Can we preserve American democracy? with Archon Fung

Announcer:

Welcome to the Wiener Conference Call series. These one hour on the record phone calls feature leading experts from Harvard Kennedy School who answer your questions on public policy and current events. Wiener Conference Calls recognize Malcolm Wiener's role in proposing and supporting this series as well as the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Mari Megias:

Hi everyone. Good day, I'm Mari Megias in the Office of Alumni Relations and Resource Development at Harvard Kennedy School. And I'm so pleased to welcome you to this first Wiener Conference Call of the academic year. These calls are kindly sustained by Dr. Malcolm Wiener who supports the Kennedy School in this and so many other ways. So today we are joined by Archon Fung the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-government at Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses on public participation, deliberation and transparency, and is co-director of the Transparency Policy Project, and leads democratic governance programs at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. So given his expertise we're so fortunate that he's agreed to share his thoughts today with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends. Archon.

Archon Fung:

Great. Hey, welcome everyone. Thank you very much for joining this afternoon. It's really a pleasure to be able to talk to everyone even if I can't see everyone. I hope that we can do this again sometime on campus when we can see each other. So I'm gonna talk to you today about some of the most, what I regard as the most important features of the fragility of American democracy, what its consequences are, and then what we might do about it. If you are like me, at the beginning of COVID, think all the way back, I guess, what? 15, 16 months now. I thought, well, maybe there's an opportunity here and what the effect of this horrible virus will be to bring Americans together, bring government together to face a common threat. Oftentimes you think about social threats like pandemics in that light. But obviously that's not what happened. Instead we got a lot of social and political division around social distancing and other COVID control measures even lots of disagreements about how bad the disease was and whether one should worry about it. And then of course, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the nation experienced an unprecedented questioning of the legitimacy of the election that reached a high point with the invasion of the Capitol by Stop the Steal protestors. So I'm gonna talk again about three different feature or three different dimensions of our democratic crisis. The first is fragility. The second is the consequences of that fragility. And the third is how we might make a stronger and more stable democracy. So first about fragility. I wonder, can people type in the chat? Betsy or Margaret. If you can, hopefully people can type into the chat, take just like 10 seconds and... Okay, they can now, okay, you can type in the chat now. Take about 10 seconds. And when I say the phrase fragility of democracy type in a word or a phrase that captures for you what you think is causing fragility in democracy. So everybody type in so we can all read it and I'll save this and use it in the next iteration of this presentation. Misinformation, fake news, lack of participation, power, division, terrors, mistrust, free press, misinformation. Good. I'll just leave this open for like another 10 seconds here. That's great. Oh, it's inherent. Maybe it's inherently fragile. Feuding political parties. Good. Partisan polarization systems. Socialism, intellectual laziness. All right, good. So a lot of thoughts there. And certainly I'll touch on some of those but not all of them. Now I wanna talk about fragility in a certain sense. And fragility here I wanna talk about in relation to democratic norms. And my thought is that political leaders and citizens need to behave in certain ways in order for democracy to work well. And one of the reasons, one of the big reasons for the current fragility is that citizens and leaders are no longer behaving in the ways that a functioning democracy or a well-functioning democracy requires them to behave. The first norm that's under some pressure is the norm to tell the truth and to try to believe the truth. So in recent history we've seen some big lies and by big lies I mean lies that advanced self-interest like the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. We've seen noble lies. And noble lies, this is an idea from Plato in which rulers tell lies to benefit the people because if the people really knew the truth, wouldn't do things that help themselves out or do the right thing. And so I think if you're charitable you could say that the assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a noble lie in that it was meant by well-meaning people, although however misguided, to justify an intervention that would overthrow a dictator. Also, I think the statement early on by the CDC and WHO up until, I think, April of 2020, that masks won't help you had a noble lie kind of component to it because public health officials were, first of all they didn't really think that asymptomatic transmission was happening and they thought, well, the people who really need these are healthcare professionals. If we tell people that masks might help you, or that people in Asian countries that seem to have this a little bit more controlled, they're all wearing masks, then there's gonna be a run on masks and we won't be able to have enough for public health workers. So I think the mask error had a noble lie kind of dimension to it. Just to be clear, my own position is that public officials should almost never tell noble lives however good their intention is. It's manipulative and disrespectful to citizens. Okay. So, and then finally, third category is misinformation and disinformation. And we've seen a lot of these around COVID cures. Many, many things. Now politicians have been mendacious as long as there have been politicians, but one difference in the current moment is that there are stronger incentives and weaker checks on those who would distort the truth or tell untruth for their own political gain. Part of this is the dramatically weakened role of journalism. I think in the last couple of decades the employment levels in journalism have declined more than in coal mining. There are polarization and confirmation biases at work inside of our own heads as people with political identities. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. And then finally, a lot of people in the chat touched on social media and the polarization that occurs on social media through filter bubbles, sometimes encouraged, often encouraged by business models. So anyhow, the first norm that's under pressure is the norm that you should be truthful as a politician, as a citizen, as a public leader. A second norm that's under pressure is the norm that you should play within the institutional rules of the game, especially to gain political power. Like there are lots of political rules about who gets to vote, how many votes will win you an election, what votes they should be taken in an order, how you certify the votes, et cetera. Many institutional rules of the game, and those are under a lot of pressure. From the Right we see election security claims that are largely, I think, almost completely unbacked by evidence of significant voter fraud. There are pressures in some states to reduce voting accessibility through different kinds of regulation. One thing to keep your eye on in the next year or two there will be even more extreme gerrymandering efforts than occurred in 2010 that really dilute the power of some people's votes and amplify the power of others. And for those of you who've been following closely there are efforts at the state level to toy around with election oversight and administration to make it, in my view, significantly less non-partisan. Okay, so those are some pressures on this second norm from the Right, but I think there are also pressures from the norm from the Left. I think some of these are taken for good reason. I don't think the system, the political rules have been fair to everyone for a long time. There are important problems with them that need fixing, but nevertheless efforts to fix the political rules are kind of pressing on the institutional rules of the game. And we see that with filibuster reform. We see that with the idea that everyone should vote. That is an idea that I very much endorsed, but it is not an idea that's been in practice in the United States. If you look at the OECD countries, we're down near the bottom of the list in terms of the proportion of people that actually vote in major elections. And so if everyone actually voted that would be a radical transformation of American politics, a good one in my view, but nevertheless, a big change from the rules and practices of the game that have taken place for all of our political lives. There are redistricting efforts to shift who makes the rules of electoral maps from legislatures to independent commissions. My friend, Alex Kaeser has written an excellent book about the history of the electoral college reform efforts and ultimately arguing why it, it very much needs reform. There's talk of Supreme Court reform. And then there's also a lot of complaints, I think appropriately so, that the Senate is a non-majoritarian minority rule institution. So you see a lot of pressure on these institutions that we've kind of taken for granted for a few decades right now from political actors on all sides. And then the third norm is an appeal to common good interests. And here I believe that a healthy democratic politics requires leaders who disagree about policy solutions, but all sides, all leaders, really what they're after is to make an argument. And they really believe that if you do things my way our society will be better off. And so as political leaders should be making arguments to both people who agree with them and people who disagree with them and say, look, I believe this policy will make us better off. That and then they should minimize as far as they can the kinds of disagreements that they have with people who disagree with them. So this is what a common good oriented politics would look like. But instead of a common good oriented politics we have a tribal politics in which a lot of political arguments are about what's good for my people and bad for your people. And part of the political dynamic is to maximize disagreement. This has occurred against the background of polarization, which a couple of people mentioned in the chat. So in 1973 and 1975 I think about 80 or 90% of members of Congress were in the purple zone. That is 80 or 90% of Congress was between the Left most Republican and the Right most Democrat. And here's what that distribution looks like in 1973. By 2017-2019, by the 105th Congress there are exactly zero purple members of Congress. No one is between the Right most Democrat and the Left most Republican. This plays out not just at the leadership level but also in society. This is a kind of old poll from 2014, the numbers would be more extreme now, but I don't think Pew has asked the question again. 27% of Democrats at the time saw the Republican Party as a fundamental threat to the nation's well-being and 36% of Republicans conversely saw the Democratic Party as a threat to the nation's well-being. And it's not just about politics, it's also about society. It used to be that people you date were looking for religion in common or common interests or whatever it was. But from a survey from a couple of years ago seven in 10 Democrats who are looking to get into a relationship said that they wouldn't date a Trump voter and five in 10 Republicans said that they would not date a Clinton voter. Okay. So that's a little bit, there's like endless dimensions and data sets that we could draw on to substantiate polarization, but it is a problem. Okay. So consequences. I wanna go quickly through what I think are three really important consequences of this democratic fragility. The first consequence is illegitimate politics. And this stems from fights over the rules of the game, that fragility. Like some people, some politicians, some citizens think we're playing soccer others think we're playing mixed martial arts, like to have a successful political contest people have to agree on the rules of the game. And when they disagree, the disagreement can go very, very high and up to the level at which there's disagreement about who actually won the election and whether they deserve to rule. I think that the 2020 election made it pretty easy for me anyway. I wonder how easy it is for you to imagine a 2024 scenario that really approaches the end of American democracy. Imagine a scenario in which Republicans control both Houses of Congress with a critical mass of them adhering to the Stop the Steal narrative of 2020. The election is as close as it was in 2020 and 2016 with the Democratic candidate