(chiming music)
- It's a pleasure to be welcoming you
to our first State of
Democracy Lecture for the year.
I'm Grant Reeher, director
of the Campbell Public
Affairs Institute, which is the institute
that coordinates the series.
First, on behalf of Syracuse University,
I would like to acknowledge with respect
the Onondaga Nation, firekeepers
of the Haudenosaunee,
the indigenous people
on whose ancestral lands
Syracuse University now stands.
Now I think, for many of you,
perhaps most, Ezra Levin
needs no introduction,
but before I offer a very brief one,
I want to issue some heartfelt thanks.
First of all, I wanna thank
all of you for coming.
And I noticed when people were coming in,
there are a lot of people
from the community here.
That's one of Campbell's goals
is to engage the community
in many of our events.
And so, that obviously
worked this afternoon.
I also wanna thank the student groups
who brought their members to this event.
I wanna thank the Dean's Office
for supporting this series.
For technical support, I wanna thank
the Information and
Computing Technology Group,
and in particular, Tom Fazio.
Thanks, as well, and as always,
to Kelly Coleman and Sunju Raybeck.
They work in the Campbell
Public Affairs Institute,
and they help to put
together these events.
And then, finally, I wanna
thank my Campbell colleague,
Professor Tom Keck, for
originally suggesting Ezra
as a speaker, and for helping
to bring some of you here today.
So a few reminders, first
of all, for all of us.
Silence your smart phones.
If you haven't already
done that, please do that.
Regarding our format.
First, we'll hear from Ezra.
And then Professor Keck will engage Ezra
in a conversation, and
then we'll leave time
at the end for your
questions and brief comments.
And when we get to the
audience Q&A portion,
I'd like you to ask you to please wait
for one of the two microphones
that will be passing
throughout the audience,
so that you are part of our archive
and also our live stream.
Following the talk,
we'll have a reception,
which is back over in our home
Maxwell turf, Eggers Hall,
in the Strasser Commons area,
where there will be refreshments,
and where we can continue
the conversation that we begin here.
I'll now end with a few
words about our interviewer
and about our speaker.
First, my colleague Tom Keck,
whom you'll hear from a bit later.
He holds the Michael O. Sawyer
Chair of Constitutional Law
and Politics at the Maxwell School.
His research focuses on
constitutional courts
and the use of legal
strategies by movements
on the left and the right.
But he has also been a
member of Indivisible,
and he can draw on those experiences
in his conversation with Ezra.
And now for Ezra Levin.
In 2016, when Donald Trump
was elected president,
almost every pundit and
political scientist,
at least the ones that
I know, were surprised.
I think gobsmacked is probably
a more accurate description.
A big chunk of the public celebrated.
At least an equally big chunk objected.
Some even mourned.
Others simply shrugged their shoulders.
But Ezra Levin went to work,
going to school, in part, on
the earlier Tea Party movement,
he and his spouse, joined
by some colleagues,
wrote a how-to manual for
effectively organizing
and leveraging the political
process for progressive aims
and to resist what they feared
a Trump presidency would mean
for policy and for politics.
Now, normally, the next
line in such an introduction
would be, and the rest is history,
but in fact, the rest is now.
Indivisible has played an obvious role
in our political life.
It has tangible effects
on electoral outcomes,
both here in New York and elsewhere,
and it's helped change the face of
and the faces in the Democratic Party.
Yet there are now even
bigger opportunities
and challenges for it, which
prompt equally big questions.
How will the movement affect
the impeachment process?
How will it influence the 2020 elections?
What role will it play
as a new Democratic Party
continues to take shape,
and what needs to be done
to advance small D democratic aims?
And is there room for
Republicans in this movement
in a new political landscape?
I know that I'm keen to learn
more about these things,
and I'm delighted that Ezra is joining us
this afternoon to share his
thoughts and his experiences.
So, Ezra, welcome to Maxwell,
and the floor is yours.
(audience applauds)
- Hey, everybody, is this working?
Great, I never get a
Ted Talk mic like this,
so it's really exciting.
I'm also, I'm really used
to speaking at rallies
in a tee shirt and with call and response.
We have this book coming
out in three weeks,
so I'm probably gonna just
break into when I say, book,
you say, pre-order.
(audience laughs)
Book.
- [Audience] Pre-order.
- We're gonna work on that, that's great.
I wanna talk about four things.
I'm gonna give a little bit of background
about how I came to this work.
I wanna talk about what
we've seen from Indivisible
over the past three years.
And then I am gonna focus
in on some of what we cover
in this book that's coming
out in a little bit,
specifically the threats
to American democracy
as we see it within the
Indivisible movement,
and how we think it can be saved.
Those four things, keep me to that.
I'm not gonna cover everything.
We intentionally have broken this up
so that we'll have some
discussion with Tom,
and then we'll open it up
to questions from you all.
I frankly think that the least interesting
part of this is hearing me drone on,
and I say that right before
I drone on for a while.
But I wanna give you all
a time to poke and prod,
understand what the movement has done,
what we're thinking about.
So, first, just a little
bit about my background.
My start in politics was
around poverty advocacy.
I started working on homelessness
issues after college.
I was working in the Bay Area.
I came to the conclusion, though,
that the problems that
we were facing there,
the homelessness issues there, were huge,
and too big to be solved purely
by local level decisions.
So I thought, well, we
gotta go to the sources.
We gotta change the decisions
that are happening in Washington,
and I went to Capitol Hill,
worked for a member of Congress
from Texas, a progressive,
and started the week that
Lehman Brothers failed.
Great timing.
And then Barack Obama came into office,
and we had Obama, a
super-majority in the Senate,
and a big majority in the House,
and that both gave me an
unrealistic expectation
for what Congress can actually get done,
but it also exposed me
to this different side
of how power works in Washington,
because at the time that
Obama was coming into power,
the Tea Party was rising up.
And the Tea Party was ideologically
on the other side of the spectrum from me.
I didn't agree with their
racism or their violence,
but I saw the impact that the Tea Party
had on the political system.
Now, the Democrats passed the stimulus,
they passed health care,
they passed Dot Frank,
the financial reform bill.
They passed big stuff, but
they didn't get everything done
that they wanted to get done.
They didn't pass an immigration bill.
They didn't pass a climate bill.
They didn't pass a big union bill.
There were other things
that they wanted to get done
that they couldn't, and that's
because this group of people
spread across the country,
wearing funny tri-corner hats,
were showing up at
Congressional district offices
and demanding that this
president not actually get done
what he was elected to get done.
I saw the impact that it had there.
And frankly, after we
lost the majority in 2010,
I kind of thought of that as just
this distasteful moment
in American politics,
and nothing to particularly
learn from that.
I went off to study poverty
policy in grad school,
came back, and joined a
think tank advocacy group
to do more advocacy on poverty issues.
And I did that for three or four years,
and the conclusion that I came
to by the time 2016 election
was rolling around was that the problems
that were facing the
issues I was focusing on
were not ones that could be solved
by one new white paper or
another coalition meeting
in D.C. focusing on a group of
members of Congress to push.
It wasn't that we didn't
have the information
in Washington, D.C., to
solve these problems,
this isn't rocket science.
Other countries had done this.
Other states had done this.
The problem was we didn't
have political will,
and so I'd actually decided to go off
and do a longer term poverty
and democracy research
at Georgetown when the whole sky fell out.
And the 2016 election happened.
And you know, as a former
Congressional staffer,
my wife and I, who both
had worked on Capitol Hill,
we don't really have very
many applicable skills, right?
Congressional staffers
don't know how to do much,
but we did know how Congress worked.
And so as dark as that moment in 2016 was,
there was this really
bright silver lining,
and it was really encouraging,
which was people across the country,
people who were distantly connected to us,
friends and family members,
were suddenly standing up
and saying, oh my god, this is terrible.
But what do I do?
How can I be part of the solution now?
And so we thought, look,
we can try to demystify
how Congress works.
We can try to say this
is where political power
actually lies in democracy here.
You can organize locally.
You can focus in on
your elected officials,
and you can never give an inch.
And the reason why we did
that really came to a head
a week or two after the election.
And I remember it vividly.
We were still going through
the stages of grief,
trying to figure out what to do,
and there were two events
within a 24 hour period of each other.
The first was there was an interview
with a future Trump appointee,
and he was referencing the
Japanese internment camps
during World War II as an example
of what to do with the Muslim population.
And similar to how they were talking
about immigrants and refugees
at the time and continue to.
That was terrifying in and of itself,
but then the other thing that had happened
was an interview with the
incoming minority leader,
Chuck Schumer, on the Democratic side.
In it, he talked about how,
well, we we lost the election.
That's how it goes.
We've gotta figure out ways to cut deals,
and maybe we can work on
infrastructure with the other side.
That's an option that we see forward.
So looking ahead to
2017, we saw this really
terrifying potential future,
one in which the roads
to American's new internment
camps were well-paved.
And that was a bipartisan agreement.
That was terrifying.
And so that's why we wrote this guide.
We wrote this guide to say, no, in fact,
you can do something else.
You can say no.
You don't have the House, the
Senate, or the presidency.
We can't set the agenda.
But we can actually influence
what our elected officials wanna get done.
So you know, like all political manifestos
that a couple people
write in our living room,
we expected it would go
viral and change our lives.
We didn't expect anything like that.
I was eating soup at the
kitchen table with Leah.
I tweeted it out to my dozens of followers
and thought that would be that.
