Berkeley Talks: The future of American democracy

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

(Applause)

David Wilson: Good evening everyone.

Audience: Good evening. Good evening.

David Wilson: It’s a democracy, right? Good evening everyone.

Audience: Good evening.

David Wilson: I‘m David Wilson. I’m Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and a professor of public policy and political science here at the University of California Berkeley. I am thrilled to welcome you all to the event this evening on the future of American democracy in partnership with Cal Performances.

Now, my task is to kind of set the context a little bit, and that includes explaining just a little bit about what public policy is for those of you who have dinner table conversation on this. So public policy is more than legislation. It’s generally how government, and by extension those who are governed, address public problems. It’s the way our democracy seeks to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Our government works through the practice of public policy and thus, while we often dislike the process of making legislation, public policy is the practice of democracy.

This event tonight is part of our larger Democracy Policy Initiative at the Goldman School, and we’ve launched the Democracy Policy Initiative because there’s no current framework for democracy policy in the United States or much of the world. If you open up any introduction to public policy textbook, public policy 101, you’ll see economic policy, health policy, education policy, technology, the list goes on and on. You will not find a chapter on democracy policy. And yet our local, state and national governments are experiencing democracy as a public problem. If you’re here tonight, you’re probably worried, and rightfully so, our governing systems are being tested by politics. But we also are going through a process of managing what we took for granted, and that is that democracy is a settled issue.

Many of you are living in what seems like a constant state of betrayal, where hate, demonization, anger, and othering are rewarded at the same level it seems as the more prominent and important values like compassion, joy, service, and sacrifice. It feels very unfair, it feels very uncertain. This, what you’re experiencing, is a democracy problem. And schools of public policy, public affairs, and government were created intentionally to improve the understanding, the functioning, and the actions of government to ensure that the governed value our system and our governing practices.

There’s no doubt that Berkeley can do more, that the Goldman School can do more. We are the people’s university. We can take on a more powerful role in closing the gaps between what we know, how we innovate, the capacity we offer, and how we make sense of what’s happening. And thus, we can offer solutions that protect, promote, and deliver on the promise of democracy. This is our calling as a research university, it’s our calling as a professional school of public policy at UC Berkeley.

And so we’re fortunate to have generous backing for our initiative. The Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Levi Strauss Foundation, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, and the Peter E. Haas Fund. Our supporters are pushing us to do the hard work of democracy, grounding our work in collaborative multi-sector partnerships, rigorous research, curriculum and learning platforms, and policy innovation. Tonight’s discussion features some of UC Berkeley’s most influential experts to talk about democracy. They’ve been in presidential cabinets and they’ve led and advised some national agenda items that were designed to perfect and strengthen our union. We’re looking to them tonight to help us understand, consider what’s possible, consider our role as a public university and again, help us make sense of the moment.

First, we’ll have Janet Napolitano. Janet Napolitano is a professor at the Goldman School and Director of the Center for Security & Politics. She served as President of the University of California from 2013 to 2020 and as Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013. She was Governor of Arizona, Attorney General of Arizona and U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona as well. She was the first woman and is to date the longest serving Secretary of Homeland Security.

Next we’ll have Robert Reich. Robert Reich is the Emeritus Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Economic Development. He served in three national administrations including Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He’s written 18 books, 18 books, including best sellers The System: Who Rigged It & How to Fix It and The Work of Nations, and he co-created the 2017 Netflix original documentary Saving Capitalism. He’s co-founder of Inequality Media, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and co-founding editor of the American Prospect, as well as being a fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Then we’ll have Maria Echaveste. Maria is the President and CEO of the Opportunity Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to increase social and economic mobility and advance racial equity. She served as former assistant to the president and Deputy White House Chief of Staff during the Clinton administration. She serves on the Goldman School Advisory Board and she’s been affiliated with Berkeley for many years, teaching in the law school in different graduate and undergraduate programs, serving as a policy director in the law school’s Warren Institute on Law & Policy, and as a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies. Prior to UC Berkeley, Maria co-founded strategic and policy consulting group NVG, and worked as a community leader and corporate attorney.

And finally, we’ll have Angela Glover Blackwell. Angela is a professor of practice at the Goldman School of Public Policy and serves as the Chief Vision Officer for our Democracy Policy Initiative. She’s the Founder in Residence at PolicyLink, the organization that she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity for all. Under her leadership, PolicyLink gained national prominence in the movement to use public policy to improve access and opportunity for all low income people and communities of color, particularly in the areas of housing, health, transportation, and infrastructure. Professor Glover Blackwell is also the host of two podcasts, Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life and the Radical Imagination Podcast. Please join me in welcoming all four of our panelists to the stage.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Hello. It’s wonderful to see so many of you who have come out tonight. This has certainly been a rough time that we’ve been through, just a week to go, and it has been many things, but it has certainly been an arduous process getting to this through this election. There’s a lot to think about, a lot to worry about, a lot to try to understand, and we are going to try to have a conversation that helps to unpack a little bit, but hopefully to be able to end on some notions of where do we go from here? No matter what happens, we go forward. Where do we go from here?

I want to jump right in, jump right in with a conversation about how did we get here. Bob, I’m going to start with you. What are the current challenges for democracy and how did we get into this situation? What are the root causes? What are the things that created it? What’s going on?