according to most people, winning a large popular vote, but on my hypothetical, wins a narrow Electoral College victory because the vote's really close in a few battleground states. And then you can imagine, this is the bad part, that the state legislatures in some of those states refuse to send electors for the winners and or the Republican majority in Congress refuses to certify the electoral victory. Then you would have a failure of the presidential election in 2024. And I think what actually transpired in 2020 makes that scenario which at least for me a few years ago was just not imaginable, very imaginable. Okay. Oh, wait. Betsy told me I'm not screen-sharing. That's really bad. Okay. Is that a little bit better? Okay. So the second consequence is... The second consequence which follows from the first is that the peaceful transfer of power fails and political violence increases. So the miracle of democracy actually is that people who have really, really different views of society managed to change power, to give up power on one side and give it over to another, at least for the next few years through a peaceful process that doesn't involve violence. And so that is the miracle of transferring power through ballots, not bullets. But when the political system is illegitimate we might shift back to an arrangement in which there's much more political violence. And we've begun to see, and not just in January 6th but in different fits and spurts in many places across the country, a rise in political violence. Okay. Now the third challenge or the third consequence of this democratic fragility that I wanna bring to your attention is that a society and a polity that is so democratically fragile back on its heels up against the ropes cannot solve the existential social challenges that face it. What we like about any system of government, whether it's an authoritarian government or whether it's a democratic government. One of the ways in which we rate governments is how well they manage to help society solve the big problems that that society faces. We've already seen a lot of challenges in addressing pandemic and public health because of political fragility. I think we will see security challenges going forward as with the rise of China and the continuing threat of Russia. We will see continuing existential challenges from racial and economic inequality. And then finally, perhaps the largest of these is, I don't know about the largest, but a very, very large one is the existential threat posed by climate change. And this is just four of them. I'm sure you guys on the call could name many, many more that you regard as existential challenges. But to deal with any of them we need to have a more functional democracy. In a functional democracy it deals with existential challenges by most people, most parties, most leaders, and most citizens operating on a shared body of fact but then having very different views that stem from their ideologies about how to solve the social problems that are occasioned by those facts. And then a functioning democratic process is supposed to sort that out, determine and combine those different solutions and then allow, enable that society to move forward at least just a little bit. That's how it's supposed to work but that is not happening for us. Okay. And then so for the next few minutes I want to sketch for you what I regard as some of the most important priorities on an agenda of reform and revitalization for democracy. And I want to say that you should think of this as an agenda and not solutions, because these are huge problems. And I guess I think that what we need... It's a little bit premature to be pulling blueprints and solutions out of a hat. And what we need is some kind of broader agreement on what the problems are that we should be working on in order to create a more healthy and constructive democracy. So the first question is, do we look backward or do we look forward for guidelines about how to strengthen American democracy? I think a lot of people... You know most of the history of the Kennedy School is that we've been comfortable and happy. Our like happy zone is in a politics between George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. We're really, really good in that space. And I think a lot of us would like to be backward looking and say, okay, well, can we just have that again? Can't we just restore. I think some of the support for President Biden had a kind of restorationists mindset behind it. That was kind of the unity agenda, I think. And the decency agenda. So that's one way you might go. Another way is to go forward looking and say, look, restoration is either gonna be not possible not feasible or some people think, even not desirable given the flaws of George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton kind of era. And if you think that, then you think, well, it really needs reimagination and reinvention, the democracy agenda. And I think it's very reasonable to pursue either path. For the next few minutes I wanna pursue the reinvention path and lay out what I regard as four items on the reinvention agenda that are particularly important. The first item is to create a much better information sphere than we have now. I do believe that for a time between the end of World War II, maybe 1950 and 1990 or 2000, we had a better information sphere than we do now. And it was characterized for much of that period by significant media concentration and mass media companies. But what made it really hum was the profession of journalists. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people whose job it was to get the truth, get both sides of the story and inform the American public and give citizens a sense of what's happening in the world, what different politicians are doing, what the policy options are, what the politics are like. In that world there were still QAnon types, there were John Birchers, but they didn't occupy so much of the public sphere because of that journalistic filter. A professional class of people whose whole job it was to provide information that kind of, if you want to put it romantically, made American democracy work better. Now there were problems with that mass media world, it was very, very slow to appreciate the importance of a civil rights movement. And was oftentimes on the other side of that. It was very, very slow to appreciate the flaws of the American interventions in Southeast Asia and resisted that narrative for a long time. So there were important errors. And in the WMD debate famously it