Across the Lines: We Win Democracy Together, with Rachel Kleinfeld

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. 

[00:00:07] Rachel Kleinfeld: When we look at democracies overseas, if people are disenfranchised, that’s the number one reason they turn to terrorism. It doesn’t have to do with poverty, it doesn’t have to do with all sorts of economic issues that people have looked at.

[00:00:19] Terrorism is really largely about political disenfranchisement and police brutality. You get those two things together and you have terrorism, whether you’re talking about ISIS or whether you’re talking about organs.

[00:00:46] Scot Nakagawa: Welcome to the Anti Authoritarian Podcast, a project of the 22nd Century Initiative. I’m Scott Nakagawa, one of your hosts. 

[00:00:54] Sue Hyde: Hello friends. I’m co-host Sue Hyde Scott and I first joined forces about 30 years ago to help defeat anti L-G-B-T-Q ballot measures proposed by Christian authoritarian groups. 

[00:01:07] Scot Nakagawa: It was as true then as it is now that those of us who believe in democracy make up a supermajority of people in this country.

[00:01:14] The challenge is, how do we go from being the majority to acting like the majority? 

[00:01:19] Sue Hyde: We dig into strategy questions like these and prescriptions for change. We talk with expert guests and commentators whose scholarship, political activism, and organizing Define the cutting edge of anti authoritarian resistance.

[00:01:35] Thank you for joining us.

[00:01:41] Scot Nakagawa: If you’re following the news, the world can feel like a scary place, with each week bringing a new source of anxiety over the state of our democracy. But our futures are not yet written. Understanding the complex dynamics at play at each historical period can help us to navigate threats and opportunities more effectively and, very importantly, to see that at the end of each historical period, there are other sets of future possibilities that aren’t apparent to us unless we look for them.

[00:02:08] and gather the courage to embrace the opportunities that lie just on the other side of crises. In this episode, we’re going to talk to someone who can help us understand the complex dynamics of this time, and help us to consider what we need to do to turn this ship around. 

[00:02:24] Sue Hyde: Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld advises governments, philanthropists, and activists on how democracies make Major social change.

[00:02:35] Raised in a log house on a dirt road in Fairbanks, Alaska, Rachel received her B. A. from Yale University, her Master’s of Philosophy and Doctorate of Philosophy at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. As a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rachel is a leading expert on how democracies, including the United States, can improve.

[00:03:02] With a particular focus on countries facing poor leadership, polarized populations, violence, and corruption. You can read more about her at RachelKleinfeld. com, and I encourage you to do she’s a font of wisdom. And welcome, Rachel, to the Anti Authoritarian Podcast. So thrilled 

[00:03:23] Rachel Kleinfeld: to be here. 

[00:03:24] Sue Hyde: All right.

[00:03:24] Scot Nakagawa: Like Sue said, I’ve been reading Rachel and I recommend her highly to all of you go to that website. So first question we’d like to dig into your 2022 paper, five strategies to support us democracy, which you wrote for the Carnegie endowment. In there you say American democracy is at a dangerous inflection point.

[00:03:44] The moment requires a step change in strategy and support. And then you described this danger in four areas. The first one is International Markers of American Democracy’s Swift Decline. The second is The Authoritarian Playbook to Undermine Democracy. The third, How Polarization is Enabling Anti Democratic Action.

[00:04:06] And the fourth, The Rise in Political Violence Against Key Targeted Groups. Could you talk about these areas and how they’ve changed in the past two years since you wrote that paper? 

[00:04:17] Rachel Kleinfeld: Sure. So I think when you look at democracy globally, the way I do, one of the things that is really notable is that we’ve been in a democratic decline for almost 20 years now.

[00:04:27] And that means that more democracies have been failing that are being created. Autocracies are hardening. So countries that started out a little authoritarian are getting a lot authoritarian and a handful, not that many, but a handful of full democracies are failing. And the way they’re failing is actually along a very similar trajectory, which is that they tend to elect leaders who are very popular.

[00:04:51] Those leaders win elections legitimately, but they then go ahead and start dismantling the Democratic guardrails. They start changing elections to favor them. They start using law and government agencies to go after their opponents. They chill speech. And so while the elections continue to be happening, they become less and less fair.

[00:05:14] They become less and less open to the opposition, harder and harder to win. But there’s also a real solidifying of a polarization. in society and that polarization abets authoritarianism because what happens is each side says we’re so terrified of the other side winning that it’s okay if our side breaks the rules a little bit.

