Nick Penniman On Why Democracy Reform Is Issue One

This is Larry Lessig and this is the third season of the podcast Another Way. It's been a while since I've done an episode. It's been a really busy couple months. But as you know, this season is subtitled POTUS 1 and it's our effort to help frame a commitment to fundamental reform and to get the candidates running for president to. And so I'm incredibly happy to welcome one of the most experienced and informed of the field's reformers, a friend named Nick Penniman. As you'll hear in this episode, Nick began his career as a journalist before he gave journalism up for the fight for a democratic reform. And he is the leader of one of Washington DC's most effective reform based organizations. Issue one, which listeners of this podcast will have no difficulty in decoding, Issue one recognizes that the first issue that must be solved is this problem of the dysfunction of our democracy. Before any other issue can be solved, you'll hear the explanation of how Nick came to this view and how he believes we can actually succeed in making that reform happen. That's the topic. Stay tuned for the episode. So welcome, Nick Penniman. I'm so grateful that you would take time to be part of this podcast. What I said in the introduction was that you have an interesting career arc here. You began as a journalist and became quite prominent as a journalist. Help us understand what pulled you out of the role of social critic into a role of trying to make political systems work better.

Yeah, I think it was the fact that I realized I kind of hit a wall at a certain point and realized that just producing more journalism about the problems of Washington, the main problem being the kind of capture of our system by the elites and special interests, wasn't going to go anywhere. It wasn't going to lead to anything. And actually there was a moment in which I called up my mentor at the time, a guy named Bill Moyers, who was a former PBS broadcaster, and I said, bill, do you think information, good information, matters anymore in Washington? Do you think it can change, you know, bend the needle or change policy? And there was this long pause on the phone and he said, no, I don't think so. And you know, and we dug deep into why, you know, the flood of media in this space, just in general, in the political space, but also the fact that, you know, that facts and information, when you have Washington that is so captured by the special interests, it's just hard for evidence and facts to break through and dominate policymaking anymore. And that includes the facts that we were putting out there about the brokenness of the system. So I kind of decided to leap out of journalism and get into advocacy and activism to try to see if I could, could make a difference.

So when is that that you have this conversation with Moyers?

That would have been eight or nine years ago. So this was, you know, so, you know, recognize it's during the Obama administration. This wasn't a, you know, partisan conversation, so to speak. It was just, it was just a kind of a realization that I had that, you know, I was involved in deep dive investigative journalism, long form policy journalism. At one point in my career we were using Huffington Post was our main platform for our work. At the time Huffington Post was out circulating the Washington Post online. So it wasn't for lack of our ability to produce high quality journalism and get the word out or get it in front of people. It was just that it didn't seem to land a punch anymore. It was just kind of like, you know, swinging and flailing in the air, but there wasn't much of a reaction anymore. And I think we all feel this. I mean, try to think of the last time you read a story in the New York Times in which there were consequences after the story. Or think of the last time you saw a 60 Minutes story appear that had consequences or ripple effect. I mean, this used to be, you know, Larry, when you and I were kind of growing up, so to speak, it used to be relatively routine. Like 60 Minutes could almost on a weekly basis create ripple effects in the political system or within the government in Washington, D.C. and now I don't think, you know, people don't even talk about it on a Monday. They don't even talk about what they saw in 60 Minutes on a Sunday, let alone, you know, it creating any kind of an effect in this town.

One part of that, of course, is related to the way government is not functioning. And I want to focus our conversation on that. But I'm also interested in the way in which it's also related to, to the way media has evolved itself. You know, I mean, I think there's this sense that if you think about the last impeachment, not Clinton's, but the process leading up to Nixon's resignation. The reason why in that context, this journalism could lay a punch is that everybody was in a sense watching the same thing. And the same thing was not laundered by the people presenting it to fitted into whatever worldview they might be trying to advance. They tried to play it in a relatively neutral way. We live in a world now, where, of course, any fact that is out there certainly has a consequence, it just gets rendered radically differently, whether it's on Fox News or msnbc. And so is that part of what you felt when you began to feel like everything gets neutralized and nothing can happen?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, there are kind of two major effects in the media. One is the flooding of the Zone. And you're right, you know, when I was growing up, it was, I grew up in St. Louis, so it was the St. Louis Post dispatch. And then we got, I think Time and Newsweek at home. And then there were the three network channels with Brokaw rather and Peter Jennings, pbs and then talk radio, local talk radio, but was straight down the center because they wanted to attract a broad audience. This is pre Limbaugh, pre, you know, the kind of the rise of right wing talk radio. And so, yeah, that was it. I mean, those were our main sources of information and we were a pretty, you know, newsy family. My dad was a newspaper publisher, but that was about it. So it still was an era in which major media outlet could absolutely set the agenda. It was also an era in which people believed in those major media outlets and believed that when they were reading something in Time or News Week or the St. Louis Post Dispatch, that they were reading something that was grounded in fact and was, as you know, was as journalistic as possible. And so what's happened now is you've got a, you know, the room has been flooded. You know, whereas once there were four or five dancers in the ballroom, there are now 5,000. And it's hard for people to differentiate between those 5,000 dancers, to figure out which one actually knows what they're doing and which doesn't. And as you said, you know, people live inside their own media bubbles. They've been allowed to burrow because they have places to burrow into, whether it's MSNBC or Fox. And then of course, there's the president who has been engaged in a four year campaign against, you know, that has delegitimized the press in a way that none of us ever seen in our lifetimes. So all of those factors combined lead to a situation in which even the finest Pulitzer Prize winning journalists at the New York times and at 60 minutes, it's harder for them to land a punch. It's harder for good information to circulate in the halls of Washington in a way that actually creates a consequence.

There's a point in the history of Fox News when Roger Ailes comes in to launch Fox News and the Murdochs originally are imagining Fox News playing the way every other news channel did, which was to try to aim right down the middle and get as many people in America to follow them as they can. And Roger Ailes said, that's not the business model. That's not what we're going to do. We're going to focus on our base and it's going to be turning out our base. And there's a really incredible shift, I think, that you might like put to exactly that moment when people realized, or maybe rediscovered, because this is what journalism was in the 19th century. But, you know, in modern journalism, they realized the game is not about telling a story to America. The game is about telling a story to your base in America. And to the extent you can make them your tribe, you begin to see this poison that I that makes it so hard for things to have the effect that you're describing here.

