Haggard published his Make America Great Again anthem in 1982, during the Reagan administration. But 42 years later, its pessimism resonated with most of the 110,000 people in Texas A&M’s Kyle Field. Country music fans, along with much of Gen Z, are pretty pessimistic these days.

In 2004, between Merle Haggard’s 1982 whining and George Strait’s sampling of it, George W. Bush won his second election for the presidency of the United States.

Liberals lost it. From their perspective, they had swallowed down a moderate, foreign policy hawk in hopes of turfing out Bush, who they considered a barely legitimate president that had launched an illegitimate war. It didn’t work. Bush won decisively, and it would be another seven years before the United States military left Iraq.

Into the undertow, below the tide of liberal despair, author Rebecca Solnit published Hope in the Dark. It is a stemwinder of an argument—not for optimism in the face of darkness, but for hope.

Solnit’s argument is neither new, nor necessarily liberal. On the last day of my American Government 101 class at SMU, I shared with my students a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Avoid the extremes of deadening pessimism and superficial optimism.” Instead, King demanded hope—active, committed, chosen hope, rather than the passiveness that flows from both pessimism and optimism.

King, in turn, echoed the Pragmatists, who argued against pessimism and optimism and in favor of meliorism—a longer word for hope. Meliorism holds that a better world is possible, and maybe even probable. But that better future can only emerge through action. To borrow and bend another quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., the moral arc of the universe will only bend toward justice if we roll up our sleeves and bend it.

For the Pragmatists, meliorism (let’s call it hope) is a foundational tenet of liberal democracy. Anti-slavery American founder Gouverneur Morris’s “more perfect union” is not guaranteed. Nor is it unattainable. It is possible. Put another way: whether there are good times in store is entirely up to us.

Background: Last week, Maureen Conway of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and U.S.C professor Dr. Manuel Pastor interviewed Natalie Foster, author of the recently published The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy, about how to provide economic opportunity for all Americans. 

Natalie Foster is the co-founder and president of the Economic Security Project, an organization that strives to address the economic inequality and financial instability experienced by many individuals in the United States.  

To start the interview, Dr. Manuel Pastor introduced the main issue: “Designing a society where insecurity is the norm is designing a society that is bound to fail.” Foster strives to change our society's main issue by implementing the narrative of “the guarantees,” which opens a future where our government can promote human flourishing instead of incentivizing insecurity as a foundation of our society.  

The guarantees consist of seven constants the government should guarantee: income, health care, family care, good work, education, and inheritance.  

Guaranteed Income  

Real world examples in the United States for guaranteed income include:  

• Michael Tubbs, former mayor of Stockton, CA, provided five hundred dollars a month to 125 families with no strings attached. 

• The Magnolia Mother’s Trust foundation gives a thousand dollars a month to African American mothers in Jackson, Mississippi for one year.  

In addition, Foster considers the Expanded Child Tax Credit to be a guaranteed income program. 

So how do we create more change to guarantee income? Policy is the way you scale this idea into the country. Pilots have been a path to show other individuals how to create policies at their own state levels.  

Guaranteed Housing  

Housing is a fundamental guarantee that should not be completely left to the private market. Foster’s housing guarantee consists of three parts:  

• Protecting renters and tenants.  

• Producing more housing units.  

• Preserving affordable housing.  

The United States is not producing enough homes, resulting in a shortage of 4-7 million homes. Foster highlights Montgomery County in Maryland, which built over 1,000 units for middle class Marylanders.  

Guaranteed Good Work  

When we invest in families and communities in the agency and resources they need to survive, individuals are then free find work with qualities that are ideal to their circumstances:  

• Meaningful to them on a personal level, such as small businesses. 

• Has enough flexibility to allow parents, for example, to pick up young children.  

• Pays enough that they can maintain only one job to pay for everything they need.  

The Role of Government Action  

According to Foster, government has a responsibility to their citizens to create the conditions for sustainable, flourishing lives. For Dr. Pastor, the foundation of stability is not found in markets or government action, but in a “to turn to each other” for the mutuality that brings us all together to use the government as an instrument to create a change.  

The first steps of actions to entrance effective change in our democracy are to invest on:  

• Activism 

• Social mobility  

• Community building/bridge building 

From Individual Action to Community Action 

Foster urges listeners to remember we are the individuals who can create change within our government, if we personally advocate and bring forward our problems as a community. In return, Foster sees the possibility of progress toward a guarantee-based system of government in support of its citizens.  

For more, watch the full Aspen Institute interview.

Why it matters: This epistemic fragmentation seems to pose a challenge to democracy, which many believe relies on some baseline agreement about facts and legitimate knowledge to function properly.

What's happening: Several forces are conspiring to pull apart the Enlightenment-era consensus around reason, science, and empirics as the basis for shaping collective beliefs and policy.

• Tribal identities are hardening and being reinforced by ideological media ecosystems that create contradictory narratives.

• Social media algorithms incentivize user engagement through outrage and confirmation bias over truth. Generating AI is set to turbocharge that.

• “Experts” everywhere—from university leadership to public health officials—are feeling the heat and losing the trust of the public.

• Deeply-held worldviews and what policy process scholars would called “core beliefs" are highly resistant to change or falsification.

