From a Great Society to a Resilient Society: Episode 1 – Leadership

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] This is policy on purpose, a podcast, produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin Way take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who helped shape it. For more, visit LBJ dot utexas dot e d u E.

[0:00:26 Speaker 0] Thanks for joining us for today’s podcast. Siri’s from a great society to a resilient society building a resilient future in a globally connected world. Today we’re building off the terrific work of the LBJ policy tool kip and looking to shape policies for a more resilient America community and world at large. I’m Stephen Pedigo, professor of practice and director of the LBJ Urban Lab in the six part series will highlight LBJ faculty and researchers who are uncovering new practices and approaches to understanding resiliency. Today we’re starting with the a concept of leadership and decision making, with my colleagues Don Kettl and Jeremy Suri looking towards a post vaccine world led by new Biden administration, Don and Jeremy. Thanks for joining us.

[0:01:10 Speaker 2] It is great to be with you, Stephen.

[0:01:11 Speaker 1] Wonderful to be part of this conversation,

[0:01:15 Speaker 0] Don. There’s a good chance that Kobe has accelerated changes that were already underway. There’s no going back to January 2020. What’s the postcode world gonna look like and what’s going to stick around that we’ve discovered in the last year?

[0:01:29 Speaker 2] That’s such a good question because there are so many people who are saying, Well, we just want to get back to normal or they’re talking about that. The now banned phrase, the new normal What’s really going on is that there were a lot of changes already underway. That cove it has accelerated. And so it’s not only a matter of not going back to where we were or even thinking about what the new normal is, but jumping on a fast moving train that’s been accelerated by the virus. There’s everything from the nature of work about where people work, how they work. The fact that remote work, which was in many places an open debate a year ago, has now become something that’s a matter of course. It’s the business of food delivery and the delivery of restaurant supplies of of take out food of things that have to do with grocery store items. The explosion of Amazon, the press that’s happened with UPS and FedEx is a result that the changing nature of cities with the exodus from places like San Francisco into places like Austin, the way that that’s changed. Real estate, where people now increasingly looking for home offices with good, strong, reliable Internet, What’s happened to movie theaters along the way and whether that the movie business will ever be the same. I mean, all those things have dramatically changed the way in which we live, which will already well underway but which unquestionably are something that’s much different now and will be in the future. So it’s a it’s a fast moving train. Anybody thinks they know exactly where the future is going to be. I think it’s probably mistaken at this point, but we do know that we’re in the midst of of an incredibly rapid change has been accelerated and one that where we have to be alert to the issue of disparities that have grown up. Not only has it’s been something that’s affected everybody, but it’s affected different parts of society differently. The gig economy workers, for example, have been severely disadvantaged by the way in which things have happened. There are lots of parts of society that have suffered as well. We have problems of both the impact of the vaccine that have affected black and Hispanic communities much worse than white communities and now the same kind of problems. We were all off the vaccine. So not only have we accelerated things already in place, but we shined a brighter light on some of if big, huge issues of inequalities in American society that we’re going to need to pay much more careful attention. Thio

[0:03:55 Speaker 0] Jeremy. Any additional thoughts to add to dons perspective?

[0:03:58 Speaker 1] Well, adding Tiu dons excellent comments. I’d say that as a historian, we know that large crises of this kind, which are rare but occur, recurring Lee uh, they leave enormous impacts upon the world and upon society and many dimensions dimensions that are often not seen as we’re going through the crisis. So here I’m comparing what what we’ve lived through the last year to World War two, for example, or to the 1918 influenza pandemic or to the Civil War on DWhite we see is that there are long term effects on demography that both create challenges and opportunities. So one of the challenges and this builds on what Don was saying is that we have certain groups of citizens, particularly from disadvantaged groups who are now far, far behind. They haven’t had access to educational resource, is which were already unequal but have now become even more unequal. They have not had access to nutrition. They’ve not had access thio their investments and therefore one K’s and other things. If they’ve been out of work for this year and then of course that the 500,000 people who will have died by the time we’re done with this crisis on and that labor will be missing from our society. So so these air, these air big holes that will will exist that we will take years and decades to adjust Thio. Now they’re positive opportunities as well. All of these big crises historically produced positive opportunities. One of them is that we’ve learned weakened Dua. Lot of the things we long have done without the same carbon footprint. I’m one of many people who used to be on an airplane every week or every other week. I haven’t been on an airplane in 89 months and I miss seeing people in person in different places. But I’m not going to get back on airplanes every week again. I’ve learned I don’t need to do that, and that’s better for our environment. That’s better for so many aspects of our society, probably better for transportation in so many ways. So there are opportunities and challenges, and the truth is that it will take us years just to identify these issues and to begin to think through what this means. Our society will be a different society. Long after Cove. It is a for gotten memory.

