Wait, Wait — What Happened?

Archon Fung: Hey, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement. This is episode twenty, milestone episode. We had an over-under.

Stephen Richer: Archon said we’d only make it five episodes. So, you know, we cleared that.

Archon Fung: Seven was my stretch goal.

Stephen Richer: It’s a nice biblical number, you know, seven. They rest it in everything. You do things in seven. So, yeah. But we made it to twenty.

Archon Fung: Right. But we’re no rest here in terms of engagement. I’m Archon Fung. I’m the director of the Ash Center and a faculty member here at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I am a senior practice fellow here at Harvard Kennedy School.

Archon Fung: Thanks for everyone who’s tuning in. And as always, we’re speaking as individuals, not as representatives of the institution.

Stephen Richer: and as always whoops let’s see I think oh we just cut out there for a little bit but also as always we love your questions put comments in there we’re going to be answering a few questions that we’ve received over past episodes today but also if you have additional questions or if you just want to give us some feedback feel free to put it into the chat box into the comment section.

Archon Fung: And I can’t believe we’re already at episode twenty so we’ve been uh live streaming for five months now and uh there’s been a huge amount of news so instead of good man yeah five months five months a big five months in American democracy instead of taking on a new topic, the team thought maybe we’d go back and revisit some of the themes that have come up and kind of assess what have the last five months and several developments meant for American democracy. Do you feel more positive about how things are going or more concerned? And we’ve touched on a lot of themes. We won’t be able to talk about all of them. So we thought we’d focus on two. And the first theme is how worried or confident are you in the free and fairness of the 2026 and 2028 elections? What is the last month’s told us about that, if anything? And the second is civil society institutions, and in particular universities, which we’ve covered for probably four or five episodes, and media. And we’ve talked about media a little bit and the tussle between the administration and universities and media.

Stephen Richer: Which continues. Which continues, right. I think he had another comment about Jimmy Kimmel recently, he being President Trump. Jimmy Kimmel, still on the Jimmy Kimmel? Yeah, among others.

Archon Fung: Among others, right. So we’re going to talk about those two. And then toward the end, we’ll talk about our holiday wish list for democracy. So we’re each only getting one list.

Stephen Richer: Who’s granting it?

Archon Fung: Well, the democracy powers that be. The tooth fairy of democracy. Exactly. Exactly. All right. So first topic, how are we feeling about the prospect of free and fair elections in twenty twenty six and twenty eight compared to like five months ago?

 Stephen Richer: So we have one data point that’s sort of national in scope. There have been a lot of elections. There are always state and local elections going on, but obviously this november just a few weeks ago with one major data point i don’t see how you could look at the election in virginia new jersey pennsylvania california and say that wasn’t a successful process I think a lot of the things that people were worried about whether it was DOJ monitors remember when we talked about that yeah or whether it was ICE outside of polling locations right right none of that manifested voting processes went largely smoothly Candidates were declared winners quickly. So I think that should give people some hope that moving forward will maybe be smoother sailing than some people maybe anticipated in light of President Trump’s remarks on elections. Right.

Archon Fung: I agree. So I agree. I agree. But then what about some of the worrying signs, the pardons of sixteen hundred January 6th protesters, the more recent pardons of the seventy seven people? Well, maybe a bunch of them involved in the scheme for alternate electors, some of the selective prosecutions of Jim Comey petition James, even though that’s not directly election related. Some people have said that’s a signal to Mr. Trump supporters that I will support you and go after my enemies. and then the continuing deployments of paramilitary ICE and then military national guard is still on the table so I’m a little I was thinking before the episode is this like are we I do feel more positive than five months ago for the reasons that you’re saying but is this like the frog getting boiled in water like there’s all of these things that like we didn’t imagine last December that have like crashed against waves crashing.

Stephen Richer: So so uh yesterday erica chenoweth and steve levitsky who are our colleagues here at uh at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School and at the department of government and talk a lot about autocracy it had been a month since they had gone on and erica at the top of the program rattled off all the noteworthy democracy things that had occurred.

