 I'm Jay Fiedel. It's a Monday morning. We are joined by Dean Neubauer and he is emeritus at political science at UH but has at many years in education as well as political science and spent a lot of time in the in the Orient in Asia. I wish I'd spent as much time as he has there. So you take those two things and he's a perfect guest for today's show. Today's show is all about how education maybe could fix some of the problems we have seen in democracy over the past few years. Welcome to the show, Dean. Thank you. Pleased to be here. You must have thought about this as you see, you know, on our democracy unravel. I mean, if you're a political scientist or a lawyer, you know, I have sensibilities on it too. You know, you make certain assumptions about the quality of our democracy and how important it is for, you know, for the quality of civic life, if you will. And we have lost that in so many ways over the past few years. And I wonder if you could comment on, you know, the state of our democracy for one thing. From the eyes of a political science professor, educator, how does it look? Well, you know, as I started to think about this, I wish we had a semester. True. I started a couple of days ago an exercise after you asked me to do this, an exercise, which I made some notes about the subject matter as you had laid it out. And every one of those terms exploded on me. Higher education, better democracy, etc. And that is part of the issue and part of the reality here, because it is not as if democracy is a thing. It both is and isn't. It is an extraordinarily complex process in which, and by now, in this case, millions of people participate with vastly different understandings of what it is that the thing is what their role is, what they're doing, etc., etc. Similarly, with the way you phrase this about better education, I got into a bit of a thought pattern about what constitutes better education and is better education that which we do at the most expensive schools. Some would have you believe that. But is better education what comes out when we test people and those who test the highest say they have the better education, etc., etc. And then flip around once again to let me share just a very brief part of my background. When I was getting my doctoral degree, I went to study under a person who was then very famous in American political science, Robert Dahl. And I chose as my dissertation subject, essentially, can you measure democracy? And I invented some scales for that and then later wrote some some articles that I published. And they were very, very interesting from several perspectives. One is that I was astonished at what you could see if you got the right indicators. And then when I published, I was really impressed with the people who wrote back to me with critiques about what I was doing. And the critiques essentially said, as we say in much of social life, what you see is where you look. So that's the way it is with democracy. What you see is where you look. Just one more thing as a pre-factory remark, and then we'll turn this around a little bit. As you indicate, I've been working in higher education for the last several years, particularly in Asia. And one of the phenomena that has occurred over the last 15 years is the passion throughout the world, but especially in Asia, to do with higher education, what I was doing with democracy, which is in essence to create a scale, to create a ranking, to be able to say this thing is more democratic than that thing. Only now we're doing it with higher education. And so who's got the highest, who's got the best rankings? And the presumption is because the notion is that the scales are good, that the highest ranking means you're the best. Well, it is a signal and important that this was an informal process run in the United States and in Britain largely for about 35 years and didn't really have much effect. It took off in Asia at the shortly after the turn of the century, went into a university in Shanghai, created rankings for Asian universities. And then that phenomenon came to have a life of its own. And part of the life is that you, it's like a recipe, a ranking is like a recipe. The recipe tells you what ingredients you need. The rankings are all about what the indicators are. So in this instance, it turns out that the indicators are vastly biased in the direction of research. And that works for these Asian societies largely because that's where they are. They are trying to gain status in the world. They're trying to infuse their social economic systems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what does that say about the goodness as it were of the education? And we're back into this business now about what the indicators are. So they're essentially saying that the more better research you do, the better university you are. And then we see how circular that becomes. So as I was thinking about the subject matter, you've chosen for today, once again, every single one of those terms has this capability. Does better education tell us how to improve democracy? What do we mean by better education? What do we mean by by democracy? And by all means, what do we mean by better? So I wish there were, for me at least, a more simple way to think about this. But I think in reality, there is not. And let me just put one more frame on this and then we can open the discussion. I think what democracies have become throughout the world in all the different forms that they have are inseparable from their institutional manifestations. Now that sounds like political science talk. But what I mean by that is that the the institutions by which a democratic society expresses itself is what it means in the world. And those historically, as we know, have been legislatures and executives and judiciaries. And then as the world became increasingly complex, particularly with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the 19th century, we saw that the administrative component, the bureaucracies, as you were, become equally or even more important because that's where the stuff gets done. And then, etc. And then the most recent revolution and the one that we've only begun to talk about, although we all, when we talk about it, report to be experts about it, is the incredible extent to which social media has changed the world in which we live. So if one wanted to have a serious conversation in the way that you've laid it out in the topic, a better education for our social outcomes as it were, one would have to put first and foremost in