This is Democracy – Episode 271: Reforming Democracy

[00:00:00] Intro: This is democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

[00:00:23] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that really encompasses many of the topics we talk about each week. This is the larger topic of reforming democracy and reforming democratic institutions. What does it mean to reform institutions? How should we think about that today? We’re in a season around the world with so many elections.

When we’re focused on individual candidates and, winning elections, we hope for the side that supports democracy and opposes authoritarianism. But of course, winning elections is only one step. the larger question is what our institution should look like and how our institution should be reformed to address the challenges and opportunities of our moment.

We are fortunate today to be joined, by one of the leading thinkers and writers on this topic. Someone who’s been writing about these issues for a very, long time. I first encountered his work, when I was a graduate student and he was writing about the war in the former Yugoslavia. this is, Michael Ignatieff.

He’s a historian and a former leader of the late, of the liberal party. of the Liberal Party of Canada. He has served as rector and president of Central University and, Central European University in, well, it was in Budapest, Hungary. Where is Central University, Central European University now headquartered, Michael?

[00:01:50] Michael: after Orban pushed us out of, Budapest, we moved the whole place to Vienna, and we’re thriving in Vienna, Austria. Two hours next door.

[00:02:01] Jeremi: Fantastic. I, Central European University was in Budapest. I remember visiting many years ago. And as Michael’s just pointed out, it’s been forced to move to Vienna and thriving, as he says, it’s really one of the most important institutions for bringing together scholars and thinkers from Central and Southern Europe.

Michael Ignatius, the author of many books, most recently on consolation, finding solace in dark Transcription by CastingWords times. Michael Ignatieff, thank you for joining us today.

[00:02:29] Michael: Pleasure to be here, Jeremy.

[00:02:31] Jeremi: Of course, we have, our poem from Mr. Zachary Suri today to get us started. what’s the title of your poem, Zachary?

[00:02:39] Zachary: Constitution of the Soul. Let’s hear it. Walking down 42nd Street It is clear to me that everyone has their own abiding guilt, their own redemption high above, some kindness, truth, and even love. But maybe it’s a good thing we couldn’t care less about warplanes and legislation, about markets and the state of the nation.

So that even when the news is dark, each apartment still has light, and every child gets a warm embrace, even if our world is filled with hate. And then I hear the president on television, saying everyone has a time and a place, saying we need to keep running the race, because each of us is but an elision between the past and our posterity, between division and prosperity.

It makes me think perhaps there’s something more at hand, than millions of people with their heads in the sand. For every constitution’s butt parchment rules, we must choose our government in our very souls.

[00:03:43] Jeremi: What is your poem about, Zachary?

[00:03:45] Zachary: My poem is about, the temptation to view politics as something separate from our everyday lives, as something that we don’t need to be actively, participating in, but something that we can separate out.

and, and, live our lives, while politics goes on in some different sphere, it’s tempting to look at the world that way, but, I think the poem’s about how important it is that we don’t separate the two, that we are active citizens in everything that we do, and that we refuse to sort of cynically turn away from politics and focus on our own sphere.

[00:04:18] Jeremi: Yeah. So politics is more than just going to the, to vote every now and then. It’s a much more, consistent endeavor, you argue. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. Michael, does that, resonate with, your perspective on democracy?

[00:04:32] Michael: Sure does. Sure does. I mean, I, except I’d add one little caveat. There are some things that politics can’t fix.

There are some tragedies in your life that, Politics can’t cope with, you know, we die, we age, we’ve lived through this recently with a president deciding or being forced by the facts to understand he was just too old to serve another term. There’s something tragic about the difficulty he had in recognizing that fact, but that’s a fact that happens to It happens to us all.

There’s a moment when it’s time and, no politics can fix that problem. You’re suddenly too old and you just have to accept it.

[00:05:16] Jeremi: That’s right. That’s right. And it’s, always hard. One has to give, I think, President Biden credit for, recognizing that. In the recent article you’ve written for the Journal of Democracy, entitled, When Democracy is on the Ballot, you talk about the performative legitimacy of democracy.

