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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. We begin the week with news of the culture war being declared on the institution of the United States government that fights our real wars. As many of you have heard in the headlines, a version of the annual Defense Authorization Act has passed the Republican House of Representatives with culture war rounds being fired in multiple directions.

The one getting the most attention is a provision banning the military from paying for the travel expenses of troops seeking an abortion to a legal state. If they're stationed in Texas, President Biden wants their travel expenses paid to their home state, for example, to get that medical care. The House on Friday said, "No," but that's not all. You know how Republicans have made a centerpiece of their recent politics, banning gender-transition surgery for minors because minors are too immature to make that choice, they say?

Well, in the defense authorization bill, they want to ban the adults in the military from having transition surgeries or even hormone treatments covered by their health insurance. Adults who have enlisted voluntarily to serve their country and may have been prohibited in their state from getting the transition surgery they may have wanted in high school. In the military, your health insurance is the military system. That health insurance could not cover those procedures. We're not done yet.

The defense authorization bill as passed by the House would eliminate many diversity and inclusion programs and limit what flags may be flown at military bases in a new way, a move that's apparently aimed at banning the pride flag specifically from being displayed. On diversity as described by the AP, it would prevent the Defense Department from requiring participation in race-based training for hiring promotions or retention. Here's the House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, advocating for these provisions.

Kevin McCarthy: Stop using taxpayer money to do their own wokism. A military cannot defend themselves if you train them in woke. We don't want Disneyland to train our military. We want our men and women in the military to have every defense possible and that's what our bill does.

Brian Lehrer: Speaker McCarthy there. Attacking the military, of all things, for being too woke is a common Republican refrain now. Presidential hopeful and former Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley recently, and we played this clip on the show, decried in a campaign speech that the military trains recruits on how to respect their colleagues' gender pronouns.

Before we bring in our guest, Richard Haass, to talk about this and a number of other things, I want to replay a moment from the show last month with the Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth. She was our guest. I asked Secretary Wormuth about Nikki Haley's objection to gender pronoun training and in general about Republicans complaining the army has become too woke. Here's what the Secretary of the Army told me.

Christine Wormuth: First of all, I would say we are a ready army, not a woke army. What we focus on is we do bring young Americans from all over the country, from all sorts of backgrounds, from all sorts of demographics and ethnicities. We do bring them together and focus on building cohesive teams. We focus on making sure that our soldiers respect each other and respect themselves. We want to welcome any person, any able-bodied person who was qualified to serve in the United States Army, whether they are straight or LGBTQ. If you're able and fit to serve, we want to welcome you. We do have training that focuses on making sure that people respect each other. I think that makes us stronger as an army.

Brian Lehrer: That includes respecting people's chosen pronouns?

Christine Wormuth: Yes, I would say we spend probably an hour on that kind of training and we spend 200 hours on rifle marksmanship and basic combat training. We are really focused on building cohesive teams and showing people respect.

Brian Lehrer: Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth, on this show last month. With us now, Richard Haass, who stepped down at the end of last month after 20 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. He's been in the news for telling The New York Times upon his departure that the unraveling of the American political system means that for the first time in his life, the internal threat has surpassed the external threat.

Instead of being the most reliable anchor in a volatile world, Haass told The Times, "The United States has become the most profound source of instability and an uncertain exemplar of democracy." He also has a book that came out this year called, The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens. He also writes a weekly Substack newsletter called Home & Away. We will go down his list of the 10-point Bill of Obligations he thinks should sit aside the 10 points in the Bill of Rights.

We'll invite you, listeners, to suggest one as well. We'll talk about some news of the day, including the culture wars intersecting with the actual wars the military is there to fight. Richard, belated congratulations on the book, and your 20 years at the Council on Foreign Relations are at the helm of it. We always appreciate when you come on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Richard Haass: Well, thank you, Brian, for the generous introduction. It's good to be back with you, sir.

Brian Lehrer: Can I dive right into this defense authorization bill story and ask if it's an example of the concerns you are expressing to The Times about the internal threats surpassing the external one?

Richard Haass: Obviously, here's a time where the United States potentially faces conflicts in three geographies. In Europe, we've already got what's going on with Russia and the Indo-Pacific and Asia with China and the Middle East, conceivably with Iran. Plus, we've got thousands of troops in the Middle East taking on terrorists and I could go on and on. We've got enough on our hands. We got to fight real wars. To inject this kind of domestic politics, we've come a long, long ways in the same progress from when politics stop at the water's edge. This is just a lack of seriousness. It's a lack of responsibility on the part of the Republicans in the House and they ought to be called out on it.

