Video: Breaking the Matrix: The U.S. Democratic System
We are embedded in systems that we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us because of the fascination of U.S. politics with carcerality. We have an opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation.
Experts have been ringing alarm bells for years on U.S. democracy’s unique vulnerabilities to the global rise of authoritarianism. Americans across the political spectrum have been steadily losing faith in public governmental institutions. With 34% of voters saying that democracy was the issue that mattered the most to them this election, the results from this past presidential election show more complicated demarcations than Black vs. White, Republican vs. Democratic, progressive vs. conservative.
In this conversation, speakers discussed how to to facilitate a multi-racial democracy and build a robust path forward for democratic institutions.
Featuring
- Grant Tudor, Policy Advocate at Protect Democracy
- Aditi Juneja, Executive Director at Democracy 2076
Moderated by Becca Leviss, MTS ‘25, CRPL ‘25
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Breaking the Matrix, the US Democratic System, March 31, 2025.
HUSSEIN RASHID: I'm Hussein Rashid, assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusetts, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusetts tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusetts people.
Welcome, and thank you for being here. Religion and Public Life is dedicated to service of just world is peace. We work with a dynamic method that has religious literacy at its core, and brings a critical analysis to understand, and challenge systems of inequity. Our focus on just peacebuilding, recognizes that a peace without justice is not sustainable.
The goal of RPL programming is to bring analysis from experts, including academics and practitioners, and those living in inequitable systems, and offer some ways forward to build a more just world. The program is currently led by interim director Dean David Holland and previously by Diane L Moore the former associate Dean for RPL.
This series, like all our programming, would not be possible without the support of our team, including Ream, Hillary, Anna, Natalie, Tammy, Hisham, Rachelle, and Elise. Early tours occur in student who is helping with the series in various capacities. I also have to mention Becca Leviss and Elizabeth Berger, the students who conceived of this series, and who have been instrumental in putting it together, and who will be moderating as the series moves forward. Thanks to them all.
We are embedded in systems that other people created, in which we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us over time because of the US fascination of US politics with carcerality. These systems mimic official cultural spaces. The events of the past year have highlighted how our past methods of sense and knowledge-making no longer hold.
In these moments of breakage, we have an opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation. We invite you to the process of radical reimagining with us. By bringing together academics, advocates, and activists, we will begin to imagine the systems that liberatory thought can create, and what needs to be done to get us to invest in futurist visions of more equitable social structures.
These conversations will engage elements of RPL's approach to just peacebuilding by exposing power structures, understanding systems of violence, engaging relationally, being creative, and exploring the role of religion. We are pleased to be working with UCLA's prison education program and center for justice to make this series available to incarcerated people throughout the country.
The mission of UCLA's prison education program and center for justice is to make higher education accessible to those who are incarcerated, and to bring UCLA students, staff, and faculty together to learn alongside them, and thereby challenge bias, discrimination, and injustice in a collaborative learning environment.
In a moment when so many people are disillusioned and frustrated, we have a critical responsibility to hold the complexity and curiosity required to create strong and sustainable future for our democratic institutions. Drawing on their extensive backgrounds in academia, political organizing, and advocacy, our speakers will show us how they are imagining the future of a multiracial democracy that truly works for everyone, as well as offer some practical and viable paths forward.
I would like to begin by introducing our moderator for this evening, Becca Leviss, MTS '25. Becca investigates the interplay between faith, community and identity. She helped build the fundraising team at protect democracy, a leading nonprofit in the US democracy movement, where she managed institutional giving and major gifts.
Now, she explores the ongoing relationships between Black and Jewish scholarship and activism, and how those insights can inform critical frameworks to envision and build expansive futures for Jewish identity and a pluralistic democracy. And tonight, we have two amazing speakers, Aditi Juneja, and Grant Tudor.
Aditi Juneja is the executive director of Democracy 2076, an organization founded in 2023 working long term to change our Constitution, political culture, and political parties. Previously, she was chief of staff at the movement voter project and prior to that spent four years at Protect Democracy, where she led the work of the national task force on election crises. Her writing has been featured in Vox, NPR, and Talking Points Memo. She received her JD from NYU Law School and a BA from Connecticut College.
Grant Tudor is a policy advocate with to Protect Democracy, an anti-authoritarian group, where he develops and advocates for a range of reforms to shore up our democratic institutions. He's written on conflict and political reform for various outlets, including the Atlantic, The New Republic, Democracy Journal, and Foreign Policy, among others.
He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he was a fellow at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. Thank you all for being here this evening. And with that, I'll turn it over to Becca.
BECCA LEVISS: Thank you, Hussein. I just want to echo thanks to Grant and Aditi for being here, and for those tuning in on the webinar, and who will watch the recording in the future. There are no shortages of demands on your time and energy these days. So thank you, thank you for spending the next 90 minutes or so with us.
I want us to take a step back first. We're talking about liberal democracy, but it feels like there's six million different definitions of what that means. So what do we mean when we say liberal democracy? Aditi, I'd love to invite you to start us off here with defining our terms.
ADITI JUNEJA: Sure, the liberal part of liberal democracy is about individual rights. And the democracy part is about governance by will of the majority. And so as you can imagine, in the course of American history and global history, those two concepts have been in tension from time to time.