Absolutely. And you know, and you've got to fault, listen, you got to fault places like cnn. I mean, CNN has comported itself in the last two years into MSNBC Lite. So even the outlets that once were considered to be semi fair brokers have decided as part of their business model to take a side, which is too bad. I mean, if I had a billion dollars in my pocket, Larry, I'd say that what I really would do with it is start an actual TV news channel, because none exists right now. So unfortunately, even some of the places that once had the opportunity to kind of maintain that middle zone and maintain a place of integrity as opposed to coming from a place of bias have lost it. It's just too bad. So it's pretty hard to hold a democracy together when people within that democracy can't even agree on a common set of facts or a common worldview or a common narrative. Which kind of gets us into, in part, what we're talking about too, about the political reform.

Right. I mean, one last point on this is this is exactly the challenge. I mean, if you look at the process leading up to the impeachment of Nixon, and you look at the polling of Republicans and Democrats, you know, Republicans love Nixon just about as much as they love Trump. The Democrats hate Nixon not quite as much as they hate Trump, but they still didn't like him much. But the striking thing about those two graphs, the graphs of Republicans and graphs of Democrats, is that they're almost perfectly correlated over the period of time leading up to Nixon's resignation. So they hover at about the same level until six months before Nixon resigns. And then there's a sharp decline, but it's a perfectly correlated decline. It falls with Republicans and falls with Democrats in the same, at the same speed. And that's because everybody's watching the same show and the show has an effect and the effect is a common effect. I don't think you're going to see anything like that dynamic in the context of the impeachment of Donald Trump. Because, you know, we live in these separate worlds. And it's not just that we live in those worlds. The point that you just made that's so important is we just have a completely different sense of the facts. And when you can't even agree on the basic sense of the facts, it's a really existential problem for the democracy. We faced it once before in the context of the Civil War, of course, where the south was cut off from the north by law. You weren't allowed to send abolition material to the south and it was blocked by the post office and to the extent began to develop these separated understandings of the way the world is. It really is extraordinarily dangerous for how a democracy might function.

Yeah, yeah. And you started out in the tech world out in the west coast at Stanford, and you saw the rise of the dot com bubble and were there at the early days of idealism around the Internet, the notion that the Internet was going to be a liberating force for humanity. And really in the last, what, five, six years, that egg has turned rotten. I mean, that is just no longer true. And obviously the social media companies encourage the borrowing and encourage people to live inside their own little information bubbles. And, and so we've got, you know, so that is part of the solution that we have to be thinking about. In addition to the kind of structural democracy issues, we've got to be thinking about the information and fact, you know, reconstitution of facts issue.

Yeah. I increasingly think that the part of the problem that we're going to talk about now, the structural, democratic part of the problem, is the easier part of the problem. I can see the nature of the solutions there. You know, we can argue about whether it's politically feasible or not, but. But we kind of know what we need to do. When you talk about, like, how do you build a democracy when we all live in our own bubbles and are outraged at the suggestion that we might not understand everything there is to understand, I'm not sure what that solution looks like. So let's give up the hard part of the problem.

Well, listen, the wonderful thing about the democracy problem is that there actually is near universal agreement, left, right, center, that Washington is not working for the American people right now, and that well financed special interests have a lot to do with it, and as do other major structural deficiencies like gerrymandering. So it is actually one of these few zones in America where there is tremendous unification in terms of the perception of the problem. Unlike, you know, climate change or the economy or some other thing. What's lacking is, you know, the collective power to bring that unity together and then force itself upon the insulated political class in Washington.

Yeah, so I wanted to go in a different direction, but I'm going to take your lead because this is a, this is a puzzle that really terrifies me. I mean, you know, you and I have been part of these conversations with people who are now involved in running these campaigns for president and running these campaigns in Congress and the Senate, and every one of those people would say the same thing. You just said that there's universal agreement, that this is the fundamental problem that we have to fix. Democracy first, as your slogan would put it. Issue one, the organization you now run for people listening to this podcast, the meaning of that title is perfectly clear. It's, it's, this is the first issue. And if we have to solve this issue before we're going to get anything else done, everybody gets it. But it seems so clear if you just see the way political campaigns play out, that it doesn't pay to politic on that message. I mean, you know, Elizabeth Warren will hit the corruption issue, but everybody thinks of Elizabeth Warren and they think about, you know, very strongly aggressive progressive policies that she's advanced. And that's true for every one of those candidates. Even if they will say, as you know, on our count, something like seven of the candidates, six of the Democrats have committed to making fundamental reform the first thing they do if they're elected president. Still, the public doesn't hear that. Why is it that politics, I don't

think it seems genuine to them. Whereas Trump with drain the swamp seemed genuine. I mean, we gotta remember the first overture of Donald Trump when he stood up on the stage with whatever 15 other Republicans in the primary was not, I'm a great businessman, was not. I have a broad view of, you know, international affairs. It was, I can't be bought and sold because I'm a rich guy. And by the way, I bought and sold politicians my whole life. So who knows better than me how to change the system? Send me to Washington and I'll drain the swamp. And so, you know, that is why he gained a claim a B also, because he just wasn't kind of the run of the mill, status quo Washington politician. Right. And then there's other stuff too, of course, that he eventually kind of incorporated the very divisive stuff around immigration identity. But his first overture was drain the swamp. And he had authenticity on that because he hadn't come from the system. So, you know, I think when a, when a politician who's been in Washington for 20 years stands up and says it, the public looks at him and they go. And they rightly go. I mean, the American public's pretty savvy. You know, they look at that person, they rightly go, yeah, I don't think so. You know, it's like the guy who's been sitting at the corner of the bar for 20 years claiming that he's going to stop drinking. It's just, you know, people look and go, yeah, okay, George, whenever, whatever, you know, so then the advisors to the

politicians tell them that this might be the right thing to do, but it's not going to be believable. So it's not the sort of thing you can do.