Brian Lehrer: Speaking about your book, you've told The Times that your concerns are not just about American democracy, but our internal situation has become a national security threat too, which we usually think about in terms of foreign affairs. Can you lay out how you mean that? If Congress is arguing over abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, et cetera, does that make us more vulnerable in some way to another 9/11 or anything else we think of explicitly as national security?

Richard Haass: In and of itself only at the margins, it does potentially detract from military readiness. As you just heard from the Secretary of the Army, you replayed your interview. It detracts from potentially unit cohesion and may make it harder to retain female troops. All of those are negatives at a time. We simply don't need such distractions. The other aspects of our domestic division are more serious.

I would say in terms of national security, it obviously makes it very difficult for us to set an example for democracies elsewhere. Just the opposite, we're actually used by the authoritarian regimes as an example or as evidence of why they are right not to be democratic. It makes us much less reliable and dependable, so all of our friends are thinking twice about putting their security eggs in our basket.

If we are divided at home, we may not have the resources we need in order to devote to national security. We won't have the bandwidth that it requires. Even worse, imagine if January 6th, there's not a one-off but becomes part of a pattern where we have a degree of politically-inspired domestic violence, then we're certainly not going to have the cohesion or the focus we're going to need to play a large role in the world.

Brian, when you look at the last 75 years, they turned out pretty well by any and every historical measure. One of the principal reasons that the last 75 years were a time of extraordinary accomplishment in the world was the United States was willing and able to play an outsized role. If we have this domestic division, we're simply not going to have either the ability or the willingness to play that role in a world in which the United States pulls back is going to be a far messier world, which, again, will find its way to our shores.

Brian Lehrer: You know that people on the left might say, "Look at all the harm the US has done in the world in the 75-year period." You're referring to after World War II, including the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, the ravages of global capitalism and supportive US affluence and more. Maybe a more withdrawn United States is more good than bad on balance. Maybe it's not just the MAGA camp, but some in the progressive camp, who might welcome a little bit more US withdrawal on behalf of other people in the world.

Richard Haass: Well, you're right to the extent that there is that point of view on the left. There are some similarities  between the far left and the far right when it comes to a degree of isolationism. That selective reading of history, yes, Vietnam and the Iraq War were misguided wars of choice. I understand that ill-advised wars of choice. Look at all the good we did. We had 75 years.

First, we won World War II. American intervention was crucial. Then we built the institutions and the alliances prevailed during the Cold War. They kept the Cold War cold. For the first time in history, great powers didn't come to war, which would have been terrible and worse in an age of nuclear weapons. It was an era of extraordinary wealth creation. It was an era in which the average lifespan was extended by decades.

Many of the colonies became independent. All in all, not bad. The world became far more democratic than it ever was. Yes, one can cherry-pick the flaws, the mistakes that the United States made, but any serious historian when he or she looks back over the last three-quarters of a century is going to say, "This was an extraordinary run of history and there's nothing comparable in modern times."

Brian Lehrer: This is a tangent to the main things that we're talking about today. Just staying on this spur road for a minute, have you ever thought that the right, when it's isolationist, wants the US to withdraw because it thinks the rest of the world is getting over on us, and the left, when it wants the US to withdraw, wants it because it thinks the US is getting over on the rest of the world?

Richard Haass: I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by getting over.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that the US foreign policy, some people on the left would say, speaks as if it's in the interest of global democracy and global peace and security, but it's really the US getting over on others, especially economically and in terms of power. Whereas people on the right would say, "No, the US should not be involved in the world because all those poor countries and all those NATO allies and everyone else, by the US participation, they're getting over on us. They're taking our money. They're taking our blood."

Richard Haass: Look, I think both sides think we spend too much on foreign policy. Both sides think a lot of the world takes advantage of us. Both sides think that we don't get a proper return on investment. Both sides are wrong. The United States now, what it's spending on national security is roughly half. The Cold War average is a percentage of our GDP. Last I checked, we not only won the Cold War and it stayed peaceful and we won it on our terms, but the United States did extraordinarily well domestically.

Where we had domestic problems in no way can one attribute them to the level of effort we made in the world. Even now when we do too little in the world, I would say we pay a price for it. Think about climate change. I would argue the United States ought to be doing more, both at home and in the world. When we don't, we hardly benefit from it. I think the larger lesson of history is when we ignore the world, the world will find a way to bite us.