that this thing about which we know so much and yet so little. And that's the degree to which social media is changing the world that the way we see the world experience the world. And here's the important part, make judgments about the world. And certainly we saw that in the election. We've seen that in the post-election shenanigans, etc. So I'm afraid, for me, the way that you phrase the question doesn't admit to any easy answers, although goodness only knows it certainly creates the basis for a political science course at any level. Okay, I'll give you my reactions on sort of Gestalt reactions on that. Number one, my reaction is that education in this country anyway has changed and the goals of it, the mechanics of it, the institution of it, the business of it has changed and not for the better, not when you're talking about building citizens. And I imagine if you looked at the classroom in Illinois, when Abe Lincoln went to school, a lot of it was dedicated to building citizens. It was civics. It was how to relate to the government and the people in the social compact to make them useful citizens. And I think somewhere along the line, we forgot about that probably because the world got much more complex. And we forgot our standards and our original mission in American education. So now what you have is that you described it. It's a business. It's very expensive. It's measured on things perhaps that really don't count if you're trying to keep the country together, those civics things, those citizenship things. And it's nobody's fault except we really weren't watching the story. We weren't realizing the implications of losing our ability to relate to the government, to understand the government, to be part of the government. That's one thing. And then the other side of it is, of course, the political science side. And it goes to the same point, I think, namely that we have forgotten about being part of the government. There's a disconnect between the citizen such as he is or she is and the government. The citizen may pay taxes, but he may try to gain the system. The citizen has no particular loyalty to trying to make it a better country for everyone. And although there are some people that feel that way, an enormous number of people don't feel that way. Furthermore, a lot of people take the assumption that the government will get along even if they don't participate. And somehow it's a bottomless pit of money. Somehow it's a bottomless pit of resources. And somehow it'll take care of us when they're going to get stuff. None of those assumptions are really good. And we've seen that in Trump's draining the swamp, his own swamp is what it is. And so what we have now is a real disconnect between the government, which is damaged. And I want to ask you about that. And the citizenry, which is not educated about how that works and what his relationship or her relationship is to that government. So these are all the marks of huge impending failure. So I guess it's clear, it's easy to conclude that the educational system isn't teaching the relationship of the citizen and the government. But the other part is how badly damaged from a political science point of view is our government. When we look at Congress, it's dysfunctional, non-functional even. We're going to have another crisis over funding the government here in a week or two. Our current policy is completely out of whack. All our policies, immigration policy, our climate change, economics policies are all out of whack. The government is not functioning. The courts are being stacked to the point where you can't rely on them for justice. People are losing confidence, have already lost confidence in the government's ability. And thanks to Trump, there's no jurisdiction that's exempt from that loss of confidence. So it seems to me that from a political science point of view, it must pain you greatly to see these great institutions of American democracy not only deteriorate but willfully, maliciously deteriorate right in front of our eyes when there's no immediate solution. And I guess the other point is how badly damaged are we in the face of the need to correct those things? Is it correctable and how long will it take? That's a question that deserves a one semester discussion. But let's see if we can get to it. What do you think about that? How badly damaged is our democracy right now? Significant. Significant. And I confess I have a small group of people that I spend my idle time with walking and chatting and that sort of thing. Many of whom are former students of mine who have developed careers in one kind or another here in this group of all of us live in Hawaii. And so we have what we call the double whammy. And one part of the whammy is looking at this constituted four-year American government as something which is so fundamentally different from anything we've seen before that the notion that even when we started talking about this a couple years ago, we were still in this notion that there are partisan extremes within the phenomena that are happening. Well, then you go back into that and say, well, what does partisan mean, et cetera, et cetera. And increasingly over the four years, we came to the conclusion that many others have that what we're looking at is a group of people who are willing and prepared for their own reasons and own purposes. And dear me, I do not wish to go a second further without talking as we always do about how this country like the global economy has slid to the direction of the 1%, who increasingly control more and more the wealth that not only of this society but of the world and who buy political systems as a consequence. And there's no gain saying that, although we try and we try mightily to overlook the damage and the shenanigans that people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Edison and those folks can do within a system which we have to recognize is enormously vulnerable to that sort of thing as we saw in the election and as we've seen before. So if I can just slide this over a few degrees and say, if we say the perspective is more the political economic perspective on democracy, then what you have to say is we need a broader perspective. We need to look at what the last 30-40 years of globalization did to the organization of wealth in the world, how that affected political institutions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So now to slip back another couple of degrees to the right, we see all of this stuff happening with Trump and we look at the silence of