Yeah, I mean, so there are two things, and I'll tell you a story related to one of the two. So number one, the politicians are scared to death of seeming, of getting caught, of getting into gotcha moments with the press. So, you know, if they're up there every single day saying, you know, big money's a problem, big money's a problem, big money's a problem. And then they're going to fundraisers with millionaires at night, they're just scared to death that someone's going to get a video of them or someone's going to write a story saying, look at what hypocrites they are. And it's just going to affirm everything that the public believes, right, that there is hypocrisy or lack of authenticity there. The other one which is very much related is that as a result, what they do, as opposed to really running on it and incorporating it as their main narrative, as you tried to do when you ran, what they do is they put policy stances on their website around democracy, reform or money in politics. They kind of hit the note when they think it's convenient to or when they're asked in a debate, and otherwise they try to avoid it. And so here's my story. So a very good friend of mine and I went to Hillary Clinton's campaign in August of 2016. This is when she Obviously was starting to lag a little bit. The drain. The Swamp Thing had fully taken off. You know, Crooked Hillary was the moniker. And we got a meeting with very high level people in Brooklyn at the head, the Hillary Clinton headquarters. And we sat down with them and we showed them all kinds of polling and marketing information and messaging information about why this issue, why de rigging the system in Washington was a big winning issue. Trump had tapped into it and it would probably be beneficial for her to do the same. And it was the most peculiar meeting because we had these three people sitting across from us in this conference room and they just kept saying, well, have you not looked at our website? Well, where do you disagree with our policy stances? Well, we believe in public financing. Well, look at our website and we're like, it's not about your specific policy stance on this issue. It's about whether or not you're willing to embrace a narrative that the government doesn't govern for the average person anymore because that's where the public is. And they just couldn't. They like didn't want to hear it, basically. So, you know, so, yeah, so what you end up with in Washington year after year after year is bills being filed and refiled. I mean, my God, Larry, we gotta remember Senator Bill Bradley was one of the first guys to file a public financing bill back in the mid-80s. Right. So how long has this been going on where people have been filing and refiling bills every two years around fixing the political system and then kind of paying lip service to it, but nothing happens. So now we're in a situation in which, you know, this whole bus has smashed into a wall and the public is pissed off. Our political system is basically in a state of shutdown. Authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. We're seeing initial flashes of it here in America. And if we cannot convert this moment of crisis and rapt attention with the public into something positive to finally break through, then, you know, shame on us. Shame on us, the people.

Okay, but that helps me understand why the traditional politicians, whether people like Bernie, are seen as traditional politicians. As a separate question, why they wouldn't embrace it like that. But why doesn't it even work for people who are not politicians in this game? I mean, you know, Andrew Yang isn't a politician. I don't know how Steyer would be perceived, or even Bloomberg. I mean, how. What would be the feasibility of them framing this campaign, their campaign, around the same kind of fundamental reform issue. And if. And why don't they. If indeed it's just this question of insider versus outsider, because.

For two reasons. Number one, I just don't think that it's. That enough people think about it. You know, I mean, if you look at.

You mean in the campaigns?

Yeah, I mean, within the campaigns themselves. I mean, if you look at. If you look at the top 20 polling questions that are typically put together by any polling firm or by, you know, USA Today or CNN or wherever, they very, very rarely include anything around the rigged political system or, you know, campaign finance or money in politics or anything like that. It's always the same old, same old, right? It's the health care and jobs and education and terrorism and et cetera, et cetera. So first of all, it's very rarely even pulled, and therefore, it's just, you know, not like a rich part of the conversation. It's like walking into, you know, 20 different record stores, and the band that you care about is you find them in, like, two of the 20 stores, and they're kind of. The records are, like, filed in the back right corner of the store behind a bunch of other stuff. Right. You just don't. They just don't feel like it's a prominent part of what people are listening to or want to hear about because it's just not showing up. And then the second part is, again, the kind of figuring out how to tell the story of it. So if you talk to Congressman Sarbanes, who led the democracy reform efforts in the House and who I know is pretty close to you, what he said is that he actually realized by making a bunch of mistakes, how to incorporate this into his narrative. And what he said is that when he first got into office, he'd go and he'd do these town hall meetings in Maryland, and he'd stand up there and he'd start talking about healthcare and education and the budget and all that kind of stuff. And he noticed that people would kind of lean back in their chairs and they'd look at him a little bit like you'd look at a fish in a fish tank, right? And just kind of with amusement. And then there'd be some conversation, then it'd be over. And he said, eventually he said, I realized that I had to do a mic tap moment. And what he meant by the mic tap moment is that what he would do is stand up in front of the town hall and he'd say, okay, let's get something straight. Washington is being dominated by big money and special interest and lobbyists. They are controlling the scene. And unless we first do something about that. It's going to be really hard to solve all the other problems that we're about to talk about. And he said the moment that he started doing the mic Tack moment, it changed the whole nature of. Of the conversations that he was having with his constituents, because it was a real moment. It was an authentic moment. And it was. And he recognized up front that there is this massive structural barrier to change that. We had to, you know, we had to cut the strings that the puppeteers were using in Washington before the people could become the puppeteers. And so I do think that there's. That part of the problem is like, no one's really tried this. I mean, even the people like Bernie and Warren, who kind of hit the note of money in politics relatively regularly, they don't start with it. It's always kind of like the footnote. Right. Bernie talks about Medicare for all and $15 an hour and stuff like that. Oh, and by the way, we've got End Citizens United as opposed to starting with it and saying, once we clear that out, once we actually restructure the system so it is more malleable within the hands of the people, then we can more effectively fix these other things. And let's have a conversation about them.

Yeah. And the other part about that, that's so frustrating when they do pick it up. I don't know if you saw the debate last night, which was the December debate, and, you know, there was something of a firestorm between Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg about whether Mayor Pete was being sufficiently transparent about the people he was raising money from and his decision to raise these big contributions from these big donors at the winery in the cave where they drank $900 bottles of wine. What's so striking about that is, I mean, there are two parts. Number one, you know, if you're rich, so like Bloomberg or Steyer, or you're famous like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, it's pretty easy to be able to run a national campaign for president without ever having to suck up to rich people. That's just the nature of it. Right. But if you're not rich or famous, you know, somebody like Mayor Pete, you know, the only way you're going to compete, given the broken, corrupted way that we fund campaigns right now, is to do exactly this. So that's the first point. But the second point that just drives me nuts is it speaks as if the problem is the integrity of the president, which in the current context I get. Like, people look at our president and they think, oh, my God, this is disaster. He's so totally corrupt. But let's remember, nobody really thought that Barack Obama was corrupt. Right. You know, we could get the most pure and good hearted person as the president, but if we don't focus people on the need to address Congress and the broken institution at the core of our democracy, we will get nothing. So the idea that you turn this into a morality play about the virtue of presidential candidates as opposed to an opportunity to explain to people what has to change to make it so we actually have a functioning democracy just drives me crazy.