And, in fact, for most of the US's history, we were an illiberal democracy because not everyone had all of their rights. And that is a thing that happens. And some might argue we're still an illiberal democracy. So trying to reconcile those two tensions is the work of liberal democracy.
BECCA LEVISS: Awesome. Grant, do you want to add something?
GRANT TUDOR: Sure. I'm just going to give a big plus to Aditi's definition. I think in addition to those two major component parts that could broadly encapsulate at least aspirationally how we define advanced democracies today. Every democracy looks meaningfully different from the next.
And one of the reasons I think why that's the case is not just the what of liberal democracy, but how. So we talk about presidential democracies versus parliamentary democracies, or democracies that use winner take all for elections versus those that use proportional representation, and so on and so forth. And so very quickly the definitions, when you start to look under the hood, become kind of very diverse, and sometimes, kind of very messy.
I don't want to get too ahead of us, Becca, but I think that tees up one of the major themes I'm hoping for the conversation today, which is, the US has a very particular rise and relatively anomalous style of democracy. And I think we're at a point in time where it's appropriate to consider whether the types of systems that we're using to at least aspirationally look towards liberal democracy, whether the ones that we have right now are best suited to do that.
BECCA LEVISS: And Grant, I think that's totally right. Part of what Hussein lead us out with is this idea of a lens of carcerality, which means of, what are the limits that the systems we operate under impose on us? What are the limits we actually impose on ourselves when we conceive of and try to imagine what our democracy can look like?
So Grant, you throw out a lot of really important words and terms like proportional representation, like winners-take-all. I'd love for you to talk about what are some limits that are imposed in our current electoral systems, and maybe what are the limits that we kind of impose on ourselves.
GRANT TUDOR: Sure. I'm just going to give a very concrete and seemingly very specific example to ground us. I promise that it is more interesting and universal than it is initially going to seem, I think, especially with the lens of I'm going to use the phrase what we take for granted, the institutions that we've inherited that I think we sometimes presuppose are inherent in a democracy as opposed to chosen and, therefore, changeable.
So the example I'm going to lead with is we have what's termed by political scientists as a winner-take-all electoral system. And the way that looks in the United States is we elect our members of Congress, we elect our state legislators. We elect virtually almost every representative to office legislatively, at least in single-member districts. And essentially what that means is we choose a single winner when we go to the ballot box to represent an entire jurisdiction, an entire geographical area.
Now, that seems like so intuitive. Like, how else could it possibly work? It's more or less what we've done from the beginning. But it's a good example because we are one of the few remaining democracies that use that system, advanced democracies, that is. By contrast, most of the world's democracies use an entirely different electoral system called proportional representation, where we elect multiple representatives from each district.
So I think I'll maybe wait, Becca, to get into what the difference meaningfully is about and how it generates, sometimes, very different outcomes for democracies. But there's a lot of examples like that, where I think we take something that from the beginning of, from the country's founding and even predating that to the colonial era. Yeah, it's the water we swim in. So how else would we do it?
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, I love that. Aditi, you were working more in constitutional systems as opposed to electoral systems. Now, could you maybe share a little bit about the structures we're operating under there, and how there are certain assumptions inherent in those structures.
ADITI JUNEJA: Yeah, I loved what Grant said about it being the water that we swim in. I think that as we were doing our workshops on a Constitution for 2076, this was a real challenge for us. Like, how do you break out of the water that you swim in?
And so one of the things that we did was we created a menu of constitutional amendments, and essentially we just pulled ideas from other countries. So a bunch of the stuff Grant was talking about, parliamentary systems, proportional representation. And we tried really hard to be honest brokers. So to include a spectrum of ideas from the left and right, and throughout history. So we included like sortition from ancient Greece and all kinds of ideas.
And I think what was really striking to our participants was to realize that not only are these ideas common in other countries, we're actually the weird ones, that we are the weird ones for only having two parties, we're the weird ones for having a Senate that can block things that the proportionate house would get done. No other country in the world still has a system like that.
I did a, particularly, deep dive into the electoral college, and there were other countries that had systems similar, and they amended their constitutions. And I think it's just a function of how old our Constitution is, and the fact that it hasn't undergone major changes the way a lot of European constitutions went under after World War II.
And then a lot of other countries also wrote their constitutions in the 1900s post colonization. So, like India, a lot of the African countries. And so they had the benefit of seeing what was happening in the rest of the world, but it was also just a different time. So the mindset and the fashion cycle of where we were constitutionally was different in the 1900s versus the 1700s. And I think it's hilarious that constitutions have fashions, but they do.
GRANT TUDOR: I'll just very quickly add on that, I think not only just to underscore what Aditi shared, not only is some of our institutional inertia a consequence of how old some of our systems are, how old our Constitution is, but some of the ways in which other democracies now operate, some of those systems were not even invented yet. It's not even that democracies weren't choosing them. It's that is that didn't even exist.
Again, I know we'll probably get into this a bit more later, but there was really one and only one electoral system, winner-take-all, at the nation's founding. Robert Dahl, a political theorist, said once that so much of this was just, quote, "the only game in town." So of course, we did it that way. And now, there's a lot of other games in town. And it's kind of incumbent on us to think about what those games, what they could look like today.
BECCA LEVISS: So you talked about themes and fashions. And in all of those there are rules about what's in and what's out, what's allowed and what's not allowed. Some of those rules are explicit. Some of them, I think, are assumptions, and implicit, and socially constructed. Would you all be able to share what those assumptions are and maybe a bit about how they were built? If you can share that.
