Works-Final-Lightbulb-150x150.png" alt="" width="150" height="150">We’ve had some incredible guests on the show in 2022. For our final episode of the year, we’re taking a look back at what we’ve learned from them.  Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle revisit our episodes with:

• Jake Grumbach
• Jeffrey Sutton
• Francis Fukuyama
• Jamelle Bouie
• Lilliana Mason
• Jon Meacham
• Jessica Huseman
• Joanna Lydgate

A programming note: Democracy Works will be moving to a bi-weekly release schedule in 2023. If you have ideas for people we should be talking to or topics we should cover, please get in touch!

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University, I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith  I’m Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. If all four of us are together, that means we have come to the end of another season of the show. And this will be our final episode for 2022. And we’re going to do something a little bit different this time. And we I’ve been thinking about all the guests we’ve talked to throughout the course of the year on the show, I realized, we’ve had some pretty incredible folks come through our recording spaces, both in the studio and online. And I thought that we would take some trips back and revisit some of the things that we’ve learned from them. So we will be interspersing clips from some of our guests throughout the episode and kind of reflecting on what we took from them and and some of the bigger lessons and democracy that we also try to bring forward on the show, Michael, I know you say sometimes that you think of the podcast as a seminar. And so that is what we’re going to try to do here today.

Jenna Spinelle So we are going to start with a topic that we’ve we’ve talked about on the show pretty much since the beginning, and that is federalism, state politics, some of the conflicts between national and state politics. And we had two guests in particular this year that I thought really hit on that first was Jake grim back from the University of Washington, who had a book come out earlier this year called laboratories against democracy. Jake was recently on the Ezra Klein show as well, but we will always be able to say we had him first before before Ezra did

Candis Watts Smith  And New Yorker put him on the good books list.

Jenna Spinelle Right, right. Yes, it is a very good book. And the other was Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who has a book called who decides, which looks at federalism through the lens of state constitutions. And as you’ll hear with a very heavy lens on Justice Brandeis. So let’s take a minute and hear from Jake and then from Judge Sutton,

Jake Grumbach When coalition’s that are supportive of democratic institutions like the expansive right to vote fair, districting, things like that, when they do take national power, you should really use it to standardize national standards across states and democratic institutions. That’s very crucial and historical, you see this pattern, threats to American democracy have tended to be state legislatures have been the main sort of backsliders or institutions that hold back democracy, whether it’s through allowing slavery, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, even mass incarceration, now current threats to voting rights, and gerrymandering and so forth and elections version. It’s been the Supreme Court that has largely enabled the state legislatures. And then it’s been when they step up, Congress has been the one to stop state legislatures from doing that. So Congress has tended to not actively backslide. But they often have this sin of omission, where they don’t actually organize to pass national policy to stop state legislative backsliding on democratic institutions. So I think that’s an important implication. And then also, just, in a way, broader sense. All of those theories of federalism being great for policy, innovation and so forth, policy learning, bringing people closer to their, you know, elected officials, depolarizing politics nationally, all of those things don’t appear to apply anymore in this era of highly nationalized, polarized parties and national media and all of this, those don’t seem to apply anymore.

Jeffrey Sutton If you have a new problem, let’s let’s talk about things that we all agree are problems, opioids, data privacy, I suppose features of the pandemic. And they’re parts of these problems that, you know, it’s very hard to get up on a soapbox and say there’s just one and only one answer. We’d love to have the opioids crisis behind us, we’d love to have a way to be more confident about data privacy. And what Brandeis says and he’s saying this back in the 20s, and 30s 1920s, and 30s, is that when you have a new policy problem, why not let a brave state take a shot at solving the problem and if they develop a good or even winning insight, other states can follow it. And if a truth really emerges, then at that point you nationalize your solution. The key insight I’m trying to take from Brandeis is, you know, we have 50 state court systems we have 50 state constants. motions, why not use the state courts as the initial innovators, initial laboratories of experimentation when it comes to the meaning of what processes do when is the search unreasonable? It means there’ll be less resentment and conflict, once you have a national solution. If you have one, it probably promotes the best ideas as opposed to prematurely constitutionalized in something. So that’s, that’s the basic idea. And it’s a, you know, it’s a really interesting time to be thinking about it. Because whatever one thinks about the current US Supreme Court is a court that is a little less willing to take issues out of the Democratic sphere. Whereas in earlier courts, particularly in the 50s, and 60s, that was something the US Court was pretty comfortable doing. And so we’re just living in this world, when now you have two opportunities, not one, to protect rights, you hold dear.

