 This is the last of four calls about governance. This one is on Thursday, March 14th, 2024. We've been talking through things like what's working for governance around the world. But we're kind of kicking around a variety of ideas here. And we will see who shows up again. Eleanor had sent me an email earlier this morning, which I have not read yet, but was just describing the questions she put in the email. And they're great questions. And Gil, one of them is the question you raised, I think, at the end of our last call of this string. And I will paraphrase it. But how do we prevent Trump from winning the next election and us slipping into the future that he and the Heritage Foundation and others are painting for us, which I think is an interesting thing to go after. You go ahead, Gil. Yeah, painting in exquisite detail. And so, and Eleanor, I'm kind of stealing your thunder here. But if you wouldn't mind elaborating on that, but also then asking your second question, we can sort of put those on the table right now. So the first question, I think, Gil has raised this. But it's really urgent about we're living in a country where there's an election just months away where one of the lead candidates is saying that he would essentially work as a fascist and be a dictator. And we've got it all laid out in great detail, Project 2025 and his own speeches, what he's going to do. So is there anything that this group on governance could do to expose that, prevent that from happening in November? So that's kind of my first urgent and pressing question. And the second question is, it's entirely possible that the hostilities within the United States and the divisions here could lead to a civil war. We are already, in my view, in a cold civil war. It could turn into a hot civil war as soon as the election in November, no matter which candidate is said to be the winner. So is there anything that this group could do with all its brilliance and expertise on governance that could help think about, if we do collapse into a civil war, what would be then a structure of governance, a system of governance that we could propose that could help guide the country out of that meltdown and into a new and better era? Those are my two questions. Thanks, Eleanor. And sobering they are. Gil asks, propose to whom in the chat? I think, Eleanor, if you were in a civil war, I think you mean propose to other citizens willing to listen. Exactly. I think it's entirely possible we'll hit a point where there's armed rebellion and fighting in the streets. And it could be a protracted struggle that goes on for a while. But as Gil is very fond and says rightly, conversation can turn into creating a new world. Could this group have a conversation that could come up with recommendations or outline or guidelines for a system of governance that would be better than what we have now? Because what we have now has led us into this predicament. And if this group could come up with it, I think we could seed it in a number of places and have it taken up when needed. And Eleanor, I think your second question gets at the itch that caused me to set up this sequence of four calls, which is, hey, what's broken is broken because there are all sorts of problems throughout the system. And we have interesting critiques of what's broken. But I'd love to know what works so that we could start to use that as a raft that will float and that eventually becomes a floating city or something like that. What would you start from? And I mentioned, I think, on one of the calls that kind of tongue-in-cheek a couple years, some multiple years ago, I bought the domain foobarism.com as a placeholder religion. And the exercise was meant to be, hey, if you were going to invent a religion of your own, what would you put in it? What would you want to have in a religion? And so this is the same question, but about how might we co-regulate? And then we've had some debates on these calls about, well, governance isn't the right word. It's about co-regulation. It's about cooperation or collaboration. And it's like, okay, those are interesting questions. I still think that governance is kind of in the middle of it. And then a third thing I'll say about it, and then I'll see what everybody else would like to offer on this. A third angle on this is that I still think that governance and trust are kind of behind a lot of these things because one of the reasons we're having these conflicts is that a lot of people feel like whatever broken governance system we have has not included them. They're left behind, they are excluded, they are looked down on, whatever else might be happening, we are not co-regulating well from their perspective. So they've been approached by people with a different program and they're like, well, okay, we'll try that program. And that's not going well. This is kind of cool. I've seen several versions of Mike in the gallery. I think he's switching devices, but it's kind of, I feel like a little panopticon effect is happening with Mike. Oh, perfect, even better. Thank you. Love that. So let me go quiet for a second and see if this stirs anything for anybody else on the call. Please, Stacy. So Eleanor, I had brought up an idea in this, in other groups, in different groups related, using to go to what Judy was saying earlier, I came in the end, but I thought I heard her talking about how people are learning not so much from books and to what Jerry's talking about with trust and relationship. I had thought about the idea of taking the 2025 platform but just taking the backbone out of it and starting a series of calls that other people could take with their groups as well to sort of rewrite, like what would you, what would you want? And to just do it like a syllabus, like taking one step at a time where we get to actually discuss it in our groups, it would be discussing the differences within our sameness, because even though most of us agree mostly about certain things, there are nuances there. But having those conversations would then lead out to other conversations in a more organized way. At least that's the way I say it. So I just wanted to throw that out. Yeah, I love that idea. And the Heritage Foundation since the late 1970s, they put together a whole blueprint for the country when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and 84. And they had it all thought through of what needed to be done. And I've often thought, we need to have that similar level of seriousness and depth and clarity on what do we do around governance? And so we're not just playing on reactive all the time. So sign me up for that conversation. I would love to be part of that. If I could just add one more point. The reason that I chose the 2025 thing is they've already identified where their energy is, where their values are. It's there for, we don't have to argue about it. We see where it is. Now we can just shift it and kind of do our thing. So just to see just for clarity for me. When you say the 2025, do you mean we should pick apart the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 platform and analyze it or do you mean we should build a reply to that, some other version of that? There is a document that I think I shared with you, the mandate for leadership, I think it's called. And- Yeah, it's part of