As November draws nearer, Democrats’ electoral prospects are looking very similar to how they were in 2018 before the party swept to victory in many congressional and statewide seats. 2028 is much further away, of course, but there is a very real possibility that Democrats could gain trifecta control of the presidency, Senate, and House.
If the recent past is any indicator though, in just two years’ time, voters will swing wildly in the opposite direction, handing control back to Republicans. American voters (and elsewhere) are clearly very dissatisfied with what political parties are offering them, but thus far, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have taken the message.
Public opinion surveys keep indicating that people want major societal reforms, including one from last September which found that 77 percent of American adults wanted major political changes, that included 24 percent saying they wanted “complete reform.”
Democrats are disadvantaged by the current political system, so it’s in both their ideological and electoral interest to change things.
But what would major changes look like? That is the project that Adam Gurri, my guest on today’s program. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, an online magazine has just put out a new book on this very topic. It’s an anthology of policy proposals and system reforms called The Reconstruction Papers, that is in a lot of ways similar to the Mandate for Leadership a book that’s more informally known as Project 2025, the collection of policy proposals that has become the centerpiece of the second Trump administration’s agenda.
The Reconstruction Papers has a lot of great and interesting ideas, and we get into several of them, but today’s discussion also focuses on the larger question of what liberalism is or should be, which as you might imagine, the publisher of Liberal Currents has thought about quite a bit.
If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.
The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
07:45 — Defining liberalism
11:21 — A liberal version of Project 2025?
16:22 — Liberalism must be able to take its own side
17:42 — Fixing federalism
26:19 — The importance of more than two parties
31:17 — Reforming the Senate and adding more states
40:01 — The vital importance of judicial reform to protect democracy
47:10 — Restraining the president
52:14 — Reforming higher education and promoting national service
59:22 — The importance of public mixing institutions
01:03:34 — Reclaiming national greatness from the far right
01:06:38 — Housing needs to be cheaper and more plentiful
Related Content
As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive—and less successful electorally
The economy has collapsed for the middle class, Democrats must admit this and act accordingly
Anglo-American liberal elites have lost the ability to argue for their own principles
Democrats get lots of bad advice, particularly the idea that most voters are ideological
As Trump’s popularity has declined, Democrats’ polls are up, but not their brand-name, why?
Keir Starmer is a cautionary tale for politicians who only want to play it safe
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Adam Gurri. Hey, Adam. Welcome to Theory of Change.
ADAM GURRI: Thank you for having me.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, good to have you. So this book, I think, is a very necessary one that you guys have put together. So let’s just first, just give us a kind of a brief overview of, what it is and why you’re doing it.
GURRI: Yeah, so Trump comes along and gives us a decade at this point of damaging our institutions and our norms and the things that make our society function. And there’s an impulse to just be reactive to that and talk about what was good about what was broken. We had the biggest publicly funded system of science in the world by a large margin.
We pr- we had a historic accomplishment in our higher education institutions. we had all these things that Trump is smashing to pieces and, oh, and, competent civil service and things like that. But [00:04:00] those things were not perfect before Trump came along. In fact, they were already in crisis and had been for decades.
Not like they were never great or, sort of like cutting edge at any point in their history. But by 2016, it was already time to, if not go back to the drawing board, at least seriously think about reform. Immigration, by the way, also one of those areas that we had like 20 years of very near reform passing and just not quite getting enough political will to do it.
And so the system itself just became an incredible mess and accumulated on itself to, to now we just have, essentially everything again is getting hit with a wrecking ball. So our idea is you don’t go back, you don’t repair. You say, “Well, in, even in 2016 if we were given the political will to build something much better than we had, what would we want?”
So this is-- the premise is if, enough people hate what Trump has done by 2028, we could potentially have a big enough Democratic trifecta of Democrats actually willing to do things that we could have our shot at actually fixing the public funding of, science, actually fixing the university system that was in chronic ill health for most of my lifetime and thi- things like that in, in a number of areas.
Es- essentially, conservatives spent a century wanting to kill the administrative state, and now in the second Trump term, they really are taking their shot. So it’s time for us to think about taking our shot too.
SHEFFIELD: And that’s right because I, mean, as you say in the introduction to the book that the United States was in many ways running just off of the inertia of an earlier time, and largely the, post-war World War II era and to a little extent maybe the, Lyndon Johnson.
O- otherwise there really wasn’t any large scale innovation or even thought of it of [00:06:00] new programs in any real meaningful way. I mean, I guess maybe the one exception might have been Obamacare, but right away they immediately, ruled out a public option, which is, was a huge mistake.
GURRI: Yeah. And I think Obama had ambitions of being an LBJ-like figure. It’s just obviously the politics were very different. First of all, LBJ himself came from the Senate, knew how to get votes. Second of all, the party system was completely different, completely incomparable to what Obama faced.
And just the politics of the country had shifted a lot. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and also I, think he also, and this is one of the, themes kind of throughout the book is that that Obama and probably most liberal institutional leaders they never had a conception of liberalism as an affirmative vision. They, saw it more as being the guardians of civic neutrality and creating a marketplace of ideas, and then not really offering any big transformative ideas.
And, he-- And in the post-Obama era people talked about it a lot but to the extent that there were things — And, they weren’t necessarily bad things, but, like, the, It was more along the lines of “Well, we’re going to invest, we’re going to invest money in, roads or, bridges or whatever,” and things like that, and not —
And maybe they did actually invest in, like, semiconductor things, but there was no effort to try to articulate a bigger vision of, “Well, this is what we’re doing, and this is why we believe it, and here’s specifically how we’re going to do it.” So you guys are kind of trying to do that here.
GURRI: Yeah, absolutely.
Defining liberalism
SHEFFIELD: Okay, so, so what is liberalism then in your conception here? I think we should talk about that.
GURRI: Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously it’s a family of ways of thinking about it. It’s individualistic, so it’s about individual freedom. It’s egalitarian, so it’s [00:08:00] taking individuals to be equals in the sense of moral equals and deserving equal dignity, deserving equal opportunity. There’s different ways of, formulating it, but for the purpose of this collection especially, it’s a pretty assertive vision.
It’s a vision that requires a willingness, a pol- political willingness to create the conditions for individuals to flourish and have freedom. So, Sama- Samantha Hancox-Lee, her-- the executive editor, her essay is sort of about what are liberal virtues. She talks about reason, like we’re cultivating actual individual reason, having the, courage to actually live un- under conditions of freedom because a lot of what reaction is, essentially a defensive crouch against the inherent dynamism of, a free society, right?
Like whether it’s a local NIMBY that doesn’t want anything new built that’s going to change the way that the neighborhood feels, or it’s anti-immigration politics that’s afraid about how that will change the character of the country over time culturally and, whatever. So, li- liberalism is about-- it’s, giving people the conditions in wh- under which to thrive as individuals and having that freedom.