Again, on the right and left, there's this selective critique of things we do or don't do. I just think all of that pales in comparison to the larger good that comes of what we've done. The real costs and risks of doing too little, it's easy to focus on when we make mistakes, acts of commission. Think about it. All the acts potentially of omission, what did people think would follow if the United States stood left?

Did I really think peace and justice would prevail? If not, I would think that the Ukraine war is a pretty good example of what would happen, or China would move against Taiwan if the United States couldn't be counted on to do that or we pulled out of parts of the Middle East. Instead, you have things like Syria or Iran repressing all sorts of people. We shouldn't kid ourselves. The alternative to an active United States in the world is not a more peaceful or just world. It's a far more violent and I think far less free world.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Richard Haass, who stepped down at the end of last month after 20 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has a book that came out this year called The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens. Listeners, before we go down his list, what would you put on the Bill of Obligations to sit next to the Bill of Rights? The Bill of Responsibilities, what would be on your list? Name one. 212-433-WNYC. We'll get to that part of the conversation in a little bit. 212-433-9692.

Richard Haass is also making news by telling The New York Times that the unraveling of the political system in the United States means that as he sees it for the first time in his life, the internal threat has surpassed what he sees as the external threat that people concerned with foreign policy are usually most concerned about. 212-433-WNYC. What would you put on a Bill of Obligations? Call or text 212-433-9692.

Richard, I think it's worth noting for our listeners that you were a Republican for most of your adult life and career. I see you opposed the Vietnam War when you were in college but then served under President Reagan and both Bushes in addition to in the Carter administration, but you quit the George W. Bush administration because you disagreed with the Iraq War.

In recent years, mostly because of Trump, you left the party altogether. It's a very unique and individual path that you followed. Can you take a couple of minutes and describe what your relationship with the Republican Party has been? Why you, a kid from Brooklyn and Long Island in Blue New York, wound up on the red team in the first place, and how you, I guess, became gradually alienated?

Richard Haass: I'll do my best. You're right. I grew up on Long Island. Valley Stream, Long Island. I have no idea what the political distribution was. At the time, my first memory is of the race between Nixon and Kennedy. I was an anti-Vietnam War Democrat when I went to college at a liberal school, Oberlin. I then got a chance to go to Oxford afterwards for my graduate work. While I was there, you had the real excesses of the British Labour Party, all the strikes. My first winter in Oxford was the miners' strike.

I saw some of the problems there. I read Solzhenitsyn. I watched the rise of Margaret Thatcher. All of that, I'd say, opened me up intellectually and potentially politically to some of the problems of the left and some of the attraction of the emerging conservative right. I then worked in the Carter administration, but the Carter administration by today's standards was quite conservative, particularly towards the end. Big increases in defense in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran.

I then worked for the Reagan administration. It was around then that I became a Republican and found a lot of what we were doing, a strong role in the world, a reduced government role in the economy, degree of libertarianism on social issues. Again, people forget that the Republican Party of 40-odd years ago was seriously at odds with today's Republican Party, which is many things, but none of them is conservative.

This is not a conservative Republican Party anymore. Yes, I was very comfortable with much of Reagan and George Bush, the father. I'd say the president I was closest to was 41, was George Bush, the father. I worked for those four years at the White House and supported both what he did and how we did it in the world for the most part. I had a falling out with 43 over the Iraq War.

The 2003 Iraq War, I thought that was a good example or a tragic example of American overreach, both in our efforts to promote democracy around the world. I thought that was a real departure from realism and common sense. Today's Republican Party of Donald Trump, again, is anything but a conservative party. If you look at the principles that attracted me to the Republican Party 40-odd years ago, virtually, none of them is in the ascendant.

Today, many Republicans are not interested in a serious American role in the world. They oppose free trade. They've become a real large government when it comes to advocates when it comes to the economy. They're interventionists on social issues. Well, I don't support any of those positions, so that's why, again, I left the Republican Party. I began to despair that it could reform itself. Even now, Brian, several years later, it's been about three years since I left the party, I'm not at all sure.

I see the seeds of reform or of the Republican Party reclaiming its heritage. I worry about that because we need a two-party system and both parties have to be responsible. We need the concept of a loyal opposition. When power changes hands, there's no reason to worry that there's much more continuity than radical change. We can't assume that anymore. What's happened to the Republican Party, more important than people like me got alienated from it, and I'm hardly unique.