Candis Watts Smith  So it was really fascinating for me to be reminded of these two scholars, and to have them back to back Sutton is a Brandeisian, he, you know, really kind of focuses on the idea that states are more nimble, they are more flexible, their constitutions are more likely to change. The idea here is that states will customize their policies and legislation for their constituents. And he argues historically, that states have become more democratic. And in this case, he means, you know, incorporating elections for state judges, or introducing the initiative, or having more opportunities for direct democracy, which the federal government doesn’t have these kind of very direct, you know, democracy components. But putting these two folks in conversation, we see that Jake is really interested and concerned with politics, not just principles. And so for example, we have the principle that at the state level, Americans have more say they can change laws, for example, they can change abortion laws. But this misses out on the politics of, for example, the Supreme Court, you know, allowing for a great deal of democratic backsliding by dismantling the Voting Rights Act. So you know, there’s an idea that people can vote in their states. But I think Jake’s work really kind of presses on this idea that we have also come into a situation where fewer people in some states have a modicum of opportunity to get their say, at the state level. So you know, I think here we kind of can see what our principles are and the contradictions that are produced in practice.

Michael Berkman Yeah, I’m the on the one hand, you know, Sutton is making the argument that states are more democratic in the kinds of institutions that they have, right. So they have access to initiatives and referendums that’s not available, the federal government and judges might be elected, as opposed to appointed at the federal level. And we could go on Kansas mentioned, some, but what Drake is pointing out is that well, this may be true, but at the same time, they’re, they’re passing laws that restrict democracy. And this is really not all that concerning to certain at least that’s what I kind of picked up in the in the discussion with him. And even in the in the clip that Jenna just played, which I think is fairly representative. You know, he’s talking about policies, and I mean, very canvasses correct, and sort of referring to him as Brandeisian because he’s referring to different kinds of policies, right. So he’s talking about responses to the pandemic, and opioids and data privacy and things like that. But he’s not talking about actually the fact that states are responsible for essentially establishing the rules of democracy in this country, because elections are all pushed down to the state level. And in there, you know, Jake’s work is really powerful. And in pointing out how some states have moved in highly regressive directions, others have not. But some have really remote moved in highly regressive directions. And I don’t know, maybe we can get to it or not. But I do think it’s really interesting some of what Sutton had talked about, to now see what’s going on post Roe, because it is actually the case that many of the state constitutions are providing pro choice forces with avenues to fight that, to my knowledge anyway, had not really ever been used before. And so you’re seeing these interesting cases in state courts in Utah and in Florida and other places, where state constitutions may actually be more protective of people’s rights to choose. Reproductive freedoms then the national constitution.

Chris Beem The reason I would find them distinctive is follows on that. Michael It’s It’s Jake’s argument that federalism doesn’t work as well, when politics becomes nationalized, and when there just isn’t as much distinctiveness within an among states. And so you have these arguments that are that where the state is almost rendered just a smaller actor in the same dynamic. And I feel like Sutton for all his knowledge and really impressive knowledge of the state constitutions is operating at a theoretical level where well, that’s not how it’s working anymore.

Jenna Spinelle Another theme that we heard this year on the show was the idea of liberalism, and majorities and counter majorities was how I framed it in our notes document the idea of what role should institutions play? How much should we how should we think about majorities and minority rights and that relationship and so on the on this point, we’re going to hear first from Francis Fukuyama. And then from Jamelle Bouie.

Francis Fukuyama  I think that for many people on the progressive left, the real problem is that liberalism is slow. It works by law, it’s very procedural, you have to respect you know, the rights of all the people, including entrenched interests. And so sometimes it’s very hard to, you know, to change things. And that is very frustrating because liberalism in no society has ever lived up to the full promise, you know, that everybody would be treated equally under the law, that doesn’t happen in the United States today, despite, you know, our founding on those principles. And so that’s one thing. I think there are other sources of discontent. So a lot of it has to do with economics, you know, liberal societies protect property rights. And for that reason, I think they’ve been associated with economic growth and prosperity. But beginning in the, you know, late 70s and 80s, you had the rise of what’s now called neoliberalism where I think market principles were carried to extremes. And also the state, you know, the role of the government was denigrated, and there was an attempt to roll back the state to a point where you had financial instability, because of deregulation, you’re on the growth of a lot of inequality. And that, I think, you know, led to a lot of populism in the 2000 10s, because people didn’t like the world that emerged out of those principles.