[0:06:06 Speaker 0] Don building off of Jeremy’s thoughts. Why is it important for decision makers and leaders both at the state and local levels as well as the federal level, to understand the implications of these changes?

[0:06:18 Speaker 2] Uh, it’s important, and it’s important in two respects. The first is in the here and now. The big problem that political leaders have is defining reality for the citizens that they represent and trying to help them find a way through that. And so so much of what we have now is answering the question of what are we gonna be able to get back to normal? What is normal gonna look like there’s just normal even have meaning. How am I gonna restore stability to my life? We’re in particular, um, I gonna be able to get a vaccine. And what is the process going to be for signing up for it? Those are all big questions of political leaders have to face it because it’s their job to communicate the citizens to find reality and help citizens find their way through. That’s absolutely essential and a huge challenge. But the other thing that political leaders have here is as Jeremy was just pointing out on enormous, enormous opportunity, the future is gonna belong to those communities who find ways to the future faster than others who have leaders who could help chart their way past the current problems and into the the enormous opportunities that the future holds open. And so that’s one of the things that is the second part of leadership that’s gonna be absolutely essential. Now, we’ve had a real challenge in the last few months. Trying toe, find ways of doing that inside our particular governmental structure of federalism. The relationship between federal, state and local governments is under assault as never before in recent history, at least, although we could look back historically to find other big times when winds of buffeted the system. But the federal government has dealt with a problem largely by passing it on to the states. The states in many cases, have dealt with it by passing it on to the cities. And we’re not gonna be able to get to either a solution to our current problems or to find a way through into the future. If we try to engage in that buck passing strategy, it’s going to require unprecedented level collaboration to be able to make that happen when we’re capable of doing it. But it’s gonna take a very different strategy, starting from the very, very top in Washington.

[0:08:22 Speaker 0] Jeremy. We obviously have a new administration in the Biden administration that will have to react and build upon many of these changes. What are some historical analogies of reference points for the Biden administration can look towards? I think

[0:08:34 Speaker 1] this is one of the most important questions because we all need historical ballast When we’re entering a new world, we don’t know what’s going to happen next. All we have is the past toe look, too, and this is something I’ve written about. We look to the past to try to give ourselves a sense of where we’re going based on where we’ve been and also give us the confidence to know that we can get through because we’ve survived challenges like this in the past. We can survive in the future. The most obvious. And I think relevant analogy is Franklin Roosevelt’s first administration. Hey took office in March of 1933. Like the current president, Hey was someone who was restricted in some of his movements. In Roosevelt’s case, it was because of health. In the Biden’s case, it’s because of the current cove, it, uh, pandemic. And it’s also because of Biden’s age, to some extent. But Roosevelt recognized three things that I think are essential as guidelines and inspirations for this administration. First, he recognized that in a time of complexity and chaos, you need to keep things simple. People need a simple, truthful message that speaks to their needs. Second, hey recognized that you need to bring competent people together. Roosevelt put together a brain trust of all kinds of figures. He didn’t have extreme Republicans. That’s true. But he had many moderate Republicans as well as many Democrats, many academics who brought new ideas to him. That’s where the civilian Conservation Corps comes from. The Works Progress administration, many of the ideas that are so central to the Roosevelt administration and then third. And I think I put an exclamation point behind this third point. He recognized that government had to reinvent the way it did, things that has to be done within the legal infrastructure that we have. But leadership is about turning those institutions into more effective actors and helpers for the things we need in our society. We don’t need an imperial presidency, but we need unengaged presidency, and we don’t need ah Congress that is passing millions of pieces of legislation. But we need some very basic pieces of legislation to get the right kinds of aid to the right kinds of communities, and history shows we can do this. And it’s not just the rhetoric of the past. It’s the example of the past that I think in Guide Biden and guide our public in seeing where we stand as citizens in this new environment today.