It's interesting that a significant plurality of Americans now affiliates with neither party. The real question is that if and when we have rotations of power. Imagine in 2024, Donald Trump returns to the White House. You have a Supreme Court which tilts in that direction. You could have a House or a Senate or both. Certainly, the Senate will almost certainly go Republican in 2024. I don't know about the House. I worry about both the lack of checks and balances in our system and a Republican president in the form of a Donald Trump, who wouldn't be constrained by a certain fidelity to democracy. That's why I no longer feel comfortable being in that House.

Brian Lehrer: When you put it in terms of the internal threats now, perhaps exceed the external threats. When we think of external threats, I think people generally think of actual war, of actual military invasion, or putting Americans' physical safety at risk around the world. Do you worry that we're headed potentially toward an actual civil war in this country? We know there have been individual acts of domestic violence. That's a chief concern of the FBI these days. With all your experience monitoring military conflicts, including civil wars around the world, how much at risk of something like that do you see this country?

Richard Haass: Brian, I'm not particularly worried about "civil war." That suggests both a binary split two sides a scale. The only one we've obviously had in our history was our Civil War, the war between the "states" in the 1860s. I don't see anything like that happening. Rather, what I have in mind, the image that occurs to me is something based on another experience of mine. I spent three years as the US envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process. I was George Mitchell's successor.

Then I went back for another six or seven months at the request of the parties of Northern Ireland to help them sort out their problems that essentially made it impossible for them to reach agreement and move things forward. I spent three and a half years heavily involved with Northern Ireland. That's an area that, for three decades, had sporadic political violence. It was called the Troubles. Something like 3,500 people lost their lives. Anything that you and I would describe as normal, suddenly, the elephant took on risk.

That's what worries me here. I can imagine the United States, the political violence, whether it's assassinations or violent breakups of legal political rallies and so forth, attempts to intimidate voters. I don't think you need a wildly fertile imagination to see the possibility of those things happening in our future. Yes, I do worry that some version of Northern Ireland could become our reality. That would have devastating consequences for our politics, for our economy, for our society.

Brian Lehrer: Which in a way leads us back to the Defense Authorization Act that's in the news right now. Why do you think with your experience that the modern GOP is so focused on limiting abortion rights despite the majority of public opinion on that and the choices of transgender Americans even in adulthood and in a country whose racial exclusion and inequality are such central parts of our history and present reality? Why so adamant about opposing policies that seek to include with race as one factor to make things more equal as we see in this defense authorization bill they're so opposed to?

Richard Haass: I think the simple reason, Brian, is that politics are all about what I would call intensity or what political scientists call intensity. What matters in politics is almost never majorities. What matters are those who are willing to act on behalf or against a particular political issue. If you're a Republican, in order to get elected or reelected, you've got to, first, win a Republican primary. The Republican party begins as roughly with a quarter of registered voters. Those who turn out in primaries are about a fraction of that.

They tend to be the most motivated. They are the ones who bring the greatest degree of intensity into the political marketplace. They care about these hot-button issues passionately. If you're a Republican, you're going to essentially respond to that, not to public opinion polls that show 55% or whatever the number is of Americans may favor certain types of access to abortions. You're going to focus on those who are most adamant against it, but those also happened to be the same people who are going to vote in Republican primaries and then will come out and vote in general elections.

Politics is almost never about passive or relatively are inactive majorities. It's all about the intensity of minorities. That's the reason, by the way, that you can have polls showing 90% of Americans may favor background checks on those who want to purchase guns, but yet we don't have meaningful ones. That's again because the minorities in this political marketplace bring a far greater intensity to the battle and therefore prevail.

Brian Lehrer: Before we take a break and transition explicitly to your book on a Bill of Obligations and see what call us would contribute to that, just on the defense authorization bill, the Senate is supposed to be the cooling saucer as they call it, where they come up with a more compromised version of things like this, that the House eventually negotiates with them on and accepts more or less. Can that still happen? That would be this week. How does this current defense authorization process end?

Richard Haass: Well, the Senate will do exactly what you say. It'll strip out most, if not all, of the provisions that entered in the House, and then it will basically have to go back. The question then is whether the speaker can stare down his more radical troops by saying, "This is the best we can get." All it would take at that point is, potentially, a few Republicans supporting it.