[00:05:35] Because we’re willing to break the rules a little bit. We really don’t want the other guy in power. They’re just too frightening. But that happens on both sides. And what in countries like Hungary, Poland just started coming out of this, but went pretty far down. India’s continuing to go far down.

[00:05:49] Is these elected leaders taking apart their own democracies? And that’s the trajectory that America’s been on. And in every international index, that downward decline in America. We’re on one of the fastest downward declines of any democracy. Freedom House, where I sit on the board, very bipartisan board, was started during World War II to stop the America First rhetoric of Charles Lindbergh during that period of time.

[00:06:11] And Freedom House has us on one of the fastest downward trajectories anywhere. We’re ranked now between Croatia and Romania in the quality of our democracy. And I think a lot of Americans just don’t realize how bad things have gotten. They still see democracy as, of course they go to the left or they go to the right in the primary election and then they should pivot to the middle during the general and rule for the whole country.

[00:06:33] But that just hasn’t been the way our elections have worked. Since about 2000, almost 25 years. Now politicians are really incentivized because of the safety of their seats. Almost all congressional seats, about 85 percent are safe for one party. And that means that they’re not worried about the other party beating them.

[00:06:52] They’re only worried about someone from their left or right flank. eating their lunch. And so that incentivizes polarization. And America is now the most perniciously polarized country. That means the most incentivized to be polarized of any democracy that’s consolidated anywhere on earth and has been for the longest amount of time.

[00:07:10] And because that polarization abets authoritarianism, as I was saying, what we’re seeing is all of these dirty tricks. And there are other parts of our, election system that further abet this. So when we do democratization overseas, I used to be involved in election monitoring overseas and helping countries set up their democracies.

[00:07:29] We never put in a winner take all system where if you get one extra vote more than your opponent, you win the whole shebang. Usually it’s something more proportional. You get a percentage and you get that percentage. And that’s because that kind of election system is really given to violence and voter suppression.

[00:07:45] Which makes sense, if you can change just a handful of votes you have more violence and voter suppression. Our country historically has had more of those problems when we’re when Congress is very closely held, when it could go to either side. Usually Congress is held by one party for 40, 50, 60 years, and the other party has an incentive to just go along.

[00:08:04] But when Congress is really on a razor’s edge, it could go either way. The incentives for violence and voter suppression becomes even greater because not only might you win that one district or that one Senate seat, but that one district or Senate seat might win you the whole of Congress. So that’s what we’re seeing, and that’s the background.

[00:08:21] We were last at this point where we were on such a razor’s edge during Reconstruction, which was not a great time in our country’s history from a violence perspective and from a voter suppression perspective. And so what we’re seeing now is Is a lot of attempts mostly by the Republican party to suppress voters and to change laws to make it easier for some people to vote, harder for other people to vote.

[00:08:46] And what we saw in 2020 was a real use of violence against first of all, moderate Republicans. MAGA Republicans using it against their own side in order to suppress that point of view. And we see that overseas too, in all sorts of conflicts I work in. One side trying to suppress the moderates within their own side to abet polarization because that helps them.

[00:09:08] And we’ve also seen a lot of violence against minority groups because that also helps build a base. It helps build base intensity to get out the vote. And we’ve seen a lot of Voter suppression and, sorry, not voter suppression alone, but also threats and violence toward election workers and people who have the power to affect how an election goes.

[00:09:28] Many of them Republicans, not just Democrats. The numbers are pretty neck and neck actually because it’s a strategy to, to make change. 

[00:09:36] Sue Hyde: Rachel you mentioned that in your analysis that The United States has been sliding for the last 25 years beginning in 2000 certainly a presidential election that I well remember.

[00:09:52] But for those maybe who aren’t as old as I am, or don’t remember, could you just briefly kind of recount for us the steps that you observed beginning with that 2000 presidential election? 

[00:10:10] Rachel Kleinfeld: Sure. We can go back to that election, which was an extremely close election. It turned on Florida, and there was a recount of a handful of votes in Florida, which it really looked like the voter intent was not what the outcome was.

[00:10:24] A bunch of voters who would normally vote pretty liberal were coming out quite conservative, and the Supreme Court ended up throwing out those ballots. They were invalidated ballots and handing the election to George W. Bush. But that is actually not the main problem that we’re focusing on right now.

[00:10:40] What’s been going on since then is Voters have been settling near people of like mind, and their ideologies have been becoming much more homogenized. What that means is that it used to be that you would have Democrats that were to the right of Republicans on a number of issues, and Republicans that were to the left of Democrats.