Audience: An easy one.

Robert Reich: How much time do I have. Angela, it’s very hard to know where to begin, but I can begin 35 years ago when I was in the Clinton administration and we had some choices to make. We chose free trade, we chose deregulation of Wall Street and finance. We chose not to make it easier for unions to organize and we chose not to raise taxes too much on the wealthy. We also chose to link CEO pay to share values.

Now, we did a lot of good things. Let me emphasize this, and the labor Department with Marie Echaveste as Assistant Secretary for Wages & Hours, which was not in your bio, did fabulous things. But let me just say that I think that there is a fundamental problem with big money in politics that has disenfranchised over the last 35 to 40 years many Americans, particularly working class without college educations, particularly white men. Donald Trump is not responsible for where we are now. He took advantage and exploited where we are now, but it was a tinderbox to begin with. I saw Newt Gingrich in 1995 take over the House with many of the same thoughts, messages, and to my way of thinking, ruinous directions as we are seeing now. In other words, the path we are now on was established long before.

Is that uplifting for everyone?

Angela Glover Blackwell: It’s not uplifting, and I want you to unpack it a little bit because you listed some things, but it may not be obvious to everyone in the audience why those things were problems.

Robert Reich: I think that many of the things I listed, and I want to make sure that there is no misunderstanding. I was part of this administration, I’m very proud of it, but many of the things I listed disenfranchised economically the working class, and every time the Democratic Party, let me not even go to the Republican Party, but every time the Democratic Party focused on the so-called suburban swing vote to the detriment of everybody else that had been traditionally part of the Democratic coalition, the Democrats dug a deeper hole for themselves.

Just one final thought, I am nauseously optimistic about what happens next week.

Angela Glover Blackwell: I am glad you said that. I’ll come back to you, Maria. You want to pick up on that Janet, and I have a question for you as well?

Janet Napolitano: Well, thank you Angela, and it’s a delight for everyone to be here tonight in a way because we’re talking about some really serious issues in our country and in our society. I don’t think I would blame everything on the Clinton administration.

Robert Reich: Oh, heavens no.

Janet Napolitano: But I would point out some other structural issues that have helped lead to where we are today.

Robert Reich: There was also a George W. Bush administration.

Janet Napolitano: Yeah.

Robert Reich: And a Reagan administration.

Janet Napolitano: Fair enough.

Robert Reich: And a George H.W. Bush administration.

Janet Napolitano: Two things I think affect our politics that are structural. One is campaign finance is out of control, and we see floods of money from very few people coming into our campaigns. I saw a clip this morning that one-third of the money that has gone into the Trump universe comes from billionaires. That’s number one. And then number two, gerrymandering. Gerrymandering affects the distribution in the House, how people campaign, from what part of their party they come, and it is a disincentive for people to run to the middle, if I can use that word. But I think the problems with gerrymandering have become ever more severe.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Maria, I saw you wanting to add.

Maria Echaveste: Well, I wanted to actually go back a little further because there’s a direct line from President Reagan’s attack on government and bureaucracy to now with so many people across the country not having trust in our institutions. President Reagan attracted a number of voters, that Rust Belt, the Reagan Democrats convinced them that using coded language like welfare queens, don’t let the government take your money, you know how better to use it. And I think that’s where it began and you just get to this point.

And on the free trade, I think having been on the campaign trail when candidate Clinton was announcing his support for NAFTA, and it was very unclear to those of us on the campaign whether he was going to or not because there was some real tensions for obvious reasons, there was a naiveté, I will say, believing that in fact, with the efforts to help workers who were going to lose their jobs, that there would be ultimately winners and that government would help those and retrain them. We did not do a good job there at all.

I just came back from Flint, Michigan. There is a reason there is interest in candidate Trump a second time. So how we think about global economy, which Secretary Reich is much more an expert than I am, is a challenge for any president. But there are too many people across this country who feel ignored and do not have a sense of hope for them and their families.

Angela Glover Blackwell: And part of what we’re seeing, because people are feeling ignored and don’t have a sense of hope, is the rise of hate groups, domestic threats, and they’re adding to the environment that you’re describing. Janet, how are you thinking about this? I know that you very much know about security and what’s at risk. How are we thinking about this rise? And is this something that’s just going to keep going? Is it going to slow down? Is it as much of a threat as it feels like from just watching the nightly news?

Janet Napolitano: Well, history teaches us something. In the early 1900s, we had a whole wave of violence associated with the anarchist movement, the communist movement, in a way with the labor movement with the fight for a standard working day and a minimum wage, and that was a very violent time. And when we kind of cycle up and cycle down. In the 1990s, we had different types of domestic violence. We had Waco, we had the rise of so-called eco-terrorism, things like that.

What we didn’t have is what we’re seeing today and what we’re seeing today is the growth in the number of hate groups and their size and their ability to organize online so they don’t all have to gather physically in one place. They can be in touch with each other and incentivize each other and get everybody all excited and so forth. And we saw on January 6th the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, those are just three of many groups. I think from a security perspective and a safety perspective, not only between now and next week, but in the weeks following November the 5th, this is going to be one of the key security concerns in the country.