GRANT TUDOR: OK, I'll start. So let me just, I'm going to put my cards on the table. I am, in large part, going to use this opportunity to speak with you all about putting something, somewhat specific on the table, which is multipartyism.
And the reason I'm using this as an opportunity is, one, Protect Democracy has for a number of years now been advancing kind of a theory of the case that one of the principal barriers to authoritarian proofing our democracy is the fact that there's only two parties. So just to be honest about my bias.
But I think, I'm hoping that it speaks to the audience here today. In large part, because a central thesis of multipartyism is it's a way to make representation a lot finer. And what I mean by finer is more exact. It is kind of a wild phenomenon that in one of the most diverse, largest countries on Earth, we have flattened representation into, essentially dividing the entirety of the polity into two warring camps.
So to go to Becca's question, we assume that the emergence of two political parties, I think, we often assume is organic. We have just somehow shuffled ourselves into these two camps. And political scientists will tell you that that's nonsense, that political parties are a function of certain rules in terms of the number of them, the scale of them, things of that sort.
So I had mentioned single member districts at the beginning of this. Single-member districts typically produce directionally two-party systems. If it's helpful, I can explain why. But just take it as a given for right now.
Other countries that use multi-member districts-- so they elect multiple representatives per district-- open up more space for more parties to compete. So that the really intuitive way of thinking about it is, let's say, you have a district with five members instead of one, five parties have a chance of winning a seat. And so there's an incentive for parties to develop and form and compete and contest those seats.
So in the United States, in federal law, the US House, as well as most state legislatures have to elect their members through single-member districts. And what that means is-- and this is kind of a hopeful point-- is that the law can change. So one of the things that we do at Protect Democracy is interrogate, kind of on a technical level, what would be required to tweak some of the rules of our system. This would be one example, changing from single-member districts to multi-member districts that would, in this case, allow more parties to form.
So again, I know that it probably sounds like a very kind of arcane example, but in terms of the implications for our democracy, a two-party system versus not. The fact that it really is a function to some-- there's other factors-- but in large part, it is a function of a rule, in this case, a statute, it's kind of wild. And I think for those of us who do advocacy in this space, it's inspiring, because it means that there's very real and direct work to do.
ADITI JUNEJA: Yeah, that's a great example. Thank you, Grant, for buying me time because I didn't have a good answer off the top of my head. I think, some of the assumptions built into our Constitution are that, our rights are divinely ordained on us from God, and that our government can only take away rights.
Most other countries in the world whose constitutions were written in the 1900s are secular. And so they don't have this. They really think about their constitutions as a social contract. And to answer the question, what do we owe one another? Which is a question from a famous philosopher, but I heard it on the good place.
And I think we're just really missing that in our Constitution. We don't even have an affirmative right to vote. And so the idea that we have all of our rights as ordained by the creator, and it is the government is infringing upon those rights. And so our Bill of Rights is all negative rights that the government shall not infringe upon. Because the assumption is we have all those rights.
That's a very American thing. It's a very unique thing that only we have, not only we have, but it's super unique to the moment in time in which our Constitution was written post enlightenment. And I think it's really interesting and strange in many of the similar ways that Grant is talking about because it feels arbitrary.
And I think the other thing I'll say is, if you go to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and you see the Constitutional Convention and the conversations they were having, I'm not going to remember the numbers exactly, but even like landing on one president, two branches of Congress, like the judiciary, they were talking about it and this was like the eighth draft. And so if there had been a ninth draft, it would have just been something different.
And I say that, just to say that our systems of governance are arbitrary. It was like 50 guys in a room, and they were like, that sounds fine. Let's do that. And they debated it some and if they had debated it for two more days, it would have been something different.
And so the other assumption that we have in the US, which I think is historically relatively recent, is this idea of a civic religion. People talk about it also as US propaganda that our Constitution is like divinely ordained, and it cannot be touched, and we cannot change it, and it's just simply not true. The founders changed it 10 times while they were alive, while they were here.
And Thomas Jefferson thought we should rip the whole thing up and write it again every 30 years. And so I just-- the esteem with which we hold our founding documents is, again, like water we swim in, but also very odd contextualized in other countries.
GRANT TUDOR: I hadn't thought about this in a long time, Aditi, until you kind of just made reference to it. One of the central arguments for having a democracy as opposed to an autocracy, is that democracies are adaptive.
In the same way, theoretically that free markets, as opposed to say, centralized markets are adaptive. You have the ability to change over time, and to respond to contemporary moments. And so it should be like a source of pride that our institutions and the rules including those embedded in the Constitution are changeable. It is the central premise of democracy.
BECCA LEVISS: That was so beautifully said. And Aditi, I want to pull on this thread that you brought up about civic religion. And particularly, this idea of divine right. Sorry, y'all are in a Religion and Public Life webinar. I just can't with that one pass me by.
Which is to say, you know what? At the Center for Religion and Public Life, we talk a lot about secularism and cellularity, but particularly the situatedness of what we think of as secularism. In that, this conception of what is secular and what is religious really comes out of, Aditi, to your point, this immediate post-enlightenment era coming from the city of Western liberalism sort of evolving from Greek and Roman philosophy.