Jamelle Bouie That is sort of an example of how our system works to constrain big majorities from just forming in the first place and then acting. The problem, I think, with this insight, especially as it’s applied to our system of government, is that it? It misses the extent to which majority is when they’re large and diverse majorities especially can act in ways that do actually preserve the liberties of everyone within them that B, is that a large pluralistic majority? Because it’s comprised of many different kinds of groups? Is it possible for it to act in ways that seek to preserve a minimum level of security for everyone in the group? And I think that if you look at American history, you see that actually happening quite often you see, big pluralistic majority is when they’re able to form trying to do things to preserve like a baseline of political rights for everyone involved in it isn’t. It isn’t our counter majoritarian ism that protects that, that protects people at the mercy of you know, I think I said in that piece, local bullies and bosses, right, it ends up being majorities trying to act but that attempts to do it and it’s our counter majoritarian system by empowering you know, what the framers may have called factional minorities by empowering those factions on the local level on the state level, on the federal level, to some extent, that stymies the ability to protect vulnerable minorities within the political system. And I think that, that is just like, not how Americans are accustomed to thinking, I think, for a variety of reasons from from sort of Cold War era civics education, right where we have to, we have to hype up the American political system as like the best of all possible worlds, to sort of like the residual sense that like, you know, states are a your state identity is paramount political identity, and you got to protect it, like for all these reasons, Americans have come many Americans have come into this idea that if we let majorities act, something terrible is going to happen. And I just don’t I don’t think the evidence really supports that within the American system.

Michael Berkman So Those were those were two interviews that I enjoyed quite a bit. I think they have different foci. But it’s it’s interesting to think about how they differ in that. We see both sides of liberal democracy here. I think Fukuyama focuses much more on the liberal side of liberal democracy, and so protections, rights restrictions on government power. But for Bouie, democracy is really about popular will and responsiveness about majorities and the Constitution that for Fukuyama would, would provide the liberalism of the protections for buoy is restraint on democracy. And I mean, I just thought he was, I’ve thought about it a lot since the interview, the sort of framing he had of talking about the Constitution as a kind of constraint on democracy. And, of course, I’ve always sort of taught the constitution that way, but really, ever sort of formulated it that way going forward, that we tend to conflate the two, and talking about the Constitution as though it is American democracy. But it’s not, it’s defining the limits on power, it’s defining who has powers. But in fact, our country has been nothing but a progression with steps back, but basically a progression towards greater democracy away from the Constitution, even to the point where we’ve had to change it multiple times, in order to keep up with the democratic impulse within the country.

Candis Watts Smith  What stood out to me regarding these two is that they both kind of touched on the idea that what we call democratic institutions can be used in illiberal and anti democratic ways. So for it seems to me that Fukuyama, you know, a person can be democratically elected, to be repressive, these are not mutually exclusive possibilities. And then for Bouie, we have a number of counter majoritarian institutions that are ostensibly designed to protect more minority rights. But these two can be used to prevent the extension of more rights and greater inclusion. The thing that stands out to me about Bouie is that he really takes an optimistic stance on the potential for the majority, which also just kind of rethinking, like the way we’ve been socialized about, you know, kind of be beware of the power and the tyranny of the majority. But I wonder still, if we’re at a particular moment in time, where we have a large majority with many factions, then, you know, people will be in multiple factions. And so ideally, they would protect, they would expand rights, and they would, there would be greater inclusion. But you know, I wonder, I don’t know, I wonder if that’s just something we’re in a democratic, we have, we maybe were in a particular moment of being optimistic around that issue. And if there are other moments where we’re actually we do want to be sure that the majority can be constrained.

Chris Beem This is typical Bouie, right? I mean, he’s contrarian, he’s he’s focused on history. And it’s always kind of thought provoking and challenging to listen to him. I mean, I think, you know, he acknowledges, right, that tyranny of majority of the majority is a thing. And it’s it’s also true that that’s particularly important, particularly something that the founders were worried about. Right. But the other point, and so I guess, I feel like there’s, you know, there’s risks everywhere, right? Every institution can undermine and subvert rights. And so it kind of makes me think one thing I take from it is that, you know, it speaks to how important having those rights articulated how important it is to have them articulate. I mean, they can still be circumvented, but it’s hard to do that when they are. They’re explicit, agreed to articulated.

