We the People on the Pillars of American Democracy

Announcer (00:01):
Amicus Curiae with host Daniel K. Wig, a podcast series from the New York County Lawyers Association. Join us monthly for candid, useful, inspirational, and entertaining conversations with leaders of the bench and bar and those who serve the legal profession.

Daniel K. Wiig (00:23):
So I have a serious case of deja vu questioning you once again on an incredible project that you’ve spearheaded. So here we go. With respect to the rule of law project, is there one major reason or major cause or a uniform reason or a uniform cause that you found in the various focus groups that was the basis for their call it misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on some of these constitutional issues that we’re going to talk about today?

Richard Gabriel (00:59):
Yes. I mean, I think for the most part, people have to have experience to impart meaning. And as a result, for the most part, people don’t have an experience of constitutionality or even democracy on an everyday basis. They live their lives. So therefore democracy and our constitutional values become sort of like the air we breathe. It just is assumed and we don’t even notice it until it becomes polluted. And so for the most part, I realize that they become informed, their attitudes and their values are informed by culture and by their everyday life experience and the belief systems that they were taught when they were growing up. And so one of the biggest revelations in doing this project is that we have this sort of assumption of assumed values, but we don’t necessarily have an everyday experience of those values. So that is for me, one of the biggest revelations in doing this project is that people for the most part, we need to reinvigorate some of these values and things to be able to tell the general public the reason that Dan, you and I are speaking today on this podcast is because of a First Amendment right.

(02:29):
So attach them to the very essence of what they do on their everyday lives.

Daniel K. Wiig (02:34):
So we will get into this and more. I’d like to welcome our listeners to Amicus Curie, NICA series of casual, comfortable, and friendly conversations with leaders of the Bench Bar and those who serve the legal profession. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back Richard Gabriel to the show. Since 1985, Richard has been a leader in the field of jury research, jury selection, and litigation communication with experience in nearly 2000 trials. CBS News has said that he is by reputation one of the best trial consultants in the country. He has assisted counsel in a number of high profile cases, including the Aaron Hernandez, Casey Anthony, OJ Simpson, Phil Spector, Enron Whitewater, Kilpatrick, and Heidi Fleisch. He is the author of Acquittal and Insider reveals the stories and strategies behind today’s most infamous verdicts about his high profile trial work. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he founded the Online Courtroom Project as an advisory task force of judges, lawyers, and consultants to study the psychological behavioral communication and technical elements of online courtroom operations for criminal and civil matters.

(03:42):
He also spearheaded the Trust and Justice Project, which examined the public’s eroding trust in our justice system, which he came on previously to talk about. And today he joins us to discuss his latest project, the Rule of Law Project, which measures public attitudes towards constitutional principles in our democratic institutions. Richard, welcome. Thank you so much for coming back.

Richard Gabriel (04:02):
Thanks, Dan. It’s a pleasure to be back with you.

Daniel K. Wiig (04:04):
And this is Richard’s fifth appearance on the show. He still holds the record as our most frequent guests. I have no budget to give him a prize. If any of you would like to complain about that, I can put you in contact with Sophia Giancopoulos, NICA’s executive director to complain about the budget. And as a reminder, Richard is sharing his own views and not those of NICA, its members, its officers, its directors, or me for that matter. So there’s an old saying, which I don’t know if it’s applicable here, Richard, that necessity is the mother of all inventions. Clearly your experience, your intellect has brought you to conduct these various projects. Talk to us today briefly about what led you to do now your latest project, the Rule of Law Project, and then we’ll get into some of the specific topics that you addressed.

Richard Gabriel (04:52):
So I’ve spent the vast majority of my career better understanding how juries make decisions, what is behind that. And when in 2025, I realized that with the new Trump administration, there were a lot of new challenges to some of the constitutional norms that we have, some of the governmental norms and the role of government and even how we function as a society. And I wanted to have a better understanding of how the American public felt about that. I looked toward the polling that was being done and most polling really sort of takes a look at approval. In other words, whether the general public approves of what the administration or various groups are doing in leading the country. But what it didn’t reveal to me is how do Americans themselves feel about our constitution? Do they still actually hold the same values as we are supposedly have?

(05:54):
So I wanted to take a deeper dive into number one, what people did feel about the fundamental principles in our constitution, whether due process and birthright citizenship and legal rights and all of that and the separation of powers and what they thought of that, whether they understood those principles and how they felt about that. And then in looking at that, I wanted to figure out what was behind their general understanding. So that sort of drove me to be fascinated with what does the American people feel? After all, the constitution is targeted toward we the people, and I wanted to understand better how we the people actually felt.

