(upbeat music) - Coming up next on this special July 4th edition of "Arizona Horizon", we speak to author and business leader Katherine Gehl about her ideas on how breaking partisan gridlock in politics can save our democracy.

Also, tonight we hear from author Eric Liu about building a culture of responsible citizenship in the US.

And a conversation regarding free speech with First Amendment scholar and Yale Law Professor Robert Post.

That's straight ahead on this special edition of "Arizona Horizon".

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Thank you.

- Good evening and welcome to this special Independence Day edition of "Arizona Horizon".

I'm Ted Simons.

Tonight, we focus on freedom and democracy in the US and we begin with author and business leader Katherine Gehl.

She's a political innovation activist and the originator of the politics industry theory, which equates the current American political system to a dysfunctional business model in need of change.

Gehl is the co-author of the book "The Politics Industry: "How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock "and Save Our Democracy."

We recently spoke to Katherine Gehl about her book and her ideas on how to right the wrongs of democracy in America.

First question, what is the state of democracy in America right now?

- Well, I think here I can probably speak pretty confidently on behalf of a majority of Americans that we are disappointed at the dysfunction in our government.

And we see that in the disapproval rating of Congress, which hovers between 80 and 90%, and just the general frustration that we all see expressed in the conversations we're having every day.

This is not working.

- Okay, so what is the politics industry theory?

What's that all about?

- Yeah, so the idea is, let's think about politics as as a business.

One of the things that I realized some time ago when I was running my business and I'm trying to sell more cheese sauce is, wow, if I were making my customers as unhappy as our political industry, our politicians are making their customers, the voter, there would be some new competition coming in to give me and my competitors a run for our money to give the customers what they want.

But that never happens in politics.

We're stuck with the same old choices, the lesser of two evils elections.

- It's like a private industry, as you say, dominated by a duopoly.

- Right.

That isn't going to change no matter how unhappy November voters are.

- Okay, so at this point, is there any connection between getting elected and solving problems once you are elected?

- Yeah, no, you've hit the nail on the head.

In our current system, solving problems in a consensus, sustainable way makes it less likely that the politicians who do that will win reelection.

So, what we have to do is connect those things, which is getting things done on behalf of the voters makes it more likely to win reelection.

The reason it doesn't work that way now is because the majority of our US House and Senate and the majority of your Arizona legislature is elected in low-turnout summer party primaries.

What we need to do is make sure no one wins elections until all voters are heard from in November.

- So, we got primary voting, which I know you're gonna say needs to be changed.

Plurality voting needs to be changed as well.

Talk to us about that.

- Yeah, so what we wanna do is make sure that nobody wins until November when all voters turn out.

You shouldn't know that because it's a safe Republican district or a safe Democratic district that so-and-so who won the primary is automatically gonna win.

You should have five choices in November, and then you should require that person to actually win a majority of the votes.

What we usually do in this country is we let someone win if they have the most votes, but not even require a true majority.

So, when you have a lot of candidates, let's say in a primary, someone can win with 30%.

- Why have we not seen these kinds of reforms, at least not on a major scale?

I know Alaska's got something going on up there, but I mean, this makes sense.

Why haven't we seen it?

- We're really kind of like fish who can't see the water that they swim in.

We just think it is this way.

It's like a "Schoolhouse Rock" sort of jingle that of course you have to have party primaries and you couldn't possibly give people more than two choices and you couldn't have competition between more than one Republican in November in a Republican district and more than one Democrat in November in a Democratic district.

But we can.

We make these rules of the game.

The Constitution gives Arizona the right to choose how they elect their officials, and it's now just time for us to take advantage of that power we have.

- Talk about Arizona and efforts here to, you're here because of these efforts, efforts to change how we do things here in Arizona.

- Yeah, I'm here as a guest of an organization called Save Democracy AZ, and I'm here to support them in any way I can to make the case for this solution that we call Final Five Voting, which creates a new system where we have an open preliminary round on the day you would traditionally have had party primaries.

And everybody participates, voters and candidates.