I agree. And imagine, but imagine if a candidate stood up on that stage and said, did a mic tap and said, let's all get one thing clear before we even enter into this debate tonight. Our political system is completely rigged. The public has been cut out and we need to have. I hope that the moderators will allow us to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes talking about that because unless we talk about that, it's going to be hard to talk about really fixing the other stuff. I mean it would honestly, everyone's minds would be blown if they stood up there and said that.

Yeah, I had that imagination for.

I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. And that's why you ran that script was written. So anyway, no, it's just a matter, it's a matter of getting, finding, being able to tell that story.

Okay. Now one thing that was really impressive about the move that you made was that you approached this when you stepped into the field of the reform, almost like a kind of businessperson talking about a new field that you were going to expand into. You did an extraordinary study in the very first round of your work to kind of look at what the lay of the land was for reformers trying to bring about what we all agree is the fundamental change that has to happen. So tell us a little bit about what you discovered when you first did this research about the state of reform in America.

Yeah, I'd say the two main insights, number one, probably the most underfunded social change sector in America. Rather striking, almost ironic, some would say that in America, the current torch bearer of democracy, one of the least invested in fields of change is democracy. And then number two, the whole field leaned heavily to the left. And that is a significant strategic problem that the field has faced for a long time, which has been why it's pretty hard to get stuff done in Washington. So happy to break down both of those because unless we talk about both of those and deal with both of those, it's Going to be pretty hard to create change in this town.

Yeah, please do.

Yeah. So we at issue one have a budget of 5 million bucks and a staff of 30. That makes us one of the top five largest political reform organizations in America. All right, now just think about that for a second. I mean, I think that the animal shelter close to my house probably has a budget of 6 or 7 million and a staff of probably 40. Right. So, you know, I mean, this organization being one of the biggest is still smallest than my local animal shelter. And number one, you know, and compare that, by the way, when you think about scale, because $5 million might seem like good money to someone. The Sierra Club has a budget of $120 million. NRDC has a budget of $150 million. The Nature Conservancy has an annual budget of a billion dollars. So that's what scale looks like. In another sector, in the environmental sector, you could take Common Cause, represent us, even Public Citizen Only a piece of which works on money in politics. Issue one, the Brennan center for justice in Washington, which does a lot of kind of, you know, white papers and legal work around democracy Reform campaign. Legal center, which is another leading group in the space. You could take all of us combined and put all of our budgets together and we still would be smaller than the Sierra Club. So, you know, when we talk about a ramped up fight for reform in this country, we've got to talk about investments in the fight for reform. It's foolish for American philanthropists or regular Americans to believe that, that you can get anything done when you're constantly playing with change. So that was step one or kind of argument number one. And then argument number two, which is in a way, perhaps even a more important issue, is that since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, the Democrats have concurrently controlled so at the same time the House, the Senate and the White House for four years. So let's say four out of 40 years, because by the time the next elections are done, it'll be 40 years. So for four out of 40 years, there's been total Democratic alignment in Washington. That's 10% of the time. 90% of the time, you've either had total Republican control, which is eight years out of those 40, or you've had divided government. So if you're talking almost exclusively or mainly to Democrats about your issue, Democrats and liberals, and you expect anything to get done in that other 90% of the time, you're kidding yourself. And then, so then let's look at the 10% of the time. So in 2009, as you know, there was, you know, Barack Obama had run on fixing the political system, even though he bypassed the presidential public financing system. He was pro public financing. He was talking big about it. Nancy Pelosi was signaling that she'd be willing to see some kind of a political reform bill through. She had the, she was running the House at that point. Harry Reid was running the Senate. He had nodded that he was also game for a big political reform bill. And as we know, after they got done, you know, trying to restore the economy, fixing the auto industry, you know, doing financial reform and then Obamacare, they didn't have any more bandwidth. So even if you're waiting around and waiting around for that 10% of the time that you've got total alignment in Washington with the Democrats, it's entirely possible that they're not going to get around to your thing, either because there's a crisis, as there was with Obama, where basically the economy was collapsing all around us, or because the President has a couple other priorities that he or she wants to check off the list first. So we've got to break out of that habit. And we got to break out of it, too, because as you point out so often, Larry, the mass of the public, 80 to 90% of the public is with us on this stuff. So imagine if you're a Republican or a conservative and you believe that our system has been taken over by the special interests and that the government isn't reacting to you anymore, as many of them do, and that's why they voted for Trump. No one's talking to you. And you go to Common Cause or one of these existing organizations and you click around and you're like, well, this must not be for me. This isn't my, these aren't my people. And by the way, they're beating up on me all day long. So we, you know, we have a remarkable opportunity in this country to lay down our arms and say, okay, we might fight on some other stuff as Americans, but for God's sake, we are unified on this and let's start showing up as a unified people and just break through this thing. But we can only do that if it's a true left right center coalition.

So, you know, I agree with that. I just want to make sure we understand, though, that the range of domains that this reform work happens. I mean, so one domain that you and I have been most focused on has been money and politics. But of course, if you think about reform at the scope of HR1, there's obviously voting rights as well, which has been a kind of separate silo of work. There are people working on gerrymandering and ranked choice voting, which has been a separate silo of work. There's, you know, every once in a while there are people talking about the electoral College, maybe more frequently. Now that's a separate silo of work. One of the great insights of H R1, I think, was the idea that the only way we're going to build a movement to scale is if we can get everybody to see that it's the same problem they're focused on and that we have to join together to rally not just Democrats and Republicans, as you're insisting, but also everybody who thinks that, you know, my silver bullet is the silver bullet. There are no silver bullets here. We have to fix five domains at the same time if we're going to get a democracy that could be responsive once again.

