The discussion, before a full house at a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event at the Landmark Theaters in Los Angeles, explored both the opportunities and the obstacles in trying to bridge seemingly vast cultural divides via TV.

Bowman, an Emmy award-winning writer and creator of Martin, described his experience in 1995 as “the white head writer of a black show” called The Show. “I wanted to explore racial issues in an integrated show,” he said. “It was the best reviewed show I ever wrote, and it was canceled after four episodes.” At a subsequent focus group, he recalled, a white respondent and a black respondent bonded over their dislike of the show and wound up hugging. Small comfort, Bowman said. “I had brought black and white together in their hatred of my show.”

The trick, said Dan O’Shannon, former executive producer of Modern Family, is to find a way to create relatability without “condescension and preachiness.” When the show first aired, in 2009, much of television “was divisive, about making fun of the other side.” In crafting the story line for Cam and Mitch, the gay couple on the show, the writers intentionally avoided physical intimacy in the first season, O’Shannon said. “We wanted to have Americans embrace them as empathetic human beings first and as a gay couple second.”

Jennie Snyder Urman, Jane the Virgin showrunner, concurred, saying it’s important to understand every character, “from the most evil villain to the family unit at home.” Empathy, she said, is “the catchphrase in the writer’s room,” with scripts given a painstaking review from every character’s point of view.

Portraying characters honestly, even when it’s unflattering, is essential, said, Gloria Calderón Kellett, co-showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s One Day at a Time. When the teenage daughter on that show came out as gay, her father refused to dance with her during the traditional father-daughter dance at her quinceañera.

Why portray the father in that light? Bowman asked.

“We wanted to let the audience know that she was going to be supported and be okay, but maybe not everyone was going to have that perfect, warm response to it,” Calderón Kellett said. “It wasn’t just hurray, she’s gay! We wanted to represent the totality of that experience.”

All of the writers on the panel—as in much of television itself—Bowman observed, had worked on shows revolving around families struggling with the deepest social and cultural questions of the day. “In TV history, the family is always the crucible of social issues,” Bowman said. “It’s where we talk, it’s where we tolerate.”

The holy grail of placing family at the heart of television’s efforts to sort through social divisions is the 1970s Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family, Bowman said. That ground-breaking show succeeded in provoking thought and conversation among non-like-minded people. But, said O’Shannon, at that time there were just a few networks competing for viewers’ attention, and even if they offended some viewers, others would tune in “to see what this car wreck was about.” Now, he said, with much greater competition, no one wants to offend because they can’t take the risk of “losing a single viewer.”

What then, is the way forward, asked Bowman, citing as an example of the vastness of the divide one recent survey that found that the favorite television show among liberals was Modern Family, and among conservatives Duck Dynasty. He specifically wondered whether in this moment where audiences place a premium on authenticity, his whiteness would be an obstacle. He posed the question to Urman, who is white and whose protagonists are Latino.

Urman said that initially she did question whether she should embark on the show, but then, she said, she realized that, “I spent all of my career writing men. I’m a lot closer to Jane,” the show’s heroine, who she described as “type A with a very complicated relationship with her mother.”

The key, Urman said, is “being open, listening and making sure that your family is so specific that they are not caricatures. We all want the same thing: We want happiness, we want love, we want to be respected.”

One of the big challenges, the panelists agreed, is in fairly portraying “red” characters—those with conservative values—without relying on the buffoonery of an Archie Bunker, for example.

Jay, the grandfather on Modern Family presents one such opportunity, said O’Shannon. “Jay spent his whole life following rules. Everything he was taught was okay is bad, he’s the bad guy now,” O’Shannon said. “I don’t know if you forgive him for some of the things he does, but you understand him.”

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member asked whether the writers worried that when they presented their characters’ flaws they were disrespecting them, suggesting that viewers might extrapolate negative stereotypes about them.

“It’s humanity and we’re flawed,” Calderón Kellett responded. “We do things that are good and we do things that are bad and that’s the totality of being human.”