The top five finishers will advance to a general election, so we're not gonna know who won.

You're gonna see a dynamic competition.

And then, in the general election, we'll use instant runoffs to narrow those five candidates down to the final two, at which point the person with the majority will win.

And the idea behind this, Ted, is that it's not to change who wins.

It's that whoever gets elected in November instead of in a party primary, can do different things on behalf of the voters.

- And this, it sounds like a weird question, here, but you're talking about ranked choice voting and top five and all these kinds of things for candidates.

But once you get elected, these issues, that's plurality voting.

That's yea or nay, that's thumbs up, thumbs down.

Can the twain meet?

- Well, once you're elected, they'll have to win a majority to pass their law.

What this does once people are elected is they're, let's say they're serving on behalf of Arizonans in the US House.

Someone elected by November voters, meaning by all the Republicans who would turn out in a red district, not just those who come to the Republican primary, plus the Democrats and the independents, for example, they have a lot of ability to negotiate and make deals and innovate and figure out a consensus way forward.

Whereas right now, when our representatives go to Washington DC only elected by these voters and these voters, the only 8% that turn out in these party primaries, they can only do what this small minority wants them to do.

- Last question.

A lot of elections here, a lot of levels here, more so than we have right now.

We can't even get through what we have right now without people saying everything's rigged, everything's a fake, everything's a, how are we gonna survive all sorts of controversies and all sorts of theories that are out there?

- Yeah, actually, the facts on the ground that we can now see from Alaska actually running their elections under this system will show us that we think it's complicated and it's really not.

It's one preliminary round.

You pick your favorite, just like always.

And instead of the top two advancing, one Democrat, one Republican, we advance five, simple.

And then, in the general, it's just using a ranked ballot to indicate your preferences.

85% of Alaskans said it was very easy, very simple or simple to do the system, and that's the first time they ever used it.

- Last question, we're running out of time, but real quickly, here.

I'm either a Republican or I'm a Democrat.

I don't wanna lose the power I have.

How do you convince me this is a good thing?

- There are no job reductions, right?

There's no layoffs, so people are going to win under this system.

Democrats can win, Republicans can win.

And the only difference is that this time to win, you have to make your case to the general election voters instead of just to a small number of people, here.

And then I say, and your job will be better because you'll be more powerful because you've got a lot of agency when you get to answer to all your voters instead of just a tiny portion of your voters.

- Katherine Gehl, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me, Ted.

It's a pleasure.

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- Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, which works to build a culture of responsible citizenship in the US.

We recently spoke to Liu about his ideas regarding political and civic life and his work as chair of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

Eric, thank you so much for joining us on "Arizona Horizon".

Good to have you here.

You co-chair this Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

You've got a day-long event coming up Friday to create a more resilient civic culture.

How is, why does civic culture need to be more resilient?

- Great question, Ted.

And thank you for having me and it's great to join you.

I wanna just back up a half step and tell you about this commission.

This is a project that unfolded over the last few years across the country.

It was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and we pulled together an incredible bipartisan group of practitioners, educators, scholars, so folks from all different walks of life who were thinking about how to, in a sense, renovate our democracy.

And we came up with a set of 31 recommendations, some of which were about things that, actually, you all in Arizona have been pioneering.

Things like independent redistricting commissions, things like ways to get the people involved in participatory budgeting and getting involved in the making of decisions in government.

But we also had a whole set of recommendations that were about culture.

And our view was that there's always a relationship between the health of our political institutions and the health of our political culture.

And if all we focus on is institutions and the rules and the buildings, but we don't think about the norms, the habits, the values, the way we deal with each other in community, in public, then we're only dealing with half the problem.

And so, we see a real opportunity all around the country right now, but especially in Arizona, to highlight practitioners who are actually part of the solution, trying to create a culture in which people see each other in humanized ways, deal across difference in more responsible ways, and try to figure out how we actually build together.

- And this is what you mean by a renewed commitment to constitutional democracy.

Just the idea that there needs to be a renewed commitment to constitutional democracy I think would floor some people.