Daniel K. Wiig (06:35):
So let’s talk about some general topics and I give you the floor to talk about specifically what you want to talk about within those topics. So one is the confidence in our constitutional institutions. Clearly there is an eroding trust in them. Pulling some of the data from your report, some believe that the United States Supreme Court, for example, is more inclined to make decisions aligned with President Trump’s wants than what the Constitution says, or at least let’s say based on an objective analysis of the Constitution. In terms of job performance, the people you polled gave both the President and Congress approval in the 30s while the court fared a little bit better in the 40s. So talk to us about this topic, the reasons behind it. Again, I give you the floor to address it.

Richard Gabriel (07:20):
One of the challenges that I think we have in doing any polling these days, and this I started looking at when we started doing both the Trust and Justice Project, is there’s just an erosion of confidence overall with all of our institutions here. There’s so much negativity that’s portrayed in our media about the way our government runs and the adversarial nature of our political process that for the most part, I really feel that part of the negativity is because we have sort of a culture of criticism, a culture of conflict that really informs how people feel about these things. So I think there’s two causes. One is I don’t think people have a day-to-day fundamental understanding of the complicated workings of our democracy and our constitution, and therefore they are informed by only the negative reporting that tends to come out about what’s happening out there.

(08:20):
And that by itself I think erodes the confidence. There’s a politicization also of, for the most part, all decision making. And I talk about this in the report. We’ve created this sort of social scientists called my side bias, which we have become incredibly binary in our thinking where it’s either a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. And what is lost in the debate is actually how do decisions that are being made by the Supreme Court or our Congress or our president actually affect the wider swath of the American people? And so for the most part, the erosion of confidence in there is somewhat fomented by the media, but also I think aggravated by a lack of understanding of some of these fundamental principles.

Daniel K. Wiig (09:16):
So one of the other issues, which I think goes into what you just mentioned, is presidential authority or some people wanting stronger presidential authority. And this was really interesting. I mean, there are some people who held their sort of no king’s day avering that President Trump is trying to assert too much power that doesn’t say traditionally belong to the president, to the executive. We had a guest on the show, for example, who went through an in-depth analysis of article two, which admittedly is written kind of broad, which talks about what the president can and cannot do or the authority that he has. And some of these statistics are really interesting. 13% believe that the president could use military force on citizens. 50% of the president should only use military force with congressional authority. I guess they didn’t know that Congress can declare war, but there are nuances there.

(10:07):
14% believe that the president should have total immunity about what they do in office. And I wonder if they know really what that means. And even just a small number, it’s very shocking to me. 6% favor authoritarian rule. That is very surprising. Talk to us about the questions that you asked, which you found about the idea of presidential authority.

Richard Gabriel (10:28):
Right. And to me, this was probably the most surprising result that I saw in the entire poll because I asked the question as I went, look, a lot of the things that are being done by the current administration obviously do reflect a type of authoritarianism. And so I wanted to get a gauge from the American people, is this something you want? Thomas Jefferson believed that the Constitution by necessity really should be reviewed and even revised every 19 years. He thought that the dead hand should not impose on future generations the wishes of a antiquated system. So this sense of reinvention is something that the Trump administration currently is doing. And so what surprised me though is that I wanted to test whether people actually believed this was something that they wanted as we the people. So I posted in the poll, I actually described a general definition of what authoritarianism or what authoritarian regimes actually did and then asked people, okay, which would you prefer, democratic rule or authoritarian rule?

(11:37):
And actually 18%, Dan, believed either somewhat or strongly favored authoritarian rule. So that’s nearly one in five Americans believe that they would favor authoritarianism in that. And I described authoritarian rule, it means that the government is controlled by one leader of number of leaders and they control the media and education and healthcare and everything and they favor nationalism over immigrant populations, et cetera. And 18% believe that. And that to me was one of the most surprising results. So I went, okay, what is underneath that? What allows people to believe that’s something that they would prefer? And again, going to people’s lifetime experience, for the most part, we do experience a lot of authoritarianism in our everyday lives. For the most part, education is authoritarian. For the most part, business is authoritarian. Even the courts themselves are authoritarian. So having a person basically making all the rules and then telling everybody else what to do is something that’s fairly common.