And so when we talk about the divine rights that are enshrined in the Constitution by a sort of god, I think it's important we also ask like, what sort of god was this inspired by? And that's not to say a Christian God, because I actually think that's an oversimplification.
I think it is a particular assumption of Christianity that is coming out of this particular moment of enlightenment, Western Europe that is informing this conception of, what are our divine rights? What is the right of man or human that is given by God? And so I think when we think about divine right, we also need to ask like what divine right? And who is that divine being?
And how is even this conception of divinity itself situated in a particular historical context? That, in many ways, has been preserved, and there are scholars well more versed, far better versed in this than I am, who can actually point to the ways in which we can see the proof points and the evidence preserved in our Constitution of a very particular idea of what is a divine human right and what isn't.
ADITI JUNEJA: Yeah, I mean, it's also who is considered human in this context and at this moment in time. So who is this Christian God for? Like, I am certainly not a religious scholar, but I have a little bit of familiarity with liberation theology. And that was not this God. This God was not like free the slaves. That was not the God that inspired the Three-Fifths Compromise. And it was not in that image. And so I think that's another piece of this.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, absolutely. So I brought up this idea of situatedness, of where we are within our own historical contexts, our knowledge-making contexts. All of us have done democracy work for anywhere from 5 to 15 years. And I think a phrase you constantly hear in the democracy movement nowadays, but always is at this moment, is totally unprecedented, we're in this unprecedented moment for American democracy.
And I kind of roll my eyes. I see you all rolling your eyes as well. Because I think we need to resist that misnomer. This is not a completely unprecedented moment. Even when we think about reimagining democracy, these sort of patterns are not unprecedented.
So, for example, I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which the last time we had massive rewriting of state constitutions were in quick succession immediately post-Civil War, when all of the Confederate states were required to rewrite their state constitutions to enfranchise formerly enslaved African-Americans, and then immediately, 12 years later, post end of Reconstruction, when all those states once again held these constitutional conventions to essentially undo everything that they had done 12 years earlier.
And so I pointed that to say that what we're seeing now in the constitutional reform space is not even totally unprecedented. I see Aditi nodding so good. I'm on the right track there. All of it to say is like in the futurism space, we often say we look back to look forward.
And from a religious studies lens, I can talk about how time is not linear. We have circular time. We have, in Jewish time we have something called spiral times. We move forward even as we repeat the same sort of ingredients as we move throughout history.
And I think this tells us two really important things. I know this is a bit long-winded, so I appreciate you all for sticking with me. I think one, it teaches us that the tools we have at our disposal are both really imaginative and also really historical, and have historical precedent. And also the stories we're going to tell about those tools are both imaginative, they require imagination, and also require utilizing history and grounding this in history.
So this is all a wind up to say, Grant, you had talked a little bit about different tools that we've had throughout history in terms of voting and electoral systems. I'd love for you to talk a little more about fusion voting, and what its historical roots are, and how it's being reimagined for this moment.
GRANT TUDOR: Sure. You're just like getting right to the stuff that makes my heart flutter. Before I jump into that, can I just quickly as an add on to what you were just saying, Becca, which I love. I think, in some ways, when folks say, at least parts of this moment are unprecedented, I think in a technical sense, depending on what they're pointing to, they're right.
I hope I'm not going to get in trouble by saying this. But this is, in fact, the first time that we have a felon as a president. It is, in fact, the first time that the leader of an insurrection has pardoned insurrectionists. So there are dimensions to what we are now experiencing, that, I think, it's OK to acknowledge that this is quite different.
At the same time, the broad brushstroke of we're living in an unprecedented era, I think it's not only incorrect for the reasons that you were kind of nodding to Becca, but I think it's also unhelpful, because when you acknowledge that, in fact, we have been this polarized before, there have been eras where the levels of inequality have reached comparable heights, when you acknowledge that those histories are with us, then the next question is like, well, what happened after?
And often, it's a mix of really fascinating and cool stuff, and also some scary lessons to learn. So that brings me to the fusion. So I think one of the reasons that Becca is flagging this is, one, it's something that protect democracy is doing a lot of advocacy around. But two, I think it's a really good example of a way that the US used to do things, in this case, a mechanism by which it used to elect representatives, that was disbanded with, and is kind of worth reconsidering today because we are going through maybe one of the spirals that Becca is alluding to.
So very, very quickly, just to ground us. Fusion voting it is a method by which usually a kind of a smaller minor political party can cross nominate a major party candidate. Again, this is going to sound very technical, but I promise it's more interesting and ladders up to something much bigger.
So an example would be, let's say, I'll just use, I don't know, like a kind of a semi made up contemporary example, let's say, like a Libertarian Party in the US, doesn't think that it's feasible to field its own candidate. Just in our largely two-party system, there's no chance of success, little chance of success. But they do think that their supporters ought to favor one candidate from the major parties over the other. And so fusion allows them to cross nominate one of the major party candidates, let's say, the Republican candidate in this instance.
As a voter, when you go into the voting booth, on the ballot, you'll have, say, Republican candidate listed next to the Republican line, and then you'll also have that same candidate listed next to the Libertarian Party line. So if you're a Libertarian voter, you can vote on the Libertarian Party line, but you're voting for a major candidate. So that's essentially fusion in a nutshell.
