 everyone this is a great crowd lots of new faces I'd like to read you a little about Linda while we're still fumbling with chairs Linda Fowler is professor of government and Frank J. Reagan chair in policy studies Emerita at Dartmouth College where she continues to lecture and conduct research she directed Dartmouth Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences from 1995 to 2004 previously she was professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University she holds her BA from Smith College I bet you might know some people I know and her MA and PhD from the University of Rochester she specializes in American politics and has been a frequent commentator in various media outlets she's published three books on Congress political ambition who decides to run for Congress Yale 1993 watch Dogs on the Hill the decline of congressional oversight of U.S. foreign relations Princeton 2015 and scores of articles books chapters and op-eds and such topics as interest groups women in politics veto proof majorities and presidential primaries I think I skipped one oh candidates Congress in the American democracy that was in Michigan 1993 she is currently writing about who testifies at congressional committees and partisan gerrymandering Fowler received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to 2006 and multiple awards for her research and undergraduate teaching at Syracuse and Dartmouth prior to obtaining her PhD she worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives please give a warm welcome to Linda Powell well because I'm still active as a scholar and lecturer a lot of people come up to me and say tell me things aren't as bad as they seem to me and I would guess that from the size of this crowd today which I understand is unusual that there are many people of the same fears here in Burlington as there are in Hanover and I did this talk a similar talk not the same talk to a Dartmouth Club group in Iowa and it seemed to me to be pertinent to a wide range of people so I asked Cindy if this talk would suit her and she said yes so before I get started I think it's important to for you to know two things about me the first is that the last eight years have been a profound professional challenge in every way I've spent 50 years of my life studying American politics I thought I knew quite a lot about it and judging from the awards I received when I thought about it or wrote about it I thought yeah you know you've got this and obviously I don't and so much of what I'm doing now with public lectures it's trying to figure out what I missed why I missed it what's different and what do I think about it and so and it's been a particular challenge because of the situation in the Republican Party because we've never really seen a contemporary political party dissolve before our eyes which is what I think we're seeing and I felt it isn't so it's important to me since I have a reputation for being on the one hand on the other hand kind of person thinking positive things to say about one side and positive things to the other side and it's been difficult to try to convey that because there really is an asymmetry in in my perception and most political scientists share that perception and we have actually a lot of empirical evidence based on roll call voting that confirms it so what do you say when you come into a room like this you don't know how many Republicans there are you know how many Democrats there are and so what I've decided I will not mention any five-letter word I will not mention Trump and I will not mention Biden so what you have to do is what I decided to do is what's happening in American politics isn't just about two old men it's not just about the fact that Congress is completely dysfunctional both chambers really that because the Congress can't do what it's supposed to do constitutionally we have a Supreme Court that is pushing all the boundaries of legitimacy and a president who's routinely being asked whether it was Trump in oh there it is whether it was the other guy or this guy being pushed by Congress and by the public to do things that are outside their legitimate authority that's what happens when Congress can't do its job so my dilemma how do I avoid antagonizing the audience and by not mentioning those five-letter words and more importantly how do I start focusing people's attention on the broader picture of why we're in this situation so that's what I'm going to do today and to do it I'm going to take you back to the 1830s I don't think any of us was alive then but I taught an OSHA course and in the fall and OSHA is like a ex and it was on perspectives from Tocqueville's democracy in America and their relevance for today so so you now know kind of where I'm coming from and what I want to do it's not that I'm chicken to take on these two five-letter words but I just think what's really important for the public now is to get out of the horse race which is dominating the press out of the coverage of personalities which is dominating the press out of the alarmist rhetoric on both sides and to try to focus our attention on this bigger issue so I'm going to start with a puzzle and we're going to put the Statue of Liberty up here now this really sells it sells it says it all doesn't it yeah we have this democracy and we don't know what to do with it because democracy is always messy and it's particularly messy right now so a lot of young people particularly are saying democracy isn't working it's not working for them other people are saying we want a strong leader who will fix everything other people are saying you know we want anarchy