Terms of Engagement – Democracy: The Worst Form of Government — Except All the Rest?

Archon Fung: Hey, you’re tuning into Terms of Engagement. I’m Archon Fung, I’m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance Innovation here.

Stephen Richer:  And I’m Steven Richer, former Maricopa County Recorder from Phoenix, Arizona, and at the Ash Center.

Archon Fung: Thanks everyone for tuning into our second episode of Terms of Engagement. Still here. We’re still here.

Archon Fung:  Experimenting and learning. And part of that learning process is we got some excellent feedback, especially from our younger listeners that is younger than you and I, and it wouldn’t be a democracy show if we didn’t pay attention to feedback. And part of that feedback was people wanted to know a little bit more about where Stephen and I were coming from on this topic of democracy is a big, amorphous word, means a lot of things to a lot of people. And so, we thought we’d spend just a little bit of time talking about our democracy origin stories before we hop into a provocative clip about, somebody who’s a skeptic of democracy that we’ll get into in a moment. , but, by way of origin story, Stephen. So, you’ve done a lot of things in your life. Yeah. You run a company, you have been in a law firm and a few years, several years, many years ago now, you decided to run for the exalted office of the Recorder County Recorder of Maricopa County, which is a democracy job, so, right. Why did you do that?

Stephen Richer:  Gets to the core of democracy because one of the responsibilities is overseeing early voting and voter registration in Maricopa County, which is the fourth largest county in the United States. But I’ve always been interested in politics, but my primary interests have always been economic and civil liberties. And I sort of viewed political liberties and democracy as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. So civil liberties, economic liberties were paramount. And

Archon Fung:  So it’s a substantive concern. Freedom. Freedom. Correct.

Stephen Richer: <laugh>, and throughout human history, we’ve solved a lot of our economic and civil liberty concerns by having wars, by killing people in various ways. And so instead, if you have a liberal democracy where most rights are completely off, out of the question, and you can’t touch them, they’re preserved for the individual. And then you designate those policy items that are up to debate, and you put those in the political arena, and you solve it through a democratic process, which broadly in franchises, hopefully a lot of people such that they feel like they have a mechanism for changing government that isn’t simply going to war.

Archon Fung: And this was important enough for you to invest many years of your life being the recorder of Maricopa County. Yeah.

Stephen Richer: That, that, that made me stem from <laugh>. I suppose just some raw political ambition. Also, the belief that democracy has to deliver. And so I’m a firm believer in making government efficient, making government work. And if you can show that at the county level, then maybe you can show that at the state level. But as we’re seeing today, there’s a lot of people who simply don’t believe in democracy because they feel like it’s not delivering,

Archon Fung: It’s not, it’s not working.

Stephen Richer: And so the more government offices, whether their subject matter is mundane or not, that deliver consistently and efficiently, the more it does to sort of buttress a belief in our system broadly. And then I think that strengthens all sorts of things that are meant to protect, hopefully, our freedoms and our way of life.

Archon Fung:  Absolutely. And we’ll get into this later on in this show, but probably in other discussions, if democracy’s not delivering, then people aren’t gonna stick with democracy for very long.

Stephen Richer: And I think this is the whole idea of the new abundance Democrats who are saying, hey, we understand that a lot of people don’t want to simply vote on democracy or question why democracy is a good thing if we’re not delivering.

Archon Fung: Yeah, absolutely. Now, when you were the recorder of Maricopa County. 2020 happened. Yes. That’s an inflection point for democracy, especially in Arizona. How did that affect your views about American democracy? Or your commitment to it one way or another?

Stephen Richer:  I think it reframed everything for the things that I thought. Well,

Archon Fung: Tell me what happened in 2020 <laugh>.