Fusion used to be really commonplace throughout the 19th century across the nation. And one of the reasons why it was really powerful is it provided an incentive for minor parties to form and take often relatively radical and fringe ideas, like anti-slavery, and put them on the national agenda.
So just to give one quick example and then we can circle back and talk more about it if it's interesting. But in the 1830s, 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 to signal support for major party candidates.
Now, if you get enough votes from a minor party, you start to pay attention to that minor party and respond to essentially kind of what it's putting on the table.
Over the course of a couple of decades in the lead up to the Civil War, the Liberty Party in coalition with others, formed the Free Soil Party. The Free Soil Party eventually became the Republican Party, and then the Republican Party eventually had overwhelming majorities in Congress. It took the White House, and then it was responsible largely for, arguably, the most important juncture in our history.
Fusion 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. I'll just pause there, because that was a lot. I think there are reasons to reconsider bringing it back today, but I think that hopefully gets to some of what you were asking Becca.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, that's awesome. I just want to rephrase and restate to make sure I'm getting this and folks listening understand this. Someone far smarter than me once told me that history rhymes. And I feel like that is kind of, that's the spiral time. Like, it rhymes. The ending feels similar. We recognize it.
And also, each time we go back around, it is incredibly urgent and incredibly existential. And I think we have to figure out how to have both things be true at the same time. Like having someone who is completely disregarding the rule of law and human dignity in the highest executive office, is urgent and existential. And that's important not to lose, while at the same time, we can, like I said, look back in order to look forward.
And I also love this idea of history rhyming because part of what rhymes function-- if any of us were like nursery rhyme kids, I totally was-- is it helps us remember and connect. The reason we sing songs and tell rhyming stories is it helps us sort of store these ideas in our head and in our hearts differently.
So to that and, Aditi, I know you're doing a lot of work around storytelling about democratic tools and democratic institutions. How are you understanding this particular moment from a democratic cultural storytelling lens?
ADITI JUNEJA: I think that we have a dearth of stories about the future. I think part of the reason we feel so stuck in this moment. And it feels so unprecedented. Everything is unprecedented depending on the window of time in which you're looking at it. And so if I'm only thinking about it in the course of the 30 years of my life, everything is unprecedented. The 35 years of my life is unprecedented.
But it doesn't mean it's unprecedented historically. And I actually think that's really important to keep in mind. And I think we lose track of that because it is the case that we are living in the urgent, we are living in the iPhone era. We are living in a moment where everything is fast. And so it can be hard to be patient. It can be hard to think back to further moments in history.
And so one of the places we are looking at this sort of storytelling piece is in film and television. When we've done scenario exercises, thinking about the Constitution over the next 50 years, it's been really striking how quickly people turn to film and television and stories that they've seen. It's just the first reference many people have.
And in our research, we found that only 8% of the stories we have about democracy take place in the future. And so the vast majority of stories people are consuming about democracy are either in the present or in the past. And of the 8% that are set in the future, only half of them depict healthy democracies.
And so our ability to imagine what the future of democracy could look like at a moment when we are living in an increasingly complex world and increasingly interconnected world, globalized world changing demographics, AI, climate change, all the things, our priors, the water we swim in the things we take for granted we, a lot of the world views many of us have are rooted in hierarchy and scarcity.
And we need practice to imagine something different. And we don't have a lot of stories that help us imagine a different version of the world, where your success does not equal my failure. And it's actually just also not true anymore. For most of human history, it was true that we were operating in a scarcity sort of zone.
But in the United States of America right now, we're not operating in scarcity. We have more houses than we have people. Are those houses in the right places? Maybe not.
But like when we talk about a housing crisis, I live in New York City. I hear about it a lot in LA and San Francisco, I always find it to be really odd, because we have more empty houses than we have homeless people in the United States. So in the US we have a distribution problem. We don't actually have a scarcity problem. And that's a really big mindset shift that we don't have a lot of stories to help us make.
BECCA LEVISS: What do you think are some of the barriers to making and telling these sort of stories?
ADITI JUNEJA: The people who tell stories are also people, is the big barrier. So the problem is always humans. People talk about systems and structures, but it's always the people. And so the question is like, do most of the writers in LA, do most of the development executives, most of the studio heads, are they thinking in a non-zero sum way?
Probably, like, they're also just humans living in this version of the world. And so that is always going to be the challenge. If you want to introduce a new idea to the people making the stories, have to be familiar with those ideas.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important to understand both that people have individual agency. And also we are only able to execute our agency so much as the systems in which we're operating under allow us to do so.
ADITI JUNEJA: But also, I think this is where the imagination piece comes in. I don't think that anyone is like, you can't write a non-zero sum story. We refuse, like we ban it at Disney. No one is saying that.
But it's a question of do you have the idea of what it looks like to tell that story? Can you imagine what that story is? And then can you tell it in a way that is compelling for all the different stakeholder interests that you have? I think it's the same thing as Grant is talking about fusion and multi-member districts.
My guess is most Americans don't oppose fusion in multi-member districts. They don't know it exists. That is the thing. And so it's a different problem if people oppose a thing or there are barriers. It's an entirely different problem when people don't even know that certain things are possible.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, I think that's totally right. And Grant, I realize I'm jumping in on your time. I also want to give you a chance to respond. I think, even we see the rhetoric around our current president focusing on the quality of being a felon as opposed to the explicit crimes that are committing, and how those things actually sort of further two different narratives.