They can wrap themselves in national security. I'm hoping that's the case. I'll be honest with you. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but my guess is, at the end of the day, there'll be enough Republicans who will be fearful of being tagged with not supporting our men and women in uniform that I think, one way or another, we will get through this. I wouldn't say it's my confident prediction, but it's my prediction.

Brian Lehrer: Richard Haass is our guest. He's leaving the presidency of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank after 20 years at the helm. He has a book called The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens. As soon as we come back from the break, we'll list the 10. We'll invite Richard to expound on some of them and we'll invite yours. You don't even know what his 10 are yet, but what would you put? We'll see if they match up on a Bill of Obligations to accompany our Bill of Rights. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text as The Brian Lehrer Show continues.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Richard Haass. Your valedictory book as you leave the Council on Foreign Relations presidency is The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens. I'm just going to list the 10 right now. As we discuss them, we'll be taking listener calls and getting them ready to say what they might put on a Bill of Obligations to accompany our Bill of Rights. Your 10 are: be informed, get involved, stay open to compromise, remain civil, reject violence, value norms, promote the common good, respect government service, support the teaching of civics, and put country first. Richard, we'll get into a few of those in some detail, but why that frame overall of a Bill of Obligations?

Richard Haass: Well, the simple reason is that citizenship has got to be a balance of rights and obligations. Don't get me wrong, Brian. I hope none of the listeners gets me wrong. Rights are central to the American experiment, to the American experience. The Bill of Rights were essential in order to gain ratification of the Constitution. People at the time, some were worried that we were in the aftermath of the wake of the failure of the Articles of Confederation.

This new proposed constitution, Constitution 2.0, if you will, was creating a strong federal government with a meaningful executive branch. There were those like Patrick Henry and others who were worried that it was too strong. We just fought one tyranny in the name of our Great Britain. We didn't want to create a homegrown one, so we needed to build up protections.

A lot of American history can be understood as the effort to make good on rights, to narrow the gap between our rights and our reality, what Abraham Lincoln famously described as our unfinished work. I would argue, we've made a lot of progress, but the work still remains unfinished. What led to the book was the thought that even if somehow, though, we could finish this work, if there were no longer a gap between our principles and our reality when it came to rights that even then, American democracy would not be guaranteed or assured.

Think about it. Rights inevitably come into conflict with one another. You mentioned abortion in the context of the defense bill. How does one deal with the fact of the rights of a mother or a woman to choose versus the rights of the unborn? We talk about the Second Amendment. As some interpreter, what about the rights of those who want to acquire guns of this or that variety versus those who have a right to public safety?

We saw all the battles during the pandemic about rights to not get vaccinated or rights not to wear a mask versus, again, rights to public safety. How do you navigate those? How do you deal with those without it spilling over even at a minimum into gridlock or worse yet into violence? That's what led me to introduce the idea of obligations that somehow along the way, and it's an interesting conversation for lots of cultural reasons, we seem to have lost this notion of what we owe to one another, what you would say you and I owe to one another, what each of us owes to the government and to the country.

It all became about what's owed to us. If all of us only focus on what's owed to ourselves, we will not work as a society. We certainly won't be a community. This is not a book that's against rights. It simply says we've got to imagine citizenship as a two-sided coin. One side is rights, but the other side is obligations. We've got to flesh out those obligations. That's got to become part of when we teach citizenship, whether it's in schools or outside of schools, this now has to be an equal part of the conversation.

Brian Lehrer: These are mostly citizenship-type things. Again, I'll read them really fast. Be informed, get involved, stay open to compromise, remain civil, reject violence, value norms, promote the common good, respect government service, support the teaching of civics, and put country first. Is there one you would like to pick out from that list to talk about in a little more detail?

Richard Haass: A little bit like asking me to choose among my children, but I will do it. [laughs] I will do it at the risk of heavy therapy bills. I would say probably the ninth one, which is the teaching of civics. This is a country that was founded on an idea. We just shouldn't assume that these ideas are that when we're born, we have them. They've got to be taught. Somewhere along the way, we stop teaching them.

I worry about that. I worry that you can graduate from most of our colleges and universities. Even though the courses are offered, they're not required. You can get a degree from virtually anywhere and never having read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or The Federalist Papers or understanding the federal system or anything else. Same thing can be said about many of our middle schools and high schools.