Angela Glover Blackwell: I want to come back to that, but I want to explore another topic. A lot of people think that no matter what happens, that we will still have divided government. With the divided government, how do we make advances? How do we address policy? How do we move forward and serve the American people in ways that they’re expecting no matter what they’re doing out there? They think the government is still going to operate, that the country will still move forward. How do we do that with divided?

Maria Echaveste: Well, I would first say that harking back to this distrust of our institutions, I think Americans forget that what has helped us navigate all these very difficult, and it hasn’t been an easy road, right? People forget that there was violence in organizing the civil rights movement, etc., but there was a belief in the institutions of Congress, of the executive branch, of the Supreme Court, the courts. It started to tear a little Watergate. We put some laws in.

So fast-forward, the American people have reason to be concerned because our government, certainly in the Congress, has become so dysfunctional where putting the people’s business as your top priority rather than appeasing your donors or the gerrymandering is such a critical element. Because now each of the parties’ candidates are veering to the extremes as they fight on this side as opposed to appealing to the massive voters in the center. So how do you make policy in that environment? I think there are issues, and we were talking about one of them. Both candidates currently talk about the need for childcare, and it is a critical issue. We’re the only industrialized country with no national effort to really address the needs of children, of working mothers, working parents, and both parties have said, “We need to have childcare.” Now, I think that is an issue that ought to be one where you could find some common ground.

Another one would be education, I would’ve said that previously, but since one candidate wants to abolish the Department of Education, I’m a little concerned about that. I do so much work on education, educational equity, I really want to underscore public education, we talk about it as necessary for our democracy and having an informed citizenry. That’s not actually how education really started. There were church groups and towns, but really it was the industrial Revolution. It’s like, “We have all these immigrants and you need to speak one language so they can talk to each other on the shop floor.” But without education, it is very easy for demagogues, for people who do not believe in our institutions, to persuade folks to vote against their own interests. So we have to work on educational equity.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Bob, you have any thoughts on that question? How do we move and to get anything done in a divided nation when the government is divided?

Robert Reich: I think the problem is not so much that the government is divided, Angela. I think the problem is that the country is divided and the government reflects the division in the country. When I look to the election coming up, regardless of who wins, I think one of our greatest challenges is to deal with the 48 to 50% who don’t believe in democracy, or at least in the current democracy, or at least as you said Maria, are so distrustful of the institutions that they’re willing to sacrifice those institutions. Those people are still going to be here regardless of even if Donald Trump doesn’t become president, we have to deal with them. And their distrust, their anger, their disillusionment is key to and underlies exactly why Congress and our federal government is so dysfunctional. We can’t have 48% of our people who are so disaffected.

Maria Echaveste: Yes, we’re divided, but having been on the campaign trails a number of times over these last, it’s amazing what a gorgeous country this is. It’s beautiful. And when you talk to people, whether it’s in Las Cruces, Tucson, Michigan, you find that the vast majority of people want the same thing. They want safe neighborhoods, they want secure housing, they want a good job, they want a decent retirement, they want good education for their kids. And that is why I am just mystified. I mean I’ve talked to people, they really want the same … Whether you’re Republican, conservative, they want the basic thing, so why can’t our Congress and our leaders deliver?

Angela Glover Blackwell: It looks like you want to jump in on that Janet.

Janet Napolitano: Well, look, we have a Congress that’s totally ineffective right now. They’re so riven by petty disputes and people who want all or nothing, the ability to compromise, the ability to legislate, seems to have somehow gotten lost in the maw. And we have big issues in our country. We have climate, we have immigration, we have education, we have fiscal responsibility, we have the national defense. There are big issues in all of these categories. The more Congress is divided and ineffective, the more power cedes to the executive because power abhors a vacuum. And what that has meant is that presidents have gradually started to govern by executive orders, by presidential policy directives, by national security memoranda pushing that because something has to get done, and waiting for the Congress to deal with anything, it seems to be less and less effective.

What can be done to change that? Well, I started with gerrymandering. I actually think that’s one of the original sins that we’re dealing with. But ultimately it’s up to the voters. The voters pick their representatives in the Congress. The voters reward what they want to reward, and right now we have a disconnect between what the government needs to have happen and the reward system politically, and that I think illustrates and is part of the product of the institutional distrust that Maria referenced.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Well, I want to complicate this conversation a little more, not that it’s already not complicated. But it really does seem that the political parties do not agree on anything, whether it’s climate change or gun regulation or immigration or affirmative action or taxes, you name it, they’re not agreeing on the rights of workers. And the conversation often goes to, “We need to figure out a way to get over this divide. We’ve got to figure out a way to bring the country back again.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable aspiration and it makes me nervous, and I’m going to tell you why it makes me nervous. Because when we get to these points where the country is clearly divided and we have to begin to think about how to bring it back again, all too often those who have been rendered most vulnerable, those who have been kept behind, those who are barely making it anyway, are the ones who suffer.

Only have to look at history to see it’s true starting with the beginning of the nation. It’s interesting when you look at the founding of the nation, the founding fathers were often talking about the immorality of enslavement. Some spoke out more than others, some were active abolitionists, and yet all of them compromised and began a country in which slavery was protected. That after we had to fight a civil war and troops went into the south to protect Black people who began to get land and businesses and vote, 2000 Black people were in elected office, 16 were in Congress, two or three were in the United States Senate. It took 90 years after 1877 when there was a compromise and the federal troops were pulled out because of controversy around who was actually elected president. It took 90 years for Black people in the south to get the right to vote again, to actually have that right protected, 92 years before we had another Black senator who was from Massachusetts, and 136 years before we had a Black senator from the South, Tim Scott from South Carolina.

