.

Brian: In your chapter on rebuilding trust, I notice that the first examples you give are of activists who are at first seen as divisive by those in power, the freedom riders in the Jim Crow South, and the victims of Harvey Weinstein, who spoke out and launched the Me Too Movement. Those examples can certainly start a chapter in a book called justice. Why in a book called Trust?

Pete: Because they believed in the power of what they had to say and they forced America to trust them. One thing that many of those who were drawing attention to abuses in the segregated South have in common with women who were coming forward with their experience of abuse, is that society largely discredited what they had to say. They had an enormous amount of courage, but also a remarkable amount of trust in one another, in the case of the activists and in the possibility of a system, even an untrustworthy system to finally change when it was confronted with demands and when it was confronted with evidence.

What we need right now is a similar expectation of accountability that is reinforced by transparency, by people stepping forward to share their truths, by processes that empower people to share their truths, which is why even though this is a model that we mostly know of because it was used in African countries. The idea of a truth and reconciliation style process or commission right here in the United States is one example of something that we may very well need in order to build the kind of trust and establish the kind of shared reality that has gotten away from us.

Brian: You're a child of the 80s born in '82. By the time you were born, Watergate had happened and Vietnam had happened a loss of trust, loss of trust by the baby boomers, and leaders from the so-called greatest generation that came before them. If I can frame it that way, I'm curious if that's where you would start a modern history of the loss of trust?

Pete: Well, as I discussed in the book I think are conscious of how Watergate and Vietnam contributed to a decline in trust. Far too often, the story ends there when it's really just the beginning. Many other things have happened since then, not just around the rise of social media and the role of technology and digital misinformation, but also some ideologically motivated projects to undermine trust, especially trust in the government.

There really began with the Reagan era, add to that some very intentional foreign efforts to undermine our trust. Again, not just in government, but in one another. You see just how many forces have been serving to erode and reduce trust here. Perhaps the greatest of all has been the rise in inequality, which just poorest fuel on the fire of resentment toward the establishment and skepticism of institutions that has ironically propelled figures like Donald Trump into office, even though he in my view is very much part of the problem.

Brian: Ironically, when it comes to inequality for sure. So in a decade or two, before you were born, it was more conservatives who trusted the establishment and young liberals who lost faith. How do you think we went from that to Trump's right-wing populists as a locus of lack of trust in institutions that propelled him to the president?

Pete: Well, I think he harnessed something that really is based on something real, even though very little of what he says is true. He is tapping into frustration that takes place largely against the backdrop of the growing inequality in this country. When I talked to my students a generation further the students I teach at the University of Notre Dame who represent a generation that is at once more earnest and more cynical than mine.

You're talking to folks who have seen only a failure in terms of policies that are most going to affect their lives climate change or gun violence or any of the other things that young people have mobilized around. In that, I also see some of the seeds of an opportunity to set things right. That's why I think that the year we're going into the handful of years in front of us really represent a deciding decade for the American project.

We will either find new ways to establish and vindicate deep trust and the cooperation that it makes possible or we'll miss that best chance, perhaps that last chance. This will be a very bleak century, I believe in the better of those two paths, but it's also clear that we're going to see which one we go down for good in my lifetime.

Brian: Last question, Joe Biden is running largely on a pitch that people can trust him, whether or not they agree with him. As a star contrast with us against them, Donald Trump, if he gets elected looking in both directions of this, what would you advise him are the most important things to do to show red and purple America that it wasn't just a sales pitch. At the same time, the people struggling with inequality, who aren't sure if they can trust Biden not to be too namby-pamby and back down from justice in the name of bipartisanship.

Pete: Two things I think need to happen. One of them is a matter of tone and he's so well suited to this, which is to set a tone that is about unifying the country to start each day with an agenda to heal not to divide. The other thing that'll have to happen, of course, is substance. The platform he's put forward is one that entails swift action to make Americans better off to make this a more racially and economically just place. It will be vitally important to deliver on that now because that's the other way you can build trust is to actually produce results. That gives you a little more room for the next week with faith you need as you build that base of cooperation.

Brian: Pete Buttigieg's new book is called Trust: America's Best Chance. Mayor Pete, thank you. I have a feeling if you ever do get elected president someday, people are still going to call you Mayor Pete, and that's going to be weird.

Pete: I'll always answer to that it's a great honor of my life.

Brian: Thanks for joining us.

Pete: Thank you.

Brian: On WNCY, Scott Stringer next stay turned.

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