Urman agreed. “Our characters mess up all day every day,” she said. “If we just made these characters that are perfect, then they have no relatability.”

The post If TV Wants to Bring America Together, It Needs to Show Bipartisan Empathy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The latter is a reference to the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, which Vasconcellos created via legislation in 1986. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau placed the task force in the public eye, lampooning it in his Doonesbury comic strip as the embodiment of California wackiness.

The task force, which operated from 1987 to 1990, was a serious enterprise. It looked at the role of self-esteem in various areas, from crime and violence to academic failure and responsible citizenship. The commission’s final report, released in 1990, was the best-selling state document of all time, selling 60,000 copies.

I first became curious about the task force when I worked with its chairman, Andy Mecca. At the time, he was the director of drug and alcohol programs for Governor Pete Wilson, for whom I served as deputy chief of staff cabinet secretary. I knew about Andy’s past association with the task force, but I had never read the report—until four years ago, when the self-esteem commission was briefly mentioned in the news. Curious, I sent a researcher to the state archives to exhume the report and search for anything interesting in the task force records.

What I discovered was a determined, bipartisan effort to identify and solve big problems. Vasconcellos, a Democrat, had the support of Pat Nolan, a prominent conservative Republican legislator at the time, and Governor George Deukmejian, a Republican, signed the bill creating the task force. California still has big challenges, and Sacramento could use a dose of bipartisan problem-solving today.

The task force identified four primary ingredients of self-esteem: “a sense of belonging, likeability, a feeling of significance, and acknowledgement of hard work.”

That’s right: “hard work.” The task force had much to say about the value of work in promoting a civil society and developing personal self-esteem. Being a welfare recipient “can be destructive to self-esteem” and encourages a “learned helplessness,” they concluded. The task force recommended a welfare system that seeks to “help people move toward high self-esteem and financial self-sufficiency.” President Clinton was later widely praised for embracing a similar philosophy at the federal level during the 1990s.

If not consigned to the ash-heap of California history, the report didn’t exactly serve as “the unifying concept to reframe American problem-solving,” as its chairman hoped. But Vasconcellos never let go of his vision for a better society. In 2010, he and a former colleague submitted 20 questions to gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, including: “Are you familiar with, and do you support, the findings of the 1987-1990 California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility?” You have to admire the persistence.

At its core, the self-esteem task force was unabashedly optimistic, and unapologetically Californian. “We can unlock the secrets of healthy human development,” Vasconcellos wrote in his preface to the final report. “We can outgrow our past failures.” California, he wrote, can lead the way.

These days, I can’t help but think of the self-esteem task force in the context of one of my current projects—countering venture capitalist Tim Draper’s controversial proposal to break California into six new states. Via a ballot initiative currently being circulated, Draper seeks to erase the current physical boundaries of California—and begin a process to rewrite every line of the California constitution (six times), every state law (six times), and every state regulation (six times).

Vasconcellos and his task force warned that erasing boundaries, and breaking up established limits, was high-risk. On page 47 of report is this finding: “To explore and grow, human beings need a clear sense of structure. We need limits, guidance, and rules that are enforced consistently and fairly. These define an arena within which we feel secure enough to explore the world and ourselves. Knowing what our structure is lets us operate without fearing that our ventures will lead us into rejection, despair, or loss.”

I’ve been arguing that Draper’s plan to eliminate the current physical and legal structure of California and start anew is bad for our economy. Perhaps I also should be arguing that it could be bad for our self-esteem.

The post California’s Self-Esteem Commission Was Not a Joke appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

They did, as I witnessed from a ringside seat as a Washington correspondent for The New York Times. The rivalry was intense, the political skirmishing fierce, but both men could see beyond the parochial interests of their parties. Today, they would be run out of town. Non-partisanship–the notion that some matters transcend politics and call for united action–seems almost quaint. That is a great pity, for the daunting problems that the United States faces today cannot be addressed, much less solved, absent collective purpose and determination.