When we get to these points where bringing the nation back together becomes the primary issue and the issues have to do with the haves and the have-nots, what’s happening with people who are of color, what’s happening with people who are at the bottom of the economic ladder, they often get left behind. The question is, how do you think we can begin to unite the country without leaving those who are most vulnerable behind again?

Bob, you go first.

Robert Reich: Angela, the United States, and you gave a great history lesson just then, but I want to focus on the years between 1946, the end of the second World War, and 1979 or 1980, the beginning of the Reagan administration. Those years were years in which the middle class of America continued to grow and widen. More and more people from the working class and the poor ascended into the middle class. The American dream, which was that I can do better than my parents and my children will do better than me, became a reality. There was a basic bargain in those years, and the bargain was as companies did better, as America did better, everybody would to some extent share in that betterment. And we had a civil rights act and a voting rights act and we expanded women’s opportunities, women’s rights. Now, we didn’t get it all right, and we didn’t complete any of that.

But starting in the late ’70s, early ’80s, we did a U-turn. Economically, the middle class began to shrink. In economic terms, more and more of the gains from the economy went to the top. To the extent that right now we have over the last 40 years, the median wage increased 15% in real terms, while the stock market increased over the same period of time 5000%. Who owns shares of stock? The top 1% has half of all of the shares of stock owned by Americans, the top 10% by wealth in this country own 92% of all the shares of stock. The stock market is not America. That is not the economy. Unless we accept and do something about, I don’t mean accept, accept the reality of and do something about widening inequality of income and wealth and opportunity, we cannot get purchase on these problems. As Louis Brandeis said in 1923, “We have a choice. We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.”

Maria Echaveste: How many of you can recall when your news program started to give you the stock market report as if it mattered? To your point, to the vast majority, we don’t have shares and yet it gets reported. And there is something about that effort of looking for short-term gains, right, if you have any, your 401K, your retirement, you have to for the long term, instead this focus on short-term gains. I used to be a corporate litigator, money fighting money, but it was during the junk bond era. Perfectly fine companies were taken over, saddled with debt, the lawyers and investment bankers got theirs, and the company went into bankruptcy.

We’re seeing that now with hedge funds, so I want to underscore what Secretary Reich has said. This income inequality, there’s been proposals about limiting corporate CEO’s pay to X percent X times what the average worker makes on the front line, some way of … What are you going to do with all this wealth? We just had two very wealthy people, Washington Post, LA Times, choose not to endorse in probably the most pivotal election certainly of my lifetime. And I thought 1992 was pretty important. I thought 2016 was very important. This is the most important election. You’ll be able to tell your children, your grandchildren, hopefully a positive result. But to have two major newspapers because they’re owned, not help their readers.

Angela Glover Blackwell: So this actually comes back to the question that I asked. It’s going to take courage. That we may get another opportunity, but it’s going to take courage. What I interpreted from your answer was that I was right about the history. You added another incredibly important part of the history, which is that this country knows how to do democracy in service of human flourishing. And it certainly did it during the period that you talked about. It wasn’t enough because so many people were not able to partake. The discrimination continued to happen. And so in your answer and Maria’s underscoring it, that what we do around our economy is the way that we overcome and we begin to act equitably, but it won’t happen if we don’t demand it, if we don’t call it out.

And the cowardice that you just referred to in terms of these papers not taking a stand and endorsing anybody is actually reflected in the way that corporations and others have turned away from trying to deal with the racial problem in this country after they leaned in completely in the summer of 2020. Leaning back now is going to take courage. Janet, do you have anything to say about this issue, how to be able to bring the country together and not do it on the backs of those who are always the ones to sacrifice?

Janet Napolitano: Well, look, I think if campaigning against billionaires is an effective technique, if I were running, I’d be out there saying, “Why are we funding the billionaires?” That’s an oversimplification, we know it is. But what it should be aimed at is saying we need an economic system, we need a tax system that is a fairer, more progressive tax system. We’ve gotten totally out of whack there, both on personal tax but on corporate tax as well.

And you’ve got to somehow connect the idea with a campaign. You’ve got to connect an idea with a voter. What is a voter going to hear? And I remember when I was in electoral politics myself and even recently, I haven’t talked to a voter yet who thinks billionaires should get more benefits. I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found one.

Maria Echaveste: I was just going to say that I think to the point that you are right, probably 48% of Americans are going to wake up thinking their guy deserves to be in the White House. How does that happen? I think we forget to our detriment that human beings are instinctively tribal, right? And there’s been some research and there have been some books written about how we’re worried about the stranger until we know that they share our values.

And I believe that one way of actually getting people to realize that we have more in common is national service, mandatory national service. Al Gore spoke about his experience when he volunteered to the military during Vietnam, and the military does a very good job, or had until recently, of really fostering, “You have to have unit cohesion. You’re going to go into battle, you need to be able to trust the people on your ship and your truck.” And you have these people from all parts of the country getting to know each other as individuals. And happen to believe that Secretary Rumsfeld was very smart when they got rid of the draft and it became volunteer.