Candis Watts Smith  So. So kind of like the having the necessity to protect marriage equality and interracial marriages right now.

Chris Beem Right, exactly. I mean, that’s right. And I wonder, actually, that’s interesting. You said that, because this is one of the things I was thinking, Is it true? And I don’t know this, but my bet is that gay marriage came about more quickly because of the courts than it would have if it had been a national issue. I know that to be true, but I certainly think it’s at least plausible. So I don’t know that it’s always the case. That I was sure it’s not always the case that going to be more democratic.

Michael Berkman Might have been the other way around. You know, the courts came around because majority might have been quickly. Well,

Candis Watts Smith  I mean, I think the other thing is like the you know, for sample, you know, in 2012, North Carolina had left it to the voters and the voters said no. And so that’s one state. And so one of the things that buoy like Grumbach is not a brand DGA, right is this kind of idea that the like that states can prevent a greater inclusion of of rights. So we might have expected in any particular state, some states would vote for it, and some states would vote against it. But if there are national poll in, you know, lists that we can all vote, maybe maybe we would have voted as a country for marriage equality in ways that at various states we would not have.

Chris Beem Kind of quickly there, right. Obama basically got outed as being 14 marriage, right, in his administration. And then, you know, how much later was the Supreme Court ruling? But yeah, so it’s all kind of, you know, these things just kind of turn quickly, once they’re determined that they’re going to return.

Candis Watts Smith  One thing that kind of stood out to me in that particular clip, or made me thinking about is just kind of the role of governance. And, you know, this kind of idea that, you know, we’re seeing all of these kind of chipping away at, you know, government actually working. So we hit upon these questions of governance, when we talked to Dan Moynihan and also Christopher ally, about rural broadband, and just kind of how this orientation towards market principles carried to the extreme are actually undermining many of the things that we need most to get just things running to make government work, even if you want it to work in a constrained way, at least you want it to work efficiently and effectively. And so you know, that that conversation made me think of, you know, just kind of thinking about administrative capacity, or the extent to which kind of a neoliberal orientation has prevented Americans from having, you know, what is now a basic necessity? In this case, broadband.

Michael Berkman And I think that’s part of Fukuyama is point to is that, you know, neoliberalism did enormous damage to the capacity of government to govern, and in part by hollowing it out, but also by, and I think, probably more to the point by destroying people’s confidence in it. And also, you know, and Bill Clinton had a lot to do with this. Because when, you know, when Bill Clinton basically gave up the show on Democrats being a party that was supportive of government responding to problems, what was his quote, government’s not the solute, he had some he had some quote in there,

Chris Beem That era of big government is over. Big Government is over,

Michael Berkman Basically picking up on the Reagan on government. And, you know, I think we’re still feeling the effects of that today. There’s simply no confidence in government. And, yeah, there’s simply no confidence in government and so much of government has been has been sort of hollowed out,

Candis Watts Smith  Which I think it becomes an issue, right. It’s like a, like a death spiral on some level. We don’t have confidence, so we don’t support it. And then we have reasons to have confidence and go on and go on and so forth.

Michael Berkman Yeah, we really saw that play itself out in COVID, where, you know, you clearly needed a large government response. And, you know, it’s just relentlessly attacked. And we haven’t seen anything yet, as we’re gonna see next congressional term when Fauci and other public health officials are called before Congress to basically be burned at the stake.

Chris Beem Well, and this this side of that is just that the markets are infallible, right, that that markets are going to solve these problems and including things like climate change and and accepting inequality and setting ever higher domain dimensions of economic inequality is the price you pay for that kind of efficiency. And the the costs to democracy of, of scaling inequality are basically ignored.

Jenna Spinelle Well, and this discussion about lack of or decreasing trust in institutions, and to some extent each other gets to our next set of clips, which takes up the issue of polarization and unity and how extreme has partisanship become, can we come back from the brink? This is something that there are no shortage of opinions of bout on this show and many other places. But for our purposes, we’re going to hear from Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University, who we talked to back in the spring. She’s the author with Nathan Telmo have a book called Radical American partisanship, which, through public opinion, work, tries to understand exactly how divided we are in a variety of ways and on a variety of topics. And then we’ll hear from Jon Meacham, the biographer, has written a lot about the soul of America, the idea that, you know, we are maybe more united than we think or have the potential to be. So let’s hear from Lilliana Mason and Jon Meacham.