other people are you know so people are all over the map about this but the puzzle is when you look objectively at the data so let's take an example of the Weimar Republic in 1939 what was the inflation rate in the Weimar Republic about 250,000 army you needed wagons to go around if you were going to buy anything in the Weimar Republic what else had happened to the Germans in the Weimar Republic in the 1930s this is before the the Beer Hall puts they had lost a war they had lost a huge number of their young men as had everybody in that war and they were saddled with reparations they were bankrupt their country was a wreck economically so you could sort of say I'm not excusing what happened in Germany after that but you could sort of look and see why the Germans said democracy isn't gonna work for us it's also the case that the Democrats small D in the Weimar Republic couldn't agree among themselves so they made the government very vulnerable all right well let's fast forward to 2024 what do we see by every objective measure the country's in pretty darn good shape think about it I'm just going to look at my list here record high stock market record low unemployment we're not talking about record low in the last 10 years we're talking about last 60 years high GDP growth in the last quarter of 5% mature economies don't get that kind of but we did increases in real wages and where they where it counts I'm sorry I have a familial tremors and sometimes it they act up which is what they're doing right now the increase in real wages and for the first time in a long time the wage growth has been in the lower middle and middle the wealthy did pretty well too but we have had decades now of increasing income inequality because wages in the lower half were just not increasing we have declines in the overall crime rate that might come as a surprise to you because what do we hear in the press all the time crime crime crime crime crime even violent crimes are down particularly in cities in blue states reductions in the inflation rate which is now within the Fed target for the first time in 20 years the nation is not actively engaged in war now we all wish the Afghan withdrawal had proceeded in a different way but the fact remains that Trump had negotiated an agreement with the Taliban and Biden had to execute it because we didn't have enough troops there to do something else and it was horrible nevertheless it's done for the and the US came out of the pandemic in the best shape of any of the G7 of the major democracies and finally you have young people for the first time actually making economic gains you have the lowest unemployment rate among black voters you have a lot of good stuff this is not the why my republic there's no reason for people to be as angry and as aggrieved by any objective measure this is not the Great Depression this isn't even the stagflation that we had under Nixon and Jimmy Carter when people were pretty angry so the question then the puzzle I have for you is if the current situation is relatively good why do Americans feel so bad and there are a lot of reasons for that that I'll talk about briefly but to me one of the things that that my course that I taught in Tocqueville pointed me to two things that are very problematic with our democracy and that I think are responsible for why we feel so bad the first is the loss of the art of association and the understanding that Tocqueville pointed and I'll give you more about this in a minute that what was unique about the American democracy was that people had learned to cooperate they had to cooperate because there were no nobles there were no great barons there were you know no popes know anybody to sort of organize activity so they had to figure out that they had to do it together and the second is the principle of what he called self-interest rightly understood which means people understanding that their own well-being is connected to the well-being of others but these are two really simple ideas and they were the things that when Tocqueville got done with his two volumes and 700 pages that were the things that were distinctive about the American democracy that accounted for the reason why ours was thriving in 1830 and the French had had this horrible mess and had reverted to empire by the 1830s okay so that's where we're going to go and but let me just sort of suggest to you the first thing I'm going to talk about is evidence from public opinion that's caused for alarm you know we're not making this up we're not just all paranoid and crazy about what we're seeing evidence about public opinion that's caused for optimism alternative explanations for why the country is in a funk and Tocqueville's arguments about the art of association and self-interest and then I've told Cindy I've left quite a lot of time for us to talk about this you know to sort of see whether how you feel about this analysis and what you might want to contribute to it and so forth so let's start by talking about public opinion and there are many more things I could have added to this list nearly three out of four Americans say the country is on the wrong track they actually this is something we all agree about we just don't agree who is responsible or how to fix it 60% see the opposite party as a threat to the nation cynicism about politicians and is incredibly low could you give me a slide so here we go I went into politics because there isn't any money in honest work and next one please and here's an average of trust this is a long historical time series among pollsters and it's and this is comes from Pew this is the percent of people who