So I think national service where there’s plenty of work to do around the country, and we have AmeriCorps, but it needs to be something that everyone does so that you get to know your fellow Americans in doing work in your community. So that would be one idea.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Well, let’s keep looking ahead. Let’s look ahead because we are going to go into the future and we need to be thinking about how are we going to build a nation that we can be proud of that includes? One of the ideas that I think is that we really need to lean into a vision of if we’re going to ask people to struggle and save democracy, what are we saving it for? Democracy for what? We need to really be able to lift up a vision and we need to be able to lift up a vision in which people can see that we are going to struggle and reach, but they can see themselves, that it is a struggle for them, it is a struggle for all of us.

And when I think about that, what I’ve tried to envision is a radically inclusive, multiracial democracy in service of human flourishing so that we can have a society that will thrive and all can have the possibility of a good life. And each one of those phrases is important to me. Radically inclusive because we need to send a message there is no one on the outside of this. It is everybody in. It is for everybody. You name the group, and yes, I’m about that, but I’m not just talking about inclusion. I’m talking about what people are giving as well, that people are all in because they’re paying taxes. They’re all in because of the kind of service that you described. They’re working in the poll booths, they’re serving in the army, they’re in the AmeriCorps. That’s radically inclusive.

And I call out multiracial democracy because we are a multiracial nation. We need to embrace it, see it as an asset, and understand that in a multiracial nation, if we don’t have a multiracial democracy, we don’t have democracy. But what is it for? It’s for human flourishing so we all can flourish, and that human flourishing enables the possibility that society will thrive and that people can have a good life.

Janet, I’ve laid out a vision that is very different from 2025, the Project 2025. How do we think about how to be able to actually lift up institutions, democratic institutions and others, that actually serve human flourishing and allow us to be able to align our policy agenda with a real vision of what the nation can be at its best?

Janet Napolitano: Well, we rely on our leaders in part to help set that vision and it is very difficult in today’s political environment and the media environment and so forth, because you state a vision and then some of the critics will say, “Well, we want the details of the policy, we want the plan.” Visions don’t really work like that, right? You need to have a goal, you need to have a vision. And that’s where leadership comes in, and that’s what we’re about to do is elect a new leader.

Now, Project 2025, don’t get me started on that because that in a way is a total revision of the United States and in many respects taking us back to a presumed time when things were better, when they really weren’t. But it’s the most undemocratic with a small D set of proposals that I think I’ve ever seen amassed in one single place.

But we’re talking really idealistically here on this panel, but at some point we’ve got to talk concretely. What needs to change in our political institutions? How does, for example, the Democratic Party expand its coalition? How does it reach out to farmers in the Midwest? How does it reinvigorate the working class in the Rust Belt? How does it excite members from marginalized or minority groups who historically have been part of the Democratic Party but we now see pulling away some? And that to me is the challenge for a political party today. It ought to be a process of expansion, of growth, not of narrowing down to a particular group or class. And the Democratic Party’s had problems with that, and some of those problems are manifesting now, but I think the goal for any political party has to be how do you grow? How do you expand your coalition? What ideas motivate people? What policies are you going to follow?

Robert Reich: If I may, I think we’re all being a little bit too polite. Because-

Janet Napolitano: We’re the stage because and everything, so yeah.

Robert Reich: Angela, you talk about radical inclusion, and Madam Secretary, you talk about the Democratic Party reaching out, and I have too, and Maria, you talk about all our children having some sort of experience in AmeriCorps or … Let me just be impolite for a moment. The elephant in the room is the Republican Party, and let me just say something because I don’t want to insult anybody here, but we now have a party, one of our two major parties, whose litmus test is whether you believe a lie that the 2020 election was stolen. How can democracy really be sustained when one of the two major political parties is based and premised on a lie? If we don’t deal with this, we are not going to get anywhere.

Angela Glover Blackwell: How do we deal with it?

Audience: Thank you.

Robert Reich: Well, I would deal with it first of all by electing Kamala Harris, but that’s just the beginning. I would then work maybe through the Democratic Party, but I don’t think so, I would work outside the Democratic Party to make sure that Liz Cheney and others can start a new Republican Party that is based on the principles that the Republican Party that I used to know was based on. Now, I want to be completely clear with everybody here, and I want to disclose the truth is that I got my first job in the federal government in the Ford administration. That was a Republican administration. I got my first job in Washington as a Republican and a Republican appointee. My boss, can I full disclose, my boss was Robert Bork.

I want to go back to a Republican Party that I respected. I was not a Republican, but I respected their views, I respected and they respected and they had principles. I didn’t believe in those principles. Bob Bork, Robert Bork and I disagreed on the first, second, fourth, fifth, and ninth amendments to the Constitution, but notwithstanding, they were principles. We’ve got to encourage the formation of a new Republican Party.

Angela Glover Blackwell: And if we were to do that, there needs to be something else that gets encouraged, and that is for people working in communities all across this country solving problems locally, bringing the people whose lives are being impacted into rooms to talk about that, they need to be empowered. Also, they might find that they could influence whatever parties that existed if they had more resources, more visibility, and all of those things. We can’t solve the problem for the nation with only the people who already happen to have power.

Robert Reich: Absolutely, absolutely.