Lilliana Mason If the parties could organize, you know, brutal violence during the Civil War. What are we doing right now? And we’re only asking questions about like, do you want to be next door to somebody? Right, we’re not actually asking anybody, the potentially really radical feelings they might have about their own party and people in the other party. And that’s, you know, really based on this idea of, of American, you know, political science thinking about, you know, we think of partisanship as a pretty benign thing, or, or isn’t like an organizing, you know, tool for people to be able to vote more easily. And, and so we’ve never, ever really asked people kind of the more extreme possibilities of their attitudes about people in the other party. So it really does seem to be that there is that one of the major and for Republicans, actually, racial resentment is the strongest predictor of moral disengagement from Democrats. So it really does seem that one of the things that’s happening is that Democrats and Republicans are hating each other over this specific issue of social equality, right, the traditional social hierarchy where to women, and they also this, this relationship also holds for Republicans on the sexism scale. So where women belong on the traditional on the social hierarchy today, where where do Where do non white Americans belong on the on the social hierarchy today? And that, that question really seems to be driving a lot of the animosity that we’re seeing, partially because the parties have sorted into these kinds of identity based groups, and with, you know, sort of white Christian men being in the Republican party that has really centralized the question of status, and whether or not we’ve made enough progress to be a more egalitarian, multi ethnic democracy, or whether we need to do more or or whether we’ve gone too far, which is, which is sort of the push and pull between Democrats and Republicans is sort of a central question that they seem to be arguing about.

Jon Meacham My view is you can’t love your country only when you win. And as long as we accept the protocols of politics, if we accept the rules of the road, if we accept, pick your analogy, then we can argue, and this country is always at its best, this country’s at 6040. That’s massive unity, right? 40% of the country never voted for Franklin Roosevelt. In the three great landslide elections from 19, from the second world war until now. 40% still voted the other way. 1964 1972 and 1984. So what we’re really looking at, I think, is 6040 is the goal, or the historical measure. Right now we’re at 50.5 to 49.5. Right? So how can we at least get to maybe 5347, and 53-47, which is what say, George HW Bush got in 88 or so we would sit around thinking the country has come together, both big and there’s a lot of political science on this the structural nature of polarization of that we can talk about if you want. But I think this is an eminently doable, because we’re not talking about that many people. And all I mean, I mean, I don’t care if you disagree totally with me on everything. In fact, most people do, I would imagine. But you got to say the election was fair. Right? That’s the that’s the threshold. If you’re going to participate in what is functionally an unfolding, plot, to undermine governance, then that’s not unity. If you if we’re all in it, and we fight it but we accept the rules. That’s a whole different thing. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

Candis Watts Smith  I would be interested to know how Lillian John are feeling about American democracy today after the kind of first major election And after 2020 You know, Lily definitely points out that there’s an underlying simmering reservoir of political unrest and PyLint potential for political violence. And to me Trump’s point, there are people who are unwilling to say that elections are legitimate, and that has its own set of problems, you know, the we need the losers consent to move forward. And I guess, you know, maybe on some level, I’m curious to know what you to think about where we stand on those issues, these issues that John and Lilly bring up in their interviews.

Michael Berkman Yeah, if I could pick up with that, in what most struck me before this election was that the husband of the Speaker of the House was attacked for political reasons. And the other party joked about it. Yeah. And I don’t know that there’s anything more really to say about American politics today, or anything more that affirms what what Liliana and her co author were trying to argue in that book, which is much greater acceptance of political violence. And of course, nothing has happened since the election. To dispel any of that, right, there was the attack on the nightclub, thinking there’s something else that I’m missing, but all this violence gets wrapped up. I don’t know, I continue to feel like, Oh, well, how could I forget that the ex president met at his summer Country Club or whatever we call that place, Mar a Lago with an avowed white supremacist and anti Semite? I mean, I think that nothing changed from the election, if anything, it’s just gonna get worse. And I think their findings, which have been confirmed by other polling, I mean, they did their experiments are, I think, probably more more compelling. But it’s been confirmed by other polling data as well. That there’s just more acceptance of political violence now, especially on the on the right. And that’s terrifying.