say they trust the government to do what is right just about always or most of the time here's where it was when Dwight Eisenhower's period and of course that makes sense the country had just come off of make an incredible victory in war and the economy which was booming and so forth it starts to go down with Nixon not surprisingly but then it stays down with these really nice guys Ford and Carter Reagan the sunny optimist Bush Clinton uh-oh W. Bush what do you think this peak is 9-11 and here's Barack Obama here's Trump and here's Biden so reading across the title here less than 20 percent give or take a few percentages for Trump and Biden and so there's an argument among scholars okay it's the 50s that were the anomaly this is much more typical of what we would expect to see in a democracy but nevertheless the fact that it we have had some peaks under H. W. Bush and and George Bush because of 9-11 but gee that's a heck of a way to earn trust in government a terrorist attack where the president didn't pay attention to the intelligence deck until the planes hit the towers not a real good way to earn your trust but it because it was a crisis we all came together and and Bush enjoyed an incredible run of sky high approvals right after that so any rate 85 percent that made say that major change or complete reform is needed 49 percent say democ American democracy is not working well near record low approvals of congress the president and the big one the supreme court in the past the supreme court has been able to ride out the storms that have brought down trust in the presidency and the congress but not this time and so that's should be a serious cause for concern in the court right now and near record okay 30 percent don't believe in democracy I've never seen that number never seen it in all my years of teaching and 70 percent think that the worry about growing extremism in the republican party 70 percent that means a lot of republicans are worried about it too disagreement about whether voting is a right 78 percent of democrats think it is but only 66 percent of republicans think it is then you have gridlock and neglect of major policy problems and what you have in many cases is the the primacy of performative politics congressional and since I study congressional hearings these days congressional hearings that aren't really about anything and congressional hearings where the lawmakers are acting like the 19th century when the members used to beat each other with their canes and legislation that's passed just to embarrass the other side so that you can run and add in the next election could I have the last slide so here we get once again the conversation gets too heated and the selection of a state muffin is um I can't read actually read the bottom of it can you see what says Travis no well anyway this is could be almost any legislative body in the united states these days and they're so polarized and so angry with each other that they can't even pick the state muffin and lastly you have the last slide very serious concerns that arose because of the insurrection that happened on January 6th and um and which is being threatened you had in the supreme court yesterday and the argument about whether trump should appear on the ballot or not with supreme court justices worrying and asking whether there was going to be bedlam if they denied trump access to the ballot in open court and this is why so um and travis I think what you can do now is take the camera off the screen because I don't have any more slides okay so well not everything is bad there's actually if you look for it there's quite a lot of agreement large majorities in this country think the united states is still the greatest country in the world so on the one hand we are saying we're telling posters everything's going to hell and then we're saying oh yeah we're the greatest country in the world so it makes you really wonder it makes me wonder anyway about what people really are telling posters why would you respond that way if you really thought democracy was a failure and um and both of the candidates who are likely to be on the presidential ballot are dangerous to the nation and the people in the opposing party are out to destroy the country and so forth so so people large majority think we're still the greatest country in the world large majorities agree on big problems everybody agreed that inflation was bad everybody agreed about health care affordability everybody agreed the dems and reps need to work together everybody agreed the drug addiction was a serious problem public health problem large majorities agree that gun violence particularly gun violence that's taking the lives of our children is a problem large people large groups of people believe that violent crime is a problem and then there's immigration where I would say democrats have been were slow to come around to recognize that this was a problem and it's partly because they got burned when obama was president and where he tried to negotiate and then the republicans pulled the rug out from him and then they lost control of congress so anyway but nevertheless these are big things and they're things where the country would be behind would be behind a bipartisan solution that's what the country wants and maybe that's why they're saying things are going to hell because they certainly don't see that in washington or actually when it has happened the people the minority of people who don't like it are just louder than the rest of us and so it kind of perpetuates this idea of polarization large majorities oppose government shutdowns large majorities