Totally. And it's also probably the only way that we're going to be able to muster an army big enough because there are people out there who care passionately about gerrymandering who would show up for that fight. It's almost like kind of bringing all the militias into one phalanx. We got to do that. And yeah, listen, the public doesn't see this stuff in the silos that the political reform can community sees it in. And it's funny because if you think about all the major bills that have passed through Washington in the last 20 years, they're all, you know, full spectrum piece of legislation. Healthcare reform under Obama was dealt with all kinds of stuff. It was a 600 page bill. Financial reform dealt with all kinds of stuff. You know, so when it, you know, when it comes to political system reform, we got to do a bunch of stuff. I totally agree with you. And it's only in packaging that stuff as a bold and comprehensive bill that I think we're going to be able to capture the public's imagination. But again, we've got to do it. And this is what HR1 failed to do. And you've written about this and I've discussed it too. What HR1 failed to do was to do it in a way that included enough people from the other side of the aisle that it could be seen as bipartisan. You know, we deal with a lot of members of Congress all the time and Senators, Republicans and Democrats both. And we work just as much with Republicans, if not more oftentimes on a monthly basis than with Democrats. There are Republican members of Congress who have told me, they said I agree with 2/3 to 3/4 of what's in HR1. But I couldn't vote. You know, I'm not going to vote. I couldn't vote for it. They never talked to me. And I'll give you one example of this, because I'm not outing anyone in this case because he did it himself. And you can look at his bill. Take Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He's in a total swing district. He's a former FBI agent who worked on corruption issues, literally was listening to wiretaps with current members of Congress when he was an FBI agent, decides to run for office because he was so disgusted by the corruption that he was seeing in our government, gets in and you know, HR1 comes up, he's not even consulted in the process it passes. And out of frustration, he takes it after it passes and he takes a red pen to it and he scratches out the stuff that he doesn't like. And then he filed a bill called the Nonpartisan for the People act, which is the HR one. Is the for the People act, the non partisan for the People Act. So you can go look at that piece of legislation and see what his version of that bill would have been. Now, he struck out some provisions that were sacred to some of the folks in the HR1 coalition, like the public financing provision, but 2/3 of it remained.

Okay, but this is where. This is the challenge, right? Because if you believe, like without looking at the politics, you just look at the reality. If you believe that some things are sacrosanct, I mean, like, we're not going to fix Washington if we don't fix the money. You've said that, I've said that. That's what we believe. What do we do about a reality? If, you know, the Republican Party, at least the Washington Republican Party, finds it impossible to embrace the idea that we got to deal with the money, you know, I mean, we could strike a deal that doesn't include it, right?

So this also, though, is the failure of our community over the last 20 years. Because when I talk to Republican congressmen and I say, do you think you all spend too much time fundraising? And it kind of gets you in too many conflicts of interest because, you know, most of the fundraising they do or a lot of the fundraising they have to do is directly from the lobbyists who represent the special interests that they're supposed to be regulating. Of course they nod and they say, yeah, I can't stand it. I spend three to four hours a day on the phone and then My breakfast, lunch, and dinner raising money from folks that I'm supposed to be regulating. They hate it. But then when it comes time, when you say, well, what kind of solutions would you be willing to lean into? It's almost like they draw blanks because there's just been a lack of outreach and education and intellectual fermentation occurring with the Republican offices for, I don't know, 20 or more years now on this stuff. So it's not that they. It's. Well, I mean, so I'm.

But when you. You reach out to them, right? You reach out to them and you say, we gotta fix. But so they understand the argument. It's not like they. It's. They've never heard about it before. The question is, what is it gonna take for them to accept it now? You know, I imagine if you're in the United States Senate and Mitch McConnell is your leader, it's just not possible, it's just not done to embrace the idea of changing the way we fund campaigns because it's so fundamental to him that this laissez faire, libertarian model reign that, you know, you just can't be a Republican in the Senate and take that position. But, you know, what's striking is they can all complain, they can all observe. They see the same reality you and I do. It doesn't take rocket science to put one. One together here. Why. Why don't they do it? Like, what's stopping them?

Again, they have not. It is not within the Republican solution set to stand up for, you know, whatever your version of public financing is. It's just not in the solution set. It's like when you're playing Scrabble and, you know, you've got your initial letters, and then you keep picking letters that that letter never has, never just doesn't show up on their little Scrabble thing, their little letter holder, because this has become a lefty thing in the last 20, 30 years, and there have not been American Enterprise Institute and the other conservative think tanks that are out there just have not been producing, thinking about how we finance politics differently in America in a way that, you know, in a way that gets these guys and gals off the fundraising treadmills. So, you know, if you think about gay marriage as an example, I mean, you'll remember as a constitutional scholar, the tremendous impact that Ted Olson had when he was, you know, and you can describe who he is, but, you know, leading conservative thinker, argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court. You know, think about 2006, the midterms in 2006 were significantly predicated on or battled over gay marriage. And it was a huge wedge issue, and they were using it to kind of divide the country. And then I think it was two years after that. Olson, Ted Olson, writes this brief for the Supreme Court that says, actually, as conservatives, we should believe in a marriage and the sanctity of marriage, but we should also believe that people have the freedom to lead their lives according to their dreams and their hearts. And therefore, as conservatives, we should believe in allowing people the freedom to marry and to form the bond of marriage and man. Within, like, a year, 12 months, that, like, just started changing the whole Republican view on the issue of gay marriage because one of their leading intellectual lights had stood up and said, not only is this okay, it actually fits into our principles. So, you know, we need more moments like that when it comes to structural political reform to begin providing. The people who are with us on this but are just don't feel like they have the room to lean into certain solutions. We got to give them the room. We've got to create, like, the comfort zone so they can say, okay, I can go. I can go stand in that room, and I can still be a conservative and a Republican. Because right now, the proposition is if they go stand in that room, they lose their Republican and conservative cred, which is just silly, right? Because again, like your average American, your average Republican or conservative who wakes up in, you know, Dayton, Ohio, tomorrow doesn't feel that way when they think about solutions to political reform. So we got. So a big part of it is that we've just got to create this sense that, like, this is something we can all do and provide the framework for it.