[00:11:00] When you had Rockefeller Republicans, they were called kind of country club Republicans. They might have very open views about immigration or what have you. And you had a lot of Southern Democrats who maybe didn’t switch parties after the civil rights act, but their core was much less open on issues like that.

[00:11:17] And so you had a lot of people in the middle and you had a lot of swing voters. Who had a belief set that I call it more for me, less for thee. They believed in redistribution. They believed in government redistribution of money, so they weren’t, were pretty left wing on their economics. But they were pretty darn socially conservative.

[00:11:36] So when you looked at who an American citizen was and asked this group of voters, they would say an American citizen needs to be European ancestry, so basically white. Native born and Christian, and those were real Americans and all the rest of us were not real Americans but they were swing voters because they voted left on economics and right on these social issues and back and forth.

[00:11:58] What we saw after 2000 was that voters had geographically separated themselves enough. That more and more seats were safe. And that means that even despite gerrymandering, not talking about gerrymandering because Senate seats, for instance, can’t be gerrymandered. They’re state by state. You were still getting liberals settling in certain places and Republicans settling in other states.

[00:12:18] We also had gerrymandering on top of that, which was making it worse in certain congressional seats. And then at the local level, often you wouldn’t even have anybody running. So you would have over, about a third of local elections now are uncontested by the other party. Only one party is even bothering to run.

[00:12:33] For all those reasons it became a much more polarized electorate. And then we had this group of swing voters, this more for me, less for thee swing voters. And what happened after 2008, Was that we had a meltdown economically and people were really mad that hedge funds got bailed out and banks got bailed out and regular people did not.

[00:12:55] And they really felt like the system was rigged against them and neither party was answering that call. And what you saw was Donald Trump come in and see an realignment is what we call them. They happen every. 50, 60 years or so on where he saw that left wing economic ideas, resentment, grievance, and this very socially conservative anti immigrant.

[00:13:18] racialized message could get a hearing and he promulgated that. And it’s worth remembering that 13 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters voted for Donald Trump in the general election. He got this group of people who were these swing voters. Now they’ve moved firmly into the Republican base, but they don’t believe in conservative economics.

[00:13:38] And so now you have a Republican party. That’s about a fifth of the people don’t believe in small government, low taxes. So how do you galvanize that base? through this real socially conservative anti immigrant and so on messaging. And that’s what the voter realignment is giving us. So since 2000, that’s what we’ve seen is this hardening, this polarization of voters, and this swing of voters who were swing voters into the Republican Party.

[00:14:04] Which is further the, furthering the stacking of identity issues. If I tell you that I drink kombucha, you know how I vote, or if I tell you what movie I, I watch, you know how I vote, where all sorts of identities are stacking up and that makes people much more volatile.

[00:14:22] Sound on Tape: Hello, I’m Marcy Ryan and I’m the print editor for Convergence. If you’re enjoying this show like I am, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Convergence. We’re a small, independent operation and rely heavily on our readers and listeners, like you, to support our work. You can become a subscriber at convergencemag.

[00:14:39] com slash donate. You’ll find a direct link in the show notes. Subscriptions start at just 10 a month, or you can make a one time donation of any amount. At any donation level, know that you’re helping to build a better media system, one that supports people’s movements and fights fascism. But at 10 monthly and above, you’ll have access to exclusive content and events.

[00:15:00] If you can’t afford anything right now, don’t worry. Our shows and print content will continue to be free for you to enjoy. You can also help by leaving us a positive review or sharing this episode with a comrade, a friend, or a family member. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:15:15] Scot Nakagawa: Rachel, when you talk about the hardening of polarization among voters, it reminds me of. A situation I’ve often described to people, Sue’s heard it way too many times about Portland, Oregon, where I used to live. Where elections have not been competitive in the inner city of Portland, Oregon for decades.

[00:15:32] But the party in charge are Democrats. And it really is a case in which people don’t have candidates who are conservatives. People who are conservatives don’t have candidates to vote on in many state legislative races because it just isn’t a financially practical thing to run when you’re just going to lose so badly.

[00:15:49] But then you have these people who’ve been excluded, basically disenfranchised socially, based on their party affiliation or politically based on their party affiliation, who really don’t have the ability to impact Portland through the through. Portland politics through voting, who are going extra judicial.