The threat: We may be on the verge of regressing into a state of what we could call epistemic feudalism— a loose constellation of insular, independent spheres with their own incompatible belief systems warring over what's real.

• Philosophers like Jacques Barzun identified this "Disenlightenment" decades ago, arguing Western democracies were decaying into “moralizing didacticism” rather than open rationality.

The counterpoint: This might make defenders of democracy queasy; after all, democracy emerged from the Enlightenment, an effort at shared reality by way of rational thought and empirical methods. Democracy seems to depend on shared facts.

But representative democracy may prove more capable of withstanding epistemic feudalism than expected.

• Late 20th century political scientist Robert Dahl saw democracy as a system for managing inherently conflicting interests through pluralism, a commitment to creating space for others’ beliefs.

• Before that, Joseph Schumpeter was cynical about the power of elites, but still convinced democracy could hang together as those elites jostled for power—as long as there was regular transfer of power after elections.

• And long before him, the American founders separated church and state in part to create a state that could hold the ring between religious factions that had spent centuries bordering each other in Europe.

The bottom line: In different ways, these thinkers understood democracy to be a way of handling conflict and preventing the tyrannical accumulation of power. To them and others, democracy doesn’t require agreement on anything more than the basic, power-sharing rules of the game.

• Reality has always been contested. Democracy can channel that disagreement away from​​​​​​​​ the bullet and toward the ballot box.

TLDR: This week, I report out on my adventures into right-wing media.

• Why it matters: There is a strong argument to be made that democracy depends on the establishment of a shared set of facts. We won’t get there without some effort to understand the voices shaping some Americans’ view of the facts.

• I teach undergraduate political science, so I consider it one of my professional responsibilities, too.

• I teach my students to do the same, by way of AllSides, the Axios-Politico-The Hill triumvirate, and the secret weapon I tell every one about, memeorandum.

On one hand: Left-wing media has its extremities. Pitches on free food for everybody and the racism of anti-pit bull rules come to mind. Darker, to me, are those who argue against the importance of free speech or celebrate terrorist attacks against civilians.

• But by and large, left-wing media is pretty… boring. It is mostly committed to a sort of modern, secular, American antidisestablishmentarianism.1

On the other hand: Right-wing media, by contrast, is a circus carnival of wild ideas. Here’s a sampling from what I've read in the last couple of weeks, as I've tried to find voices that (a) are pretty far out there but not QAnon, and (b) play meaningful enough roles in the new Republican media ecosystem that their ideas are circulating among actual decision-makers in Congress and would influence a second Trump administration.

• Curtis Yarvin, advisor to billionaire Peter Thiel and Senator JD Vance, went on Charlie Kirk’s podcast this week to argue the next Republican President should declare a state of emergency at the inauguration, nationalize police forces across the country, and give them all red armbands. Kirk, to his credit, didn't bite on that one.

  • Charlie Kirk also recently hosted Steven Miller, former President Donald Trump’s senior advisor on immigration, who says that the Trump administration would build a network of detention camps to accomplish the largest mass deportation in history.

• Brian Glenn is the face of the Right Side Broadcasting Network, which Politico describes as “like NFL RedZone for Trump rallies, covering them hours before any speakers approach the dais. Now, as Trump’s general election campaign kicks into high gear, it has also cemented itself as the pro-Trump media outlet of record for the MAGA base.”

  • Glenn is also dating Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom I have begun to think is better understood more as a one-woman social media platform than a congressional representative.

  • MTG is so adept at search engine optimization and social media vitality, I’ve started to wonder if she began pushing for space lasers on the southern border just to push her “Jewish space lasers” comment onto page two of search engine results and therefore out of the public memory, like Boris Johnson attempted with his red Brexit bus.

  • This personal brand-focused politics further fractures the feedback loop between policy and electoral politics. Legislators are now more likely to boost their electoral chances not by advancing in the party or passing legislation voters want, but by making otherwise nonsensical “big moves” against each other, like Survivor superfans building their tribal “resume.”

• The Joe Rogan Show, which Ad Fontes classifies as slightly right of center and generally untrustworthy, spent over three hours last month hosting Tucker Carlson (“interview” is too strong a word here, I think). I made it through about thirty minutes, during which I learned Carlson believes Rogan’s theories about UFOs are mistaken; they are actually spiritual phenomena of some kind.

  • Incredibly, Carlson—whose claims about the 2020 election cost him his job and Fox News $787 million—has this to say about lying:

  • “… lying is bad. It's bad not just in a legal sense, in that it can be illegal to lie, but it's bad for you. It rots you. Being a liar makes you a bad person. When you lie, you are serving evil. There's a moral quality to it that's inescapable and very obvious, and only advanced civilizations ignore that lying is bad.”

The one ideological thread holding these folks together is anti-elitism. In different ways, each believe political elites are unfairly rigging the game against the rest of us.

• That—populism—is a powerful force in the history of American politics.

• As Thomas Chatterton Williams puts it in a piece about Michael Kirby, we don’t have to accept these authors’ view of the solution to find points of agreement with their diagnosis of some problems:

  • “… as the internet and social media have allowed us to peer inside our national institutions, there is no denying their stewards have suffered profoundly from the exposure. And yet, I kept asking myself a question and phrasing it to Kirn in different ways: Why can’t we do two things simultaneously? Why can’t we revise our estimation of a decadent and often deceitful ruling class and refuse to downplay the sui generis outrage that is Donald Trump? It is not an acquittal of [the elites] to insist that a second Trump term would be a mistake.”