In principle, we would never think of graduating someone who couldn't function with a computer or read or write or do math. Why is it somehow less important that we're not preparing people in this country for citizenship? Why is preserving our democracy any less important? Yes, if there were one thing I could do and it's something I am going to do in my post-Council on Foreign Relations life is devote a portion of my calories, of my time to promoting civics education, particularly in high schools and in colleges and universities.

I think it's essential. Here we are, Brian, we're three years away now from the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I'd like to think that we're going to celebrate this 50 years from now and 100 years from now and so forth, but I don't take it for granted. My purpose is not to be pessimistic or defeatist, but I also don't think we have the luxury to be sanguine.

That's the reason I wrote this book was to start a national conversation, the kind of conversation you and I are having right now. If there were one thing I could do, it would be to teach civics in our schools to require that students took it because that could subsume a lot of the other obligations. What we could do is essentially teach obligations alongside rights, alongside history. I think that would give Americans the foundation they need in order to be active, informed citizens.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to take a phone call right now from a listener who represents many listeners in that in the invitation that we gave for the listeners to call in and say what would be on their Bill of Obligations for Americans or name one thing. There is one that's breaking out as the overwhelming one that people who are calling and texting us are mentioning. Do you want to take a guess at what that is?

Richard Haass: No, but I'm fascinated because I've been having conversations about this book now for some five or six months and I haven't heard anything that I said, "Wow, I wish I'd included that." Indeed, most people said, "Yes, your 10 pretty well covers it." I'm really fascinated to learn and to hear what people have to say.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I'm going to let Jim in Ocean County, New Jersey represent. Jim, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Jim: Oh, hi. Great. Thank you, Brian and Mr. Haass. The Greeks had a word for people who were eligible to vote and didn't. "Idiot." I think it's great to teach civics, but what I would espouse would be compulsory voting, something along the lines of what they have in Australia. If you don't vote, there's a minimal fine, but it would motivate people to educate themselves. It's all well and fine. You hear people even admit at the last minute, "Oh gee, I don't know enough," or we have these long campaigns and people are newer to anything.

I don't blame them. They're ridiculously long and there's a lot of money. It would be compulsory for all elections, primaries. I grew up in Hudson County where there was one party, the Democratic Party, but there were two very active factions. You talk about vandalism, people tearing down signs, posters on polls. That happened every night for weeks before an election in a primary because the primary determined who was running in the general election.

Brian Lehrer: Jim, let me leave it there for time, but that's very clear. Richard, that's the number one that we're hearing in various forms of expression. Jim put it his way. Other people are putting it slightly differently. From callers and people texting us on the Bill of Obligations, they would put "vote."

Richard Haass: Well, the second obligation is to be involved. In the chapter on that, I have a discussion of some length on just this, on the Australian model of required voting. As Jim correctly pointed out, you've got to go to the polling station. You can foul your ballot. Essentially, if you don't show up at the polling station, you get fined. My own view after talking to people and thinking about it is I didn't think this would fly here.

Americans don't do well with mandates of this sort. Indeed, when it came to both voting and public service, I think these things ought to be encouraged. I didn't think calling for mandated or required voting would go anywhere. Republicans in particular would resist it. What I wanted to do was incentivize voting to make it easier to vote, but also through civics education.

The rest would be to show to Americans how their vote really can count and why the consequences of different outcomes are meaningful for their lives and for the country's future. Again, we're not arguing where we want to go, which is higher voting. Indeed, I was shocked that in the midterms this November, despite the stakes, less than half the eligible voters in the United States bothered to vote.

There's all sorts of reasons people give why they don't vote. I'm hoping that through civics education and the like, we can get more Americans to see the value of voting. By the way, Brian, even a small increase in the number of Americans who vote could have a tremendous political impact. If you think about the recent races that determined that Republicans control the Congress, a half-dozen districts in New York might have been enough to swing the difference.

The number of votes was small or recent presidential elections. Usually, it's two or three states. Less than 100,000 votes would've brought about different presidents. We don't need a revolution in voter participation. We just need a small increase. Rather than having, I think, a distracting debate about making voting mandatory, what I want to do is have voting encouraged. I think that can be done and I think it would have a meaningful difference.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Some critiques that are coming in of things on the list. One listener writes, "What is meant by number six, 'value norms'? Should groups that deviate from norms be less valued? What about marginalized communities that are already undervalued?" Well, why don't you take on that one, and then I'll throw another one at you from a listener who's texting us?