the Project 2025, mandate for leadership or conservative promise, yes. So the very first basic conversation, the one I had with a friend of mine who's on the other side just started with that they want to support the family. And we just simply talked about where that could go wrong or maybe it should be shifted to the community. But we went back and forth with that because, I mean, I think everybody agrees that the family is broken down, but where we might disagree is, so should we try to squash it back together or should we be taking care of the people that don't have families or what can we do? But again, it comes from conversations with you don't have to have a PhD to have these opinions. I don't. Thank you. An interesting thing is that the Republicans in this election cycle don't have a platform, they didn't create a platform. The thing you're pointing to is created by Heritage Foundation is outside the Republican Party but they basically swallowed this program, I think, wholesale, they seem to be all on board, but there's no official Republican Party platform. There is a Democratic Party platform and then my new much more conservative than me friend pointed out that if you go read the Democratic Party platform, there's a whole lot of stuff in there about equity and equality and social justice. It reads like a social justice manifesto, there's almost nothing in there about running a country and making your country better. And he pointed that out and I was like, ah, crap, that really sucks. So that was very interesting to go read the Democratic Party platform because it felt like it had been overtaken by, eaten by people who cared only about those issues and that seems to be a huge problem. That's causing a lot of friction, I think, in this space. So we've got two mics and a gill in my queue. So Mike, you're gonna have to speak twice. Or twice as fast. Yes. Or just drop a mic. Oh, nice. Oh, real quick. I love this idea about chewing on how do we counter project 2025? Because it's very specific and it allows us to go through and actually see where the weak points are in it. And most importantly, see where the inconsistencies are. I've done a lot of pieces recently on myth-busting. So taking on people's purported positions and pointing out why it's built on a phony or false foundation. And often it's really simple to knock out the foundation. One way you can do it is by coming up with a better way of describing what it is that they're trying to do. The thing I would alter, though, is I would not focus so much on what we need to do and who needs to do it. I mean, that's a very hard involved process and you'd need to get hundreds of people around your idea to really be credible. Instead, this group is incredibly creative coming from lots of different perspectives and we know so much about what other people have thought in the past. If we can just change the framing and this often is two tweets and focus, do what Frank Luntz did. How many people remember Frank Luntz from the 90s? Can't forget him. Yeah, he was Newt Gingrich's mind control expert and he did this so effectively. They had their own contract with America. It was Newt Gingrich's platform that got the Republicans elected in 1994 so that they could take over control of the house and they simply went through and came up with things like changing the estate tax to the death tax. And somehow we have to change it back to the trust fund baby subsidy. I mean, somehow you have to just get people to think differently and to realize that they're coming at things from the wrong perspective. I mean, we were talking on an earlier call about these data protectionism efforts and how it makes so much sense to keep TikTok out of America until you realize that you've just given permission to 80 dictators around the world to keep YouTube out of Tunisia and Kazakhstan and everywhere else. And so if you can just, sometimes it's literally two tweets but I would change the focus though from what Trump wants to do to the government and instead look at those pieces of it where they wanna fundamentally change the Congress. And there's different pieces of the project. It's a huge project and I don't think we're gonna have a lot to say about what they wanna do to the judiciary. And I don't know that people would listen to us on those issues. But if we could somehow point out where they're gonna do things that make the Congress even more dysfunctional and allow Trump to be more autocratic, I think that's where our leverage is is because it just takes five members of the House to change from Democrat to Republican and even if Trump wins, we now have a firewall against autocracy. Just a couple of thoughts but I love where we're going with this because it is specific and it is something that we could spread like wildfire to people who could pick it up and push it out to their activist communities. Thanks, Mike. I wanna pour a tiny bit of kerosene on what you just said. The role model here is Victor Orban who just visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and who over the last decade has turned Hungary into an illiberal democracy, which he says. He's like, we are now an illiberal democracy which means illiberal democracies look like democracies, people still vote, there is a judiciary, there is a press, there is whatever but all of those are owned and basically taken care of. So it's an autocracy that masquerades as democracy. So it's illiberal democracy. And I think the plan is not just to weaken Congress but to completely own and permanently burn into the system irreversibly as much as possible, as much as our system can be sort of set in concrete for a long period of time but there are mechanisms to change things but I will point out there hasn't been an amendment to the Constitution in a long time and there's a whole separate conversation about, hey, why is our Constitution so old and tired? Why don't we actually like upgrade it a little bit? And there is something we could do very, very practical. If we put together like the 10 things to save the Congress or make Congress great again, we could have our list of eight or 10 things and then start sending average citizens to the town halls that all these incumbents are holding and stand up and say, do you agree that we need to blank in 2025 when the next Congress convenes? So are you saying we need to hire Frank Lanz to run the counter campaign to his previous campaign? I'm ready to and he's actually pretty, I mean, the people who are most frustrated in Washington are people like Frank Lanz who think government's important and have a Republican label. I mean, these, my Republican friends are going absolutely stark raving mad and they're looking for where they're gonna move to, what party could be formed. The progressive equivalent to Frank Lanz's George Lachoff who has not been nearly as effective, not nearly as effective. Well, he's too academic. I mean, Gore used him a lot in the 90s. We used to have dinner parties with him. He was a neighbor of mine in Berkeley, yeah. Jose then Gil. I really liked the idea of doing something, actually doing something. So that's nice to hear. I haven't been party to these conversations. My schedule hasn't permitted. The idea of working with something like Project 2025 I really liked, I liked from the