[0:10:53 Speaker 0] So done one of the biggest issues that we face as a country is getting the vaccine distributed to Americans that’s gonna require engaged governance is Jeremy Illustrated. Biden’s plan is to vaccinate nearly one million Americans a day, and that’s gonna require collaboration between the state and local officials as well as the federal government, as well as engaging the private sector. What steps are needed to make that happen?

[0:11:18 Speaker 2] This is if there’s anything that’s important in trying Thio make really the kinds of things that German I have been talking about. It’s getting the vaccination process on track and there’s a sense that it has been broken, which in fact it is. In many ways, that’s not surprising because this is in many ways that the most challenging logistical effort that the federal government, state, local governments as well have had to try to face since mobilizing for World War Two. We’ve we’ve got to try toe do all of what we’ve done to try to make even the testing process which has already been struggling. We’ve got to do essentially something seven times is big and half the time if we’re going to meet the goals to try to get the country back on track, so this is an enormous problem to be able to get at that. What we need first is a federal assumption of strong leadership, and that means both clarifying the nature of the problem and leading from the top. There’s something that Biden only Biden could do in terms of communicating the citizens the urgency of the problem off fixing the vaccination issue, but also to try to find ways of ensuring that he’s got the kind of messaging to people about the importance of vaccination. The second thing is to develop a strategy to deal with the logistical issues. For the time being, at least we have a supply problem. There just isn’t nearly enough supply of the vaccine to even take care of the current needs and current demands. But we don’t have a logistical system in place to deliver it. We’ve been pretty good about getting it to the airport, not very good about getting it from the airport into people’s arms, and that’s the next piece. There’s been talk about trying to federalize the entire effort, but the federal government somebody does not have the capacity to be able to do it all on its own, so that there has to be an effort to try Thio connect this federal effort to deliver the vaccines through UPS and FedEx into a very complex system off stadiums of, uh, convention centers of local public health offices. To be able to deliver the vaccine at scale to be able to immunize Americans, there has to be a process of communicating to people about how it is that they could sign up on. There has to be a logistical effort to make it easier to sign up, to be able to get those vaccines, which is something that large I t firms have mastered but which many county public health department simply don’t have the ability to be able to do and then last. We need to make sure that we pay attention to the issues of equity because they’re already are troubling signs that the vaccine distribution is focused largely on, uh, people have more privilege and less on people who are underserved and have been underserved in the health care system, especially blacks and Hispanics. The vax, the virus processes already disproportionately affected those populations. Unless we’re careful, we run the risk of being, uh, increasing. This disparity in the system, which is already aggravated by the fact that some communities simply distrust the virus more than others. So we have to look at the differences between big cities and rural areas. Between. Blacks, in particular, tend to distress the vaccine and whites who are more trustful uh, they have to look at the difference between older Americans are more likely to want to get the vaccine and millennials who are more suspicious. There are lots of information pieces out there that suggests where the problems are, and that’s all going to take both leadership in a rhetorical sense, leadership in a administrative sense and partnerships and collaboration, public, private and non profit that can connect the different parts of society to go to get this job done. If we get our act together, we can get back to something approaching normal life by perhaps the end of the summer and have a chance to be able to get together with families and Thanksgiving, if not at the current pace. It’s going to be this time next year until we could begin to get our heads up, and so it’s in our hands right now to figure out how to try to do just that,

[0:15:15 Speaker 0] Jeremy, as we look back to history, is there an example that we can point to where the public sector in the private sector came together to accomplish a challenge as large as we’re facing with a covert vaccine?