Chris Beem Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. I mean, I feel like the deal election of 2022 is being presented as being this watershed that that shows that we’re out of the woods. And I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you can say that it was, it could have been a lot worse than it was we

Michael Berkman Can carry out an election what’s that? It showed we could carry out?

Chris Beem Right? And maybe the wind is out of the sails of the whole election denial crowd? Maybe not. But it certainly wasn’t again, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. You know, I think, you know, I mean, I’m a big Lilly automation fan. I think I used to work a lot in my in my last book. She is smarter research is good. And I completely agree that there’s this cultural core to the split, that we find ourselves in front tech, right, that there has been these dramatic cultural shifts in American society. And half of Americans see that is basically a good thing. And half of America sees it basically, as a bad thing. And when you say you want to make make it make America great again, you want to go back to the former status quo ante when there was a white male Christian, hegemonic, you know, if you looked at this, you know, Anna sceptically you’d say, well, yeah, that’s just kind of what happens when there’s a big cultural shift that there’s a, a core of people who see their identity and their self interest too tied up in the former status quo and let it go. But eventually it changes and how soon and under and how violent that change is. That’s a different story, a different question. We don’t know the answer to it. But yeah, I mean, I think that’s basically where we are right now.

Candis Watts Smith  Thank goodness for the people who show up to work every day to make sure that that doesn’t happen while you

Chris Beem Guys both Jana, and, and you guys are all like coming up with these great segues. Very impressive.

Jenna Spinelle Thank you. Thank you. Nice. Yes. Nice. Setup. Thank you, Candice. For our last set of clips, which looks at to harken back to the name of the show the ways that democracy works the ways that just like you said, the people who show up every day to fight for democracy and the principles they’re in so in this set of clips, we’re going to hear from Jessica Houston of the new site vote beat that’s out on the ground covering county clerks and other people across the county. True. And then from Joanna Lydgate of the States United democracy Center, our 2022 Brown Democracy medal winner for the work they’re doing on the legal and the policy and the advocacy side to help these folks. So let’s hear from Jessica and Joanna.

Jessica Huseman The vast majority of clerks that I speak to on a daily basis are like, people who started working at the county when they were 16 years old and like, have just been promoted and promoted and promoted. Right? Like, they’re not people who you can’t get a degree in election administration, right, like you just do it. And so, you know, I think that that realization has been really helpful. Like I have noticed, for example, that clerks are much more willing to spend more time with me and other local media for for the reasons that that I’ve articulated. But you know, I, you know, I think that the other thing is that there are big nonprofits that are helping these groups come up with communication strategies. So the elections group is a consulting group that does a lot of like, work with local municipalities, and they had Pam Fessler come in and do like a communications guidebook for election workers. And Pam Fessler is a delight and a genius from NPR. And so, you know, I think that there are these support systems and guidebooks that didn’t exist before like these people actually need to be told, like, here’s how to engage with the media. And that’s not, that’s not an insult to them, it just like is what it is. And so now that they’ve got those tools at their disposal, I can see them, putting them in.

Joanna Lydgate And I think the good news is that these folks are holding strong, we get to work with them every day. They’re incredible at what they do. One in three says they feel unsafe in the job right now, yet they keep doing the job. And they’re holding strong just like they did in 2020. And they’ll continue to do that if we continue to support them. I think about it this way, you know, when I need my car fix to take it to a mechanic when my kid is sick, I take her to go see a nurse or a doctor. election administrators are professionals, like so many other people we rely on in our lives. And in our system, they’re trained to do this. They’ve done it for decades on a nonpartisan basis. And so to be undermining and questioning their work in this way, you know, not only is it totally unmerited, but it’s really unAmerican. And so we do our best as an arm just described to support these officials and to educate the public on what they do. But we also get to be inspired by them every day and all across the country.

Candis Watts Smith  So both Joanna and Jessica reveal for me, on one hand, how important the people on the ground are to making democracy work via the election process in particular. And on the other hand, how much our democracy as we know, it depends on unsung heroes, county clerks, poll workers, etc, which is quite different from what we were just talking about elites who have an entirely different set of incentives, some of which are incentive to misbehave and to, you know, undermine the kind of central components of democracy, there are just kind of 1000s of people who work at an offices that are ugly, and have, you know, bad lighting. And, you know, but they, they show up to ensure that we can move from one election to the next, despite all of the kind of obstacles that people are putting in front of them on an everyday basis.