Maria Echaveste: I just really want to applaud Secretary Reich. Yes, there needs to be a new Republican Party because we have been fighting from the very founding of this country what is the appropriate role of the federal government, of the role of government? And democracy is the process by which we decide collectively what we want government to do. And that’s been hijacked completely, starting with the Tea Party and now candidate Trump. But make no mistake, we’re going to have disputes about what the right role on different issues on government, how much assistance, housing assistance should be given or what type of healthcare, health insurance. Look at the battles we had to get the Affordable Care Act. My God, and it’s not access, it’s insurance to get access. It’s not even a healthcare system.

Robert Reich: But Maria, we’re going to have battles in this country over all sorts of things forever. The real issue is do we agree on how we overcome or decide on how those battles are going to be waged? That’s where the Constitution comes in. That’s where our respect for the institutions of government, that’s where something that we haven’t talked about yet, the Supreme Court comes in. And if we don’t have institutions that are respected by the public as settling those controversies, then we can’t get on with the work of our government and the work of being Americans.

Angela Glover Blackwell: So Janet, I’m going to pull you back into this conversation because we have got to do what you were starting to do, and that is be specific about what has to change. But we have had institutions that collectively were supposed to keep things moving and in balance. We had the Congress, we had the executive branch, we had the Supreme Court, we had all the agencies. All of them seem to be in crisis, particularly the Supreme Court. At least the Supreme Court may not feel that it’s in crisis, but there is a crisis related to the Supreme Court. So how do we begin to translate the aspirations that we’re talking about here into the kind of strengthening of democratic institutions that are essential to go forward? Bob has given us one idea.

Janet Napolitano: I want to follow up on Rob. First of all, like Rob, my first employer was on the Republican side. I worked for the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee. It was a different Republican Party, and now it’s not really a Republican Party, it’s a Trump Party and we ought to just call it that. He has managed to occupy all of the arms of the party and take them into his view, Trumpism as it were. And it would be great if there were a Republican Party that was a conservative party, one that you and I probably disagree with on a number of policy issues, but one that you could disagree with in a principled way, on the Supreme Court, oh my heavens, two things. They need an enforceable ethics code and how about some term limits?

Robert Reich: If I could just build on the term limits, Janet, because there is in front of Congress right now, and I think that when Kamala Harris is president she might have an opportunity to get this legislation through perhaps, a bill that would limit Supreme Court terms to 18 years. It would give every president every term, two Supreme Court appointments. And when at the end of 18 years under Article III of the Constitution, a Supreme Court justice was finished with being a Supreme Court justice, then they would move to the Court of Appeals or they would move to another court. Article III says these are lifetime appointments, but it doesn’t say lifetime appointments …

Janet Napolitano: To the Supreme Court.

Robert Reich: … to the Supreme Court.

Janet Napolitano: Exactly.

Robert Reich: That’s the issue. Very important change that ought to be made.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Part of what I think we need to talk about, and I’m afraid that this gets back to the domestic threats, is that when you describe getting a reasonable Republican Party again, being able to actually have rules and values and expectations that we are all aligned with, that actually also needs for everybody to be able to participate and to be agents for change in this democracy. I think that part of what’s going on is that a part of the country is afraid of full participation in democracy, afraid of what it means for all the people who ought to be able to vote to be able to vote and to have their voices heard, afraid for real representation to come forward. We’ve got to figure out a way as we are thinking about how to have normalcy to honor what we’ve talked about in terms of a democracy that works for all and all can participate. What do we do about that? Because I think that’s why we have so much turmoil and hate groups and domestic threats. There is a whole segment that is afraid to allow democracy to operate.

Janet Napolitano: I don’t think they’re so much afraid of democracy. They want to run it.

Angela Glover Blackwell: I’ll take those words.

Janet Napolitano: They want … Yeah, and we cannot discount in the current era the effect of misinformation that is out there and how it’s targeted to people and how people are persuaded by it and then act upon it. We have not solved the issue of misinformation in a First Amendment-based constitution, right? There is a real tension there, and then we see it play out, right? Now we see conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. The theories that FEMA in the wake of the hurricanes was not providing assistance to Republican areas of North Carolina or that it was going to steal people’s homes or that it was going to do this or that so that people wouldn’t go to FEMA and seek the assistance to which they were entitled and that they would get. So it’s a very destructive media environment that feeds into those who are susceptible to conspiracy theories, and then of course they can organize better than they have before.

Robert Reich: Let’s talk about social media for a second if we can, because I think we’ve got to the point in this country where social media platforms have a choice. They can either be treated like newspapers and subjected to all of the potential defamation or liability or whatever legal standards newspapers are subjected to, and they are, or they have to be treated as public utilities. Elon Musk’s ex is getting a free ride in the most despicable kind of way, and if there was ever an example of how great wealth abused and corrupted can lead to the weaponization of disinformation, Elon Musk’s ex is the perfect sadly frightening example. We must not allow that.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Do you have an opinion on whether it ought to be treated as a public utility or as a newspaper? You said that we needed to decide whether social media should be treated as newspapers or as a public utility. What is your opinion?

Robert Reich: First of all, I’d use antitrust law to break them up if they’re too large and too dominant. Secondly, after antitrust, I would treat them as if they are very still very large, and if they’re huge economies of scale or economies of membership, I would treat them as public utilities because they have some responsibilities in a democracy.