support gun control and abortion rights large majorities don't think medicare should be cut or that social security or veterans should have their benefits trimmed 67% believe it is very important for the president to unite the country and 90% believe that the president should be honest why are you laughing so um any rate so the issue here is that things you know on the face of it americans look like they're really in the middle of a hissy fit on the other hand there's plenty there that suggests that we could come together as a country if we could get past the fact that we just don't trust the other guys because they have as it turns out a lot of the same concerns so the question in my head is when i look at this data is why can't we get there why can't we overcome the mistrust in that's preventing us for uniting we're not going to solve all these things you know a lot of congresses have been working on immigration really since w in 2005 and um so forth so here's here are the explanations that you see in the press it's a news media's fault well it's always easy to blame them poor suckers um and there is a lot to blame because they insist on treating our politics as if it's a horse race and that the only important thing is who's ahead and who's behind and how by how much um and everything is treated looked at through the lens of who it's effect on who's going to win the presidential election you know you see the headlines on the op-ed pages and by the way compared to when we were growing up look at how much of the paper is opinion now compared to news it's a lot so but when you look back historically on the news media what do you see the press in the 19th century was scurrilous they said awful things the press the 19th century was also highly partisan the one party put out its paper the other party put out put out their paper there was no objective source of news and yet the country managed to not fall apart after even after having had this horrible civil war so i think it's too easy for americans to just say oh if we had a different media things would be better i just don't believe that in many ways the media is reflecting our own limitations if we weren't so gullible if we weren't so eager to believe the worst of the other side they wouldn't print it because they wouldn't make money on it but what the more candid journalists are now saying is they really hope trump wins the election because he sells cable subscriptions if they're being honest because the controversy the chaos around him gets more people to tune into not just box news but a cnn and msnbc because then the people at msnbc can pedal their outrage it was being said on box news so i'm not saying the media isn't a problem but i don't think we put the blame for what we're seeing this puzzle of the country's in pretty good shape but nobody thinks it is so the role of money particularly dark money in elections citizens united that spring court case really unleashed a huge deluge of cash and basically um wealthy people are supporting keeping candidates in the in the races um and what's very interesting in this race though is the big money donors are not backing trump maybe they'll come back but so you can't really blame if you don't like trump you can't blame trump on but dark money you can blame a lot of the mess in congress on campaign finance but there's a worse problem behind that as i'll talk say in a minute you have residential sorting by income race and party preference which leads to safe seats and a lack of electoral accountability and this is a paper that i'm right working on right now with regard to congressional district with a really smart scholar named chris fouler who's a professor of geography at penn state any rate um and we've been doing work on whether you can draw fair districts the answer is you can't because of residential sorting and the more populations are sorting with a homogeneous group the easier it is to gerrymandering and in fact to get fair districts fair being defined as proportional that the party that gets the most seats is also the one that gets the most votes and basically that doesn't happen in a lot of places and it doesn't happen nationally so um so what that means is you know you have about 20 percent of house seats being uncontested you have in this coming election the latest tally is in terms of the number of seats that are tossed up out of 435 18 so how can the public register its disapproval in the conventional way which is throwing the bums out of congress i mean that's how we always did it and you'd have these huge swings of 50 60 seats and that's just not possible now um i think primaries are a big problem primaries were reform conceived in hell by the progressives um and basically the idea was to make the selection of candidates more democratic to trim the power of the political parties but primaries are one of the most fundamentally undemocratic features of our politics now why because that's where the money goes and it's um and turnout is very low so my poor state of new hampshire which has wonderful turnout we just vote because we got trained to that because of all the interest in the new hampshire primary now the first in the nation for the democrats is south carolina what do you think the turnout is in south carolina about 12 percent what is it in new hampshire 51 percent who likes the who likes 12 percent interest groups and extremists and they are the ones that show up for primaries so primaries is what number one on my list if i were a benevolent dictator i would go back to smoke filled rooms in a heartbeat the other thing and this is something that a good