was very imbalanced in the number of voices after September 11th that were in mass media that were advocating for the invasion of Iraq versus those that were arguing against the invasion of Iraq. And these media studies showed that in that era the most common voice that you heard arguing against the American invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein on American media. So it was not fair and balanced as the phrase goes. Nevertheless, despite these errors I think it worked by and large pretty well in being truth oriented and trying to hold power accountable to truth. And then what happens with the advent of the internet and the rise of large social media platforms after that, is that all of those journalists and media organizations they get decapitalized and we have the social media sphere and the truth seeking problems that I pointed out a little bit earlier. Now, how to get better. Like there's a lot of silver bullet proposals on the table for how to make social media better. Policing fake news. Have oversight boards. Maybe stronger government regulation. I guess I regard those silver bullets as a little bit premature at this point. I think we need to take a step back and have a more structural view and have a more structural discussion. And lemme just give you an analogy for how that happened at a different point in our history. So at the end of World War II that was the last big time before the internet in which technology had really, really radically transformed the information sphere with the rise of mass media, radio, film, a little bit later, television. And at the end of World War II people in Western Europe and the United State many of them thought that mass media was terrible for democracy because it had been the handmaiden of fascism, that it had allowed Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, who are very adept at using mass media to overturn, in the German case, the democracy but to rise to power. And then so they had a bunch of conversations about, okay, what are we gonna do about this? Is there a way to make mass media good for democracy rather than bad for it? The owner of Time-Life magazine, Henry Luce, convened this group called the Hutchins Commission, which issued a very important set of recommendations that ended up transforming, creating corporate social responsibility in mass media. And the corporate social responsibility that the Hutchins Commission urged on Time magazine and the broadcasters was that they said your job is to inform citizens so that they are democratically capable. And doing that will cost you money, no doubt about it. You will have to pay journalists enough so that it's a profession and people can kind of do that for a career. And their job is to make the day's events understandable. It's to be objective, and it's to hold power accountable to truth. That's their job. And then your job is to allow them to do their job. Sure, you can make some money by selling advertising, and we expect you to do that, but democracy is more important. And one of the norms is, look, if a journalist writes an exposé, say on your biggest advertiser, you're gonna be tempted to quash that and sometimes they did, but everybody understood that it was wrong to quash that because that would be a violation of the central responsibility to inform citizens. We need an analogous conversation at this stage involving publics and advocates, regulators, for sure. and very importantly, the social media companies in which there's a very, very serious discussion about what is your responsibility to democracy and what are you going to do to your business operations and the way that you construct public discourse in order to fulfill those responsibilities? The second item on my agenda here for democratic reform is that we need more common social and political spaces. Many people know that politics is not just polarized on issues, but it's geographically polarized. 25 years ago America was much less geographically polarized. Lots of people lived in purple places where there were diverse political opinions in their towns and their cities and their neighborhoods. But by the mid 2010s, America is very spatially polarized. A few of us live in places that are evenly split. Most places that we live at the state level, but especially at the city and neighborhood level are intense pockets of deep red and deep blue, but not so much light red or light blue, very little purple. So that's spatial polarization. It's really hard to change 'cause people feel really strongly about where they live. But we also have institutional polarization. So we think of American institutions, take some of them, the university, the military, the press, the religion as being institutions for all Americans for society. But one really unfortunate feature of the current polarization is that the institutions themselves have a political tilt and participate in the polarization. Universities tilt strongly left as does the mainstream press. The Crimson almost every year looks through election contribution records of the faculty, and kinda 90-95% to Democrats these days. And other institutions tilt right. The military and veterans community, I think in the 2016 election went two to one for Trump over Clinton. I don't know what they did in this election, but I suspect it was also very strong. And religion by and large, although obviously not completely American religion, especially evangelical religion tilts right. So the institutions themselves have polarized. And so it's becoming a very, very divided and segmented society. A third item on the agenda that I want to propose is to move beyond two parties. Most of the politics that I grew up, perhaps that you grew up, was a two party politics in which there was a Republican Party and the Democratic Party. And they weren't all that far apart. But in the 2020s, politics has changed fundamentally. Like these were kind of the groups that dominated all of American politics for that long 50 year period that I sketched before. Establishment Democrats and "Never Trump" Republicans. But right now they're closer to each other than many of the other political formations in the United States. I'm calling them establishment for short. But then you have the rise of other political factions that have a lot of popular support. The Trump Right and the post-Trump Right on one hand and the if you like the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders on the other. And then you can kind of name the inheritors of those traditions. Who the leaders are now and who the