"Democracies are adaptive": RPL webinar panelists demonstrate that reform begins with imagination
On April 1, 2025, Religion and Public Life hosted the second session of Breaking the Matrix, a five-part series of online conversations on carcerality in the United States. This second session, “The U.S. Democratic System,” highlighted American democracy. Becca Leviss, MTS ‘25, moderated the discussion, which featured Aditi Juneja, Executive Director at Democracy 2076, and Grant Tudor, Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy. The talk was made available in a number of prisons through collaboration with UCLA’s Prison Education Program and Center for Justice.
Many structural aspects of the U.S. political system are assumed to be natural or immutable, but they are actually specific choices that were made at a certain point in history. Many of them are not essential to the core of democracy, evidenced by the fact that they are not shared globally. Both Tudor and Juneja drew on the metaphor of the ‘water we swim in,’ in which we do not realize that things could be different.
For example, Tudor highlighted that “we have a winner-takes-all electoral system, but that’s not the only way. . . . Many of the things we take as constitutional fact—like single-member districts—are actually statutory choices.” Even constitutions, laws, and electoral systems have fashions, as Juneja pointed out. This means that all things can change. She continued, “Most constitutions around the world are amended with regularity. Ours isn’t sacred. It was created by people, and it can be changed by people.”
In fact, Juneja challenged the nature of the U.S. Constitution, as one that doesn’t honor aspects of basic humanity that other constitutions do. In other countries, “they really think about their constitution as a social contract and use it to answer the question ‘what do we owe one another?’ . . . And I think we’re really missing that in our constitution; we don’t even have an affirmative right to vote.”
However, there are real barriers to reform. While some barriers are technical and legal, the vast majority of them are imaginative. “Our systems are designed to be changed,” Tudor emphasized, saying, “The barriers are not laws, the barriers are just customs.” This kind of reform requires both imaginative thinking and constituency power.
One of the ways we can cultivate better imagination is through storytelling. This was particularly highlighted by Juneja, who pointed out that people understand systems and values through narratives not policy briefs. Cultural narratives influence political imagination more than policy preferences. As Juneja stated, people are “whole people, with lives beyond democracy . . . especially for the 60% of Americans who are actively avoiding political news.” It is essential to remember that these people are still learning about democracy, values, and the news through the stories we tell, and they then vote based on those identities and values. Juneja continued,
The stories from your childhood, the nursery rhymes, the parables, the religious stories are powerful because they have values embedded in them. They teach you lessons about what is okay and not okay. And I think that is, at a basic level, what we’re doing every time we tell stories about the systems we operate in and our democracies. And we’re writing stories right now about what is okay and not okay.
“If you want to change something, you have to be able to imagine it differently first. Storytelling makes that possible,” echoed Leviss. One clear example of imagination potentially leading to real change was highlighted by Tudor, who pointed to the example of multipartyism and fusion voting to help build a more representative democracy. He explained that the two-party system is not inevitable. Single member districts lead to two-party dominance, but legal and structural reforms could open space for broader representation. “If you have a district with five members instead of one, five members have a chance at a seat,” finished Tudor. Fusion voting is a potential mechanism for change, and it is a tool that has historically worked in the past. It enabled fringe ideas like abolition to gain national traction. Applied contemporarily, fusion voting could allow cross-nominations to break the binary. Tudor shared the story of the Liberty Party as an example:
In the 1830’s, a band of Abolitionists formed the Liberty Party, which at the time was seen as a dangerous radical fringe movement that eventually used mechanisms like fusion [voting] to signal support for major party candidate. . . . The Liberty Party, in coalition with others, formed the Free-Soil Party, which eventually became the Republican Party. . . . Fusion [voting] is not the sole reason that any of that happened, but it was one mechanism that allowed a minor party to exert influence in the electoral system. . . . Fusion voting helped abolitionist ideas grow into a national political force. That’s a playbook we can re-use.
Tudor and Juneja asserted repeatedly that we have more individual agency than we think we do in the current system. Change simply requires audacious individuals and the capacity to act in an information-saturated world. Juneja highlighted that the current challenge is to be able to “sift through that information, not be paralyzed by it, and translate it into agency and action.” The problem is not access—it’s agency. Democracy work is about transforming information into action.
To enable people to do this, it is important to be conscious of the language we use. While today’s crises feel unique, the myth of the “unprecedented” is not always helpful. American history provides both precedent and lessons for moving forward. Understanding past crises can help us imagine constructive responses. “We have been this polarized before, there have been eras where the levels of inequality have reached comparable heights,” Tudor said, while also highlighting that in all these instances, change, transformation, and innovation have followed.
This panel showed that the carcerality of the democratic system is primarily rooted in our imagination. Democracy is valuable precisely because it can evolve. The goal is to prepare people, as best as possible, to imagine and enact that evolution. As Leviss said, “one of the ways authoritarianism thrives is by encouraging black and white thinking.” Reform, by contrast, thrives on nuance, imagination, and shared values.
Tudor and Juneja left the audience with a multitude of examples, highlighting what Tudor stated early in the panel: “One of the central arguments for having a democracy as opposed to an autocracy, is that democracies are adaptive.” There is great potential and power in this adaptivity, if we simply have the imaginative courage to seize it.