Stephen Richer:  Well, in the 2020 election, you might’ve heard there were <laugh>, disagreement over who won. And central to that conversation were the states of Georgia and Arizona. And I was in a large role in the state of Arizona. Maricopa County makes up about 60% of Arizona. And so, a lot of these conversations were swirling around Maricopa County. There was an extracurricular assessment of the 2020 election done by a group of called the Cyber Ninjas. And so, a lot of people were sort of questioning the mechanics of democracy, but then also sort of challenging some of the underlying assumptions. And so, where I felt like I was at first a crusader for good government and a crusader for certain liberties that put me strongly in the libertarian camp. Yeah. All of a sudden, I felt like I was sort of like the defender of democracy because the, the, the, the basic entry point into a democracy, I think, is still a competitive election process. That’s sort of like a Robert Dahl type theory. Yeah. Um, political scientist from Yale University. Um, and so that, and then there will be questions of like whether or not we should abide by the results, which is a fundamental concept to a representative democracy as well. And so that became my life

Archon Fung: <laugh>. And, you walk away from that, I guess many of us do after 2020 thinking, well, maybe we could, could take elections for granted, but we shouldn’t be taking them for granted.

Stephen Richer:  I think the assumptions that were baked into my political thinking were completely challenged the notion of American exceptionalism, that the, the types of autocratic movements that have existed in other places in the world, the, the notion that they couldn’t exist in the United States, that was beginning to, there were some cracks in that, and the notion that we would of course, abide by results of an election after every legal challenge had been mounted was also called into question.

Archon Fung: So I think probably a lot of people listening to the show understand that at a 40 foot thousand-foot level, looking at what’s going on in Washington and the administration, what I wanna hear a little bit more about is how it feels at the county level. So you have some, you go to some unpleasant town meetings Yeah. Where people do not believe that you counted the votes properly.

Stephen Richer: Yeah.

Archon Fung: So that’s a bad meeting. That’s not shaking the foundations of your faith that Oh, elections are gonna govern America from, or is it,

Stephen Richer: In some ways, when, when you realize that there’s just this crisis of confidence, and then there’s a reluctance to abide by the longstanding rules of the game when it no longer becomes a question of fact or just wanting more information. And it instead becomes a question of whether or not you’re going to abide by the, the same principles, the peaceful overturning of power that we’ve long abided by. Like, it, it shook that, that, that, that, that did more. Yeah.

Archon Fung: And is the revelation there at the, about the people, like you think, oh, well, by and large, most people in America will believe people like me and the thousands of other election officials, when they say, and now you find out, oh, that’s not true. They’re just like, there’s a big number of people who aren’t gonna believe it.

Stephen Richer:  I think it gets into one of the, like the underlying culprits of which the alleged attacks on democracy are a manifestation, which is we don’t believe in institutions. We don’t really trust fellow Americans. We don’t have a shared notion of truth. And we, we saw that play out in, in a disadvantageous way for democracy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But what’s your democracy story?

Archon Fung: My <laugh>, my democracy story is different. Um, so it, I think where it took an inflection point for me was when I was in graduate school. And, for those of you who’ve gone to graduate school in a social science, it’s a very lonely time of life. The loneliest part of it is writing your dissertation.

Stephen Richer: Okay. So you’re sitting in the library carrel, just cranking away reading books?

Archon Fung: I’m not in the library carrell. I’m taking buses all around the south side of Chicago. Okay, because my dissertation is about people in neighborhoods trying to get a little more responsiveness out of public services, out of police and schools in Chicago. And so my dissertation is about how people in neighborhoods interact with police and schools in Chicago. And, um, it’s got a bunch of pieces to it. It’s a whole dissertation, but just to give you a little sense of it, in Chicago, in the late eighties, there was a law that made every school governed basically by the neighborhood. Every school even today, is governed by an elected school council of six community members, two parents. Okay. Or, six parents, two community members, two staff and the principal. Okay. And that local school council, one for every, like of all of the 500 schools in Chicago, they can hire and fire the principal. They approve the school budget. So

Stephen Richer:  A powerful position that’s at the closest level Yeah. To the actual voters.

Archon Fung: Exactly. And then, so, which is the police department and the school system a little bit to kind of get what they want, get a better education, be able to work with police officers, be able to work with parents. So for me, where you begin with liberty, for me, it’s about voice. Okay. It’s about people in neighborhoods being able to get something.

Stephen Richer:  And were they effective

Archon Fung: In many places, they were effective and many places. Okay. They were not effective.