(12:50):
You look on top of that where you have constant messages about things to fear. And one of the oldest biological systems we have is in group outgroup, which basically means that we like people who we identify with and people who we perceive to be threats, obviously becomes the out group. So what ends up happening is when you have a culture which also demonizes constantly other side and that creates great deal of fear. And this is one of the notations when Hannah Arendt in her published work on authoritarianism and totalitarianism in the ’50s said that propaganda really can create this sense that the public mistrusts everything. They mistrust government, they mistrust. So the goal of propaganda is not necessarily to persuade a portion of the population that one side is right, it’s to essentially decay the trust in all institutions and even all objective facts. And that’s when you can then foment the seed of fear, of it’s an uncertain world, it’s a chaotic world, there’s a lot of threats to you, and that’s when people tend to turn to a strong father authoritarian figure to somehow say, “I will solve it and I will help you.” So there’s a psychological underpinning toward this gravitation toward authoritarianism because to tell you the truth, democracy by itself is complicated.

(14:35):
It’s not easy. And for people to understand compromise and debate and the nuances of why you sometimes have to negotiate things away and stuff like that, that’s a much more nuanced conversation and stuff. And people don’t have the experience of that a lot of times in their lives. So I think these are all things that tend to make authoritarianism probably more just easier for people and more comforting to say, “I just want somebody to tell me what to do and to tell me they’re going to help me.”

Daniel K. Wiig (15:15):
Do you have any background information on the 18% that strongly favored authoritarianism? Is there anything background in terms of political ideology, anything that you can share that may shed some light on?

Richard Gabriel (15:26):
Yeah, I mean, we did take a look at it. I tried not to focus as much on the political divisions in there, but we did look at that. And there’s obviously a much stronger view of Republicans towards authoritarianism. And in the political differences in our polling, the Republican respondents to our poll had a much greater acceptance of authoritarianism, much greater deference to President Trump exerting presidential power, much more faith in things like religion, much greater acceptance of the ICE and both the immigration reforms that President Trump is doing. So it definitely, there’s this greater acceptance of the Republican voters, the Republican respondents to that than the Democrats. The independence that we also kind of stayed right in the middle between Democrats and Republicans. That being said, there were Democrats that surprised me in terms of their acceptance of some of these issues and Republicans that also accepted some of the more democratic principles and also disapproved a lot of some of the presidential Trump.

(16:44):
So we had to do more of a nuanced analysis of the findings.

Daniel K. Wiig (16:49):
Dus, this is another interesting one, independent law enforcement, which I think to some extent counters the 18% who believed in authoritarian rule. So here you found there’s, I think, a pretty strong consensus of law enforcement’s independence from the executive. And we know, at least from an accusation point of view, I’ll put it that way, there were those that said the Biden administration colluded with prosecutors to go after President Trump did his various legal woes. And there were those who believe Trump is using the justice system for his personal advantage going after his “political enemies.” James Comey and New York Attorney General Tish James, for example. Talk to us about this particular finding. This has been in the news, this topic, each side pointing to the other for a few years now.

Richard Gabriel (17:38):
One of the things that also occurred to me as I was looking at these research results was that these results are a long time in coming. It’s not just the recent Trump administration, and it even started even before the first Trump administration in here. So there’s a natural inclination, partly because of the media, I think that overwhelmingly people think the Department of Justice and the FBI should be independent agencies. That’s an overwhelming finding on that. That being said, there still is this sort of cynicism that the American public thinks that if you are appointed by a president, you are going to favor his policies, you are going to do his bidding or her bidding, whoever it is. And that goes not only for the FBI and for the Department of Justice, but also for appointed judges to the federal bench. They believe that there’s a natural inclination for judges and federal law enforcement and prosecutors to be appointed because they favor a president’s policies, whether they be Democrat or Republican, and to then carry out their implied wishes.

(18:57):
So I think that when I looked at that, I kind of went, okay, well, and this was born out because we did two phases of this process. We actually did this polling, the national polling with Ipsos, but we also conducted a number of focus groups because I wanted to talk to people around the country and find out why did they believe the things that they did.

Daniel K. Wiig (19:18):
Let’s now move to immigration equal protection because they’re sort of connected in a certain way. So immigration obviously is an extraordinarily hot topic right now, and there does seem to be a clear divide between the two parties. But let me ask you this question before we go on. One of the things about the immigration debate that I think to the point about maybe the media pitting it against, sometimes I think the politicians and maybe some in the media don’t present the arguments accurately. And what I mean by that is there are clearly individuals who have come to this country, they didn’t follow the process, so they are sort of here illegally. How you address that, maybe that’s where the debate should be. Do you do amnesty? Do you just sort of round people up and throw them out? I mean, that’s where the nuance is, but I think sometimes that’s where the problem lies.