We thought that maybe
sometime in the future
somebody would come to us and say,
hey, we saw your guide and went
to a Congressional town hall
and we really gave it to
our member of Congress.
And that was gonna be success.
That's what we were hoping would occur.
Shockingly, what happened
was the Google Doc crashed
within a few minutes or a
few hours of it being online.
So many people were trying to access it.
We got just thousands of emails
and they all said the exact same thing,
which is this guide is full of typos.
(audience laughs)
And it was, so if you want
something copy-edited,
just put it online.
If people read it, they'll tell ya.
But no, then the second
thing that everybody told us
was oh my god, I didn't know what to do,
but now I've got 15 of my friends,
and we're Indivisible Tallahassee.
Or we're Indivisible East Tennessee.
Or we're Indivisible Houston.
Within days, we had hundreds
of Indivisible groups
all over the country.
By January 2017, there
were literally thousands,
thousands of groups, locally led,
organized under this
banner of Indivisible,
and in every single Congressional
district in the country.
So not just city centers.
Not just blue states, but in red states,
in rural districts, there
were these groups popping up
of people who were starting
to build power on their home turf.
And that was terrifying,
because we just tweeted out an
Indivisible guide on Twitter,
and so we just brought as many friends
and friends of friends
into our living room
to try to manage with all these questions
that were suddenly coming to us.
What do we do in our first meeting?
What's happening in Congress?
What about the Muslim ban
that's coming through?
Trying to respond, and eventually,
that group of volunteers turned
into a national organization.
We have going on 90 full-time staff
spread around the country
who are working explicitly
to build up the Indivisible groups.
We've got one right in the audience
right here, Sarah Reskay.
Find her later to join your
local Indivisible group.
So these Indivisible groups
who started after the election,
these are the folks who, in part,
made up those masses of
people who were showing up
at Congressional town
halls in February of 2017,
they're the ones holding die-ins
to protest the repeal of
the Affordable Care Act,
they were showing up in partnership
with local immigrant rights groups
when Trump rescinded DACA.
They're the ones fighting
against the tax scam,
which passed in 2017.
These are the ones that then transitioned
directly into registering
voters, endorsing candidates,
and getting out the vote to
build the blue wave in 2018.
That's what the Indivisible groups
have been doing for the past three years.
And right now, in this post-election,
post 2018 election period we're in,
we knew that the Indivisible
movement had to evolve,
because the way social movements work,
you either change with the times
or you decline into irrelevance.
So 2017 and 2018 was
fully about, more or less,
the Indivisible guide, which
was how do you build up
resistance power when you do
not have agenda-setting power?
That's not the position we're in any more,
because of taking the
House of Representatives,
because of the presidential campaign.
We know we've gotta be proactively
for saving American democracy.
That's the next step.
And that's not a decision that we've made,
this is in consultation with
the groups around the country.
So this brings us to the, I'm
kinda zooming through this,
this brings us to the next two parts
of what I wanna talk about, which are one,
the threats to democracy as we see them,
and two, what we're gonna do about it.
We wrote this book
because we wanted to build
on the Indivisible guide from 2016.
We wanted to talk about not
just how we build the power
to replace Trump,
although that's necessary,
but also what we do
with that power in 2021,
what democracy we build
when we get to a 2021
with a House, a Senate, and a president.
So let's talk about this
historic threat to democracy
that we feel we're facing,
because any good how-to guide
has to start with what are we up against,
what is the problem we're
actually trying to solve.
And the problem we're trying to solve,
the name is not Trump.
Trump is a symptom, he is a
grotesque bile-spewing symptom,
that's my opinion, but
a symptom, nonetheless,
a symptom of a much deeper problem.
And the problem facing our democracy,
we look at as two intersecting problems.
One is the buckling of democracy,
which I'll talk a little bit about.
And two is democracy being rigged.
So it's buckling and it's being rigged,
and I wanna talk about
multi-decade long trends
one after the other.
So buckling, what do I mean by buckling?
A political scientist at
Yale named Juan Jose Linz,
he published an essay a few decades ago
called The Perils of Presidentialism.
And he was talking about how
poor the model of democracy is
that relies on a presidential
system of government,
where you have a president elected,
and you have a Congress elected,
and they're in conflict with one another.
They can actually bump
up against each other.
And what he says is this
is a particularly weak form
of democracy, that it
naturally leads to dysfunction,
to brinksmanship, and that ultimately,
when you look out over
the scope of history,
that countries that first
started with democracy,
starting with a presidential system,
inevitably declined into just gridlock
or straight out violent conflict.
But there was one exception
when he was writing this
a few decades ago,
and that one exception
was the United States.
Here was the United States
with a presidential system
that had been around at the time
for more than a couple hundred years.
And yet it's still chugging along.
Why is that?
Why is it working still?
And Linz had an answer to that, too.
He said that American democracy has
these weird political parties.
He didn't say weird political
parties, I'm not quoting,
but he identified the fact
that the political parties
were different in American
than other places.
Yes, you've got Democrats and Republicans.
You've got these two parties,
but you've got conservative Democrats
and you've got liberal Republicans,
you've got conservative Democrats
who are more conservative
than the most liberal Republican
at the time he was writing,
and that's different, and it
allowed American democracy
to continue chugging along.
It allowed it to not
break down into gridlock,
because they cut deals,
and they figure out how
to move the country along.
Linz was obviously writing
before Donald Trump,
but he was writing also
before Mitch McConnell,
the Senate majority leader.
He was writing before Newt Gingrich
had led the Republican revolution.
And politics was changing at the time
he was writing, and it has changed now.
By the time Donald Trump became president,
the most conservative Democrat
was still more progressive
than the most progressive Republican,
and that remains to be the case.
So these parties have become
ideologically distinct
in the way they have not been before.
They've actually become polarized,
so that thing that we used to have,
that kept American
democracy from breaking down
into gridlock and dysfunction,
we don't have that any more.
We've got polarized parties.
That's what I mean by
democracy is buckling.
But this is also where
I get off the bus, too,
because a lot of people
who are talking about
this basic analysis, that
oh, couldn't we just go back
to the time when American democracy
wasn't defined by polarized parties,
they're trying to make
America great again, often.
And if I were in the
audience, I would be thinking,
oh, great, yet another
white guy in a blazer
talking about this bygone era.
So yes, we believe, and we
see democracy is buckling,
and it's common to talk
about these problems as,
ah, both sides just need to
come together and figure it out,
but that's why this rigged portion
of the analysis is so important,
because at the same time the parties
were becoming polarized,
we see the Republican party
falling off an ideological cliff.
And falling off is
probably the wrong word.
It's actually they've
been being shoved off.
The Republican party has
become downright hostile.
It's become reactionary.
It's hostile to 20th century social
and economic reforms writ large.
And I don't use that phrase lightly.
I don't say that they're just hostile
to 20th century reforms
as a throw-away line.
I don't think that's hyperbole.
You can't talk about the rise
of the modern Republican Party
without talking about the Koch brothers
and others who helped
drive it in the direction
that it's been driven.
I recommend Jane Mayer's
Dark Money book on this.
Nancy MacLean has a good
book Democracy in Chains.
One of the jaw-dropping
stories that I read
in those books was on a rare
moment when we actually got
a peek inside what the Koch brothers
and the rest of the
reactionary conservative forces
who are driving the Republican
party now is actually,
are actually attempting to do,
and it's when David Koch was
running for president in 1980.
He ran for president.
He ran for vice-president
on the Libertarian ticket.
And, folks, let me just
read some of the proposals
in that agenda that he was running on.
He was calling for eliminating
social security, Medicare,
and Medicaid, just getting started.
For abolishing the FBI, CIA, FEC,
FDA, EPA, and the postal service.
Eliminating all campaign finance laws.
Eliminating child labor
laws and the minimum wage.
Eliminating all individual
and corporate income taxes.
That was the proposal.
Now, Koch got one percent of the vote.
He got creamed, he didn't come close.
But that was the agenda
they were working on.
So it's not enough to just
call that an extreme agenda.
They are not just trying to roll back
what Barack Obama accomplished.
They're not just trying to roll back
Johnson's Great Society.
They're not just trying to
roll back FDR's New Deal.
We're talking about rolling back
the Progressive Era reforms
of Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson.
This is trying to usher
in a new Gilded Age
of laissez-faire government,
where the robber barons just
control things permanently.
So what does this have
to do with democracy?
Yes, that is a radical social
and economic policy agenda, but so what?
What does that mean for why
is democracy being rigged?
And the answer is that these
reactionaries aren't dumb.
They look at the same
demographic statistics
and trends that we do.
They understand that the country
is getting more diverse and more unequal.
It's not rocket science.
The data is out there.
They know in 1960, non-Hispanic whites
made up 85% of the population.
Today, they make up about 60%.
And that population is dropping.
In 1960, there were fewer
than 10 million immigrants in America.
Today, there are more than
45 million immigrants,
and that's rising.
In 1960, American's richest
one percent took home
10% of the income and
owned 30% of the wealth.
Today, it's 20% of the
income and 40% of the wealth.
It's pretty obvious to
see what's happening.
The country is changing,
in my mind, for the better,
in many ways, but conservative
leaders understand
that if you maintain your allegiance
to this radical agenda,
what are you gonna do?
You've gotta face the
voters at some point.
You've gotta ask them for
their votes at some point.
So you've got a choice.