Stephen Richer: But again, that’s one of the prepositions that I think people are challenging these days. Yes, yes. That they can’t have that what you witnessed while doing your dissertation.

Archon Fung: Yeah. And so a part of my democracy journey is about always trying to figure out, well, keeping a faith that they can have that, but that it’s a hard thing to figure out. How do you make it so a city government is more responsive to all the people in it, or a national government, or a Democratic party, or a Republican party?

Stephen Richer: So there are lots of ways in which people approach democracy. You and I have approached it differently. There’s lots of ways that people define democracy, and we might get into that a little bit differently, but we both know that people are even just sort of questioning is democracy the right course forward for the United States? I think we sort of think of it as just a fait accompli in the United States, although, you know, obviously that depends on what point in history you were. In terms of who was enfranchised, yeah, in the democratic process.

But, I think there is some measure of taking it for granted in the 21st century in the United States, even though it’s a pretty radical concept in the course of human history. Yes. But, so we wanted to play a video clip that sort of tees up, i I, I guess one particularly poignant recent skeptic, skeptic of democracy. So we’re gonna play that film now, that little clip. Now, democracy.

Speaker 3   No, I don’t. Absolutely not.

Speaker 4    What do you believe in?

Speaker 3    Autocracy.

Speaker 4    By who?

Speaker 3    Honestly, quite frankly, anyone who is in line with Catholic teaching,

Speaker 4    Donald Trump is not Catholic.

Speaker 3    Of course he’s not. I completely agree. And that’s part of Trump the problem. So you support Trump. You don’t support Trump? No, I don’t, I didn’t even vote for him. I wrote in like, John Pork, or someone did remember, did <laugh>,

Speaker 4    Why did you vote if you don’t believe in democracy and you want autocracy?

Speaker 3    Well, ’cause quite frankly, I voted, I kind of voted just to make, I

Speaker 4    Came with this argument, but I’m of my own argument. I’m much more interested in this.

Speaker 4      So yeah, absolutely. How do

Speaker 4    We get to an autocracy?

Speaker 3    I think, quite frankly, that if we are able to enact local leaders, who’s

Speaker 4    The we by the way?

Speaker 3    I think, quite frankly, these far-right conservatives sitting right around me. White people. Yeah, absolutely.

Stephen Richer: I don’t know if it gets around a little bit, but so we, what we have here is we have, I, I think a man who identifies as far right conservative speaking with a former M-S-N-B-C, or is he maybe

Archon Fung: Hasan yeah, yeah. Kind of prominent left progressive media figure

Stephen Richer: And openly saying that he doesn’t think democracy is the way forward. It’s not just about he; his side has lost elections that he wanted to win, but he doesn’t even think that democracy is the right solution. He even says something like an autocracy. And so I, I think the first place we need to start is how, how, how are we even defining democracy? Because when I went around to a lot of Republican grassroots meetings, one of their favorite things to say, if you said, you know, and we’ve gotta protect democracy, or we’ve gotta preserve democracy, people would say, we’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic. To which I say, you know, we’re, we’re a banana, but that means we’re also a fruit sort of thing. <laugh> and, and democracy encompasses that. But what are sort of the broad strokes that you think of when you say, when somebody says democracy?

Archon Fung: Well, I think one of the most important things is political equality, is everybody is an equal citizen regardless of what they believe. And part of that equal citizenship means that they get an equal voice in determining where society goes, whether it’s by direct democracy or by voting for someone. And that’s surprising thing about this video, is that’s the premise that the young man is rejecting. He’s rejecting political equality if in, I don’t know what the rest of his views are, but part of it is if you’re not a Catholic, then I don’t think you should have as much of a voice in deciding how society goes. So, so I, which is very disturbing

Stephen Richer: To me, <laugh>. Yeah. I mean, I sort of wanna strip out sort of the, the, the, the religious hierarchy that unfortunately sets up some racial, racial

Archon Fung: Hierarchy

Stephen Richer: Right. As well. And, I don’t think that worked out well for his employment status. But, but, but the point, like I, I looked up some statistics and about a third of young Americans as defined under 30 and Tova from our office. Does a lot of studies on this are having real doubts about democracy. So for me, the core concept of democracy is that voice component that you talked about. That there is a competitive process Yes. By which ordinary citizens have a voice and have the ability to impact the trajectory of the government in some form or fashion. Now, that doesn’t mean that they can vote on everything. That doesn’t mean that if I get all my buddies to say, Archon has to give us all of his dollars, then like, you have to do that because there might be some rights that are screened off or something like that. But there has to be some mechanism for individual citizens to be able to affect his government. Yeah. He doesn’t believe in that.