We can’t build a persuasive, alternate story—one that pulls together Americans frustrated with the direction of the country —unless we listen, even and especially to voices we don't like.

Thomas Jefferson

— Jefferson believed that individual property ownership was crucial to driving the nation forward. He often connected land ownership to success and stability. However, he also believed that unequal distribution of this land could be troublesome as it could lead to social and economic problems. We see this in 1785 when Jefferson writes to Madison, “The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands.” In these letters he points out the concentration of property and wealth being in the hands of very few, suggesting that this could lead to widespread poverty and unemployment. While he does not explicitly mention employee ownership, his views align with employee ownership models such as cooperatives or employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) because they align with the idea that giving workers a stake in success can profit all. The idea of equal distribution of land aligns with the idea of giving employees a stake in their workplace and also highlights a commitment to reinforcing democracy through shared economic participation.

James Madison

— Like Jefferson, Madison also expressed concerns about the concentration of power. In Federalist No.10, Madison focuses on factions and the majority. He worried about the tyranny of the majority and the ability of one faction to completely dominate others and lead to unfair decisions. Madison also expressed concerns about few people owning most of the land and argued this would lead to inequality problems. He proposed a large republic that represented a diverse range of interests so that this would cancel out the power of the majority. His concerns along with this proposed solution are reflective of employee ownership models because they ensure that the employees are part of a more inclusive and fair form of governance that aims to prevent the tyranny of the majority within the workplace. By including employees in the decision-making process, companies also enable a diverse range of ideas to be presented. This incorporation of employee perspectives not only aligns with democratic views but also mitigates concerns about inequality, echoing the founders’ visions for a balanced society.

Background: Regular readers of this podcast will know that I’m teaching a course this semester on democratic theory and practice. One of the most helpful resource I’ve found is Capilano University professor Michael Laurence’s Oxford Bibliography entry on Democratic Theory in the (PDF here). It covers major movements in democratic theory, including classical (Aristotle, Plato), Enlightenment Republican, Enlightenment Liberal, up through radical schools of democratic thought.

You might the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry’s entry on Democracy by Tom Christiano and Sameer Bajaj would cover some of the same ground. You’d be wrong! It address philosophical justifications for democracy, arguments for and against its authority, the demands of democratic participation, types of representation, “social choice” theory, and the boundary problem of who should get to participate in a democracy.

To compound things, in researching for this post, I just noticed that the Oxford Bibliography series has separate entries on democracy in its sociology and philosophy sections. I don’t have access to the sociology entry, though it seems to cover similar ground and the same authors as Laurence, with the odd sociologist thrown into the mix. The philosophy entry includes sections on voting, justice, epistemology, equality, deliberation, pragmatism, and criticisms of democracy.

Enter Generative AI, sort of: Frankly, just getting my hands on these summaries and going through the first two was exhausting. To get a sense of what was included in each, I asked Claude (a ChatGPT competitor) to generate clean citation lists from the Oxford entries, which I then put into Google Sheets to see what authors were common across all three. Below is a list of those, along with Claude-generated, offensively single-sentence descriptions of their work:

1. Plato - Presented influential early criticisms of democracy in the 300s BCE.

2. John Locke - Justified democracy instrumentally via majority rule in the 1600s [editor’s note: I would *not* pick this sentence to describe Locke’s work]

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Linked democracy with general will in the 1700s.

4. John Stuart Mill - Discussed representative democracy and participation in the 1800s.

5. Kenneth Arrow - Formulated a mathematical impossibility theorem concerning social choices in the 1950s.

6. Anthony Downs - Applied economic theory to voting behavior in the 1950s.

7. John Dewey - Linked democracy with pragmatist philosophy in the 1950s.

8. Joseph Schumpeter - Advocated elite theory of democracy in the 1940s.

9. Robert Dahl - Analyzed democracy's critics and democratic ideals from the 1950s to 2000s.

10. Joshua Cohen - Developed the idea of epistemic populism in the 1980s.

11. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson - Advocated deliberative democracy for moral disagreement in the 1990s.

12. Ronald Dworkin - Connected democracy with equality of resources in the 1990s.

13. Amartya Sen - Connected democracy with individual capability in the 1990s.

14. Jon Elster - Edited influential essays on deliberative democracy in the 1990s.

15. Tom Christiano - Defended equality in collective decision-making in the 2000s.

16. Elizabeth Anderson - Argued for democracy's epistemic benefits in the 2000s.

17. David Estlund - Defended epistemic proceduralism regarding democracy in the 2000s.

18. John Parkinson - Examined deliberative democracy's practical legitimacy in the 2000s.

19. Gerry Mackie - Systematically reviewed criticisms of democracy in the 2000s.

20. Jason Brennan - Critiqued uninformed voting in the 2010s.

Next Steps: Some of these authors were already on my syllabus for class this semester. Others just got themselves added! But not Kenneth Arrow. Social choice theory bores me to tears. Sorry, not sorry.