You can either moderate your agenda,
or you can choose to systematically
disenfranchise people.
You can choose to
systematically make democracy
less responsive to the will of the people.
Which one have they chosen?
The same year that David Koch
was running for president,
Paul Weyrich was giving a speech
to a group of conservative allies.
I don't know if you all know Paul Weyrich.
He's a real architect of
the modern Republican party
as well, helped co-found
The Heritage Foundation.
He also, Heritage Foundation,
received millions from the Koch brothers.
He was giving a speech to
these conservative allies,
and he said, and I quote,
"I don't want everybody to vote.
"As a matter of fact, our
leverage in the elections,
"quite candidly, goes up as
the voting populous goes down.
"I don't want everybody to vote."
That is the foundation of
this political strategy
coming out of this
modern reactionary party.
What does that lead to?
It means that you rig the maps,
so in your next election,
your candidates run in safe districts.
It means you disenfranchise
voters of color,
you stack the courts with
judges who will back you
and strike down your opponents' policies,
you roll back campaign finance laws,
so your friends have free reign,
you cut their taxes, so they have
even more money to play with,
you attack your opponents' power bases,
you attack organized labor,
communities of color,
immigrant advocates, and women.
You amp up your own voting base
by talking about the other,
by talking about the
black and brown people,
or the immigrants, or the refugees,
or the LGBTQ populations.
You undermine faith in media directly.
This is the foundation.
This is what we're up against.
This is what we mean when
we say that democracy
is being rigged, that it's
not just buckling on its own,
but there's somebody actively rigging it
to entrench their power.
That same speech that Paul
Weyrich gave decades ago
could've been given today.
We see Mitch McConnell,
the Senate majority leader
of the U.S. Senate, standing
on the floor of the Senate
a few months ago calling voting rights,
D.C. statehood, and election security
socialism and a power grab.
He's not an idiot.
He knows what he's doing.
He understands that the
single greatest threat
to the agenda he wants to pass
is a truly representative democracy.
That's why he systematically dismantles
American democracy to rig it in his favor.
So, yes, American
democracy is being rigged.
Trump is benefiting from it.
Trump is pushing this forward,
but he did not invent it.
These elite reactionaries
have been playing this game
for a very long time,
and they've been playing
it very effectively.
It's all very scary stuff.
It's not even Halloween yet.
So what are we gonna do about this?
Democracy is buckling,
democracy is being rigged,
we're up against a lot.
The book, the book,
pre-order it, yeah. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
I'm gonna get this y'all.
So the book is about these basic problems
facing American democracy,
but it's also about
what we're going to build.
We're not just fighting against something,
we're trying to do
something to make democracy
more representative.
And from our point of
view, the stakes really
have never been higher.
And I know people say
that about every election,
but we see one limited
window of opportunity
to make this right.
Yes, this depends on winning in 2020.
There is no path to a
representative democracy
that does not involve having a Senate,
having a president, and having a House
that is willing to make
reforms to our democracy.
That is necessary, but that's not enough.
November 3rd, 2020, in
our mind, is a milestone,
a very important milestone,
but just a milestone.
The real victory is going to
be when we have that trifecta,
we actually make the reforms
that we need to make.
So I wanna talk, I'm gonna talk quickly,
about six reforms that we cover.
I know, six, and you've gotta
listen to the whole thing,
but I'll go quickly to
six reforms that we cover,
and if y'all are interested
in any particular one,
we can dive into that at the discussion.
First is, there is going to be
no pro-democracy legislation
that passes in 2021 as long
as the filibuster exists.
The filibuster gives a minority
in the Senate the power
to veto all legislation,
and it's not only the power
to do so, we know that Mitch
McConnell will use it in 2021,
and I know that because he says it.
He is proudly calling
himself the Grim Reaper
of progressive legislation right now.
That's his word, that's not mine.
He calls himself the Grim Reaper.
If he has the ability to,
he will veto everything else
I'm about to talk about.
We know that already,
'cause he's promised it.
So after you eliminate the filibuster,
what can you get done?
That's the rest of the focus of the book,
because yes, there are a lot
of constitutional amendments
I would like to see get passed.
None of them are gonna happen in 2021.
What we need to focus on is
what can legislatively pass
through the House, through the Senate,
and be signed into law by the president.
And it turns out there's a
whole bunch that can be done.
We can admit new states.
D.C. should have statehood.
Puerto Rico should have the
right to self-determination,
as should the other territories.
We can do that.
It's absurd that we haven't yet.
On the House, we can
ensure that people actually
live in competitive districts.
90% of Americans don't live
in competitive districts.
We can change the rules to
encourage these districts
to be drawn in ways that
actually invite people to vote
for who they believe in,
instead of just having to tick whoever is
the most likely candidate to win.
In the courts, we know that
Republicans have been waging
a battle to pack the
courts for decades now.
The last 15 of the last
19 Supreme Court justices
were appointed by Republicans.
Donald Trump appointed
more appeals court judges
than Barack Obama and Clinton did
in their first two years combined.
The courts have been packed.
That's both swung the
ideology in their direction,
and it's undermined the
legitimacy of the courts.
We need to pass legislation to fix that.
Otherwise, all of the reforms
we're talking about here
could be struck down.
We need to vastly expand voting rights.
There are more than 20 million immigrants
who don't have the right
to vote in this country.
There are around six million
formerly incarcerated
or incarcerated Americans who
don't have the right to vote.
There are around eight
million 16 and 17 year olds
who don't have the right to vote.
You could expand the right to
vote by more than 30 million.
And we need to democratize the media.
Local media is dying in this country.
It's dying, and part of that is nefarious,
part of that is Facebook and Google
and multinational
corporations who are squeezing
the life out of American media.
But part of that is that
the model just died.
We have the Internet now.
We don't need classifieds as much.
It's hard to sustain that business model.
We haven't had a major investment
in independent media in this country
since the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting
was created 50 years ago.
We need another one.
A functioning democracy depends
on an informed electorate.
So that's brief.
We can go into any of
these in greater detail.
We wrote quite a bit on these in the book.
- [Audience Member] Pre-order.
- Yeah. (laughs)
But so at the heart of all, so,
that's all I'm gonna say on
the reforms specifically,
but at the heart of all of these reforms
is this basic foundational belief
that the only legitimate source of power
in this democracy, but actually,
anywhere on the planet,
the only legitimate source
of political power comes from the people.
And in a representative democracy,
like the one we've got, we've chosen
to parcel out this power.
We call those parcels
Congressional districts or states,
and we've decided to
let individuals borrow
some of that power from time to time.
We call that a term of office.
Every once in a while,
they've gotta go back
to the people who are the
legitimate source of power,
remember, and they've gotta ask to borrow
that power for a little bit longer.
We call that an election.
The reason why we're facing the problems
we're facing right now is because
there are breaks in that chain.
Popular legislation
doesn't even get a vote.
Unpopular legislation
that benefits corporations
and billionaires sails through.
Representative democracy in America
is not representative any
longer, and if we want it to be,
we've gotta actually make the reforms.
From Indivisible's point of view,
this crisis in American
democracy can be solved
by adding democracy.
We need to make our
representative institutions
more representative.
And, look, I believe that's possible.
I believe it's possible.
Because when I think about 2021,
I think about the State of the Union
that that new president is gonna give,
and she's gonna be looking out,
or he, conceivably,
over this new Congress,
they will have been elected by
this changing grass roots
movement that started
as a resistance movement to Trump
and is transforming itself
into a pro-democracy movement,
a movement that is not just
going to declare victory
on November 3rd of 2020, it's a movement
that's gonna show up on
January 20th of 2021,
and say, great, we just
got you into power.
Now how are you gonna use it?
So, with that, I wanna dive into anything
that Tom wants to dive into.
But welcome any of your questions.
Please poke and prod.
Welcome questions from any side
of the ideological spectrum.
Indivisible is not an arm
of the Democratic Party affirmatively.
We think that the only way
this movement will succeed
in transforming American democracy
is if we grow it from now until 2021.
And that means bringing
on people who have been
part of this movement,
people who have never been
part of any movement,
and people who've been
on the sidelines, but wanna get in it.
So welcome the discussion.
(audience applauds)
- Great, thanks.
Great, thanks so much, Ezra.
And so, just to remind you of the format.
So I'm gonna get the conversation started
with a few questions for Ezra here.
And then we'll open it up to the audience.
And as Grant mentioned
in his introduction,
so I'm Tom Keck, from the
political science department
at Maxwell, and as Grant mentioned,
I have two sort of relevant
bases of experience
to draw on here.
By day, I'm a political science professor.
And by night, I'm a member
of a local Indivisible group.
So if anybody wants to
hear more about that,
I'm happy to chat with
you at the reception.
But, at least for the
beginning of our conversation,
I wanna start off talking to
you as a political scientist,
and pick up on a couple of the things
that you touched on in your talk,
and just sort of push
that a little further.
And so I wanted to start with the concept
of democratic erosion, right?
So you used the word
buckling in your talk,
but a lot of political scientists
have used the term democratic erosion,
and it's a concept that
political scientists
who study European and
Latin American democracies
have written about for some time.
Post-2016, the rest of us
are trying to catch up.
And, so in short, the concept is, right,
that sometimes, what looks like a stable,
well-functioning democracy,
the quality of democratic norms
and institutions slowly
deteriorates, right?
We don't have, it turns out
that sharp sudden collapses
of democracies are less
common than they used to be.