Angela Glover Blackwell: And I like that you checked to take it back to democracy because that’s how we ought to be thinking about it. You want to say something Janet?

Janet Napolitano: No, I agree. I think one of the issues in the internet era was when the internet first started and we started the development of the companies, they were given broad immunity from any litigation because of the thought that litigation would slow the innovation and the development of the internet, and also because they were able to sell the story that they were not providing the content, they were just the pipes. They were just sort of the pipes. I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons from that, and I think for example, where AI is concerned, we shouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Good. Before we end, I’m going to come back and talk about a positive vision for the future, but I’m looking at some of the questions from the audience that are right in this discussion, so I’m going to turn to at least one of them now. Do you worry about the Constitution becoming completely ineffective? What path do you see to strengthen or reform the Constitution to better serve our needs? Is the Constitution at risk?

Robert Reich: I don’t think … The Constitution, as you all know, is a very tiny little document. It’s not the Constitution, it’s the people interpreting the Constitution that need to be changed, starting with the Supreme Court. The idea that money is speech under the First Amendment and that corporations are people under the First Amendment, those two ideas are absurd. They have to be changed and reversed.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Maria?

Maria Echaveste: And it can be done legislatively. And when things don’t make sense, I’m thinking about your point, Secretary Napolitano, about the misinformation in North Carolina, it’s like that doesn’t make sense, right? It’s like follow the money. Who is benefiting from this misinformation? Who is benefiting from the dysfunction? Who is benefiting? Follow the money?

Angela Glover Blackwell: Who is benefiting, Maria?

Robert Reich: Name names.

Maria Echaveste: Right now I’d say Trump because he’s using the misinformation to create the distrust to set up the big lie of 2024, feeding it all in. Obviously Musk, but others. I mean the fact that a number of Silicon Valley billionaires are spending a lot of money in this election, millions of dollars in the Ohio Senate race, you would say why? Well, because there’s an effort to have crypto not be under the purview of the SEC and let’s have it over … How many know the Commodity Futures Trading? It’s a smaller agency with a lot less heft than the SEC. So there’s these nuances, right? But meanwhile, people who need help are being told, “Don’t go to FEMA.”

Janet Napolitano: Yeah, well, tonight we’re going to talk about democracy and now we’re at the Constitution and there some who have advocated that we ought to just start over and we just ought to have a new constitution. I don’t favor that point of view for any number of reasons, but I always, when I get really down, I think of what our democracy is. It’s of the people, by the people, for the people. And our challenge, our collective challenge, is to effectuate that in a fair and progressive way.

Angela Glover Blackwell: So another question has to do with money and politics, the electoral college, and gerrymandering, all of which fight against of the people by the people and for the people. Do you want to comment about money in politics?

Robert Reich: Let’s get big money out of politics.

Angela Glover Blackwell: How do we do it?

Robert Reich: Now, there are bills in Congress to do that that would do it in a way that is I believe consistent with the First Amendment and consistent with Citizens United. Much better would be to get a Supreme Court that reverse itself on Citizens United as readily as the Supreme Court reversed itself on Roe v. Wade, but that’s another story. But we do need to get big money out of politics, and there are ways of doing that. We could talk about it more specifically, but it is not impossible.

Janet Napolitano: When I ran for Governor of Arizona in 2002, I was a Democrat, I am a Democrat, and Arizona was a much redder state than it is now, but it had, and it was a new public financing system, so a candidate collected $2,005 contributions, and if you collected $2,005 contributions, you qualified for a certain amount of money for the primary. If you won the primary, then you got another tranche of money. If your opponent didn’t run on the public financing scheme, you got matched up to an overall very large cap for extra money that he raised, and it was a very effective system. I had people though, it was really confusing for people, they would want to give me 20 bucks and I’d say, “No, no, I can only take five.” They say, “Well, I want to write your check for 200.” I say, “No, just $5.” But everybody could play. It was very fair. Of course, with Citizens United and with the Supreme Court jurisprudence on campaign finance, that system is gone by the wayside. It would be great if something like that could come back.

Angela Glover Blackwell: What about the Electoral College? The Electoral College, people think that it’s anti-democratic.

Robert Reich: I think the easiest way to deal with the Electoral College is to join the interstate compact on a popular vote. Do you all know that? Have you been following it? It’s a very important initiative. It means that if enough states with enough electoral votes, that is 270 is what you need to elect a president, if enough states sign up this interstate compact, what they are saying in effect is if every other state that is joining the compact agrees, we will give all of our electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.

Maria Echaveste: Of the national popular vote.

Robert Reich: Of the national popular vote. That’s possible. That interstate compact is already very far along.

Janet Napolitano: And another alternative, I like the compact a lot, but another alternative quite frankly is we ought not to say that we’re not going to play in too many states. I mean in other words, we have too easily fallen into the red state/blue state category. There are states where good candidates can be competitive regardless of red or blue, and that makes a real difference where the electoral college is concerned.

Maria Echaveste: And on that point, going back to the gerrymandering, here in California, we took the politicians out of drawing the lines. We have a citizens commission. There are a number of states that are also doing that, and it’s not perfect, but it is one way of reducing the gerrymandering because politicians will draw lines to protect themselves, and what we need is districts where the candidate has to appeal to a broader group of people. It’ll get us, I believe, a more rational place.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Yeah, I agree.