• Some of those authors believe a virtuous citizenry is required for democracy to function; others argued that democracy would make people more or less virtuous. Some recent political scientists, though, maintain it’s not that important.

• Machiavelli, famously, argued in The Prince that the “virtues” needed to make an effective ruler—cruelty, cunning, deceit—were very different than the virtues required to make a good human.

• In his new book, The Pursuit of Happiness, author Jeffrey Rosen explores the American founders’ own obsession with virtue and self-improvement:

Virtue, of course, is a sticky topic. Some of that stickiness:

• Republican leaders were focused on personal virtue in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton’s carousing spilled into public view. They seem less focused on it today, or at least to apply it inconsistently (consider the indiscretions of Donald Trump vs. Lauren Boebert).

  • Still, if you go googling around about virtue, you’re likely to end up in center-right corners of the internet.

• Virtue and virtue ethics have fallen out of fashion, despite having been a core part of American education until the middle of the twentieth century, according to Rosen.

  • Rosen attributes that in part to the decline of religion; it might also be that the rise of a more diverse America, and one in which more voices are heard, has exposed a wider variety of beliefs about what virtues are important.

  • As a result, it might be harder to talk about virtue today, than ever. But that doesn’t make it less important.

• Many conversations about virtue still center around the same authors—Western, white, and male. It has made me wonder what a more well-rounded conversation about virtue would look like.

  • What would “modern” virtues include? Empathy? Grit? Ubuntu? Ahimsa?

Go Deeper: Check out Rosen’s recent interview on The Realignment podcast:

In preparation for that, I thought I’d take a look at what’s happened since then:

• All the think shops—Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, The Brennan Center—have felt compelled to put out their reports about how AI will change the 2024 election.

• In December, a congressional candidate used AI to have phone conversations with voters. Today, the FCC extended its prohibitions against scam robocalls to include artificially generated voices.

  • This came after “a Texas man and two companies” made AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden. That doesn’t ban AI robocalls, of course—it just applies the same scam robocall laws to calls using AI-generated voices.

• Even Meta is getting antsy, claiming it will prohibit the undisclosed use of AI in politics ads.

  • How they’ll do this, I’m not sure—I can’t effectively prohibit it my own classroom.

• I’m exploring how to use this software to sort through and access the national database of campaign staff that I put together while writing my dissertation.

At UTA, I’m teaching a class this spring called Democracy in Theory and Practice. In addition to the Aristotle, Machiavelli and Madison, we’ll spend a couple of weeks talking about technology. I encourage my students to think about this and all technological developments in two ways:

• The democracy-weakening uses of new technology.

  • This is most of what you’ll read about: deep fakes, micro-targeting, and even more robocalls that turn off voters. The sum effect of all this technology, I believe, is that it will be logical for us to trust less of what we see and hear on our computers.

  • In that way, I think the cumulative effect of the use of AI, including generative AI, is that we’ll have to return to some old school trust-but-verify behavior, where the “verify” part happens in person, in living rooms and in public speeches. Very Athenian, really!

• The democracy-enhancing uses of new technology.

  • Some of the theories we study in class point to the need for citizens to be educated in how to participate in democracy. Participation is hard! and weird! and takes time. These tools could make it much easier to train people to participate in democracy. And some of those AI robocalls might turn out to be useful, drawing people in to the political process.

  • Other theories that we study in class focus on the need for people to learn how to deliberate well—to argue effectively and empathetically. These tools can help! They can offer guides for how to unstick conversations that feel stuck, or suggest ways forward on issues that are contentious. Maybe ChatGPT will train us to argue and deliberate more effectively.

  • A quick post-posting update: I just saw that the Hewlett Foundation is working on the possibilities of AI rather than just its dangers—check it out.

If you really want to gaze into the looking glass, the MIT Technology Review article is my favorite of the ones listed above. An AI-generated political party??

The organizer, technologist Bruce Schneider, put out a wonderfully overwhelming summary of the two-day gathering. But what most excited me was Katy’s first takeaway:

Finding fellow travelers on that kind of adventure is always exciting; finding an old friend already walking a parallel path is a marvel.

Small democracy

I came to be interested in small-scale democracy by way of learning about employee ownership. At the same time I, like many Americans, had become anxious about our large-scale democratic institutions that are, at the very least, in need of serious renewal.

If we are struggling to govern ourselves well at a national level, I wondered, might we be a part of smaller institutions—churches, clubs, families, neighborhoods, workplaces—where we could relearn the habits of democratic self-governance? Of how to build and maintain rule by, for, and of the people?

Fellow travelers

A handful of other summary quotes from the conference, compiled by Schneir, also caught my attention:

Jon Evans: Wide adoption is required to recreate democracy, and this needs to start on a small scale, with democratic testbeds. Traditional testbeds include civic groups, fan clubs, churches, grassroots communities… New testbeds include decentralized autonomous organizations, CityDAOs (for particular cities), “network state” movements, online spaces (Discord, subreddits).

I would love to talk with Evans about whether the technological avenues he mentions here are best deployed as alternative testbeds, or as complementing some of those older forms and then subsequently scaling them up.

Nathan Schneider: Towards “modular politics” (e.g., at Metagov), a mode of doing governance tooling, with interoperability between diverse governance forms, and self-governance rather than top-down control.