friend of mine has worked on for a long time because the parties are just so closely divided now um at the presidential level for the senate for the house of representatives what they end up doing is magnifying their differences and exaggerating how bad the other side is because a couple of votes a couple of seats one way or the other determines who's going to control the government so they are complicit in trying to make themselves look good in tearing down the other side and in the process they're driving out reasonable people in the house in the senate we're getting very close to the fact that the crazy people will have a quorum um the failure of congress since congress is my field and i worked on congress it invites power grabs by the supreme court and the president because it can't function if you look at the constitution article one is the congress it's not the presidency and it's surely not the court all of the ordinances when the new capital were set up to elevate the power of congress in a democratic society it's up on a hill where's the white house down in a swamp you couldn't even get between capitol hill and congress when the capital was first set without going through that swamp all of the height regulations in dc even today you can't build a building that's higher than the capital dome and if you look of the powers of the national government they're not an article two they're an article one one and what has happened over time as the country you know confronts big problems and the kind of veto points that exist in the congress because of the senate people turn more and more to the presidency but the power of the presidency is basically the power that congress has given it over the last 70 years and so when the congress doesn't work this whole elaborate system of separation of powers and checks and balances is completely out of whack so the fundamental way in which our constitution has structured our government is been upset both by the gridlock in congress which causes people to turn to the courts and the presidency and also the fact that congress repeatedly says oh that's a problem we can't fix it i mean the republicans in congress petitioned joe biden to to do something about the border and he is a former senator said wait a minute that's your job you tell me what i'm supposed to do oh no so um and finally you have the decline of norms of comedy respect and truth telling when you look at you know people used to say about linden johnson how do you know when he's lying when his lips start moving but the fact of the matter is we don't even notice now when we're being lied to it's just what people seem to expect so okay so here we are what does tokeville tell us about any of these things he was an aristocrat who came to this country in the in 1830 he was a small d democrat despite his aristocratic upbringing and he was eager to figure out why the french revolution failed so dismally and he went to the united states because that's where democracy particularly at that time was the only place where democracy was not just surviving but thriving and you read his whole book and he has he starts with town meetings in new england and all these other things he worries a lot about race and about the divisive nature of slavery and what it's going to do to tear our country apart so he got that right um and you just look at the things that he writes about and you said wow he was 26 years old he was really a very observant young man but the main thing that he said was what's unique to the united states is this self-interest rightly understood and the power the art of association so he starts with the idea that the real problem in any democracy is equality if everybody's equal everybody's equally powerless you're just have one vote and so if you want to get anything done you've got to figure out how to work with other people you can't go to a baron and say we need a new road you can't go to the church and say we need to do something about the poor you have to figure out and he talks a lot about how when americans want to one thing that he really he loves is men who want to give up drinking remember temperance was big in the 1830s the men who want to give up drinking they don't just say i'm giving up drinking they form an association so they all can give up drinking and he remarks on this throughout the book but his point is that the powerlessness that comes from equality if people can't get things done they're going to turn to an autocrat and so he sees the powerlessness that is inevitable in an egalitarian society also sets it up for embracing autocracy and of course that's what the french did so that's the first thing the second thing is individualism well we take that as a hallmark of our culture right he made up that word and he noticed he said okay another thing that comes from equality is that people think of themselves whatever success they had in their lives is the result of their own efforts and he says they have no sense of who came before and the people that they owe who preceded them and they have very little concern for the future they are individuals and they have very narrow circle probably extending no farther than family and perhaps intimate friends and he says in in America the weakness the vulnerability is that americans will end up quote locked up in the isolation of their own hearts think about that for a minute locked up in the isolation of their own hearts and that of course will mean americans could never undertake any great undertaking they're all too individualistic and they don't think they owe anybody anything we see a lot of that rhetoric today