And I think that overlaps with what you’re referring to here. What, do you mean by the performative legitimacy of democracy?

[00:05:40] Michael: Well, that’s a fancy way of just saying when democracies are working the way they should, the machine just Produces results that people don’t question and more or less, except Congress meets Congress, pass bills, the president argues with Congress, Congress argues back with the president and other political systems.

The arguments are a different kind, but the system turns and the legitimacy of the system is achieved by the fact that it just works and people. Don’t think about it very much and then there comes a moment and we’ve been living this in the United States And we’ve been living this in a lot of other countries when suddenly the system is in question people are thinking Democracy doesn’t work very well.

the conflict is continual. some people are saying something is undemocratic. The other side is claiming it is democratic. We as citizens can’t adjudicate that conflict or we’re caught between two competing views of democracy. And suddenly democracy itself is on the question. And as president Biden said at the beginning of.

January this year, democracy gets on the ballot and suddenly people are being asked to choose between candidates, one of whom is supposed to be an enemy of democracy. And the other is a friend of democracy. And that then polarizes the country still further. So the performative legitimacy of democracy is, democracy and normal operation when we don’t question its legitimacy and how it operates.

And unfortunately, we’ve left that yeah. World of normal operation. And we’re in a situation in the United States, but also in other countries where suddenly the very are very support for our very belief in our very faith in our willingness to continue with the system is suddenly a ballot question. And this is extremely bad for a democracy.

I mean, I just point out one thing that’s bad about it. And this is controversial. If you’re a Democrat, you may be inclined to believe that anybody who supports President Trump is an enemy of democracy. Well, the difficulty here is that millions of people who vote for Trump believe they’re defending democracy, supporting democracy.

They believe that, you know, the recent assassination attempt against President Trump was, President Trump himself said, I took a bullet for democracy. That is, both sides are claiming democracy is legitimacy, and that’s why this is a painful and difficult moment. If all the right answers were on one side, yes, this would be simple, but it isn’t.

[00:08:38] Jeremi: yes. Zachary?

[00:08:39] Zachary: Why do you think we’re in a moment when, so many of the norms of democracy seem to be on the ballot around the world when so many, institutional norms, but also, as you said, political culture itself, seems challenged?

[00:08:54] Michael: Oh, Zachary, if I knew the answer to that question, I’d be a rich man.

I think we’re all, struggling with that. Partly because the conditions in each of these countries is different. I mean, India, the biggest democracy of them all, has had an election and everybody thought democracy was in peril there. And in fact, the electorate held back from endorsing the incumbent.

And so suddenly what looked like a crisis seemed to be a demonstration of democracy’s resilience. So it’s not just that there are different conditions around the world, but the conditions in some then change. From moment to moment. I mean, I’m I have a feeling if one side or the other wins a clear ballot victory in November, either Mr Trump or Mrs Harris, one side or the other will say, well, democracy has been vindicated and the other side will say, well, democracy still in crisis.

What are the deeper reasons for this? I think that’s what you’re pushing us to think about. I mean, some of it is, I think, a thing that’s very difficult for liberals, and I’m a firm I’m a liberal to talk about, which is a sense of deep scathing distrust towards liberal centrist politicians who’ve managed the democratic system for 40, 50 years and whoever enriched themselves often done very well within the system.

And a lot of people feel that elite has sold them out and they feel neglected. They feel their claims, their assertions, their desires, their views of the world are being dissed and not listened to. So there’s a, fracture there that between elites who think the political system is serving them well and a vast number of people in lots of countries who think the political system is either not working at all or is actively betraying what they.

Deeply believe and that’s a real that’s a that’s a crisis. There’s no way to duck it There’s no way to pretend this isn’t happening. It’s really happening

[00:11:07] Jeremi: One of the points you make in your Journal of Democracy article that I think addresses this and that resonated certainly with me Michael was a point about populism.

you, you call democracy a promiscuous legitimizer. And I, you, give examples, including Viktor Orban, in Hungary, where you’re, where you are now, of individuals who are doing things that are patently, undemocratic, but use arguments of democracy, just as you gave examples now, perhaps those who support Donald Trump, who out of a certain anger will do things such as support dictatorial policies that look undemocratic, but democracy is used as, you say, a promiscuous legitimizer.