the Republican Party in its institutional manifestations and we say, goodness gracious, what can that be about? And ultimately it is about the fundamental notion of staying in power period. To gain and regain office is one of the principal aspects of politics and it has been and we can follow this throughout the history of the country. From one era to another, different strategies emerged as to how to do that and sometimes post hoc, we call that corrupt. If we were to post hoc this and say what possibly can explain the behavior and forgive me in putting in these partisan terms, but that's the way of thinking about it, what possibly can explain the behavior of the Republican Party in the Congress in the face of this behavior on the part of Donald Trump. And it's about a lot of things, but for me, number one on that list is we need to stay in power and we'll do anything to do that. Well, slide your terms over and once again, that's what autocracy is about, staying in power irrespective of what the institutional norms are. But it is in the United States, autocracy is not a familiar conversation. We are not accustomed to using that with respect to our own government. Even when we went through period after period, sometimes in the South, but not fully in the South where we had totally corrupt legislatures and governors who were organizing their political power largely for the purpose of promoting racist racial agendas. We did not call that autocracy. We called it something else. And Trump has opened up new dimensions of behavior, which the Republican Party at the highest levels has bought into. I confess that I spend a fair amount of time, I'm going to say this. Let me jump in and ask you the Charles Dickens question, which is, what about the ghost of Christmas future? Because we have a problem. And the problem is the government is not functional right now. It is an autocracy right now. He somehow early on created this by nullifying the bureaucracy, by nullifying Congress, by nullifying the courts. He's taken away all the major institutions by which we practice government. And then on top of that, he has made tremendous strides in undoing our voting system. There was an article in The Times this morning about how, yeah, he's losing all these cases, but he's creating a stream of culture and precedent in the courts. Very damaging in future elections. It's a new brand of federalism, if you will, and it doesn't work well. So my ghost of Christmas future is, if we keep on doing this, if Mitch McConnell stays recalcitrant in the Senate, and we can't get anything done with Biden, assuming he is timely sworn in, then what happens to the country? First of all, I would make a guess and ask for your response. First of all, we decline. We decline worldwide. We decline economically. Obviously, we are declining in healthcare, vaccine or no vaccine. We have declined. And then the second question is, it can't stay this way. It can't, you know, autocracies in the modern era do not last. There will have to be a change of regime. There will have to be a change of regime either peacefully or violently. This country cannot, if that's the case, this country cannot continue to exist under the mantle of an ostensible democracy. It simply won't be a democracy and it will suffer. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, we've got three minutes. Yes, I'm going to go to answering that question, but I want us to slide back a little bit and realize the degree to which we've been complicit with this behavior for such a long time. This has been a dysfunctional institutional arrangement for a long time. So during those hard periods, which go back at least to the Reagan era and certainly with Clinton and the senior Bush, when the politics of the institutions essentially made it impossible to govern, and so we got accustomed to governing by executive orders. And it wasn't until Trump that we'd looked on the other side of the executive orders and saw, oh my goodness, all of that stuff that we did by executive order, guess what, can be undone by executive order. And that's largely where Trump has done most of the damage. Plus, and I'll say this and then again, slide by it so we can get to what you're concerned about. But boy, we should have known something was up in those first six months of the Trump administration when we saw those people that he appointed to government. And I'll leave it at that. But goodness, was there ever an era in contemporary American politics where the national government was led by so much ineptitude and confusion as during the Trump administration. So go pass that then to the questions that you're raising, which I interpret as how do we create within this mishmash an understanding of what our national purposes might be and the role that education could conceivably play in this. And here I think and slide over to another function of analyzing politics and that is to say what are the discourses, who creates them, who promotes them, how are they conducted, etc. So we have lived in the last four years with the reality show discourse. And that is the subject unto itself, how that has unmade politics. What I see Biden trying to do and the appointments that he is trying to make is to create a new discursive structure for government. Some of what you read is that this will be based upon regarding people with dignity, etc, etc, etc. But beyond that, I think it is the people that I see and listen to when they show up on the TV talking about their appointments. What I see common amongst them is that we have to create once again a discourse, which is not first and foremost about blame. Second is not about the Bette Noir, the secret force which has made everything bad, but which seeks to return the notions of rationality and purpose to the governmental process. That I see as really the beginning of re-establishing what I would call civil discourse in the society. Now what education has to do with this at all levels is moving us away in bits and pieces from the damage which has been done by a culture of name calling, of once again all the BS that goes on on a television made up show, as opposed to efforts in the real world to try to get real stuff done. That's going to be a long process, Jay. I'm not entirely success optimistic that it can succeed, but once again I see that the basic structure of what Biden is trying to do is to re-establish the legitimacy of civil discourse, allowing us to speak to each other again about our differences, our legitimate differences, without demonizing the