Archon Fung: Positively?

Stephen Richer: Oh, no. I think in her mind, I think she was presenting them as noteworthy. I think she probably thought that they were negative. It was just sort of like breathtaking the number of things that happened that in maybe previous years would have been the development of the month. So I do think that there’s some to what you just said about the fraud boiling. And I think that no election administrator thinks that like, oh, we’re not going to have any concerns or any sort of democracy advocate is resting on their laurels. But I do think that November went very, very well. And I think that a lot of these things, you know, just the federal government has a lot of things going on and the sort of the likelihood that it can sort of get into the mechanics of every single jurisdiction and and play a role but i do think it can set a tone and i think that the point about the january six rioters being pardoned is i mean it’s a demonstration that this type of activity is more permissive than maybe we would have previously imagined. And I don’t know if some will be emboldened by that, but I could, I see the logic there. Yeah, yeah, right.

Archon Fung: So I’ve been thinking about after the elections in November, A lot of the commentary was about who won and what the margins were.

And I’m kind of thinking these days we should be thinking about politics and elections on three different fronts. The first one, which is most of the coverage, is who wins and who loses? Is it red or blue? The second front is who’s trying to rig the rules in their favor and how much. And that’s the gerrymandering fight in Texas and California. And then the third level is the meltdown, is will the winners, however rigged it was, be seated? And so maybe I’m thinking that third level, the risk level, we’re backing off a little bit for the reasons you say. But the second level certainly is churning really strong.

Stephen Richer: So I think obviously the redistricting component is going to continue to be a story. And my fear or that isn’t so much the legal process itself, but what will that do for people’s confidence? What will that do for confusion? What will that do to election administrators who are maybe going to be spending the first month of the year? Getting all their GIS mapping done and so that a voter doesn’t even necessarily know which congressional district that he or she is going to be in. And so I think that’s potentially problematic. I actually think that where there will be some challenge is if certain people don’t like the results. Some people don’t like the results. And so I think it will be in the aftermath again. And I think that some of these conversations, while they didn’t manifest in any sort of action at a voting location, could be pretext for saying no this wasn’t a fair and lawful election and therefore we shouldn’t abide by the results or just that we’ll return to a twenty twenty one level of confidence that would be that would be about that would be right right.

Archon Fung: So on the elections just it just happened in november why do you think it was the dog that didn’t bark in terms of crying foul on um uh on who won or who lost casting doubt on that yeah and will those factors lead to the dog not barking in 2026 well.

Stephen Richer: So some people said there was a little bit of chatter online about election administration being problematic or fraudulent and that resulted in But I think just because they were state and local elections, the results were abundantly clear. So the margins were big. Too big to rig. So it helps. And then it plays into the narrative. I think that the president quickly pivoted to, well, I wasn’t on the ballot. And there were blue states. yeah and some people might roll their eyes about that but there is something there is something to that yeah one he’s very popular with his base and then two there are a lot of low efficacy voters meaning people who don’t participate in every election who have become major trump supporters and so they might not have participated in some of those elections that were less i don’t know nationally grabbing um and so if if president trump had that and he also you know the the shutdown was a very present thing at that time And so maybe it was just that there were ready-made narratives that weren’t, this was a referendum on Donald Trump.

Archon Fung: Well, then does that underlying factor change in the midterm elections? He won’t be on the ballot, but a House-level loss for the Republicans would be a strong rebuke, I think. I think if the Dems take the House, I don’t see how you could avoid saying that’s at least in part a referendum on the president and his agenda. And then from the small-D democracy perspective, the worry would be that he has… stronger incentives and motives to cast doubt than he did in 2025, perhaps, because I think that he’s comfortable with some reasons for it. I think he’s comfortable in not being on the ballot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he’s comfortable with the shutdown, which he didn’t view as optimal, but he pinned that obviously on the Democrats. But I don’t think just sort of a negative prognosis of his time in office is something that’s not very digestible to many in that world. Right. Right. Okay. So I guess mixed bag. Appreciate the comments, perhaps. Oh, yeah. Served as a validation of the election results, too. I assume that the academic portal is referring to the no Kings protest, which we obviously talked about. Yeah. So, you know, do you think that there’s some quality through line between how many people were out at No King’s and the fact that these elections, setting the results aside, had higher turnout than oftentimes is the case in an odd year election. For instance, in New York now, I don’t know how much of that’s just the Mondani factor, but lots of people participated, much higher percentage.