[00:16:05] And then, the dynamic is, of course, people react to that in ways that then cause even more polarization, candidates run against phantom fascists in races where they have no opponent, for example, in order to perhaps empower fundraising. And that then is normalized. And you now have this situation where it’s basically baked into the social life of the city that there are these eruptions and occasional spates of violence.

[00:16:29] I just wonder if you’re seeing that happening elsewhere, but also just feel like, this is such good guidance to understand where we’re at. 

[00:16:36] Rachel Kleinfeld: So Portland, Oregon is a tragedy in many cases. Eric Ward, who used to run Western State Center there and is a real personal friend and hero in many ways, really has detailed the level of tragedy that is Portland.

[00:16:50] And I think it’s a number of things. One is what you’re saying, When we look at democracies overseas, if people are disenfranchised, that’s the number one reason they turn to terrorism. It doesn’t have to do with poverty, it doesn’t have to do with all sorts of economic issues that people have looked at.

[00:17:05] Terrorism is really largely about political disenfranchisement and police brutality. You get those two things together and you have terrorism, whether you’re talking about ISIS or whether you’re talking about Oregon. And you’re exactly right that what’s happened as we’ve polarized more is that a lot of people aren’t feeling heard.

[00:17:21] Sadly, almost no one is feeling heard, which is particular, you’d think that at least somebody was feeling represented, but in our current system you’re actually getting even the side that’s winning feeling like they’re not represented because there are so many flavors of belief set and only one of them can really get a say.

[00:17:38] And as we polarize more and more. They’re becoming further apart. It’s one of the reasons I really like things like primary reform, ranked choice voting that they did in my native Alaska because these allow different flavors of candidate to run against one another. And you can pick a more moderate Republican or a more MAGA Republican or a more progressive Democrat or a more working class Democrat.

[00:17:57] And you get more of a sense of representation from that system. Without it, you get the kind of extrajudicial action that you saw in Oregon. But it’s not just that, because the other thing that we’re getting is a real re masculinity. I don’t know quite what to call it, but men are feeling particularly embattled, left wing men and right wing men.

[00:18:18] You have masters of the universe like Elon Musk who are doing perfectly well for themselves, but an awful lot of men are not, especially working class men. And you’re seeing in all sorts of statistics, diseases of despair, all sorts of things that men are having a really hard time. They’re having a hard time socializing.

[00:18:34] They’re having a hard time getting married. And as a result of all of these pressures, they’re turning against women. And the number one. variable for political violence is actually hostility toward women. It’s one of the reasons you see so much connection between domestic violence and so on, and mass shootings and things like that.

[00:18:52] So what you end up with in a place like Portland is a lot of men, and it is almost all men, play acting their violent instincts against each other. And that’s bad for the left, it’s bad for the right. We’re seeing much more violence from the right, but the left is almost allowing themselves to being used as targets.

[00:19:09] Normalizing this idea that you can shoot paintball guns against humans and sometimes real violence. And that’s a bad thing, too, because that normalization of men fighting men as an expression of political identity. In a way that they think of as righteous is not something you really want to spread further in your society.

[00:19:28] Scot Nakagawa: It’s an interesting dynamic that you’re pointing to. I think that our listeners should really pay attention to this sense that men are being feel they’re being emasculated and that’s driving a lot of this because that’s often the tipping point to violence, right? And historically that seems to be consistent that it’s not just race that we’re contending with here gender as well, and that we need to pay really close attention to it.

[00:19:49] The other thing I just wanted to mention, incidentally, is that in Oregon, generally, in rural counties, of course, people can elect people up to the county level, but not to the state level because the state is overwhelmingly blue, mainly because of one large metropolitan center. And so people should keep their eyes on what’s happening in rural Oregon to understand what it means when people get disenfranchised in that way, opening the door to things like, the appeal of the posse comitatus, the old white nationalist formation that believed that the highest legitimate power.

[00:20:15] powers, only the power of the county. But in any case that’s where we’re at, I think in Oregon. And it’s just interesting that your observations just correlate so directly with what I have seen happening there over the last 40 years or so. But just, For a moment, returning to the five strategies to support U.

[00:20:32] S. democracy paper that you wrote about insufficient tactics activities that are crucial to hold democracy or at least to hold democratic ground, but that will not alter the trajectory that we’re on that you described so vividly based on the findings of Freedom House. So these include, first of all help Democrats win two, increase voter turnout, three, get more minorities to vote, four, court more swing voters.