(20:10):
Do you think that’s sort of accurate, that in other words, people’s views on whether it’s Trump’s immigration policies or immigration law in general might be colored by a lack of full explanation by those who should be explaining it?

Richard Gabriel (20:26):
I think almost every issue that we tested in this polling could be helped by a clearer explanation from our politicians and from the media there. Immigration is obviously an incredibly complicated issue and stuff, so there has not been really good explanations about the complexities of these issues. Certain presidents have tried to deal with it. President Obama, I think, tried to address this when he was in office and tried to say, but it is a very complex issue. And as a result, when you don’t have an understanding of that, the people who think immigrants are a threat, number one, they get colored with the rhetoric that says that the people coming to this country are criminals and are somehow a threat to US citizens or taking people’s jobs and stuff.

(21:13):
While they don’t understand that a lot of the people that do come to this country are escaping political persecution or actually violence or poverty. And a lot of the reasons there, a lot of people don’t understand how much immigration actually contributes to our economies and to our diversity and to basically as one of the fundamental values that we have when we started this country. And my grandparents both were immigrants who came through Ellis Island. And so it’s one of those fundamental things, but people seem to have lost touch with that. So they become prone to the rhetoric about that. What is interesting with the social science also is the people who have probably some of the strongest opinions about this for the most part don’t live in more homogenous communities. In other words, that I found in our focus groups, the people who have the strongest opinions about crime and immigration were people who lived in communities that didn’t have immigration or crime problems.

(22:10):
They didn’t see it in their own communities, but they fewed people in Idaho who though Los Angeles had a really big problem or Chicago had this huge problem there and therefore that became the threat that they felt the administration had to do something about. So I mean, that’s where they have this misunderstanding about this, I think, and that contributes obviously to the ability to kind of believe that we are under sort of attack here and that it has to be. And obviously the research is pretty clear, crime is down significantly across the board, violent crime especially. But this has been a problem in our media for many years because there’s that old saying, if it bleeds, it leads. Even our local media tends to highlight all the crime that goes on as a result. There’s this huge disparity between crime statistics and what people actually believe are the threats to their community.

Daniel K. Wiig (23:11):
And some of the stats that I pulled from the report, I’ll give you an opportunity to chat about them because it seems like those who were polled maybe, as we said, did not understand the full situation. 65%, it’s a large number, believe immigrants should have fewer rights. And then the question that I’m asking is, who do they mean? If they mean immigrants who have become citizens, they’re citizens of the United States. If they didn’t become citizens, maybe that’s a different story. We can talk about that. And then a quarter believed that I should deport anyone for any reason without due process. Due process is part of that process. It’s not the same that perhaps that you and I have, but it’s there. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Richard Gabriel (23:52):
Again, these were surprising statistics for me too. And then I took a look and I go, “What don’t people understand about due process?” And I don’t think people have an understanding of what due process rights are or even legal rights in general. So when you have a lot of rhetoric out there and there’s not a common experience as to how do legal rights affect, they’re afforded to everybody who is in this country. But again, I don’t think people understand that anybody who comes to this country should have the same legal rights as everybody else, whether they’re illegal, whether even their birthright citizenship and things like that. So there’s a lot of misunderstanding, I think, about what due process does. And I described it in brief in the poll to try and help people understand the issue. One of the things that I encountered when I was designing the research is I said, “Well, I can get people’s opinion about that, but what if they don’t understand it?

(24:50):
How meaningful are the responses?” So I wanted at each point to describe what the 14th Amendment does, what the Fourth Amendment says about these legal rights. I described at the very beginning of the survey what the separation of powers were, because I wanted people to have a context in which to actually answer these questions. But I do think that, again, without that common experience, even with an explanation, they have a hard time seeing how it applies to them. And so I think what ends up happening is, again, in this deference to an authority, they’re like, “Well, if President Trump says this is important, then I guess we should defer. He’s the president, we elected him.” Or if ICE, who’s the authority on immigration, thinks this should happen and they should get out, then I guess, again, they don’t understand that there should be some due process rights for somebody who’s in this country who wants to stay and is applying, wants to apply for asylum or who has escaped a volatile regime.

(25:55):
So I think there’s a misunderstanding about this, but there’s a lot of things that I found that I thought, “Well, is this also a partisan response to it?”