The phrase modular politics lit up my brain; learning only a little about MetaGov might have broken it. I’ve got homework to do here.

Helene Landemore: Infusing more democratic processes in corporate governance, there are two main alternatives: technocratic oversight boards (e.g., Meta, but unclear whether truly independent and representative) or citizen assembly representative of humanity providing direct inputs, faster than regulatory processes.

This! I strongly suspect Landemore (whom we’ve written about before) listed these as just two of many possibilities for infusing more democratic processes into corporate governance, given how many more are out there.

Archon Fung: Principle of affected interests: an individual should be able to influence an organization if and only if that organization makes decisions that regularly or deeply influence that individual’s important interests.

I learned about the principle of affected interests from W. Watson, a guest speaker of ours from last year, who is working now on a paper applying it to the design of open source technology projects, which… 🤯. The idea has been stuck in my brain and conversations ever since.

Signing off for now. Hopefully much more to come!

If you have had a broken relationship come back together, you also know that new relationship will not look like it did. Those cracks show. How they are mended, however, determines whether they remain weak points that precede future fallout, or serve as a shining testament to the breakages they survived.

Last fall, I bought a kintsugi kit, which I plan to test out during my first five-day Covid isolation, which started this week. As best I have learned, kintsugi is the Japanese art of binding broken things together with gold and glue, turning them into newly useful and surprisingly beautiful works of art. Take a look.

The more I have learned about kintsugi (short podcast here for the aurally inclined), the more I have wondered what lessons it might hold for democracy today. We have just landed in 2024, a year that promises future breakages in American politics, and likely in others as over 1 billion people go to various polls around the world. In America, we will press against weak points whose origins date back to our founding and unmended wounds from the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction.

I am not bullish that the pressure will come down in 2024. But I am confident that democratic deliberation, of which I am more student than expert, will have to serve as the glue and gold that binds Americans, shattered shards that we are, back together.

At the Obama Foundation’s second Democracy Forum today, the former president will focus not on politics, but on economics. He plans to advocate for what he calls inclusive capitalism, according to Axios:

“the former president will call for ‘a new economic framework that addresses inequality and prepares citizens for the coming changes in how we live and work that reaches a higher purpose beyond material consumption,’ according to a preview for Axios.” (emphasis added)

What to watch: It’s not clear yet what Obama’s inclusive capitalism includes. It’s a strong bet that means continued reinvigoration of unions.

• We hope it also includes employee ownership, steward ownership, workplace democracy, and other paths by which workers and stakeholders might have a voice in, and benefit financially from, the companies whose decisions shape our economy and society.

Every August, Congress heads home for recess. For many of them, it isn’t a break—they’re still at work, touching base with constituents in one of America’s great traditions: the town hall.

Earlier this month I spoke with Dang Le from the Fort Worth Report for his article on congressional town halls in Texas. Le featured my own representative Marc Veasey, whose hilariously gerrymandered district runs from Fort Worth to where I live in South Dallas. It was one my first interview as a professor, so I did way to much research on town halls in preparation. Here’s what I found:

The first town halls in America were mini governments, not Q&A sessions—and we don’t really know where they came from. Today, when a representative goes back to their district, it’s mostly listening and responding carefully to constituent concerns. But the first town hall meetings in Massachusetts in the 1630s were experiments in community-level direct democracy, a tradition that continues today in some Massachusetts towns. But how they got started is contested. I’ve written before about how many of our democratic ideas and practices have Native American roots; I find myself wondering if the town hall might be the legacy of Pilgrims’ exposure to Native American deliberative traditions.

The phrase town hall is now part of American mythology and gets repurposed to lend legitimacy to lots of different things. Companies have town halls. Starting in the 1990s, presidential debate organizers started experimenting with the town hall debate format. CNN called its disastrous 2023 interview with Donald Trump a “town hall.” Former Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price used to have bicycle ride town halls, and the City of Dallas will host town halls for its 2024 bond program.

Congressional town halls took a beating in 2009, but there has been a wave of innovation since. In the midst of the fight over Obamacare and the rise of the Tea Party, generally sleepy town halls turned into fiery exchanges and, in one instance, a reported death threat against a representative. The town hall, scholars lamented, had devolved into a combination of a press conference and screaming match. Some representatives stopped doing them entirely (though the average representative holds nine town halls every two years). Other formats have emerged to serve some of the same functions as town halls. Politicians host AMAs on Reddit, interactive campaign announcements on Twitter, and video conferences for supporters, for example.

The most exciting experiments to me are online or “deliberative” town halls with representative samples of constituents, where it turns out representatives can be remarkably persuasive. It was a deliberative town hall-esque gathering that convinced politicians in Texas to support the development of the Texas wind industry (!). More links on those below.

We don’t know very much about how town halls reflect or effect congressional behavior. I was able to find very little research on congressional town halls themselves, which was a fun surprise. One working paper I found held a surprise. Scholars have tended to think of legislators having different legislative styles: some are focused on making policy, others on constituent services, and others on moving up in the party. But when Andrew Clarke and Daniel Markovitz looked at 23,000 congressional town halls over eight years, they found that representatives more likely to show up for town halls were the same ones that were effective at getting legislation passed.