[00:20:57] And, four, improve election administration, and then finally, five, increase economic distribution. Oh, and there’s a six. I’m sorry. I see five twice on my notes. I apparently have forgotten how to count, but six is fixed gerrymandering. So there’s a lot of money and work going on in all of these, each of which is a big lift.

[00:21:20] How do we hold democratic Ground and alter the trajectory at the same time. 

[00:21:25] Rachel Kleinfeld: So first, let me say I use necessary, not sufficient very carefully. These are not unimportant things to do. They’re just not sufficient. Personally, I hold liberal beliefs. I have my feelings about who I want to win. And I think this election in particular is really important at the national and state levels.

[00:21:45] And so I want people to do everything they can to support democracy. in this upcoming election. In 2020, however, you had Democrats win both houses. In Congress and the presidency, and we continue to see this democratic degradation. We’re a federal country. And so even if you win all the powers at the top, states have a huge amount of power over what happens.

[00:22:07] And we’ve seen that state power be used. against various groups within those states. And even if you said, okay, fine, we’re just going to try to run the whole board and have Democrats win everywhere. And a lot of those other strategies have to do with Democrats winning. But they’re gussied up in 501c3 language, trying to get minorities to vote and so on.

[00:22:26] It’s not, Solely because people believe in inclusivity, although hopefully it’s largely that, but first of all, minority men are moving away from Democrats quite significantly for some minority groups, 44 percent of Latino men voted for Trump in 2020, 18 percent of African American men. So that’s not, even if what you’re trying to do is a more partisan strategy.

[00:22:48] It’s a little more iffy, but if what you’re trying to do really is support democracy, at some point you’re going to lose. We have hundreds and hundreds, actually thousands of elections in this country. You’re not going to win all of them. You’re not going to win even the most important ones. There’s 23 states that are so solidly red that there’s really no, no chance.

[00:23:07] So you really need two parties that are committed to democracy that might disagree on a lot of policies. And I might still want to fight very hard for my side to win. But the rules of the game aren’t going to be changed. You’re not going to have the kinds of things we’re seeing in Hungary and that we saw in Poland and that we’re seeing in India where media is being turned against people.

[00:23:29] Lawfare is being used against people and son. What we want to see is free and fair elections where everyone has a chance to contend. And and then we can fight on the policy grounds. And so what I’m saying is, We can’t just try to win elections with our preferred tribe. Ultimately, we need two groups that are committed to democracy, and right now we don’t have that.

[00:23:56] Sue Hyde: Also in the paper that we’ve been talking about, You discussed strategies and concrete tactics to alter and change and try to stop the current disintegration of our democracy. I’m curious about two of them. You wrote about building a broad based, multi strand pro democracy movement around a positive vision that’s concretized in locally rooted action.

[00:24:29] And you also wrote about engaging the left in defending democracy by making it deliver. Can you talk a little bit about where you think we are now with those strategies and mention any others that I have not? 

[00:24:45] Rachel Kleinfeld: Sure. I think one of the reasons for the level of polarization we’re seeing, and particularly the level of active partisan participation in social media that’s not particularly helpful in terms of actual real life getting out the vote or doing things, is that it’s easy to take maximalist positions.

[00:25:04] when you’re not actually trying to accomplish something. When what you’re trying to do is signal who you are, what your identity is, or tell people over social media what you believe and feel. It’s real easy to take maximalist positions. As soon as you say, what I want to do is change Portland, Oregon and make it a better city in whatever way you conceive that to be.

[00:25:25] Or I want my state to legalize abortion that’s just been made illegal or whatever the issue is. As soon as you do that, you start to need to engage a broad coalition. And to engage that broad coalition, you need to de maximalize some of your activities and beliefs so that you can work together and you can agree to disagree on this, but you’re going to work together on that.

[00:25:46] And one of the things that I think has been happening is that as people feel less and less agency and more and more catastrophe, they’re pushing themselves toward these maximalist positions that ironically pull them away from having agency and getting anything good done. Now, I’m not saying it’s.

[00:26:02] It’s easy to get good things done. I think we really do have a pretty nefarious anti democratic portion of a Republican party that’s pushing against that very hard. I also think we have a pretty illiberal part of the left. Not part of the Democratic party, but part of the left. That’s also pushing against that.

[00:26:20] Actual action in the real world that would make people’s lives better necessarily. But what happens when you take these maximalized positions is you just don’t get anything done. And and you polarize further and that creates more backlash to getting things done. So that stranded idea, which was very wordily written about, locally rooted action that’s concrete, that’s multi stranded is basically, Hey, can you pick an issue that you care about and get something done together?