One is a narrative about the role of felons in society, and the other is like actually being explicit about what it means to go against the rule of law, and accumulate and hoard power, executive power for yourself. And there is an opportunity there. Aditi, what I'm hearing you say is like, there's an opportunity there to tell two very different stories. And what is the story that is going to lead to abundance and redistribution of power? And what is the story that is going to continue to replicate the same systems that are entrapping us right now?
ADITI JUNEJA: Yeah, and just to, sorry, to just continue on that is, also, we're not operating from blankness. We all come with existing stories. Our oldest stories are religious stories. Like those are, we all have stories that help us make sense of the world.
And so one of the common protagonists in democracy stories, particularly for those who really value autonomy, is the story of a criminal changing the system, working with people from the inside. And so the idea of a felon working to change government is actually a super common story in film and television for a quarter of Americans. And so it's not an odd story for a lot of Americans in terms of what they are consuming as content for how to improve democracy. That is actually a very common trope and narrative.
And so I think that is the other thing that often we're missing, is that people are not hearing from Grant or me for the first time. They're whole people with lives beyond democracy. And I think a lot of democracy research, a lot of democracy communications research really focuses on democracy values, democratic values. What are the stories we're telling about democracy sort of misses the fact that people actually have values, just values period that then transcend into the space of democracy.
People before they watch the news or they learn Schoolhouse Rock, or they do civics education, they like watch film and TV. I think that's where people are getting a lot of their understanding of our systems, especially for the 60% of Americans who are actively avoiding political news. So they're still learning about it. They're just not learning about it, maybe from the places you'd like them to learn about it.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, I wonder what like a fusion voting Schoolhouse Rock episode would be like.
GRANT TUDOR: Sign me up, I'll do it. can I just-- I want to pull on a thread, Becca, that it's a little different than where we landed just now but something that you mentioned that I just want to underscore because I think it's really important. I think that often-- and this shows up in any number of spaces, but in the spaces that Aditi and I work, in particular, there is this tension and narrative between individual agency, and then like the role of systems in which that agency is embedded.
And I think we are at a point right now, where we've put a little bit too much weight on the systems as being pre-determinative and operating on agency in a way that's too constraining. And so what I mean by that is, if you had told someone at the beginning of the Gilded Age that potentially in their lifetimes they would get to directly elect their senators, they would have laughed you out of the room.
And there are so many examples like that throughout our history that, to go back to the time period I was referring to earlier, like when the Liberty Party came about, when it was like very fringe and radical. If you had said that within the next 20 years, one of the major parties, the Whigs, wouldn't even exist anymore, that an entirely new party would be dominant, that emancipation was around, these things would just be seen as absolutely insane.
And so I think it is true that at those times as well, things seemed nearly impossible because of the institutions that constrained agency until things changed very, very quickly. And the reason for those changes are obviously manifold. But individual agency is a really big part of it.
Like at critical junctures, there were folks who had a lot of audacity and imagination to think of something different and better and then brought a lot of people along with them. And so, yeah, I there's something there that I think is instructive for our current moment.
ADITI JUNEJA: And we don't have to go back that far in history to think about those moments. Like, if you had told people in October 2001 that seven years later, we would have a president named Barack Hussein Obama, people would have laughed at you. So it is always impossible until it's done.
I think, we feel right now, depending on how you're politically affiliated that, yeah, we're constantly surprised. But it's like horror, we're constantly horrified. But in our lifetimes, we have also been really pleasantly surprised by Americans and the goodness of Americans.
I think, if you had told me in 2016 that in the next five years, we would be living in a global pandemic, where everything shut down and ecosystems restored, and I would be able to go to the Javits Center and get a free vaccine, and the president would send me a check, I would have also thought you were crazy. And all of those things happened, and then they reverted.
And so I think that is what's really interesting about these moments in history, is it feels like it's very linear. Bryan Stevenson says, when we tell the story of the Civil Rights movement, it's like Rosa Parks at Martin Luther King marched, and then we passed the Civil Rights Act. And that's just not actually how it goes. There are a lot of false starts and failures and people trying and failing.
So Grant told the story that sounds very linear about a new party forming. It wasn't that linear. It was a lot of failure, a lot of mess. And one of my favorite historians, Lindsay Chervinsky, when she tells the story, she's like, when it's neat at the end of it. But when you're in it-- if you've written a resume or a cover letter you know this. You tell some story about how all your jobs connected. But in the moment, they don't actually connect. They connect in retrospect.
And so I think there's a lot of that, that all of the people we look up to all these moments in history, they were all uncertain moments. They were scary moments. And it was people exercising individual acts of agency, collective agency, working together, trying for a better future, but not knowing if they were going to succeed, very possibly failing, and often risking their safety, and their lives to do so.
GRANT TUDOR: Nice one.
BECCA LEVISS: I think that's totally right. So Aditi, you talked a little bit about the barriers to imagination in terms of democratic culture, democratic futures. Grant, what do you think are the barriers to all this incredible work you're describing around fusion voting part and electoral systems reform?
GRANT TUDOR: Sure. I think there's two categories of barriers. And I'm going to risk repeating some of what we've already covered, but maybe I'll repackage it so that maybe lands differently.