Robert Reich: Angela, so far we’ve talked about a lot of reforms. The problem is a chicken and egg problem, we can’t get the reforms unless we get the right people in Congress and in the White House and in the courts. But how do you do that without the reforms?

Angela Glover Blackwell: Yes.

Janet Napolitano: Well, in many states that have the initiative process, the people actually can act things that come up organically, and that is somewhat of a safety valve, but for states that don’t have an initiative process, they don’t have that option.

Angela Glover Blackwell: So I want to turn to how we just begin to imagine something different and what we see on the horizon. But I have one more question that I want to ask you from the audience. What advice do you have for teens, like a teen that is in the audience, who’s curious about what they can do to advance the interest of democracy?

Robert Reich: Run for office, run for your local school board or your city council or any small office there is in your town. Get involved at the electoral level. That would be my advice. That’s the advice I give to my students, some of them have taken it.

Janet Napolitano: Canvas, go out, find a candidate or a cause that motivates you and go out and knock on doors. You will learn a lot, you will see a lot, you will hear a lot. It is a very valuable experience.

Angela Glover Blackwell: So I want to talk about where the hope comes, how could things be different in the future? And I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at what’s going on in local communities. I am always drawn to local communities. I believe that local leaders are national leaders, they are solving the nation’s problems, and that we need to pay a lot more attention to what’s happening locally.

Looking locally in Los Angeles with this podcast that I have, Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life, really looked at Los Angeles organizers and how those organizers began to get more and more sophisticated about multiracial organizing and building power and working with labor and turning that into who gets selected. And what I’m seeing across the country is a whole new generation of people running for office, school boards, city council, and they are people who are the children of immigrants. They are working class people of color. They are people who have a vision for a new way of living, and they’re putting themselves on the line and running for office.

And I believe as that begins to happen more and those people develop and move forward, that’s how we begin to have a democracy and service of human flourishing. So even as I twitch and turn and wring my hands and worry about what’s happening at the national level, and I know that the support is coming from local communities, I know that in local communities all across this country there’s a new generation of democratic leadership emerging, and that gives me a strong sense of being optimistic about the future.

I want to turn to each of you and see if there’s anything that you want to put forward about where you see promise, where you see something that we ought to be fanning and getting it to really bloom and blossom.

Janet Napolitano: I see a great deal of promise in the younger generation, and I’ve talked with many who don’t like the division, who don’t like the ultra-partisanship. They sense that there has to be a different way and a better way and are ready to commit to working for that. And so many of them are kind of finding their way now. They don’t really know how the system works or doesn’t work, but they’re learning and they have a sense of potential, and that gives me hope.

Robert Reich: I agree with that. One thing that gives me hope as well is when I go into the country, whether it’s small towns or big cities, and I talk to teachers and social workers and nurses and people who are actually serving the public every day, and they’re first responders. The people who were involved in the horrible hurricanes that we had in the Southeast, there are Americans who respond like nobody else in the world to problems in their communities or problems of people who they don’t even know. We’ve got to celebrate that part of America. We’ve got to talk about it. We’ve got to make sure people realize it is there. It’s the heart of America.

What I worry about most is cynicism. Those who really don’t believe in democracy would rather have a dictatorship or some other anti-democratic small D system are counting on the rest of us becoming so cynical about our system that we no longer care. Cynicism is the enemy of progress. Young people, Janet, the people I teach at Berkeley, make me happier than any group of people has ever made me.

Maria Echaveste: What gives me hope is Americans will organize over anything. I used to run the office now called Public Engagement at the White House before it’s the complaint desk. Somehow there’s a group out there about pick Atheists, pick an issue, and they’re organized and they want to tell their president and his advisors about the most important issue. That’s actually what gives me hope that Americans do have up until now, this sense that they have a right to demand of their government, of their elected leaders to do something about a problem that they’re concerned with. And I believe perhaps because I am an optimist, that though there are more people willing to organize, to improve things in their communities, in their towns than the people who are organizing to destroy our democracy and our country.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Thank you for that. And I’m glad that you mentioned the university and your students because I really do think that the university, particularly a university like the University of California, has a super important role to play as we think about how to protect and promote and deliver on the promise of democracy. Public university ought to be a place where people are really seeing the kind of leadership and problem-solving. It strengthens democracy, and it’s not just the public policy school, it’s the public health school, it’s the planning school, the journalism school, where we need to tell a different story about our nation. We need to tell truth about the past, and we don’t need to be afraid of that truth.

We need to understand it because ultimately, hope is a discipline. Hope is a discipline that requires us to understand how we got where we are, how did we get here? Go back and look at the history, look at what’s happening. It’s a discipline that has us gathering the data so we can actually know where is something good happening, where are things wrong? Is it concentrated in one part of the country? Is it concentrated on one racial or ethnic group? Really getting into that data, finding out what works, and lifting it up, looking at it, examining it, put it in policy if that’s what’s needed, get it into practice if that’s what’s needed. And then asking what can you do?

My friend, Mary Wright Edelman, always use this phrase, she still uses it. “Assign yourself.” Don’t wait to be asked. Assign yourself using all of that information. And if we practice that kind of discipline, there’s every reason to have hope. Thank you all. You’re amazing. You’re amazing.

(Applause)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)