inheritors might be in the next phase. I am for moving beyond the two party system because I think in our current highly polarized environment the two parties, instead of creating political incentives to find common ground and make common good appeals just move further and further apart into tribal politics. I would like to see political institutions which can encompass all of these different dimensions. And if you had that you would get, I think, different political deals. Here is, I guess a couple of years ago Josh Holly and Bernie Sanders on the floor of the Senate both supporting a $1,200 COVID relief Bill. To provide, look outside of the United States. It is remarkable that the United States is such an outlier in the number of effective parties that we have. We're up with Hungary in being among the only democracies with two parties. Everybody else has more. And I think there was an argument a decade or two that the two party system was more stable, could get more done, was more healthy than a bunch of European parties or a bunch of parliamentary systems which are bickering with each other and which can't form governments. But I think in the current context the arguments for moving beyond two parties have become much, much stronger. And here are some ways within the US context well short of moving to parliamentary system that we could move beyond a two party system. And this is being tried. A lot of these are being tried at the state level. Last item on the agenda is political equality and responsiveness. Our political system, at least for the last few decades, has not been characterized by a high level of political equality or public responsiveness. This is an award winning book by a friend of mine, Marty Gillens. I encourage everybody to read it. "Affluence and Influence". And what he did was he looked at a bunch of public opinion data and then a bunch of actual legislation over a few decades. And he asked, well, how responsive is the government? Does American government at the federal level do what people want? And what he found was kinda shocking. He found that our democracy on many issues has not been responsive to the majority of Americans, people at the middle of the income distribution, but that it has been very responsive to people at the top 10% of the income distribution. So on Marty's analysis, kind of what we've had in this 1976 to 2016 era that many of us think of as golden age for American democracy is really American democracy for the top 10% of the income distribution. And I think that moving forward this fact of what's happened over the last few decades is an important cause of the democratic fragility that we face today. So there are a lot of reasons for this and a lot of ways to begin to create more political equality and responsiveness that we can talk about. I just wanna talk about just one here. And that is to make sure that everyone gets some group representation. Like we all have interest groups. Business people have a chamber of commerce. I have the Association of American University Professors. A worker at a GM factory has the United Auto Workers. And I believe that that group layer is just really, really important to making government hear what people's interests are, well beyond the ballot box. And so here I'm showing you data from a study that was done by Kay Schlozman, Henry Brady, and Sid Verba a few years ago. And what they did is they said, okay, well, here's what the American population looks like. 8.5% of us are executives. 13% of us are professionals. 22% blue collar workers. 35%, not in the workforce. And then they said, okay, well, let's get out the directory of all of the associations and lobbies inside the beltway in Washington DC, and have a look at who gets represented in the group system. And what they found is remarkable. Is that 70% of the groups that they found represent the interests of executives and 23% represent the interests of professionals. So that means that 78% of the people, everybody from white collar worker down to non in the workforce, according to Kay and Henry and Sid's book, get 6% of the groups in Washington. And so given that inequality of voice through the group structure, it's very easy to understand how Marty's got the findings that he did that public policy in Washington is quite responsive to people at the upper end of the income distribution, but not at all responsive to people at the bottom. Now there are of course, inequalities in voting, et cetera, that I could show you, but this is, by my lights, the most extreme and in some ways enlightening dimension of political inequality in American politics. So I want to wrap it up here. And just in sum, what I've suggested in the last few minutes of these remarks is that if we wanna make American democracy better we should focus on at least these four items. And you may have other items which we should talk about in the Q&A. But just like for a moment, limit it to these four. And then I'm gonna ask you to select in a poll question of these four: the good information sphere, the common social and political spaces, moving beyond a two party system and then creating greater political equality and responsiveness, which do you think are the most important for the success of American democracy? So let me put up my poll here. And you can pick up to two of them, so you don't have to have just one. Pick a couple. And then hopefully everybody can see the poll up on... Yeah, some people are answering. And I'll just leave it open for a couple minutes here just so we get a sense of the room. I have not ranked them by the way. I think they're all quite important, but I'm interested in how you would rank them. A lot of people have answered. I'm just gonna leave it open for about 15 more seconds, so get your answers in. Great. Alright, here we go. And I'm gonna share the results. Hopefully everybody can see that. So a lot of people picked information sphere. So the fake news, the misinformation, the mendacity is really, really important to folks. Number two was creating greater political equality and responsiveness. And then number three was the common sociopolitical spaces so that we can at least get to know and engage with one another. And then, beyond two political parties. All right. And Elsa says, I think there's a time factor in that. I think you mean the ordering probably matters. I don't know. Anyway, you can say what you meant in the Q&A, because those are the end of my remarks. And thank you very much for your attention. And I look forward to the discussion and hearing what you think.