other in the process, and that I think is at the end of the day the significant damage that the Trump administration has done is to demonize the other, and that's what autocrats do throughout the world, that they need the target. They're trying to control the information, of course lies. They're trying to control the press. The first thing we do is not kill all the lawyers, it's kill all the press, then we kill the lawyers, Shakespeare. But I see two practical problems here. One is the education system has in fact been profoundly damaged. It is profoundly damaged. It's pointing in the wrong direction. We may have some very talented teachers and faculty, but it has generated 70 million people, plus who don't want to engage in civil discourse, who are into name calling, and who follow him around like Jim Jones in Guyana. Some of them would die for him. It's hard to argue. It's hard to reason with somebody who is in that place. We have a problem in terms of the educational system as it is. We've had some really bad bureaucracy on education in recent years under Trump anyway, and now the first thing we have to do is fix it, so at least it can teach reason and collaboration and social compact. Then we have the problem of how long does that take, Dean? How long does it take to educate or re-educate a country of 70 million of which are off the side? Clearly by the vote. You can see it happening. The third question I suppose is, this goes back to Charles Dickens and the Ghost of Christmas Future. Do we have enough time in the useful life of our democracy, in the remaining life of our democracy, to undertake this task? In order to teach a country different things, you have to start early. You have to teach a lot of people a lot of things and have them change their way of thinking. I think that's really necessary. Do we have the time for that? Can we do that? With that I knew. The way that you have framed the issue makes me want to underscore, again, the idea that exists within our heads as parents, as citizens, as people with occupations, about what education is for. Now, we started ruining education long before Trump because we allowed ourselves throughout the 70s and the 80s, particularly within the Reagan transformation of political economy, although we didn't talk about it that way, into a world in which we thought that the purpose of education is to get a job. Without having the capacity or the willingness to raise the question, what the heck are the jobs that we're supposed to be educating for? You and I have had a bit of this conversation about what it means to take 14 million people and stick them in the biddy economy and then say, well, we're taking care of that. What we did was to take job security as a goal and allow that to be just trashed by the incursion, particularly of high tech, but high tech within the global economy. You and I have had conversations previously about the other part of that before the pandemic and before Trump that was going to make this a dilemma. That's the incursion of artificial intelligence upon the world that we're creating. We put all of these bundles together and boy, it's going to be an interesting time in the next couple of years. I think that the conversations that are going on within higher education oddly as a result of the enormous discontinuities that the virus has provoked in them, has forced them in a way that nothing else has to raise the question, what are we here for and what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? The data that I look at indicate that as much as 25 percent four-year institutions in the United States may not survive this financially. Well, that's one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is, what are the other 75 going to learn as a lesson from that? I picked up a book the other day. I got to tell it to you and I got to tell it to everyone who might be listening and watching to this, Barbara Tuckman's A Distant Mirror. Of course, one of my favorites. Fantastic book. We need to ask herself in the way that she raises the question, what is the century about? And as a century of extraordinary transformation, it leads us inevitably to the question of what do we want to be? So the ghost of Christmas pass, yes, do we have enough time? But in addition to that, do we have enough time for what? And this is precisely the time in our history where all of these events have led us to a reconsideration of the what? And in a democracy, in a functioning democracy, that question is never an innocent question. And it's never an easy question. So even in the best of circumstances, we would find ourselves debating at the most fundamental level the values that we want to promote in a radically changing world. And then you put into the equation the toxic elements that we've been talking about. And it's unprecedented. Perhaps it's unprecedented until we go back to the 14th century. But we have to, you know, my takeaway from that is that we have to ask ourselves the question in these new terms of discourse. What can we consider and how can we consider them in a way that is not usual and conventional? The other thing I'm reading is our friend from Plenipot's book, Mr. Obama's 700 page first, first book. Just that. Oh, the old one. Okay. Right, right. And he talks into Alia again and again in there about what he discovered about himself in writing the book. What was that inner discourse that he was overlooking even when he was, as it were, in the midst of the action? And that's what I think we started this by talking about what creates a better education. And in part of my understanding of a better education is asking the people who exit on the other side to have learned the humility to say to themselves on a regular basis, what don't I know? And what do I need to know? And what do I know? That may simply not be true. And I got to get rid of it whether I know it or not. Well, you know, that's the ultimate problem to get people to think about that. There's going to be resistance. And that's the first step. The first step is to have people consider what they need to consider. Anyway, you know, there's so much to talk about here, Dean. And I would like to rejoin with you in a few weeks. And we'll see how things spill over in terms of the political science side of things, the social science side of things. And maybe we can find new. I'm sure we can find new topics to discuss. Thank you so much, Dean Neubauer. Appreciate it. Thanks for asking me, Dave. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dean. Aloha.