But also it’s sort of an ethos of having the courage to actually live with the open society and, what that means and to, to seek to protect it against the ones that want to close it down.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and the idea though of, giving people the conditions in which they can exercise their freedom, I think that’s c- that kind of fell by the wayside dur- especially during neoliberalism.
GURRI: Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: that neoliberalism has, within your publication has, been something you guys have —
it’s been a persistent theme of trying to differentiate what you’re doing versus what the neoliberals are doing. So let’s talk about that.
GURRI: one thing that we want to recover, especially now, especially in the Trump second term, is that early [00:10:00] liberalism was very militant. And in fact, there is a militant liberalism throughout its entire history. When we had our fundraiser at the end of last year, Jamelle Bouie did a little promo for us, and he went through how liberalism is not just the, squishy institutionalists of today.
It’s also the people that destroyed monarchy and the people that abolished slavery and the people that fought fascism, built the military that fought fascism. So it’s, the, idea that it’s not just a neutral arbiter of different substantive goal, ideas of the good which is, like, a whole philosophical debate that I feel like gets conflated with more practical political things.
Political liberalism should never be neutral. Political liberals should always be very substantive in their goals and very aggressive in pursuing them in our perspective. And this, collection is an example of what we think because, the things we push are not politically easy to get, but-- And it’s not like we’re saying, “Okay, we’ll just give it to the next guy, and they’ll definitely do this.”
It’s more if we h- if, someone can create the political conditions, this is what we should be fighting for. We should have big, ambitious goals in mind, and we should fight for them
A liberal version of Project 2025?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, a common trope in the, liberal blogosphere since its inception was the idea that people think that only conservatives ha- or that conservatives have no agency.
And I don’t think that — I always think that was a wrong analysis, because really what it w- the passivity that was trying to diagnose was more that liberals thought that, or Democrats in general thought that, “Well, they won’t work with us, so what can we do?” Well, the answer is ha- should be, well, you work to get rid of them and replace them.
That’s the proper way of, dealing with intransigence rather than just simply saying, [00:12:00] “Well, we can’t do anything with them.” and, and s- and, that also, by the way, the idea of steamrolling the opposition, that is actually how the Republican Party thinks of political change. there was always that dichotomy between the, two sides, and having been, seen both from the inside, like, in a lot of ways, Democrats are more conservative than Republicans. Republicans, are full of radical reactionary ideas for change. And, one can obviously disagree with them, and one should.
But at least they think about transformation and how they would do it. They, don’t even necessarily talk to the public about it, but they talk about their cultural vision and their political ideological stance in a way that you just don’t see from most Democrats, it seems to me.
GURRI: Yeah Certainly. Also, I mean, part, of that is that in many ways, liberals had-- it was their game to lose for a long time. the New Deal consensus was pretty durable for a very long time. And conservatives as they exist now are sort of the product of an ideological insurgency, which is why they have that kind of attitude, right?
Whereas the established side felt that they could rest on their laurels a bit. They would win by simply preserving the status quo. Insurgents are always just throwing bombs, because they f- they feel, any, variability in the situation is going to increase their odds of success
SHEFFIELD: and so this is no longer the time for that. And so I guess perhaps one could say that in, in, some ways what you guys are trying to do here is a, liberal Project 2025. Is that, an accurate way of saying that?
GURRI: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because there’s actually something called Project 2029 or something, but they, seem to completely miss the point because they seem to be mostly [00:14:00] thinking in terms of something to campaign on which is not what we need to be doing. what we need to be doing is offering a governing philosophy for people that are actually in office.
There’s this idea from ACT UP of inside strategy versus outside strategy. Outside strategy is very broad, very high level, and it’s much more like campaigning, but it’s usually more protests. It’s mass politics. But then-- So, the in the case of ACT UP, it was draw attention to the AIDS crisis, for example.
But once you’ve drawn attention to it and you’ve, have outraged people about it, you have to have people that have conversations with the policymakers to say, “Okay, here’s what you do about the AIDS crisis.” And that’s not like the laundry list of specific things you do for a public health program aren’t necessarily what you are chanting at protests or in order to mobilize people, but you have to have both strategies.
And Project 2025 was absolutely an inside strategy thing. And the Reconstruction papers is, similar in that sense. We’re trying to influence the conversation among people who could potentially do this in the future. One of the key differences is Project 2025, other than like the obvious substantive difference in our goals, Project 2025 is very much aimed at helping establish a dictator-l-like presidency.
Even if it’s not an actual dictator, it’s, more or less if, if elections don’t go away or become meaningless, but Project 2025 was otherwise successful you would have like an elected dictator every four years, more or less because of how unconstrained they are. Whereas we don’t quite articulate it in, the collection itself, I think, though we have elsewhere.
For us, it’s very important to center Congress in, in, in radical changes because that actually has grounding in the larger democratic body, like small D. So, we, want to remake, the, Federalist system, for example, I did an essay on. It’s stuff that’s going to requi- Well, you, want to fix the court.[00:16:00]
Like it’s stuff that’s going to require actual legislation, which means you-- it’s a high bar of you have to actually have not just a president, but a trifecta in place that is willing to do these kinds of things. But that is when change has happened in the past, right? the New Deal most classically.
they they had their trifecta, and they, accomplished enormous things. So it’s, it is possible. It’s just rare.
Liberalism must be able to take its own side
SHEFFIELD: The other thing also that I think, you guys are, having a similarity Project 2025, is that w- in liberalism, as it became kind of hollowed out and non-ideological in many ways it also failed to understand the difference that you have to have-- Your policies have to be structured also to preserve and help your own coalition and preserve and, to foster the kind of civic culture that you want.
And so, where-- And so, like, th- there was this dissociation between sound policy, like good policy, and the culture that would elect and want that sound policy. The latter part, they lost almost all interest in ability to understand the need for that and how to generate it
GURRI: Yeah
SHEFFIELD: governance.
it was — So it was something that happened as a result of the post-war consensus but they didn’t understand wh- how it happened and why, it was made, and, how people specifically did it. Like, it- this wasn’t a thing that just magically happened. It was through the work and planning of people
GURRI: Yeah, I agree with that
Fixing federalism
SHEFFIELD: yeah. And so, so that’s, and so that’s a big, point. And but, let’s — So to, to that end, though, let’s talk about some of the structural changes that are in the book that some of the authors, including yourself, are talking about. Well, I guess we can start with yours this idea of [00:18:00] fixing federalism.
what do you mean by that?
GURRI: Yeah. So I, I-- a few years ago, I wrote something on this, and the basic idea is that s- state governments are better than local governments, and that a lot of our problems in our country actually come down to local governments. This idea seems a little strange to s- be saying in 2026, frankly, when the, the biggest problem is actually the federal government.