As is often the case, I left all this research with more questions (and paper ideas) than answers. I’m curious to hear what questions you readers have about them, too!

—

Bonus! Go deeper on deliberative town halls:

• Civil Political Discourse? Yes!

• Digital town halls take political discussions beyond sound and fury

• Who Wants To Deliberate—And Why?

• Politicians Are More Persuasive During Interactive Town Hall Meetings

• 'Deliberative town halls' encourage civil dialogue, Ohio State institute says

• Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress

• What deliberative democracy can, and can’t, do

Background: For years, political scientists have studied Americans’ trust in our democratic and political institutions—Congress, the military, et cetera. Things aren’t great. Americans trust the government less. To pull out just one stunner, 9% of Republicans report confidence in the federal government. But this distrust applies to functionally every institution, with the recent high water mark coming just after September 11th, 2001. Why is an open question. But perhaps regardless greater participation—political, civic, deliberative—could be the path out of our distrust and to institutional renewal.

Why is this happening? A recent Ezra Klein podcast offers two opposing answers. First, as conservative guest Mary Katharine Ham argues, those Americans might be right: Perhaps our institutions are less trustworthy and competent than they used to be.

The second possibility, voiced in part by substitute host Jane Coaston, is that American voters have been told by some political leaders to distrust institutions. The most straightforward example of this, to me, is election security. We don’t have direct evidence of a meaningful amount of electoral funny business, so that can’t be why 1/3 of Americans don’t trust the 2020 election. Instead, they have that belief because they trust leaders (political scientists call them elites) who signaled they should be distrusting.

Going A Little Deeper: In a recent paper, political scientists Henry Brady and Thomas Kent asked a similar question. They used surveys of Americans to argue that:

• The decline in trust is specifically about perceptions of a lack of accountability, competence, and responsiveness.

• Decline in trust is polarized: “Republicans trust business, the police, religion, and the military much more than Democrats, [who] trust labor, the press, science, higher education, and public schools.”

• Both of these, they suspect, has to do with income inequality and segregation.

Brady and Kenny leave open the questing of causation. Paraphrasing aggressively here, they think it’s equal parts these three things:

1. Americans’ negative experiences with institutions

2. Increasing inequality and demographic shifts (they say “diversity,” but I think there’s a stronger case that it’s racial resentment that is the problem)

3. Culture wars that have sucked in and polarized a new set of institutions (think Nike, the NFL, a more liberal Pope, Pepsi, school boards, ESG investing…)

I find myself stuck on, and dissatisfied with the lack of an answer to, the question of why Americans are so distrusting—a starting point for some empirical work, maybe.

Is participation the path out of distrust?

But that stuckness on how we got into this mess doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t find a way out of it.

Singer and activist Joan Baez allegedly said that action is the antidote to despair. Which leads me to wonder: could greater participation be the answer to Americans’ distrust in institutions? And at the same time, spur the renewal of those institutions that are failing?

The backstory might go something like this: as Americans stopped participating in democratic institutions, those institutions performed less well. And at the same time, those now-withdrawn Americans are more likely to casually complain about those institutions, which are now run by someone else. Increasing American participation might work in the other direction, rebuilding both the institutions and our trust in them.

What kind of participation might lower distrust and renew institutions? Based on what little evidence I could find during my lunch break, it seems important to distinguish between three kinds of participation: political participation, deliberative participation, and civic participation.

Political participation—voting, donating to campaigns, volunteering on campaigns—is way up, at the same time that distrust in institutions is going down, in a polarized way. That makes sense to me. Each party has an interest in establishing some punching bag, whether that’s the other side’s big business donors, the government agencies they don’t control, the police, et cetera. So whatever the relationship, I’ll assume for now that greater partisan political participation hasn’t led to more trust in government institutions in the last twenty five years.

Deliberative participation. Another other path, which I’m still learning about and will share more on in a future, is a field of democratic theory called deliberative democracy. Its proponents argue that participation in decision-making itself, rather than just voting for representatives, that changes people. I touched on that briefly here, but it’s also worth reading about this experiment (hosted here in D-FW!):

Civic Participation. Since the publication of Robert Putnam’s 1995 article “Bowling Alone” (later a book), political scientists have been mildly obsessed with the decline of civic participation and “associational life” in the United States. The pandemic, I suspect, turbo-charged this; how many Rotary Clubs have successfully stitched themselves back together in the last two years?

Because I have a day job to get back to, I’ll share here where I’m headed next, in case anyone is curious to pick up the threads:

• The Census Bureau has a Volunteering in Civic Life survey that I’d like to explore; AmeriCorps has an interactive page where you can explore the results.

• That survey doesn’t get a ton of coverage, it doesn’t look like, but the recent version inspired one WaPo article to examine America’s Friendliest Cities.

• Pew Research Center published a report on civic engagement in 2009; I haven’t found an updated version of that yet.

• John Gardner, a favorite author of mine, wrote that individual self-renewal was the path to institutional renewal. This Brainpickings/Marginalian article is worth the time, too.

• Academically, this article on the link between government performance and trust looks like the most recent article published in well-reputed journal.

More soon. In the meantime, maybe let’s go join something?

Where do good ideas come from? American author Steven Johnson argues that they do not spring forth pre-formed from the minds of genius individuals; they emerge through interaction, connection, and play.