beginning when Stacey mentioned. I do struggle though with the idea of us and them. The idea that this is a us rebutting their ideologies and vice versa. As you pointed out, Jerry, I think we're dealing with extremes on both sides and both extreme sides only see the other extreme side. And the big gulf in the middle is ignored because it just doesn't have the same level of distaste as the extremes do. So the first thing I see when I open up Project 2025 is about the grip of the radical left. And what you've just described as the platform, the democratic platform sounds to me like the grip of the radical left. Can I explore that with you for a second? Please. Because the radical left wants people to be called by the proper pronouns, wants to make restrooms available for transgender kids, wants transgender care, there's a bunch of other things. The radical right wants to take away women's reproductive freedom, which will cause lots of deaths. So I think there's a false equivalence and there's a radical right and there's a radical left that are kind of equal doesn't ever really work for me, but I'm falling into the left, right binary conversation by doing so. Yes, and, but I think the fact that we've got these extreme positions as what is dividing us, we're missing out in the 99% that's in the middle. The average person doesn't, in their daily lives, sorry for my language here, but they don't give a shit about any of this stuff, right? This stuff is just fodder for the fight. It's not what, it's not gonna pay my mortgage, it's not gonna, it's not gonna get my kids a job, it's not gonna get them having a life better than what they have, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? That's what's making me feel shitty wherever I sit in the political spectrum. And if I think we take the fight to these extreme issues, then we're really fighting stuff that isn't really the problem. It's only been political fodder so that they could be a fight, right? This whole abortion thing was a political game. It wasn't. I love that you guys both have the hat. This fight isn't, it's a game and we're falling into. It's a lethal game. It's a lethal game that's actually like running the table right now, but- But we can't buy into it because if we do, we can't make it. Make Earth cool again says Gil. I love it. I just wanna be clear about this cause I'm being kind of mischievous here, but my point is let's not fall into the game of fighting over the things that some activists have decided are the things we should be arguing about. And let's talk about the things that are real. Thank you very much. Gil. Yep, since we're doing hats, Tom, you gotta catch up on your hat. This is from the Global Climate Summit in San Francisco, I think in 2017 at Moscone Center, we almost got jumped walking to the bar from there because it was a red hat, you know? So there's that. Golly, so many things here. We're talking at two levels in this conversation. One is about how to hit off a possible MAGA sweep in November, which is the immediate emergency first aid question. And we're talking about how do we change the conversation and the trajectory of democracy and governance and politics in this country? And they're different and they're related obviously, but just to flag that. Frank once has been generous in giving advice to Democrats. Democrats don't always take it. As they didn't take George Lykov's advice very well. So there's that. And the mystery of why that is, I think it's important, Doug, what you're saying about the, so yeah, Mike, I'm not interested in refuting the heritage platform. That's a different kind of game. Somebody's gotta do that. That's not this conversation. The Democrat platform is indicative of the problem because it's, well, to put it very simply, identity politics is not the concern of most people in this country. But when we think about that, when we think about moving from policy documents to something that's evocative, that captures people's imagination, that captures people's hearts. Look, we're dealing, we have super majorities in this country around the most progressive issues. It depends how you frame them. It depends on how you ask the questions, but about right to choose, about gun control and a whole host of other things. The majority's run in the 70s, 80s and 90%. That's been true for decades. The People's Bicentennial Commission in, well, it was in 1976, did polling on this and showed that then. And most of the polls I've seen since then have been consistent on that. So communication that captures people's imaginations about the things they really care about and the world they want, the world we want, is really different approach than critique of what is or attacks on the other guys. One of the first things I did when I was CSO of Palo Alto is write a future story of looking back from 2030 at what our community, what the world was like then. And it was designed to be evocative and have people say, yeah, I want that. That's what I want. How do we get there? It's a very different kind of game than what politics usually plays. So, Micah, like what you're saying about changing the framing, it's only two tweets if it's the right two tweets. And it takes the kind of messaging brilliance of people like, like often once in advertising folks and so forth, but it takes a fundamental sense of what is it that we're trying to do here? And I think we're trying to do is, and I found this in, you know, in small scale and personal conversations and the work of search for common ground and the work of living room dialogues and others that, and the brilliant work of Bill Reed in conflict communities is that there are ways to bring people together and find that they really care and care deeply about the same things. And when the conversation go to there, very different things happen than if the conversation is about what we disagree about. And I'm claiming that there is enough of a core of common concern in this country, even the face of the shredding of the social fabric that we're seeing where that conversation is possible. And the question is how do we, what are, you know, this is what we got. We got 11 people here in one bot. You know, how do we drop some seeds into the pond or some seeds into the supersaturated solution to have a couple of tweets go, you know, how do we go viral with some core messaging that captures imagination and shifts the conversation? Because, you know, like we don't have multi-million dollar, multi-billion dollar ad budgets. We've got a bunch of people who are smart and interested in have networks of networks of networks. So I'm in that question here, which is not where I expected to be at the beginning of the school, I'm complete. Thank you, Stacy. Well, I agree with the last part of what Gil said, but I disagree with the first part, which is that these are two different conversations because part of the reason, if he were to win, part of the reason would be because of all the, everybody has an opinion. Everybody wants to give that opinion. We see that on Facebook. People aren't spending hours and hours on Facebook because they don't wanna share their opinion. The people that will support Trump, if that were to happen, which I really hope it won't happen, will be doing it because they are so angry and frustrated and tired