[00:26:45] Work with real people, figure out how you do that. We are still a democracy. There’s a lot of people. talking about the coming authoritarianism and so on. I know the podcast has a name of that sort. And I am worried too. You can’t look at places like what we’re seeing in India and Hungary and so on and not be really worried about what’s coming here.

[00:27:04] But we are still a very full democracy compared to most others where you can get things done. And so you need, I think, to try. And the more you try, first of all, the more you build trust, the more you see who you actually can work with and who you can’t. Sometimes those people are on your side, not just the other side.

[00:27:20] where you see that, just personality wise, some people work better with others. And you start realizing what the real forces are that you’re up against, which might or might not be what you imagine. And that helps hone strategy and it helps hone allies and it helps you build the broadest coalition you can.

[00:27:36] So that’s what that strategy is about. That it’s starting to happen. I think we’re starting to see a coalition that sees itself as pro democracy and anti democracy rather than just right and left. But I also think that the maximizing wings are pretty strong and getting stronger. I think both those things are happening at the same time.

[00:27:55] And they might be actually playing off one another. And if we get another Trump administration, I would expect the polarizing dynamic and the maximalizing dynamic to just swamp the Trump administration. The getting stuff done dynamic, and that’ll make it much harder to build a sort of pro democracy middle.

[00:28:11] In that getting stuff done dynamic, and I’m sorry I’m being lengthy in these answers the left has long promised a lot of good things for a lot of people but it has had trouble delivering. And sometimes it has had trouble delivering because we’re a democracy and Republicans have disagreed and they can’t get through certain things they want.

[00:28:29] Other times it’s been because The left has many people in it, and those people don’t necessarily agree on prioritization. And so if you’re going to focus on climate change, which is an issue that really appeals to college educated major donors of the democratic party, you might focus a lot less on asthma and inner cities, which is something that’s caused by truck pollution and other forms of pollution, a very different solution set.

[00:28:53] People only have so much time in the day. And so what I was saying in that one was There are real people that we’re promising things to and then asking them to vote as a result of those promises. And we really need to make good on some of those promises. Otherwise people don’t believe in democracy.

[00:29:07] And some of that making good is just keeping your eye on the ball. Some of it’s listening to your constituents, not imagining that the. Self appointed people who often speak for different groups actually are the only people who speak for that group. And sometimes it’s, getting back to the first issue, making coalitions of unlikely allies.

[00:29:25] For instance, with criminal justice reform, where we got immense criminal justice reform with a kind of left right, very unusual coalition, including Jared Kushner, whose dad had been in jail and didn’t like that experience and was willing to go to bat. So sometimes you hold your nose and do the things you need to do to make life better for a lot of people.

[00:29:49] Scot Nakagawa: This podcast is presented by the 22nd Century Initiative, a hub for strategy and action for frontline activists, national leaders, and people like you. 

[00:29:59] Sue Hyde: At 22ci. org, you can sign up for our newsletter, you can learn from our anti authoritarian playbook, which includes resources. on how to block rising authoritarianism, bridge across the multiracial majority, and build an inclusive pro democracy movement in your community.

[00:30:19] Scot Nakagawa: Thank you for that. Now, You published Closing Civic Spaces in the United States, Connecting the Dots, Changing the Trajectory in 2024. And by the way, for our listeners, both the Five Strategies paper and Closing Civic Spaces will be in the show notes. I strongly encourage reading these articles.

[00:30:38] But our listeners are hungry for solutions and strategies that can engage them wherever they are. What’s the problem with closing civic spaces? And what can people do to open them back up? 

[00:30:49] Rachel Kleinfeld: So this is something I’m spending a lot of time on right now. There’s a lot regular people can do. And it’s a really worrisome area.

[00:30:56] So overseas for about 15 years, what we saw was that governments that had never wanted to be democratic or weren’t really democratic, started to make it harder for certain kinds of civil society to organize. It started in Russia, but it spread really quickly all over the world, including to full democracies.

[00:31:14] India and so on that just didn’t want to deal with a really raucous public space. And so they did things like said, Oh, if you’re, if you get money from foreign organizations, we’re going to put you on a foreign agent list and you’re going to have to say you’re a foreign agent before you speak and you’re going to have to register all your donations and then you’re not going to be allowed to have any of those donations and then And so the walls kept getting closer and closer, but it wasn’t just about foreign money.