Archon Fung: Yeah, it was a much more contested election, I think, than in.

Stephen Richer: But do you think there’s anything to be said about this question? That’s just like, look, people are turned on, right?

Archon Fung: I do. I think that people are, I mean, it kind of goes both ways. I think people are more turned on because of the polarization extreme. A lot of people, lots of events, lots of events, I’m surprised. And maybe upset at some of the things that the administration has done. And so, you know, that that increases the motivation to turn out. It is notable that the prominent campaigns, most of them were not the front line was not by authoritarianism affordability. So the politics maybe they knew the fighting authoritarian people were going to turn out anyway.

Stephen Richer: So that will continue to be a debate. I think that will be very much a debate in twenty twenty six is how much do Democrats run against? Look, he’s prosecuting James Comey’s prosecuting Letitia James. ICE is in the streets versus he didn’t take down price is as much as he campaigned on. And inflation hasn’t, you know, it hasn’t gone away. um I think that I’m not sure which one of those messages will work better I think that may in some of the more purple districts will campaign on prices and affordability still yeah versus um the threats to democracy yeah.

Archon Fung: I feel like you shouldn’t have to campaign on threats to democracy that people should just kind of take it for granted that you shouldn’t threaten.

Stephen Richer: I mean, the Harris campaign very much leaned into that on democracy. And obviously, while it was a close popular vote contest, President Trump won the popular vote in the Electoral College. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I don’t know. Mixed results.

Archon Fung: Yeah. So we wanted to bring in some questions from viewers both this time and then that have come through over the course of the last nineteen shows. So on the redistricting question. So just a little bit of update on the redistricting question. What’s happened is we talked about this a little bit last time, the district court the three judge panel ruled that the Texas 2025 map was invalid because it was a racially it was a racial gerrymander.

Stephen Richer: Because race was the primary motivating factor in drawing new maps.

Archon Fung: That’s what the majority ruled. And then for people who like reading judicial decisions. the dissent is very much worth reading.

Stephen Richer: Yeah, Jerry Smith’s dissent, which is over a hundred pages, uses caustic language and… Yeah, in my view, it’s a shame, especially for a judge. Correct, not… typical judicial yeah.

Archon Fung: Yeah absolutely and then uh i think i’ve got this right the appeals court supported the district court and then the supreme court stayed the ruling uh until the fuller hearing so as of now uh uh the new 2025 maps are in play those are the maps that they’re supposed to use And then I don’t know what the clock is for the Supreme Court hearing the full case.

Stephen Richer: I don’t know that. But so, yeah, Justice Alito is the justice who presides over the Fifth Circuit for for temporary injunctive relief, emergency injunctive relief. And yes, he kept. So the twenty twenty five maps, even though they were just ruled against, are the operative maps. And then, of course, in California, which is a little bit different process because they had to amend their constitution by popular vote. That was what was on the ballot. And it was what, two to one, basically. Yeah, yeah. For a sixty forty, sixty thirty five. And then the thing I found interesting was that at one point in the California conversation, they had talked about this is contingent upon Texas’s maps being redrawn.

Archon Fung: And they took that language out of Prop fifty.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. So we could be in the bizarre scenario in which even though this was started by Texas with a desire to bolster Republican chances for holding on to the House, this could wind up a net for Dems. Texas’s old map is ultimately ruled against and California’s citizen process stays in effect. Yeah, which I think it’s going, it’s gonna, I mean, this will be the California map. Well, the Department of Justice has sued saying that it has violates the Voting Rights Act and has racial implications as well.