First of all, what should we do about that? and what insights does it give us about a pathway to reform?

[00:11:58] Michael: Well, I think one thing we need to do is stop using populism as a kind of acute accusatory denunciatory category that we use every time somebody makes a challenge to political elites in the name of the people and dismisses us.

A kind of popular way of speaking, a popular way of mobilizing anger from the base. We dismiss that as populism at our peril. I mean, the right thing to do is to figure out where this is coming from. Why the populist is making an appeal that is, Successful. What is the resentment that is being stoked and confirmed by populist appeals?

There’s a kind of really dangerous way in which embattled political elites and by political elites, I mean myself, you know, I used to be the leader of a political party in Canada, and we had run the political system. The Liberal Party of Canada was the governing party of our country for long periods of time, and we tended to dismiss populist anger towards our kind of politics as unreasonable, irrational, little people who didn’t somehow understand what the, you know, what the big world was really like and how it should be run.

And, this condescending way of looking at popular discontent and labelling all populism as Kind of wrong, laid, us wide open to people like Trump, who is, in my view, an unscrupulous demagogue. Others will disagree with me, but he heard something, from the excluded majority of American life and has wrote it.

To the white house once and may write it to the white house. Again, the problem with Trump is not that he doesn’t have a good ear for popular discontent. The problem is that he doesn’t propose solutions for that discontent that are really going to make a difference to the people who support him. And that’s the problem.

But he’s heard something from an excluded America that just has to be listened to. And. You know, Political elites around the world have been extraordinarily slow since the 2008 financial crisis to pick up this, these voices from below. And I think that’s what the populist revolt is, registering.

[00:14:32] Jeremi: I guess what I struggle with, Michael, is, this voice from below, right?

The way you depict it, and perhaps correctly, and certainly very thoughtfully, is, that there’s a brewing discontent, and that pre existing brewing discontent is exploited by the demagogue. But to some extent, it seems to me, The demagogue creates that discontent, right?

[00:14:59] Michael: I’d agree with that. it’s a kind of pernicious cycle in which there is a discontent and then a successful demagogue plays on it, exploits it, torques it up.

And so it gets a kind of dialectical relationship between the top and the bottom. and that heats the temperature of the water pretty quickly.

[00:15:18] Jeremi: Right. and some of that has to do with new forms of media, and this is not a unique problem to our moment. We see this in other moments that when the, when radio is developed, and we have radio demagogues, in various places, television.

but some of it also seems to me to be about rules. And you talk about this in many things you’ve written, right? So, the reason we often have political rules, and the reason we have political parties, is to bound our discourse. Right. The demagogues of our current moment have broken the rules. Is this where institutional reform is needed to recreate rules and guideposts for our politics?

[00:15:55] Michael: I don’t think there’s any question, but some of the things that are broken in the rules desperately need to be fixed. I mean, there have just been too many elections in the United States recently in which one party won the popular vote and the other party won the electoral college. So you have Elections elect, you have presidential elections determined not by the size of.

The popular vote, not by majority rule, the basic rule of democracy itself, but by an antiquated institutional mechanism that had a purpose when it was originally designed, that is to offset the, to give to rural and small communities, a voice and power to offset the. population in other parts of the country.

All of that made sense 152 years, 100 years, 200 years ago, but it doesn’t now. And it then means that you have elections that are essentially decided in five or six quote unquote battleground states. I think almost every American looks at this now and thinks this just doesn’t make sense.

And then the Challenge is to find some bipartisan way of fixing this. And there are, I’m no expert on American electoral systems, but there’s no shortage of sensible, sound proposals to fix that. And if it, and if we could fix that would then. Provide, you know, a new degree of support for the legitimacy of the American political system.

But as long as people come out of election in November 2024, feeling that, you know, the electoral college went one way and the popular vote went the other, the performative legitimacy, which we talked about earlier, of democracy will be more and more in danger. There’s no question about it.