Archon Fung: So that’s one thing is the voice in equality part. There’s a lot of things that democracy is supposed to do. And I think the most basic thing that it’s supposed to do is peacefully solve the problem of pluralism or difference, right? Every society, whether it’s a huge one or just a tiny one, people have different views. They have different views about who God is. They have different views about what our individual rights are. They have different views about how progressive the tax rate is. But as you said, most societies in human history have not settled those differences. Democratically. They’ve had a king, they’ve had a strong man, they’ve had a junta, they’ve bought beat each other over the head till the last person decides what the truth is in a democracy. You decide fundamentally at the ballot box. And that’s what he’s rejecting is he’s like, okay, well, I understand we live in a plural society, whether it’s could be about the tax rate, could be about religion, could be about race, whatever. But he doesn’t wanna settle it democratically

Stephen Richer:  No. But

Archon Fung: So

Stephen Richer: When pressed on that, he sort of struggles. He does, does

Stephen Richer: He does. And he says like, well, how would you determine who the autocrat is? The challenge for anybody who believes in an autocracy is, you know, you might want your autocrat, but you might not want the other person’s autograph. But setting that aside and just assuming we can have, so a broadly agreed upon autocrat, should we be having sympathy for this type of worldview? Right Now, I think this clip is provoking a lot of interest on the internet, in part because it goes against the grain of what we’re quote surprising. Right. But also because we’ve seen some people on the internet be like,

You know, maybe we should be questioning this model of government. Do you have any sympathy for that individual, setting aside the race and religion stuff?

Archon Fung: Yeah. Yeah. So I think there’s like a medium bad argument for autocracy and a terrible argument for autocracy. Okay. And I think he makes the terrible argument. So the medium argument for autocracy is, oh, it’s, it’s the delivery argument. Right? It’s okay, well if we get somebody up there who’s not democratic, you know, he is not elected, but he is good at running stuff and we all want, the economy to grow, we all want the buses to run on time. At least we’ll get that. So I call that kind of a common good, oriented autocrat. There’s a common good, and this

Stephen Richer: Is like a Singapore type

Archon Fung: It’s like, yeah, I think that would be the Singapore would be the example that everybody points to

Stephen Richer: The streets are clean. GDP grows by 10% every year. And, , we have a more orderly society now if you spit gum out on society, like it’s not

Archon Fung: Good for you.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. Like you’re stripped of your civil liberties immediately. , but, , the streets are clean.

Archon Fung: Right. And I, I personally think that you could squint and say the Chinese regime from like 1990 to maybe 2010, the People’s Republic of China was kind of like that. It’s the most successful anti-poverty program in human history. Not good if you’re a Uyghur. Yeah. Not good if you’re in Tibet. But by and large, a lot of people benefited. Now, I think I say that’s like I medium bad argument for autocracy. ’cause you’ve gotta keep thinking, you roll the dice and you’re gonna keep getting double sixes. Yeah. You’re gonna keep getting a leak on you. Yeah. And I just don’t think that’s likely. Now he makes a very different argument for autocracy, which is, I want my view to run society, which is the terrible argument for autocracy. ’cause I mean, I think for a lot of reasons,

Stephen Richer:  Yeah. But so, so, but now make the case for democracy, because I will say that all too often I fall into the, well, we shouldn’t upset the apple cart. The combination of a liberal democracy, rule of law, and a market economy has brought billions of people out of poverty and has completely transformed the hu human history. And therefore we should, we should stick with it. Don’t mess with it. <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s not, that’s

Archon Fung: Small conservative, but that’s

Stephen Richer:  Necessarily a compelling case to a 20-year-old who is struggling to find a job, a post

Archon Fung: Financial crisis young person

Stephen Richer:  Thinks he’ll be able to afford a house when he is 55. Um, and, and so to the extent that you’ve given it thought have, have you made an elevator pitch for democracy lately?