Archon Fung: So, um, I’m glad to see the Department of Justice standing up for the Voting Rights Act.

Stephen Richer: Some people would say they didn’t intervene in the Texas one, but they’re intervening in the California one. I don’t know how much of that is a different fact pattern versus just sort of naked partisan politics. It is interesting because the Texas one, is that where they got in trouble was not just being nakedly partisan, where if they had said, we are redrawing these lines expressly to add more Republican seats. That would have been constitutional. That would have been okay.

Archon Fung: Right, right. So some viewers might understand, but some might not, that right now the constitution permits partisan gerrymanders. This was the result of Rucho v. Common Cause. But racial gerrymanders are unconstitutional. And so according to the district court’s decision, the problem with the Texas process is that it was not a partisan gerrymander, but it was a racial gerrymander. So the partisan gerrymander would have been AOK. Which was kind of funny. Right, right, right. What else have we got? Okay, so Monty McMurtry, three, six, five, nine, asks.

Stephen Richer: I think he’s on today. Oh, really?

Archon Fung: Oh, great. Oh, great. Asks, why not have AI draft distinct district map or district maps for the U.S. House with equal numbers of residents, which they have to do anyway. That’s the equipopulation principle. Thereby affording the voter the chance to select their representative instead of the representative choosing the voter. So why not have a pretty technocratic mechanical process? Basically just lay rectangles all over Texas or Arizona or California, wherever it is.

Stephen Richer: Love it. Love it. It’s a highly technical process. And anyone who’s done this before will tell you that it’s just painstaking. to be able to you know know when you’re going through a community of like interest or being even cutting through an apartment building or something like that i would happily hand this over to AI and I would imagine AI is going to be used a lot when drawing maps in the future now, to propose to the committees or whatever who doesn’t change, is that in most states still that is still the rule of the state legislature which can say hey AI, I want this to be a plus three D state or a plus five R state or something like that. And AI do that. But I do think that more this whole situation made more people aware of which states have independent redistricting commissions versus which state it’s wholly left to the state legislature. And maybe there will be more of a push to sort of hand it over to something that’s you know, sort of disinterested and completely technical. Right.

Archon Fung: Would you favor some technical, like a machine, an algorithm? Yeah, but I want everything. As opposed to an independent commission?

Stephen Richer: I want everything handed over to the machine. I want speeding tickets handed over to the machines. Machines don’t get sleepy, they’re not biased. Right, right.

Archon Fung: I mean, if it had enough information to reasonably tell what a coherent community of interest was…

Stephen Richer: I would imagine some of the cybersecurity and ethical use of AI, people are saying, well, AI is biased and AI has these baked in things. But in my imagination of it, I think that this is where we should go. Tom Gong is all about this, by the way.

Archon Fung: Really? I mean, this is a great, we’d love to hear audience thoughts. I guess you could have some hybrid where an AI proposes three maps and then the committee looks at those maps or where there’s a human final decision and review. It might feel more transparent and be more transparent compared to what’s going on now.

Stephen Richer: I think this is one of the areas where AI will be really neat and it will open up the process and more people will submit maps because I just think that process will be so much easier.

Archon Fung: Yeah. Well, that would be a positive change. That’s good. all right so uh tom deets asks is there so one of the things that uh President Trump said in the uh i don’t think it was an executive order it was a White h=House pronouncement on election administration okay or maybe it wasn’t an executive.

Stephen Richer: There was an executive order in march and then there was a pronouncement where he talks about vote by mail august august right well both kind of but more august yeah.

Archon Fung: Tom Dietz asked is there solid data on who will be less likely to vote if vote by mail is eliminated and he says i’m wondering both about b versus r but also like age income yeah do you think it would advantage some demographic groups or one party over another I don’t know.