But I still think there’s something to that. S- at the time, I was pretty pessimistic about the federal government playing much of a part in any shift there. Now, again, things, have changed so much that I think it’s necessary. It’s, again, it’s if we got the trifecta we wanted, this should be something that they push very hard.
And the way this would work is sort of three parts. Th- the first and most important part, which is the newest part from, my old essay, is guaranteeing the republican form of government, which the Constitution says we, we should do. But it’s thin on details, and that’s never really effectively been enforced.
Even something like the Voting Rights Act was couched s- more in terms of the 15th Amendment than the Guarantee Clause, which some previous I forget the court case, but they, deemed it non-justiciable. In my opinion, that should be used as the rationale for a law that’s just lays out in detail, here are the range of government forums a state can have and be considered the republican form of government.
And the, bare minimum change that they need to make from the current status quo across almost all of them is one of their legislative chambers needs to be proportional representation. Which I don’t-- we don’t have to go into the technical details of, but essentially, for people who don’t know, there are a few methods you can use to essentially guarantee that if 40%-- if, a party gets 40% of the votes, they get 40% of the legislative seats.
So you don’t have to worry about gerrymandering. That’s not, like, that, immediately [00:20:00] en- ends that, that race to the bottom. And you have at least-- and if, if, states went this direction, they would have at least one chamber that could not gerrymander their way into competitive authoritarianism.
It also says that if you keep a separately elected executive like, like the governor, it has to have some kind of runoff. So e- either a traditional runoff where there’s two rounds of voting and there’s just the top two that run against each other at the end so that someone gets a majority, or what people call ranked choice voting which is actually in political science called instant runoff because it’s the same logic.
S- again, so that you can avoid a situation where someone with substantially less than a majority takes the governor’s office, which is pretty powerful. And I offer another set of ranges, but the, bottom line, like, details aside, and they’re all in there is the federal government should be very prescriptive about what state government-- how state governments are allowed to organize themselves, and they should actually enforce that.
The second p-part, though, is, and th-th-- you know, if that’s the stick the carrot for state governments is one, administrative authority should be consolidated at the state level. So right now, t-to give an example, Texas has a law saying that localities can’t collect more than a certain amount of, rev tax- of revenue in fines because there’s this terrible incentive where people just fine-- localities that have a l- small tax base will just over-fine people in order to get some more money.
And Texas wants to put a stop to that. Localities just do it anyway, and Texas is very bad at actually enforcing it. If they wanted to enforce it, essentially the state attorney general would have to sue the locality and take them to state court and, like, go through that slow process. Whereas what I’m suggesting is, alternately, those localities should just be part of a state administrative body, and the attorney general or someone else in the state government could just look at the person who is breaking the state law and say, “You’re fired,” and replace them with someone who will be, who will actually follow that law.
[00:22:00] And the federal government can help facilitate this consolidation. But most, most-- and the main way they would do that, and th-this is the, third leg of the stool is by having fewer strings attached to block grants to states. Right now, we actually are less I would say that like Canada and Germany are better at fiscal federalism than we are.
Liberals and, progressives talk a lot about how in welfare, having a lot of compliance costs can make it so that people that are supposed to get their benefits don’t because it just becomes too difficult for them to. The compliance costs that the federal government puts on, for example, education funding to the states are so massive.
I mean, they dwarf anything comparable in welfare. When-- And th- this, goes back to LBJ, w- by the way. He-- they wanted to help create state departments of education, and they did. But like the lion’s share of what the work that those state departments of education would do would be compliance work rather than substantive education policy or administration.
So you don’t want that. We should have-- we should make-- we should have a more egalitarian fiscal federalism so that budgets per state resident, state budgets per state resident are a lot more equalized across states. And then the way-- the, enforcement mechanism for making sure that you’re not just giving lots of money to an evil, red state government or something is the Guarantee Clause action.
That making sure that whatever it is they are doing, it’s something they’re democratically accountable for in as responsive a way as we can make them be.
SHEFFIELD: So what does that mean though?
GURRI: the, the, when I was talking about the r- proportional representation. Basically, like, you can’t have a gov- y- trying to avoid the outcome where the federal government is giving a lot of few strings at, y- n- hardly any strings attached money to a state government that then gerrymanders its way to not being responsive to a majority of its voters
SHEFFIELD: [00:24:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Well, so, but how — Like, these are pretty big changes though. Like, it seems like people would have to be talked about. Like, this would have to be debated in public and presented. So, like, what would be the — How would you kind of justify these, changes to people? Especially the idea of changing state constitutions and allocations of seats and apportionments.
GURRI: I think that they’re making that easier for us than ever. With the gerrymandering fight that they kicked off this year, or, this, term I think it’s pretty, like, out in the open and ugly, and I don’t think anyone likes it, I mean, like, the p- whoever may potentially win it may like it in hindsight, but for the most part, I don’t think, I don’t think even the Republican side is particularly comfortable with the overall competition and race to the bottom that’s been created by it.
And there’s not necessarily a clear winner as a result. And national politicians are, you know-- it’s, the, pos- the national position of the party isn’t necessarily improved by it. There’s definitely, like, specific people that get screwed over. There’s not necessarily s- definite winners at the end of it.
So, and, and voters for the most part h-hate it, right? Like, they hate what’s go- what’s, being done. The r-Republicans Vir- in Virginia hate it. Dem-Democrats in Texas hate it. So I think a national program that says, “We have the means to make sure this never happens again,” and r- and sells it on that basis could, work.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so like saying you, you’re, going to ca- campaign on unrigging the system basically.
GURRI: Exactly. but you actually have a specific plan to do so. Like, everyone runs on unrigging the system, and then it’s just like some minor campaign finance reform or something. this actually, I think, the political science is very clear. You ac- you actually do-- If you actually do proportional representation in the legislature, and you actually have runoffs for the separately elected [00:26:00] executive and you’re not going to have a gerrymandering problem.
You’ll still have other problems, like it’s not going to-- Like, getting your institutions right doesn’t fix your politics. Like, it’s not, a cure-all. but one thing you’re not going to have is insulating yourself into power, by making it so that you can win even if you lose a majority of votes
The importance of more than two parties
SHEFFIELD: Well, and, it’s, the, idea of proportional representation, it also i- encourages more parties, and I think that’s, that has been probably the, biggest flaw of the American system and, why, I mean, it’s hasn’t really been copied too much anywhere else around the world because, people in other countries when, they looked at our, ideas, they’re like, “Well, why would we be forced into two parties?
That’s absurd.” and so — and it’s also really important too because the, two-party system, it does actually really discourage a lot of people from being interested in, in politics because they do feel like, “Well, I don’t really align with either party.” And then it also makes both of the major parties not really be coherent, at least if they’re not run by a, movement.