Mari Megias:

Great, yeah. So now we'll open it up for your questions. To ask a question, please use the virtual hand-raising feature of Zoom. And in true Kennedy School of fashion, keep your question brief and end it with question mark. We will notify you via Zoom chat feature when it's your turn to speak. You may experience a short lag time, so make sure to unmute yourself. And if you could also just let us know your name and your Kennedy School affiliation. So I'm gonna start things off with a question that was submitted earlier by Doug Ogden MBA 1995. And that question is speech that amounts to crying fire in a crowded theater is burning down our democracy. How do we reign it in?

Archon Fung:

Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people are for measures that would police misinformation and hate speech, much more strongly. I'm more traditional first amendment person. And I would favor a lot of structuring moves that fall short of just take down. So for instance, like how do you determine what is true? So I don't know what you guys did, but I bought my masks in Amazon in, I think December or January. December, 2019, January, 2020. And if I had posted on Facebook, hey, I think everybody should buy masks 'cause the CDC is wrong. That would have violated most of their standards for what truth is. But turns out I was right, CDC was wrong. So part of what's good about democratic discussion is that you have lots of different viewpoints mixing it up with one another. And now, I mean, your point is well taken. There's a lot of that mix-up is resulting in a lot of really, really bad outcomes. And so what I think we need to do. My first favorite approach is to try to create architectures of discussion that encourage people to seek truth, to amplify truth, and to know when false things are said and to kind of downplay them a little bit more. So my analogy is a little bit like somebody designing a park. So any park designer knows that you've gotta put up a lot of lights because it's gonna be really dangerous at night if there's a bunch of dark spots and people who walk through them might get assaulted or robbed or harassed or something. And so that's common knowledge. And so what is the social media equivalent of designing a park so that people can have a good time there, feel really safe and be social with one another? And I think we haven't gone through that exercise. We spent like many, many hundreds of thousands of engineering hours figuring out what kind of social media design keeps people's eyes glued to it and how to target people for advertising. We spent much, much less engineering design, energy, figuring out how to design the social media space so that truth rises up to the top and people have a good conversation. And I think we should do that before kind of resorting to, I know you shouted fire in a crowded theater, I'm gonna take you down.

Mari Megias:

Great. Monty, you're up. You can please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Monty McMurchy:

I'm Monty McMurchy calling from Toronto, Canada, Harvard Kennedy School many years ago. Interesting comments. My question comment is this, the type and quality of candidates seeking and participating in public office. Ted Cruz being one example, prima facie, a well-educated man attended schools of good quality and yet he resorts to what I term to be pernicious venality exclusive in power aggrandizement. What? And this is universal, Canada as well. How can one possibly try to recalibrate that people seeking public office seek it as service, not for personal gain. I thank you.

Archon Fung:

Thanks, that's a great question. And I very much agree with your goal and your assessment. I think two things need to happen. I think one is that the ethic of service and truth needs to be more deeply imbued in education training, in the political culture, that's really important. But also I think that you can't expect people to be truthful and non self-aggrandizing and public good and public good oriented and public spirited when the political incentives reward a different kind of behavior. And so I think another challenge is to reform political structures so that they reward people who are accountable and who are seeking to serve the public rather than self aggrandize. And some of the reforms that I was talking about I hope would do that. And importantly, I think a big driver of the kind of political behavior that you're bothered about that I'm also very deeply bothered about is the tribalization. Right now I think there are big, big political rewards for affirming your identity with one side against the other. And that explains some of the self aggrandizement.

Mari Megias:

Great. Thank you very much for that question and answer. Dwight Hutchins, your turn to ask your question.

Dwight:

Thanks a lot. Calling from lovely Singapore where they pay the ministers a million bucks a year. So I think that kinda helps keep people focused and attract the best and the brightest to do their best work. Then my question is, how bad is it compared to history? I mean, we don't have duals in the streets. We don't have a civil war yet, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah. Are antenna up higher or is it truly worse now?

Archon Fung:

Well, there've been some pretty bad moments in history. So, I think you should talk to Alex and other historians on our faculty who are very attuned to this. I think it's worse than... We had a period of pretty narrow stable politics that had a lot of problems to it, many, many problems, but it was kind of stable, predictable from 1976 to 2010, roughly speaking. Before that, I think there was a huge amount of turbulence at different periods. One period of turbulence was the civil rights era, well before that a civil war. I think if you... Somebody should do this, I haven't seen this study. If you just look at the political violence that's occurring, my guess is it's probably lower than the civil rights era. A lot of people got hurt. Lower than the civil rights era, but higher than that period that I'm talking about from 1976 to 2010s. And even in the civil rights era. People were fighting over improving the rules of the game and living up to the promises. As Dr. King put it, the uncashed check. Broken promises. Whereas at this point it feels to me like people are arguing over the fundamental structure and what the rules of the game are. This was obviously an issue during the civil rights movement, but after the civil rights movement we had a hiatus in which the fights really weren't about who should get to vote and who shouldn't, whereas now we're having that fight.