Stephen Richer: I know there are statistics on who actually uses it, but there have been very few statistics on what happens when you roll it back, just because the use of mail voting, the trajectory has gone up and up and up and up. It looks like we’ve looked out there for a little bit, but I don’t think the audio is working out. So the use of it has continued to expand. So we haven’t seen the reverse. I don’t tend to view this as many liberal election people do and and don’t think it’ll be like the end of the world I think most people sort of like if you want to vote then like most people make the effort, even if it’s less convenient. And so I don’t think drop-off would be as steep. Now, that being said, I’m not advocating for the systematic revocation. Right, right.

Archon Fung: So you think the main question is the absolute drop-off rather than the advantage or disadvantage of particular groups? Yeah. Because it’s hard to tell, right?

Stephen Richer: I just don’t have anything smart or otherwise. I don’t have anything to say smart or otherwise. Right, right. About, yeah, the differential effects.

Archon Fung: All right. So so people should keep an eye on twenty twenty six and twenty twenty eight. A lot of people, especially on the capital democratic side, are saying, oh, it’s going to be a blowout. They’re feeling pretty good about their chances in the midterm, whether that’s true or not. I guess I don’t really care about that. I care more about the integrity of the elections. And so I think that’s one thing everybody should keep their eye on coming up. OK, so let’s move on to universities and the media. So democracy, a liberal democracy relies, I think libertarians and like liberal progressives agree on powerful bodies outside the government in which discussion can occur, in which people can form views, in which people can criticize. The government universities are one such and media is another. A lot of stuff has happened on both fronts. Are you feeling pretty good about free expression and search for the truth in both of those institutions despite university pressures or do you think or administration pressures or do you think? No, we there’s cause for concern.

Stephen Richer: So in one way, yes, actually. Yeah. In that. So let me talk about sort of the positives for, I think, free expression at the university level. Yeah. One, anyone who’s challenged the administration’s actions in court has won. Yes. Two, it’s made a lot of people. say this is important to us even if they’ve traditionally been more right-leaning such as fire the free yeah yeah right right has not they’re kind of…

Archon Fung: right principles remain constant they’re political.

Stephen Richer: And then so three and I’ll only make this four points i promise three i think it’s uh sort of made some on the left say like oh no this has to be a principle of the highest order and we maybe lost sight of that until President Trump attacked. And then four, I think it’s caused some introspect within universities to say, you know, if this is a high principle or if this is a high order principle, are we doing that? Are we doing enough to facilitate free speech, not vis-a-vis the government, but within our academic communities and have a robust enough conversation? And so I think there’s been some good. On the bad side, I’ll say, you know, a few universities and obviously a few large media organizations just sort of said like, hey, send over your demands. We’ll negotiate a little bit. We’ll send you a few millions of dollars and then, you know. like we’ll sign on to whatever you wanted.

Archon Fung: Yeah, right, right. So I’ll just add one. It might go with your number one about the lawsuits. One thing that makes me feel somewhat better, slightly more positive is five months ago, I think it wasn’t really clear whether anyone would or would be capable of resisting administration pressures. And so, you know, you’ve seen a lot of deals with Columbia, Cornell, Penn, UVA, others. But then the Compact for Higher Ed came out to nine universities initially. Seven of them have said no to our whatever, haven’t really said anything. They haven’t agreed to it. So I think that you see more kind of, no, we’re not going to do this. It’s too much of a threat to intellectual academic freedom. Do you think we’ve heard less about this in the last few months? I do. So I’m wondering why.

Stephen Richer: Do you think that the Trump administration has said this doesn’t pay much or this is kind of hard or just like it’s just not the topic at hand right now?

Archon Fung: I don’t really know. I think maybe it could be that some of the principals who are really pushing for this and the engines for it have gone on to do some other things, although many are still there. It could be regrouping as they’re trying different strategies, or it could be that they’ve kind of moved on. This is too hard. Maybe the political gain no longer is worthwhile. I don’t know.