Like, that’s — I mean, the fundamental difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is that the Democratic Party is a traditional political party, whereas the Re- Republican Party is controlled by an ideological faction. And so when you have one party that’s explicitly ideological and then the other party that is not then the ideological party is the one who’s going to have the momentum.
And because it, that, because they actually want something and they can see how to get it.
GURRI: And your point about multi-partyism is good because, again, in theory, it would be Democrats that would be-- have to be the ones that would be pushing this. And the fact that they are pushing a system that would weaken the [00:28:00] Democratic hold on blue states, it’s like argument against self-interest. Like, it’s, it shows that they’re committed to actually democracy rather than the Democratic Party. And the-- I mean, that’s-- And then it’s a real question if, you can actually get Democrats that would want that. I mean, I would o- you know, I would hope given the stakes of what’s happened that you could.
But I, I do think that is the way out of a lot of this stuff
SHEFFIELD: Well, it is, and I th- yeah, having more parties is especially also important on the right side of the aisle because really what powered Trump to his presidential victories, it wasn’t that people, I mean, like Project 2025, Trump explicitly denied that he was connected to it, of course, even though his OMB director formerly and currently, Russell Vought, was the prime mover behind it.
So that was an obvious lie and people knew it at the time. But still, even if he had said he was, con- connected to it, it’s just not something people would’ve, really understood. But l- but, point being, though, let’s say they had m- like when you look at polls, so f- like for instance, an, a poll that, I find very interesting i- in the 2024 election, it was done by YouGov, and what they found was that that 50 4%, I believe it was, of Trump supporters, or 57, something like that of his voters agreed with Kamala Harris on at, at least eight major issues.
And so, th- and that was his issue, like his, supporters, and then the general public was like 60s 60-plus percent with her. So, so the problem for Harris wasn’t that her positions were unpopular. Like this is the, a, serious flaw with the populist people that say, “Well, we can just win if we have popular positions.”
Well, no, the, you just tried that, and it didn’t work because people don’t vote on issues. They vote on, l- values. They vote on [00:30:00] how they see the larger system of governance and, what society should be doing for them and for itself. That’s what people want most people.
Like they, they’re not, they don’t care, they don’t even know about, the various policy minutias. And another example in like in 2010, Pew did a, survey of, they asked people so Joe Biden had been the vice president for 18 months by this time, and they asked people, “Who is the vice president?” 41% of adults could not name Joe Biden as the vice president. So like the idea that people are voting on policy is just, it’s absurd. It is an absurdly naive idea. And so, but what that means on the other hand is that, if you can construct a larger vision and, really sell well, then you can do a lot of things and people will give you wiggle room like that.
We saw that even with Trump, like, his policies became unpopular because people don’t like them, and we-- and, he should have known that, but still they were willing to give him a chance even though he And so that’s that’s something that people can look forward to, I think in some sense who are liberal.
GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I agree
Reforming the Senate and adding more states
SHEFFIELD: okay. So, but of course, one of the other issues or things you talk about is reforming the Senate as well. So what does that, mean?
GURRI: Yeah, that’s Kevin Elliott. It was interesting ‘cause I-- he-- when he-- we, wanted him to do some kind of, dem-- political reform piece, and he just-- he picked the Senate. And I was curious to see what he could do because, it’s, a difficult institution to change. But he made this a strong case that a lot —
I mean, there’s fundamental things that you can’t change without an amendment, right? The, apportionment, the staggered terms that make it so difficult. But a lot of what we think of that’s wrong with the Senate other than that are things that the Senate has chosen to do [00:32:00] itself.
And his, argument is, look, we just have to accept we have moved to a system that is polarized into two parties, and when each party gets their turn, they get to try their thing. And the Senate just even now, even as bad as Republicans are has not accepted that. It’s still, it’s still-- People think about the filibuster, but really it’s more like the unanimous consent component, where one senator can hold things up regardless of what the rest of his caucus or, the majority of the chamber wants because they do so much through unanimous consent, which is in-insane.
What-- it’s bad enough to be supermajoritarian. Like, doing anything on unanimity is just-- It’s incredible that the Senate has ever accomplished anything on that basis. And it only does because it sort of maintains this fiction that agreeing with the step of unanimous consent for things to move forward is not the same thing as agreeing to the actual legislation itself, despite the fact that it is clearly enabling it to potentially pass at some point.
So it’s, there, there are these games. The filibuster is the same way. Obviously, filibuster more famous or infamous. The fact that it, supposedly requires 60 senators to do anything. Well, what it really is, that there are not enough senators within the majority party who want to actually vote on the legislation that gets filibustered to do something about that.
When it-- Every, single time they actually feel strongly enough, they carve out new exceptions. The-- most recently that I’m aware of anyway Republicans voted to do an up or down vote for a huge slate of nominations that, that, Rep- that Democrats had been holding up for months at the end of last year, if I remember the timing right.
So, whenever they really care, they-- the majority, that is, the majority party cares, they work around the [00:34:00] filibuster. The filibuster is just sort of like a paper-thin excuse for them not to have to do things and take stands. But anyway, Kevin Elliott’s main proposition is the Senate needs to be reorganized so it operates like the House more or less.
Like, they just actually vote on things. When partisans have control, they actually do just vote for their party’s things more or less. He also talks about adding states. He has a fairly out there idea, which is not original to him, of like making like a, more than one DC state in order to, more or less gerrymander the Senate to try and push some things through or pot- you know, potentially to pass amendments and things like that.
We went back and forth on that one. I let him keep it in with some like footnotes, like talking about some of the difficulties because we like, we, we do want to think creatively. But I think the main takeaway from that essay is you can make the Senate a lot more like the House in how it operates, and that would fix a lot, honestly.
That would fix a lot of the current dysfunction of Congress. The House is often very willing to do work and the Senate just simply seems to exist to stop work from happening. So, there’s multiple ways you can go about that, but he, goes into those.
SHEFFIELD: I thought his yeah, he would’ve been better served by talking about breaking up California. And I live in California. Like, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you have, a completely desertified part of the state that also has to have the exact same policies as, a co- the coastal part of the state.
It doesn’t make any sense.
GURRI: It’s funny though, I’ve argued that before, and I’m trying to remember which political scientist it was, but it is a California-based one who vociferously argued with me against it because he said that California is like the only geographic unit of the United States that is the correct governance unit just because of its geography, is what he said.
And so I thought that was interesting.
SHEFFIELD: Huh. Oh, well, I guess I’d have to look at that. But yeah, to me, I mean, it’s nice that we have basically every kind of climate the United States has in one state. Like, I like that. But on the other hand, yeah, it’s there, ‘cause there is something, I- [00:36:00] fundamentally undemocratic about the way that a lot of our governance is structured and, it goes back to the two-party idea, like, and even for people who are, conservative because, a big portion of the, Trump base, or the Trump vote, as I was saying earlier, like they’re not people who are reactionary. they, they’ve never heard of Russell Vote. they don’t support what he does.