[00:17:49] Jeremi: Right. I agree.

Zachary,

[00:17:51] Zachary: in this framework, how can we reckon with the, distinct possibility that maybe a lot of the populist anger is at the system itself, but also at democracy itself? At greater inclusion of minority groups at, more equal democratic system and not, anger at the inequ, not anger at the inequalities in the system, but anger at the efforts to make the system more equal and more democratic.

[00:18:16] Michael: Zachary, that’s a very important. point. I say in the piece itself that if you’re a sort of centrist liberal like myself, the salient fact about politics around the world from the 1960s onwards has been a revolution of inclusion. Women, gay people of all sexual orientations, black Americans, it is said, and I think with justice, that America was not.

A fully inclusive democracy until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and five. So we are the, you know, my generation, I’m born after the second world war is the first generation to live in a democratic system that was fully inclusive in which everybody. had the right to vote and the right to stand and the right to stand for office publicly representing themselves as female, gay, whatever they wanted to be.

And that’s an incredible advance in my view, an incredible increase in the legitimacy of the democratic system. But you’re entirely right. This has awakened enormous power. Resistance from white males. I’m a white male, a proud white male, but enormous resistance from that enormous resistance from lower income Americans who used to feel they had a kind of status in the political system and have lost it.

So we’ve had a revolution of inclusion that has produced a better democratic system, a more legitimate democratic system, but it’s produced an astonishingly. Fierce and continuous backlash. And I think one of the illusions that heightens or highlights for me in my own views is that, you know, I was in my twenties when the, this revolution of inclusion began in the sixties and we had this illusion that.

That will be that. That is, once blacks have the vote, once women can participate equally in the political system, once gay Americans can proudly affirm their identity when they put their names on a ballot, that would be kind of, that would be done. We’d be done. We’re not done. We’re not done at all. This battle is still being fought and still must be won.

And I do believe over time that the revolution is irreversible. I mean, to give you one salient example, no one on the Republican side, to my knowledge, Is seeking consciously overtly and as a matter of public policy to reverse equality of marriage. The revolution that occurred as late as 2015, I think is irreversible.

I’ve officiated as a, Proud friend of two male colleagues of mine at their marriage. And I don’t, think we’re going back from that. I think it’s one of the best things that’s happened in my lifetime. I don’t think we’ll go back. So the battle isn’t over, but I do think the battle can be won.

And as it’s one, I think it’ll wreak havoc. constitute the legitimacy of the political system on the basis of full equality. And that’s the goal.

[00:21:39] Jeremi: And I think this gets us, to the core point about reforms and institutions. you make a really important point in your piece for Journal of Democracy that institutional reforms, you gave an example with the electoral college in the United States, you gave another example with marriage laws.

That for the most part, especially things like reforming the electoral college, those kinds of institutional reforms, most people agree something needs to be done, but those are usually not popular issues when people vote. They tend to vote on a personality or on a particular issue, such as their views of abortion or their views of the war in Ukraine.

And so how do we get people in this environment of discontent, of shifting cultural perceptions? How do we get people to take institutional reform seriously in these moments?

[00:22:33] Michael: It’s a great question, and it’s very difficult to give a clear answer because there’s a disturbing reality that I think I encountered when I was in politics.

Which is the democratic system itself doesn’t have many defenders, that is, the ordinary citizen don’t, think very much about democracy, don’t, it’s not a central ballot question to them. They’re concerned about cost of living issues, they’re concerned about values and identity issues, but not about what do we do to fix the system.

that’s problem one, problem two is that the political parties have an intense interest in the system because they’re, Electoral success depends on how those rules are written and which, whether those rules benefit their side or the other side. And that then produces the very considerable difficulty that any kind of political reform that you propose, will have winners and losers.

And, the losers will not support anything that makes it more certain that they’ll lose next time. So you have to have a very rare A situation in which you have a political leader who has control of Congress or control of their parliament, that is, has a majority, and decides suddenly not for his own or her own party political, benefit, but for the benefit of the whole system to propose a reform that he or she thinks, Will make democracy fairer and more equal Having described the problem.