of trusting the establishment. So the way I look at it, if we don't bring these people into conversations and help them to create something alongside of us, we're missing it. And to clarify about the original project, it's not about disputing what's in 2025. It's about taking the pieces that we actually agree with and just making them readable and putting it out as the people's platform by whatever name you wanna call it, I don't care. Thank you. And so I've got too many things going on in my head. So you were saying earlier, Stacey, that the family unit is broken or something like that is a thing we might be able to agree on and reframe. I'm sorry, I wouldn't even have that. This is too high level of a conversation for that. I would take a conversation with that, maybe in a Facebook group that I was starting just to get to know people. So there's different levels. And there's just, we can have another planning call because I looked it over and I've already thought about where I think we would start that would fit in with other people's interests that don't even have to do with politics, but that are also in our networks. Thanks. Tom said something really interesting in the chat about how the abortion positions were opposite back in the 50s and 60s. There's a whole lot of interesting history around, I guess, the abortion issue, in particular also when Roe v. Wade passed in 73, the Southern Baptist Convention was like, yep, this is good. And they were on board with that as policy. I think my take on what's been happening is it is political strategists who've decided to blow oxygen on the abortion issue and make it a key massive issue, which it is now. It's absolutely a massive issue except the far right has won so much on it that they're now afraid that there's gonna be huge blowback. And when Biden said in the State of the Union and loyal looking at the Supreme Court, you are about to now witness the power of women. And I hope he's right from his lips to God's ears is what I was thinking, that may be playing out. Tom, do you wanna say more about just that in general? I don't know that in general. I feel like there's, I was part of a conversation that had at the Pitzer Institute in the early 2000s which is where my comment came from that had very high level right wing people in it including that guy's name slips my mind but he's very famous for crafting the legislation or crafting the strategy that makes all the people sign up against all the Congress people sign up against any additional taxes and who wants to strangle the government and the crib that guy, he was a president. Norm, Norm. Yeah. It's in the chat, Grover Norquist. Grover Norquist, there we go. He was in this conversation and so was the head of the American Conservative Union and there are a bunch of left wing people but not nearly as high place. This was during Clinton's administration. It was actually on the week of Reagan's funeral and the National Conservative, American Conservative Union heads that he was there. He was attending this instead of Reagan's funeral because George W. Bush was gonna claim the, what do you call it, not the cloak, the mantle of Ronald Reagan and he says George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan. For him, Ronald Reagan is like a Lincoln or something. But I taught, had lots of conversation with him and I was really amazed at how much agreement there was between us and I got the feeling how my progressive perspective, and I researched these people before I went into the conversation with them, I was just like, fuck, I don't, there's a lion's den, I don't wanna go in there. And then finding out that they're real human beings with nuanced perspectives, nothing like their public personas was revelatory for me and I realized that my habitual from childhood, raising a progressive perspective had me divided and conquered from other people I could work with, that I was actually the effect of that binary framing and I also remember what was called the public conversations project and that's a different name now, but in Boston, their big thing was on abortion. They took a half dozen abortion or pro-life activists and pro-choice activists from each side and brought them together for confidential conversations during which it became clear that there was an entire spectrum of opinion in them and it was the political majoritarian battle, that divided battle that made the position so solid because you have to ally yourself with yours. You have to go vote for the guy who's better than the other guy because if you don't, the other guy's gonna win. There's no, the idea of the, what is it called? The choice voting, instant runoff voting. Ranked choice. Ranked choice, but there's a bunch of other ones also. There's ones that are ranking, there's ones that are rating, star voting, whatever, those things are trying to break down the binary and have more representative spectrum of opinions for people to choose from. So I'm junk all private, it's an interesting phrase. The forward party is pushing open primaries and ranked choice voting as a way to break through because when you have these separate primaries, the people who come from the separate primaries are the most activist people in the different sides and they vote in, their candidate is gonna be the most extreme or has to speak to that extreme. Then you get to the general election, what you've got is a bunch of extremes. So having open primaries and random choice actually a very, not random choice though. Ranked choice is actually a very interesting strategy from a practical political system change perspective and they've been getting that on ballot in state after state. I don't necessarily agree with the other perspectives of the people who are doing it, but it's an actual systems change thing. Yeah, so the whole left-right thing, I like Braver Angels because they prove that left-right people can talk together. That's like established and they have thousands of people who identify as red or blue who have been part of them and that a lot of those people now go, since we can talk together, what's next? What's supposed to happen now that we can humanize each other and talk together? So the idea of using, talking to them about actions that people can take once their left and right thing has been eased up and they can see each other as human beings that potentially work together. But that's a raw material kind of space for working with people on that kind of thing. And then my thing has for a long time has been random selection, random selected citizen councils and stuff, because that breaks away from the whole right-left thing when you're getting a broad spectrum of perspectives. But that's another subject, check. Thanks, Tom. Before passing the mic today, I just wanted to explain a couple of things I put in the chat. In, Adam Grant talks about complexification as a way of finding agreement with people, which means, hey, this isn't just a big binary thing. It's a complex issue and let's peel it apart and then we'll see what's inside the issue and we'll discover that we agree with each other more than we think we do. The Bannon's assertions note in my brain, I listened to an interview of Steve Bannon who is not on my pantheon of heroes. And I basically in good faith took notes on the