Archon Fung: Well, I just wanna hear more about what the alternative version is. And so this guy articulated one, I don’t think that’s gonna help lower the rent. Um, I think they’re, so I think that all of the versions of helping that young person out get their first job or their third job, or lower the rent or buy that first house, pretty much, I think all of the promising versions occur within democracy. So, but

Stephen Richer: You’re resorting to saying, I like democracy because I don’t like any of the other forms of government. And while I think that’s historically well-founded, yeah. , like it’s very dissatisfying as an answer to say, you know, nobody wants to be asked to the school prom because they were the least worst option

Archon Fung: <laugh> sort of thing.

Stephen Richer: Um, and so when, when I, when I talk about democracy, you know, I talk about our ability to affect government, our ability to have a say in our community. I, I think that oftentimes talking about democracy on a much more local level Yes. Is more impactful. So returning to your dissertation experience, I think school boards are maybe where you can have the most effective conversation about the qualities, the benefits of democracy. Because if you don’t like something, you really can have an outsized influence on changing that, whereas other systems of government, I, that would be foreclosed to you.

Archon Fung: Yeah. So I think there’s a couple things Democracy’s got going for it for the young person, although it’s a little abstract <laugh>. Okay. Right. The first thing that’s got going for it is democracy experiments and tries new things. So it’s a little known story, but for like Chicago, after I finished my dissertation first book, I kinda lost track of it. But since I left for like the last 20 years, the Chicago public school system just has been improving, improving, improving on graduation rates. College.

Stephen Richer: That’s not the

Archon Fung: Narrative quality. That is not, the narrative is absolutely the case. And that has happened a little bit through the parent voice and local school council. But it’s also happened because the bureaucracy’s gotten much more responsive and much more nimble and much more close to those parents and communities. Okay. And so that’s a, for me, a great example of democracy delivering. And I think one that you may not like, you Steven, may not like, is I think the most prosperous period in the United States has been the industrial period after World War ii, up until a little bit like Ronald Reagan,

Stephen Richer: The enshrinement of the New Deal,

Archon Fung: Of the New Deal, and the post-war period in which, um, middle-class people, right. The incomes grew about as fast as the GDP grew. And part of that was kind of a balance of power between employers and industry, and workers in industrial unions. And so that’s another thing democracy’s got going forward, is a balance of power. And with the autocrat to deliver cheap rent or affordable groceries, you have to depend on a pretty nice autocrat rather than your balance of power. So,

Stephen Richer: So taking it in the terms of balance of power and the through line between the individual citizen and government has democracy in the United States improved over the last, let’s say 50 years. So simply as a matter, we usually default to that by how many people have voted, have people had access to, to the polls. Yeah. ’cause that’s an easy proxy for democracy. Yeah. And on that way, over the last 50 years, the trajectory has been very positive because obviously the civil rights movement was in the sixties in which before that large portions of America were disenfranchised. Yes. But as a matter of that connection between an individual citizen and what the government does, do you think that that’s been weakened or strengthened over the last 50 years?

Archon Fung: I think it’s been weakened. Okay. Um, I think it’s been weakened. We’ll get a lot of feedback on this <laugh>, I think <laugh>, um, I think it’s been weakened in part because of the large influence of money in politics. And I think there’s good evidence that it’s pretty weak in terms of responsiveness. So there’s a great book by Marty Gillian’s, affluence and Influence. And what he does is he takes a bunch of survey evidence about what people actually want. And then he takes a bunch of laws that Congress has passed over a couple decades, and then he takes the issues for which people who are better off tend to have different views than people who are less well off, like Medicare would be, and Medicaid would be a couple of those issues. Right. And what he finds is that by and large, the federal government has been unresponsive to the bottom 80, the preferences of the bottom 80% of the population. It’s an amazing finding, but it has been very responsive to the top 10% of the population. So in that regard, I think, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s been getting less democratic, less responsive. I’ll,

Stephen Richer: I’ll show due deference to the undoubtedly excellent empirical research

Archon Fung: Behind that. I’m Marty Gilens.