One exception to the poisonous partisanship of Washington is an improbable joint effort by five prominent Americans to reduce nuclear dangers and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons. I spent the past three years working on a book about nuclear threats and the effort of the quintet, and I found their collaboration remarkable.

Two of the men, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, are stalwart Republicans. Shultz, among four Cabinet posts he has held, served as Richard Nixon’s treasury secretary and Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. Kissinger was Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, and he directed American foreign policy as secretary of state under both Nixon and Gerald Ford.

The two Democrats are Bill Perry, defense secretary during Bill Clinton’s first term, and Sam Nunn, longtime chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The fifth member of the group, Sidney Drell, is a Stanford physicist.

Over the past few years, the five men set aside their ideological differences. It didn’t happen overnight. The convergence of views evolved over many years, beginning in the Cold War, as each of the men came to grips with the destructive power of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals. At the zenith of the Cold War, the two nations owned a grand total of nearly 70,000 nuclear warheads, more than enough to reduce both countries to fields of rubble and kill hundreds of millions of people.

The threat of global nuclear war ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, but a new set of nuclear threats soon developed, commanding the attention of the five men. Nuclear materials and technology spread to unstable nations like Pakistan and North Korea. Iran is likely to be the next member of the nuclear club, barring an Israeli or American military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

As they looked at the world after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, Nunn, and Drell realized that nuclear dangers were rising to a perilous new level. The unthinkable, a nuclear 9/11, was all too possible. As Robert M. Gates, defense secretary under Presidents Bush and Obama, told me, “If you were to ask most of the leaders of the last administration or the current administration what might keep them awake at night, it’s the prospect of a weapon or nuclear material falling into the hands of Al Qaeda or some other extremists.”

It takes just 60 pounds of highly enriched uranium to make a crude atomic bomb. Terrorists can’t enrich uranium–that requires industrial-scale operations–but if they can buy or steal the material, they can fabricate a bomb. Alarmingly, tons of highly enriched uranium are stored at inadequately secured sites in dozens of nations, a legacy of Cold War competition when Washington and Moscow gave away fissile material and research reactors to win allies.

When it comes to matters like national deficits and debt, the gears of American democracy seem frozen. That’s why the collaborative effort of Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, Nunn, and Drell is especially notable. Beginning with a Wall Street Journal op-ed article in 2007 signed by Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, and Nunn, the men have campaigned tirelessly on behalf of a series of practical steps to reduce nuclear dangers. That includes securing stocks of highly enriched uranium and ending the production of fissile material for weapons. To rally supporters in the United States and abroad, the men have also championed the long-range goal of eradicating nuclear weapons.

Today’s combatants in Washington–leaders like Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell–would do well to study the example of these five men. Theirs is not a love match. Differences among them remain, some acute. Their history is filled with conflict. Kissinger relentlessly hammered Shultz during the Reagan administration for thinking Washington could do business with the Kremlin after Mikhail Gorbachev become Soviet leader. Richard Nixon co-authored one especially caustic attack, an op-ed article that ridiculed Reagan and Shultz for mishandling relations with Moscow. (As Shultz told me, “They’re entitled to their opinions. But it turned out I was right and they were wrong about the biggest issues we faced, namely how to deal with the Cold War.”)

If Shultz and Kissinger can rise above such bitter differences and join hands with Democrats like Perry and Nunn, Congressional leaders should, at the very least, find a way to come up with bipartisan agreements to tackle America’s other pressing challenges. Although it may seem easier to bridge political differences in retirement than in high government posts, what brought the men together had far more to do with a cold-blooded conviction that an urgent problem must be addressed than any desire to heal old wounds.

It shouldn’t take the threat of nuclear annihilation to get policymakers to put the national interest above parochial party interests.

Philip Taubman, a consulting professor at Stanford and former New York Times bureau chief in Moscow and Washington, is the author of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

*Photo courtesy of The White House.

The post Bipartisanship Shouldn’t Just Be Nuclear appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.