[00:31:39] It was also things like, if you support LGBTQ rights, we might go after you with lawfare, with lawsuits from the state, from private actors and so on. In some cases, vigilante violence. We’ve seen that against, say feminist organizations or transgender organizations and so on. It was this whole suite of activities that we were seeing overseas, usually used by the state, although sometimes by vigilantes, to consolidate power and allow only the voices that they really wanted to hear.

[00:32:08] And I think the best way Americans can think of this is the Jim Crow era. When it wasn’t that you had no civil society I think I say in the paper you could have a junior league or you could have a Kiwanis club, but you couldn’t have a checkers league that was biracial, that was illegal. Some civil society was allowed if it spoke the government line, and some was not, and was highly constricted, and was constricted through laws, through violence, through government regulatory enforcement, during Jim Crow, if you tried to open up a newspaper that spoke well of interracial activities, you could be closed down in some states altogether, but in others, maybe the laws would still allow you to operate, but suddenly your insurance would get cut.

[00:32:48] Or the regulatory agencies would say that you didn’t have the right sprinklers or what have you, and you would be shut down. So that sort of thing. We’re seeing this more and more again in the United States. The chamber of commerce just got pulled up in front of the house ways and means committee last week because they had accepted a donation from the tides foundation, and that was seen as a left wing organization.

[00:33:10] So what we’re seeing in America is the use of. congressional committees, state AGs, lawsuits, private lawsuits vigilante violence, like Tucker Carlson talking about a drag queen story hour and suddenly militias descending on that group, all to silence a certain part of the political spectrum. A lot of this is right against left, but it’s not solely right against left.

[00:33:33] It’s also right against like the House Ways and Means is run by a Republican going after the chamber, which a lot of people think of as a more right leaning organization. But again, it’s just silenced dissent. And it’s also left going against left. Some of what we’re seeing on university campuses is a quieting of space that people don’t like.

[00:33:53] By closing off the opportunity to speak. So it’s a little bit of everything, but what it really is illiberal forces that don’t want to allow certain viewpoints, even if peacefully expressed. To express themselves peacefully and using the powers at their disposal, whether that’s government powers policing powers, private powers, the way shopping malls used to close people down who spoke, now universities can do that to close this space.

[00:34:17] And it’s actually very hard. to stay in a classically liberal position about this and because it’s really easy to say oh I don’t like what those protesters are saying or I don’t like what that group is doing and so I’m happy to use government powers or other powers against them. The problem is it boomerangs, once it starts and you have the power in some spaces to close it, other people have the power in other spaces and you end up with a much less free civil society.

[00:34:46] The good news is that We do know a lot of what’s worked overseas to push back on this, and we’re at early enough stages in America and people seem to be taking it seriously enough, that there’s good ways to push back. And the first thing, and I’ll stop here for your listeners, the first thing is just to be aware of what you’re doing yourself, where you might be saying this person doesn’t have the right to speak that opinion because I don’t like it.

[00:35:09] And how you might be supporting things that end up being anti protest or anti boycott or What have you, types of activities unwittingly, 

[00:35:19] Sue Hyde: Rachel? Towards the end of the five strategies paper you described three near term future scenarios which can be thought about in terms of what’s happening here in the United States.

[00:35:34] You posit that we could become. A stable country run by one political party where voters cannot alter politics or a country run by one political party whose control is upheld by violence, or a country with political stalemates and increased criminal and political violence. Not very encouraging scenarios, but where do you think we are and what are the positive futures that you envision?

[00:36:12] Rachel Kleinfeld: So my worry right now is that we’re moving toward a kind of Jim Crow 2. 0 that’s based not just on race, although race clearly plays a role, but also on gender, as I said before. So that your rights vary quite a bit depending on what state you live in. It hasn’t solidified necessarily into voter suppression, and that’s really important that it hasn’t solidified into full voter suppression.

[00:36:38] While there are activities that Like voter I. D. laws that some people are very concerned about. It’s still quite possible to vote. We don’t have the actual Jim Crow laws. So it’s not there yet. But I worry about it. That with the abortion rules and all the rest of it, you start seeing a place where your ability to control your fate is much less in some states than in others, and all you can really do is migrate.

[00:37:01] And, of course, during Jim Crow, we then got the Great Migration in which lots of people just voted with their feet because they couldn’t vote any other way, and left. And I can imagine that kind of a scenario playing out. And then, even though the voter laws stay the same, And people aren’t suppressed to the degree that they were during Jim Crow, where you went from, in my last book I had the exact numbers, now I don’t remember them, but you went from literally hundreds of thousands of black voters voting in one election to one voting in the next election because of those laws and the violence.