(26:09):
When I asked whether the president should be doing that, I think some people said, “Well, I think President Trump should be able to do this, should be able to declare war or attack other countries if he thinks there’s a threat without consulting Congress.” And then I though, “Well, would those same people say the same thing if a president of another party was doing the same thing?” And I’m not sure that that would’ve been their same opinion.

Daniel K. Wiig (26:38):
And I think if you pay close attention to what certain politicians say and certain media pundits, social media is such, you have to be careful what you say because someone who may have said it was fine for President Obama to do something and then they’re criticizing Trump or vice versa, they criticize Obama and they’re phrasing Trump, again, it’s party lines. They’re not being intellectually honest, I think. That is part of the problem. Let’s talk about the First Amendment. First Amendment always gives a lot of people a lot of problem and a lot of misunderstanding. Interesting stats here. 26% believed that the government should restrict free speech and 25% believe Christianity should be the established religion for the country. I guess separation of church and state, which doesn’t mean the total elimination of religion, but not a state as we know from the folks in Britain that they went through.

(27:29):
Talk to us about the First Amendment and freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Richard Gabriel (27:34):
The thing that, again, got me about this is that the wording of the question was that the government should be able to restrict free speech and a free press if they think they’re reporting or the speech is harmful. And I went, wow, I mean, that is totally subjective.

Daniel K. Wiig (27:51):
I was going to say, we’re not talking now hate speech, which is a totally different topic. Harmful to whom?

Richard Gabriel (27:57):
I didn’t specify that. It’s just whether the government believes that it’s harmful. So it is a totally subjective criteria and 26% said, “Yeah, okay.” If they think that somehow people are, again, a threat, I think of this. Again, I don’t think people though, “Well, can that be used for political purposes?” Which clearly I think there’s a lot of views right now about it is being used for political purposes to intimidate the press and to intimidate people who are talking about this. And so I think that is, again, deferring to a certain authority to saying, “Oh, if they think it’s bad, I guess they should be able to restrict that.” Again, not necessarily understanding what that restriction actually means, how that might affect their ability. I mean, I don’t think people are thinking, “Well, if I post something on Instagram about my opinion about something and the government thinks that’s harmful, they can come after me.” I don’t think people are thinking of that.

(29:00):
They’re thinking about other people there on the freedom of religion or separate. I don’t think people understand the establishment clause at all. They don’t understand the separation of church and state really. And I think there is because we live in a world right now which does seem chaotic. We’ve got climate change, we’ve got political unrest, and we’ve got a pandemic, and we’ve got social injustice, and we have technology that has create a lot of isolation. And so people feel kind of scared, I think, right now. And as a result, there is an increase in returning to religion. And the framing of the question was Christianity or another religion should be an established religion. People think, I think it’d be a good thing to have a religion as a result, maybe to establish some moral value in our country, not necessarily realizing how an established religion can also create disc Discrimination, prejudice, and bias.

(30:03):
Again, both of my grandparents, sets of grandparents came from Hitler’s Europe and Russia’s pogrims. And understanding that background, I understand the dark side of established religion and how that can create a bias against other religions there. When I looked at the results, I looked at what is the positive intent that makes people want to believe some of these things? What are the things that this is doing for them? And I think that’s one of the reasons that maybe people think, “Boy, I wouldn’t mind having more established religion to create a moral foundation to our chaotic world.”

Daniel K. Wiig (30:49):
So I wanted to finish our chat talking about the recurring themes that you found in the demographic groups. And you have now said a few times in response to these discrete topics, going back to the authoritarian, going back to the leader who is going to do things right and protect us from that. Even though the percentage was not the majority in terms of who wanted absolute authoritative rule or whatever your phrase was, do you think that was a theme across it that some of the folks who held positions that were surprising to you, such as establishing a religion in this country or restricting “harmful speech,” was it all based upon the ruler who’s going to protect me, and if he or she perhaps one day says, “This is bad, well then it must be bad. This must be stopped, then it must be stopped, and I don’t have to think about it.”

Richard Gabriel (31:45):
I think the theme that is more recurring to me, because again, just the lean toward authoritarianism to me is more of a symptom than the underlying cause. And so for me, what I see is a really yearning for meaning, for people to have a better understanding of what the world means to them, what is the role of government, what is my role as rights of an individual? Look, I don’t know about you, I’m older. So when I was growing up, I didn’t know much about how the government actually operated. One of the things that occurred to me in working on this study is that we now have become so involved, everything’s become personal to us because we have the internet and we have something in our pockets that allow us access to the entire world. So we’ve personalized everything that goes on in the world these days.