Stephen Richer: I’m somewhat skeptical of sort of the broad conclusion. Do you think that the problem that young people are identifying today with democracy is more that, and do you think, well, let put this another way. Do you think the threat to democracy is more something like money and politics, which we’ve been talking about for a long, long time now, forever? Yeah. Yeah. Or do you think it’s like that guy that we just showed who’s completely dropping out and saying, you know, let’s just try, let’s try autocracy.

Archon Fung: I think one precedes the other, like the money in politics, , generates a sense of cynicism and unresponsiveness, and then you get, , people being very suspicious of institutions like universities or like elections even when they shouldn’t be. Right. And so then things really start unwinding, and then it becomes people who are really losing faith because it hasn’t been responsive. So the only way to restore the faith is to make it more responsive. I mean, what do you think? Do you think it’s money in politics?

Stephen Richer: Or do you think it’s No, I don’t think, and I think one of our weaknesses in being able to confront the last Es, especially four or five years, has been that we’ve been talking about the decline of democracy now in a lot of quarters. So I think when a school like this school publishes why democracies die or, or, or any of the things that like the Levitsky and Ray are, are doing sort of thing, some people are saying, well, you’ve been sort of like saying that democracy’s been fading for a long time now. And so there’s a, a level of skepticism there. But here’s my hot take for the last few minutes we have

Archon Fung: Here. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What’s the answer? What’s the danger? What’s the

Stephen Richer: Danger? I think that in some ways we are suffering from a sur of democracy rather than the decline of democracy. I think Donald Trump represents the ultimate democratic fi figure in that he would like to

Archon Fung: Basically, I agree with that, actually. I agree.

Stephen Richer: Oh, he would like to have a referendum society where yeah, everyone, he won the most votes, therefore he calls all the shots and pretty much everything else is obliterated. Check, check any checks and balance any other branches of government, any processes, maybe even every, any civil rights, because he wants to live in almost sort of a pure democracy where he has won this and therefore he is imbued with power. And it, it arises out of this sort of what the founders feared with these unchecked animal passions that give, you know, a lot, have a lot of momentary interest, and then elect somebody who’s, I, I think even by his own terms, he would say he’s a demagogue who stirs that.

Archon Fung: Right. Well, he certainly brought a lot of people in the electorate who were pretty tuned down and pretty cynical before. Yeah. And so I think that’s a democratic plus the huge Democratic minuses. Are he kinds of as, you know, maybe he wants just a one shot democracy where you get to decide once and then that person, but to me, that’s not a democracy. So when I, that’s to be again and again

Stephen Richer: When I think of, you know, democracy declining, sometimes it’s not so much the actions of any one individual. Yeah. But it’s the fact that, for instance, some of our governments, branches of government seem asleep at the wheel. Some of our institutional checks and balances don’t seem to exist. Some of the ways in which we engage in a civil society have been completely changed, probably for the worst. And so that, that, that’s my hot take for the, for the end of the day, which is just, we’re suffering in some ways from a surface of democracy.

Archon Fung: <laugh>

Stephen Richer: Any parting words for the guests?

Archon Fung: Well, I think we have to figure out how to, , take all of this energy, both the, the anger, but then also the democratic energy, people showing up for Donald Trump and other people, and crafted in a more liberal democratic election that does a direction that does respect people’s rights in civil liberties.

Stephen Richer: Well, thank you very much for joining us at the As center. This is Archon Fung, Steven Richer. Again, we are speaking only for ourselves. We are not speaking for Harvard University or the Ask Center. We hope that you will join us again next week. And if you have any comments, questions, suggestions, ideas, we’re just starting off doing this. This is week two. We’d love to hear from you, and we’d love to hear how we can continue to improve this.

Archon Fung:   Thanks for joining everyone, and thanks, Stephen.

Stephen Richer: Thanks, Archon.