don't we but this he says that's the problem but americans have fixed that by embracing this principle of self-interest rightly understood that i actually can't have what i want unless i work for the well-being of other people because no autocrat no noble no baron is going to give this to me so i have to understand that my welfare is tied to the welfare of others okay those are both pretty powerful ideas aren't they and i think they are at the root of what we're dealing with now because if you look say at the principle of self-interest rightly understood you see all this talk about rights on both the left and the right versus obligations everybody's got rights nobody's got obligations that's the first thing and you see the changes in social institutions that teach cooperation now whatever you think about the boy scouts or the girl scouts or the ynca or churches or whatever those are places where children and they became very popular at the turn of the 19th century because the country was trying to integrate a huge number of immigrants and so this is where the children of the new immigrants were taught self-interest rightly understood and you have to look at the history of those organizations and how critical they were to handing on that cultural norm that first develops in the new england town meeting and so forth and so when we look and now when schools are trying to teach tolerance and cooperation they're being attacked because they're brainwashing innocent children and that really only the parents can say what is good for children the idea that we might be raising our children with some idea of self-interest rightly understood as now viewed as indoctrination so that's what's happened to that principle there still are those things and i see a lot in my Dartmouth students of this understanding of how privileged they are and the obligation that comes with that but you see a lot of the other two these are my rights this is what i'm owed the heck with everybody else the art of association this has also changed interest groups have exploded into checkbook organizations you could we you know interest world is alive and well everybody sends a check so that somebody is writing you know pursuing their particular agenda many of which are hardly in the interest of the society as a whole and the civic groups where you came together and you actually had to deal with people who were not like you and who might not think the way you do the else club the chamber of commerce the whatever i wrote a bunch of these down the lions the scouts the only place real place where Americans are coming together is through sports particularly that's where children learn sports but what are we seeing on the playing fields of America the parents are horrible and they're teaching their and they're teaching their kids win at any price and if the coaches try to teach values of sportsmanship and community they're criticized if they if they're because they're not winning enough so athletics is a huge way that we socialize children into the art of association labor unions that was a place where people went and got political information it's costly to get political information if you're a working person if you have two jobs got kids at home your wife's working whatever the labor union will give you political cues and information and you would talk about it with your fellow union members no we shouldn't back this person or yes we should so the decline of labor unions is a big big part of this problem believe it or not the suburbs coming to south burlington where is the center of south burlington can anybody tell me uh market street market street okay but that's true and we're we're lucky we live in states that still have towns that have centers and greens and still have town meeting and so forth but most of the world most of the united states lives in places where there are no centers and there's no open space for people to gather you can't even have the kids can't even have a pickup game of softball where they learn how to work out their differences without overbearing adults telling them what to do hollowing out of the industrial cities is well established but also the hollowing out of rural communities the disappearance of small manufacturing companies has been devastating the disappearance of family farms in place of huge agribusinesses has been devastating what's left are these husks and what happens in these husks people are unfit and all they're beating their wives their kids are running wild and have no hope of a future so how can they embrace the art of association when there's nothing to associate into so and then of course tv and cell phones but particularly cell phones ten years ago on the dartmouth campus when i would go from class to class or go downtown i would see students we would make out how are you professor fowler whatever now they're all like this so so that's my diagnosis that the thing the two things that toke will put his finger on as what distinguished our democracy from failed democracies were those two fundamental principles so let me stop here and i have some questions for you but you may have questions and i think cindy said there were going to be mics coming around while we get that done one of the things i thought some of you as i've been talking may have come up with your own examples of things that you see is particularly problematic for american democracy and you don't get to use those five letter words yeah would you stand up and speak loudly and then i'll repeat your comment yeah it is that's what you want okay a green light i sometimes wonder how much of the problem