Mari Megias:

Thanks very much for that question and answer. Jen Posner, you are up. Please let us know your HKS affiliation and ask your question.

Jen Posner:

Hi, this is Jen Posner in Connecticut. I think it was '92 when I got my MPP. So I'm really interested in the movement beyond two parties. And I feel like I have a little failure of imagination going on with this. Like I can imagine what it would be like to have, you know, more healthy parties and coalitions, you know, that's easy looking at other countries, but getting from A to B in this country, imagining us ever being like that. I really have trouble with the nitty gritty of it. I get how ranked choice voting gets candidates to work together and that kind of stuff. I didn't get down most of that slide, I got down the first three things. But can you envision that?

Archon Fung:

I can. And you know, this goes to the history question. I guess it is kind of far. If you look back to the early part of the 20th century and the last part of the 19th century, there were way more than two parties in lots and lots of places. And the two bigger parties found that quite uncomfortable, and they passed a lot of laws and regulations to make it very difficult for third parties to compete. So I can imagine. And so what you do is to begin to unwind some of those laws and regulations and create some new ones. An important proposal. And New York City, I think, still has this. New York has the Working Families Party which is neither Democratic nor Republican, although leans quite progressive. And one thing that makes the Working Families Party possible, and it kinda gets into the weeds here so I apologize, is called fusion. So in states that allow fusion, I think New York might be the only one now, what happens is you can have a party that fuses with another part. So Jen, you could be... So say I'm a Green Party activist and Jen you're a capitally Democratic Party favorite and you're supported by the Democratic Party in Connecticut and Connecticut has fusion. I as a Green Party person, I could say, okay, Jen, I would like you to also be a Green Party person. And so you the ballot would say Jen Posner, Democrat and Green Party, and then it would have the Republican candidate. And then I would vote for either Jen Posner the Democrat, Jen Posner, the Green Party person or the Republican, and then the number of votes you get would be your Green Party votes plus your Democratic Party votes. And then that allow you to do is look at your support and who actually got you the election. And then you'd be able to say, ah, you know, it was only Archon that voted for me as Green Party, that's one vote. I don't need to pursue a Green agenda at all. Or you might say, wow, 40% of my votes came onto this Green Party line. I hadn't been so attentive to climate change, but I better really pay attention to that. So fusion was a measure that was eliminated in most states as part of solidifying the two party system that really allowed other parties to compete. And that's one of them. Ranked choice is another one, multi-member districts, cumulative voting. So there's a number of electoral measures that are experimented with, Maine has RCV, et cetera, at the state level that would create more party latitude that try to reach beyond two parties.

Mari Megias:

Great, thanks very much. Nancy, it's your turn.

Nancy Maney:

Yes, hi, my name is Nancy Maney and I'm from Albany, New York and I graduated from the Kennedy School in 1989 with a Master's in Public Administration. I would just like to comment that I think education is also an issue here. I think that there's a lot of people in this country that really don't understand what it means to live in a democracy. That people think that it's about civil liberties when really sometimes it's more about the common good. And I think that this is relatively easy to fix because I think it's hard to create a third party, but I think it's relatively easy to educate people in the United States about what it means to be in a democracy, about our constitution. I think a lot of people don't really understand the constitution. They don't understand how it originated, what it says. And so I just think that that's something that we should focus on as well. What do you think?

Archon Fung:

I completely agree with you. My colleague Kathryn Sikkink is doing... She's a scholar of human rights among other things, and her more recent work she's exploring rights and responsibilities. So she really wants to advance this idea that, yes, rights obviously hugely important, but also, so also our responsibilities, and they've been more neglected. And then I see somebody, Elsa put in the chat, Judge O'Connor, Sandra Day O'Connor civics movement. Absolutely right, I agree. And there's a lot of work on service learning and civics education. Myera levinson over at the ed school. my friend, Peter Levine, over at Tufts who are trying to... And Danielle Allen at Harvard University are trying to create a curriculum that really educates at the K-12 level students about living and being citizens in a democracy. And some of that is service learning. It's like, okay, well, say there was a whatever, a stoplight that was dangerous in your neighborhood, how would you begin to go about addressing that? And that's a practical journey that takes people through local democracy. And then finally, probably a lot of people would disagree with this, but I'm fascinated with the idea. My friend Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne through a collaboration between Brookings and the Ash Center are exploring, trying to get more conversation about universal civic duty voting in the United States. So what if the United States was like Australia or Brazil in that there were a legal requirement to vote and then you'd get whatever a speeding ticket if you didn't vote, some sort of minor citation. And so that would kind of make good on our civic responsibility and duty to participate in politics.

Mari Megias:

Great. We do have a question that came in on the chat from Scott Black. Who's a member of the Kennedy School's Dean's Council. And that question is how do we get enablers from Congress to uphold their constitutional oath rather than propound false narratives and to undermine democracy?

