The Night Politics Met Candor
Reflections on the 2016 We the Future Summit in Philadelphia
During the 2008 presidential race, I was a student at Penn State. In the months leading up to Election Day, I got to see Barrack Obama speak on the lawn behind Old Main; I braved the cold and multi-hour wait to witness Sarah Palin drop her famous one-liners; and I stumbled upon Ron Paul speaking to a small gathering in a dank gymnasium. I’m thankful now to have been there for all of it.
Sometime during that same season, a classmate told me that actor Kal Penn was coming to town to encourage students to register to vote. Like any college student, I’d seen and enjoyed Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and thought it was pretty cool to have Kumar on campus. But nothing much beyond that.
Eight years later, I’m sitting in a crowd of millennials at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia listening to Kal moderate a panel featuring four young Democratic members of Congress. To my great surprise, we — Kal, me, the panelists, and everyone in the room — were all on the same page, regardless of our party affiliation.
That event was the 2016 We the Future Summit, sponsored by SAP.
We gathered on a warm July evening, before a backdrop rich in American history, with the Democratic National Convention underway just down Broad Street, to cut through the politics and have an open discussion about how we as the next generation can create the world we want to live in.
The program kicked off with remarks from SAP CEO Bill McDermott, who shared the inspiring story of how he ran a small deli on Long Island when he was 15 years old. He explained that the success of his shop was due in large part to the young people who, noticing Bill’s genuine concern for their needs, became loyal customers. During Bill’s talk, I was particularly struck by his call for government to have the same level of concern for citizens as businesses, if they wish to survive, must have for consumers.
Power flows from citizen to government, and not the other way around.
In a way, Bill was resurrecting an old idea: that power flows from citizen to government, and not the other way around. This means that a successful government, like any successful business, is one that doesn’t operate in isolation, but in and among the very people who created it, sustain it, and consent to its existence.
When Kal took the stage, he was joined by representatives Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego from Arizona, Joseph Kennedy from Massachusetts, and Eric Swalwell from California. What followed was an open conversation featuring questions from Kal and the audience about how government can be made more representative of the people, especially younger generations who are soon to inherit both the American government and economy.
As Representative Gallego rather bluntly put it, “If the only people that are talking […] are above the age of 65, the policies that are going to come out are going to be aimed at people above the age of 65.”
Kal would later say it was “the most candid conversation with members of congress I think I have ever seen. Period.”
It was in my estimation as well.
“If the only people that are talking are above the age of 65, the policies that are going to come out are going to be aimed at people above the age of 65.”
From Representative Gallego’s acknowledgment that voting is the “ultimate consumer feedback” to Representative Kennedy’s call for more creative problem-solving in government, it was about as politically agnostic as you can get. We all seemed to be aligned, sharing in a desire to create a world where governments are beholden to the people and the economy is primed for the next generation of workers to envision, innovate, and thrive.
It remains to be seen if our generation will rise to the challenge of creating a world we’d all like to live in. But events like the We the Future Summit go a long way in showing us that older generations care, that we have a voice, and that ours is a book just waiting to be written.
This fall’s We the Future Summit is being held in Boston, Massachusetts on October 16, 2017 and will feature SAP CEO Bill McDermott, young entrepreneurs, as well as members of the United States Congress. You can join in person (register here) or via Facebook Live.
You can also watch the full replay of the 2016 We the Future Summit Philadelphia or catch the 2017 We the Future Summit Berlin recap with #SAPZeitgeist here.