how much of the problem is we have too many people if we were a smaller country we would care more for each other and be nicer to each other well that's certainly what the anti federalists thought her question is if we were a smaller country and had fewer people would we be more caring towards each other and when the constitution was being ratified the anti federalists who lost that debate basically said the country is too big to be a democracy and you know the only time democracy has really worked has been in small city states like Athens or even Venice um small republics and so they basically said we have we have to have a federation we can't have a strong national government because it's not going to work it'll be you know it won't be close enough to the people and so forth but what mad at james madison says in federalist 10 he turns that argument on its head and he says what makes us strong is our size and our diversity and the argument is if we're so big it's going to be really hard for any one faction or cabal to seize power and control the whole government particularly if we divide power and so you see this that the states so the republican states are fighting biden because they think what he's doing is wrong when trump was president it was the democratic states their attorneys general were suing and so forth so the idea is if it's big enough and diverse enough it's going to be really hard to find a single thing that will be enable a faction to oppress the rest of the country and in in the end that view carried the day we did ratify the cousin but the anti-federalist idea is still very much alive and um the problem is we are big and we could start we could do what yugoslavia did and create three separate independent entities i don't see a lot of support for that in the country i have to say on my bad days when texas threatens to secede i say have a good life um there's a question over there okay i'm coming good afternoon um i see four things that to me are some of the most basic in terms of maybe turning us around and of course that would require a constitutional convention which is also dangerous uh but i'll i'll name them real fast the first one is money in politics when you hear that senators and congressmen and maybe even state senators and state congressmen are spending more time raising money than they are helping their constituents and serving in congress like they're supposed to that's dangerous and so campaign finance reform would be my first one second one would be done with a constitutional amendment without a convention okay thank you we'll do that we'll do that okay second one is gerrymandering and you mentioned that one um and then it is now no longer racial gerrymandering as partisan gerrymandering and that is a problem uh i don't know how we solve it but certainly the fact okay multi-member districts larger districts which um encompass more diversity and make it harder what what these larger multi-member districts would do would mean you'd have a much higher probability that there would be multiple coalitions in the district instead of it's being okay and vermont has at the state level has had some multi-member districts yes and congress passed a law in 67 to outlaw multi-member districts so that law would have to be changed and they they also limited the number of congressmen too to 435 yeah right yeah uh and then that okay three okay number three is the electoral college which many people bring up uh we should have direct voting and number four well let me deal with that one okay there is legislation that's passed in many many states now that where the state pledges to give its electoral college votes to the candidate that wins the most votes nationally it started in mariland and a number of states there are about 70 electoral college votes shy of making that public policy oh that's interesting okay so and then so we don't need convention what's the fourth one okay the fourth one is a required course in civics when when when i hear that and i believe this too that uh immigrants gaining citizenship which they have to go through several lengthy courses learning about how our government works they know more about how our government works and who's president and who the representative is etc etc then then you know the average a large majority of americans could not pass that test right i rest my case all right well somebody likes that idea i don't kidn't tell how people were reacting to your others but but the point is these are reforms that are not impossible they don't require the constitutional convention um and the reason why you worry about constitutional conventions is so when the framers went to philadelphia they were going to tweak the articles of convention and what did they do they threw them all out and wrote a whole new thing where they invented federalism presidencies um judicial review whole bunch of things that had never been tried before in the country so god knows what people would invent now yeah uh yes i'd love your comment about another five letter not really a word but an acronym that has had a pretty negative effect on rural america and small cities and small companies and that's nafta yes this is a case where nafta the um trade agreement between canada mexico and united states this was an era where the democratic party embraced open markets and global trade and um except for do biden by the way he he rejected the open borders thing and so and and the idea and i have a dear friend a colleague at dartmouth who is an expert on trade and he will tell you that in the aggregate free trade makes the society better off that prices are