Right. But you can understand the way the Washington Republican Party finds it very difficult to even think about changing the way we fund campaigns since so much of what they depend on is people who depend on being able to control the way Washington works through the funding of campaigns. I mean, there's. You know, it seems that the only solution here is to imagine bringing Republicans from. From the grassroots into Washington where, you know, I mean, I've seen. You've seen you go out into the. You know, into America, and you talk to conservative people about this problem, and they have no problem talking about vouchers as a way to fund campaigns that doesn't give the power to the tiny fraction of the 1% who right now are funding campaigns. They don't see any conceptual problem with that at all. In fact, use the word voucher, and it seems like a perfect Republican idea So it might be that the only solution to this is ultimately to find a way to recruit those not yet Washington Republicans into the Washington Republican mix so that Washington Republicans begin to at least see that there are credible Republicans who are advancing this kind of anti corruption.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, you look at the Missouri ballot initiative that passed in 2018, I think it was last year, and you know, one of the most sweeping of all the ballot initiatives to pass ethics reform, campaign finance reform, all kinds of stuff, transparency measures. You know, it was Republican, led by a guy in St. Louis whose name I can't remember right now. And it received, I think it received 63% of the vote, 64% of the vote. So basically two thirds. Totally. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of the solution. But also, Larry, again, I wouldn't write off the a, don't write off the people who are there. They might not have stuck their necks out yet, but we talked to we'd have done 250 meetings on the Hill in the last year and 70% of those have been with Republican offices. And they are really good people up on the Hill who really care about this stuff, who see it in the same way that, you know, you and I have just been discussing it. They haven't again, they haven't stuck their necks out yet. But they that's in part because they fear that if they stick their necks out, either A, they're going to get totally discredited as, you know, being part of their party or B, they're going to get their heads chopped off by leadership, which is a totally different political problem that we can talk about. But I don't want to, I want to, you know, I want to be hopeful here in that there actually are people who are there and they're kind of poised and positioned, but we've got to help create the right environment for them to be able to stand.

So who are the Republicans? Who are the Republicans? Not necessarily members, but who are the Republican thinkers that you think are most probably going to play the role that, you know, you identify Ted Olson as playing in the gay marriage contest?

I don't have a good answer for you on all the stuff that we're talking about. You know, given the fact that we're kind of we haven't mentioned it really or called it out, but what guess given the fact that we're talking about gerrymandering and congressional functioning reforms and money in politics and, you know, voting. But there are some really interesting people, like if you take Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute. You know, he is a leading light of the kind of conservative intellectual movement and he approaches a lot of these topics from a different prism. His prism is congressional dysfunction and the weakening of the first branch, the weakening of Article 1. But he, I think that he would probably, you know, come to many of the same conclusions and be willing to think about solutions in a similar way that you have if there could be a kind of meeting of the minds. I think he just took his seat at AI a little while ago. And, you know, my sense is that he's very open minded about this stuff. I think the folks at national affairs magazine, which was founded by a bunch of kind of younger conservatives who were sick of the status quo, thinking that the National Review had fallen into and they wanted a kind of a competitor to the National Review. Having talked to them and having, you know, subscribed to their magazine, I feel like there's probably an opening there. And then there are some, you know, there are some interesting Republican senators. I'm not going to name names here, but that, you know, we've had very fascinating conversations with. One of whom asked us a couple weeks ago in a meeting. He said, why don't we just limit all campaign giving to people who live in your congressional district or your state, because then your fealty is to the people who got you there. It's to back home as opposed to K Street or, you know, rich people in other cities. That's a pretty radical idea. I don't think the Supreme Court would like that idea very much. But, you know, that was his solution. So, you know, like, once you actually get into the conversation with folks, some very interesting stuff can emerge. But again, there's been like, silence. There's been no conversation because our community leans so heavily to the left that it's just, you know, like there hasn't been the fertility for conversation on the other side.

Well, I've been in meetings with, for example, Bill Kristol, who's, you know, been pushing very hard to get an alternative to the President on stage and obviously has been a never Trumper from the very beginning. But he was, you know, obviously an incredibly important intellectual in the conservative movement. And, you know, in those conversations, if, you know, you would say to him, what do you think about making fundamental reform a central part of what a Republican presidential candidate would talk about? He would say the same thing. He said, absolutely, that we're at a point where the frustration and the anger is so significant that that has to be at the core of what anybody is talking about. And so I think that there is a strategy, and the strategy is about finding these people and bringing them in. But I think that the resistance to it is really the business model. What is the business model when, you know, if we succeeded, a whole bunch of the base that's supporting much in the Republican Party right now would lose a significant amount of their leverage to affect policy.

Yeah. Although let's be fair about that. Right. I mean, the Democrats have now, as of this cycle, have now outraised the Republicans in dark money. The Republican, I mean, the Democrats have fully embraced the super PAC model. There are plenty of Democratic billionaires who are sloshing around, including, you know, Mike Bloomberg, who's worth 60 billion bucks and has said that he's worried, willing to release vast amounts of his fortune to try to help win the next election for the Democrats. So, you know, you can say, but these are two different things. This would disempower Republicans. But in fact, the Democrats are playing the game just as hard, too. So I think that we've got to be careful.

We're not going to disagree. We're not going to disagree about whether people use money to get elected. What I'm saying is something different. What I'm saying is that business model of using Washington to profit your business is something Democrats and Republicans both do. But on balance, the real money that's been coming into the Republican Party has been money driven to make sure that it continues to get government to play the game that they want them to play with their business. So my point is just the business interests to the extent they want to play in Washington and would be weakened by fundamental reform tilt in an obviously political way now, you know, that reality makes it harder on one side to be reformers than on other sides. And you know, when historically, if you think about the Republican Party that, you know, had Teddy Roosevelt and, you know, other reformers who made the Republican Party at that point become a party of reformers, it was really because the party split between the traditionalists, McGinley and, and these reformers. And maybe that's what has to happen in the Republican Party here again. But I do think that to the extent corruption is corruption of money for the purpose of advancing wealth, as we've seen it happen in America, it does read in a particular way. And we just should be honest about that and not imagine it's a problem caused by, you know, just caused by liberals not being sufficiently open to talking to government.