And yet because of the two-party system and the way that the states are allocated it means that basically you do have, significant percentages of each state and, and the country as a whole that basically are not represented by anyone because neither party wants them. Because the Democratic Party by and large, is a, a slight- a slightly conservative corporate-friendly party by and large.
Like, that’s what it has been. And it changed a little bit under Biden. But you know, roughly speaking from, let’s say Jimmy Carter up un- up until then, that’s what it was. So it was a, kind of slightly conservative-ish party. And then you had a, reactionary Republican Party. So to somebody who is, more of a, let’s say, Dispatch-style conservative or somebody who is a socialist or somebody who’s a social democrat, they haven’t really had any representation and neither party wants them.
GURRI: Yeah. I will say that the issue of the Senate and the president, like the Electoral College and things, is w- m- was my original reason for writing the original essay about redoing federalism, because it’s much easier to make each state more democratic than it is to make the federal government more dem- democratic.
Because state, constitutions are incredibly easy to update. Just incredibly easy. And, it’s, in, in some cases one can argue it could be mandated by federal law that, they do so, and has been in the past. So I, think, the basic idea was you can have state [00:38:00] governments that are actually democratic, and then you can have fiscal federalism that makes sure that re- regardless of what state you live in, whether it’s very populist or very, or, not, whether it’s very wealthy or not you’re getting a similar per capita level of investment in your infrastructure and thi- and things like that.
And that sort of like balances both the equalizing effect of the federal government across the disparities of local conditions and the difficulty of getting the federal government itself to be particularly democratic compared to what we could do with state governments
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, one thing that, yeah, isn’t in the p- book is as I thought it would be, is like the expanding the, idea of plebiscites and ballot initiatives. ‘Cause like those, even in red states actually have been the source of a lot of, good policy. I mean, like that is why we have seen abortion rights protected in, in many states that otherwise vote for a Republican.
Like they would people would go and vote for Trump and then also vote to protect a woman’s right to
GURRI: Yeah, though I, part of me thinks that they thought they could have their cake and eat it too. If they were forced, if they were forced to do things through the legislative process or through, politicians, then maybe they would feel a little more urgency to not vote for evil Republicans, that want to take away the rights that they want to keep.
And I actually, I’m, I am fairly-- I won’t say that I’m entirely against. I’m pretty against ballot initiatives per se as, as law. I’m not against referendums, like non-binding referendums, ‘cause the p- the politics often means that in the end you get those policies anyway once, once you’ve seen that, like, that’s what they want.
But I, feel like you have to actually have the connection between the people making the rules and the people that are going to implement it, enforce it. And that often ballot initiatives, A, they’re n- they’re often not particularly well-written, frankly, in terms of like how they end up on the ballot in the first place, like that whole [00:40:00] process.
The vital importance of judicial reform to protect democracy
GURRI: And second of all, they kind of are too easy to undermine, as we’ve seen in the case of some of those abortion pro- pro-choice, ballot initiatives. The states immediately figured out ways to ignore them or undermine them. I think you actually have to focus the l- the locus of democratic competition on the personnel to get the people that will actually fight for-- ‘Cause it’s, in my opinion, it’s never just about passing a law, right?
So for example, court reform or, housing reform, it’s not, it’s, so to, to stick with court reform, it’s not about like you pass a law. So like Wyden had a plan a few years ago for court reform, and it was more or
SHEFFIELD: Senator Ron Wyden.
GURRI: Senator Wyden. Sorry, yes. And the plan was more or less, we’ll have a fixed number of appointments per presidential term so that it’s not so tied to just when people die or something.
And you, in theory, you have to like, have an amendment to set term lengths. But in practice, what we’ll do is we’ll make a law that says after you’ve been in the Supreme Court for a certain number of years, you’re in a new senior track where you don’t hear cases anymore, right? So like they try and do that.
Say they actually pass that law, and then the Supreme Court immediately, some conservative group challenges it. The Supreme Court hears it before anyone new is appointed, and they try and strike it down, before it’s done anything. S- in my opinion, it matters less whether or not that plan would have worked, whether that would have happened, then that we get a Congress and a trifecta that’s willing, if the court does something like that, to smack them down.
You have to-- You-- There, there has to be a commitment on the part of the elected branches to actually see it through, which, is difficult, right? It’s similar again, so the, the predatory finding thing I mentioned, same deal. Passing a law is not enough. You actually need the p- you actually need to figure out the administrative side of how to do it.
Housing, it’s similar. California has passed a ton of laws that on paper are great. localities have fought them tooth and nail. and essentially California’s like at war with itself, right? In terms of its state government versus its [00:42:00] local ones. And most famously of all, the, Civil Rights Acts.
People remember the 1964 Civil Right Act, but it was not the first one. Eisenhower passed the first one, and what happened is we created a civil rights division in the DOJ. They went and tried to implement the law, and Jim Crow lo-localities and states were very nimble about fighting them, and playing the clock in the courts and things like that.
So you had like a decade of fighting one another before you get to forget the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, the Voting Rights Act, where the, civil rights department of the DOJ says to Lyndon Johnson, “Here are the tools that we legally need to be able to do to actually win this fight. Like we’ve been fighting this for a decade.
We know their tactics, and we know what they-- we know, like, we just need you to give us the power to go and register voters ourselves,” and a few things like that. So it took commitment. It was-- There was-- The politics were such that nationally there actually was enough of a commitment to, to see that through, fighting Jim Crow.
and it took a decade of before they got the right tools, and then of course it took much longer than that even to, see it through and actually crush Jim Crow. but so my, theory of the case is, and I know this is like a tangent from the actual collection or anything, but I, do feel strongly about this.
And my theory of the case is you have to line up the politics, that you want with people in office, who will ac- who actually can-- who actually they have both the commitment to seeing it through and like they develop the, knowhow to do so.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and that goes to the militancy idea that you were talking about earlier. Yeah, and, I mean, the, thing about-- the biggest thing about Trump too has been just the, desire to, just go for it. Just do what you want, even if you might lose in the courts. And because, if you lose in the courts, then you can make that an issue itself, and, it makes people [00:44:00] more focused on the courts as a, locus of, of, attention.
Because, like right now and when you look at the way both parties talk about the courts to their voters the, polls show very consistently that Democratic voters do not understand the courts as a, as political institutions, as, quasi-legislative, well, really actual legislative institutions, that they don’t understand this argument.
And like there, there is a lower approval rating among them, among Democrats in general, but there, there are significant slices of the Democratic electorate that, actually have pretty close to majority approval of the Supreme Court. Even though they also, they get upset at Democrats for not doing things that they want or like that’s what they think. But in reality, it’s the courts that have stopped the Democrats, and the Democrats haven’t really said this to them and talked about, “Well, here’s how we’re going to stop the courts from stopping us.”