[0:15:27 Speaker 1] Absolutely. We can do this. We have done this. In fact, we won World War Two Stephen, because we did this. Every historian of World War Two will tell you we won the war because we out produced other societies. The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States had a military that was smaller than the number of Germans occupying France. At the time, we were woefully unprepared and we were able within a relatively short time. Thio fuel an army, a navy and air force on create the productive capacity to not only provide military supplies to a two front war, but to feed the world, including ourselves. We had rationing of food. Texans were eating less meat because of the war. And we had millions of people, particularly African Americans who were moved with government help from the South to factories in Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere to produce more aircraft per day. by the end of the war than our enemies were producing in a year. So so we can do this. But it takes exactly what Don said. It takes a leadership commitment, and it takes savviness and understanding of how our system works. We always say a scholars that you have to map the system before you figure out how to navigate the system We’ve been trying to navigate without a map for a long time. It’s time that we map our system, works, seethe strengths and build on them. Three historical points here then that I would make that that that come out of this historical perspective. One, It requires clear information. Right now, the city of Austin does not know what the federal government is doing. They don’t know my wife’s on the City council she has given. She’s been given no clear indication of what federal policy is in the distribution of vaccines. I’m sure that will come from Biden, but it is terrible that we’ve gone a year and there’s no clear communication information needs to be communicated clearly and effectively, and it has to be communicated in a truthful way how difficult the challenges are and what the government is doing. Second resource is need to be pushed out. Roosevelt famously said that the secret to solving the Depression and winning World War two was not efficiency. It was going to be quantity. You have to get more money out more resource is out to more people and empower those individuals, those local state actors and others to do their jobs. There are thousands and thousands of highly qualified emergency relief, uh, individuals working in different states working in cities. Many of them are in the private sector. And just like during the New Deal, they need to be empowered on federalized in a certain way. Not that they’re gonna follow federal orders, but they need to be part of a federal coordinated effort that’s attentive to the local needs of cities and communities and then third in the piece that’s really been missing. Stephen Iss citizenships citizenship Citizens need to take ownership of this. The president and other leaders, including state leaders, need to speak out, and citizens need to take ownership of their behavior. There were always citizens in World War Two who violated rationing laws and ate more meat than they should have eaten or had more butter than they should have had. But in fact, the vast majority of Americans followed the rules. The vast majority of Americans bought bonds put their life savings into the war effort. We need to make this a collective effort. This needs to be a generational. Calling for all of us on DAT makes a difference in terms of getting people mobilized behind the effort and sharing information effectively. We all have to be part of this, and our leaders have to encourage that rather than discourage it as they’ve been doing for the last year.

[0:18:59 Speaker 0] Don and Jeremy, how can listeners learn more about your work?

[0:19:03 Speaker 2] There is more information about my work, both on the website at the LBJ School, as well as with the pieces that I write for governing dot com as well as gov execs dot com. And that combination is possible to track all that down. Then, finally, if you’re interested in federalism, I have a book, the Divided States of America, from Princeton University Press, which provides a look from before the revolution to the President in terms of the challenges that we face

[0:19:29 Speaker 1] and yes, so I my work is in probably too many places Many people would probably prefer to avoid being overwhelmed by things I’ve written. I I’ve written most recently a book on the presidency, The Impossible Presidency, on how presidents over time have struggled with crises like this. I have a weekly podcast, which I hope many of our listeners today. Well, listen to. This is democracy. We actually have quite a large audience of young listeners to that, it’s about how history can inform our democratic decision making. Today I write frequently for CNN, Washington Post and other places. Many of the links to these materials are available in the LBJ website. You can also go to Jeremy Siri, J E R E M I s u R i dot net and material. Is there a swell as news interviews and other things? But most recently I’ve been delighted to be part of the project that Stephen Pedigo has spearheaded, producing what I think is a really important book on resilient leadership. And both Don and I had pieces in there that I think are the basis for this discussion.

[0:20:33 Speaker 0] Don and Jeremy, Thanks for joining us for today’s podcast.

[0:20:36 Speaker 2] It has been such a pleasure.

[0:20:37 Speaker 1] My pleasure. Well, thistles Policy on Purpose, a podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin Way take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who helped shape it. To learn more, visit LBJ dot utexas dot e d u and follow us on Twitter or Facebook at the LBJ School. Thank you for listening