We don't have military
coups around the world
as often as we used to.
But it appears to be the case
that--
- Knock on wood.
- Well, knock on wood, yes.
It appears to be the case
that slow steady declines
in the quality of
democracies is more common
than it used to be.
So just, can you just, so you
touched on this a little bit,
but your take on that
concept as it applies
to the contemporary United States,
and then I'll follow up.
- Yeah, I mean, I would be
inclined to put that more
in the rigged category
than the buckling category,
because I think there is an active attempt
to degrade democracy in the country.
And it's not, it's not just because
people dislike democracy,
it's because they recognize
their ideas can't win
in a democratic system.
So it makes sense, if
your goal is to abolish
child labor laws, or your goal
is to abolish all tax bills,
or your goal is to provide tax cuts
to billionaires and corporations,
you can't do that if you've
got a democratic system
that will actually hold you in check.
You'll either fail to
get it through Congress,
or you'll fail to win
election, re-election.
So I see the other side
actively dismantling
in order to achieve their policy goals.
- Okay, and so I think that's consistent
with some of what we
see in other democracies
around the world, as well.
So countries like Hungary,
Poland, Venezuela,
the Philippines, Turkey, Russia,
are led by leaders who are
democratically elected, right,
whether their democracy's
perfect, probably not,
but they had a functioning democracy,
and they were democratically elected.
And then once in power, those
leaders tried to dismantle
some of the norms and
institutions of democracy
in order, presumably,
to lengthen their own control on power.
And so, I guess, part of the question,
so one question, which
we'll get to in a second
is what do we do about it.
But the initial questions,
sort of the diagnosis,
like, how, like, so some
things in U.S. democracy
have gotten worse in recent years,
but sort of how far down that path are we?
Like, how big is the problem?
- So I think the problem is enormous.
One statistic that I
can't get out of my head
is the trends with the
representation in the U.S. Senate.
So what we know is that
American populations are,
on their own, actually,
just, well, to some extent,
on their own, concentrating
in a handful of states.
So in 20 years, 50% of the population
is gonna live in eight states,
be represented by 16 senators.
The other 50% is gonna be
represented by 84 senators.
When you look at how that breaks down
by rural versus urban, by
conservative versus progressive,
it's not a pretty picture.
What we know is 70% of the population
is gonna reside in just about 15 states,
whereas the more conservative, more white,
more rural 30% of the population
is gonna reside in the rest,
so they're gonna have 70 senators.
So, we have a shot to
take the Senate in 2020.
I think that is realistic.
I don't think it's automatic,
but there is a possibility there,
but I don't see another shot after that.
So when we look at will we be able to pass
democracy reforms sometime in the future,
this isn't a five-year
plan, this isn't a 10-year,
20-year plan, this is a 2021 plan.
That's our shot to
actually take back power
and pass these laws that reform democracy
and make it more responsive,
because after that,
you're looking at near
permanent control of the Senate,
and by connection, the courts,
by either a Mitch McConnell or
a Mitch McConnell look-alike,
who understands that if
you make these reforms,
you're not gonna get
your policy agenda done,
so you're not gonna make those reforms.
- So there's some built
in structural weaknesses
in our constitutional democracy.
Equal representation
of states in the Senate
has been there from the beginning.
And some combination of
shifting demographic trends,
which are making those built-in
structural features worse,
or more problematic, combined
with some systematic efforts
by some people in power to undermine
the quality of democracy,
to preserve their own hold
on power, okay, so that's the diagnosis.
That sounds pretty bad.
And so, so among political scientists,
some of the conversation
that's been going on
over the past couple years, right,
so there's a book, I'm sure some people
are familiar with it, it's
called How Democracies Die.
Two political scientists at Harvard,
came out shortly after Trump's election.
One of the authors is an
expert on European politics,
the other is an expert on
Latin American politics,
they've both studied
many democratic countries
that have collapsed,
and they try to draw on that experience
in sort of illuminating
the current U.S. situation.
And so among political scientists,
a lot of the discussion about that book
is focused on, like,
what do we do about it?
And so you're familiar with the book.
I'll let you jump in.
- So, we read the book when it came out.
It was both scary and instructive,
but the least satisfying part of it
was what to do about it
in our current context.
So we actually talk about
that book in our book,
which of course,
everybody is pre-ordering.
(laughs) But, so the analysis they give,
or the recommendation they give is that,
well, you've got to build
a bipartisan movement
in order to push both
parties to come together
around pro-democracy reforms, essentially.
What it doesn't really
conceive of is how to deal with
a political situation where one party
has totally fallen off
an ideological cliff
and is willing to both take
hostages and execute hostages.
And so the question is, so what do you do
when the Republican
Party is, for instance,
standing on the floor of the Senate
and actively blocking a
vote on election security?
What do you do when one party
is actively undermining
the freedom of the press?
What do you do when one party is actively
weakening incoming governors
as they get popularly elected
so they can protect their agenda?
That's the situation
we're facing right now.
So I only have a partial answer to that,
and it does build off what they say,
which is you need, what
you need is not one party
coming in and playing tit for tat,
because that leads to this death spiral
where democracy just disintegrates.
You need these reforms to
come from someplace else.
And it's one of the reasons
why it's really important
to us that Indivisible is not seen
as an arm of the Democratic Party.
Our goal is not to empower
Democratic politicians.
It's not what we do.
What we're trying to do is
build American democracy
and make it representative.
Now, currently, there is one party
that is pretty affirmatively against that,
at least at the national and
state level, to some extent.
But, we are fighting for this
with whoever will be part of this fight.
So, there are independents,
there are former Republicans,
and even current Republicans,
and there are Democrats who
are part of this coalition
who are fighting for this.
I think that's necessary.
It is important that when
we get into power in 2021,
we're actually pushing
those people in power
to do the right thing,
whether they're Democrats or Republicans.
- And so just to pick
up on that for a second.
So, the current news, right,
if you're following the
impeachment scandal, with new news
every day.
- I've heard of it.
- So there are a number
of prominent Republicans,
Republican lawyers, for example,
and some Republican pundits,
George Will, this week,
right, who've come out in support
of the impeachment inquiry.
George Will said no Republican
who supports Donald Trump
should be re-elected.
And but, so there are people from across
the political spectrum
standing up in defense
of small D democratic norms,
but not in Congress, really.
And so in Congress, it really
is, capital D Democrats,
right, who you're working with.
Is that?
- Well, so yeah, I mean, what we've seen,
there are a handful of elected officials
who have come out to be critical of Trump
or in favor of impeachment proceedings.
I believe zero of them are
running for re-election.
That's the problem.
There's a lot of political cowardice
within the Republican Party right now.
I think we can impeach Donald Trump
without any Republican votes.
You can't convict him
without Republican votes.
And I think, one of the
things I think about,
I'm from Texas, grew up in the boonies,
and there are a lot of
mega-churches in the South.
And the story I think
about is the mega-churches
saving the parking spots at the front
for people who have
never been there before.
I think that's the approach
we need to have with this.
There are gonna be people who
were never with us before,
who aren't with us on a lot of things,
but they're willing to
come to us for this,
and we need to be as
welcoming as possible to them.
So I don't know who the
first elected Republican
in Congress who is running
for re-election is gonna be
who comes out to actually
stand up for the Constitution,
but whoever that person is,
we need to cheer them all on the way.
This is what we did when we were fighting
the healthcare bill, this is what we did
when we were fighting the tax bill.
It's gotta be a situation
where it's not just us
trying to whack the other
side for being with Trump.
We need to be as welcoming as possible
when they're willing to come over.
- Right, so the story
in How Democracies Die,
the kind of story that they often point to
is the Watergate impeachment,
where you have Barry Goldwater,
a conservative Republican
senator from Arizona,
come over to the Oval Office
with a couple of colleagues,
and Nixon asks him how many
votes do I have in the Senate,
and Goldwater says 10, maybe.
And then Nixon resigns.
- Yeah, and before that, but even before
that event happened in 1974,
you had Larry Hogan, Sr.,
who was a GOP member
of the House coming out
in favor of impeachment
proceedings after being
a Nixon supporter, one of
Nixon's strongest supporters.
The news over the last 24 hours
is his son just came out
for impeachment proceedings.
- The Republican governor--
- The Republican governor of Maryland.
Now, the messy history of that
is that his dad was trying
to run for governor,
and so thought that it
would probably help him,
and it ended up losing
the Republican primary
to an opponent who was a Nixon supporter.
Not great, and also, Larry Hogan, Jr.
is not running for re-election.
He's term limited out, so he
doesn't meet that criteria.
What, the thing we really need
are Republicans in
Congress who are looking
to face the voters and are
still willing to stand up.
And currently we have zero of that.
- Okay, so let me pick up.
You went pretty quickly through six ideas
of things that need to be fixed.
Let me pick up on maybe two of them.
And the audience might have questions
about some of the others.
So let me start with
the Senate filibuster.
So, if I were to play devil's advocate,
it might seem kind of scary to get rid
of the Senate filibuster.
No party's gonna have a
majority all of the time.
And is that not a
long-standing institution
of our constitutional democracy
that's served some important functions
in protecting the rights of the minority?
- Great devil's advocating.
So, I think, let me, maybe,
there are three things I wanna say.
One, I think the legislative
filibuster is dead.
We just don't know it yet.
As soon as Mitch McConnell sees it
as a barrier to getting something done
that he wants to get done.