- Well, I think it would floor some people, but it would also be to a lot of people like, "Yeah, where you been?"

A lot of people have lost heart, have lost faith in our institutions and in our democracy for different reasons across the ideological spectrum.

And you all saw that recently in an election cycle in your state, people on both sides thinking, "Hey, this whole thing's rigged.

"This whole thing's broken.

"Why should I bother participating?"

And our belief is that the thing about democracy is democracy works only if enough of us believe democracy works.

It's that fragile.

And we have to actually renew a sense of not just unthinking belief and commitment, like, "Oh this is great!

"I always think democracy is going to be awesome!"

But rather, a questioning kind of faith that says: It's only gonna work if I show up, if I participate, if I ask questions, but also, if I take responsibility for answering the things that I raise and for fixing the things that I see are broken.

- But Eric, it seems to me as though you would be, it's important to ask questions, yes, but you gotta be able to listen, too, and to, as you mentioned, reach across the aisle and to do things in cooperation with others.

I gotta tell you, here in Arizona, we didn't see a whole heck of a lot of that in this last election cycle.

And I'm not sure that we've lost, it hasn't burned off very well.

How do you get to that state?

- Well, I think one of the things we gotta do is, in between election cycles, remember that people are still people and relationships can be built between humans.

If you come at each other as, oh, you're the avatar of this party, oh, you're the representative of that person.

You're wearing this color hat or that color T-shirt.

I know all about you.

I'm gonna flatten you from a three-dimensional human into a two-dimensional caricature, well, then, we're toast.

But actually, if we can be rooted in place, rooted in community, and rooted in relationship, and deal with each other and say: You know what?

We're not gonna agree on a bunch of things.

That's okay.

But I wanna understand why you see the world the way you do.

I wanna understand what experiences, what mentors, what tormentors, what traumas, what triumphs shaped your worldview.

And as you tell me that, I'm gonna find something that I have in common with you.

I may not end up at the same place with you on who we vote for or how we feel about a certain hot button issue.

But to humanize that way is still possible on the ground.

And there are so many organizations all across Arizona, rural Arizona as well as in the cities, who are doing this work right now.

I think that's one of the things that we're coming to the state to highlight is all of this bottom-up civic renewal that is happening even though the statewide politics can be toxic and polarized.

- Yeah, indeed.

I hear 31 recommendations, as you mentioned.

Some of the rubrics, equal representation, empowered voters, responsive government, great ideas.

I think most people would agree, let's go in that direction.

How do you go in that direction?

- Well, in the first place, you actually invite people into the conversation.

I think there are a lot of folks who look at our national politics and look at civic life and say, "Well, it's broken, and maybe I'd like to fix it, "but I don't even know where to begin."

And this is why our partners in Arizona, the Center for the Future of Arizona, the Flinn Foundation, and the Vitalyst Health Foundation have convened this gathering, day-long gathering on Friday to get catalytic leaders and practitioners from all different sectors in Arizona who are showing up and already doing some of this repair work.

And they can share notes with each other, they can highlight how they're doing it, and they can start spreading a positive contagion of can-do rather than a negative one of, "It's all hopeless."

That's how it's gotta begin, from the bottom up and the middle out, that taking of responsibility.

Whatever your political party might be, I think recommitting that way to rebuilding a sense of trust and recognizing that democracy is a game of infinite repeat play.

You're gonna win some and you're gonna lose some.

But if we can actually learn to live together and build together and compromise over hard issues, then we actually have a shot at making this experiment last another round.

- [Ted] Eric, thank you so much for joining us.

Great conversation.

- Thank you so much, Ted.

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- First Amendment scholar and Yale Law professor Robert Post spoke at the ASU law school earlier this year.

His address focused on what he says are the unfortunate consequences of misguided free speech principles.

We spoke to Robert Post about his thoughts on free speech.

Does America have a free speech problem?

- Everybody seems to think so.

Everybody thinks that we're not talking enough.

And you get people on the right and people on the left saying: We need to talk to each other more.

We need to be less inhibited.

We shouldn't be afraid of being canceled.