conversation and wrote down the statements he was making during the interview. And I will say that 60% of the things he said I agree with. Like the party of Davos said, let's globalize and let the devil take the hindmost. Yep, check, totally agree with that. And then there's a bunch of stuff that he said that I disagree with. And it's very interesting to sort of disaggregate that and see how it is in part also because it lets you see how people are building their arguments and what they're doing. So that's kind of one piece. Then Newt Gingrich, when he came in, instituted a bunch of things that are still a problem. Before Gingrich, Congress critters used to share crash pads. They used to share rented flats in DC. Different parties would share the same apartment. So they had to live together. They ate together at the table. They shared the gym. They shared dining. They basically ate in the Congress congressional mess. They had lots of times. They played softball against each other and with each other. They had lots of places where they could sit and talk and cut deals. Gingrich basically said, if you so much as talk to somebody on the other side, we're going to cut away your primary or your funding in the primary. And because the house is so gerrymandered, nobody in the house is afraid of the general. They're afraid of the primary. The contest is really in the primaries. And that really, really, really changed the tenor of Congress enormously. And I think it was- Well, it wasn't that threat, Jerry, that so much as the fact that Gingrich said, okay, we're only going to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, so you can all go home to your district and build support. When they were there Monday through Friday, like most working people, they moved their families to Washington. So it really, that's- And their families socialized together. Yep, correct. Their wives were friends. Yep. This broke. They no longer had the constraint of their wives being friends and saying, hey, Joe, don't do that. It was, I mean, it was a brilliant move on Gingrich's part and hugely destructive. So that was just an interesting background and so forth. Dave, off to you. Yeah, thanks. It was a great conversation. I was thinking the- I got everything I learned I got from West Wing, you know, and I watched it every 10 years, just- And it's interesting because I feel like I learned different things, you know? And I just watched it a month or two ago. And it's interesting to watch. I mean, I think bottom line, right? If you're going to assume that, quote, democracy works, you're also making an assumption that, you know, at least half the people are well-intentioned and competent, right? And, you know, it's an assumption that we're still testing, I think, right? It's possible, arguably, that like our notions of democracy don't really work because we don't have any well-intentioned, competent people, you know, who are willing to participate. Maybe they have to participate. And, you know, I feel like we're testing that theory right now in the United States. Like, really? We're like, you know, right at the edge of 50-50. And if you want, like, for watching West Wing, which would be a liberal democratic kind of presentation, there's a ton of disrespect for the polity, right? I mean, like, there's no, you know, George Lyman does not like the voter. And most of the effort is kind of, how do we kind of trick people, you know, into doing what we want to have done, right? What's the game we can play? And I think that's the technocratic role and I expect most of us fall into this technocratic braiment, right, where we're trying to get what we want done, you know, kind of, you know, prove the process. We're going to understand the process enough to get, you know, like, and Newt Gingrich is in that same space and he's quite good at it, right? And I've tried to go back and examine my technocratic impulses and imagine what it would be like to not have them, kind of, what does it look like to kind of be genuinely participatory or something like that. And I still trip up a lot, but I do feel like there is something to, you know, and then it's combined with somehow we've reinforced the party split, or, you know, which it seems to play out in a whole bunch of societies. This is a note going by that the Republicans are getting rid of the green pins that identified congressmen because they don't like green, you know, because- But they're happy to wear AK. They're happy to wear AR-15 pins. Yeah, well, I don't know what- I'm not gonna even comment on what pins they are wearing, but it's amazing how we've done this split and it made me think of the old Kurt Vonnegut stuff of Grand Faloons versus the Karas and, you know, kind of like political parties as a Grand Faloon, but a very powerful one, you know? And loyalty to the party above all else. So I don't know what it looks like to have switched from pro-abortion to anti-abortion. Was that like a paradigm shift kind of movement in the, who did the paradigm book? Kind of like all the old Republicans died off and new Republicans took over with the abortion stuff or did people actually just, the policy switched and everybody just brought along with it? Which when was it? And it feels like right now we're seeing a whole bunch of stuff where the policy just switches and people are saying, fine, I'll go with it. You know, it's like, Trump is the worst thing that'll ever happen. Well, Trump's our guy, let's go with it, you know? It's an amazing switch amongst the same people. It's not like we've had a generation die off and the next generation takeovers. So anyway, I don't know how to fix anything, but those are the two things I've been thinking about. Thanks, Dave, two thoughts. There's the reason I call these four calls governance and not democracy was that I've got a thought in my brain was 2006 peak democracy, which is about the sort of continuous tugs to the far right and the illiberal democracy and all those kinds of things. But also because the whole one person, one both thing, I'm unclear that that's the best way to actually govern ourselves. And by democracy, I would mean individual autonomy though. Not one person, one vote is kind of unimplementation of a democratic format, but it's really, it's like individual autonomy versus aggregate autocracy at the spectrum. I would use democracy towards the people get to decide for themselves and the spectrum. I'm curious how all of us would define democracy or whether we would agree on a definition of democracy because I'm unclear that we would. And I wasn't thinking of autonomy as a part of my definition of democracy. It's not a word I would have used had you asked me to sit down and write a definition of democracy, that word would not have shown up in it, but I like what you said. And then the second thing I wanna say, and this goes back to, how do we stop the Trump apocalypse from happening is that it appears that the law doesn't work. I am like from, I have a T-shirt that's in the next room over that says it's Mueller time. In the same script as Miller time from back in the day, which is like way too early for young people these days, they have no reference for it. But when the Mueller report was about to come out, I was like, okay, great. They sort of, we finally like cornered the