No, no, but I think we also have to. I mean, listen, we don't need to get too deep into this. But we got to remember that one of the innovations, so to speak, that Bill Clinton brought to the Democratic Party is that he saw back in the 1980s that the union money, with the decline of unions in America, the union money was going to dry up, which was one of the main sources of support for the Democratic Party, and that the Democrats, to be competitive, would have to find money elsewhere. So he started. The Democrats started going to industries that they believed, believed were less odious than the extractive industries, you know, that they felt like they had funded the Republican Party for a long time, the defense industry, the oil and coal industry, et cetera, et cetera. So they went to Wall street, was number one. They went to the pharmaceutical companies, they went to the health care companies, they went to the media companies, and they developed their own kind of, you know, very reliable bench of corporate support for the Democratic Party. And so now unions, you know, where they represent less than 8% of the population, a tiny percentage of the money that goes into the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has leaned much more into those large corporate interests than you or I would have expected 30 years ago. So it's not like. Absolutely, you know, it's not like the Democrats are out there kind of like just collecting money from common people anymore. Which is part of why. Which is part of why the public is so pissed, because both parties are like, you know, not listening to them.

Absolutely. I mean, I'm not making a. I'm not saying one is good and the other is bad. And I think that the fight that you and I have watched in the Democratic Party to allow reform to rise to the top has been a fight against Democrats in the Democratic Party who believe in the old system, who believe in a world where they're going to raise money from a few rich interests, because that turns out to be the easier way to raise money to win elections. So inside the Democratic Party, too, there has been that fight. But what's striking is it's not like the facts are not as equally obvious on both sides. And it's not like, you know, there's some obligation for liberals to teach conservatives. Conservatives can figure this out just as easily we can, as liberals can. And it's just been possible within the Democratic Party to make this move because of the leadership of particular people who've, like, made it central. And we've not seen that opportunity yet in the context of the Republican Party. But you and I know really extraordinary leaders in the Republican movement. You know, people like John Pudner's Group Take Back a Republic, and Richard Painter, who was originally part of that, who, you know, wants to maintain a frame of like, what traditional Republican values should be here. I mean, these are people who I think have an opportunity, if they can rally enough and give, get freedom from the party to do something that could begin to make this happen inside the Republican Party too. But those are not people who are going to be supported by the equivalent of Wall street in the Republican Party. But. And you know, yeah, they're going to come about Wall street and the Democratic Party.

Yes.

Yeah, we need more of them. Okay, so your group issue one has been the most effective. Knitting together, I think, these two sides. On the website, which we're going to link to on our page, you have an extraordinary list of solutions that, that have been hammered out by real members of both sides that you could pass tomorrow, even if they don't yet include what I believe, maybe you believe too, is a central part of this, which is to deal with the money problem. Are you optimistic?

Yes. Yes. And the reason why I'm optimistic is, and I'll give you this kind of gruesome metaphor that gives me the optimism, which is that if you've got, if you've got a kind of a functional alcoholic living with you, you know, who's able to get up and go to work good enough and able to kind of sit at the dinner table and make conversation good enough and hasn't crashed the car and, you know, or left the bathroom bathtub running to the point where it floods the house, then you're kind of like, okay. I think a lot of people are like, all right, well, it's a functional alcoholic. And I think that's kind of the way the public has been viewing Washington for the last 20 years or so. Like, eh, it's pretty ugly there, but I guess something's happening. I don't know. Well, then all of a sudden, if the drunk falls down, smashes their head and is bleeding out on the bathroom floor, you have a totally different situation on your hand. You've got an emergency. And that's what's happened in the last three years. I mean, the drunk has fallen down and there is blood all over the bathroom floor. And so that is the very thing that gives me hope is that there is a sense of deep panic in the country and increasingly in Washington that something terrible has happened. And that if we don't begin working together to put this thing back together, we could, you know, we could lose it. So lose it big time. You know, so people see that we're unraveling as a country right now. We're unraveling socially and we're unraveling politically. Increasingly, I hear, I talk to national security leaders, including former generals, Republicans, who say, you know, flat out, the number one threat to America right now is not external but internal. ISIS is not a threat to America. ISIS is not going to take over America or take down, you know, buildings in New York. We're taking down ourselves. And they understand that it's the greatest threat. So, you know, you hear that with business leaders who are starting to show up and say, yeah, we might have a decent Dow, but we don't have a functional country anymore and we don't have reliability anymore because the political situation is so chaotic. And then you've got, you know, a lot of grassroots Republicans, you've got a lot of establishment Republicans who are starting to come out and say the same thing. And if you just look at, you know, some of the leading Republican columnists in the major newspapers, they're almost all saying this, right? So there is a profound recognition that we're in a crisis situation right now. And so it is, you know, where that leaves our community, this community of political reformers is we've got the opportunity of a lifetime. And frankly, if we can't seize it, then the failure's on us in the end because we're the ones who do this work for a living. We just have to figure out how to seize it. So that's what gives me hope, is that there is widespread panic right now.

Yeah, that's usually what it takes. What concerns me is that that panic is interpreted to be caused by a single person and that so much of our energy is focused on the president not recognizing that even if there were not Donald Trump on the stage, we would still be facing exactly the same level of crisis in the functioning of our democracy. And so this is where I want to agree with you, that on our side, the Democratic side, my side, I mean, you're playing the cross partisan game quite effectively. But on my side, what terrifies me is the failure to help America see that however bad this president might be, the problems underlying this administration come from something much more fundamental. And we have to find a way to talk about that to get to that if we're ever going to get beyond this existential crisis you've described.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and it's obviously you and I like to focus a lot on democracy and political reform, but really at the center of it all is massive economic displacement, which is a Result of the money in politics situation, a result of the fact that public policy has been either slow to react or there's been almost no reaction to the evaporation of middle class jobs in this country in the last 30 years. And in fact, quite the opposite. Oftentimes there's been gasoline on the fire, including nafta, you know, and other of these in quote, free trade deals, you know, the financialization of the entire economy by Wall street, which Democrats helped lead with financial deregulation in the 1990s. So, you know, that's, I think where most people wake up and start is that they, is that their communities have fallen apart, that there is widespread anxiety and depression and plummeting health and plummeting prospects. And that's why, as you know, for the first time, two years ago, for the first time since they've been tracking this in American history, Americans have said that their children's lives will no longer be better than their lives. So that's where most Americans start. And then they understand that there's, that we need, our only way out of this is through a government that can function on behalf of them or all of us again. So, you know, I think that the thing that needs to be married up here is the two of those. We did a bunch of polling work, actually it was more like marketing work about five years ago about political reform. And we hired this guy, this famous guy named Roy Spence, who's a real character from Austin, Texas. He literally is the guy who came up with the phrase don't mess with Texas as the anti litter campaign. He's the guy who transformed Southwest Airlines from being the cheap, kind of dangerous airline into the freedom to fly airline. Right? Like big marketing genius. And we challenged him and said, Roy, take democracy reform and make it and sell it to people, basically. And after a bunch of work, he came back to us and, and he said, you gotta talk about the price we all pay. The price we all pay. And if you don't talk about the price we all pay, if you can't connect fixing the political system to the fact that people are, their moms are having to cut their pills in half, the fact that they don't have any good job prospects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, like if you can't connect the dots for them, it's going to be harder for them to lean in. But the moment you connect those dots end at the, almost like a nuclear explosion. And so I think that part of what's incumbent upon our community is to not just talk about democracy for the sake of democracy, but to talk about democracy for the case of rebuilding the middle class in this country. And that's no great insight. I mean, you hear many of the Democrats on the stage are kind of talking that type of language or talk in those circles, but it's not explicit. And I think that part of what we're going to need is to make it much more explicit.