Stephen Richer: I mean, they could say and all politicians do. We had success. We influenced how some of these universities behave. We had a few of them acknowledged. You know, anti-Semitism was a yeah. Some people would say pretextual reason for some of the administration’s involvement. But regardless, they would say we’ve seen some improvement on that. And so therefore, you know, it doesn’t need to be our priority anymore. Yeah, and maybe they’ve gotten a lot through what Tim Snyder called anticipatory obedience. Universities are doing a bunch of stuff that they would want even absent court victories. Do you think it will fire up again any time soon? I guess I probably do think. I think these things seem to have a rhythm and we’re kind of in a quiet… Yeah, I think Secretary McMahon said… just a few days ago that harvard was on the verge of a settlement which the administration has been saying week after week so i don’t really know the administration slash the new york times yeah right some combination thereof right.

Archon Fung: What about media, I think media organizations and universities One thing that these fights have made more visible, I think, for a lot of people inside them and for the American public is that really these organizations, there’s a lot of money at stake and keeping that money may not go the same direction as keeping freedom. Right. And I think that’s true in universities with the research grants and some very wealthy donors. But then maybe more for media organizations for changes in the Washington Post, Barry Weiss at CBS, you know, kind of media organizations, some of them wanting to stay on the right side of the Trump administration. So are you worried about the billionaire control issue?

Stephen Richer: I think a lot of people. Sorry, Sean, but I’ll try and spice it up. So I think… I think that a lot of people are learning that media companies are no longer just media companies, that the Washington Post is owned by something else that has a lot of disparate business interests. And same with NBC, owned by disparate interests. And so they are more heavily leveraged, I think, in terms of where else they have exposure vis-a-vis the government. I think that this will exacerbate the decline of traditional cable news, cable television. I think that we will see more YouTube channels and podcasts that will just be sort of fighting the fight in terms of what some viewers want. So I think it has been a little bit disappointing for people who think that they should resist uh the administration’s calls to do differently um and I think that those people have expressed their dissatisfaction by unsubscribing or not to Disnet or whatever it is yeah so maybe that’ll continue or the post or whatever right.

Archon Fung: Okay so last couple of minutes a holiday wish list for democracy. In the last couple of episodes, we covered a couple topics that were pretty focused on ways to improve democracy in a narrow gauge way. So we did fusion voting, talked about that. And then we did internet voting. Those are interesting things to explore. If I only had one wish, I don’t know that I would use it on either of those things.

Stephen Richer: On fusion voting or internet voting? Do I get one wish?

Archon Fung: Or it can be other things as well. It probably wouldn’t be either of those two. What would it be?

Stephen Richer: I think parties continue to have a really bad effect on the American political discourse. And I don’t really, I mean, this is, I like it in that it’s very Washingtonian in some ways. Beware of political parties. I don’t know that you can ever realistically move past parties, but I just think so many people default into their positions simply based off of what does my political party. I think that polarization has reached just a complete fever pitch, almost such that we’ve outsourced our thinking. We’ve outsourced our political philosophy. Does this align with political philosophy? Does this seem like good public policy? And just is this team red or is this team blue? And so I’m increasingly pessimistic about them. And I think that they’re just stifled debate. It’s stifled ingenuity.

Archon Fung: So you would want no parties or just more than two parties?

Stephen Richer: I think I would take away any sort of special status that any of the political parties have. So a lot more independent candidates. well just you do you run on the ballot just everyone runs on the ballot and you don’t have a party label so I can form a club I can form the we all like cats organization or something that’s weird that was the first thing that came to mind but we can rally around that and we can even say this is going to be our candidate and he’s going to push for animal activism or something like that. But it wouldn’t be designated and they wouldn’t be given special privilege in terms of ballot access and everything like that. And maybe that would lead to a more multi-faceted election process that wouldn’t just default to, well, you know, And Timar said our politics are this today and tomorrow it’s this, but I’m with it not because of any coherent reason, but because Timar. Yeah. Good, good. All right. Cheers.

Archon Fung: So mine is about money and politics, which I think is not going away without constitutional amendment.

Stephen Richer: But why is it different?