We shouldn't be afraid of being bullied, and the recipe for our political problems is more speech.

That seems to be the consensus on all sides of the spectrum.

- [Ted] What do you think?

- Well, I think that's a misdiagnosis of our political problem.

I think that it's true it's a bad thing when we don't speak to each other and we feel inhibited to say what we actually think 'cause we're afraid of it.

But we have to go deeper than saying it's a free speech problem.

We need to say, "Why are we feeling inhibited?"

And if we analyze that problem, we'll see that there's something much deeper at stake than simply free speech.

- Indeed, you say that challenges to free speech, that it's more of a symptom of what's going on out here.

Talk about that.

- Well, I think those people, like, for example, "The New York Times", who has a headlined opinion of "The New York Times" editorial board saying, "America has a free speech problem," they mistake a symptom for a cause.

We are not speaking to each other because our politics has broken down.

And then the question is, why has our politics broken down?

And to answer that question, you need to think of, well, what's the prerequisite for having a healthy politics at all?

Politics is a way of solving our differences.

We don't need politics if we all agree.

We have politics because we disagree.

So, in politics, we talk to each other disagreeing, and yet agreeing not to go to war with each other.

We don't wanna annihilate each other.

We don't wanna obliterate each other.

We wanna speak to each other and find a common resolution that will apply to all of us.

That's a very fragile thing, politics.

We take it for granted.

But sometimes, politics can tip into war.

That's when I don't care about talking to you.

I just wanna impose my will.

And then, how do we live together after that?

And I think our problem that we're diagnosing as a free speech problem is better understood by the fact that we have ceased to care about what each other thinks.

We stopped talking to each other, and the preconditions for a conversation have diminished.

- What happened?

Is this something slow-growing?

Is this something we've always had, it's just now being amplified?

- Well, we call this polarization.

We have a lot of words for it.

But if you isolate what polarization means, it means we're on two sides of an issue and we don't care what the other side is saying.

We just wanna win.

- How did we get here, though?

I mean, we've obviously had all sorts of tussles on the Senate floor and the House floor back in the old days and this, that, and the other.

But for those of us who are of a certain age, I mean, there was also an honor, there was a decorum, there was something lifted and elevated in political discourse.

That's adios, that's out the window.

- So right.

And I would diagnose it like, I'm an academic, I'm gonna think, so what does that mean, that we were honorable to each other?

It means we had something in common that we cared about.

We shared a destiny.

We felt, no matter what happened, we're still Americans, and America has to flourish.

- Talk about knowledge and how that plays into this dynamic.

- Well, one of the interesting things about polarization that you're seeing is it tends to be accompanied by a kind of populism, which is anti-expertise.

We're gonna tear down the experts.

It was shocking to me to tear down the vaccine.

I mean, how are we gonna cure people?

Are people who get cancer not gonna go to the hospital because they don't trust the surgeons?

Are people who want clean drinking water not gonna trust the experts 'cause they don't trust the experts who clean our water?

This is a society that depends upon expertise.

The wheels go 'round in the society and everything from the bridges not collapsing to television going out over the airwaves because there are experts who know how to make this thing work, make our society work.

If we lose trust in that, we collapse as a society.

And it's always been said that democracy is impossible unless we share common facts.

'Cause how can we talk to each other if we don't share common facts?

If paranoia goes all the way down, conspiracy theories go all the way down, and we can't share what's true, what's false, there's no conversation that we can have at all.

So, democracy presupposes common facts.

But more than that, life in the 21st Century presupposes common facts and a respect for expertise.

- Yes, but America's always had a bit of a past regarding quote-unquote eggheads and not trusting the experts and not trusting the academics and Mr. Know-it-all and all this kind of business.

Is this, again, is this just another manifestation of that amplified by way of social media in a modern world?

I mean, goodness gracious, the same people that are saying that they don't trust vaccines are also getting different kinds of vaccines.

- Yeah, vaccines, that'll get them sick.

I mean, let me give a little different history of America.

This is the America that created the land grant universities that made possible the agricultural explosion that made America a great nation.