Richard Haass: That might just simply be a question of language. When I said "value norms," norms are things you can't require as a matter of law. Like really all obligations, they're things that should happen the most. The norm I focus a bit on is that election results ought to be honored. The norm that, at the presidential level, we have a vote. It's certified. A winner wins. A loser loses. Losers tend to be gracious and concede. The reason is they honor the 10th obligation, which is to put country before a person or a party, and then people act a bit graciously.

In the case of the presidential election, they ride together in a limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. You have the inauguration. It sends a message to the country and the world that Americans value democracy higher again than they value their own personal ambitions or their party or their policies. This was violated, obviously, in the last presidential election. I think it gets violated at a price. I think norms, which are behavioral, that's all I'm getting at. No one should read more into it.

Brian Lehrer: Right. January 6th was one of the inspirations for you to write this book.

Richard Haass: For sure.

Brian Lehrer: I hear what you're saying and I had read that too. The one you just mentioned, put country first, listener writes, "'Put country first' concerns me. Couldn't that mean country above the planet or above the humanity of others?"

Richard Haass: It's an interesting point. I don't think so, in reality, to put country first in terms of citizenship. We are citizens of country. That's for citizenship as a national definition. We're not citizens of the world. The world does not confer citizenship, but it's in our own collective self-interest to act responsibly towards the world. We ought to, I believe, act responsibly, whether it's dealing with infectious disease or dealing with climate change or building institutions that, from among other things, say, "Deal well with people and for migration."

We should do it because it's the right thing to do, but it's also the self-interest thing to do in all these areas. To put country first, I don't see a conflict with the world. Indeed, a United States that's more united, that's willing to play a responsible role in the world, it'll be good for the inhabitants of this country and it will be good for the world. Indeed, as I was saying before, Brian, I think that's pretty much the lesson of the last 75 years.

Brian Lehrer: You just touched on what is breaking out behind voting as the overwhelming number two thing item on the Bill of Obligations that our listeners would list. I'm going to let Emily in Ossining represent on this one. Emily, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Emily: Thank you so much, Brian. Yes, I don't have the most articulate phrasing for what it should say, but something needs to be added to this Bill of Obligations to protect the systems that support all life on the planet. Of course, that would include the United States. Being a good citizen of the US, I think, includes being a good citizen of the world, even though there's no such official thing as citizen of the world. The climate as everyone can see if they just open their door is in crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, thank you very much. That goes, Richard, to some commentary that I've read about your book. There's been commentary from left and right as I'm sure you've seen. On the left, the publication, the Jacobin, says in part as a criticism, "Instead of the stuff of democratic politics, building coalitions, matching means to ends, negotiating the distribution of power in society, we get an amorphous set of calls for moral introspection." I guess the question that comes out of that critique is, why not things as obligations on the Bill of Obligations more like fight for justice, call out discrimination and hate where you see them, guarantee a minimum national income, make sure you live a sustainable life, things like that?

Richard Haass: Because in every one of those, you're not going to have consensus. I'm not necessarily against those things. We can argue them case by case. My point is, whatever your policy debates, whether it's about the climate or about economic inequality in American society, whether there ought to be a floor, any policy issue, there's going to be a range of views. We are not going to be able to approach or address the differences unless we adopt the kinds of obligations I'm putting forward in this book.

I did not want this book to deal with policy issues. I wanted this book to deal with basic political behaviors with the culture of how we go about it. I would lose people if I basically said this or that on climate. That would be the end of the conversation for a big chunk of Americans. What I'm writing about is how we should approach the climate issue or any issue given our differences when it comes to policy. Brian, there's 1,000 reports out there about how to fix our political system, about fixing gerrymandering or doing this or that with the Supreme Court.

Again, none of that's going to happen. What I decided to do was write a book that was-- I'm not sure if it was one level more fundamental than that or one level above all that, but simply said, "Whatever our differences, whether they're domestic or international on matters of policy, here are the behaviors. Here are the attitudes we have to adopt if there's any chance of reaching compromise, if there's any chance of getting things done, if there's any chance of avoiding violence." That is the purpose of this book.

Brian Lehrer: Richard Haass. He stepped down after 20 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations on June 30th. He also has this new book that came out this year called The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens. You can also keep up with his thinking if you're interested in Richard Haass on his weekly Substack newsletter called Home & Away. Richard, thank you for continuing to come on with us. We really appreciate it.

Richard Haass: Really enjoyed it. Thanks, my friend.

 

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