fella. And that didn't work just because Barr went out and said, oh, he's, you know, this doesn't hold him guilty. I'm like, wait, how did that work? I was as surprised about that melting away as I was about the dean's screen kicking Dean off the campaign back in the day. It's like, wait, he was hoarsely screaming at his followers to exhort them. And a week later, he's not in the camp. Oh, how did that break? And I think there's just a lot of sausage being made behind the curtain that I'm just unaware of. So that's probably happening there. But I have a thought in my brain called T-91, which is Trump's 91 in various counts, various indictments. And they're melting away. And T-91 doesn't include the cases in front of the Supreme Court, which are about his immunity, which are, you know, other kinds, there's another thought in my brain right next to that about what the Supreme Court watch, SCOTUS watch, because there's really important things there. Any one of which, any one of which could be disqualifying. And Trump has now has to pony up $450 million for a lawsuit, and that's not gonna stop. How is he working in bullet time where he can dodge everything? Is he a weevil or a punching clown where he just bobs back up to the surface after everything? I do not understand how earnest attempts to use the system to stop this madness have not worked and might not work. And people who say, oh, just let the voters decide. Like don't try to block him with all these legal methods, just let the voters, that's bullshit. Because if he loses and it's close, you know what's gonna happen right after that. So I'm frustrated by all that. Jose. I share your frustration, but I suspect that he has much more experience than anyone else in using the courts and he has benefited. He was trained by Roy Cohn. So Roy Cohn was one of his mentors and Roy Cohn was McCarthy's lawyer during the Army McCarthy hearings and all that, and the McCarthy era. Go ahead, Gil. We're seeing here a really fascinating and scary example of what John Robb calls asymmetrical warfare. You know, Trump and Roy Cohn were masters at gaming the system and have got, you know, a skewed judiciary because of some, you know, good fortune on appointments. And the broader we are playing by the rules in a system that is slow by design and hard to correct quickly. And, you know, people have wondered whether the circuit will intervene and take Aline Cannon out of the mix, but that hasn't happened. And so, you know, the core of the game is delay. Trump doesn't have to win in court. He just has to delay court decisions until after November. Right. And so it's, we're playing different games and we're playing with different tools and different rules and it's asymmetric. And, you know, to the point about asymmetric warfare is that it's very hard for conventional armies to fight guerrillas. Just ask the IDF right now. Just ask the IDF right now and everything else. So, you know, I mean, you know, we've all lived with many examples of these, but it's just, it's very hard to do. I mean, Putin, who doesn't face the same constraints as the IDF, took a very different approach in Chechnya. It's like a no restraint approach. That's one way to deal with insurgents, but that doesn't work in the long run either. I just wanted to, so my comment wasn't the comment that I had. I like the idea of defining democracy and of understanding what components each of us think democracy contains because I suspect it's a lot more varied than most of us would assume. And I noticed that Tom, during that topic, had raised his hand, so I just wanted to give him a word. Oh, I took my video off just to let you know because I'm getting an internet connection problem. But I was raising my hand to define democracy which I put in the chat, is ruled by ordinary people slash those who are being ruled. It's in that space that, the idea of democracy of those who are impacted by decision should have a voice in making it, that's different from a we the people kind of democracy. And what I realized recently is there's two, at least two branches of what democracy is, one of which is stakeholders, which is those who are impacted by a particular, things going on, a particular decision domain or issue domain. And then there's the we the people and the we the people one is centered on place. You are a citizen of a place. You're a citizen of a state or a, you know, it's county or a country or whatever. And that's where your voice is expressed. And the stakeholder voice is for an issue. People gather around an issue often widely around divided among many different levels of governance. And there is emerging, this is like five years ago ran into this, around the world in many different circumstances, there are emerging collaborations between stakeholder networks across sector lines, multi-sector, multi-stakeholder, multi-scale networks collaborating sometimes dysfunctionally, sometimes functional, but it's a totally different approach to governance. And these are people who are involved on the ground in a particular issue domain, like agriculture or food systems. That's the one I became familiar with at first. And all the different players are getting into collaborative conversations and then they go and just do something. They do what they came up with. There's nobody to appeal to. All of the citizen councils, fancy citizen councils we have now are sophisticated versions of petitioning the government for petitioning the king. King, here's what we think should be done, please do it. And that's what these councils do at a more sophisticated level. So having, if you can somehow weave together the citizens and the stakeholder kinds of governance and with the fellow who wrote to the list right before and I answered who brought that model up with experts, people who are, you're trying to get deeper understanding of what's going on and doing that collectively across all fields of expertise. That's a whole another way to define it if you step away from governance and think of collective intelligence and collective wisdom. We're not talking about, I said wise democracy is my thing because I wanna have not just everybody have any equal voice, but actually generating wisdom for the whole as a shift in perspective. But I think democracy in terms of self-governance, all the different human rights is a form of self-governance. You're able to govern yourself, not have interference in that, et cetera. I think democracy is relatively easy to define at a generic level and the root demos is ordinary people andocracy is government. So anyway, those are all the thoughts that are bubbling in my head when I put my hand up. Thanks, check. Yeah, thanks Tom, thanks for that. And you reminded me of something I wound up reading recently from a different thread, which is the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka and how it's about self-governance and self-empowerment and I'll leave it to anyone who wants to to read the page or whatever. But Sarvodaya is one of the examples of when I said what seems to work in governance. I think this would make the short list of systems that seem to work well. I like the ones you were just describing, Tom. Go ahead, Tom, go ahead, Ken. And you're muted, there. If I'm not mistaken, Sarvodaya means we wake up together is how it