As soon as there is a
Republican trifecta again,
and this is standing in the way
of some legislative
agenda, they will scrap it.
And the evidence I have for that is
they've already done
that a couple of times
since Trump became president.
They scrapped the filibuster
for Supreme Court justices,
and they weakened the filibuster further
to expedite their nomination process.
So they have shown no
allegiance to the filibuster.
They are willing to change
the rules when necessary.
They tried to repeal
the Affordable Care Act
through budget reconciliation,
which circumvents the filibuster.
Couldn't get 50 votes for it.
They passed their single
legislative accomplishment,
the tax bill, through reconciliation,
again circumventing the filibuster.
The reason why the filibuster technically
is alive still is only because
they haven't had to kill it.
So the filibuster is already gone.
It's just a question of
whether it constrains
progressive legislation in 2021.
And that's the real question here.
So we've gotta imagine
that we are in this,
this beautiful new 2021
world we're imagining,
where we have the House, the
Senate, and the presidency.
We've done this amazing work,
building up the political power necessary
to realize that new political environment.
And then the question in
front of us is going to be
do we maintain this Senate
procedural loophole,
or do we pass legislation?
And keep in mind, the filibuster
is not in the Constitution.
The filibuster was not
envisioned by the founders.
The filibuster was accidentally
created by Aaron Burr,
as if you needed another
reason to hate Aaron Burr.
He thought we didn't need some provision.
We scrapped it, they eliminated it.
The filibuster was not used for decades,
and then when it was used,
it was used explicitly by
Southern segregationists
to block Civil Rights legislation
for three-quarters of a century.
There's nothing special
about the filibuster.
It is absurd to build a system
of representative democracy
where 11% of the population
can block popular legislation.
That's what we've got right now
because the filibuster exists.
So I think, it's not a question of like,
should we pass the filibuster or not?
It's a question of do we want social
and economic reforms in 2021 or don't we?
We're discussing in the
Democratic primary debates
a lot of questions about climate
or about healthcare or about
gun violence prevention
or abortion rights or
taxes or immigration,
all things that all of us
care a whole bunch about.
None of it's gonna happen as
long as the filibuster exists.
So that's the question in front of us.
And it should be a no-brainer for us.
That doesn't mean it's not scary.
Doesn't mean it's not scary.
I think, absolutely, when
the other side gets in power,
they are gonna do things
that I don't like.
And as a progressive, I
put my faith in the will
of the people, and I say,
if you change election rules
so that people have to be fairly elected,
and elections can't be stolen,
if you make the country
more representative,
so you enfranchise
millions of people more,
and in that new political environment,
if there is a conservative
trifecta that wins fairly,
and they wanna do bad stuff, y'all,
that's democracy, that's how it works.
- So, the other one I wanted
to pick up on was the courts.
So, as some of you know in the room,
this is what I write and teach about
and have been for a long time,
so it's gonna be hard not to
make this a 15 minute question.
But let me see what I can do.
So, I wrote a book in 2014, where I argued
that the concept of judicial activism
is somewhat overplayed.
You hear a lot of
complaints about the court
using the language of judicial activism,
it's overplayed, and instead,
the problem we should be
focused on is partisan
capture of the courts.
That it's not that big a
deal if courts are regularly
intervening in policy
in political conflicts,
because that's a long-standing feature
of our constitutional democracy
that the American people are
mostly pretty supportive of.
But it is a big deal if the courts
are only doing that in the pursuit
of one political party's agenda.
And when I wrote that
in 2014, at the time,
I actually thought we
had dodged the bullet,
because Obama had just been re-elected,
and he was in the midst of
bringing the federal courts
back into rough partisan balance.
Now, not so much.
And so, so I agree with you
that there is a significant
potential small D democratic defect here,
where the courts are already,
or at least on the verge of,
being pretty far out of line
with the views of the American public.
So...
- What do you do?
- What do you do?
- (laughs) So I think
there are two problems
facing the courts, and I
mentioned a little bit.
I think one is the ideological swing.
So, obviously, when we
talk about court packing,
we're often talking about mid-30s,
FDR's over-reach, and oh,
what a disaster that was
that he tried to increase
the size of the court.
In reality, conservative
court-packing has happened,
is happening, we're in it.
The courts have been packed.
Like I said, 15 of the last
19 Supreme Court justices
were Republican appointees.
And they're jamming
through a ton of appointees
at the appeals court level.
So, the courts have been packed.
The ideological swing has happened.
It's gonna be very hard
to dig out of that.
Because of what we
discussed with the Senate,
and that natural unbalance,
it makes it even more
difficult to pull out of that.
If we fail to take the Senate again,
I don't know if people remember this,
but in the week leading
up to the 2016 election,
when it looked like Hillary
Clinton was for sure gonna win,
as everybody knew she was,
people liked Ted Cruz and even John McCain
were openly talking about shrinking
the size of the Supreme Court.
They were saying, there's nothing,
there's nothing so significant
about nine justices
on the Supreme Court.
We can have eight.
They were openly talking about that.
I think in the event that there is
a Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell in 2021,
and a Democratic president,
they're not gonna get a
Supreme Court justice.
They've signaled that already.
So, that packing has occurred.
It's gonna be harder to
undo it going forward.
But also, in packing the courts,
you've undermined the
legitimacy of the courts.
The courts need to be seen
as this independent body
that isn't poisoned by partisanship,
and that's not where we are anymore.
And I think the Republican
party, for a long time,
has viewed the courts as
a political battlefield.
That's been less true
on the progressive side
of the spectrum, although,
I think Kavanaugh
has changed a lot of minds.
So these are the two
problems you need to solve,
and I think any set of policy reforms
that we look at needs to do both.
It can't be, to the How
Democracies Die book,
it can't just be tit for tat.
It can't be well, they packed the court,
now we pack the court,
and then they'll pack the court later.
That will then not solve
the second problem.
That will further
undermine the institution.
So, I think we gotta get creative.
We gotta figure out how do you do both.
You can expand the court,
but can you add term limits?
Can you do rotating justices?
There are a few different
options out there
that are being debated.
I wouldn't say I've got
the only idea out there,
but I do think it's important for anybody
running for president right now
to describe exactly how they're
gonna tackle this issue.
Because otherwise, what we
very well could see happen is
a bold pro-democracy package pass in 2021,
and then a Roberts court
just rule against it
and throw out everything.
- So let me ask one final question.
I'm gonna shift gears a little bit,
and then we'll open it up.
And I wanted to pick up on something
that we talked a little
bit about at lunch.
So, you have worked on the Hill.
You've worked in policy advocacy.
And now, you're the head
of this organization
whose strength lies in its ability
to mobilize thousands of ordinary voters.
So I'm just curious, particularly,
for the undergraduate
students in the audience,
if you could just reflect a little bit
on those sort of different
modes of working for change,
and sort of some of the trade-offs
between those different arenas.
And there are students out
here trying to think about
what they're gonna do for
the rest of their lives,
and any thoughts there.
- So, we were talking about this earlier
with the lunch with the students,
and I think you can
occupy different spaces
at different points in your career.
I think that's totally fine.
I was on Capitol Hill and in advocacy,
and I thought, at that point,
especially when there was
a political opportunity
to actually push through big things,
that was the place to be.
You could actually do a lot of good.
It mattered who the staffers were.
It mattered who was maneuvering
inside the halls of Congress.
That was important.
By the time I left that space,
I was becoming disillusioned
with the ability
to actually push for real change.
It seemed like we were
not lacking in the number
of white papers that were out there,
the number of coalition
builders inside D.C.,
that that wasn't why we
weren't solving poverty.
The reason why we weren't solving poverty
was political will wasn't there.
I think right now the
single best thing we can do
is go for that political
power in that country.
The missing piece right
now, in the country,
is political power.
So that means organizing,
that means getting behind
the leaders you wanna
see actually in office.
So, for anybody who has just graduated,
I would pick a candidate,
or pick an organization
that's building power and get behind them
and help them build that power.
That could change in
2021, if we're successful.
Maybe there's gonna be an opportunity
to push on the inside.
That doesn't mean that that outside game
isn't gonna be important.
The way we get that done
is gonna be by building
up that outside power,
but I see there as being,
at different times,
different places where you
can have the most impact.
- Great, thanks.
So, we're gonna open it up now,
and the system is there
are some mics going around.
I'm gonna call on people.
So if you wanna ask a
question, raise your hands.
I'm gonna try to call
on two people at once,
so you can each get a mic ready.
And we'll take as many
questions as we can.
So I see one up there in the back.
Can we get a mic here?
Anybody else ready?
And one right here in
the front, center front.
Great, so up in the back first.
- Okay, yeah, so I just have a question.
So you predicated a lot
of your, I would say,
your policies that you wanna see,
or a lot of your political views
off of the idea that the
U.S. should be this big,
beautiful constitutional democracy.
But if you kind of look at the history
of the foundation, and our institutions,
it's more reflective of
a constitutional republic
that has democratic institutions.
So, I know that's like a lot of issues
when it's coming to expanding
democratic institutions,
so how would you, I mean,
it would probably need
a constitutional amendment,
but how would you
change some of those more
constitutional republicanism
institutions and then replace them
with democratic institutions?
- Yeah, so I mean, my
issue with the functioning
of democracy now is actually
that it's not representative.
So it's not acting as a
functional republic right now.