GURRI: No, the fact that Wyden proposed that plan at all frankly was a good sign. And I do actually think-- I actually am optimistic for a future Democratic trifecta doing something about the Supreme Court. I think they’re, ready from what I’ve heard.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it seems that way. And, and, this does reflect a problem, a mistake that was made by liberals was that they became addicted to the courts themselves. During the Warren Court and the Burger Court, they abandoned the idea of pushing civil rights through the legislatures.
And that was a huge mistake
GURRI: Yeah. No, and that’s, our concluding essay, right? That’s Adam Rust talking about the distinction between constitutional law and constitutional politics, and how constitutional politics comes first. Constitutional politics is the fight to decide what the Constitution means in the first place, in practice.
And because we got [00:46:00] some courts for a period of time, like the Warren Court, even the Burger Court, frankly that were very willing to aggressively push liberal rights and positions a lot of, people in the liberal legal space especially, but in general, came to view the court as having a role that we should not have granted to it.
It has its particular, it has a particular, like, functional role that it plays in the l- the legal system, but we shouldn’t pretend that it has a moral role in term-- it, it has moral authority, in other words, to force us to accept whatever it rules, whatever five of, its members decide is the meaning of the Constitution or the law on any given day
SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, or, like just the idea that even what they say is what it is.
GURRI: Right. Exactly.
SHEFFIELD: I’ve had several conversations with attorneys even now who, they have — This is a childlike belief that the court is correct when they say things. No, that’s just their, that’s just their opinion.
There’s a
GURRI: just have power. They just have power, right? Like, yeah,
Restraining the president
SHEFFIELD: yeah. So, okay. So, and so reining in the court, reforming the Senate these are big things. But then, but there’s also the danger of the imperial presidency, and that’s that is the focus of — I, so there, I mean, that’s a the focus of one essay in particular by Patrick Sabowski.
I, I, sorry, Sabkowski, I think that’s how you say it, right? but it’s, it is a persistent theme in some of the other essays as well because, like that’s — And you alluded to that earlier, this idea of that the reactionary right is basically wanting an imperial presidency. And this is a worse way of doing political majoritarianism than a parliamentary system.
Because in, at least in a parliamentary system, while they, while the prime minister has, [00:48:00] supreme authority, they also can get thrown out like that by their, by, by a vote of no confidence. And, the American system doesn’t have anything like that. And the repeated failures of impeachment, the fact that none has ever succeeded in the entire history of the country suggests very strongly that the executive has to be, the, as a person, has to be restrained quite a bit.
GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of our problems are downstream of how dysfunctional Congress is specifically. Both the court and the presidency sort of are downstream of that, and anything you can do to make Congress more functional will fix a lot. Because Congress ultimate- even with the Senate being the way that it is Congress ultimately draws from a broader cross-section of the country in order to be able to do things.
And the punishment is, swifter for it if it oversteps. And just in general, the way-- the president is a guy who does things. Obviously, the executive branch is a whole other can of worms, but Congress is an institution with hundreds of people that are elected to it and that, plus then their staff.
The, the-- And they do things other than just legislate. They do, the committee work that they do is, I feel like very underestimated and very poorly understood by the American public, and even many people that are fairly politically engaged. but, like, Congress actually will turn the screws on administrative agencies because they often frequently have to come back to Congress and ask for more money to do things.
So, there’s good literature that’s very sort of like under-underread and undervalued that shows that, like, if, Congress is, more or less on the same page about how a lot of ex-executive, the executive branch should behave, they tend to behave that way. Especially, like, the more independent agencies and things that don’t directly respond, react to the president.
but even, stuff that’s just-- I mean, the, executive branch is so big that one person can’t really run it on his own. [00:50:00] so c- when Congress is, functional, the system as a whole just kind of works a lot better. And that’s why, Pat-Patrick’s essay, a lot of it comes down to just make Congress more stronger compared to the, the, presidency.
We also have the other essay by Judith Starr, which is specifically about strengthening watchdog agencies in the executive branch, which currently exist but have been more or less demolished functionally by Trump.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and so, so specifically how though? Like, ‘cause they, what they have to be is independent of the president and not controlled
GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry. Top, top of mind, I don’t have all of the recommendations. but a lot of it has to do with similar to how it works with Fed Fed governors, staggered terms so that they don’t perfectly align with presidential terms and things like that. some-- Like she’s, she fixed, she gives them a little more, the, inspector generals a little more direct authority to interface with Congress, or parts of the DOJ that aren’t like directly under the president’s control.
I’d have to — Actually, it’s been a while since I’ve reread that one, but yep, the gen- the general th- thrust is strength- strengthening the posi- the position of the inspector generals, making them a little more independent of the president.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and, the reason why these agencies and the presidency in general, I mean, became so out of control was that Congress became more dysfunctional. And so, so they basically, decided, “Well, we don’t understand this stuff. We, don’t want to understand it. And we’re going to get rid of our offices of technology and other things like that. And so we’re just going to let you guys handle it, and we also don’t have to run the risk of, taking a stand on our own there.”
And that’s, like ultimately what that does though is not only [00:52:00] does it, remove accountability of electoral accountability for, policymaking, but it also, it makes the policies much more easily captured by private special interests as
GURRI: Yeah. Ab- absolutely
Reforming higher education and promoting national service
SHEFFIELD: okay. So l- let’s just kind of go back though to the idea of opportunity, of enabling the gov- the government enabling people to exercise liberty, because that’s also a big, theme here that the, government has through neoliberals and conservatives and reactionaries have really kind of drastically, again, since C- Carter roughly focused on, reducing government spending in a variety of areas.
A- and education w- has been probably the, biggest area because they certainly haven’t cut defense. And and, so it’s cr- it’s created this perverse structure in which the university systems, they get money for doing things no one wanted them to do. So like, there’s a, zillion law schools now that, that churn out students who will never get a job in law.
They have wasted their money g- seeking that degree. They have been lied to. And so, a lot of people are upset at the educational institutions. And then but at the same time, q- moving toward just a purely vocational way of doing things, that’s not going to work in a, in an age of AI where so many of the specialized tasks especially that are, white collar oriented, those, those jobs are going to be eventually be automated away.
And so you guys talk about that in a couple of the essays as well.
GURRI: Yeah, I mean, I think I don’t make any predictions about what the, industrial organization of society will end up being in terms of automation and things like that. I feel like we always think everything’s going to be [00:54:00] automated for the past 100 years or 200 years, and somehow there always ends up being lots of things that you need humans for still.