This might sound obvious, but the history of democratic ideas is usually about genius individuals: Aristotle, Machiavelli, John Locke, James Madison—take a look, for example, at the table of contents of this popular democratic theory textbook.

Other scholars take the Johnson view. They argue that the emergence of democratic ideas was not the product of brilliant European minds alone, but the result the clash of civilizations—and in particular, the clash of imperial, post-feudal Europe with more egalitarian societies in North America. Some examples:

• In The Dawn of Everything (2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the very concepts of freedom and equality put forward by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau were likely inspired by the (Native) American, Wendat rhetorician Kandiaronk.

• Wengrow and Graeber also raise the possibility that the idea of republicanism, which flowered in Europe in the 1600s, might have been influenced in part by the Tlaxcallan Republic the Spanish encountered in Central America in the early 1500s.

• Recent scholarship has taken more seriously the contributions of French feminist writer Françoise de Graffigny, whom Graeber and Wengrow posit might have “formed their first impression of what a welfare state, or even state socialism, might be like by contemplating accounts of the empire in the Andes.”

• The self-governance of the Haudenosaunee, which according to one author had had been practiced for 15 generations before the arrival of Europeans, “made a lasting impression on the English colonists.” They included one Benjamin Franklin, who would go on to shape the self-governance of the new American colonies. Franklin observed:

  “The Indian men, when young, are hunters and warriors; when old, counsellors; for all their government is by the council or advice of the sages. There is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment. Hence they generally study oratory, the best speaker having the most influence.”

• The Haudenosaunee peoples and the broader Iroquois Confederacy also inspired the very idea of federalism, that most American of political ideas, as a 1988 Congressional Resolution attests. Their constitution—the Great Law—may date back to the late 12th century, and has some striking overlap with the U.S. Constitution. While not the only inspiration for the Constitution, it seems reasonable to me that the American founders might have snagged more than one good idea from it.

On a personal note, I have been humbled to learn about all of these influences and connections and grateful for scholars’ efforts to lay them out. I am only beginning to consider their implications, including for how we understand and teach American history and democratic theory. And in a particularly fractious time in American history, I’m curious to take another look at those early (Native) American thinkers for clues about how we might recompose a story of America’s future, one that can carry us toward a more perfect union.

Helene Landemore’s response to the claim is “you’re right! And we should make it more of one.”

Landemore argues for more a more radical vision of democracy. In her recent book, she explores how randomly selected representatives of the people might serve as decision-makers for a government, like a jury might for a court. She points to examples like the Icelandic constitutional reform and the French Citizens Convention for Climate as early experiments in what is possible. She argues that these bodies were more “democratic” than the bodies created by elections, which are often unrepresentative legislatures.

Klein and Landemore also touch on one workplace-related research finding: that if you want to raise the IQ of a group, you are better off picking people to it that are a little more diverse than recruiting people that are little more individually intelligent. Perhaps this is true outside the workplace, too!

In 2018, I helped re-publish a powerful, mostly forgotten, first-person account of the struggle for power in Russia 100 years prior.

I thought about that book today as I read breaking news from Russia, just as I thought about it watching U.S. news on January 6th, 2021.

Institutions, whether autocratic or democratic, are shockingly fragile things. Democratic values in particular depend on constantly renewed, shared commitment.

Without that commitment, we too could find ourselves subject to the machinations of people like Vladimir Lenin, who in 1918 "found power lying in the streets and simply picked it up."

In a recently published article, “Inviting in Philanthropy to Strengthen Local News and Democracy” MacArther Foundation President John Palfrey explains that as a nation, we need more journalism from every community in order for democracy to thrive. The absence of local news, he argues, is driving polarization in America.  

In reading this article, I reflected on the role that stewardship has on democracy. While aiding communities financially can be beneficial if done properly, it can also reinforce a hierarchical, class-based system. Furthermore, some people may participate in philanthropic work for the wrong reasons such as political gain or to earn public trust. Instead, philanthropy should be a true desire to give voices or means to more people—an inherently democratic ideal. Philanthropic work that is good for democracy must empower the groups being funded to eventually become self-sufficient and must not disrupt the culture or nature of communities, but rather work with them.

Investing in local news and journalism fits that bill. It would give the “fifth of Americans [who] live in news deserts” as well as historically underrepresented groups their proper place in the public arena. However, if we put money into local news, we must ensure that the local news business does in fact reflect and connect to the communities it is meant to serve. As Palfrey elaborates, “we need more journalists, from more diverse backgrounds.” The issue is what comes first: the platform or people?

Palfrey goes on to explain the importance of the media, and especially open media, to our understanding of democracy. Much research has shown just how divisive our nation is now, especially our mainstream, cable news sources. Social contributes, too, as does the absence of fact-checking and the constant availability of new content. While our opinions are formed through many different avenues, it is through media use and interpersonal communication that these opinions are reinforced and strengthened. If more proper news work from each and every community was being published or broadcasted with varying opinions, Americans may not need to turn to TikTok or Instagram. Hostile disputes through major media networks used for publicity rather than to properly inform the people could transform into healthy discourse between neighboring stations who better represent their communities. 