cheaper we have access to more kinds of goods there's more quality and whatever and i say to him yes but economists always never overlook the fairness of the distribution so what we didn't do and we still haven't done is compensate the losers we have some trade laws that provide very modest dollars for retraining mostly and and what and i've heard doug say this well people can't get a job in bang or main then they need to move it's a very cold-hearted view of the world in my view oh you can't have a decent life unless you move and also what that means is our cities get more and more crowded and more and more unmanageable so some of what's happening now with this reindustrialization that's going on is trying to create incentives certainly by creating the infrastructure so that modern companies can operate on the wet you know with web and remotely and whatever but i you know clinton clinton missed the boat then and i and democrats have not been have not stepped up republicans are fine with it seemingly you know it's let the market rule but democrats should have known better in the view of some people yeah here we go okay i'm concerned about that because whether we like it or not this is not the only country in the world and on the planet and we have managed to use a four-letter word south america and a lot of other countries because we want bigger wages and more free goods and we don't want to pay a fair wage to the people that are working their bodies to pieces and now we're pissed off because they want to come here and take advantage of what we took so i think we have to have a little more nuanced conversation about what really are the effects of free trade and what that really should mean and the self-interest rightly understood includes people other than us in the united states i think we're really seeing that self-interest rightly understood involves the globe because you know if one country is polluting or dumping or killing all the whales or whatever the rest of us pay the price for that but going but to latch on to what you first said again my economist friends would say world poverty measured in the aggregate has decreased significantly but again the problem is distributional and they would say that without all those sweat shops in places like peru and whatever peru would be even poorer and more desperate yeah i'm just saying that rightly understood in a broader in a broader sense but that's sort of there isn't consensus in this in in this country about what free trade really is about it's not just about the aggregate productivity of the society some people think distribution internally in a nation and cross nations are things that we should be thinking about and pretty soon mother nature is going to going to take care of it one last question over here yeah yeah hi thank you um so my question is about well it's a quite question per observation so question term limits how do you think term limits or the lack of term limits has impacted what we're seeing now in our government structure in congress if you want me to say term limits it would be good you got the wrong person because i actually testified before the house judiciary committee back oh i didn't want you to say any yeah yeah yeah but um and i use james madison mm-hmm what a lot of the problems that we have in government right now are the result of amateurism in politics people have decided that outsiders are a good thing and the society you know you wouldn't go to a heart surgeon who just figured it out yesterday well it turns out that madison and hamilton particularly worried a lot about competence in government and they they they and the and continuity and what madison said it's a democracy not just ours but it needs what he called masters of the public business and a master of the public business was somebody who'd held office not just nationally but locally so knew how and it and had served long enough to know that other people have needs because the congress was supposed to be a place for deliberation he says in federalist 10 that's where you refine and enlarge the public view i don't see a lot of refining and enlarging going on in our congress right now and what when the reason for that is that so many people are being elected particularly in the republican party i have to say because they don't know anything about politics and so they can't get what they want because they don't know how to work the system and all they can do is say no we don't want that and they've put poor johnson in the hot seat now he doesn't have a clue what's going on and and we shouldn't expect him how does he's never been in a leadership role in the congress and suddenly he's the speaker he's never even chaired a committee um and so if you're going to be an effective speaker of the house you have to know your members you have to know what they want you have to know how much pressure they're tolerate what they you know what their priorities are for their districts and so forth now to some extent when you have these clueless members being elected they don't know what their districts want because they ran on chaos and you know and and uh own the lives and so johnson can't even figure out how to round them up it's no accident that um jeff you know that the democratic minority leader is able to keep his members in line he's had a lot of experience so did nancy polosi she was able they both are able to head off problems at the past now you might not like the fact that they are so successful but if you want if you want to get what you want politically you better stop picking amateurs wow this has been terrific absolutely wonderful