But I think what’s clear is that even now, the premium to having a college degree versus not is pretty significant in terms of your earnings. There’s also, like, thicker reasons we want people to seek higher education if, they can in, in terms of it just create-- There’s, a, there’s like a social cohort effect when people go to college.
They get certain, tools. They work, they end up-- It, it makes it easier for them to work well with other people who’ve also gotten a similar education. It’s just like that was one of the great achievements of the post-war world, right? Was just this huge push into higher education, and it really was a world-class achievement.
But it, higher education ex-exactly like it’s been so dysfunctional. Since the ‘90s, tuition rates have been exploding for various reasons. And at the same time, money is poured in through the student loan system, but that just increases the price and increases the debt burden on
SHEFFIELD: And there was no control on the universities either
GURRI: Right. Exactly. So, yeah our, offering in, the higher education space Brendan Cantwell he is of the opinion that essentially because, policymakers think of universities as just about the education part. But of course, that’s not what students think about, and that’s not what their parents, prospectively were thinking about even just, that.
there’s this whole cultural side to colleges that it’s easy as a policymaker to want to discount. But clearly it’s, hard to discount when that’s what, they’re not just the consumers of higher education, right? They’re also the voters in the, states and the country that are deciding these policies for these things, and it’s clear that they want that kind of thing.
So he doesn’t go as far as to say, “No expensive football teams. Stop building so many damn buildings on your campus,” overbuilding like crazy. More what he says is there [00:56:00] should be generous public, mostly state government packages of support for state schools, including community colleges.
And they should come with strings attached that are about controlling their spending. and the strings are enforced by essentially drawing back on support from the state if you’re going to go nuts on the other things and increase your tuition too high. So, he, sort of has a, It’s not a silver bullet approach, and it-- he himself calls it a framework, not like a detailed policy package for what to do. But yeah, I mean, that’s, one. I think in terms of like also ag- conditions for exercising freedom, I know you were thinking of getting to this, but Alan Elrod’s piece on public service, also another, I think, c-critical pillar in that regard.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, actually let’s, talk about that. Yeah.
GURRI: Yeah. Yeah
SHEFFIELD: saying there? ‘Cause he’s, yeah, he’s been a guest on this program, so I’ve gotta
GURRI: Oh, good. Nice.
SHEFFIELD: some, respect there.
GURRI: Yeah, I, mean, Alan’s theory of the case really is like we’ve grown too isolated, we’ve grown too willing to communicate digitally. Ev- even like people that you know in your immediate life, you like spend more time texting with than like seeing in person necessarily like your friends.
So he’s, very like in favor of creating conditions that push people to meet up in person. And then of course, there’s polarization. And what I like about what he says is he’s, sort of nuanced in what he thinks putting people together with different political perspectives will do. He specifically says the evidence is not that Republicans and Democrats working together makes them depolarized politically.
In fact, there’s no evidence for that. But there is evidence that when they get together and know each other and work together they have less of what’s called effective polarization, which is like conceiving of the most caricatured version of your political opponent. Like the way-- it brings the temperature of the conflict down [00:58:00] because you stop conceiving of your political, the, other side as like ideologues that are seeking to destroy you, and more like just an ordinary person like yourself who, and the people, people that are perfectly nice that believe that, just have a wrong-headed idea or something from your point of view.
So, he wants y- he wants a huge fu- well-funded federal public service that involves like sending people to multiple locations across the country, not where they’re from to, build community theaters and do all the, little things that, that, you would expect public service things to do, what the Peace Corps does in other countries, what America does do now.
It’s just AmeriCorps is very small, very small program and very limited in, its scope. So he wants something bigger. His, in his ideal world, if you have someone who is sort of, without direction after high school or even a high school dropout, say, the group that really does have it
SHEFFIELD: Or hell, why limit it to post-high school people
GURRI: sure. but, ag- I think like in, in the past, traditionally, someone who’s sort of wavering after high school might decide to go into the military because they don’t know what to do with themselves, and that’s always an option. In his dream, vision, you would have a civilian alternative to that.
Not like it’s bad to go into the military and serve, but like you could do service that’s not military service.
The importance of public mixing institutions
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the historic evidence, I want to bring that in here on this point, like it, it is pretty clear. And there’s two real test cases that I think show this. One is the is World War II. and, even the Vietnam War and the Korean War, like those were draft wars.
And so, and I’m not in favor of having people go to war under a draft, but unless, like, absolutely necessary. But you know, what that, what those, things did, and the military does this just in general, is that it does bring people together who have different backgrounds, [01:00:00] different ways of life, different ethnicities and religions or none.
and, it, yeah, it, and it shows them that, as you said, these are just people who think differently than you. And that’s, that is really important as a as, something to instill in, in regular people because like that’s really what powered the, Trump victories, is that, you have decades of these evangelical churches telling their adherents in, and, this is chronicled very well in the movie “Jesus Camp.” they, tell them from childhood that these people that we don’t like are literally satanic. They’re under control of Satan, and they’re going to destroy you. That’s their goal in life. And and so if you have somebody who’s had that drilled into their head, for 20 years, including in their young childhood, of course they’re going to be, hateful and
GURRI: Yeah
SHEFFIELD: support fascist people like Donald Trump.
So, so like, so yeah, this program would go a long way toward stopping that. But, then also, like in the ga- the, movement for same-sex marriage rights and marriage equality, that succeeded because people came out of the closet. Because they, had, lived in it for so long that a lot of, straight-presenting people, heterosexual-presenting people b- actually didn’t realize that that there were a lot of people who were LGBTQ.
And then once they saw that and, that it was their f- friends, their family members, their community members who they knew from their own interactions as, they weren’t going to recruit you to be gay or, silly things like that. But these were, these were innate conservative beliefs that were false.
And so, this overt mixing of people, it was a really [01:02:00] good thing for for everyone
GURRI: Yeah, no, and, more generally, I would say, tying it back to the idea of milit- liberalism that’s very assertive. Like, the world that, liberalism wants is open and dynamic and mobile and sort of embraces the best of change and, difference rather than shrinking from it. The fear is more stagnation and shrinking and becoming something small and, rigid versus being afraid of the upheaval of change, right?
And so if you want to sell that, one way to do that is to create a program that encourages people to mix it up a little bit more and s- and be exposed to people they would not have otherwise met and see places that they would not have otherwise seen. And, like the military, you can do it in a way where, you hope it-- You- the hope is to sell it as a high status thing, right?
It’s you-- If you go into the military, one of the things about it is they have high expectations of you. They hold you to a high standard, right? It’s not like-- It’s not you, can get in, but it’s not like it’s an easy ticket, right? You go in and they work you very hard and they demand a lot of you. So you could have a public service that also has high standards that they hold you to, makes you feel like you’re really doing something.
So it’s not just like, you’re opting out of trying to get a job or something. You’re actually doing something important and, being challenged. And then, s- sends you out to experience the country, which is an incredibly diverse country, both sort of like geographically and in terms of the different cultures across that geography.