Yes, because people don't actually believe the government can do anything because they believe the government is broken and corrupted. So if you don't make it explicit, they all will agree with you that we need a health care system that works. But if you don't make explicit how you're going to fix the broken system of government, they're not going to believe you when you say elect me and we're going to get a health care system system that works. Because they're reasoning quite rationally why, how you've got a broken, corrupted system called government that can't actually deliver.

Yeah, totally agree. But I think they also intuitively know that neither the private sector nor philanthropists have enough power or vision to get us out of this, out of what we're currently in. I think that people understand that we actually do need the kind of policy making and the kind of moves that only the federal government can make at this point to be able to drag us out of the ditch.

Yeah, but here's where you know, to go back to again, Reagan, the way you framed it, you know, when he said in 1981, Government's not the solution, the government is the problem. I think most people, you know, he said that for kind of libertarian reasons. I'm not sure most people actually agreed with it then, but I think people agree with it now, not because they're libertarians, but because they've just been so convinced that the system is as we've described it to be. And there's a lot of work to get people back to the place where they actually think that there's something here that can be done. One of the polls you did, you did with me. If you remember way back in the beginning when we were talking about what was the public support, and there's something like 96% believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. And then 91% didn't think it was possible. This is like part of a general skepticism about, you know, this ideal of collective action really working anymore. And we have to break that as well.

No, totally, totally. And you know, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Right. Like you don't believe Washington can work. Washington doesn't work. The gridlock remains. You're not leaning in as a citizen. So the politicians are kind of left to their own devices or vices maybe I should say. And so it just kind of goes around and around. I see this with philanthropists too Larry, which really goes back to some of the stuff we were first talking about about like why the needs of the democracy reform sector to scale in the way that the States United environmental sector did. So I'll sit down with people, high net worth individuals and they'll say well you know, I mean, what's the point really? Should we be investing in any federal strategies right now? Because what can happen in Washington? So I think I'll invest. I either won't invest because I don't think this stuff can be fixed so I'm going to invest in homeless shelters instead because that's something where I can actually measure my, the effects of my dollars, or I'm going to invest in stock state level change. I'm going to invest in ballot initiatives so that in itself becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Okay, so we're not investing in federal strategies to actually create a climate environment in Washington to pass political reform and therefore we never create the climate environment in Washington to pass political reform. And so two and three years from now those philanthropists can say see, I told you so, nothing was possible in Washington. Well yeah, it's because we didn't invest in anything to happen in Washington. So it's like, you know, it's the same mentality as the city, as the regular disempowered citizen who doesn't have a lot of money, who's like yeah, nothing can happen in Washington, so why should I lean into that? So I think that. But again I think that at this point, in this moment of crisis, at this historic inflection point, we have the ability, if we can play our cards right and develop the right strategies, we have the ability to capture the public imagination, which includes the imagination of people who have money and can invest in change and kind of rush in and start getting some stuff done in the next couple years. And if we don't, I think that our current flirtation with authoritarianism in this country we could turn into a full blown love affair. Because authoritarians, God damn it, if they know how to do anything, they know how to push everything out of their way, including democratic norms and standards to get stuff done on behalf of enough people that they can get reelected.

It's terrifying. So Nick Penniman I'm grateful that you take this time. And I'm so grateful for your work. I can tell you that many people, not necessarily people in the reform community who of course have known you forever, but many people from outside the reform community who I've talked to about what we're trying to do point me directly to you or to your organization. And it's a great testament to the success you guys have had. So point people to you too. And I wish you luck in bringing more from the other side into this conversation.

Thank you, Larry. Thank you for your constant creativity and dedication to this stuff also.

Okay. Okay. See ya. That's Nick Penniman. Thanks. These podcasts are produced by citizens us. You can find us on the web at equal citizens us. And you can find this podcast@equalcitizens.us. there's a place there to share the podcast and to give us feedback and your ideas. Please do both. Please share this broadly and as I've said before, I'll say again, whether or not the philosophers can resolve whether a tree falling in the woods, when no one hears it creates any sound, we here are pretty sure that a podcast that is not shared does not produce any change. Many of the ideas discussed in this season of Another Way are also discussed in a book that's just been published. Part of the reason I've been off the air for so many weeks, I've been out talking about my new book, they Don't Represent Us. You can get the book at your local bookstore, I hope. If you can't, then tell them they should have it. Or@hc.com representus hc for HarperCollins.com representus or I hear they have it at Amazon. I'm grateful for your listening. I'm incredibly grateful for the feedback that you give us and the support for Equal Citizens. We've just completed an incredibly successful campaign to raise the funds that we need to make our work continue. As you know, I hope you know we believe in this pretty significantly. So I hope it's at least a message that's conveyed. We don't raise money except for one period of time during the year. So I'm not even going to ask you to give us money now. But when we do raise money and we succeed, it is such a pleasant relief because there's so much real work to do. Real work that's not about asking people to turn over their credit cards or treating people like they are just mini ATMs. So thank you for the support that makes that possible. And stay tuned for the next episode. We've got a really incredible lineup coming up, and I'm eager to continue the recordings. This is Larry Lessig. Thanks very much.