Archon Fung: Because this was very much like in the nineteen nineties. Yeah. Democracy advocates talked about. We’re very worried about money in politics. It’s true. how does this sort of why is this different yeah yeah yeah so I think the nineteen nineties worry which I certainly still share is that you know some people and some interests have a lot of money many others do not and when there’s so much money in the political process you get laws and public policies which advantage people who have a lot and work to the disadvantage of other people Now, I think there’s a whole new twist on that, which is a lot of people without monetary resources are populous now and want to burn the whole thing down. I’m very happy that you’re saying that. And so it’s really out of balance. So you could have like the two options on the table are a corrupt system that’s dominated by money, whether it’s our money or D money. Or right now, predominantly a right populist, but I could imagine left versions as well, that is very, very skeptical about institutional structure at all and ready to burn the whole thing down. And neither of those two alternatives are very attractive. And so then the first one is the nineties worry, which I still share. But this other one is much, much more present. And I mean, I’m really glad you said that.

Stephen Richer: I actually, you know, to me, sort of, you know, corporations give too much money or the wealthy give too much money. It’s like, one, I disagree. And two, it’s I feel that, you know, we’ve had those conversations before. I’m sitting here thinking that campaign finance messed us up because I think we should have to go to the chambers of commerce and sort of like, Get by it. And I think that they should have a bigger role because they sort of play this gatekeeping function versus today. Like it’s so diffuse and spread out over low dollars that what gets people to donate, like just appealing to sort of this basis animal instinct, like they will take your children in the middle of the night if you don’t vote for me. Which works well for, I think, a lot of sort of populist demagoguery on both the right and the left. And so I think sort of the rise of the dominance of the small dollar donor is to me like, is like, The popular story has potentially a corrosive impact. Yeah.

Archon Fung: Yeah. But I guess I don’t think we’re going to put that part back in a bottle. Right.

Stephen Richer: And so you’ve got to have some third thing of sort of being able to give directly to candidates.

Archon Fung: Oh, I see.

Stephen Richer: Corporations being able to give directly to candidates. individuals being able to give unlimited amounts to candidates. And then, you know, those sort of the elites become important again, because then you can just go out and you can, you know, say like to Bezos or to Musk or to Jeannie Diamond, and you can say, I want a million dollars. And then they might say, okay, well, then you have to have, I don’t know if this describes those three individuals, but you have to have like a reasonable public policy plan. Tech and development policy or whatever it is. Yeah. And that, I think, might have a good effect.

Archon Fung: I don’t know. I mean, I guess I really worry that that would fuel the whole cynicism that everyone’s bought, which is like, I mean, people think that now anyway. But I think this is a big one. It used to be dominance of money. Now it’s, oh, people got wise to the dominance of money. The response to that is populism that may, I mean, it’s a huge topic of this show, erode all of these institutions that we depend on. Yeah. what’s another set of alternatives going to be?

Stephen Richer: Unless there’s fatigue from the small dollar donor that says, you know what, ever since the internet got easier to fundraise. Yeah, the move on. And it’s been like for ten years now you’ve been telling me like, my children will disappear and like they have it yeah and we’ve lost some elections so no I don’t need to give twenty five dollars every single time you text me now and so maybe that just sort of naturally falls off the cliff and then we’re back to sort of the 1990s world which then you can fight sort of the same yeah yeah I can be happy.

Archon Fung: Right right I’d rather be fighting that at least that’s just one fight that I understand pretty well all right so that is our uh episode I hope people enjoyed a little overview and uh we’ll return next week we don’t know what the topic is because probably uh things will happen over thanksgiving and early next week that are really important for the future of american democracy. So thanks for joining if you have suggestions about themes or want to offer feedback or questions just email info ash.harvard.edu.

Stephen Richer: Yeah this has been a fun experiment thanks for sticking with us for the first twenty episodes and if you have ideas uh let us know and yeah like archon said uh so come back and give us your input.

Archon Fung: Yeah and big thanks to our production team which is uh colette uh courtney uh and sarah great all right take care everyone Thank you.