In total, we must be careful what philanthropic jargon we fall prey to. In order for a productive democratic society, we must fund our communities and others altruistically and strategically. Philanthropy can mend America’s tattered democracy, and supporting local news is a great start. 

Wealth inequality in America is the highest it has been in decades, with a small percentage of the population holding a disproportionately large share of the nation's wealth.

This is not only not sustainable for the economy, but it is also not sustainable for democracy. In order for democracy to function, labor needs to have just as much of a say as their bosses.

While the wages of the 1% have doubled since 1979, everybody else’s wages have only increased by 24%. I attribute this to Reagan’s anti-labor policies, which heavily favored corporate power over worker organization. Since the Reagan era, policies that oppose unions have been consistently promoted, such as right-to-work laws. These policies lead to declining union membership and weakened bargaining power. These have effectively led to the destruction of worker power in favor of corporate control.

However, this could change. Support for unions is at an all-time high, despite steadily decreasing union membership. At the very least, this shows people understand that unions are an important part of dealing with corporations, even if they are struggling to implement them. It shows a need for investment in this field, which could potentially boost the membership and potency of unions. With guidance and investment, workers may be able to gain back the bargaining power that they lost.

Unions are an important first step in closing the wealth inequality gap and reestablishing worker power. They have been proven to increase wealth for all households, especially marginalized groups. Allowing workers to develop socio-economical wealth is foundational to political power. Incredible wealth concentration leads to power concentration. The 1% holds a disproportionate amount of power because they hold a disproportionate amount of wealth. It allows them to easily lobby for their interests, such as tax cuts or deregulation. Workers can establish a similar power through unions. Unions can organize workers and allow them to express their interests in a way that a single worker cannot. It ensures that the demands of the majority are heard just as much as the demands of the wealthy. In a healthy democracy, everyone should have an equal voice. However, in a system where a small group of individuals control an overwhelming amount of wealth, their influence can far outweigh the majority. Unions can be a powerful tool in restoring balance and giving power back to the people.

TLDR: Liberal intellectuals and conservative anti-intellectuals are both increasingly sure of themselves. That certainty, which a group of political scientists call “epistemic hubris” has no redeeming democratic qualities.

The big picture: In an in-depth, survey-based study, a group of political scientists identify some worrying trends:

• Americans on the right and left are pretty confident about their political opinions, even on issues that remain unsettled among experts.

• On the political left, unwarranted certainty (epistemic hubris) is associated with intellectualism as an identity “marked by ruminative habits and

  learning for its own sake.”

• On the political right, unwarranted certainty is associated with anti-intellectualism as an attitude (an “affect”).

That kind of over-confidence may be helpful in launching a new business or launching a long-shot campaign for political office, but it is a serious obstacle to democratic deliberation.

The bottom line: “In contemporary American culture, the authors quip, “the three little words in shortest supply may not be ‘I love you,’ but ‘I don’t know.’”

—

Go Deeper: Read more about how the authors decided what contentious claims lacked clear scientific consensus in either direction:

• “If unchecked, the US national debt will cause major economic damage”

• “If college were free, there would be much less economic inequality”

• “Gun control reduces mass shootings”

• “The quality of health care is better in many ways in the US than in Canada”

• “Unauthorized immigration hurts the American economy”

• “Human life begins at conception”

• “Significant increases in the minimum wage reduce poverty”

• “Charter schools harm regular public schools”

• “When it comes to success, grit is more important than luck”

As the Russia-Ukraine war continues to unfold, the world has seen Ukrainians defending their home through unity and mutual reliance. In sharing food and resources with people who can’t wait in lines, driving trains coming back with supplies after evacuating others, housing strangers in volunteer shelters, aiding troops in making Molotov cocktails, and fighting without question, Ukrainians have been coming together to practice an emergency participatory democracy. While Ukraine is receiving aid from various outside sources such as the Salvation Army or the UN, it is mainly the citizens themselves putting the interests and needs of their peers first without any request from the government or holding a position in government.

According to Julia Keugten, Senior Advisor at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Participatory Democracy is “concerned with ensuring that citizens are afforded an opportunity to directly participate, or otherwise be involved in the decisions that affect their lives.” While this seems bound to happen on an individual level when in a war-zone where everyone is left to fend for themselves and thus has complete control over the decisions they make in their lives, civilians are in-fact not acting alone or against each other. This goes to show a sort of human nature to equally all participate in the betterment of the majority, even when not seeking a reward or title. Ukraine has and is showing the power of democracy as well as the instinctive manner in which people, when all experiencing the same losses, fall into democracy on all scales, big and small. In this, Ukrainians are exhibiting what Rebecca Solnit argues is basic human nature in the face of disaster:

“In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it." - Rebecca Solnit.

As tighter and tighter centralization of power leads authoritarian to crumble, we may see a riptide of democracy pulling in the opposite direction, giving power and choice back to citizens. The citizenship Ukrainians have displayed in battle need not stop once the war is over. One Ukrainian resident, Vladymir Balabanov, sets his hopes high for the country’s revival after seeing and engaging in this natural emergence of participatory democracy stating, “People who fled are coming back now. We see our country in a new way. We have changed, and we want to change Ukraine for the better. A year of war has left us tired, but with hope.”

Read more about Rebecca Solnit’s hopeful vision of humanity on The Marginalian.