(32:39):
And as a result, it appears like, my God, there’s wars around the world and there’s so much division. And we hear the term polarization, and yet underneath all of that is a real desire, I think, for people to have a better understanding of what is my role? What is the role of government? How is that going to assist me in my everyday life? So I think there’s this yearning for meaning, for values, for things like this. I mean, it’s really interesting to me. One of the key principles of authoritarian and totalitarianism is separation. Separate people, make them fear each other. And yet when I started having discussions in my focus groups, people really responded to the ability to actually sit down with each other and actually have a reasoned, civil, respectful conversation with each other about these issues and stuff. So I think there’s a yearning for community, a yearning for some more universal understandings despite lots of political and business and media forces that tend to want to separate and create these sort of adversarial positions.

(34:06):
So I think to me, I keep looking for what can assuage some of the cynicism that we see in our everyday life. What can rebuild, as I did with the Trust and Justice project, what can rebuild trust? What can we build confidence in some of these fundamental values? And in the report, I talk about essentially five key areas that I think are really important here. One being just more conversation, just the ability of even having some more town halls where we have moderated discussions about some of these issues. And second is education, just more understanding what civics really mean, what our community means, what is the goal of our political system and our democracy? What are some of the complicated nuances of that? Part of this also creates a sense of shared identity because we are the United States of America, and so it’s a matter of what do we have in common here?

(35:14):
I think our government on the whole really does need more accountability and transparency. We don’t have a better understanding of how these processes are. One of the universal concerns and is they want Supreme Court arguments and rulings to be televised. These are essential rulings that affect a great majority of Americans. We can do this also on the local level with judges creating better education. I think everybody in the legal system should be going to high schools and middle schools and talking about here’s what our system actually means. And so that education is that. And then also just right now we have this sort of decay of learning and understanding and critical thinking. And I’m concerned with even the foment of AI that that allows people to resort to what’s the bot going to give me? What’s Claude or ChatGPT going to give me as an answer to that as opposed to really developing these social media and critical thinking skills to really better understand what the system is, what the nuances are, what’s the reporting that we’re getting, how does that affect me so that they have just a better understanding of this?

(36:32):
So these are all the things that I think will address and help some of this cynicism and some of this erosion of these values.

Daniel K. Wiig (36:41):
You mentioned that your younger days you didn’t necessarily pay attention or understand these. And you also mentioned how today everyone is their own pundit, right? They go on name your social media platform and they post about whatever they post about here’s the cupcake that I had for dessert and five million people like it. It’s a little strange to me, but be that as it may. Humor me here. 30 years ago, if you were your age now that 30 years ago, how would this report have been different? How do you think the results would’ve differed?

Richard Gabriel (37:16):
30 years ago, I think there would be a better understanding of some of these constitutional issues because I think that we are more affiliated with that. There’s some elements of the authoritarian elements that I think might still be present because I think that is a natural inclination of people to trust authority figures. We have a democratic system right now which says these are the leaders that are going to be making these fundamental decisions. And I think back then a lot of that trust would’ve been there, but I think there was a better understanding. There was a sense of collaboration and cooperation and bipartisanship even with the differences there. So I think there was a sense of even though there were differences, we had a shared identity. I think right now people feel like we are divided. Even though when you bring people together, they don’t feel that way.

(38:13):
When you’re actually looking at another person and talking to them, you have a shared identity, you’re talking to another person, even if it’s somebody of another race, religion, political inclination. So I think that there would be more alliance. I think there’s probably more. There was more civic education. There was more sense of community, I believe, 30 years ago. Right now we have become so individualized in our own beliefs. We have these social media bubbles which says essentially we get everything tailored to our individual preferences and we don’t encounter as many differences as we used to. And so as a result, I think that’s the big difference here that we become so addicted to a certain extent about our media feeds. And I think there’s also a lot of individual learning has been eroded in terms of really the ability. I mean, you take a look now, the amount of people that read these days is really, it’s a shockingly low number of people who actually read books.

(39:23):
There’s a lot of systemic cultural and social issues that I think we need to address in order to sort of repair or restore this and to help people have a better understanding of our system.

Daniel K. Wiig (39:39):
And on that note, Richard Gabriel, thank you once again for stopping by and sharing your report and your insight into this interesting topic. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. I’m Dan Wig, your host. That’s a wrap.

Announcer (39:54):
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