translates. So I posted something to the OGM list this week. Harvard Radcliffe Institute had the really interesting article about civil rights and the law and the Supreme Court and the Constitution is colorblind and the woman speaking is like, the Constitution is absolutely not colorblind. Absolutely not colorblind. It said black people are three-fifths of a human being. That is not colorblind at all. But the really interesting thing that caught my eye in this post, that's pretty long, I don't think many people read it if anybody, but they said, if you wanna figure out what originalism means, look at the problems that the framers are trying to solve. Don't try to figure out their intent. What was the problem they were trying to solve? And I think that's missing from a lot of our public level conversations about governance is people were just talking about it should be this way or that way, rather than what is the actual problem we're trying to solve. Right now we have a problem which has turned into a wicked mess that our system of governance has been gamed by special interests and it no longer works for the people. We the people, it doesn't work for it, right? So how do we get back to solving the problem of how do we create a system of governments that works for the people that is as Eleanor put in here and I believe it's written in the Constitution, that the consent of the governed is given. I do not give my consent to a lot of what's going on in governance these days. And I think a lot of people that's why we have such a polarized mess right now is a lot of people are saying that it's not working. Yes, did it work for the people? It depends on how you define the people. It worked great for white landowners when it first started. It has not worked too well for women or black people or gay people. So that's the next level. How do we design a system of governance that works for everybody where everyone feels I'm willing to give my consent because I feel that my needs and my concerns and my interests are being looked after and taken care of and I can see that in my day-to-day life. That's what I would like to work on. I just want to tease. Gil, hold on a second. I know you want to jump in. Hang on just for a second. I just want to tease something out from what you said. Look at the problems they were trying to solve. So I'm a big fan of the book, The American Slave Coast, A History of the Slave Breeding Industry which makes very, very interesting assertion that the American Revolutionary War was actually a civil war so that the US could preserve slavery and break away from England which was abolishing slavery way before we did. And the American Civil War was actually a revolutionary war where we broke the legal back of slavery. But that slavery was one of the problems they were trying to solve for to preserve it. So that imputes much more. And by the way, eight of the first 10 presidents were slaveholders from Virginia. The Adamses are the only ones who are abolitionists, the two Adamses. There's just a whole mess of whoa, Nellie. The North was profiting wildly from slavery. Insurance companies in Connecticut were underwriting slaves. New York City was banking it, the whole thing. So I'm just trying to pry apart how do we understand what people were thinking about and doing back then? But they basically, no British ships could transport slaves. That was way earlier, like 1817, something like that. I mean, anyway, we can- I just have to interject. Being from Massachusetts and a big, I grew up not far from John and Abigail Adams home. And in Massachusetts generally, there was a very strong anti-slavery sense. Even back then, and Massachusetts was one of the first states against it, and we could have a longer conversation about the roots of the American Revolution, which I'd love to have, because it's an amazing time of history, but it was what they said it was about, which is to get rid of the yoke of being controlled by the British across the seas so that they could elect people to make their own decisions about how they would be governed, including taxation and everything else. So I just didn't want to let that sit there. The American Revolution was not about slavery, although obviously that was a key condition they had to grapple with. Because otherwise they wouldn't have the country going with them. Thanks for that, Elmer. And I'm sorry for being so vehement on that. I just, that book really kind of blew me up too much. It's a critical point. And when the Constitution, apparently the first draft Jefferson had had it against slavery, like it would not be allowed. They had to take it out, but there was a fight at the Constitutional Convention around the issue of slavery. There were anti-slavery people in the room led by John Adams who fought about it. They realized they didn't have the votes in the room and that there would be no new United States if they didn't give on the question of prohibiting slavery. But they agreed as a strategy, they would build into the system of the United States a process by which what they laid out for governance could be changed and amended over time. And they expected that that would become what the country would do down the road. I don't think they ever expected it would take 100 years. But we did eventually get there and they put a system of change and amendment in there. So that could be fought at a later time. Thanks, Eleanor. And I think I'd love to have that conversation and dive deeper into the history at a different call. Mike, then Gil, please. And then we're nearing the end of our hour. I was gonna say just a couple of quick points. Thank you, Eleanor, for saying what you said about Massachusetts. I lived there for six years and got to know a lot of the history. But the best American history book I've ever read is it's actually three books by Daniel Brewston, former Librarian of Congress. And it's just called The Americans. And what's special about it is rather than doing a chronology or looking at major trends, he breaks out the United States into states or regions and tells the different forces that were shaping the politics of Virginia, the politics of New York, the politics of Massachusetts. I'd recommend it even though it's 35 years old. The other thing I just wanted to weigh in on it and reinforce what Ken said about looking at the problems that led to the Constitution. One of the other best examples that I've seen is about gun control. The reason that they wanted to have a Second Amendment for a well-regulated militia was because there were these uprisings in Western Massachusetts and New York, one was over, it was the Whiskey Rebellion. And there was a need to have local militias to back up the local government, because George Washington couldn't tell the army to go march up to some obscure corner of New York. So it has nothing to do with what we are today, which is we need bazookas so we can shoot the tanks or the black helicopters when the government does something we don't like. That's a different problem. Thanks, Mike. Yel, thank you for being patient. Yeah, I'm patient and frustrated. I feel thrown off the conversation because I'm just lately is hot clearly and I've got a lot more to say about it, but we were talking about democracy and governance and Ken made some really important