The two categories are there are technical barriers. And what I mean by that is there are laws on the books. There are provisions in the Constitution and state constitutions. And so when I say technical I mean the ability to sit down with a policy lens and reconsider something and rewrite something and then potentially have those things change.
That's one barrier. And I can speak specifically to fusion as the example here. But the other is imaginative. We presuppose that some of these things are just too hard. And that might be the case. But it also might not.
So to use fusion as an example, because for over 100 years, it allowed a lot of minor parties to wield influence and in electoral politics, anti-slavery parties, the Populist Party, the Progressive Party, I mean, parties that ended up putting what we now take for granted kind of on the National agenda graduated income tax, the Federal Reserve System, you name it. The major parties eventually to make a nonlinear story linear. The major parties eventually colluded essentially across the state and then banned it.
So bans on fusion voting are on the books in almost all states. There's a handful where that's not the case. Aditi, the state in New York is one of them. And that's why one of the most powerful minor parties in the country is in New York, the Working Families Party.
So one of the pieces of work that Protect Democracy has prioritized is litigating to overturn those bans. Our belief is that those bans are unconstitutional. For instance, kind of an encroachment on free association. And so part of the work that we're doing is technical. We are bringing lawsuits, in particular, jurisdictions to challenge bans on Fusion voting.
The other part of our work, though, is non-technical. It's a lot of communications work to begin to put into the water one, this idea of fusion voting just as educational matter what it is, why it could be useful today. But then also trying to inspire that. Like there's a reason why this was used for so long. And there's a reason why it was successful. And there's inspiring reasons why it could be useful again today. And so both of those.
Oh, sorry. And also that it's possible like it is very possible that we could bring something like this back. So Yeah, I think that those are the two big categories of barriers and it's certainly not possible to succeed without both of them tackling both of them.
BECCA LEVISS: Absolutely. Aditi, any thoughts or you just nodding excitedly?
ADITI JUNEJA: No, I'm nodding in agreement. I think that the technical barriers, any of them, our systems are designed to be changed. So the technical barriers are all changeable if the imagination is not there. And even if the technical barrier is really low.
And a lot of times in our institutions, the barriers are not laws. The barriers are just customs. It's just like we've always done it this way. Therefore, we must always do it that way. It is really, I think, like the imagination to do it differently. And I think it's also the imagination with the right set of people.
So I think that if the imagination rests with people without constituency, without voice, without power, then it's not that they can't grow their power, but it's that they're not going to have the power to do the thing. And so I think that lighting the spark of imagination with people who either have power or can build power, is really important.
GRANT TUDOR: I just say one more thing that I think maybe is like a useful nuance here, which is, I think one of the things that occurs to us when we are at least attempting to storytell in the version that Aditi does. Is, I think, it's very easy with a policy perspective or like a policy hat on to think in somewhat Black and white terms, like, this is a particular policy solution to this particular problem, and that's it.
I think what storytelling allows us to do is to add a lot of dimensionality and nuance that speaks to different people in different ways. And so just as one simple, even if it's a silly example I mentioned at the beginning of this one of the things that seems novel today, rightfully so, is that there's a felon in the White House.
There's both a good version of that, and there's a bad version of that. The bad version, as Becca, I think was kind of alluding to earlier, is what that person did to get that label. Like, the crimes that were, in fact, committed and what that person is now bringing to the office, like, a distaste for the rule of law, to put it charitably.
But there's another version, where, for instance, protect democracy has been engaged in litigation over the course of years to re-enfranchise felons across the country who had their voting rights stripped away from them even after they've been reintegrated.
And so just talking about, like felons in public service totally obfuscates meaningfully different versions of events, where different types of public servants and different voters can participate in the system. So I would just kind of offer that as storytelling becomes very important when we're talking about this stuff.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, Grant, I so appreciate you offering that and Aditi as well just thinking about the capacity of imagination because I think one of the ways authoritarianism thrives is it encourages this kind of Black and white thinking, which immediately brings us into fear, trauma, mind, and narrows our sense of imagination of what is possible. So saying, like, this class of people is only like this and, therefore, cannot be all these other things, or that nation state is only like this, and, therefore, cannot be all those things.
And I'm thinking, especially in this particular moment, some of the most terrifying and multifaceted barriers to imagination, I think, in many ways, are the fear and trauma. And it's a bit of a chicken and egg kind of situation, where the fear makes it really hard to think expansively, and it's also weaponized as a self-imposed limit on our ability to imagine greater possibilities than what's right in front of us.
ADITI JUNEJA: I think that's completely accurate. And also, I'll just add that the nostalgia sort of framing that folks have. Nostalgia is also a tool of authoritarians of this reversion to this forgotten time, where everything worked and it was all fine. There's like no moment like that, actually, in reality, in any history anywhere in the world.
And so yeah, I think it is very much at all and a tactic to really crowd out the space, because when you are afraid, you begin looking for people to blame, and you are less likely to exercise agency because you are scared. And so I think it's, yeah, it's huge.
The other thing I wanted to say is the other opportunity stories provide for us is our story segmentation was done with-- sorry. This is a values-based segmentation. I'm like imagining the quadrants. And so it allows you to speak to what people care about in the way that they care about it. And straight policy and legal technicalities, much to my chagrin don't do that.
And it turns out most people actually don't vote based on their policy preferences, which is also a real bummer to me. But people are really motivated by identity and value, and you can do that much better through stories. And people remember stories so much better than facts and information. And so storytelling has been how we've transmitted knowledge for most of human history before we had written word.