Michael Berkman Yes, I mean, bravo to the election workers who managed to pull off a very good election and even counted the votes fairly fast, which there were a lot of concerns wouldn’t happen. And, you know, these adaptations put in in response to COVID are continuing to work pretty effectively. And all of that is good, I still think it reveals a real weak spot in our democracy, the fact that our elections are so decentralized, the fact that they’re so much of their administration is put into the hands of elected officials, and then also to just everyday folks, we have volunteers who are being asked to put up with with quite a bit increasingly so this is not the only way that a country can run elections in other countries. Elections are administered by a political or nonpartisan administrative, nationally, national offices with uniformity across all voting jurisdictions, with professionals who are paid and you know, it’s good, it worked, and hopefully it’ll work next time, too, but I continue to feel like elections are really a American institutions have held up well in a difficult time, I think, but election strike me He as a really vulnerable area,

Chris Beem These election, beleaguered, unfairly treated threatened election workers helping them figure out how to present themselves in terms of the media, how to present the work they do in a way that seems you know that that appears less threatening or less nefarious, and also defending them right in law on and otherwise, and my kids would be shocked if the if they heard that I was the the Pollyanna of the group. But you know, it is it is true that the one election denier that’s operating right now is Kari Lake out of Arizona. And she is becoming a laughingstock, you know, both in terms of her inability to get any groundswell behind her and in terms of the reaction of the general public. So I just say it it’s not it, this is not a done deal. There are there are opportunities here duck democracy works, dammit.

Michael Berkman You know, sometime maybe next year or something, and we can flesh out a little bit more about what this notion of election denialism needs, you know, it’s, it’s all being taken quite literally right now. So they deny the media that 2020 election. And so the big ones all lost the States United had their focus on the people that were going to be governor, Secretary of States, that type of things. The referees, I believe is determined State United uses, right it concern with replay, but over 60% of from a number I picked up from the Washington Post of Republican House members now or election deniers. And I know somebody here just did a really interesting paper on the tweeting activity of state legislators. And the extent to which they’re tweeting out misinformation about elections is mind blowing. And it’s not like they do just that, you know, election denialism doesn’t like to sit there alone. It is part and parcel of a general worldview of conspiracism. And of not accepting reality. And I think we’re going to be dealing and this is why, Chris, I think I probably tend to be a little less optimistic than you around some of these issues coming out of this election. What does it mean that so many of these people now are in positions of elected office at the state level in Congress, at the school board levels, I mean, it’s true, maybe they’re not going to be the referees, although that may depend a little bit about how the more cases decided true, they’re not going to be the referees. But there’s something really toxic about the fact that this has worked its way into our elected officials, and public the extent that it has and it feels very anti democratic to me,

Jenna Spinelle You know, I think about our conversation we had with Larry Putnam, earlier this season about, you know, we have to kind of keep these the two thoughts in our head at the same time and not let the pessimism, you know, get in the way of the work that’s necessary to fight for democracy, whether that is organizing work that Leora and her colleagues in southwestern Pennsylvania do, whether it’s the poll workers, whether it’s supporting people doing good journalism, and supporting organizations like States United, or any of the other democracy reform organizations that are out there. And I think that’s always the balance, maybe going all the way back to the beginning of the show, that’s always been the balance that we’ve been trying to strike here.

Candis Watts Smith  I mean, I appreciate like, just the reminder that we have to have a North Star, we have to have something that we have that we can imagine to be a better situation than what we have. And if we just kind of focus on what we don’t have. We can’t, we won’t walk toward the kind of the ideal situation. So

Chris Beem Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean, I certainly absolutely agree that this is no occasion to let our guard down. And I absolutely agree that the next two years as so many two years cycles in the past is going to require vigilance and willingness to just keep stepping into the ring. And that’s where we are, but certainly not enough reason to give up either.

Jenna Spinelle All right. Well, I think we’ll leave it there. Thank you, Michael, Cands, Chris, for another great year. Thank you to all the guests who have joined us Over the past year, you’ve heard from some of them in this episode, but there are a whole host of other episodes, you could go and check out while we’re off for the holidays. And thank you to our colleagues at WPS you for helping us put the show together and get it out on the airwaves. And thank you to all of you for listening. If there are people you think we should be talking to topics you think we should be talking more about, or maybe less about in 2023. I’ll put a link in the show notes to get in touch with us any and all suggestions are welcome. So for the entire Democracy Works team. I’m Jenna Spinelle. Thanks for listening.