You can see why it’s so difficult to get reform.

[00:24:14] Jeremi: Yes,

[00:24:15] Michael: and in the united states, I think the best chance of reform is your federal system that is A lot of election law is a state matter. So each state can innovate can try something out to make the system fairer or Conversely make the system less fair.

That’s a lot of that going on and somehow By incremental reform at the state level you can begin to get begin to get changed But when you look around the world when you stand back, what is very striking is how badly Democracy is operating in country after country. You know, Belgium spends a year and a half not with no government at all.

France is in the middle of what may become a full blown constitutional crisis because they don’t have a, they don’t have a prime minister that commands the support of parliament. The president is turning down people who are Proposed to people. So the system, the French political system is in crisis. The German political system has a three way coalition that is just basically barely functioning.

And these are big, important countries. I mean, if you ask questions about, can we, you know, hold off the Russians in Ukraine? It turns on, you know, can the French get a government? Can the Germans get a decent government? So democratic reform is. I think becoming more and more urgent priority, certainly in Europe where I’m talking to you, but I think it’s also existential in the United States.

I just think you can’t go on and on with a system which is just violating the basic principles of majority rule. And if I conclude with another example, you know, I’m actually a Canadian. I sound like an American, but I’m actually a Canadian. My country, which always thinks of itself as perfect in comparison to the United States, you know, you’re, the problem guys down South, but our political system has lots of problems and we just, we can’t seem to get them fixed.

And our country is getting weaker and weaker as a result. we, need a reform of our electoral system and we’re going to need a prime minister with the guts. And a majority to drive something through that makes our democracy more representative of, all our people. So, so it’s a global problem.

It’s not just a U S problem. it’s a global problem.

[00:26:40] Jeremi: That’s very well said. And, it does strike me that it is one of these historical moments where we’re in. where we need, new political actors who are not already embedded in one side or another to embrace the idea of reform, to push for the idea of reform, and to make this an issue.

I mean, so to talk about grassroots politics, I think that’s sort of what we need here. What are some of the issues? to close on, Michael, we always like to give our listeners, an agenda. We like them to, see how this history and political analysis matters, and many of our listeners are. younger, citizens in various societies.

What would you say are the top two or three, reform, institutional democratic reform issues that you would encourage listeners to champion or at least to learn about?

[00:27:30] Michael: Well, I think, you know, our democracy is a representative system and I think the core discontent is that we’re not being represented.

We’re not being heard. We being citizens. And so what do we do about that? I think What we know how to do is to throw the rascals out when we’re not being listened to by our representatives, we reject them in favor of another. So that’s one thing, just simply change at the ballot, but that requires that you vote.

So not voting seems to me to be pretty bad thing. It’s very important to drive up the turnout, drive out the, drive up the, participation rates, particularly among young people. I was in an election in 2007 in my own country, Canada, where. Only one in five. people under 25 even bothered to show up.

Something has happened to the instinctual loyalty that generations used to have towards the ritual of voting that has collapsed basically. And that’s Mission critical for the future of democracy. So anybody who knocks on your door and wants to register your vote or wants to get you in a get out the vote thing, please do that.

Second thing that I notice as a very hopeful sign, given that the crisis is a crisis of representation, is this thing that you see in Ireland, Ireland had a very complicated and divisive choice to make about abortion reform. In a once very Catholic country, and instead of turning that over to the elected representatives, the representatives turned it over to a citizens assembly chosen at random of about a hundred citizens from all walks of life in Ireland.

And, they were given the authority to make a proposal back to parliament about what we should do about this controversial issue and the citizens listened, they deliberated, they took it seriously, they spent time with it, the government made available all the expertise, the citizens not only came up with a great Suggestion of reform, particular reform proposal on, abortion law, but they then, because they were citizens, they helped to mobilize the Irish community, in support of, the measure itself.

And so a potentially extremely divisive issue. Was handed to citizens and they handed it back with a proposal that avoided, polarization and, contention and, that’s an example of trust citizens, give, citizens Important and difficult tasks. And I think they will come up with the goods.