And part of the reason the stories from your childhood, the nursery rhymes, the parables, the religious stories are powerful is because they have values embedded in them. They teach you lessons about what is OK and not OK. And I think that's at a basic level, what we're doing every time we're telling stories about the systems we operate in and our democracies, and we're writing stories right now about what is OK and not OK.
GRANT TUDOR: I'll add something that Becca, you made me think of taking a slightly different direction. And maybe for folks listening, this will seem really obvious, but I think it's worth underscoring. Authoritarians use nostalgia as a tactic. Which is to say, they lie because those nostalgic stories are simply not true.
But, Becca, the fear that you were mentioning, I think ties so directly to this kind of theme in the conversation around possibility. I think in moments like this, we reach like a juncture or many, many, many junctures every day, where authoritarianism thrives off hopelessness. It thrives off people feeling like the only reasonable thing to do is to check out that things are a foregone conclusion, so on and so forth.
But of course, when moments seem to be like especially tough, the other option is to see that, change is really urgent. It lights a fire under your butt. And so I think it is obviously not a coincidence that over the course of our own history, some of the most incredible transformations in our systems were produced in moments of just like extraordinary crisis. It is not often the case that transformation happens when things are going really well.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And Aditi, I love that you brought up the example of COVID and the ways in which you had this transformative reimagining of what is the responsibility of the government to its citizens, and in what ways did the government actually actively fail and actively succeed in that responsibility. And I we're still experiencing the after action and storytelling of that particular moment.
And I also think there's other massive upheavals we've already experienced and are seeing on the horizon, like climate change, like this pendulum swing between globalism and hyper localism. And so I think, in many ways, there are these really important opportunities for nation remaking and reimagining, and democratic remaking and reimagining. And what our mandate is, how do we actually view those moments as an opportunity for resilience and expansiveness, as opposed for an opportunity of scarcity and fear?
ADITI JUNEJA: And I think part of that is rehearsing for them. Like, I know that many in the democracy space are exhausted from scenario planning. But I think short-term scenario planning, I get it why it's exhausting.
But, like when we were in 2018 preparing for the 2020 election-- so some of you may remember this-- we had put together a handbook of likely election crises. And in the first version of it, a pandemic was included, and it was thought to be too unlikely that it was not one of the scenarios that we had fleshed out. But the fact that we had thought about it at all, I can say from having been there in 2020 when we were thinking about the task force and what we wanted to do with it, we were just like fundamentally prepared for it in a different way.
We weren't on the back foot in quite the same way because it was something that had been considered. And so I think that is the other part of this, is part of what enables us to step into the future and to step into crisis as opportunity, is if you've thought about what you might do in such a moment.
BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, I think that that's totally right. And Grant, anything to add there?
GRANT TUDOR: No, I mean, I could listen to Aditi talk about this all day.
ADITI JUNEJA: No, I mean, I was just going to say COVID is the perfect example. Like, why don't we still have universal health care? Why don't we have a UBI?
If you go and ask the advocates who were advocating for Medicare, for all these things, they're like, we never dreamed we could have had the National Guard giving out vaccines. They were completely unprepared to step into that opportunity. And it happened. And you can't prepare when it's happening. You have to have a little bit of preparedness in advance.
GRANT TUDOR: I will maybe add something to this. One of the questions that I get, my teams get often at Protect Democracy is this incredulous. Well, first it's an incredulous look. Like, you're proposing these things that seem insane, like, we're never going to have proportional representation, you're never going to bring fusion back, and so on and so forth.
And I think that under the status quo circumstances, that's right. In large part, our theory of change here is that, if we're well-prepared, if we've fleshed out the policy proposal, if we have made the case to the public, if we know who the lawmakers are, who might be receptive, if we've done all of that homework, I don't know what the crisis might be or what the opportunity might be but if and when it hits, that will be ready for it.
I'm with the appropriate dose of humility. But it is kind of our theory of change here that being prepared for something unlikely to come around the corner and take advantage of it is a big part of the work.
BECCA LEVISS: Both of those really beautifully said. And plot twist, I'm going to answer my own question because I'm the moderator and I can, which is to say, as the lights are going down in this room and this all comes down to stories. Like, what are the stories we have told ourselves about our democracy? Oof, traumatic, lights go off.
And ultimately, I think a lot of the stories of American democracy are based on myths of nostalgia and a democracy that on paper reads as inclusive and in practice, often excludes large swaths of the population. And in order to keep that story re perpetuating, you have to exclude certain voices and stories from the collective imagination.
So as folks are being selective about the media you are consuming, the actions you are taking on a local or national level or the terms you're researching, I also urge people to think about what imaginations, what stories are not present here, which stories and imaginations are being cut out of the equation or are being silenced, and to make sure we are constantly expanding it.
Because in a moment of immense fear and trauma, there is so much pressure to narrow our conception of what is, and what will be, and what can we do in small and large ways to actually open that back up. And I'll end with that, if either of you two have last thoughts to add.
Awesome. Well, thank you for both of you as always. I just learned so much from being in conversation with you both. Thank you all of our audience members, for joining us today, and for Hussein and all of the incredible staff at the Center for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. We will see you here next week, same time to discuss how we can reimagine our economic systems.
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