We have incredibly popular legislation
that literally can't get
a vote in the Senate,
because we have these institutions
that don't actually reflect
the will of the people.
If the Congress was able to actually
reflect that popular will,
we would have many of the things we want.
So all of the reforms
we're talking about here
are reforms that try to make
our democratic institutions
more responsive, more
reflective, more representative
of the broader American public.
And what we see on the other side
is this recognition that
the country, like I said,
that it is getting more diverse,
it is getting more unequal,
and there is an effort to prevent
our democratic institutions
from responding
to that changing electorate.
I just want everybody to be represented.
- [Tom] So we're here, and
then in the SU shirt over here.
- Hi, thank you for coming.
So, as local, ooo.
As a local organizer, I
sometimes find it very difficult
to work with lawmakers on the other side.
Usually local lawmakers,
they sometimes don't respond
very well to criticism.
I often have this internal debate
about whether to hold
them accountable publicly,
or to withhold from doing that right away
to maintain this relationship with them
and hope that they'll wanna meet again.
What do you find is the best way
to approach lawmakers who
are clearly contributing
to that threat of democracy,
and just aren't open to
having conversations?
- Yeah, so you know, I think the,
it depends on what space you occupy
within the advocacy world that you're in.
It could be that you're purely
playing the inside game,
and a lot of organizations do that.
They don't really have as
much of a grass root presence,
but they have really
good policy advocates.
They have really good experts,
and what they specialize in
is building this relationship
with the lawmakers directly.
So to break with them
publicly would be a big deal.
It would be giving up
the one asset they have,
which is this connection to
the lawmakers themselves.
That's not the role
that Indivisible plays,
and in fact, we really caution people
away from being captured by the lawmakers,
whether it's, doesn't
matter what party you're in,
Independents, Republicans, Democrats,
because as we see it, the
role for Indivisible groups
is to exist outside the party structure.
Our goal is not to develop
friendships with lawmakers.
It's not to get the cell phone numbers
of a Senator or Representative.
That's nice, it's nice to
see our names in print,
but the goal is to actually change policy.
And the way you do that is
by providing positive
and negative feedback.
So when they do something good, you cheer,
and when they do something bad, you boo.
And you get media, and you make clear
that they're representing
or not representing their constituents.
That's not what everybody
within the advocacy world
is gonna do, that's what Indivisible does.
We affirmatively try to stay
outside the party structure
and not directly tied
to some specific ally
in Washington or in the State House.
- Hi, hello, hi.
Thank you for coming.
I am fascinated by this idea of,
of representation in a government
that's supposed to represent everybody,
while at the same time not
representing key people
who we need to hear from.
And like, in these last midterms,
we've seen the most diverse
representation of women
and people of color,
both in the government,
in statewide and federal wide.
And so, I guess like, we know
that the house is on fire,
as far as like democracy is concerned,
and getting that representation,
but what policies, in your line of view,
in your work, have we seen,
that are very effective
and also not effective
into getting like that
representation in there.
I'm not sure if I'm clear enough.
- Yeah, yeah, I mean,
and we dive into this
into the book, pre-order,
and so that is the question
that we try to tackle.
There was a good piece of legislation
that went through the
House of Representatives
earlier this year called
the For the People Act.
I think it's a good baseline.
And it does a whole bunch of stuff.
It provides for election security.
It provides small dollar matches
to tackle campaign finance.
It ensures that there is fair
redistricting that is done,
independent redistricting commissions.
It ensures early voting, same-day voting,
automatic voter registration,
all good things.
I think that's all good,
and that's also a baseline.
So we need to build on top of that.
So that's why when we go into the book,
I think we need to enfranchise Americans
who are currently not enfranchised.
That means folks in D.C.
That means folks in Puerto Rico.
That means immigrants,
that means young people,
that means the incarcerated and
formerly incarcerated folks.
We need to ensure that our elections
are easy to participate in, hard to steal.
That should be a bottom line.
And I do think that we saw
an incredible new class
get elected to the House of
Representatives last term,
and I'm proud of so
many Indivisible groups
that rallied around
members to be part of that
blue wave that was built.
It is worth noting that
in the entire country,
there was precisely one black Republican
elected to Congress in
literally the entire country.
He's not running for re-election.
So, we did see a very diverse class.
It was very lopsided.
And I think part of the reason for that
is because we are
actively disenfranchising
such a large swathe of the country.
- [Tom] So the woman in
the black vest right here,
and then, Vaughn, right
next to her, he goes next.
- [Woman In Audience]
Hi, I have two questions.
One of them, is where
in Texas are you from?
- Buda, Texas, is where I grew up.
I know, a thriving metropolis.
It's between Austin and San Antonio.
It used to be the boonies.
Now, I actually grew up
outside Buda city limits,
if you can imagine, and
now it's practically
a suburb of Austin, 'cause
Austin's just expanded so much.
I was homeschooled in
this small little town.
All of my family members
are in the music business.
My dad is there, my sisters
got into the music business.
I had zero talent, which is why I'm here.
(audience laughs)
- Sorry, just curious.
My other question, on a more serious note,
you keep saying that if we
say lose the 2021 election,
then we're screwed.
There is no coming back.
So if we lose the 2021 election,
will this be disbanded.
- [Ezra] This, being America?
- No, Indivisble.
- So, there's nothing, at
the heart of Indivisible,
the idea is that in a
representative democracy,
your representatives oughta represent you,
and in order to ensure that,
you need to participate in democracy.
That basic idea is true,
regardless of if there are Republicans
or Green Party members or
Libertarians in charge.
That is true.
Now, I think, in the event that
you lose the 2020 election,
by lose, I mean either
Donald Trump gets re-elected
or Mitch McConnell remains
Senate Majority Leader in 2021,
the prospects for the kinds of democracy
or forum I'm talking
about are basically nil.
They're not gonna happen,
because the Republicans are going to
block it from happening.
So then, you gotta ask yourself,
what good can you do going forward,
and I think the answer
is, if you elect somebody
other than Donald Trump president,
you could look at administrative reforms,
which is gonna be much more
limited and less permanent.
And you can look at state
level policy advocacy,
which, of course, is
gonna be limited primarily
to the states where you
have the political power
necessary to push it through.
But it's not gonna be in
many of the state that are,
with saying a lot of the attacks
from the is administration
from the state legislatures.
So it's bad.
It is really bad.
The problems that we're
facing in 2021 are severe,
and it is not an option
to just try to fight
the best we can in 2021.
We do have to win in 2020.
That is a necessary first step
to the kind of reforms we need to see.
- [Tom] Next to you, actually,
yeah, right there, thanks.
- So, I hope people can hear me.
So we were talking about this
earlier during the luncheon,
but I also would like
to expand on the idea of
if we do win a super-majority
or even a majority,
there will be, obviously,
a very large pushback
from the other side.
How exactly do you think your movement
will anticipate this and react
to hopefully get the measures
that you want pushed through,
considering that they will be
up against a hard resistance?
- It's a great question,
and again, why we wrote the book.
- [Audience] Pre-order!
- You all are the best.
So, the point in part of
focusing in on the book
and elsewhere on this two-year strategy
is to point out exactly that.
That if we treat this whole movement as
the point is we just
need to get rid of Trump,
and then we're done and we
go home, we're gonna fail.
And the thing that really
sticks out in my mind,
we talked about this a little bit earlier,
but just for everybody else,
I think about 1977, and when
Carter came into office.
Carter came in, had a
super-majority in the Senate,
had a huge majority in the House.
Obviously, this is after Watergate.
This is after Agnew is driven from office.
After Nixon is driven from office,
the Trump before Trump,
and we had this political
opportunity in that moment.
There was demand for a political change,
and in fact, one of Carter's
first major proposals,
in early 1977, was this
massive democracy proposal.
It was really a huge deal.
It would've eliminated
the electoral college.
It would've provided
for election security.
It would've provided
campaign finance reform.
It was really a bold package
of democracy reforms.
In this post-Nixon era,
and after having won
such huge majorities in
the House and the Senate,
and ultimately, that
package got filibustered.
It didn't even get a vote in the Senate.
It died.
There was no movement that
rose up to support it,
and the existing people
who had won office,
won it under the existing rules,
and so they didn't wanna change the rules.
So it died.
I think about one of
the lost opportunities
of the Obama era was this
huge grass roots force
that was built up in order to
elect Barack Obama in 2008,
turned into Obama for America,
Organizing for America,
and what happened to it?
It was largely absorbed within
the existing Democratic Party,
and it wasn't used to support
the president's policies,
and instead of having
a massive progressive
grass roots force in support
of the Affordable Care Act,
in support of the stimulus,
in support of Dot Frank or labor reforms
or climate or immigration,
instead we got the Tea Party.
And there was no countervailing force.
So I think you are exactly right.
If we are successful in 2020,
we are going to see something
like the Tea Party in 2021,
a new version of that.
And there is a big question of do we have
some other force out there
that's gonna stand up
for the reforms that we're fighting for?
In the absence of that,
I think we'll lose.
So one nightmare scenario
is we just lose in 2020.
We fail to win the election.
But another nightmare scenario is we fail
to actually align this
broader grass roots movement
that has been resisting Trump
around fighting for democracy in 2021.
We need people to treat
that 2020 election, again,
as a milestone, not the finish line.
The finish line is actually
saving American democracy.
That's gonna take a little bit longer.