This is the America with Edison and with the patent system that became a leading technology developer in the world.

This is the America that created Silicon Valley that powered our economy for the last 30 years.

America wouldn't exist as we know it if we didn't have faith in experts and faith in science.

It became associated with universities with the land grant after the Civil War.

But it became especially associated with the universities after World War II.

Remember, in World War II, it was technology, radar, things like that which wins the war.

And the federal government understood that under Eisenhower and said, "If we don't fund research in universities, "we're gonna lose the Cold War.

"We're not gonna be the first to the moon.

"We're gonna lose the race for the atomic bomb."

You cannot survive in today's world unless you lead in technology.

- But what if I'm hearing all this and I say to you: Yeah, but my brother-in-law heard something from his sister-in-law that said if you take some sort of horse pill, that will protect you from COVID.

And really, these COVID vaccines, they're just another way for the communists to get into our system.

How do you deal with that kind of free speech?

- Well, I'm not sure how you deal with it, but what I can tell you is if we continue more free speech like that, we're gonna fall to pieces.

I'll tell you the closest analogy, the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

What happened with the invention of the printing press?

Before the invention of the printing press, the church held a monopoly on divine knowledge.

If you wanted to get to heaven, you had to trust your priest because it was illegal for you to read the Bible and you couldn't do it anyway, 'cause you were illiterate and it was in Latin.

Along comes the printing press.

They print the Bible, they print it in everyday language, and suddenly, I didn't have to trust the priest.

And you know what that led to?

It led to the Reformation and it led to two centuries of war because there was no longer any epistemological authority in Western Europe because of the invention of this new system of knowledge.

Well, the internet is a little bit like that system of knowledge.

It's like your brother's sister, I mean, your brother's sister's wife, husband, or whatever.

You can go on the internet.

And have you seen those signs in doctor's offices where the doctor says, "Your Google search is not equivalent to my MD degree?"

(both laughing) I know plenty of people, I know, they do the research before they go to the doctor's office and they don't need the doctor 'cause they know better, right?

This is the same thing that happened in the 16th century that led to two centuries of total social chaos and we're in the middle of that right now.

- [Ted] How do we get out of it?

- I don't know how we get out of it, but that's a question we ought to think about instead of more free speech.

- When we talked about redirecting, we're running short of time, here, but we got a couple minutes left, here.

We talked about redirecting free speech, constructive free speech.

Obviously, maybe not so obviously, you can't legislate that kind of stuff.

It has to be organic.

Does it become organic when worse comes to worse?

I mean, do you have to hit the bottom before you can start crawling out?

- Well, I think about hitting the bottom is when you really hit the bottom, like the Great Depression, people discover things they have in common because there's a real crisis that they have to get out of.

I think we're a long way from that kind of bottom.

I would've thought the epidemic, the pandemic was an example of that.

I was wrong.

So, what the bottom is, I can't tell you.

But what we need to discover is things we have in common, and then we discover how we get out of it together.

It's the together part that's the crucial part.

- But can the together part occur in this current climate of social media and everyone's an expert?

I mean, I thought 9/11 would happen.

I thought Sandy Hook, of all things, would change a mindset of this country.

When children are massacred, nothing changes.

- Well, one thing that's changing is the use of defamation law.

Alex Jones is never gonna be the same again because of the defamation suits that are filed.

I'm now the co-reporter for "The Restatement of Law" for defamation.

I'm trying to codify it and it's very interesting now that defamation is becoming, it's being revived as a tool to restore truth in this world of made-up facts.

- Last question, you got about 30 seconds, here, that's all you got.

Is democracy at risk?

- Yes.

- I need more than that.

- (laughs) You thought I was gonna need 30 seconds!

- Now it's 10 seconds.

- We're at risk!

We have to preserve what we've been given.

It's fragile.

We're at a precipice and it's a crisis and we gotta think like that.

- Great discussion.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- You bet.

And that is it for now.

I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us on this special Independence Day edition of "Arizona Horizon".

You have a great evening.

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