[00:37:31] It was very dramatic. But if you have enough people moving out, Then you can effectively accomplish some of those same things without changing the voter laws because people who live in a place believe in those policies. And the people who can’t move out who of course tend to be poor and have less options are stuck.

[00:37:51] And so I really worry about that situation taking place and taking place so slowly and gradually and voluntarily in a certain way. that people don’t notice what’s going on. I also think, though, there is a real positive scenario, and I did try to signal this a little bit in that five strategies paper, although maybe I should have done a little more signaling, and that’s that the last time we were at a period of this much polarization and this much plutocracy, this much wealth inequality, we had the Gilded Age, and then we had the Progressive Era, and the Progressive Era was an era in which people took real agency, often at the local level.

[00:38:25] real concrete things. They wanted playgrounds for their kids. They wanted better ventilation for their houses. They wanted less corruption. Some wanted no liquor. There were a whole bunch of things that were part of the progressive movement. It was not a perfect movement. It was largely a white movement.

[00:38:39] It had some real blind spots and a number of places that were not good. However, it also ushered in a much less corrupt country. It ushered in a much more equal country. Most of the fair wage laws and so on, vacation laws, all this sort of thing that we have now has to do with the progressive era.

[00:38:59] And that was really an era in which the Republican Party had a progressive faction that was fighting against the corruption of that party. Democrats also had a progressive faction, so it was cross party but also usually factions within each party. That were fighting the internal corruption, and they really made a lot of change, and I think one could imagine something similar today.

[00:39:20] We have right now the largest majority of Americans we’ve ever had who want a multiracial, inclusive America. We have just, when you look at the survey questions, it’s just undeniable. There’s a lot of people, a clear majority, who want that. And and it’s a big group of people, it’s not a bare majority.

[00:39:38] but they don’t know how to figure out how to get from A to B. And so I think lots of different activities that give people agency, that teach them how the system works, that teach them how to work together, which is what happened during the progressive era. Lots of people acting at a local level, but connected, not feeling like all they were doing was local, but that their activity to get playgrounds for poor kids was connected to a national activity set on that, same with other things.

[00:40:05] That set of activities changed who people thought they were, who they thought their allies were what they thought they could do and ultimately changed a system in America that was, and it’s hard to believe how corrupt we were at that point. Robber barons. Like Carnegie, who of course I work at the Carnegie think tank, so I’ll call him out for it, but, these folks were just buying politicians, and the level of child labor and worker harm and violence against workers was extraordinary.

[00:40:37] The Insurrection Act got used against minors. and union members over and over in that period of time, and we moved away from that. Now, history doesn’t always move in the same direction, but we moved pretty well away from that. So I think a lot of change is possible, even in dark circumstances, if you start taking agency.

[00:40:55] Link up that to broader activity sets and really start working for change in a practical manner. 

[00:41:01] Scot Nakagawa: Thank you so much for joining us, Rachel. This has been really enlightening. I was very excited about this interview because I’ve been reading you and now that I’ve met you, I feel like I need to keep talking to you, so I hope we can keep the conversation going.

[00:41:12] And to our readers, again, please do check out the show notes to grab hold of some of Rachel’s writings, and get on board and start reading. There’s much to learn. 

[00:41:23] Rachel Kleinfeld: Thank you so much, both of you. And, Scott, I feel the exact same way. I’ve been hearing and reading and all sorts of things.

[00:41:28] I feel like you always show up at meetings right after, before I’m at them, and so I really do hope that we can start being at the same meeting at the same time. Talking and strategizing more together. It’s really important what you’ve been doing. 

[00:41:40] Sue Hyde: Thank 

[00:41:41] Rachel Kleinfeld: you

[00:41:52] Sue Hyde: Hey, thanks again for listening find more episodes of the anti authoritarian podcast on all of your favorite platforms and also at to ci org and Convergence mag org Direct links to these and other resources referenced in this episode are in the show notes.

[00:42:17] Sound on Tape: The Anti Authoritarian Podcast is created by the 22nd Century Initiative and published by Conversions Magazine. Our theme music is After the Revolution by Carsey Blanton and is licensed under Creative Commons. The show is hosted by Scott Nawa and Sue Hyde. Executive producers are James, mom and Tony Eskridge. Our producer is Josh Elstro and Yong Chan Miller is our production assistant.