points. And Jerry, just a suggestion. I think what you raised was good. The level of detail about it was not necessary. That's where it lost it for me. Sorry about that. Yeah, so just something for us to think about. And we have a lot of hot buttons in this conversation. It's challenging. What I wanted to say to Ken's point, yes, paying attention to the issues they were trying to deal with is very helpful. Related to that, I'm not a fan of us trying to define democracy or anything else because the labels get us into trouble because no matter what definitions you do, the words have connotations for other people. And we lose the focus of the conversation, the most vivid example of that these days is the pro-life, pro-choice bullshit, which is a strategic reframing that had enormous, to my mind, damaging political impact. But the main thing I had wanted to say briefly back then to Ken, about consent of the governed, the game depends on consent of the governed. Consent that includes consent to the majority when it doesn't go my way. That's a difficult thing to do. And it's the thing that certain folks are rejecting right now, but that has to be part of the democratic process because I won't always get my way. And how do I have enough trust in the community and the shared values and the overall dynamics of things that I'm winning to do that and win sometimes and lose sometimes and find common ground and come back together and do it again and again and again. And that's been lost in part the MAGA game and part the Gingrich game. I don't know how that gets rebuilt except through relationship and engagement and gradually rebuilding trust. We're moving past the two-party system and do a more parliamentary one where you have to build coalitions. Yeah, well, that doesn't feel like a near-term option in this country, Ken, so I don't know. Are we working on near-term options or are we working on what did the governance look like? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yep. Another short-term thing. How come Biden keeps referring to Trump as my predecessor instead of as the sore loser? Because that's what Trump is. He's just a sore loser. He won't concede defeat. No, he's not just a sore loser. He's way more than that. But calling the sore loser would, he would hate being called a loser. Yeah. He refuses to be, but so that would get under his skin I think really pretty well. Somebody, apparently it was, was making the case that the game should be just ridiculing him at every opportunity. Getting under his skin, calling the loser is one way to do that. Yeah. Isn't that what got him into politics in the first place? There's Barack Obama at the Correspondents' Dinner, ripping people. It seemed to be the poop of this political move I've seen in my lifetime. Because he'd thought about it before then, but that was the point where you said, oh yeah, fuck you, I'm going in. I think. Yep. I think I have that clip. If that clip is still alive, I'll share it in the, hold on a second. Shrappy, somebody tell me if this clip still plays that dinner. Let's not spend time on that. Yeah, no. And we're past our time and I don't intend to go back in and keep doing these calls, but I'm interested in the topic. So open to proposals or suggestions, but it's probably time to wrap this call. And I had asked Ken if he would mind reading Let America be America again, even though I attributed it to the wrong person. It's a Langston Hughes poem, but that might be a nice way to wrap this series. Let America be America again. Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plane, seeking a home where he himself is free. America never was America to me. Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed. Let it be that great, strong land of love where never kings connive nor tyrant scheme that any man be crushed by one above. It never was America to me. Let my land be a land of liberty is crowned, excuse me, let my land be a land where liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, but opportunity is real and life is free. Equality is in the air we breathe. There's never been equality for me nor freedom in this homeland of the free. Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark and who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart. I am the Negro bearing slavery scars. I am the red man driven from the land. I am the immigrant catching the hope I seek and finding only the same old stupid plan of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man full of strength and hope tangled in that ancient chain of profit, our grab, grab the land and gain, or grab the gold or grab the ways of satisfying need of work, the men of take the pay of owning everything for one's own greed. I am the farmer bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro servant to you all. I am the people humble, hungry, mean, hungry yet today despite the dream beaten yet today, oh pioneers, I am the man who never got ahead of the poorest worker bartered through the years. I am the one who dreamt our basic dream. In the old world, still a surf of kings. We dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true that even yet it's mighty daring sings in every brick and stone, in every furrowed turned, in every furrowed turned that's made America the land it has become. Oh, I am the man who sailed those early seas in search of what I meant to be my home, for I am the one who left dark Ireland shore and Poland's plain and England's grassy lee and torn from black Africa strand where I came to build a homeland of the free. The free? Who said the free? Not me, surely not me. The millions of relief on relief today, the millions shot down while we strike, the millions who have nothing for our pay, for all the dreams we've dreamed, for all the songs we've sung and all the hopes we've held and all the flags we've hung, the millions who have nothing for our pay except the dream that's almost dead today. Oh, let America be America again, the land that never has been yet and yet must be the land where everyone is free, the land that's mine, the poorest, the Indians, the Negroes, me who made America, who sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose pile in the rain must bring our back, our mighty dream again. Sure, call me any ugly name you choose, the steel of freedom does not stain. For those who live like leeches on the people's lives, we must take our land back again. America, oh yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me. And yet I swear this oath, America will be out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot of graft and stealth and lies. We the people must redeem the land, the mines, the plants, the rivers, the mountains and the endless plain all stretch out, all the stretch of these great green states and make America, America again. We need red hats with pictures of Langston Hughes on them. We do. Thanks, Ken. That was awesome, Ken, thank you. Just realized I was muted. Thanks, Ken. Thank you all for being in conversations. That's a wrap for this one, but I think there's a lot of stuff in our heads that we'll find ways to share and express, so. Thank you. Thanks all. Tom, how are you good to see you? Yeah. In a minute. More later. Thank you, congrats on your new book. Oh, thanks. Read it, that's the good read.