- I just wanna remind everyone
that we're live-streaming
and recording the event,
so it is helpful if you hold the mic
as close to your mouth, make
sure it's as loud as you can.
And we're gonna go right here in the front
and then the woman with
the vote shirt right here.
- Thank you for coming.
Is this on?
Oh, I guess it's on now, maybe.
Thank you, Fred Greenwald,
leader of We the People
of Oswego Indivisible.
Appreciate you coming.
I appreciate you saying
earlier that the election
of Donald Trump was not the cause,
it was a symptom of what's happening,
the fracture of our society.
And if we achieve the improvements
that we're proposing here,
we're still gonna have
a divided society that needs to be healed.
And part of that is restoring rule of law,
restoring respect for the media,
restoring respect for the truth,
restoring respect for the
values that most people
claim to embrace, and I'm
asking, I know this is a, for us,
a simple small question,
if you could address
how this effort you're describing
would achieve those goals?
- How do we heal the country?
So, yeah, super easy.
(audience laughs)
I do think a prerequisite
for that is treating the
residents of this country
as full-fledged residents of this country
that deserve representation
like everybody else.
I think we can't start
that healing process
without acknowledging
the disenfranchisement
and the concentration of power
that predominantly white,
wealthy men have pursued
for the last several decades.
I don't think we can
heal until we acknowledge
the damage that's been
done and right that.
That's gotta be part
of the healing process.
Now, a lot of the reforms
we're talking about
will fix the structural problems,
some of the structural
problems of democracy,
but it's not the end of it, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
So I think it is a prerequisite,
but we don't have a solution
to solving all the cultural
problems in America.
That's the second book.
So, I would recommend stay with us,
and we'll just, it's
something we're gonna have to
grapple with together.
- [Tom] So right here, yes.
- So, I worked in local
organizing during 2018
and the blue wave, and I was
faced with a lot of apathy
from people my age.
And I'm wondering what you think
is the best way to energize youth
who are generally apathetic to politics,
or just feel rejected
by our political system?
- So I think this is not
even specific to youth,
but in any population, I think there,
and nobody's brought up the demographics
of Indivisible groups, but
we should talk about it.
Demographically, Indivisibles tend to be
white, college-educated women.
Which is to say not the entirety
of the progressive movement
and not everything we
need in order to win.
They also tend to be either,
I see two age humps, normally,
and depend, on based on where we are,
but either younger mothers or retirees.
But not a ton of folks in high school.
Not as many college chapters as there are
as folks in those age ranges.
And one reaction to coming into a room
of disproportionately
privileged white women
is to say, well, how
do we get young people,
how do we get people of color,
how do we make sure that
this group is more diverse?
And I actually think that
is the wrong question.
The question should be, how
do we actually effectively
fight for justice, and
if you are showing up
for issues that people care about,
then you are going to
diversify your group.
So I see the work that
the Sunrise movement
is doing as great.
If that's an issue that
is going to attract
more young people to the fight,
by all means, organize on this.
But if you're not
showing up for immigrants
when they're under attack,
if you're not showing up
for communities of color
when they're under attack,
if you're not showing up for the issues
that young people care about,
why on earth would you expect them
to be part of your coalition?
This is one of the things we think
is absolutely necessary
for winning in 2020.
We can't expect populations
that are ignored
by the political system to show up
just because the other side is so scary.
We've gotta actually fight for
the issues they care about.
Indivisible is going
to be the right avenue,
the right vehicle to
organize, some of the country.
It's not gonna be the right vehicle
to organize all of the country.
So sometimes we are organizing
these constituencies,
but sometimes we're trying
to act as effective allies
and co-conspirators
with these other groups.
So, I do think, but bottom line,
we need to be showing up for the issue
that people care about in
order to energize them.
- [Tom] We're gonna go
to Jonah right here,
and then Professor Campbell in the back.
Zane, right here.
Jonah, raise your hand.
Hey, good to see ya.
We had an email exchange in, what,
two days after the guide came out?
- Right.
- Yeah.
- [Jonah] You came to some
of our calls right away.
Well, good to meet you in person.
First, I just wanna
acknowledge that we're in
an important Congressional swing district,
and thank, you know, being involved here
is a Congressional
candidate for being here.
(audience applauds)
- Indivisible endorsed.
- My question is, as part
of the democracy reforms,
I think getting big money out of politics,
and overturning Citizens
United is absolutely essential.
And we can't do that without, I guess,
a new Supreme Court or a
constitutional amendment.
But how do we build for a
constitutional amendment
in a country where Republicans
are really just steadfastly
against democracy,
against democracy reforms?
- Great question.
So I think you're absolutely right.
There's some partial steps we can take
on campaign finance reform.
Some of them are included in HR1.
One of the ideas is matching
small dollar contributions
six to one, so every dollar under,
I think it's $250 that you contribute,
would be matched by six,
which is a way to try
to balance a little bit more.
But it doesn't undo Citizens United,
and your point, yes, you need
to change the Supreme Court,
or you need to pass a
constitutional amendment.
And that's a longer term goal.
So I think it is possible
for us to have goals
that are on different time horizons.
Right now, the existential
threat that we're trying
to address is what can we
solve in 2021 immediately?
So we have this vision of
having the House, the Senate,
and the presidency in 2021.
What is the first piece of
legislation that goes through,
and unfortunately, it's
not gonna be us passing
a constitutional amendment
to overturn Citizens United.
We're not gonna get that done in 2021.
It is something we can build towards,
and the democracy reforms
that we're talking about
would help us do that.
I would say that there is
broad bipartisan support
for the kinds of reforms that
we're talking about here.
This does not need to be a Democratic
versus Republican issue.
In general, as long as you exclude
Congressional Republican elites,
if you talk to just
Republicans on the street,
they don't think Congress works either.
They don't like money in politics either.
So there is some opportunity to do this,
but I think it's a longer term vision.
This is why, the book is
in many ways very tactical,
that we're trying to say, okay,
we've got a limited window of opportunity.
What can we get done
in that limited window?
Not the end of what we wanna accomplish,
but what can we do immediately?
And then we need to build on it.
- [Tom] So we've got Professor Campbell,
and then the young man in the
baseball cap in the middle.
- I wanted to thank you for
the work that you've done
to oppose those ICE
raids across the country,
because this, as some of you know,
has really been an attack
on immigrant communities
across this country.
And the work of your
members is commendable.
What I find striking
about your presentation
is what you've left out in
relationship with objective
(microphone interference)
and the goal of private equity office.
And Indivisible has not taken a position
on private equity at home
and abroad in relationship
to militarism and the
role of what you consider
to be past democracy, because
the objective conditions
of the democracy that you
talked about as change,
but my question to you is
about this thing I've heard
on the news where there
has been someone who used
the word civil war, and the
first part of my question is,
do you dismiss this talk
by the president of the United States?
And the second part of my question,
if you do not dismiss it,
what is the planning of Indivisible
for such an eventuality?
- Also easy question.
So let me just note on
the ICE raids, quick,
but then, I'll go into
the other two things
would be concentration of economic wealth
and the impact on the political system,
which is private equity and broader.
And then, this threat of a civil war.
Is that okay?
So, on, I would say, some
of the proudest moments
I've had at Indivisible is
when we've been standing up
with the immigrants rights
groups across the country
in opposition to Trump's policies.
What we know about Trumpism is really,
at the core of it, is this
anti-immigrant xenophobia.
And it's been that from the beginning.
In 2015, Trump launched his campaign
talking about the folks
coming over the borders
who were criminals and drug dealers.
In 2016, he ran his campaign on this.
In 2017, his first policies
were the Muslim ban,
were attacks on immigrant communities,
an attempt to build the wall.
In 2018, while trying to save
his Congressional majority,
he was running on this trumped up idea
of this caravan invading the country.
And we know, headed into 2020,
immigration is gonna be at the heart
of the campaign he runs.
So we don't have a choice about whether
to fight with immigrants or not
if you're trying to resist Trump.
You got to.
We have to stand with them,
because this is core to Trumpism,
and we believe that strongly.
So we have formed very strong partnerships
with the immigrant rights community
in order to fight arm in arm with them
as these attacks come.
And the major legislative attack this year
is indeed a fight over
whether to provide funding
to Trump's deportation machine or not.
There was a continuing resolution,
a short-term budget to provide funding
through early to mid-November,
and there's a question
of whether Democrats
will draw the line or not.
And I think what we have
been trying to build up,
and in fact, the local Indivisible groups,
I hear, have been active in as well,
is trying to ensure that
Democratic members of Congress
stand with the immigrant
communities and not with Trump.
Just a note on that.
The second question,
which is broadly about
the effect of concentration of wealth
on our political system and
how you, how can you have
a functioning democracy when the levels
of wealth and inequality
are such as they are.
There was a recent article
in The New York Times.
This isn't just about private equity,
but there was a recent
article in The New York Times,
it was a new analysis
by, is it Emmanuel Saez,
and a couple, somebody else,
looking at the change in tax rates
for the top 400 Americans,
the richest 400 Americans
over the course of he last
several decades, and just now,
as a result of the tax
bill that was passed,
it is now the case,
that for the first time
since they were tracking this
for the last several decades,
the top 400 Americans
pay less as a percentage
of their income in taxes
than the poorest Americans.
That's a result of policy change.
And so there is a little bit of a chicken
or egg problem here.
We have a democracy that is
infected by concentrated wealth,
and also, it's not representative.