Reclaiming national greatness from the far right
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the other thing that’s good about this idea is that and, this is w- r- an area where, Biden’s infrastructure spending really failed is that it creates physical monuments to civic greatness.
and, that’s, th- there’s something to the Trump slogan of Make [01:04:00] America Great.
Like, it, is something that has a visceral, somatic quality to it that, that is meaningful in a way that is un-- you don’t even have to, make that argument. Like, the America’s smaller towns especially and smaller cities, they, have even now, public structures that were built during the, Roosevelt administration or, the Carnegie libraries,
GURRI: Yeah
SHEFFIELD: by Andrew Carnegie.
Like these are physical monuments to something or someone that was-- that did something good in society and, like, and, we don’t have those anymore. And so the way that infrastructure spending is done and has to be done in this way, I think, in order to, really be meaningful because, oh, we th- you fix a road for someone, well, that’s nice.
People like a nice fixed road, but they don’t understand what went into that or why, it was good
GURRI: Yeah, for sure
SHEFFIELD: okay. Well, you can go off on more on that if you want. I I agree. And it’s, it’s taking credit for things, right? It’s, the, actual, “This was part of this program. This was done by this agency.” I mean, here in m- here in New York City, again, Mamdani has been very good at this. There’s only so much a mayor can do in his first few months, but when we had a blizzard, he was doing videos and being like, “Here’s exactly what all the waste management people are doing while you’re at home in order to make sure you can get back out there.”
GURRI: Like, it, he’s, I cr- credit-taking is something that I don’t know, like you actually, you, it’s, a job. It’s something you have to actually do. You can’t just, you can’t just deliver. You have to make sure they know who’s delivering and how that happened,
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.
GURRI: or you take it for granted.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Because, the, far right has spent, 80 years telling people, “Government does nothing for you. It’s a total failure. It’s a waste. Everything it does is stupid.”
GURRI: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: and that’s [01:06:00] a lie. But if you don’t show them, as, Mamdani was doing, of, this is what government actually does.
Like, the, biggest problem with effective governance is it’s about what doesn’t happen. And so i- it’s about what doesn’t go wrong. and, we’re seeing that, with with Trump’s horrible approach and with RFK Jr. toward vaccinations and, disease and, things like s- the screw worm.
That’s the whole point of government, is to stop bad things from happening.
GURRI: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: And so you have to tell people, “Well, we stopped this from happening.”
GURRI: You do.
Housing needs to be cheaper and more plentiful
SHEFFIELD: yeah. All right. Well, so l- and then the, one of the other persistent themes in the piece or in the book and there’s is — so it’s not a, like, dedicated theme, but I, like that it is touched on by several authors, is just the idea of housing.
Because that’s that’s, that is such a huge problem for people now that, there just hasn’t been enough construction in the country. And prices just keep going up and up. And, it — and the government is the one that has to force that. And, it goes back to what you were saying earlier, that, the local governments in many ways are the problem because of the not in my backyard, NIMBY people really have ruined things for a lot of younger Americans.
GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, no, and, we didn’t have, like, a big build more housing piece. Frankly, we write like 100 of those at “Liberal Current” all the time. But yeah, no, it’s, very true. We do touch on it at a number of places. Sort of in-- we, we have different from our usual angle as well, we have Moira Burse talking about the climate like the climate dimension of housing and all the places that people need to move away from and how you manage that, how you manage the insurance aspect, which Florida has completely failed to do, and frankly, California’s on the exact same trajectory just earlier at this point.
Yeah, we talk, we talk about that as well, just like [01:08:00] there’s, we haven’t built enough, and then there’s, a lot of our housing is on coasts that are very climate vulnerable. And we have to think, we have to think ahead about that kind of thing. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, we do. And it’s also, but it, is a way of making climate change policy more of an opportunity for, citizens. Because while it’s easy, for the, to, for people to scaremonger and say, “Oh, they’re going to take away your truck,” or, various things this is a way of, restructuring public spending that can, again, be a visible benefit to, people in a way that is also being helpful toward reducing carbon emissions and and things like that.
GURRI: Yeah
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, I think we’ve touched on a lot of the bases here, but this book is, it’s, it’s pretty comprehensive, so I encourage everybody to check it out. There’s a lot more in here than what we touched on, but, we hit on the bigger notes here.
But yeah, let’s just kind of give the concluding sales pitch here, for people and why they should buy this and take it seriously.
GURRI: Yeah. I mean, so I think we’re at a window of time where we will either shoot our shot or we won’t. The I am not afraid at this point that Donald Trump will actually successfully consolidate an authoritarian system by the end of his term. What I am afraid of is that we’re going to enter a cycle of every four years, we get, like, Democrats trying to be normal, a normal party, and then every four years after that, we get another bite of the apple of attempting fascism again for however long until we finally get it.
So the stakes are very high to get out of the immediate crisis, which is something we write about, but also to lay the groundwork for a durable new, century of l- liberal democracy that’s stable, actually. So that’s, the real pitch for the book. And, we’ve, been through this before.[01:10:00]
Americans like to focus most on the original founding moment, but to me, the tradition of the Founding Fathers is the willingness to to redo it all. I mean, they did the, Articles of Confederation first. They did a ton of experimentation with their state constitutions after that, and then they looked at it and they said, “This isn’t working,” and they did the Constitution, which was huge, which they then amended a few times before they, before that generation died and, fully intended to be r- regularly amended.
And then of course, Reconstruction, big, change. I would say from, Woodrow Wilson to to FDR, also an enormous transformation of our government. However you feel about any one of those, and all of them were flawed I think just, taking the spirit of the willingness to go back and actually try and make drastic changes to our system is a big part of who we are, and we gotta, we have to rediscover it.
SHEFFIELD: We do. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we should think of this moment as an opportunity for a second reconstruction in a lot of ways. Yeah. All right. Well, cool. Glad to have you here today, and for people who want to follow you personally what’s your advice to them there?
GURRI: Well, there’s, Bluesky, I’m on there. And, but of Liberal Currents, I mean, we have an email you can sign up for. You can decide what level of emails you want to get, including just like updates about, us rather than our actual essays and things. So yeah, definitely, sign up for those updates
SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. All right. Thanks for being here.
GURRI: Great. Thank you.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, a- audio and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for your support.
You have unlimited access to the archives as well, and I really appreciate that. But if you can’t afford to subscribe on a paid version, we do also have free versions as well. You can become either type of [01:12:00] subscriber if you go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack.
Thanks a lot. Oh, and if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to click like and subscribe. So, let’s do that again. All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.
And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to all the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there is a new episode. And if you want to become a free or paid subscriber, you can do that on Patreon at patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can do it on Substack at flux.community.
Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time.