And so the citizens assembly model doesn’t replace representation, but it supplements it. And if representatives are big enough and smart enough to take issues that they cancel and hand them back to citizens. Its citizens will hand it back to them with a proposal that I think can often, solve a democratic impasse.

So those would be the two things. Get out to vote. And secondly, let’s give power back to citizens in the form of citizens assemblies. I think they’re a very promising way to resolve some of our democratic difficulties.

[00:31:05] Jeremi: Zachary, as we close, as someone who’s, very involved in politics and hopes for reform, as I know you do, are those two good pathways to begin to work on, voter turnout, which of course is already an issue for many people.

And, what Michael describes as a plebiscitory or referendum Citizens Assembly approach to, to, voting. moving decisions to groups of citizens who might be self organized or organizing outside of representative institutions working in tandem with those institutions. What do you think, Zachary?

[00:31:42] Zachary: I think so.

I think we often complain about our political culture in the United States without really thinking seriously about structural reforms and the way in which our political system encourages the worst in our political culture. As we discussed last week, on political violence. And I think that these reforms are, very, good places to start in thinking about how we could creatively change our political culture using structural reform.

one thing I would say that I think is very, promising is what, they do in Australia and I think Argentina as well, which is requiring people to vote. So it becomes the norm that you have to show up at the ballot box and you have to make your voice heard even if you vote for no one and you just sort of put a blank ballot in and you’re fine if you don’t go and you have a day off.

from work. I think that would actually go a long way towards, towards incentivizing a participatory political culture. which I think is one of the greatest difficulties in our democracy is that some 30 to 40 percent of Americans and 30 to 40 percent of people living in democratic societies around the world don’t actually go to the polls.

[00:32:56] Jeremi: Yeah. Often in the United States, it’s close to 50 percent and for midterm and off year elections, it’s more than 50 percent that don’t vote. Michael, we are out of time, but I can’t help but ask you this very last question. Do you agree with Zachary that we should have a system of more mandatory voting?

[00:33:10] Michael: Well, I’m an old libertarian liberal, and I, there’s a bit of me that thinks if somebody’s going to fine me for not voting, I’ve got to. I’ve got a problem with a too powerful state, but look, I want to encourage voting, but I, do think voting to be virtuous, to be what we want it to be has to remain voluntary.

And I’m, a little uneasy about coercion. But we may have to get there. I go halfway with Zachary. If the turnout rates fall any more, we may have to call in the cops. Okay?

[00:33:48] Jeremi: What has been so valuable, Michael and Zachary, in this conversation, and I know our listeners will appreciate it, is I think we’ve displayed the value.

Of having a serious discussion about institutional reform and the possibilities that open up. This doesn’t have to be an argument over who’s right and who’s wrong. It can be an argument over how to improve our system. The American system certainly was created with the intention that this would happen.

Thomas Jefferson was quite clear on this, that he believed the system should remake itself. With every generation. And I think this conversation has pointed out, Michael, your work, your large body of work, and particularly your most recent article in the journal of democracy that we’ve been sort of focusing on, your work shows this, that our systems need to evolve and we need as citizens to embrace that.

So I hope all of our listeners will find a way to bring that into their political discussions, not just which candidates do you like or not like, but which reforms do you want to push for and how can you get more people to talk about reforming the electoral college, reforming voting, various other things.

And many of these reforms can start at the local level because as Michael said, at least in the United States, many of the decisions about how people voted, what elections are about and how our democracy operates, they’re decided by cities, states. And so we can begin this change at home. Michael Ignatieff, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:35:10] Michael: Pleasure. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, Zachary.

[00:35:13] Jeremi: Zachary, thank you for your stimulating and thought provoking poem as all. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners. Thank you for reading our substack, Democracy of Hope, and for listening to our podcast, We Are Fortunate. To, have you as listeners and, we will continue our work each week to help our democracy grow and thrive.

Thank you for joining us. This for this episode of This Is Democracy.

[00:35:47] Outro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Kini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find this is Democracy on Apple Podcasts. Spotify and Stitcher. See you next time.