Archon Fung:

I wish I knew the answer to that. I think, I mean, for me, it goes back to elections. You have to create an electoral structure or movements in which people pay a cost for doing that. And part of that might be altering the primary structure. I think, unfortunately, Scott, I think we're in a lot of states were going the other way because the result of gerrymandering and primaries that select for more intense political positions will create incentives for enablers to further enable. So I think we have to figure out how to open up those political processes so that there's a real political cost for doing that.

Mari Megias:

Thank you. And we have time for one last question. That's from Ty Farrell. You're up.

Ty Farrell:

Thanks So much for this Professor Fung really interesting. My name's Ty Farrell, Kennedy School mid-career 2001. Calling from Washington state. And it just seems like the issue of political equality is really kind of a chicken and egg question in terms of economic inequality. Wondering if you can speak a little bit about that. And also just this kind of broader mental model that we all carry around. I think very deeply embedded that we're kind of operating in this scarcity and competition model as a society, and how those two things interrelate maybe.

Archon Fung:

Yeah, good. So I take by chicken and egg you mean that people with more resources are able to capture and manipulate, exercise more voice in the political system so that the economic inequality feeds into and generates political inequality that gets you public policies that reinforce economic inequality. Is that the chicken and egg idea?

Ty Farrell:

In a sequence model that would be called success to the successful. It's actually a systems archetype.

Archon Fung:

Yeah, right. So I think that has been true in American politics over the last few decades in large part because of the huge flows of money into the political system through campaign finance rules which are very liberal in the sense of allowing a lot of money in politics in the United States. I think that Bernie Sanders main contribution in his presidential run was not in the policy space but in the business model space. So he figured out how to finance a whole political campaign without any billionaires. So I think there are innovations out there in campaign finance. A real regulation would help a lot. But absent real regulation, there is innovation on how to finance political campaigns through small donor donations. And there's a lot of innovation like that going on. Certainly at the presidential level we see this, but also at other levels, ways of conducting campaigning and organizing that get-together political constituencies even in the face of lower resources. So, the remarkable thing... Let's just talk about the presidential level from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. And then I don't know, Biden's more of a wash, but let's just like take those two. And then the rise of other insurgents, like Bernie Sanders as a real contender. All of those insurgent candidates were the ones not preferred by the party machines and the ones who had less resources. So the feedback loop that you point to is very, very real for sure, but it's not an iron law. And increasingly in this moment of topsy turvy politics which exhibits a lot of fragility also brings with it some openness to breaking the inequality dynamic. Let me leave you on the last, the zero sum politics. I'm shifting away from economics toward race and economics now. But let me leave you with a reading recommendation, which is Heather McGee's book "The Sum of Us", which I think is for American politics, to my mind, in the last few years, the best book that talks about race and politics at the same time. Your comment made me think of her book because her book is built around this metaphor. And the cover of the book is a painting, kind of abstract of a swimming pool with a black girl climbing the ladder out of the pool and a white boy jumping into the pool. And why is there a picture of the pool on her book? The metaphor is that in the new deal and a couple of decades after the new deal, all across America, in many, many communities, people built largely out of works projects and other efforts, beautiful community pools. That were like centers of activities for these communities. They were beautiful public works. And then the civil rights movement and desegregation came along. And through a series of court decisions, communities in the South were ordered to desegregate public accommodations and in particular swimming pools. So they were all white in parts of the country and then the courts come along and say, no, no, you have to let everybody swim in these pools. You have to integrate them. And in many communities, rather than integrate them, it's hard to believe, they filled them up with concrete because their preference was not to have anybody swim in the pools rather than for the pools to be shared by white kids and black kids. And so her book says, well, one of the prisons of American politics, especially when we think about the racial dimension, is it's a zero sum mentality. And it's like affirmative action or college admissions. You know, this person gets the job or the position, but this person doesn't. And even public assistance. We're locked into the zero sum mentality. And she points out, has a lot of ideas about how to get out of it that would be beneficial to everyone. And in particular, it's obvious that the black girl and the white boy would have far preferred to be able to swim in that pool. There's plenty of water, it's not like there's a constraint. But that was not allowed to happen. That couldn't happen because of the zero-sum mentality that we're in. And so thank you for that question. And I do encourage you to look at the book 'cause I think it's really good.

Mari Megias:

Great. Well, thank you very much for all the questions and everyone who called in. Special thank you to Professor Archon Fung for this Wiener Conference Call. I would like to invite you to save the date of October 14th for the next call with Professor Julia Minson, who'll discuss the psychology of disagreement. Thank you very much.

Archon Fung:

Thank you everyone.