So how do you, how do you
change the concentration
of wealth when you don't have
a representative democracy?
We think that in order to
pass the kind of tax bills,
in order to pass the kind of
social and economic policies
we would need to do things
like break up Facebook,
break up Google, to tax
people their fair share,
you need a representative
democracy that responds
to the people, and
that's what we would hope
these democracy reforms actually realize,
that you have the broader
population being represented,
so that you can do things like
raise taxes on billionaire,
as many people in, for instance,
the Democratic primary for
president are proposing.
Third thing, civil war.
I don't think we can just dismiss things
that the president says.
I think there's been years of examples
of people saying, oh,
that's just him talking.
We don't really need
to pay attention to it.
He's just kidding.
He's speaking figuratively.
When, in fact, he's told us
who he is from the beginning.
He's told us his plans from the beginning,
and I think we need to listen to him.
I, for one, am very worried
that Democrats will win in 2020,
that on November 3rd, there
will be a clear decision,
and that Donald Trump will
be voted out of office,
and I am not confident he
will peacefully step down.
I don't think that's a guarantee.
So I think we need to be prepared,
and part of that is having
the grass roots energy
that comes out on November 4th and says,
no, you lost, now it's time
for peaceful transfer of power.
But the other thing we really need
are Republican officials
who also do that same thing.
We need people in his party saying,
no, you lost, now it's
time to give up power.
Because if it is the Republican party
versus everybody else, I
do think you're gonna have
some conflict that doesn't look pretty.
And we can't afford that.
- [Tom] So Professor
Reeher has just signaled me
that we have time for two more questions,
and I have at least four
or five hands in the queue.
- We could do rapid, try to--
- So I'm gonna try to
take several in a row.
He said two, but I'm gonna
try to take three or four,
if you guys are concise and
there is a reception coming.
But then I'm gonna make
Ezra answer them all at once
is what we're gonna do.
So first is baseball is cap
and then those folks
right in the back row.
And then red scarf right here.
(microphone interference)
- [Man In Audience] Do you think that
(microphone interference) is complicit
in this...
- Can you hold it closer to your mouth?
- [Man In Audience]
Sorry, I'll say it again.
Do you think the DNC is complicit
in this democratic erosion?
And if so, how much do you think this
in-access or, I guess, inability,
or I guess, decline of representation,
how much do you attribute
that to external factors
that influence how lawmakers act,
so as far as, like, special interests?
- And then up in the back row?
- [Woman In Audience] Is this on?
- I can hear ya.
I don't know if it's on.
- [Woman In Audience]
Okay, my question is about
living in a blue state.
We live in a blue state,
and I think many of us
are very actively involved,
but many of us also feel like we can vote,
but we can't impact the
votes in 49 other states.
And you know, as you pointed out,
it's all in the changes that
would happen in the laws
if we get the right kind
of representation in 2020,
but the best we can do in our city
is turn over District 24 and hold on
to what we already have, which is,
that feels a little bit poor.
So help us with that.
- Yep, got it, blue states.
- [Woman In Audience]
Like it if you would speak
about the electoral college,
because a lot of voters
I speak to are extremely
discouraged and apathetic.
- And then right here.
- [Woman In Audience] I love everything
that you've been saying,
but what are we gonna do,
how do you do all of this when you know
that there are actors on the other side
that will not play fair?
That will do whatever they have to do,
that will hurt people, hurt
laws, do everything wrong.
How do you fight that?
- Yeah, okay, so to try to do rapid,
which means this is gonna take a lot.
But what role do
Democratic politicians have
in this breakdown of democracy?
And so what I would say is that
every single elected
official in office right now
got elected according to the
rules that we currently have.
And we know that power concedes
nothing without a demand.
So that holds whether
you are an Independent,
a Republican, or a Democrat.
Now, we've gone over the precise attacks
on democracy coming from
these reactionary elites.
I think that is real.
I don't think that if
we just elect Democrats
all of our problems are solved.
I think in 2021, if we
have Democrats in control
of the House, the Senate,
and the presidency,
you're still gonna need pressure in order
to convince Democrats
who are elected that,
yeah, you were elected according
to these campaign finance rules,
or these election security rules,
or these constituencies
who are enfranchised rules,
but in fact, we need to change that.
And we are going to put
pressure on you to change that.
And I think that's necessary.
You can't just win an election and assume
everything's gonna work itself out.
Questions about what
to do in a blue state.
So this is a question we've got
from the very, very beginning.
Three answers, one, you do
live in a blue state, kind of.
You have some representatives who are good
and some representatives
who could use some nudging,
and some representatives
who could be changed.
And so what I would say is
one, positive reinforcement
is very rare, so if you
have good representatives
you really think of as being
good, most of the time,
when people get in touch
with their state legislator,
or with their member of Congress,
they're getting in touch
'cause they're pissed off.
That's just human nature.
You're angry about something,
you call, you yell about it.
It's more rare to
receive calls from people
that are very happy that
you're fighting the good fight,
that you're out there in front,
that you're really leading on an issue.
That kind of positive
reinforcement is really important.
That applies to your representative.
It applies to Chuck Schumer.
It applies to everybody.
Let them know when they're doing good.
Let them know when they're not doing good.
Let them know that you are watching.
That is really, really important.
Even if you think of them
as being on your side.
But, so let's say you've done that.
You've done everything you
can to elect your friends
who you think are going
to be on your side.
You've provided the positive reinforcement
and you've provided the nudges
when they don't do good.
There are ways to use your, maybe call it,
excess energy to help
out other Indivisibles
in other parts of the country.
A good example of this right now is a tool
that Indivisible National has
out right now on impeachment,
and it's called the HubDialer tool.
We do not recommend that you
call Kevin McCarthy's district,
because you're not
represented by Kevin McCarthy.
We don't recommend you call
Martha McSally in Arizona,
or Joni Ernst in Iowa, or
Susan Collins in Maine.
They don't care what you think.
They don't represent you.
That's not even a knock on them.
That's just how
representative democracy works
in this country, but we
have a tool that allows you
to call other pro-impeachment
folks in those states
and tell them, hey, you've
got power right now.
I'm not represented by
these senators, but you are.
Now, if you'll let me,
I'm gonna press a button,
and you're gonna be connected
directly to their office.
We're gonna drive over a million calls
to these Senate offices over the course
of the next few weeks, and
you can do that right now
in your Indivisible
group in your blue state.
But still, I would encourage you to focus
on your own electeds to begin with.
After you've done that, you can use
that excess energy to help
out other Indivisibles.
Electoral college, let's
get rid of it, love it.
That said, that's not a solution for 2020.
It's not gonna happen.
It's the same problem that faces us
on the constitutional amendment.
In order to eliminate
the electoral college,
you either need a
constitutional amendment,
or the more popular version
that is moving through now,
is an interstate compact,
where you get enough states
at the state legislature
level to pass a law
saying, if enough states pass this law,
and if somebody wins the popular vote,
all of our electoral votes go to
the winner of the popular vote.
Great idea.
You're also gonna need
some red states to do it.
We're not close to doing that yet.
So, I'm all for eliminating
the electoral college.
I'm all for fighting this
fight at the state level,
if you have the ability to do it,
but let's not kid ourselves.
This is not going to
solve our problem in 2020.
We need, and it's not
going to be the thing
we get done in 2021, in all likelihood.
So, yes, long-term plan, but
not the solution to everything.
And then--
- [Tom] The other side's
not gonna play fair.
- Right, so the other side's
not gonna play completely fair.
We know that already.
They've not been playing
fair for the last two years.
Why would they start now?
There are a limited set
of things we can do,
but we need to run up the
score so it's hard to steal.
It is easier to steal an election
that is separated by point one percent
than it is that's
separated by two percent.
Just as simple as that.
What we saw in Georgia was
that the Secretary of State
who was running for governor had control
of the voter rolls, and
was able to purge hundreds
of thousands of votes.
Stacy Abrams did an
incredible job running,
and very well may have won that election,
and it was stolen from her.
Now, we can't allow that to happen.
That means we need more
people voting for us.
That means, that doesn't just mean
a big get out the vote effort, though,
and I think there is
this common misconception
that the way you win elections
is everybody ramps up
and registers a lot of
voters in the summer
and then gets out the vote in the fall,
and that's how we're gonna win.
But that's not what we've
seen within Indivisible.
Yes, that's important.
We oughta be doing that, but keep in mind,
the best get out the vote effort
pushes the envelope by two,
maybe three percentage points.
At best, that's gold standard.
That's relational organizing tools,
that's knocking on all doors.
In reality, you're probably gonna push
a percentage point or two, that's it.
But, what we know from
new research coming out
is that there's a big impact
from off-year organizing
on election year outcomes.
So if you are showing up in
support of immigrants in 2019,
if you're showing up in
opposition to the budget bill
that's coming out, if you're showing up
in favor of impeachment right now,
you're building the movement,
and you're also changing
the political environment.
That's how we wound up in 2018 with just
a ton of Republican retirements.
That's how we wound up
with the kind of movement
we needed to build a blue wave in 2018.
So I would say, the way we
are going to win in 2020
is we gotta run up the score,
and the way we do that is by
getting involved right now.
- So I hate to cut off the conversation
when there are still questions.
I encourage folks to follow us back
to the Maxwell foyer for the
reception, or maybe you can--
- [Grant] I wanna thank both Tom and Ezra
for an insightful and
provocative conversation.
(audience applauds)
